The Queer Kid
by Graham J. Darling
It all came out in gym class.
Mister Poynter, in his ratty tracksuit, was dishing out one of his “serious talks.” While he ran on and on, we and the rest sat around pretending to listen: we trading looks and nods on who to beat up in the shower today, and the rest trying hard to f-a-a-ade out, natch.
When just like that, the guy’s goat voice cuts out in mid-bleat, his mole eyes go wide, and he makes like he’s reaching for the next word in a place it usually was but isn’t now and never will be again. Then this weirdo kid jumps up and catches him before he hits the floor, and starts hilariously humping his chest and yelling, “Call 911! Oh, God, call 911!”
This looked like a good time to step out behind the school for a smoke. We checked back in when the fire engine showed up. Brad the Rad got to hook a helmet that later made us a cool ashtray.
While those dudes were jump-starting old Poynter — and asking each other who’d taken the call, or had they really all just piled into the truck without knowing why? — 911 Kid flops against the wall bars like a spaz. Even after the ambulance came and left, he was still all sweaty and shaky, like he’d just run a mile away and two miles back. The whole damn class was gawking at him.
Then he looked up and around. “I saw... saw his heart stop,” he said. “Suddenly I could see inside him, inside every one of you...” And he touched the shoulder of Mitch the Twitch, who went all still, straightened up, and never copped crank from us again.
He’d never given us grief, this kid, about forking over his milk money; or he’d take his licks when we found him broke, usually from paying some other chump’s tab. Scrawnier than most, otherwise everyone-in-a-blender average; no homies, spent his spare time mumbling on his knees in a corner: the quiet type, and we like ’em quiet.
But now he’d pulled some Respect his way and, so, away from us. And then we started to get some lip from the sheep, especially those who’d begun following him around, listening to his stupid stories. Time to cut him down to size.
But when we hid his lunchbox, a crow brought him a sandwich through an open window. When we dinged him with dirt clods on the way home, bears came out of an alley and chased us away. When we stuffed him into a locker, someone let him out behind our backs without the key. When we dunked his head in the can, the toilet water turned into eau de toilette. When we tried to give him a wedgie, the waistband kept reeling out till it made a pile on the floor. When we dog-piled him on the playing field, he got up from under and walked away like we weren’t there.
His hat, tossed back and forth with him in the middle, would fall short and land back on his head. Tacks on his chair turned to rubber, gum in his hair melted away, tied shoelaces came undone, spitballs missed, towel snaps backfired painfully, “Kick Me” signs wouldn’t stick, hate mail got lost, whisper campaigns went nowhere. And even though we could corner him anytime and bring him to tears, we got no satisfaction from it, because you could tell they were for something about us and not for himself at all. And the pics turned out blank.
We couldn’t use any of this. Though he never did either, from what we could see. When he wasn’t wasting our time, he was wasting his own, with kid stuff. Every morning, he’d walk in through that homeroom door, take his seat and write down the teacher’s ramblings like the rest (we don’t have to, since we already know the only things worth knowing). Math gave him trouble, though he helped other suckers with their history homework, except he wouldn’t do our essays. And he paid no mind to the pecking order, but would talk to every doofus who’d talk to him. He’d listen to their prawwwblems, and in their own home jabbers, tell ’em what he told us, that someday they’d get away to a world we didn’t rule — as if.
Day by day we smelled the rising stink of hope, heard more mutterings behind our backs, saw more eyes meeting ours. It got so bad we even offered to cut him in, if he’d just shut up and get with the program. No deal.
The last straw came when we tried to mess up his act by siccing the school slut on him. Instead, the day after they “accidentally” got locked in together in the supply room, she started a No Nookie Club and got all her friends to join. That made us madder than ever.
So after the last bell, we carried him over to the old quarry, stripped him down and pitched him in. When we fished him out, he still had this goofy face on, so we dragged him back up and did it again, only this time, he somehow managed to miss the water.
Swimming accident. Kids fooling around. Happens every day. We got time off class for grief counselling.
Funny thing though, when we let go of him then, it was like everything turned upside-down and bass-ackwards. All at once, it was him who was hanging still, up in mid-air, looking sadly down on us. And it was us along the edge who were falling headfirst, with the whole world, away from him, into a dark sky crawling with twisty clouds glowing red in the sunset. It seemed to welcome us like a wide-open mouth filled with flames.
But, finally, it was him who went splat, and we’re still here.
The stream that sprang up from the rock where he hit, we stuffed with dirt till it stopped flowing. The flowers that people left, we threw away till they stopped coming.
Things soon got back to normal, pretty much.
Life is good again.
Copyright © 2023 by Graham J. Darling
