Page 1 of Footlights and Forever

Act One

Chapter 1

“Brainy is the new sexy.” — Irene Adler

Dylan

There aren’t a lot of smells on this earth that could make me want to lose my lunch. For example, I had worked over at a Griffith’s diner on Fifth and Madison for the previous two summers washing dishes, bussing tables, and hauling the trash out to the large red dumpsters in the alley out the back. The stench from that alley on hot summer nights was something to be feared and avoided if at all possible. That being said, I could just about handle the smell if I only breathed through my mouth and ran as fast as I could.

That smell, however, had absolutely nothing on the giant off-white laundry bins in the locker room of my high school. The fetid stench of ball sweat and filth from the discarded jockstraps, jerseys, and track pants infiltrated my nostrils and clung to my skin. The warm damp material of a mud-soaked football jersey sliding across my face and neck caused bile and vomit to rise into my throat. I swallowed it down in hopes of staving off whatI assumed would be a torrent of puke that would only serve to make the stench worse.

What exactly was I doing in a laundry bin, one might ask? Especially since I appeared to have such an aversion to them. Let’s just say my current predicament wasn’t exactly voluntary.

“Take a good whiff, Cooper!” the deep steely voice of Garrett Marks bellowed across the room. “Must be like Nirvana, the smell of all those cock and balls.”

Garrett Marks was the thing that all young gay boys feared, a super-hot guy that had the ability to both strike fear in your heart and give you an inappropriate boner with just a wink. Sadly, this story would not end with Mr. Marks falling head over heels in love with me. No, Mr. Marks was just a regular run-of-the-mill hetero bully. I had ‘come out of the closet’ at the start of my junior year, and by that, I meant someone had Sherlocked my identity on a popular gay dating app that I should not have been on until I was eighteen. A screenshot of my hairless pale-skinned twink chest, with a group of messages informing my suitor just how horny I was, had circulated around the school within two hours of my first day after summer.

All throughout junior year, I had just been the skinny nerd whom the jocks liked to make fun of, knocking the books out of my hand in the hallway between classes and occasionally shoving me into a locker door if the mood took them. I wasn’t saying I’d been okay with that, but it hadn’t been the worst. Then, after my big surprise coming out, it was like the gloves had come off. Now instead of making fun, it was turning into good old-fashioned hate speech. “What up, faggot?”, was basically my greeting most mornings. Instead of knocking books out of my hands between classes, being tripped and shoved to the floor While a group of jocks sneered at me and told me how I probably liked to be on my hands and knees became far too normal, and instead of being shoved against a locker door, being shutinto a locker or being thrown headfirst into a dirty laundry bin was becoming something I expected rather than something of a surprise.

“I think you should definitely spend some more time in there, Cooper,” Garrett sniggered, which was a not-so-hidden message for ‘don’t even fucking think of getting out of that bin’. The cruel jeers and cheers of Garrett’s little gang of jock clones sounded along with his own, banging the bars of the bin and rattling the heavy fabric bag that contained their dirty castaway linens and me.

I still wasn’t sure what I had done to land myself in the laundry bin. I’d been stopping by to talk to the coach after he had sent a message to the theatre department that he needed to speak to me urgently. I had found his office empty, knocked and entered the locker rooms, only to be confronted by the sight of eight sweaty muscle-bound football gods semi-naked. Sure, maybe my mouth had hung open for a few seconds longer than what would have been considered socially acceptable. Sue me.

The cream-colored paint on the walls of the locker room was chipped and peeling away all over, leaving small flecks of paint visible on the sloping roofs of the bright pillar-box red lockers. Ugly orange terracotta tiles smeared with mud and god-knows-what lined the floors, and wood benches stretching down the centre of the room were littered with bottles of what looked to be off-colored protein powder mixes and balled-up towels.

Garrett had approached me from somewhere off to my left almost instantly, swinging his heavy arm around my neck and pulling me into what could be considered a sort of bro-hug, but was actually a covert act of dominance. His sweaty pits had pushed against the side of my face as he pulled me to him.

“Getting a good look, Sally?” he’d sneered, turning me around the locker room. I’d winced as I saw the other boys giving me disgusted looks, covering themselves up and dressing quickly.“Bet you’re gonna go home and jerk your meat to this later, aren’t you?”

I’d known there was no point in me trying for any type of defense. That wasn’t what this had been about; this was about an alpha asserting his superiority over the weaker members of the herd. He’d muttered some mild insults, shoving me towards Taylor Granger. The funny thing about Taylor was that other than being a linebacker for the school football team, he had also been one of my best friends in middle school. The gods of puberty had chosen to bless Taylor with normal growth, whereas I still kinda looked like I had in elementary school, just taller. So we’d drifted apart until a divide had become a gulf, and that gulf became what separated the bully from the bullied.

A few seconds later, Garrett had informed me that if I really wanted to get an up close and personal experience with their junk, he could help me out with that. This was how I’d found myself sitting in a heap at the bottom of the laundry bin.

The jocks always liked to think that we gay guys were lusting after them non-stop when in actual fact, our entire mission statement was staying as far away from them as possible, avoid eye contact at all costs, and keep our fucking heads down until graduation. Garrett and the rest of the team were in every way not my type. However, there were always exceptions to the rule.

“What’s going on?” I cringed as the locker room door creaked against its hinges as it opened fully, the tell-tale bang of the door against the rubber stopper on the wall. Please no.

“Hey, Austin.” Garrett’s voice transformed from the cruel biting tones he saved just for me to the friendly baritone he shared with everyone else. “Nothing man, just having a bit of fun, you know?”

“Fun in the locker room, eh?” The smile in the newbie’s voice was evident. “Something you want to tell me, Garrett?”

A chorus of ohs from the jocks sprung up around the room, a cold fear started to work its way up my spine, chilling each knot of bone along the way. While I could appreciate Garrett being taken down a peg or two, the mere mention that he was anything other than a straight alpha male would likely result in him needing to take that supposed humiliation out on someone, and that someone tended to be me.

“Fuck you, Ridge.” A deep groaning laugh croaked from Garrett’s throat.

“Seriously though,” the deep voice chuckled, “everything cool in here?”

“Yeah, it’s all good man.” I heard the sound of what could have been a faint high five. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure how much longer I could stay in here without either passing out, crying, or hurling. A low rumble in my stomach warned me that soon, option three would be thrust upon me whether I liked it or not.

“Boys, get your behinds out of the locker room and get moving towards your next class,” Coach Helmsley’s voice shouted from the other side of the room. “None of you dumb asses can afford to fail a class. You know the score: you fail a class, you don’t get to play football.”

Ah yes, the undisputed religion of my high school and for all intents and purposes, this entire town. I lived in a small town called Wickford in Ohio on the banks of Lake Erie. If you looked up the word ‘unremarkable’ in the dictionary, you would more than likely find a picture of me, but I would be standing pointing at a sign leading to ‘Wickford, Ohio, Population 24,560’. The town was small by any metric, but our town did boast that it was the best little town in all of America, which I suspected might be the slogan for nearly every small town in America. Red brick buildings lined the streets, each one as indistinguishable as the last. The shopkeepers proudly hung the Stars and Stripes from poles outside their shop fronts until the entire town’s MainStreet looked like it was about to host some type of large-scale military parade. The perfectly manicured lawns of the suburbs in front of white and cream, two-story house facades gave the impression one was running down a repeating corridor like a scene from Scooby Doo.

In the middle of our small town, red bricks and in-your-face patriotism, was Central River High School, the banner outside proudly stating, ‘Home of the Red River Coyotes’. The Coyotes football team was the pride and joy of the school and the town in general, and the boys who played within its ranks were untouchable. I was pretty sure, as a certain Cheeto-looking ex-president would say, that a member of the team could shoot someone on Main Street and the town would somehow manage to spin it that the victim just got in the way of the bullet.

If I thought that the coach would have helped me out of my current predicament without somehow making it my fault, I probably would have called for help. Instead I stayed silent, the rancid smell now stinging my eyes and making rivulets of water cascade down my cheeks.

“Where the hell is Dylan Cooper?” the coach barked. I imagined a Mexican wave of shrugs and averted glances traveling around the room at the coach’s question. “That boy was supposed to be helping me out with the schedules for next week. If any of y’all see him, tell him I’m looking for him.”

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