Page 5 of College Town

He’d been sitting slumped forward at his desk, cheek rested on his folded arms so he could stare at the classroom’s lone window. Leaves drifted down past the wire mesh set in the glass, collecting in bright yellow drifts on the brick of the courtyard. It was a pleasant view, with its little leaf-cluttered bench, and its wall crawling with ivy. A bird sat perched on the arm of the bench – a blue jay – cracking acorns against the wrought iron. Lawson wanted to be that bird; to be out in the cool wind, breathing in the sunshine, rather than hear in the stuffy, droning confines of Mr. Ballas’s social studies class.

At the sound of Mark Walton’s hissed question, he jerked his head up, and realized his mistake. “What? No,” he hissed back. “I was looking out the window.”

Mark was currently the most popular boy in their class. He’d hit a growth spurt over the summer, not simply taller than the other boys, but broader in every dimension. Dana had said his wide forehead and strong jaw would run to fat before he was thirty, and that his too-short nose was piggish, but right now, all the girls thought he wastotally the cutest. Lawson didn’t think he was…but he did think Corey Martin was cute, and he’d made the terrifying, unforgivable mistake of acting on it last week.

They’d been working on a group assignment in English together, the two of them bent over the posterboard, duel-wielding markers to finish before the bell rang, and Lawson had glanced up and been struck dumb by the sight of Corey with a marker cap clenched between his teeth, brows notched together in concentration, the curve of his near cheek rosy from the heat of the classroom.

Lawson had been guarding his secret from everyone save Dana for years now, since he’d first gotten warm in the face and fluttery in the chest watching freaking Bruce Willis inDie Hardand begun to understand what that meant. Since he’d realized what attraction meant. So he kept his mouth shut, and he didn’t ever touch other boys, not so much as a friendly smack or an arm looped companionably across shoulders.

But helooked. He looked and looked, and most times he didn’t know what he even wanted to do with someone, only that his palms itched, and his tongue felt too big for his mouth, and he knew that the way he looked at boys was the way boys looked at girls; and the jokes in the locker room told him none of the boys around him would appreciate being the recipient of his longing stares.

He was so careful…but he was also thirteen, and stupid, and that day over the posterboard, his hand moved of its own accord, and he brushed the backs of his fingers down Corey’s soft-looking cheek.

Corey, generally kind and good-natured, quick to smile, had jumped back as if Lawson had punched him, clutching at his offended cheek. “W-wh-what the hell?” he’d stammered, eyes huge, face no longer rosy at all, but sickly pale. “Why did you do that?”

When Lawson only gaped at him, heart pounding, the rush of blood in his ears crashing like waves, Corey’s face screwed up, angry and twisted and nothing like he’d always looked, and he’d spat, “What are you,gay?”

Lawson had bolted. Fled to the bathroom, and earned a detention for it.

A week later, the incident still haunted him. Every boy in his grade level seemed to know what had happened, and if he was lucky, they avoided him. Some, like Mark, wanted to make a thing out of it. To needle and insult and name-call.

Mark’s lips peeled back off his teeth in a nasty leer, and there was nothing cute about him at all. “Whatever. Stop fucking staring at me, queerbait,” he said.

Lawson didn’t want the slur to sting, really he didn’t. But. Well.

He scowled. “I’m not. Why would I wanna look at your ugly meatloaf-shaped head?”

Mark had whispered.

Lawson had not.

“Mr. Granger,” Mr. Ballas said, clearing his throat loudly.

Mark smirked and faced forward.

“Fuck,” Lawson murmured, and turned around slowly, hyper-aware of the stares of his classmates. The whispers. The rustle of book pages and creak of desks.

Mr. Ballas was drawn up to his usual scarecrow height, body held tight and close and tense, as ever. “Unless you have something to share with the class…” He waved in an expansive gesture.

Lawson shook his head, and had to nudge his glasses up his nose afterward.

“Yes, well, as I was saying. Class.” Mr. Ballas lifted his voice, projected it. Hislisten up now, childrenvoice. His other hand, Lawson noted belatedly, rested on the shoulder of a stranger. “I’d like all of you to welcome our newest student to Eastman Middle. This is Tommy Cattaneo.”

New kid.

Tommy Cattaneo.

Oh, Lawson thought. And his chest hurt.

Tommy Cattaneo was short for an eighth grader. Small, and slight, his wrists pale and fragile inside the cuffs of the Colts sweatshirt that swallowed him whole. Dark, almost-black hair parted on the side, and a slender nose, and a pressed-thin pink mouth, and soul-swallowing, big brown eyes like warm cups of coffee.

(Lawson was something of a creative writer even at thirteen.)

Lawson sucked in a breath, and pushed up off his desk, both hands braced on its surface.Stupid, he told himself.Stupid, stupid. So he ducked back down, but not before his movement attracted Tommy Cattaneo’s attention.

Their eyes met. Briefly. Lawson swore he heard aclickinside his head. A frisson of awareness moved down his spine.

Later, days, weeks, months, years, he would call it love at first sight. But it wasn’t. It was just love, plain and simple; the uncomplicated love a thirteen-year-old could conjure immediately and unselfishly from out of thin air. Like the love one could feel – aching, sweet, instant – for fresh cookies steaming from the oven, or the latest skateboard suspended in a shop window. A love made mostly of anticipation, a yearning for something sweet, an affection for something unknown but that might be.

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