Page 4 of Pride High 2: Orange
“I will,” Mindy said. “Thank you!”
She rushed back to the phone. “You can come get me,” she said. “But um… Would you do me a favor?”
“Sure!” Cameron said without asking what it was. He was so nice!
Mindy hurried away from the dining room and whispered. “Could you pretend to be my boyfriend? You don’t have to kiss me or anything. My family just assumed and…”
“No problem,” Cameron said. “You’ve already done so much for me.”
He left it at that. They’d never talked about how Anthony had crashed their date in jealousy, or what that implied. She wanted to though. More than ever, because she really liked Cameron and didn’t care if he was gay. She simply didn’t know how to broach the subject.
“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll be here. Hey! You know what we should do? We’re both worried about Ricky. Why don’t we surprise him? Make sure he knows that he has friends.”
“That’s a great idea!” Cameron said. “Even if his family tells us to go away, he won’t forget that we stopped by. Let’s do it!”
He sounded genuinely happy now, which made her own problems seem far away. Mindy might not have a boy who was madly in love with her, but she had amazing friends and couldn’t wait to see them again.
CHAPTER 2
November 26th, 1992
Ricky Nishikawa hid a yawn behind his hand, not that his father noticed. Ken’s attention was glued to an old rerun ofStar Trek. A local TV station had been broadcasting a marathon, and while Ricky liked watching the occasional episode with his father, the pacing could be slow, making time crawl by like it had all day.
Their relatives lived on the West Coast, so it was only his parents and him this year. They’d already eaten together, Ricky picking at his food since he wasn’t crazy about turkey or most of the other Thanksgiving fare. Afterwards they had reconvened to the living room. Ricky would have preferred playing on his computer upstairs. Or he could have sat around reading comics, or called someone, or jacked off, or any number of activities that used to be possible but weren’t anymore due to a lack of privacy. His parents had been on edge since his suicide attempt. Which was understandable, but they were making it very difficult to be the happy well-adjusted person they wanted him to be.
“This is a good episode,” Ken said as the theme song played. “Do you know who Captain Pike is? They actually used footage from the abandoned pilot episode for this one. And it’s a two-parter!”
Ricky suppressed a groan, staring dutifully at the screen until the commercial break. Then he glanced around the living room and noticed that his mother wasn’t there. Which was odd. She’d been peering at him from over a book all afternoon.
“Be right back,” Ricky said before standing and going upstairs.
Once in his bedroom, he considered shutting the door, even though his parents didn’t want him to. Not until he talked to a therapist, which he wasn’t looking forward to. Ricky left the door open and went to his computer. He logged on to Side Streets, a gay-themed bulletin board system. Once in the chatroom, he thought of Jeremiah, the guy he had dated back in Colorado who had dumped him for a girl. All’s fair in love and war, but Ricky wasn’t ready for a second tour of duty yet. He logged out, typed the commands needed to launch his word processing software, and opened an article that he’d been working on.
An op-ed piece, as Mr. Finnegan called it. His journalism teacher had asked Ricky to write about his suicide attempt, thinking it could help other students who might be struggling with the same urges. Ricky liked the idea of something good coming from the whole ugly mess, so he read through the article and made revisions, lingering on one line in particular:
As soon as I could feel the pills kicking in, I knew I had made a mistake. I didn’t really want to die. That’s the tricky thing about suicide. If you’re successful, you don’t get to change your mind later.
Ricky had tried explaining that to his parents. He didn’t have a death wish. Not anymore. If only they would listen! Ricky didn’t need to see a shrink or be under constant guard. He wanted everything to go back to normal so that he could too. After saving his work to a floppy disk, he stood, intending to go back downstairs to watch TV. Except just as he left his bedroom, his mother came up the stairs. And when she saw him, she stopped and stared.
“Everything okay?” Ami asked.
“Yeah,” Ricky said, shoving his hands in his pockets and leaning against the door frame. He was convinced she had only come upstairs to spy on him and wanted to prove it. “What areyouup to?”
His mother didn’t answer right away. Busted! “I was going to change the towels,” she said at last.
“Oh. Okay.” He stood there and stared, giving her a taste of her own medicine.
Ami looked him over. “What’s in your pockets?”
“My hands.”
“Anything else?”
“Razor blades, cyanide, and the world’s smallest rope to hang myself with.” Ricky said this without humor. He pulled his hands out to reveal empty palms. Then he began patting himself down, like he was being frisked.
“I know you think—” his mother began, but the doorbell interrupted her. Ami’s expression was just as confused as his own. “Who could that be?”
“No idea,” Ricky said, already heading down the hall. He welcomed the distraction, not wanting to have another awkward conversation with his mom. He raced down the stairs and threw open the front door, his heart doing a gleeful backflip because it was Cameron! The guy he had crushed hard on, and if he was honest, still had feelings for. Mindy was with him, which made Ricky almost as happy. They’d shared the same table in journalism for a while and had gone to the haunted houses together on Halloween. She was always nice to him.
