Page 11 of One Little Problem
“Should we stop holding hands?” I asked. We weren’t always so touchy-feely. Lately, it seemed like Luke didn’t mind, but I wanted to be sure.
Luke just shook his head. “Guess there has to be some downsides to having an awesome boyfriend. I don’t care what people say to me.” Then his expression turned serious. “But if anyone messes with you? Tell me and I’ll kick their asses.”
“Say that again but this time take off your shirt.” I crossed the fingers of the other hand that wasn’t holding Luke’s. Come on early morning strip show… that would be pretty weird, but I still wanted to see it.
“Some downsides in addition to you, I mean.” He smiled like he was cute. He happened to be cute, but still.
“You’re sleeping on the couch tonight,” I informed him.
“We don’t live together.” Maybe one day my brain said and I told it to shut up.
“Want to come over after school and pretend we do?” I waggled my eyebrows in a way experts would deem excessive. “We’ll play house.”
“Roleplay already?” he asked but didn’t say no.
Oh. “Do you have a French maid’s outfit?” I could get into that.
“Okay, I’m leaving now.” Luke gave me a quick peck on the lips and we went our separate ways.
Luke recently had an identity crisis of sorts. Hopefully not a midlife one because his lifespan needed to be much longer than that. More of the sexuality crisis kind. It took him a while to figure things out and it might not always have been the most fun, but I was a supportive boyfriend and stuff. If there was any evidence to the contrary, then I didn’t remember it and didn’t want to be reminded, but Luke was on the other side of that now. He was cool and confident and awesome. Stronger. Comfortable. Way hot.
He was always that one, but in a new way.
He was here, he was queer, he was used to it.
If only everyone else could be used to it too.
* * *
“We really have to stop meeting like this,” I told Mrs. Sharp. How did I end up in these situations? Me alone with the scariest teacher in school and sharing information about my personal life. I didn’t deserve this; I was a good person!
… Or at least I wasn’t actively a bad person. That was totally the same thing. Whatever, I could be a good person when I was old and boring, but first I had to live long enough to be old and boring. Which didn’t seem very likely if I always had extremely awkward conversations with a lady who had the power to suck out your soul through your eyeballs.
“You’re the one who sought me out,” she reminded me. We were in her classroom. As an English teacher, she was familiar with several concepts like foreshadowing and archetypes and motifs and had probably come across many things in books, even things like fun and humor, but it seemed like she had no personal experience with those last two.
However, she was correct. I did seek her out. Oh right. It was my fault this time. “You’re the one who offered to give me advice!” I accused. I was innocent and this was all her fault. If we were ranking people to come to for advice, she’d probably be at the very end of the list, only behind the janitor with the lazy eye, the lunch lady who wore too much perfume, and my homeroom teacher if you wanted anything other than football advice. However, she was the only teacher I knew of who was gay.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, amused. Good. If she was mad, she’d probably explode me with her mind powers.
“Just don’t do it again,” I scolded. Was this the quickest a conversation had ever gotten away from me? Sadly, no.
“Maybe you want to get the advice first before making demands of me?” She asked with a raised eyebrow. Maybe I should have asked the janitor with the lazy eye anyway.
I pulled up a chair and began voluntarily offering up information about my personal life to her even though it felt terrifying. She was fairly short, though she had the sharpest heels I’d ever seen, and her tiny stature was offset by her intimidating demeanor. Her hair was pulled up in a tight bun. I wasn’t sure ghosts could feel the weather, but she obviously knew spring was here and summer was on the way because she had on a pale pink blouse. That somehow made her scarier. Like she was trying to lull people into a false sense of security with the pink and that’s when she would unhinge her jaw and release her talons.
In the past few minutes, I’d privately referred to her as a ghost, a snake, a vicious animal with talons, and some kind of soul eating succubus. Too bad I preferred science because maybe I missed my calling as an English savant. Anyway, all the scary ways I viewed her wasn’t even the worst part of sharing with her. The worst part was that I briefly explained how both our parents were against Luke and I and at the end all she said was, “I’m not sure there is anything you can do.”
That was the same thing my boyfriend said, and it was a lot better coming from his beautiful face. I didn’t need the same words from her. I told her this. “I really didn’t expect your advice to suck.” Did I have some kind of death wish I didn’t know about? Or maybe my 17 years of never having a filter when I needed one was finally coming back to bite me in the ass? Finally? Sadly, that happened all the time.
“In my time, we largely didn’t tell our parents.” In your time, you used dinosaurs as cars and carved markings into rocks to make books. Cool, I didn’t have a death wish; there were some things I could keep to myself. I just couldn’t turn off the part of my brain that made snarky comments, pretty sure that was, like, my entire brain.
Wait, what Mrs. Sharp said was helpful. Hiding things from parents. Lying. Not telling them everything. “Oh, lying, now you’re talking.”
“No,” she corrected immediately. “What I meant was that most people had no choice but to keep ‘that sort of thing’ to one’s self. Even sharing with family or close friends wasn’t always an option in a place like this. Getting to be more open about it is progress, even if it doesn’t seem like it.” She said everything with such authority and surety; it almost seemed like I should be writing this down, like I might be tested on it later.
She talked like a teacher. I talked like a whiny teenager. “But our parents hate it.”
“You can’t control their feelings.” I couldn’t but was that one of her scary superpowers? Mind reading totally was, because she continued with, “No one can do that. When I said there was nothing you can do, I suppose I meant nothing else. You can keep them involved, keep talking to them, but there’s no quick fix. There’s no skipping ahead. Everyone has to work through this in their own time.”
