Summary:
Kyle Stilleno is the invisible student even in his nothing high school in the middle of Nowhere, Texas. Brad Graymark is the baseball star of Foster High. When they bond over their mutual damage during a night of history tutoring, Kyle thinks maybe his life has changed for good. But when you’re gay and falling for the most popular boy in school, the promise of love is a fairy tale, not a reality. Isn’t it?
A coming-of-age story, Tales from Foster High shows an unflinching vision of the ups and downs of teenage love and what it is like to grow up gay.
New edition contains new material and story points not in the original version. Sharper story telling, different points of view, same old Foster High.
Summary:
Kyle Stilleno is no longer the invisible boy, and he doesn’t quite know how he feels about it. On one hand, he now has a great boyfriend, Brad Greymark, and a handful of new friends, and even a new job. On the other hand, no one screamed obscenities at him in public when he was invisible.
No one expected him to become a poster boy for gay rights, either—at least not until Kyle stepped out of the closet and into the limelight. But there are only a few months of high school left, and Kyle doubts he can make a difference.
With Christmas break drawing closer, Kyle and Brad are changing their lives to include each other. While the trials are far from over, they have their relationship to lean on. Others are not so lucky. One of their classmates needs their help—but Kyle and Brad’s relationship may be too new to survive the strain.
Publisher has changed numbering of series with this edition.
With just 151 days left until the school year ends, Kyle Stilleno is running out of time to fulfill the promise he made and change Foster, Texas, for the better. But he and his boyfriend, Brad Graymark, have more than just intolerance to deal with. Life, college, love, and sex have a way of distracting them, and they’re realizing Foster is a bigger place than they thought. When someone from their past returns at the worst possible moment, graduation becomes the least of their worries.
Tales From Foster High #1
I DON’T remember the moment I knew I was broken.
I was seventeen and on the edge of an eighteen that seemed more like a cliff to jump off than an actual milestone. I was a nobody in school, had no friends, a horrible home life, and oh yeah. I think I’m gay.
I say think because as in most fairy tales, saying it out loud would make it so, and this is a wish I didn’t want to make.
Not that there is anything wrong with being gay. I mean it’s who I am and that’s great and all, but the reason I didn’t want it to be true wasn’t because I didn’t want to be gay. It was because I didn’t want to be gay in Foster, Texas.
In Foster, anything that wasn’t white, athletic, photogenic, and Republican was different.
And as we all know, in high school there is nothing worse than being different. TV shows and movies will tell you the wacky, zany, oddball characters are not only cool but a necessary component in most social settings, but the truth is, no one ever closed their eyes and wished they were Screech. I know it sounds stupid me saying I didn’t know I was broken, because if we were playing broken white boy bingo, I had every space covered. Single mom? B5. Nonexistent father? I27. Single parent with drugs issues? I don’t even need that free space, thank you. Living on the edge of town in a crappy apartment? G47. And a paralyzing fear of interacting with other human beings? Look at that, O72.
Broken white boy bingo.
But I was broken in a different way, and I hadn’t noticed until recently.
I was emotionally stunted in a way that made connecting with another human being so fearful a task that even considering it could cause my heart to race and my breath to stop altogether. See, I’m what they called gifted, like a mutant in X-Men. But as with those mutants, my gift is a horrible curse and though I don’t have giant purple robots trying to kill me, I have something much, much worse.
My brain.
Trying to talk to someone made my mind start to spin scenarios on how it could go. What if they laughed at me? What if they spit at me? What if they punched me? What if they were nice to me but actually part of a coven and were just befriending me to use as a virgin sacrifice? What if they were actually purple robots but in disguise?
You see my problem.
The gay thing made it a million times worse. Since junior high, boys had made me feel funny, and not in a laughing sort of way. In a clumsy, all feet and no balance stutter that you see in rom-coms, that’s how I would get in the locker room. And where Noah Centineo looks fifteen kinds of cute doing it, I just looked like I was having a seizure. All sound would drain away as my vision zeroed in on the boy next to me taking his jeans off for gym. I know, serious creeper, but I couldn’t help it! More than once I forced my eyes to look away so I could finish dressing for gym.
By the time I started high school, I had constructed a virtual igloo of emotional distance between me and everyone else. I projected a coldness that bordered on snobbery, and I knew it. I was the guy everyone knew of but no one could recall speaking to personally. I imagined myself an urban legend of Foster High School, like Bigfoot, chupacabra, or a Nicki Minaj song you could sing out loud and not look like a loon. Everyone had a friend who had seen me talking to someone, but no one had ever spoken to me directly. I was a ghost wandering the halls, head down, backpack over one shoulder, eyes focused on where my next step would take me and nothing more. In a social environment where being cool and liked were currency, I was a monk who had taken a vow of poverty, which then necessitated a vow of celibacy. I sidestepped conversations, ate lunch by myself, and practically ran home after school.
I didn’t know it yet, but I was broken in a way that wasn’t readily evident to those around me but soon would be.
As anyone who has read comic books knows, when one sense is taken from you, the others become almost superhuman, allowing you the ability to get by in life the best you possibly can. Since I was completely and utterly devoid of any knowledge of how emotions worked for other people, my mind had taken the unused space and used it to amplify what book smarts I already possessed to a Rain Man level of intellect. I was the person who never needed to study, never needed to read anything more than once, and always finished his test first. It might sound like I am bragging, but I assure you, high school students are way worse than those purple robots I was talking about. I am sure in some alternate universe there’s a high school where being a nerd is cool. That possessing a vast array of pop culture knowledge is a badge of notoriety and would have garnered me some kind of social worth. Alas, I was not born there. Instead, my brain made me a geek at worst, at best the quiet, smart guy who never seemed to look up when he walked.
Which would become a serious problem in a second.
I just realized I haven’t introduced myself to you, which is odd since I am vomiting my personal baggage all over you. My name is Kyle Stilleno, and I’m broken.
You say, “Hi, Kyle,” and then someone reassures me this is a safe space and we continue.
With that out of the way, let’s play a game. It’s called “find the Kyle.”
So this is a typical hallway between classes at Foster High. It is filled with people grabbing stuff out of their lockers, talking to people grabbing stuff out of their lockers, people leaning on the wall trying to flirt with anyone with their head not in their lockers, and me.
Let’s go down the list, shall we?
I am not that dark-haired, action-hero-chin guy in a football jersey with an ass so fine that it should be in a museum. That’s Tony Wright, all-around asshole.
I am not the future boy-band star with the dirty blond hair and pearly white smile talking to him. That’s Josh Walker, Foster’s own resident fuckboy.
I’m not that guy whose body looks like it’s a square and has resting bully face. That’s Kelly Aimes, the worst guy in the world.
I am also not the girls next to them, that guy by the door is a teacher, and I am definitely not the guy in the letterman jacket with dark red hair.
That’s The Most Perfect Guy in the World.
His name is Brad Graymark, and to say I am obsessed with him is understatement. I am obsessed with Joss Whedon shows; I am obsessed over Marvel movies; I am obsessed over any reality show that has a guy with an eight-pack. Those are all healthy obsessions, and no, I am not willing to debate that.
What I was with Brad Graymark was something that transcended the word obsessed.
“How quaint,” my self-esteem commented. It was wearing a pink satin jacket from Grease, leaning up against a locker just judging me. “Little gay boy is in lloooovveeee with the straight jock.” It put its finger down its throat and gagged.
Ignore it. I can’t, but maybe you can for me.
He was easily the most popular guy in school, hands down. Everyone liked him and I mean everyone. He was like the crown prince of Foster, and he acted like he was completely oblivious to all of it. I never saw him join in on throwing freshmen in trash cans, an Olympic event around here. I never once heard of him trying to stuff someone into their locker, and he always smiled at people as he walked by, like he was genuinely happy to see them.
He was everything I thought I wanted in a guy.
Now see the guy barreling toward him? With the blond hair, slumped posture, gray hoodie clinging to him like a security blanket? Yeah, that’s me. Take it all in. I can wait.
I know I don’t look all that tall, but that’s because I try to stay hunched so I don’t stick out in a crowd. Standing upright I would be taller than him, but while in movement mode, I come up to about his shoulders.
At the time I had no idea of anything of this. I was counting the steps to AP Biology, wondering if I was going to watch Dragon Prince or Mandalorian when I got home from school.
No, I did not have Disney+ or Netflix, but I did have a crappy laptop and a Torrent program that I used to download movies when I went by Nancy’s to use their free Wi-Fi.
It was business as usual, tile, tile, wadded-up piece of paper, someone’s used gum, gross, tile, tile… and then something new.
A set of size twelve Converse sneakers, once green, now mud-stained green, were directly in front of me. My automatic stay-as-far-away-from-people-as-I-could program kicked in, and I swerved sharply left. The sneakers moved to intercept me. As I tried to pull right, I heard his voice say, “Hey,” and mentally, I lost it.
There is nothing worse than your body reacting to someone before your brain can even recognize who it is. It is a Pavlovian response when you run into someone you are attracted to and aren’t ready for it. There is something that runs up your spine, as if every particle of your being is being magnetically pulled to the other person. Every single autonomous function my body possessed stopped. I felt like I couldn’t breathe, my mouth hung open, I was struggling to stay upright, and I think I peed a little.
And not to be crude, but other things happened down there that had nothing to do with urine.
I forced myself to focus on a spot between his eyes and tried to replicate the heterosexual male head nod that all teenage boys except me seemed to know, and responded with a “Hey” that was a few octaves higher than I initially intended. My right hand was still gripping the history book and folder I had just retrieved from my locker, so as he began to talk, I tried to shift the folder in front of my groin as unnoticeably as possible.
“So you’re kind of smart, right?” His question was far more rhetorical than an actual inquiry, since he kept talking without waiting for an answer. “Because Gunn is a cool coach, but he is a dick about grades.”
This only made sense if you knew how our high school worked.
Coach Gunn was a bulldog of a man who spent his day coaching baseball and teaching history. That would seem to be a godsend to our school’s jocks, who had to maintain a grade point average of 2.75 to stay on the team. They thought that since he coached them, his history class would be a breeze. So every year the new group of jocks would do everything they could to make sure they got into his class.
And every year a fresh group of boys found out that Coach Gunn did not believe in a free ride. In fact, from what I heard, Coach Gunn didn’t believe in a free ride, free lunch, discount coupons, or anything that would make something easier for the players.
Brad had paused to wait for some kind of response from me, which was his second mistake; his first was expecting me to be normal in the first place. I wasn’t used to talking to actual people, much less people waiting for me to respond to them. My gaze had moved from the space between his eyes and drifted to the almost luminescent green of his irises and had stayed lost there for a few long seconds. His eyes led me to the ruddy blush of his cheeks, which, upon closer inspection, seemed to hide pale freckles that made his skin seem that much more perfect with its newfound imperfections. His freckles led down to what I could see of his muscled neck. It was hidden by the collar of his jacket on either side, and I saw the first Adam’s apple I was ever transfixed by. His neck led my eyes down to a thin white T-shirt that seemed to accentuate the hard muscles that made up the twin curves of his pecs instead of covering them. The way the cotton seemed to dip between them almost invited a person to see how deep the space between them actually was. I could see the impression of a chain underneath, and when he shifted his weight and I spotted the glint of silver between the white T-shirt and the jacket, I felt like I had almost seen the band of his underwear.
“You okay?”
My head jerked up so fast it was a blur as I realized I was still standing in the middle of a high school hallway instead of running toward him in the middle of a field while music played around us. On second thought, that sounds more like a fabric softener commercial than actual love, so never mind. “Yeah,” I said quickly, not sure exactly what question I was answering.
Obviously he wasn’t either, because he cocked his head like a dog and asked, “Um, to which one?”
“What?” I asked, as confused as he was, if that was possible. And then whatever buffer that had frozen in my head freed itself, and time started moving normally again. “Yes,” I said again, now answering his question, followed by a sharp “No.” Which didn’t sound good. “I mean, I don’t… what do you mean by smart?” I could see in his eyes that whatever hopes he had that I possessed any superior intellect were dwindling quickly as it became apparent I couldn’t even string together a sentence. “I mean, there is street-smart, and there is, like, math smart, which I am but it’s all done my head so I couldn’t teach it, so not really, but if you’re talking about….” The words just kept tumbling out of my mouth like a broken water main and I couldn’t stop it.
“History,” he said, cutting me off. “Coach Gunn teaches history, and you seem good at it.” He was talking slowly now, as if he were trying to communicate with an alien. “Are you?”
“Yes,” I answered, trying to swallow.
We stood there staring at each other for about five seconds before he just shook his head. “You know what? Forget it.” He began to walk away.
“You do know he was asking you for help?” my intellect said as it pushed my horniness out of the way. “The guy you’ve been drooling over for exactly six years, five months, and an odd number of days just asked for your help and you stood there drooling because of him.”
My brain jerked a thumb at my sex drive, who was just staring at Brad’s ass with its mouth open.
I don’t have to describe the drool, right?
“What do I do?” I asked myself.
“Leave him alone,” my insecurity said. “It will only lead to sorrow.”
Go get him! my brain and libido screamed at me.
“Wait,” I said, turning around after him. He paused and looked back at me, and I felt my mind begin to get lost in the lines of his chin, so I blurted out, “I can help you.”
He raised an eyebrow as the people walking past us stared, no doubt wondering what exactly that meant. I realized I had broken another cardinal rule of surviving high school besides “never look up” and “always bring your own lunch”: never talk to someone else loud enough for other people to hear. I was talking way too loud.
I took several steps toward him and said in a quieter tone, “With your history—I can help you with that.”
“I need to pass the midterm,” he said in the same conspiratorial tone I was using. “If I don’t, I’m toast.”
I nodded to both the spoken and unspoken sentiments. I could indeed help him study for the midterm, and I was aware he would be tossed off the team if he failed it. And in a culture that is completely popularity-driven, like high school, being stripped of his letterman jacket was akin to being cast from the pantheon of high school gods and forced to wander the barren earth with us commoners.
The ironic part is not once did I consider not helping him simply out of spite.
He was one of those golden boys who somehow seemed to deserve the spotlight of attention they received. Resenting or even trying to deny him that kind of adoration just seemed a cruel and unusual form of punishment. Imagining him not being one of the most popular boys in school was like picturing a beautiful golden retriever caked with mud or a masterpiece of a painting covered with years of grime and dust or any Britney Spears album after Circus. I think that was his secret, the reason he was so well liked even though he didn’t seem to try. People naturally wanted to help him, and I’m sure the fact that he resembled the lead of a CW show didn’t hurt.
“It’s before Christmas break. We’d need to study pretty hard,” I said, wondering what exactly I was getting myself into. “We could meet after school at the library—”
He shook his head, cutting me off. “I have practice, has to be after that.”
I paused. “But the library closes at five.”
He shrugged. “Then come over to my house, and we’ll study there.”
I froze.
“Or we could go to yours….”
“We’ll go to yours!” I blurted out, not letting my overactive imagination have even a second to envision the horror of my mother stumbling out of her room, hungover and wondering why there was someone else in the house.
“Cool,” he said, nodding to himself. “You need a ride, or do you have a car?”
“I do not have a car,” I said tonelessly, still in shock as I realized that by not wanting him to come to my house, I had agreed to go to his.
See what happens when you talk to people.
“Cool,” he said with an easy smile. “Meet me by the locker room after five; I can drop you off at home afterward, okay?”
My head nodded all by itself.
“Awesome. Thanks, Kyle,” he said, turning around and then pausing. “That’s your name, right?” He seemed contrite and embarrassed all at once, which made him about a thousand times more attractive in my eyes.
I paused for an impossibly long moment as I realized I didn’t know my name either. “Yes!” I blurted out as the memory of my given name stumbled across the tip of my tongue. “My name is Kyle!” I tried again, reinforcing it by saying it out loud again.
His smile turned into a wide grin as he held out his hand. “I’m Brad.”
“I know,” I said before I could stop myself. His hand closed on mine, and his head tilted to the right a bit as his eyes locked on to mine, as if he were considering those words carefully. I felt my stomach fall out from under me as I realized what the hell I had just said. “I mean, everyone knows you,” I amended, and I followed that up with a nervous little serial killer chuckle that would convince absolutely no one I wasn’t crazy.
He held my hand for a second too long as he said nothing and then slowly nodded. “Okay, Kyle. Cool.” He let go, but I could still feel the warmth of where his skin had touched mine. “So, after five?” My head did the bobblehead nod as I agreed. He laughed a little to himself as he turned away. “Awesome, see you then.”
I tried not to stare at the way his jeans hugged his ass as he walked away.
I tried but failed pretty badly.
“Well, this is going to end in tragedy,” my fear said as the first bell rang.
End of the Innocence #2
KYLE
THERE IS an old French quote that goes: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. It’s usually translated as: The more things change, the more they stay the same. Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote it in the 1800s, and it has become a common phrase people use when they are complaining about life or by adults who want to instill the feeling that no matter how weird things get, they have seen it all before.
Have I lost you already? Like one paragraph in and you’re all, “I just can’t with this kid.” But bear with me. I’m going somewhere with this, okay?
So the French quote, the actual translation is: The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing. And that, my friend, is completely different.
See, the one we use, the more they stay the same, that really isn’t true, is it? I mean when something changes, that shit is changed. It’s like diffusion. You know, the process that happens when you add a drop of red ink to a glass of water. At first the red drop is super obvious and you can see it is clearly different than the rest. So if we go by an inaccurate translation, the more red we add to the water, the more it stays the same.
But that isn’t true.
Sure, the water is still water, but it isn’t what it was before. One, no one wants to drink it. People want crystal clear water, and if you have some weird red water that has ink it, you’re going to pass real quick. Two, you can’t get the ink out of the water either. What was once pristine water is now ruined with ink, and everyone knows it. You can’t hide the red; you can’t pretend it isn’t there. What was a glass of water is now ruined, so what use does it have anymore?
So the more things change, the more they are not the same.
So let’s try the actual translation, okay?
You have a glass of water, sitting there on the table. You’re either going to drink it or not. That is determined in your mind by looking at it, and there are a lot of factors that will influence that. How thirsty are you? Are you hot? Did you just work out? So many things that have nothing to do with the water.
Now someone comes by and adds a drop of red ink into the glass and it’s changed. Changed forever, never to be that clear glass of water again. The question is not what’s wrong with the water or why did someone put ink in it. The question is, how thirsty are you?
See, people didn’t know me before all this. I had spent so much time being invisible that I was used to not being considered a person. So I was a glass of water sitting on the table, being ignored because who gives a damn about a lone glass of water. But then Brad kisses me and suddenly I’m seen, and I’m not just seen, but they figure out I’m gay.
And one drop of ink falls.
Nothing has changed. I am still the same person I was before he kissed me, but am I? I am now gay and will always be gay. I could get struck with a lightning bolt sent by Brocules, the patron god of heterosexuals, and have my entire brain rewired. I would wake up and like boobs and stuff, care about the color of girls’ panties, and spit more. And fart I guess, I don’t know. I’d make a bad straight.
But the point is, even after that lightning bolt, I’d still be the gay guy to those people. They’d go, “Did you hear Kyle got struck by lightning?” and then ask, “Who?” and they’d say, “You know, the gay guy.”
I haven’t changed. Brad hasn’t changed. Yet we can never be the people we were before last week.
And here comes more of the same thing.
I was still ignored because no one wanted to be caught talking to the gay guy in public, only this time they were doing it on purpose. They knew I was there, they knew who I was, but they made a point not to even glance at me. Completely changed, more of the same crap.
Brad had always been the center of attention. People talked about him, watched him as he walked by. He was someone everyone knew. But he had always been envied and scorned by the people who were never going to be as cool or handsome as he was. They thought about how much they disliked him; they talked among themselves about how fake he was and why people couldn’t see through his bullshit. They just didn’t say it to his face because he was that guy, and no one wanted to talk shit about that guy.
Brad kisses me and suddenly their thoughts became words and their words became weapons, and instantly, Brad was the center of attention in a completely different way.
Nothing in his life stayed the same, nothing at all. He was kicked off the baseball team, and though they were willing to let him play to save face, he wasn’t going to go back unless they changed the rules about how they treat gay people at Foster High. The people who used to be his friends openly scorned him, and a few were very vocal about it if they ran into him in the halls or whatever. He used to date the prettiest girl in the school, and now he was dating me, who was not the prettiest anything in the world. He was no longer the person people thought he was, although he hadn’t changed one thing about himself.
Yet according to Brad, this was all just more of the same.
He had always known these people didn’t really like him, and the only thing that had changed was they were being honest about it. I thought he’d miss being popular and everything that came with it, but he said he honestly didn’t miss it. He did say he hated being spit at in the hall, but besides that, he was relieved he was out.
The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.
So as another week passed, the next part of our diffusion happened.
People stopped seeing the red ink and started seeing red water.
Brad explained that most of the people he knew didn’t have the attention span to dislike someone for very long. It didn’t sound right to me, and one night, at his house, he laid it out for me.
“See, you think everyone is like you,” he explained as we lay on his bed. “You think that people have the ability to focus on something and not let it go. You have that crazy elephant memory, so once you dislike something, you keep disliking it for… well, forever, I guess.”
“You know elephants do have great memories, but they forget stuff.”
“Fine, but you’re elephant-like in more than just your memory.”
He glanced down at my crotch, and I blushed instantly.
“Brad!” I whined.
“Okay, but my point is, these people don’t have the endurance to care about anything for long. I mean, look at memes. They are everything for, like, five seconds, and then they’re gone. You know why? Because people find something else and move on. They hate me—”
“Us,” I interjected.
“Us,” he added. “But that was like two weeks ago. We’re gay. Who cares? They all hate us and that’s a law now, so going out of their way to show it is too much for them. They’ll never like us, but they will start to ignore us.”
“Well, that’s normal for me,” I said, going over what he said in my mind. It was scary how smart Brad could be about people. It was like he had access to the machine code of people’s minds. He didn’t know the formality of psychology or the technical terms for things, but he understood the motivations of people like no one I had ever met.
He scooted over toward me. “And I still don’t understand how anyone could ignore you.” He moved closer. “You’re just too cute for words.” He leaned in to kiss me.
“Knock it off, Romeo,” his dad said, walking by the open door, a rule his parents had insisted on once they accepted we were dating.
Brad smiled and gave me a quick peck as he pulled back. “Sorry, Dad.”
“You’re going to get us in trouble,” I scolded him.
Another grin that could charm the pants off a nun and he adds, “You’re worth the trouble.”
And sure enough he was right. As we headed into the third week, things just… stopped.
People stopped yelling things at us at lunch, people stopped moving as far away from me as possible in the hall, and Brad said he hadn’t had his books knocked out of his hands two days in a row. And then I made a friend.
I think.
Well, let me explain.
See, normally when I walk into a class, I take my backpack off, sit down, pull my notebook out, make sure I have a clean page ready and have the textbook on hand if I have to read out loud or something. I sit near the side of the classroom, next to a wall, and usually in front since I want to actually hear the teacher instead of a bunch of idiots drooling on their desks.
No one ever really talked to me unless they were in deep shit.
Maybe once a month since I had been a freshman. someone would come up to my desk and beg to see my notes on whatever since they were dead fucking asleep when we covered it. I knew with my memory I didn’t need them, but I liked making detailed notes because it gave my brain another way to memorize the stuff and pass the time in class. So I was used to someone wanting me to share what I wrote down now and then.
When I walked into trig, the blue-haired girl from the drama club waved at me.
Yes, I turned around to see if she was waving at someone else, and she nodded and said she was waving at me. I walked over and pulled my notebook out. “This is everything this week. For anything older, I’d have to check my locker.”
She glanced at my notebook like I had offered her a dead bird or something.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“My notes.”
“On?”
“On trig. Hurry before the teacher comes in.”
She laughed. “Kyle, I’m not asking to see your notes.”
I looked at her, completely confused. “Then what do you want?”
“I was saying hi?”
Confused.
“You know, like a human being?”
More confused.
“Trying to be nice?”
Yeah, something was off.
“You can sit here,” she said, gesturing to the seat next to her.
“What’s wrong with it?” I asked, giving the seat a stern look.
“Um, nothing? What do you think would be wrong with it?”
Sighing, I explained, “It’s just this is my last good pair of pants, and I can’t get them torn on a tack or stained with something.”
Now it was her turn to be confused. “Who would put those things on your seat?”
“Tommy Lopez, seventh grade. It was some kind of soda that made my pants stick when it dried. I had to go home and change and miss the rest of the day.”
She looked horrified.
“So what’s with the chair?”
“I was just offering you the seat, to sit together? Like, I don’t know, people?”
Yep, not understanding one word.
“Jeremy was an asshole to you guys and I wanted to say sorry. I didn’t know you’d be this paranoid.”
My confusion turned to ire. “Three different people spit gum into my boyfriend’s hair last week because they were having a contest on who could make the bigger mess. It’s not paranoia if they’re out to get you.”
Now she was completely shaken. “I didn’t know. I am so sorry.”
And she did seem sorry. I didn’t see pity on her face or even just sympathy. She really looked like she was distressed by the way we were being treated.
“The chair is safe. I’ll sit in it if you don’t believe me.” She started to stand up.
“Okay, I believe you,” I said, sitting down gently, just in case.
“I’m Sammy,” she said, holding her hand out.
“Kyle,” I replied, shaking it.
“I knew that.”
That made me smile. “Sorry, habit. I’m not used to people knowing my name.”
She shook her head. “Well, they know it now.”
I got my books out. “Tell me about it.”
151 Days #3
Kyle
FOR EVERY action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
This is Newton’s Third Law of Motion, and it is a pretty standard concept that is universally accepted in science. It’s a cornerstone of physics since forever. Well, not actual forever, but before color television, so close enough for what I’m talking about. It states that whenever object A interacts with object B, they exert forces on each other that forever changes the trajectory of both objects. Everything in the universe can change anything it comes into contact with. No one escapes unscathed.
I’m pretty sure you know I am not talking about physics.
There is no way to exist in this world without affecting it. Trust me, I tried. Most of my life, I tried to place myself outside the world. A boy in an emotional bubble, never touching anything, never letting anything touch me, just my own little island of nothing, trying my level best to just move forward.
I didn’t want friends.
I so desperately wanted friends. I mean, in the same way that boy bands wanted to stay relevant past their third album desperate. But I had no idea how to make friends. Hell, I didn’t even like myself. What were the odds someone else would like me? No, better not to engage and ignore all that socializing.
I didn’t want love.
Now, this is complete bullshit and we all know it. I mean, who doesn’t want love? I wanted love the same way people who believe in UFOs want to be abducted. Both of us would be completely shocked by it and then find ourselves utterly unprepared for the actual occurrence. I wanted to be loved, but I had no idea what it would feel like if someone did.
I didn’t want to be seen.
This one is true. I hated everything about me, which seemed like it wasn’t really a big deal because I hated almost everything else, but it was. See, I hated myself for all the things I wasn’t, and I hated everyone else for being everything I could never be. Things like normal, cool, and chill were beyond my grasp, and I grew up loathing all the reasons why I couldn’t be like that and hated the people who were.
I wanted not to exist, I wanted a pain-free life, I wanted to get out of high school in one piece.
Turns out I was better off wishing to be abducted. At least then all of my failure would have been contained to a spaceship.
Let me show you the chain of events that led to this clusterfuck of a life I live.
Brad Graymark’s dad was a douchebag and didn’t use protection in high school when he had sex.
That created Brad. He’s object A.
Brad desperately wanted to be loved and accepted by his father, but couldn’t get it because, and again I refer back to, his father was a colossal douchebag. For Brad that meant playing baseball the very best he could. Because Brad was so good at baseball, he became one of the most popular guys in school. Because he was so popular, he didn’t think he needed to do anything except play baseball.
Turns out he needed to maintain a GPA above a negative number.
So to keep playing baseball, which would keep him popular, which would magically change his father to show emotion and say he loved his son, Brad had to find a tutor.
That’s me, object B.
We met, he kissed me, I had a stroke and kissed him back, and then all sorts of shit started to happen.
The school decided to say very loudly that they didn’t like gay people, which then caused our parents to rise up and threaten to sue them if they kept it up.
See? Action to reaction.
Since the school couldn’t openly be hostile toward us, it allowed everyone else to be hostile, which meant it was open season on gay people at Foster High.
Action to reaction.
Being openly attacked forced Brad and me to make new friends—well, new ones for him, my first ones. Those people had been treated shitty for just being different, so we all kind of came together.
Can you see how every single thing has caused a completely different thing to occur?
That led to us crashing a popular-people party, which led Kelly, a friend of Brad’s, to admit he had feelings for Brad, which led to Jeremy, don’t ask, to film it and put it up on YouTube, which led to Kelly shooting himself in the head.
You know, that makes it sound like Brad being born is at fault; let me start over again.
If I had never been born then Brad would have found someone else to tutor him, Kelly could have gone on crushing on him in silence, and none of this would have happened. So if I was dead, Kelly would be alive.
We all got that?
So now we are here, 151 days left in this school year and we’re a man down. I know that sounds flippant, but think about it for a moment. Our senior year had a literal body count; that’s how bad it had gotten. But the clusterfuck that was this year wasn’t done yet.
Because Kelly killing himself caused people to lose their minds. They wanted someone to blame. Some found that blame in the school, some found it in Kelly, and most of the people at school found it in me.
See, to everyone else, I was object A, the first kid in school to stand up and say, “Yeah, I’m gay. What’s your problem?” which led to Kelly being object B and killing himself. Sure, there were a lot of steps in between, but in their head the line from me to him was pretty simple. Gay guy to dead guy. End of story.
But they’re wrong. It isn’t the end of the story. In fact, it’s the start of a whole new one.
Because Kelly killing himself was object A, and trust me in this:
I’m object B, and I am pissed.
This town killed Kelly, this attitude that normal is a religion and anyone who doesn’t worship under it is a sinner who deserves to get punished. Maybe you shun them, maybe you hurl derogatory comments at them, and maybe you hold them down and beat the shit out of them in an empty gym. Well, if that’s the case, I am not a sinner, I am the fucking devil, and I refuse to stand by and let anyone else end up being sacrificed on the altar of normal.
I have 151 days left in the school year before I blow out of this town like a cartoon roadrunner. That leaves me a little under five months to fix Foster and make sure this never happens again.
So if I were you, I’d buckle up, because I’m not playing around anymore.
John Goode is fifty years old and was found in his floating crib by a strange man… wait, no that’s Baby Yoda. I am a cat that gets constantly screamed at by a blond woman while I’m trying to eat… wait, no, not me. I am inevitable, nope. I am Iron Man? More no. I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way? I can’t pull that dress off. Okay, I am and shall always be your friend. Sigh, I think I stole that from somewhere. Let me try again. WHEN I WAS A YOUNG WARTHOG! Too much? I agree. Okay, how about a little Fosse, Fosse, Fossee, a little Martha Graham, Martha Graham, Twyla, Twyla, Twyla and then some Michael Kidd, Michael… I lost you, huh? Well whoever he is, I can assure you he isn’t a black cat that wears glasses. Okay, how about this?
He is this guy who lives in this place and writes stuff he hopes you read.
Tales From Foster High #1
KOBO / iTUNES / iTUNES AUDIO
End of the Innocence #2
KOBO / iTUNES / iTUNES AUDIO
151 Days #3
KOBO / iTUNES / GOOGLE PLAY
Series
KOBO / iTUNES / AUDIBLE / GOOGLE PLAY
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