Chapter 84

Where was Nina? Jacky wondered. Cody wasn’t in school, but she wasn’t over with the cheerleaders, either. He was looking for Haylee and her friends – not that he’d ever really met her friends – when he saw Ryan approaching him.

He froze.

Was Ryan coming to sit with him? Break up with him? Was Ryan on his way to the bathroom? Nope, Ryan was definitely heading straight toward him.

“Hey,” said Ryan when he’d reached the empty table where Jacky was sitting. Jacky suddenly felt like a huge loser. Ryan was dating a loser.

“Hey,” Jacky mumbled.

“You wanna come sit with us?” Ryan asked.

Jacky looked over at the table – correction, tables – full of football players and cheerleaders and popular people, most of whom had never spoken to Jacky. “Um…”

“Come sit with me,” Ryan said softly, that same low voice that reminded Jacky of the things they did when they were alone together.

And then Ryan was helping him fit his Tupperware containers back into his lunch bag and he was walking across the cafeteria with his face on fire and feeling like everyone was staring at him, except when he finally reached Ryan’s seat, which Ryan offered up to him as he dragged up a new chair for himself, it wasn’t everyone in the cafeteria staring at him. Just a few people at this particular lunch table, and most of them were casual glances, and smiles from the people who knew.

“Hey,” said Lance.

“Bout time you finally joined us, Jennings,” said Alex.

“What the hell is that?” Matt asked, as Jacky opened up a Tupperware container of what his mother called “Southwest Salad.”

A while later, Ryan leaned in and whispered in Jacky’s ear, “I guess it can be easy.”

But, of course, it wasn’t.

Maybe because Ryan was out and self-conscious about it, he noticed when people said things like “That’s gay” or used the words “faggot” or “homo.” And after repressing his instinct to call out bullies for so long, Ryan found himself unable to let anything slide.

People in the “That’s gay” camp didn’t mind when Ryan confronted them. “I’m sorry,” the person would generally say. “It’s one of those things I mean to stop saying but it’s a terrible habit.”

People who said the other things were a whole different story.

“Hey, faggot, stop starin’ at my dick!” Brayden Cobb told someone in the locker room.

“I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t use words like that,” Ryan said.

“What, are you captain of the Gay-Straight Alliance now?” Brayden demanded. “You’re probably starin’ at my dick too!”

“Trust me, I’m not,” Ryan said. “I just find what you said offensive.”

In that instance, Ryan had Lance and Matt at his back, as well as Tyler Gomez, plus the kid Brayden had been yelling at in the first place. No one was going to back up Brayden Cobb against Ryan Sullivan and half the football team. But when Brayden couldn’t go up against Ryan, he turned to the next best thing: Jacky.

“That asshole Brayden Cobb cornered me in the bathroom today,” Jacky told Ryan on the phone.

Immediately Ryan clenched his fist. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” Jacky sounded tired. “He was all, Tell your boyfriend to stop staring at me in the locker room, and when I was just like, Whatever, he was like, What’s a guy like Ryan Sullivan want with someone like you, huh? Is he one of them freaks who like deformed people?“

“Jacky…” Ryan softened.

“So I was like, Yeah, he is. He loves my arm stump. You wanna touch it?” Jacky laughed. “And that freaked him out and he left me alone.”

Even though Jacky’s stories made Ryan’s heart swell with pride that his boyfriend could damn well take care of himself, it made him that much more eager to confront Brayden Cobb and every other homophobic asshat who hadn’t gotten the memo that gay-bashing was not okay.

It also made his stomach twist. The dance was hurtling toward him and all he wanted to do was duck. Sometimes he could imagine it would all be fine, he and Jacky would dance and no one would say a thing about it. Other times he imagined Brayden Cobb making some rude comment and Ryan beating the shit out of him and getting expelled.

Then came the day he saw Brayden talking to Jacky at Jacky’s locker and everything about Jacky’s body language told Ryan that Jacky was ready to explode, and he saw red – suddenly he had his fists in Brayden’s shirt and had him shoved up against the lockers.

“You wanna kiss?” Brayden sneered, because Ryan was close enough to smell the toothpaste on his breath.

“Boys,” came the warning sound of a teacher’s voice, and though Ryan pushed himself away, it wasn’t soon enough.

They landed in Principal Novak’s office, interrogated separately, then together. Ryan waited his turn, leg jumping, knowing Brayden was going to claim that Ryan had been bullying him. But this was his first trip to Principal Novak’s office for anything negative. In middle school that would have been a different story, but Principal Novak had only known the well-behaved Ryan Sullivan.

Eventually Ryan and Brayden ended up in Ms. Scott’s office for a mediation session, in which Brayden talked out his ass and Ryan did his best not to punch him.

In any case, both of them ended up with detention. It was Ryan’s first detention in high school, and he realized what would have happened if he had punched Brayden: he would have been suspended for a week (or maybe even expelled), and he wouldn’t have been allowed to go to the dance.

The detention was a bigger deal at the group home. Ryan lost all of his privileges for the rest of the week – only two days, but still. That meant no TV, no computer unless he was doing schoolwork, and no phone calls. “I was just waiting for his true colors to show,” said Darren smugly.

Hope rolled her eyes. “Don’t let it happen again, okay? And so you’re aware, if you get suspended, you lose weekend visit privileges.”

All of this led to Ryan lying awake in bed at night, imagining the worst.