Chapter 2
Jacob wanted to stop him. “Don’t…” He wanted to reach out and grab him, for comfort, or maybe to shake some sense into him. He’d wanted to beg him, “Please stay.” But he had no choice but to let Rory go.
Jacob had witnessed the teasing first hand. He’d chastised the jocks for their name calling. “Hey, Betty!” Betty, as in BettyGoodman,was a favorite amongst the not so creative footballers, because of Rory’s instrumental prowess. “He likes to play a girl’s instrument, ‘cause it’s like sucking on a dick,” Peter Underhill had once said.
“Enough, Peter!” Jacob scolded the junior classman trumpeter right there, right in front of Rory. He’d made Peter apologize, and informed the overachieving asshole that just because more girls than boys happened to play the clarinet in high school, in the real world, it wasn’t that way at all. Sticking up for Rory had only made things worse. The harassment increased, and the day after quitting drama club, Rory quit the band.
“Don’t give up something you love, something that makes you happy, because of what other people think.” Jacob tried really hard to change his mind.
“I’m done with it. With band. With chorus. With drama. With everything, including Underhill. Including you.” And for a while, Rory kept to his word.
But he approached Jacob’s desk that hot summer day, the one that came before the season officially started. And Rory still hummed. He was still making music, even if he hardly realized. The love of a good song, it hadn’t left him entirely.
“You got a hundred?” Jacob asked, as elation turned to doubt. “Really?”
“Well,” Rory admitted. “Not actually. But I passed.” His grin made up for the fib.
Where Jacob had failed, Wendy had been more successful, somehow convincing Rory to come back to school, at least a couple of half days a week. Both had supplemented that with private tutoring; Wendy Dutterman, his math teacher, at her home, and Jacob always after school, in the classroom. They worked together since that night in his kitchen when he’d come close to touching more than Rory’s hand. Together, they’d somehow gotten their student through twelfth grade History and Physics, and now, apparently—miraculously—Trigonometry.
“So, um, can you lay an actual test paper on me?” Jacob was still a tad dubious.
“You need a decree from President Johnson?” “Richard Nixon is president.”
“I know. I was joshin’.”
“Were you?”
“It’s kind of a drag I won’t get to hold Max no more,” Rory said, ignoring the question, still petting the snake.
“I needto see the test. Or a note from Miss Dutterman.” Jacob went all business. “To make sure.”
“I got an eighty.” The boy grinned again. “Ain’t no fake out this time.”
“Rules are rules.” Jacob shrugged.
Rory reached into his pocket. “I dig.” He pulled out a bag of marijuana first, then some loose cigarettes, and three sheets of folded paper, handing over one of those. “Here.”
Jacob picked up the weed and tossed it back. Rory stuffed it in his pocket, working it down, the act lowering his Levis enough to flash a width of skin between them and the bottom hem of his light blue denim shirt. “Eighty is really good!” Jacob opened the eight by eleven sheet that started out, like, three by three. He smoothed it out atop of his desk. “Oh.” It wasn’t a math test.
The hot classroom felt suddenly smaller, closer, more confining. “Is this really what you want to do?” Jacob asked. The words in the letter cut him like a knife, and seemed to suck the breath right out of him.
“My dad said it was either that, or prison. Like he even cares. ‘Something’s gotta make a man outta ya.’” Rory mocked the last part, complete with wagging finger on the hand not holding the classroom snake.
“Oh, Rory, you are a man.” That was what Jacob wanted to say. He wanted to push the scraggly, wild hair from Rory’s eyes, take him in his arms, and tell him everything would be okay. He wanted to tell him that he cared about him, to tell him how much. Not like a father, but in other ways. “When do you go?” That’s what he settled on instead. It seemed easier to ask the boy standing in front of him—the man, a man old enough to go off and fight for his country—than to read it in the letter from the US Army.
“The Monday after graduation.”
That was four days away. “So soon.”
“Here.” Rory offered a second origami square. “‘Cause it’s the last day of school.” He also offered another smirk. “And…And ‘cause I’m going away, dig?” He waited for Jacob to work it flat. “You like?”
“Rory, this really isn’t…appropriate.”
“Last fall, Miss Taylor asked us to do a self-portrait in art class. That’s mine.”
The kid had talent. The image was drawn in pencil…shoulder-length, kinky locks faded by the sun to different hues, sad, hooded eyes, and an impish grin, just like now. The body, lean and completely smooth—except in one area—was long-legged, and collapsed in on itself, in a somewhat awkward pose of a teenager burgeoning on manhood, but not yet quite comfortable in the role. It was all finely detailed in shades of gray on lined paper, down to the gentle curves of the side view of slim buttocks and a long, slender circumcised erection.