The Thunder in His Head Read online

  Chortling, grunting, we collapsed, our upper bodies landing in the passenger seat of the car, our legs splaying out over the driveway.

  “What a wimp!” I taunted. “Can’t even stand up straight!” The two us chuckled away as Ty struggled to get out of my headlock, the leather of the seat scrunching loudly beneath us.

  Seconds later, a voice above us went, “Hey….”

  There was a note of concern in the voice, and it made me realize that Ty and I were violating somebody’s very expensive car. I looked up at the Corvette’s driver.

  He was, surprisingly, about my age. Nice face. Dark-brown eyes, dark-brown skin, a faint sprinkling of pimples across his forehead. He had a little mustache going, his small lips pulled into a grim line. Very cute.

  The way he was staring at me had me thinking that the dude was upset. It was a sort of amazed, what-the-hell-are-you-doing look. With a goofy, embarrassed grin, I let Ty go. “Sorry, man,” I said to the driver, pushing myself up from the seat and getting my feet under me. “Got carried away there.”

  Ty shoved me playfully. “That’s right, get your big behind off me.” He sat upright, and his smile briefly flashed into a grimace, his back arching as if it hurt. “Dang, dude, you weigh a ton!”

  I felt awkward suddenly. I folded my arms across my stomach, hands clutching at my sides, swamped by the urge to slink away and hide. The dude behind the wheel was still giving me that stare. He wore a dark-green tank top, and his chest, shoulders, and biceps were smoothly built from workouts. My muscles were thick but undefined. I felt outclassed. Leaning down, I apologized to the driver again. “I hope we didn’t mess up your seat or anything.”

  “Dwight,” Ty said to the driver, “the ox who keeps apologizing to you is Kyle Manning. He’s my dad’s girlfriend’s son. Kyle, this is my bud Dwight Varley.”

  A shaky little smile tugged at my mouth. “Uh… hi there, Dwight.”

  Dwight half raised one hand in my direction and then turned away, apparently disgusted.

  “Well, we gotta go,” said Ty, pulling the car door shut. “See you tomorrow, Kyle.”

  Dwight hit the gas, and the Corvette shot down the street like a rocket.

  Three

  THURSDAY morning, I was out of bed before my alarm went off. After going through my usual routine in the bathroom, I dressed in the slacks and blazer I’d worn yesterday, adding a clean white button-down shirt. Ties were optional at Pemberton, and I usually avoided them, but today, for some reason, I cinched a gray one around my neck. Who says I got no class?

  I came downstairs carrying my backpack in my right hand. It tugged at my arm as though filled with bricks. Last night, I’d had homework in six subjects, which meant I’d brought home a pile of textbooks as tall as a toddler. Thank you, most wonderful teachers.

  The kitchen was empty. The dishes I’d dirtied eating chicken salad and crackers yesterday after Ty left were on the counter by the sink, looking lonely. Usually, by this time on a weekday morning, the air would be filled with the smell of coffee and toasting bagels. The television perched on top of the fridge would be quietly presenting the overnight news, and Mom would be drifting back and forth, fumbling with this and that as if trying to fill the spaces emptied by Dad’s absence. I pulled out a chair and put my backpack at the table, then walked down the hall to Mom’s room.

  Her door was closed. There was no sound from within, no television or radio going. Mom was a real news junkie. It was one of the ways she got the topics for her opinion column. I knocked and, trying for casual, fed her one of the lines she used on me when I overslept. “Hey, that stuff you see in the air is called daylight.”

  Silence. That worried me. Was she sick? Or, worse, was Reece in there with her? I knocked again, louder. “Mom?”

  “I’m awake.” Her voice, though muffled by the door, sounded clear and alert.

  I waited. She didn’t say anything else. “Mom? Are you all right?”

  There was a long pause before I heard her footsteps. The door opened, and she was standing there in her pajamas and the little pale blue silk robe Reece had given her to commemorate some ridiculous occasion, like the anniversary of their first hello. A scarf tied down her hair, and she was thankfully alone. She didn’t look sick or tired or anything. As a matter of fact, she looked sort of blank.

  “I’m fine, Kyle,” she said. “I’m just taking my time getting started this morning.” She stepped past me and started up the hall toward the kitchen.

  I followed. “You gonna be working at home today?”

  “Yes. I have to start putting together a column from my interview with the mayor.” She had gotten home a little after eight last night. I had come down from my room, where I was struggling through two pages of geometry problems, and given her a kiss on the cheek because I thought she needed it. She had given me a smile and a pat on the back and gone straight to bed.

  Mom had always seemed invincible to me. Her column appears in the paper seven days a week, and many times, her opinion isn’t exactly popular. In their feedback, especially on the newspaper’s website, most readers are not content to just express their disagreement; they get vicious and cruel. Her last column was about this psychiatrist in Germantown who caused a big media flap when his landlord asked him to take down the pole he’d planted in front of his office to fly Old Glory. Since the good doctor was calling out to every media outlet to spread the word of the outrageous injustice inflicted upon his patriotism, Mom separately interviewed the man and his landlord.

  In the resulting column, Mom made the argument that the doctor was wrong and that the media had blown the situation out of all proportion. She pointed out three indisputable facts: first, the doctor only leased his office, which meant that he was not entitled to make a permanent change to the landlord’s property, such as installing a flag pole in the lawn. Second, the landlord had not only the right, but also the obligation to have him remove the flagpole since the man had no authorization to put it there, and the landlord would be held liable if, say, the pole fell over and broke a car or the head of a passerby. Third, the landlord attached poles to the front wall of the tenants’ offices for purposes of flag flying.

  Mom’s point was that this was not simply a matter of a big bad landlord infringing on an innocent citizen’s rights, which was the picture the doctor had painted. And for that, Mom was called racist (the doctor was white), unpatriotic, un-American, un-Christian (I never could figure out how religion came into all this), and socialist. One guy said she should leave the country since she obviously hated the constitution and the flag. Another questioned her intelligence, saying that only a moron would be so utterly incapable of seeing the landlord’s vile disrespect for that poor doctor’s love of his country. Mom was called other names that had to be edited out because the newspaper wouldn’t print obscenities, on paper or online.

  That happened every time she published a column. Seeing how those stupid people insulted her always got me riled, but Mom just shrugged it off, said it came with the territory. If I were her, I would fire off none-too-polite columns responding to the bat-crazy feedback, but she said that would be pointless since she would just be restating the same argument the idiot respondents had already missed or simply ignored. She went on writing exactly what she thought, and the name-calling bounced off the force field of her indifference. She was invulnerable, it seemed, and that was one of the reasons it was disconcerting to see her so troubled lately.

  Entering the kitchen this morning, she pointed at my dirty dishes. “Take care of those before you leave.”

  “Okay.”

  Mom got a bag of coffee from the fridge and went for the coffee maker. I reached into the pantry and pulled out her box of Special K. She’d bought a casket-sized box of Frosted Flakes for me last Saturday, which I’d polished off in, like, two days. I grabbed a fistful of Special K and stuffed my mouth.

  “Put the cereal in a bowl, son,” Mom said jadedly, pouring water into the coffee maker.

&n
bsp; “Aw. That’s another dish I’ll have to wash.” But like a good little boy, I got down a bowl from the cabinet and poured in a mound of cereal. What the hell. I might as well add milk. And sugar.

  Once the coffee was ready, Mom filled a mug and came over to the table, where I sat wolfing down my breakfast. She stood over the chair across from me. She seemed tense suddenly, as if trying to force herself to do something she wasn’t quite ready to do. My heart beat a little faster. She’d been through so much since she and Dad separated. I knew she was hurt, knocked off balance by the changes in her life. Maybe she was finally going to open up to me.

  “Kyle?”

  “Yeah, Mom.”

  “Reece wants you to go swimming with him at the Y.”

  Okay. That wasn’t what I was expecting. “Swimming?”

  “Yes. You do like swimming.”

  “I like biting my toenails too, but that doesn’t mean I want to gnaw on ’em with Reece.”

  Disappointment settled flatly in her face. “You don’t like him.”

  “Mom, I like Reece.” Yeah, if she only knew how I liked Reece. “But why would he want to hang out with me? You’re the one he’s interested in.”

  “You just answered your own question, silly boy. He wants the two of you to get to know each other better. And that sounds like a good idea to me.”

  I groaned. “Aw, Mom!”

  She groaned right back at me. “Aw, Kyle!” She pulled out the chair and sat, looking at me steadily across the table. “He’s making an effort. The least you can do is meet him halfway.”

  I looked down at the table so she wouldn’t see my eyes roll. “Fine. When?”

  “Today. He’ll pick you up after school.” Mom reached over and squeezed my hand. She smiled. “Thanks, son. You’ll have fun. I’m sure of it.”

  Well. That made one of us. Yippee.

  “MY MOM’S boyfriend is taking me on a date.”

  Jill, seated beside me on the steps behind the gymnasium, put a hand to her mouth and froze. One second later, diet Pepsi sprayed from her nose in a watery snort.

  “Ugh.” I handed her a napkin as I scooted away from her.

  It was our lunch period. The back of the gymnasium was only a few yards from the brick-wall fence on the western border of the campus, facing Regency Street and its line of quietly modest houses. Few students ever came here, so it was a good place to go when you wanted to get away from everyone.

  Jill was in a rotten mood. This morning, someone had pasted a picture of a skeleton on her locker with her name written on it. She didn’t feel up to facing the crowd in the bright, noisy cafeteria today. She put down her can of soda and mopped quickly at her face with the napkin.

  “Are you serious?” she asked, eyes wide. “Your momma’s boyfriend came on to you?”

  “Well… I wouldn’t say all that.” For lunch, I’d bought three slices of apple pie in the cafeteria and was now polishing off the last one. Those slices had to contain the equivalent of three apples. Mom was going to be so proud when she heard how much fruit I ate today. “He apparently told my mom that he wants to get to know me. So we’re going swimming at the Y this afternoon.” I shook my head at the inanity of the whole thing.

  “Why are you so bummed? You’re gonna get to see him in swimming trunks.”

  “Jill. He’s my mom’s man. I’m trying to cool down, not get hotter for him.”

  Jill blinked, and just like that, her mind went somewhere else, her eyes blank. “I weigh too much,” she said after a moment. “That’s what gets me about my name being on that stupid picture this morning. I know I don’t look like that.”

  True. Jill was far from being skeleton-thin. But she was very slim. And she had visibly lost weight in the six weeks since school started. Every morning she arrived with a lunch her dad packed for her in a nice little insulated red canvas bag. And every noon, she emptied that food in a garbage bin and sucked down a soda for lunch. Not a regular soda, oh, hell no. A diet soda.

  She was in trouble. I wanted to tell her that, tell her to get help. But if you even mentioned her weight, she spazzed and went into denial. She was in denial about a lot of things.

  She wound a finger into a lock of her hair and picked up her soda. “You think that’s why Ty doesn’t talk to me? Because I’m so heavy?”

  “Jillian, baby. Ty has a girlfriend. Remember? Her name is Carla.”

  “But he’s not into her. Not really.”

  Major denial.

  I WAS on my way to my fifth period class when I ran into Ty for the first time today. He was coming out of a classroom and spotted me heading down the hall. He gave me a wave.

  “Hey, man,” I greeted him. We stopped in the middle of the hall to talk. Kids swerved around us like water around a big rock in the middle of a fast-moving stream.

  “I hear my dad’s hanging out with you this afternoon.”

  “Yeah. He wants to go swimming.”

  “That’s not all he wants,” Ty said with a sly smile. “He wants to talk to you about something. That’s how he does it. He takes you someplace you really like, and once he gets you there, he lights into you with some big dressing-down about all the things you’re doing wrong. He’s done that to me a million times.”

  “Oh.” My neck stiffened. Reece had been dating my mom for all of two seconds. Did he seriously think he was going to start playing dad to me?

  “Don’t sweat it,” Ty said reassuringly. “If you just nod a few times and mumble ‘you’re right’ every once in a while to him, he’ll wind down pretty quick.”

  “Yeah, okay. Thanks for the heads-up, man.” Reece was hot, without a doubt, and if he only so much as kissed the palm of my hand, I could meet my maker with a big fat grin on my face. But I had already decided that if Reece tried to lecture me today about anything, I was going to give him explicit directions to the devil’s front door. I have a father, thank you very much.

  “Hey, what did you think of my friend Dwight?”

  Pure, nasty hostility blazed up in me. “Your friend Dwight is a dick. You can tell him I said that.” I still felt stung with embarrassment from my brief encounter with the dude. He’d looked at me as if I were a smudge of fresh, wormy dog crap on the underside of his shoe. I’ve caught plenty of looks like that since word got around about my sexual orientation. They always bring out the beast in me, although I couldn’t explain why the reaction had been so delayed with Dwight.

  Ty looked surprised. “Really? That’s so weird, man.”

  “And why is it ‘weird’ that I think he’s a dick?” I could feel some of my hostility redirecting itself toward Ty.

  “He asked about you after he picked me up from your place last night.”

  “Asked what about me?”

  “Just stuff. You know, like how long I’ve known you. If you’ve got a girlfriend. Where you like to hang out. That kind of stuff. He likes you.”

  I frowned, deeply confused. “Wait a minute. He’s gay?”

  “Yeah. He goes to Somerset Academy. He came out to his dad last Christmas.”

  The frown in my face didn’t ease one bit. My brain was trying to reconcile this new revelation with the look I’d read on Dwight’s face yesterday.

  Ty suddenly seemed uneasy. “Uh… I guess I should have asked you before I did it. I told Dwight you were gay, but I was just going on what I’ve been hearing around school. And now that I think about it, that was a pretty stupid thing for me to do without asking you myself. It’s just a rumor otherwise, and here I’ve gone getting Dwight all psyched up to meet you—”

  “Ty, stop,” I said, raising my hand. “It’s okay that you told him. I am gay.”

  “Good. I mean, I’m glad that you don’t mind. Dwight really likes you.”

  “So you keep saying, but that’s not what I saw in his eyes yesterday. He made me feel like a cockroach or something. What the hell makes you think he likes me?”

  “Because he asked me to give you his cell phone number and tell you t
o call him.”

  I was stunned. “Get out.”

  “Well? Do you want his number or what?”

  I pulled out my cell phone and handed it over, feeling sort of dazed all of a sudden. This was strange. The hot guy in the Corvette, the very one who gave me the impression yesterday that I was a walking social disease, was actually a homosexual? And he supposedly liked me? When had we entered the Twilight Zone? Ty plugged Dwight’s name and number into the phone book on my cell. When he handed the phone back, I went ahead and added the number to my speed dial.

  Ty was giving me an amused look. “So.”

  “What?”

  “You really don’t like girls, huh?”

  I patted the side of his face. “Not true. I like you just fine.”

  He tried to kick me, but I was already scurrying down the hall.

  Four

  REECE was sitting behind the wheel of his big blue Ford Escape when I walked through the main door of the school at three. There were no clouds in the sky, and the afternoon sun was overwhelmingly bright. For an instant, I considered turning around, going straight through the building and out the back exit. Reece saw me a few seconds after I saw him, and he waved. So much for the run-and-hide idea.

  Dread slowed my footsteps. Other kids flowed past me, eager to get away from school. A slap on my shoulder made me flinch. I turned my head as Ty went by, holding hands with Carla.

  “Good luck, dude,” he said, grinning at me. Then he waved at his dad with his free hand.

  Carla, a short, buxom girl with her medium-length red hair tied off in about a thousand pig curls, gave me the kind of stiff, not really sympathetic smile reserved for condemned men on their way to face the firing squad. She didn’t seem to like me all that much, which was strange since we’d hardly said more than hello to each other. As if anxious to remove themselves from the line of fire, Carla and Ty hurried toward the student parking lot, where her car was waiting.

  Under other circumstances, I would have worried that Jill was nearby and would take it upon herself to free Ty from the clutches of this no-good redhead he was not really into. But all I could think about at the moment was Reece. I thought about how pretty and white his teeth were in the smile he shone on me. I thought about how wide his shoulders were. I thought about the big, rugged hand he had draped casually over the top of the steering wheel and how nice that hand would feel rubbing the back of my neck.