The Understatement of the Year Read online

  “Gotcha.”

  “I will take care of this. After I run it by Coach.” She squeezed my arm and walked away, smiling as she went.

  And that was my cue to go home to the little dorm room I’d been assigned, and call it a night. There’s only so much drama a guy can take in one day.

  — Graham

  I drank my sixth, seventh, and eighth beers while Bella and Rikker were having their private little chat. My stories don’t disappoint, he’d said. God only knows what he was telling Bella. Was it the version of events where we used to be more than friends? Or was it the blow-by-blow of the day we stopped being friends?

  At least if he told her that story, it would be a short story: there was an alley. Four rednecks gave chase, while yelling, “Get the faggots!” I ran away, and Rikker spent the next week in a hospital. I didn’t visit him, and I never even called. Then he left the state.

  The end.

  You know that cliché about time healing all wounds? Time had scabbed this one over pretty well. But Rikker showing up had ripped that sucker right off. And I felt sure that anyone looking at me right now would be able to see the bleeding.

  Before tonight, I didn’t know that you could be both drunk and literally twitching with anxiety at the same time.

  Bella and Rikker were in there a long time, hidden just from my view except for her elbow, for what seemed like an eternity. Eventually she rose up to hug him. Or maybe kiss him. (Because we’re talking about Bella, here.) Then she came back into view, a cheery smile on her face.

  And Rikker went the other direction, leaving the bar.

  And I drank yet another beer, feeling nothing but dread.

  Bella didn’t come back to sit by me for quite a while after that. At least I think it took a while. The details began to get pretty fuzzy.

  “Graham.”

  I opened my eyes, and Bella was shaking me. “What?” Somehow I was still sitting in a booth at Capri’s.

  “Wake up, Sweetie. Are you okay?”

  “‘Course,” I tried to say, although my throat was thick.

  Bella laughed. “How did you get so wasted on Capri’s pitchers? You’d have to drink a whole barrel of this swill.”

  “You have to really want it,” I mumbled.

  “Come on. Let’s get you home.” She led me out the back door and down College Street toward Beaumont House.

  “Wait a second.” It came out “shecond.” We were passing one of the secret societies’ crypts. I ducked behind the elegantly-pruned shrubberies and unzipped. Secret societies were a bunch of elitists who probably wanted nothing to do with me. So whenever I needed to take a piss on the way home from the bar, I favored their walls with my business.

  I heard a deep sigh from Bella where she waited on the sidewalk. “We lead a glamorous life, you know?”

  “Yeah, baby.”

  At a drunk’s pace, I followed Bella to my entryway door. “I can make it from here,” I slurred.

  “Don’t argue. I haven’t seen your room yet, anyway.”

  “S’good to have a single,” I said, trying to hold up my end of the conversation.

  When we’d climbed the stairs to my room, I fumbled with the key for so long that Bella grabbed it out of my hand and unlocked the door herself. Inside, she gave a low whistle. “Nice. Where did you get a second bed?”

  Instead of one regulation twin, I had two of them hitched up next to each other. “You know Donovan?”

  “The tight end?” Bella kicked off her shoes.

  “Yeah. He bought a waterbed, so I took his.”

  She giggled. “Seriously? How did he fill it up?”

  “Not my problem,” I said, yanking down the comforter on my giant bed. “I had to buy king-sized stuff, so I hope he doesn’t change his mind.” I dropped my jeans and fumbled my shirt over my head. That brought me down to just boxers. I climbed all the way into the bed, making room for Bella.

  I closed my eyes, as if I didn’t really care whether she sat down next to me or not. But the truth was, I didn’t want to be alone. I didn’t want to know where my mind would take me tonight if I was left to myself. Nowhere good.

  After a few moments’ hesitation, I felt Bella sink down onto the bed. She flopped back onto my second pillow, her arms folded behind her head. “It was a strange evening,” she said.

  Tell me about it.

  “I’m going to like working for the hockey team. Even if people are going to give me shit for it.”

  “What kind of shit?” I mumbled.

  “The same kind I always get. They’ll say I might as well ride the bus. Because I’m already riding the players.”

  I laughed, although being very drunk made that difficult. I rolled onto my side, which made my head swim. Bella was right there. So I pulled her closer to me and gave her what was probably a pretty sloppy kiss. She went with it, though, wrapping her arms around me. And when I dove into her soft mouth, she met me stroke for stroke. I hadn’t planned to do this tonight. But suddenly it seemed like a great way to keep my head on straight. Losing myself in Bella.

  But then she pulled back. “You’re so drunk,” she whispered. There was accusation in her voice.

  “I’m always drunk,” I argued. “Never stopped you before.”

  Now her voice had an edge to it. “You stopped me before,” she hissed. “You said that we weren’t going to do this anymore.”

  “I changed my mind.”

  As drunk as I was, I knew it was the wrong thing to say. And Bella confirmed that by giving my chest a rough shove. “Don’t treat me like a slut, Graham.”

  Shit. With great effort, I propped myself up on an elbow to squint down into her pissed-off face. “I would never call you that, Bells. I don’t think that way.” It wasn’t an eloquent apology, but it was true. Bella was the greatest. She never apologized for what she wanted. She just owned it.

  The way I never could.

  Pulling my sloppy thoughts together, I tried to do even better. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gone there. I’m just a train wreck tonight.”

  Having said my piece, I slid back down onto the pillow, rolling onto my back. Making a move on Bella had been very, very stupid. Not only was she mad at me now, but it probably wouldn’t have worked anyway. There was a window of drunkenness that I had to hit in order to get it up for a girl. I had to be drunk enough for the whole thing to seem like a good idea. And drunk enough to claim whiskey dick if it didn’t work out. But I couldn’t be too sloppy. Because I needed to concentrate to pull it off.

  And right now, my eyes were too heavy to stay open. But I curled one hand around Bella’s, and she let me.

  I was just drifting off when Bella got up off the bed. There was some rustling of clothing. I heard her belt hit the floor. And then my dresser drawer opened and shut, probably as Bella helped herself to one of my T-shirts. A minute later she came back into the bed. She put her head on my chest, and one knee over mine. Her arm snaked around my waist as she curled into me. She’d always been a cuddler.

  Tucking a hand over her smooth knee, I fell asleep.

  — Rikker

  There were pros and cons to signing on at a new college the July before your sophomore year. In the plus column, I’d lucked into a single. But they didn’t have room for me in Turner House where I was assigned. So my room was in a little overflow dorm called McHerrin. There were two other rooms on my floor, both housing exchange students from China. McHerrin wasn’t exactly the party dorm. But I was okay with that.

  After a stop in the shared bathroom to pee and brush my teeth, I let myself into my little habitat. Last year I’d made the effort to hang stuff on the walls, and make the place my own. But this year, I didn’t bother. I was jaded, I guess. Before, I’d thought that once you chose a college, you were there for four years. You could go ahead and hang the felt pennant over your bed.

  I’d jumped the gun on that one.

  So my little room looked like monastic living quarters. Or a prison cell. I
got into bed and shut off the light, but sleep didn’t come for me right away. I was too amped up by everything that had happened today.

  In the positive column, I knew I’d done well on the ice. And both Coach and Hartley had been good to me. Bella had been great. But that was only a start. There were still a thousand ways this could all go south.

  And then there was Graham, who’d looked as cheerful as a mushroom cloud tonight. I knew things about him that he didn’t want others to know. After he got over the shock of seeing me, I hoped he would just call me and say that. If he did, I’d tell him not to worry. I’d never out anybody, because I knew how much that sucked.

  Even someone who’d been as lousy a friend as Graham.

  But if he wanted that assurance from me, he’d have to actually acknowledge that we knew each other. And when we’d been seated three feet apart at Capri’s, he hadn’t even been able to manage eye contact.

  Hell, it was trippy. It had been Graham right there. But also not. It had felt a little like keeping company with a ghost.

  I lay there in the dark, thinking about him. And it wasn’t the first time I’d done that. When I’d signed on to come to Harkness six weeks ago, the memories had begun to roll over me. Before the bad ending, there had been a whole lot of good. Call it nostalgia. Call it idiocy. But my subconscious preferred the memory of Graham’s embrace to the memory of his rejection.

  Also, we were fifteen then. Everything I shared with Graham had been so vivid and new. No wonder that shit was still projected on the inside my skull in Technicolor.

  Though I hadn’t been near there in five years, I could picture Graham’s house so clearly in my mind. We always did our fooling around there, because he had the basement lair, complete with a tattered old sofa and an XBox. During middle school, we were all about the XBox.

  Ninth grade, we were all about the sofa.

  Whenever I looked back on that time, it was hard to pinpoint the moment I realized how I felt about him. We were two dorky teenage guys, not exactly big on talking about our feelings. Even after we’d started fooling around, we never had a conversation about it. Not even, “Do you like girls?” “Not really!” “Me neither!” For all I knew, maybe Graham did like girls now. I wasn’t going to ask.

  But five years ago, he liked me.

  We were best friends first. Together we survived middle school. We played hockey on a club team, and we went to the same Christian school. In fact, Christianity was a big deal in the corner of Michigan where we grew up. Kids on the playground would ask each other, “Which church do you go to?” Because that’s how our parents looked at the world.

  My parents were more religious than Graham’s, though. I knew this because at Graham’s house, nobody cared if we played video games on Sunday. And I’d heard Graham’s dad mock some of the things that our classmates’ parents thought. “If I take you to the Harry Potter movie, you won’t start worshiping the devil, right, guys? I didn’t think so.”

  Nobody found it unusual that Graham and I were so close. Including me. During middle school, I never let myself think about him that way. But even then, I was always incredibly aware of him. When he walked into a room, I knew it without looking. By the time we turned fifteen, his voice was already deep and smoky. And the sound of it resonated inside me like no one else’s.

  Girls never affected me like that. Some of them were nice, and fun to talk to. But they just weren’t Graham. I noticed that he never seemed to pay much attention to them either. We went to the middle school dances with a group of our friends, where we all danced to the fast songs. But Graham never pulled me aside to ask, “Do you think she likes me?”

  Not once.

  Meanwhile, we played video games in Graham’s basement like it was our job. And there was a different way that we looked at each other when we were alone. Graham has always blushed easily. In time I realized how easy it was to make him do that. All I had to do was hold his eyes a little longer than necessary, and pink spots would appear on his cheekbones.

  I liked that. So I did it all the time.

  The long looks — and sitting a little closer than necessary while we watched movies — that went on for two years. And then one Friday night during our first month of high school, we were tussling over the remote control. In order to win the fight, Graham put his knee across my thighs to hold me down. And then he stretched his long body toward my arm, where I was dangling the remote as far from him as I could. It was then that I realized Graham was on top of me. Finally. And without thinking, I put my free hand on his chest.

  I’ll never forget the wild jerk that his body made under my hand. And then he was staring down at me, cheeks flushed, breath coming fast. I lifted my chin an inch, and that’s all it took. Graham dropped his mouth onto mine.

  Our first kiss was hot and sloppy, and it lit my body up like a flare.

  Yes. This. Yes. Yes. Yes. It was all shock and awe for maybe two minutes. And then Graham’s mom called down from the top of the basement stairs. “Hey, Guys? Do you want popcorn?”

  Graham jerked back onto his own end of the sofa. “Uh, sure,” he called.

  Then he got up and switched the TV over to video games. And we played Call of Duty until the popcorn was ready.

  We didn’t speak about it after that. Not one word. But the following week, I thought of almost nothing else, and wore a perpetual boner every time I saw him. And the next time I went to Graham’s, my hands sweat through two rounds of whatever video game we were playing. Then Graham’s mom yelled down that she was going to the grocery store, and could Graham think of anything they needed?

  “Nope,” he called up to her.

  We heard the sound of shoes clicking a couple of times across the kitchen floor. Then the door to the garage, and finally the sound of her car’s engine backing out and driving away.

  There was a beat of silence in the basement. “So…” we both said at exactly the same time.

  “Jinx,” I said.

  Graham gave a nervous laugh. “The jinx machine is out of order. Please put in another quarter.” He wore a lopsided smile, and his cheeks were flushed red.

  “Dork.”

  Two seconds after that, Graham had tackled me, pushing me down on the couch. He moaned on the first kiss, and I felt that sound everywhere.

  There is nothing so explosive as two horny, fifteen-year-old boys finally getting a taste of something they both crave. As we made out, Graham rode me with his hips. The motion, and the feel of his hard body pressing down on me was better than any of the fantasies I’d cooked up every half hour since our first kiss.

  It was probably only five minutes later when Graham closed his eyes and gasped twice. And just the look on his face took me there, too. I locked my arms around him and hauled him down for one more kiss — wet and dirty and more satisfying than I’d ever dreamed.

  And by then, I’d dreamed plenty.

  Forty minutes later, Graham’s mom came home to find us playing a round of Realstix hockey on the XBox. She would never have noticed that a couple of paper towels were newly buried in the bottom of the family garbage bin.

  So it began.

  Our make-out sessions were always fast and frantic, because privacy was scarce. There was never any nudity involved, because that would have been far too risky. But there were athletic pants, with their handy elastic waistbands. And I didn’t need more, not with the sublime feel of his long fingers sliding down my stomach and onto my groin. He was sometimes slow and teasing, and often fast and rough. I wanted all of it. All the time.

  We were exceedingly careful. Looking back on it, I’m amazed at our discipline. Fifteen year-old boys aren’t known for their caution or diligence. That same year, I probably lost three pairs of gloves and locked myself out of my own house once a week. But Graham and I never touched each other if another person was inside his house, or scheduled to be there within the hour. And even then, we learned to make out and listen at the same time, often leaping apart at the smallest sou
nd. We were never, ever caught.

  Until one awful day in August, before the start of our sophomore year, just after I got my driver’s license. Freedom was our downfall.

  We’d driven to a seedy part of town to find a comic book shop we’d heard of. But that was really just an excuse to be alone together. After I parked the car, Graham put his hand on my leg, just because he could. We were together, and we were out in the world in a car. Two huge freedoms in one afternoon. So after a cursory glance out the car windows, I leaned across the gearshift and kissed him.

  Smiling, he grabbed my face in both hands and licked into my mouth. We were probably only there for ninety seconds. Maybe even less. But immediately after we stepped out of the car, everything went very, very wrong.

  There was shouting, and the pounding of feet behind us. We both ran. I thought we were going to get away. But then I looked over my shoulder to count our pursuers.

  That mistake that changed my life.

  I tripped. And then came the horror of pitching toward the asphalt, and the terror of those feet pounding closer. A second later, the first kick landed at my ribs. The second one nailed me in the cheekbone, and I heard my own scream.

  Curling up into a protective ball was my last conscious act.

  Much of the next few hours were lost to me. I woke up in a hospital room with my arm in a sling, stitches on my face and a snug bandage around my chest. My mother was crying, and my father was on the phone.

  “Where’s Graham?” was the first thing I tried to say.

  “Why?” my mother sobbed.

  Telling her the truth turned out to be my second big mistake.

  For the next five days, I would lay in that hospital bed wondering what had happened to him. Every time someone walked past my room, my eyes would flick to the doorway. Each time I expected to see Graham.

  He never came.

  Body Check: The use of the body against an opponent. A body check is legal against an opposing player who has the puck or was the last player to have the puck.

  — Rikker