End of the Innocence Read Free

person from the other half of the class. Then we were supposed to learn from each other. In reality, everyone hoped the other one had been paying attention. Pairing was a colossal waste of time, made even more of a waste of time since my fall from grace.
    The only thing worse than sitting with someone and pretending to do school work was having no one willing to sit with you pretending to do school work. It sucked, but I had grown used to just sitting by myself and ignoring the people around me snickering under their breath at me.
    “You need a partner?” a familiar female voice asked.
    My head snapped up as my mind realized it was Jennifer talking to me. “Huh?” was all I could reply.
    “I’ll take that as a yes,” she announced, sitting down across from me. There was absolutely no sound in the classroom, and I realized everyone was staring at us. In a whisper, I asked her, “What are you doing? Everyone is watching us.”
    She gave me that Mona Lisa smile that drove straight boys all over town crazy. “Since when are you afraid of people staring?”
    She was right. Before I’d come out, I had been used to people staring at me. When I was on the baseball field, there were more eyes on me than most people can imagine. Having a classroom full of students watching me should have been a cake walk, but for some reason I knew I was shrinking in my chair.
    She laughed infectiously when she noticed my discomfort. “Wow! You have changed,” she noted, opening her book. “I never thought I’d see the day Brad Greymark was at a loss for words.”
    “I can talk,” I said, pretending to open my book as well. “I just don’t know what you want.”
    Her smile didn’t waver, but I could see the change in her eyes when she looked at me. “Maybe I just wanted to talk. Is that a crime?”
    I sighed and gave up, since the talking with Jennifer thing was happening whether I wanted it to or not. “Okay. Talk.”
    We just stared at each other for almost a minute. I assumed she was trying to find the words in which to tell me I was a complete asshole, so I waited for her to explode on me because, to her, I’d really been worse than that. Finally she just sighed and shook her head. “Man, you make it hard to like you sometimes.”
    That didn’t sound anything like what I was expecting. “Say what?” I asked.
    “I’m just saying, you were the one who didn’t tell me he was gay for three years, then came out and embarrassed the fuck out of me, and now you have an attitude?” Her voice didn’t sound angry, but I knew her well enough to know that when Jennifer sounded like she was joking, she really wasn’t.
    “I just assumed you didn’t want to talk to me,” I admitted after a few seconds.
    “I didn’t, but that’s beside the point.” She laughed, and I could tell by the fake tone she was as nervous as I was.
    “So why are you talking to me, then?” I ventured, hoping I wasn’t pushing my luck.
    She shrugged again and began tracing circles in her notebook. “Maybe I’m done being angry? Maybe I’ve gotten over it?” She gave me a shy look. “Maybe no matter how pissed off I was, I can’t deny that Kyle kid brings out the best in you?”
    Once again I found my flabber completely gasted.
    She saw my confusion and smiled. “I’m not going to lie. The first few weeks, I hated both of you because you never smiled at me like you did at him. But when I heard they were kicking you off the team, I lost it.” She was still tracing circles in her book, the only outside indication she was as nervous as I felt. “You practically carried that team to state last year. For them to kick you off for that….” She broke the point of her pencil off, and I could see the tip of anger that was the only indication of a huge iceberg of fury that lay just below the surface.
    She grabbed another pencil out of her bag and started making circles again. “Anyway, I realized a lot of people were mad at you just to be mad.”