Raise Your Glass Read Free Page A

Jennifer, not with any of the people I had dated. I had liked them, sure, and they had even turned me on; but when I looked at this boy, my mind lost the ability to comprehend simple concepts like breathing and speech. I couldn’t get close enough to him, and knowing how much I needed to be with him scared the bejeezus out of me. But that fear always ran like a bitch every time he smiled at me. The sincerity in everything he felt and said made me feel like a fraud in comparison. Then I saw Julie Benson walk by the car with one of her friends, and they laughed when they saw who I was in the car with.
    Just like that, the fear was back.
    I slipped my hand out of his and tried to ready myself for this. I could see the uncertainty in his eyes and I felt horrible, because there was nothing I could do about it. “Look, Kyle, this is going to suck pretty badly, and I can’t imagine it’s going to get better anytime soon. So let’s make a promise. No matter what happens, we don’t take it out on each other. It’s going to be us against everybody else; the last thing we need is to turn on each other, okay?”
    I could tell he didn’t understand exactly what I was talking about, but I thought I knew the danger of the next few weeks. We were going to have no one else but each other to rely on, and if we alienated each other, we were truly fucked.
    He just nodded and looked as frightened as I had ever seen him.
    “Ready or not,” I said, trying to show him my most confident grin before we got out of the car.
    After I swung the door shut, I forced myself not to look up to see how close the ball was to me.
     
     
    Kyle
     
    L ESS than twenty minutes after I walked into school, I realized I hated being the center of attention.
    The looks I got from everyone—and until that moment, I hadn’t realized how many everyone was—as I walked down the hall were creepy. The whispering from behind me was a little too serial killer for me. But the suck-cherry on the top of the entire sucky sundae came when some girl I had never seen before walked up to my locker and started to talk to me. “So you’re, like, the gay guy, right?”
    Four years at this high school, two years in junior high, and another seven years at two different elementary schools, and I was boiled down to being the gay guy.
    I bit back a sigh and closed my locker. “I’m Kyle,” I said, trying not to sound as pissed as I felt.
    When I looked, there were, in fact, three girls instead of just the one. I assumed either they were like a soaking wet Gremlin and multiplied over time, or I had just missed them walking up. If she understood the difference between referring to me as “the gay guy” and using my actual name, the knowledge was lost between her vapid gaze and her single AAA-battery brain. Clueless, but on a mission, she just stumbled on with her question. “Um, right. So you’re the one who turned Brad gay, right?”
    As stupid as this might sound, I honestly didn’t think that there were people who still believed that.
    I mean, sure, I got that I was outed as being gay now and that people were going to know about Brad and me. But the thought that some people might be so ignorant as to think someone can be “turned” gay had just never crossed my mind. Who thinks this crap? Like homosexuality is a contagious disease. And if it was contagious, wouldn’t a group of us have left packages of infected plaid shirts and jock straps lying around to turn the guys we wanted? I was hoping that AAA-Battery girl was asking a sad and completely inappropriate question for the sake of being sarcastic, or maybe making a joke. But I could tell from the unblinking stares from her and her friends, and the way other people slowed in the hallway to hear my answer, that she was asking a serious question.
    “Yes,” I said, turning to face her directly. “Yes, I did. I took Brad Greymark, one of the most popular guys in school, and used my gay magic on him to turn him into