Lua shook his head, his eyes tinged with sadness. “It’s not you. I miss Jaime.”
“You regret breaking up with him?”
“Sometimes,” Lua said. “I still think it was the right thing to do, and I think I miss the idea of Jaime more than I actually miss Jaime, but it was nice knowing there was one person in the world who loved me more than anyone else.”
“I love you, Lu.”
Lua pursed his lips. “Yeah, I know, Oz.”
He let his thought trail off. I understood what he was thinking, though. It’s how I felt about Tommy. Lua was my best friend, and he would always be part of my life, even if he went on tour and I went to college and we didn’t talk for months at a time. We were on planets in different galaxies, and Jaime was for Lua, as Tommy was for me, the sun around which we orbited. Ours, and no one else’s.
“Oh!” I snapped my fingers, hoping to change the subject. “Speaking of Jaime . . . well, not Jaime, but of guys we hate who totally love you and want to have sex with you. You’ll never guess who I saw at the club.”
“If you’re going to say Mr. Blakemore, I saw him there a few weeks ago.” Lua leaned back in the booth and stretched his arms over his head. “I watched him twerk. High school teachers should not twerk.”
“No one should twerk,” I said. Lua’s fun fact should have surprised me, but it didn’t. Any person as persnickety as Blakemore was probably repressing some serious freak tendencies. Still, it was weird to think about teachers having lives and doing things other than grading papers and getting high on the smell of red ink. “But that’s not who I’m talking about.”
“Don’t toy with me, Ozzie. Spill it.”
“Trent Williams.”
Lua’s mouth dropped open, which was exactly the response I’d hoped for. I grabbed my phone off the table and quickly snapped a picture. He slapped at me. “Asshole!”
“That one’s going on SnowFlake,” I said, and I was already uploading it.
“Trent was really at a/s/l?”
“He tried to buy a shirt,” I said. “No, correction: He tried to steal a shirt.”
“What’d he say? Tell me everything.”
So, of course, I did. When I finished, Lua said, “You invited him to IHOP?”
I poured myself another cup of the World’s Shittiest Coffee from the carafe our server had left on the table. “Come on, Lu. You know he’s into you.”
“I don’t think Trent knows what he’s into.” Lua blinked rapidly, still shocked at learning Trent Williams had gone to a/s/l of his own volition.
“Who are we to judge? We certainly don’t fit the textbook definition of normal.”
“I know for a fact he hooked up with Aja Shapiro, though she is pretty hot. I’d hook up with her if given the chance.” Lua’s eyes seemed unfocused and far away. “Do you really think Trent’s got a thing for me?”
I stirred three single-serve creamers and eight packets of sugar into my coffee. “He showed up at a gay club on the night you were playing.” I narrowed my eyes at Lua. “The real question is: Do you have a thing for him?”
“Even if I thought he was good-looking, which I’m not saying I do, he probably only sees me as a novelty act in his perverted mental circus.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yeah, Ozzie, I do.” Lua bit his lip. “Jaime never cared what was under my clothes. He loved me for me. Do you honestly believe Trent Williams is that enlightened?”
“No,” I said.
Lua nodded authoritatively. “Remember that list going around last year? The one that assigned points to each girl in our class.”
“And the guys earned the points by having sex with the girls? I remember. Unfortunately.”
“Trent started that list.”
“Sometimes guys overcompensate,” I said.
“Bullshit excuse. Overcompensating for insecurity and a tiny penis doesn’t give guys the right to treat girls like shit.”
I held up my hands. “I’m not excusing him, but it’s like Dustin said: There’s a lot of pressure on guys to be one thing or the other. Girls can experiment with other girls, and it’s cool—”
“What a crock of shit!” Lua sputtered, and shook his head. “You’re an idiot if you think that’s true.”
“It’s a little true.”
“No, Ozzie, it’s not. Girls don’t get a free pass to experiment. That’s a fiction cooked up by men and played out in television and movies so they can fetishize girls hooking up, but it’s nowhere even close to reality.”
“Fine, but if a guy even thinks about experimenting with a guy, he’s definitely gay and no one will ever believe otherwise.” I sipped my coffee, which was basically milky brown sugar water, and grimaced. “Plus, Trent’s dad played professional football, so I bet he puts insane pressure on Trent to be this übermacho, bang-all-the-girls guy’s guy.”
“Boo-fucking-hoo,” Lua said. “Lot’s of people whose lives suck don’t grow up to be assholes.” Lua’s attention wavered when the Rocky table spontaneously burst into song. For a moment, I thought he was going to join them, but then he said, “Enough about Trent. Tell me more about Calvin and the teacher. Was it Mr. Bergen? I’ve always gotten I’ve-got-candy-in-my-van vibes off of him.”
I shook my head. “Calvin didn’t give me a name.”
“Well, that’s not fair.”
“I think the guy is the reason for his dark-side transformation.”
“Can you blame him?” Lua licked his lips. Most of his glitter lipstick had worn off, leaving them pale and somewhat shimmery. “Being in love is tough enough without the person you’re in love with being an adult who took advantage of you.”
Which was true. Thinking about losing Tommy was enough to make me want to curl into a ball in the corner of my room and never leave. I couldn’t imagine what Calvin was going through. “I think it’s more than that, though,” I said. “I think what happened with the teacher was just the trigger.”
“Maybe he is depressed. Maybe it was always inside of him, and this just brought it to the surface.” Lua paused. “Like how Dinah gets. Sometimes I think if she didn’t work, she’d lie on the couch all day and eat pickles.”
Ms. Novak had never hidden her depression. Lua had lived with his grandparents for a few months in seventh grade because Dinah had checked herself into a psychiatric hospital. When she got out, she’d talked to me and Lua about it, explaining her illness and how she was fighting it. I’d always admired Dinah’s openness.
“Either way, I think that teacher definitely screwed him up,” I said.
“Do you think the teacher molested him?”
“Calvin says it was consensual, but how could it be? He’s only sixteen.”
“I thought Calvin was seventeen?”
I shook my head. “He skipped a grade in middle school.”
Lua formed an O with his mouth. “Yeah, well, I can definitely see how having sex with a teacher could have fucked with his head.”
“I just wish there was something I could do.”
“Have you considered telling his dad?”
“I thought about it,” I said. “But if I rat him out, he’ll hate me. Besides, he promised he wouldn’t cut himself anymore, so I don’t think he’s a danger to himself or anything.”