Christmas Kitsch (Hol) (MM)

Twenty percent of all proceeds from this title are donated to the Ali Forney Center in New York.

The mission of the Ali Forney Center “is to protect lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning (LGBTQ) youth from the harm of homelessness, and to support them in becoming safe and independent as they move from adolescence to adulthood.”

To learn more about this charity or to donate directly, please visit their website:
http://www.aliforneycenter.org
.

Sometimes the best thing you can get for Christmas is knowing what you really want.

Rusty Baker is a blond, rich, entitled football player in a high school full of them—just the type of oblivious jock all the bullied kids hate. And he might have stayed that way, except he develops a friendship with out-and-proud Oliver Campbell from the wrong side of the tracks. Rusty thinks the friendship is just pity—Oliver is very bright, and Rusty is very not—but then Oliver kisses him good-bye when Rusty leaves for college, and Rusty is forced to rethink everything he knows about himself.

But even Rusty’s newfound awareness can’t help him survive a semester at Berkeley. He returns home for Thanksgiving break clinging to the one thing he knows to be true: Oliver Campbell is the best thing that’s ever happened to him.

Rusty’s parents disagree, and Rusty finds himself homeless for the holidays. Oliver may not have much money, but he’s got something Rusty has never known: true family. With their help and Oliver’s love, Rusty comes to realize that he may have failed college, but he’ll pass real life with flying rainbow colors.

To Mate. This is our 25
th
Christmas together, and we have so many more plans to go.

It was sort of a shock. I mean, I was
supposed
to be coming home for Thanksgiving, not getting kicked out of the house a month before Christmas. If I’d been mean about it, I would have blamed Oliver, but I couldn’t. I mean . . . you can’t
really
blame Oliver for anything. He’s just too damned nice.

In fact, that was why we hung out together all through our senior year. I mean, I’d been hanging with all those other jokers for my entire life. Kindergarten, grade school, middle school—you could have thrown our jock genes in a blender and pretty much swapped all our parts. We were interchangeable. White boys, blue/green eyes, sandy blond/sandy brown hair, good bones, good nutrition, some sort of Teutonic conspiracy to produce a football team in the nouveau riche suburbs of the foothills—that was us. I mean, I had
brown
eyes and blond hair, and I was the closest thing to an ethnic minority our high school had ever seen.

Until Oliver.

Oliver showed up in early September of my senior year, slender, brown on brown on brown. Dark brown hair cut with long bangs around his narrow face, dark brown eyes with thick, thick lashes, and light brown skin. He slouched quietly in the back of Mr. Rochester’s English Literature class and eyed the rest of us with sort of a gentle amusement.

“Yo, Rusty,” Clayton called to me as I took my seat by the new boy. “What’s the new guy?”

I looked at Clayton blankly. He was one of those big white-blond kids with a face that ran to red whenever he exerted himself. He was a defensive lineman on the football team, and his father sold insurance. He was also a sadistic fuck who liked to haze freshmen by slamming them against lockers and calling them names until they cried. That shit had been sort of funny when we were sophomores, but my little sister told me the last kid he’d done that to had needed to change schools and see a shrink, and that’s sort of a horrible thing to do to a kid.

It suddenly occurred to me that the dark kid slouching in the corner of the room was a prime target for Clayton, but he was looking at us, all amused like he didn’t give a crap, and that might have offered him a little protection right there.

I liked that. He didn’t give a crap. The last girl I’d dated had been so excited about dating a football player, she’d literally gone down on me before dinner, and, well, I’d liked her, but I hadn’t been sure I wanted to know her that well. I’d also been hungry. I’d sort of pulled her away from my crotch and asked her if we could go eat steak. I think I hurt her feelings—she didn’t say much during dinner, and she’d taken my kiss on the cheek like it was some sort of insult or something.

So this kid, smiling at us friendly but not slobbering all over us or being afraid of us—that was sort of nice.

I didn’t like Clayton saying “What” in conjunction with those laughing brown eyes.

“What do you mean ‘what’?” I’m not that smart but I knew I probably wasn’t going to like that answer either.

“I mean Indian, Mex, darky, what?”

That snapped my head back. My mother wasn’t the warmest person on the planet, but she was
not
pro on us being rude like that.

“Where the hell were you raised?” I snapped, appalled. “Jesus, he’s a kid. Leave him the hell alone!”

Clayton rolled his eyes at me. “Oh my God, Baker, could you
be
any more of a fairy princess?” That was fine, though. He was so miffed at me, he’d forgotten about the kid, who was watching our byplay like he was watching a tennis match.

“Do you see me in a dress blowing you?” I asked, and the rest of the class chortled. Clayton turned red(der) and glared at me as the teacher walked in. I leaned back in my seat and gave the kid a reassuring grin.

“He should leave you alone now,” I said quietly as Mr. Rochester pointed to the warm-up on the board. “See that? That’s the page number. There’s a quick assignment we do in our grammar books, and then we correct it.”

“Thanks,” the kid said. “But you know, I’m gay. I’m not really big on the princess dress, but if he wasn’t an asshole, I wouldn’t mind blowing him.”

And that was Oliver.

I sat there, my mouth open, while the class got out their books and started the assignment. After about a minute, the kid looked at me sideways, and
finally
I saw a waver of uncertainty in him.

“You never met a fag before?” he asked, and again, those painful manners that had been beaten into my and my little sister’s hard heads—pretty much in the cradle—asserted themselves.

“Nope,” I said honestly, “but my mother wouldn’t let me use that word.” I wasn’t sure she’d let a homosexual sit at our dinner table either, but then, that was my mother.

The kid looked at me for a minute, considering. “Okay, if we keep that word off the table, could you make sure I don’t get stuffed in a trash can during lunch?”

I grinned at him. “I can do that. Can I copy what you got on the grammar warm-up? You scrambled my tiny brain with the big, scary word.”

The boy laughed and handed me his paper so I could copy super quick before Mr. Rochester could call on me. That’s when I saw his name: Oliver Campbell, which wasn’t Hispanic or Indian, but he didn’t look African American either.

I sat with him at lunch that day, and a few of my friends sat with us. (Not Clayton—he had his own squad of goons, and that was a relief.) My buddies harassed Oliver, don’t get me wrong. Brian Halliday asked him if he got a thrill out of sitting with all us football players, ’cause we were all buff. All Oliver had to do was look him up and down once and say, “I may be gay, but I got better standards than that,” and Brian was smirking and talking about cheerleaders. They kept at it, but Oliver was great at rolling his eyes or saying something just as good, and my buddies would start giving each
other
shit and leaving him alone.

It’s kind of sad when I think about it now. At the time, I thought I hung out with a bunch of okay kids. I figured we were spoiled and sheltered, but that wasn’t our fault, really. I mean, I was proud because we sat down with someone new and different, and didn’t beat him into the ground. Pathetic, really—that’s what I had to be proud of, right? That my peer group didn’t bully people
too
badly? But it was something to hold on to, even if it was something small. I needed any pride I could find, because I knew college was coming along like a big steamroller to cream me into the fucking pavement.

Now see, I know I’m not that bright. I mean, give me time, and some hints, and an example, and directions carved in rock, and I can power through almost anything.