Jumbo (8 page)

“What?”

“Sorting things out with the guys.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got your back.”

17

As he stood in front of his locker, Mitchell’s heart began to thump in anticipation. Would there be another note from Luke? He supposed there wouldn’t be, but he dried his hands on his towel expectantly. He opened his locker, and there it was.

Can’t stop thinking about your dick. It’s the hottest thing I’ve ever seen.

Mitchell drew his head back and frowned. His dick? Why would Luke think his dick was hot? He frowned again, thinking that maybe someone had the wrong locker. Maybe these notes weren’t from Luke, but were from someone else and meant for someone else. Then he reminded himself of what had happened in the showers yesterday. Luke’s cock had been pressed into his ass, and Luke had had to control his boner. It had to be Luke, though Mitchell couldn’t understand why Luke would think his cock was hot. It was almost nothing. Could Luke like that?

Mitchell frowned, thinking, and then he smiled. Hell, if Luke could like his cock, then there was no problem. Over the past few years, when Mitchell had thought of Luke, he had always thought that there was one thing that would make Luke sure to reject him — his cock. It was a fucking joke, though now it seemed that that wasn’t the case.

He ripped his speedos off and slung them over his locker. He walked toward the showers naked with his towel in his hand. He figured there was no point wrapping it around himself because none of the guys had to wait anymore. Sharing the showers was the accepted thing. He hung his towel up and took the situation of the showers in in a glance. Jack was sharing with Luke and Ben. The only place he could go was into the corner, where Tyler and Tadd were showering. Still, though, Mitchell didn’t mind. Tadd had been pretty cool to him just now, telling him he was a good swimmer and so on. He wasn’t the worst guy on the planet, and Mitchell knew that half the reason he hated Tadd had to do with Tadd’s cock and balls.

Mitchell was jealous.

He walked toward the corner and Tadd stepped out. “You want to hop under?” he said. Mitchell said that he did, and he stepped under the spray, warming himself in the water while Tadd soaped his body. Again, Mitchell found himself looking at Tadd’s cock and balls. He couldn’t help it. They were so big; it was almost impossible to believe. Every time Mitchell saw them it was like a new thing, something incredible. Could they possibly still be growing? Mitchell had heard somewhere that people didn’t stop growing until they were twenty-one. Was Tadd going to end up with a cock that hung to his knees? Mitchell smiled. That certainly couldn’t happen.

Tadd reached out and put his hand on Mitchell’s shoulder. He had soap in his eyes. He pulled on Mitchell’s arm and Mitchell moved, though as he passed Tadd, the back of his hand slid across Tadd’s cock and he felt it flop. Oh, man, Mitchell thought. He felt like reaching out and grabbing it. It had felt so heavy.

He turned and watched Tadd rinsing himself, and then, as Tadd cleared the water out of his eyes, he handed Mitchell the soap. Mitchell began to soap himself and Tadd smiled. He reached his arms up and turned in the shower, letting the water rinse under his arms.

“You want to jump in here?” Tyler said, as Mitchell finished soaping himself.

Mitchell nodded, and he stepped into Tyler’s shower. He began to rinse the soap off, and as he was swishing the water around his cock and balls, he happened to look up. Tyler and Tadd were staring at what he was doing, staring at his cock and balls as Mitchell swished the water around them.

Hell, Mitchell thought. He really figured everyone was gay when it came right down to it.

18

On Saturday afternoon, Tadd arrived around two-thirty, pulling into Mitchell’s driveway in his car, an Audi TT that his parents had bought him.

Mitchell said hey and they went upstairs where Mitchell had cleared his desk off so that they could sit side-by-side. He borrowed Pete’s chair, wheeling it through the bathroom, and then the two of them sat down next to each other and pulled out their textbooks.

Tadd wanted to go back to a place they had covered a few weeks ago, where everything had gone crazy, as he said it, where they had started on calculus properly and he had lost the plot. They found a place in the textbook where Tadd said he was okay, where he understood things, and then they began to work forward.

Tadd wasn’t stupid. Mitchell had sometimes thought he was a little slow, but as they worked through a series of examples and Mitchell explained things, he realized that Tadd could grasp things; he just wasn’t confident. The other thing Mitchell noticed was that as he was demonstrating the examples to Tadd, and proving the answers, he began to understand things a little better himself. He hadn’t seen calculus as clearly as he could now, some two hours after they had started.

“Wow,” Tadd said. “Thanks, man. You don’t know how much of a load off that is.”

They hadn’t caught right up to date, and Tadd asked if he could come by next Saturday again and work through some more examples with Mitchell, not calling him Jumbo now, as he usually did, but calling him Mitch, which Mitchell supposed was because he wanted something from him.

Tadd put his hands behind his head and stretched. “That your dog?” he said.

“Yeah,” Mitchell said. He turned and looked at Sally who was sleeping on her bed in the corner. “She’s getting pretty old. When I was a kid she used to follow me everywhere, and now, sometimes, she still hauls herself up when I walk out of the room, but she’s got arthritis, the vet says.”

Tadd hopped up and walked over to Sally. He bent down and started patting her gently on the head. She woke up, and started licking his hand, and then she got up and stretched.

“I think she likes you,” Mitchell said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. She doesn’t get up for just anybody.”

Tadd smiled, smiling at Mitchell with his perfect face, with his dimples and square jaw and raked eyebrows, his eyes glinting in the bright sunshine streaming through the bedroom window.

Mitchell took a deep breath. “Do you want a coffee or anything before you go?”

“Yeah. Okay.”

Mitchell got up and they went downstairs. There was some coffee already brewing and his mom said it was fresh.

“Are you going to introduce me to your friend?”

“Sorry. Mom, this is Tadd. Tadd, this is my mom. Mrs Cunningham — Helen. Take your pick.” Mitchell smiled.

“There’s no reason to be silly about it. You can call me Helen, Tadd.”

“Thanks,” he said, and they shook hands.

They walked out onto the back deck to drink their coffee and Mitchell’s mom brought out a plate of carrot cake that she had baked that morning.

“Wow. Your mom’s pretty nice,” Tadd said. He took a piece of the cake.

“Yeah?”

“My mom wouldn’t even want to speak to anyone I brought over. She’d just ignore them.”

Mitchell nodded, though he didn’t know what to say.

Sally clattered through the back door, rattling the screen, and came to sit beside Mitchell.

“She’s followed you.”

“Yeah. It makes me feel guilty. I know she’s in pain, but it’s just like she feels she has to.”

Tadd reached down and patted her again.

“Have you always lived here?”

“Yeah — ever since I was little. We had another house when I was a baby, but I don’t remember it.”

“Hell, my parents move every couple of years — always trying to find a better house. My dad renovates them, and then sells them, and then we move up-market again.”

Mitchell nodded, and there was an uncomfortable silence. He finished off his coffee and they sat side by side, looking over the back yard where the sun was angling golden through the trees.

“I suppose I should get going,” Tadd eventually said.

Mitchell led him through the house, walked out onto the porch with him and held the door open for Sally.

“Thanks again, Mitch,” Tadd said. He put his hand out, and Mitchell shook it. Mitchell stepped down onto the lawn and walked with Tadd toward his car. Sally sniffed at the rear wheel and Mitchell waved to Tadd as he put the car into gear.

Then Sally was behind the car, behind the rear wheel, and Tadd hadn’t seen her.

“Sally!” Mitchell said, and he started forward.

The car roared backwards and struck Sally in the middle, knocking her down and bouncing over her. Tadd’s tires screeched on the cement as he hit the breaks.

Mitchell rushed forward and slammed a fist into the side of the car as he bent towards Sally. A paw reeled helplessly in the air. Her intestines were on the drive.

Mitchell held her head as the last of the light died in her eyes. Then he stood up slowly, stunned. He jerked away from a hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t. You fucking touch me, you dumb jock prick.”

He glanced at Sally again, and then bolted, slamming the front door behind him and taking the stairs two at a time. He threw himself face-first onto his bed and wrapped the pillow around his head, though it didn’t block out the sound of the doorbell or the sound of his mother’s voice as she registered what had happened.

Mitchell got up and slammed his window shut, aware of his father now and of Pete, all of them talking on the front lawn. He threw himself onto the bed again. They could deal with it. Tadd could deal with it. Sally was dead.

19

On Sunday morning, Mitchell and Pete dug a grave for Sally in the back yard. Pete had wrapped her body in a couple of burlap sacks, but Mitchell hadn’t looked at her again. Once the grave was dug, he helped Pete lower Sally’s body into it, but he didn’t want to shovel the earth over her, so he went back upstairs and had a shower.

Memories of Sally, of all the times they had spent together, of rambles through the neighborhood, of times when he was a little kid and he had played with her for hours, of the way she had trusted him, kept returning to Mitchell with a crashing regularity. He wished there was some way it could be over, that the thoughts could be out of his mind, though he supposed he would get over it in time.

He left his homework Sunday night. He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t done it, but he simply couldn’t find the energy for it. He figured it didn’t matter. Half the teachers never checked.

On Monday morning he felt a little better, until his mother told him after breakfast that she would be leaving sometime today.

“You have my number.”

“Where are you going?”

“I need to be alone, Mitchell.”

Mitchell pulled away from her and walked out to the car. His father was waiting.

They drove toward the school, though Mitchell only realized as he was about to get out of the car that it was calculus first up, which meant Tadd. He walked into the classroom, a stony look on his face. The room was half-full, though Tadd wasn’t there. Mitchell walked up to the back of the room and sat down in a place he never sat. Ryan Anderson came and sat down beside him, a guy that had been raising hell since grade school and was only now realizing that he needed to do some work to get into college.

Mitchell saw Tadd walk through the door, saw him start to look around for Mitchell, but Mitchell shifted his eyes away, and when he looked again, he saw Tadd sitting where the two of them often sat. Teresa Forester came in and sat beside him.

The rest of the day was a blur to Mitchell, and he didn’t know how he was expected to pass, not with his mom leaving today, with Sally dead and his father telling them all he was gay. Hell, how could he concentrate with all of that going on?

He walked to training slowly, not looking forward to it. He didn’t even want to get in the water, and that was something he always looked forward to.

When he opened his locker, he realized he had taken two of his pairs of speedos home yesterday to be washed. If his third pair wasn’t in his pack, then he wouldn’t be able to get in the water. He half-hoped his speedos weren’t in his pack, and as he looked, he saw that they weren’t. His mother had always packed them for him, something that he knew was a little childish, but she kept track of his towels and his speedos, making sure he had a clean towel and a clean pair of speedos everyday. Well, he had a towel, one that must have been in there since yesterday, but no speedos.

He slammed his locker door and stood silently while it echoed in the locker room. Mason turned to look at him with a frown on his face, but Mitchell turned away. He walked up to Coach Marley’s office.

“Yes, Jumbo?”

“I’ve forgotten my speedos. I can’t train today.”

“Are you wearing underwear?”

Mitchell nodded.

“Well I suggest you strip down to that and get out to the pool.”

“Fucking shit-ass,” Mitchell muttered, walking away from Marley’s office.

Back in the locker room he pulled his clothes off and realized he was wearing tighty-whities as usual. Hell.

Mitchell slung his towel over his shoulder and began to walk toward the pool. Luke skipped up behind him.

“Dude, you’re wearing underwear.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you can’t swim in that.”

“Marley says I have to.”

“Fuck.”

“Tell me about it.”

For some reason, there were ten or fifteen people in the bleachers today. Usually there was no one, but somehow, as though they had known they would get an eyeful of Mitchell in his underwear, these people had turned up.

Mitchell dived into the pool and felt his underwear slide back to his thighs. He stopped to pull them up, and then started on his warm up laps. Every ten or fifteenth stride he had to reach back and tug on his tighty-whities, pulling them up so they were covering his ass. By the time he got to his ten or fifteenth lap, he had virtually given up, swimming freestyle with his underwear around the tops of his thighs. When he got to the end and looked up, he saw Tadd standing there, smiling at him.

“How you doing, Mitch?”

Mitchell shrugged, pulling his underwear up high.

“You’re swimming in your underwear.”

“Yeah. I know. I forgot my speedos.”