The Ongoing Reformation of Micah Johnson (9 page)

“Rick!” his mother yelled out. “Can you come here?”

She handed the envelope to Micah, and he stared at the familiar logo embossed on the left-hand corner, still unable to move.

Rick entered the room, followed by Alex. “What’s up?”

“The letter came.”

Neither Rick nor Alex had to ask. The letter had been weighing on everybody’s mind lately, and it had only intensified as the date drew closer. Micah wondered if his inability to check the letter box like his mother asked had actually been the result of a subconscious desire to avoid ever having to go through this moment.

“Open it,” Alex said.

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Stop being a drama queen.”

“Alex!”

“I didn’t mean he was a queen, Mum. I just meant he was a
drama
queen.”

Joanne shook her head while Rick hid a bemused smile behind his hand.

“Thanks for clearing that up, Alex,” Micah said.

“Just open it, already!”

More annoyed now than scared, Micah ripped open the envelope without further ceremony.

“And the winner is,” Alex said in a deep voice.

“This isn’t the Academy Awards,” Micah said.

“It’s basically your version,” Alex pointed out.

“I think that’s more the Brownlows,” Rick said.

Micah shrugged. The letter felt heavy in his hands. As he unfolded it, a map and information booklet fell out. That could only mean one thing, but he had to read it to be sure before he said anything.

When he looked up, everybody was looking at him anxiously.

“Well?” his dad asked.

Micah took a deep breath, and smiled. “I’m in.”

As his family cheered, Micah felt like maybe he was finally on the road to getting his life together.

THE NEXT
two weeks flew by. Declan and Emma were pleased that his hard work in getting his act together had paid off. Carl idly wondered what it would be like to have a friend in the AFL and what bragging rights it could get him, even though Micah informed him that there was still the draft camp to go before any dreams of AFL stardom could be achieved. Mardi was disappointed that the work they had already started on forming a gay-straight alliance would be interrupted by his time away in the country.

Mardi had become a third member of Micah and Carl’s little group. The rest of Carl’s friends had faded away when Mardi outed herself in an English class by arguing Charlotte Lucas in
Pride and Prejudice
was a repressed lesbian and probably in love with Elizabeth Bennett, and the whole school knew she was bi before she even reached her next class. Carl’s friends apparently thought two confirmed queers in their group was too much.

“Doesn’t matter,” Carl said when Micah tried to apologise. “If they’re that bigoted, I don’t really want to hang with them anyway.”

He put on a brave front. Micah knew it must have hurt him regardless.

Mardi didn’t apologise. She thought she’d done Carl a favour by exposing just how much his friends were lousy people. Although Micah liked her, he thought she could be a bit insensitive sometimes—but he couldn’t talk, as he had been pretty much the same only a few months ago. And he knew her heart was in the right place. He just hoped Carl recognised that as well.

But he had barely any time to worry about that. Footy training at school only got icier when it was announced he was off to yet another training camp for consideration for the AFL. Micah just put his head down and worked through it. He knew the end was in sight. A few times he tried to make eye contact with Will, but he always quickly looked away, and Micah decided not to push it. He had his own life to live, and Will had to make his own decisions as well. He heard snatches of conversation where he figured out Will hadn’t earned a place in the camp.

“It should have been you, dude, rather than fucking Micah Johnson,” Shane Pickering said.

Micah was just glad Will didn’t give any kind of response. It would have been too much to see him revelling in the facade of his heterosexuality and taking on the mantle of “more desirable than thou.”

In the end Micah looked forward to getting away for a while. Running away was always a desirable option, even if the training camp wasn’t going to be anywhere as picturesque as Lorne—the last place he had run away to when running away was his thing. And there was no guarantee things were going to be any better there than they were at school either.

Alex knocked on his door the morning of departure, while he was still trying to get his bags packed. “Can I come in?”

“Knock yourself out.”

Alex sat on Micah’s bed, kicking his feet out. Micah realised, with a pang, that his little brother was still “little” enough that his feet couldn’t reach the floor. He wondered if Alex would hit a growth spurt like Micah had done when puberty hit, or whether he would always be pint-sized. It also reminded him that, come December, he could be forced to move interstate and not see his little brother grow up day-to-day like he would normally.

But he had to shake that off.

“What’s on your mind?”

“Nothing,” Alex shrugged. “Just wanted to spend some time with you before you go.”

“I won’t even be gone a week.”

“I know.”

“You’re really going to miss me that much?”

“Stop loving yourself sick.”

Micah laughed. “I do that a lot, don’t I?”

Alex inspected a set of St. Kilda cards with some distaste. “You’re not that bad.”

“No, I guess you’re not, either.”

“Just, I was thinking—”

“Stop. That can be dangerous.”

“Only for you,” Alex said. “But hey, I’m trying to be nice to you!”

Micah dumped the pile of underpants he had just pulled out of the chest of drawers into his bag and sat beside him. “I’m intrigued.”

“It’s just, this is the beginning.”

“Of what?” But Micah already knew—hadn’t he just been thinking it a few seconds before?

“The beginning of you not living here anymore.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re going to get selected, and who knows where you’ll end up? You could be in Queensland—”

“Ugh! I’d rather be dead!” Micah cried.

“—or Perth—”

He didn’t even want to think about
that
. “A fate
worse
than death. Are you actually wishing for horrible things to happen to me? What next? The Adelaide Crows?
Port Adelaide?
”

“See, you
never
think about things. You might not end up in a Melbourne team, and then you’ll have to go away. We’ll have no say in it.”

Micah was touched that his little brother, who he had treated rather shabbily recently, appeared to think Micah leaving home was a bad thing. “Look, Alex, what you fail to realise is just
how
good a footy player I am. Everyone’s going to want me. No Melbourne team is going to let me slip through their fingers and go to a different state. It would be sacrilegious!” He hoped his rampant egotism would assuage Alex’s fears.

“They let Chris Judd go to West Coast.” Alex was never one to let a historical fact escape him.

“Yeah, but they eventually got him back again.”

“
Eventually
,” Alex pointed out. “And only because he wanted out.”

“Look, you’re not getting rid of me that easy.”

“Okay. But you can’t go to Collingwood either.”

Micah gave Alex his best mock glare. “I have my standards! I’d rather even go to Perth!”

He was rewarded with Alex giggling, which was about the only time his old-soul brother actually sounded like the kid he still was. It was time for the ultimate in brother bonding: the noogie. Alex screamed when Micah snaked an arm around his neck and ground his knuckles into the top of his head, but his screams gave way to laughter.

Holding his brother in torturous rapture, Micah looked up to see his dad watching them from the hallway. Rick was laughing, shaking his head. He looked happy to see his kids being brats with each other.

Maybe the Johnsons could pull it together after all.

“ARE YOU
sure you’ve got everything?” Joanne asked as they pulled into one of the few available car spaces still left. The buses were leaving from Princes Park, and the grounds were swarming with teenagers and their families.

“Yes, Mum,” Micah said for what felt like the hundredth time. “You know, it really wasn’t necessary for everyone to come see me off.”

“Don’t think we’re doing this because we’re going to miss you,” his dad said, turning off the engine and throwing open his door.

Joanne nodded. “It’s just to make sure you get on the bus.”

Micah grinned. “I feel the love.”

Alex had been pretty quiet all the way to the departure point, but Micah knew better than to push him. They had had their little heart-to-heart last night—it was enough. Alex would have felt like he was being babied if Micah tried to rouse him out of his mood, and as Alex was already far more mature than Micah, it was best not to condescend to him.

Besides, he had enough to worry about as he got out of the car and saw what was awaiting him.

The huge crowd of seventeen-year-old boys and their families milling around the bus and saying their good-byes made him realise that if he
had
been nervous the past couple of weeks about the camp, it was absolutely nothing compared to what he was feeling now.

There seemed to be no other loners like him. Even the kids who weren’t being chaperoned by their parents until the second they stepped on the bus seemed to have found each other like long-lost friends and were now kicking and hand-balling a number of footballs, narrowly avoiding hitting anybody else who happened to be rushing between the buses and their families.

It just accentuated Micah’s loneliness and upped his fear factor.

“Hey, isn’t that Declan?” Alex asked.

There was nothing he wanted more than to run over to Dec and be assured that Micah would be okay, and it was in no way harder than anything else he had ever done, by someone who had been through this before. But Dec was currently surrounded by a large group of boys basking in the shadow of an AFL legend. What was so different? Boys very much like these wouldn’t give Micah the time of day because he was queer, yet Dec was still being lauded over.

But he guessed that was the major difference. Dec was a famous ex-AFL player. Celebrity trumped everything else.

Plus they probably weren’t as scared of Dec’s gayness—after all, he was an adult—and famous, fame wiped a whole lot of reservations. Of course, that hadn’t stopped adults of any sexual orientation from trying to get it on with a teenager before, but they were less suspicious of him.

But a gay kid their own age? Heavens, they’d be convinced Micah wanted to shag all of them and twice on Tuesday.

Being straight, they were clueless about how
careful
gay people were among straight people. Especially straight people in groups. The change room was not a fantasy come to life; it was a place for a gay person to be even more reserved and try not to draw attention to themselves lest anything they do be misconstrued as a seduction. Straight men acted more homoerotically with each other than a gay man ever did with a straight man in such a setting.

Even Micah’s dalliance with the other boy in the change room so long ago had been because he was another gay kid—the move would never have been made with a het.

He’d learned pretty early on how to protect himself the best way he could. Straight guys never knew that fear—and Micah knew girls would have told them a few million things about that feeling and in far greater detail.

“Micah!” Declan called out, and the boys around him turned instantly, like the Midwich cuckoos sensing an outsider. They parted to let him through, leaving enough space so there was no accidental touching.

“Oh, hey.”

Declan grinned at him, and Micah knew he was already sizing him up, looking for any display of nerves.

Or the possibility of bolting and Dec having to arrange another road trip to retrieve him.

“You ready for this?” By now the other boys, sensing they weren’t a part of this inner circle—and to try to get an edge on everybody else, Micah suspected; he would have to see if he could exploit his friendship with Declan and take advantage of their weakness for celebrity—drifted away.

“As ready as I can be,” Micah said.

“That’s the spirit!”

Micah was surprised by Simon appearing behind Dec’s shoulder. “Those buses are death traps, and I bet you metal bands wouldn’t even take them on tour. I’m pretty sure if you scraped the paint off the side of them, they would probably be advertising Gloria Estefan’s 1990 tour.”

Micah had no idea what he was talking about—just another of Simon’s obscure pop culture references. Dec seemed to get it, anyway, judging by the creasing of his eyes.

“The positivity is just flowing off you two,” Dec said.

“Don’t worry, Micah,” Simon said. “Just don’t sit at the front with the driver. That’ll be the first to go if you’re in a head-on accident. But don’t sit up the back either, because someone can rear-end you. And not in the middle on the driver’s side in case something hits you there. Probably the best place is the middle left, but safety isn’t guaranteed….” He trailed off at the look Dec was giving him. “I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

Micah actually found himself cheered by Simon’s rant. It was unbelievable that both of them were here to see him off, even after he had caused Dec heaps of grief, accused Simon’s friend Coby of sexually harassing him, insulted Simon at every turn, caused Simon a huge loss of money by refusing to film his documentary on a certain day, and made them rescue him from Lorne when he ran away. That wasn’t even an exhaustive list—there was so, so, so much more Micah could add to it. And Simon didn’t even have to help him; he only did it because Dec felt a sense of responsibility towards Micah.

“Gotcha. Don’t sit at the front, the back, or the middle.”

Simon gave him a thumbs-up.