Darius the Great Deserves Better - Adib Khorram Page 0,49
and let him pull me up.
“Don’t listen to him,” he said, nodding toward Trent.
“I won’t.” Trent Bolger was like a warp core without antimatter: powerless. He kept trying the same old tactics to make me miserable, but I had grown up. I wasn’t so easy to bully anymore.
I even had friends.
The very foundations of Trent’s worldview seemed to depend upon me always being a Target.
Coach Winfield whistled. “Let’s go, gentlemen!”
I stuck with Jaden and Gabe as we ran down the halls, out the side doors, and toward the track. Five miles meant twenty laps. The cross-country guys looked longingly toward the road, but we weren’t allowed to leave school grounds during class.
“What is it with Trent, anyway?” Jaden asked as we dodged around a line of goose poop stretched diagonally across the track.
“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s been like that pretty much since first grade.”
“You ever want to just, like, kick him in the balls?”
“No. Maybe. I don’t know.” I sighed.
And then I said, “Having been through that myself, I don’t think I’d wish that on anyone. Not even Trent.”
Gabe spun around so he was jogging backward, looking at us.
“Yeah but, is it just me or is he way worse lately?”
“I don’t know.” I glanced behind us where Trent was running by himself, ahead of a couple seniors who had only signed up for the class because they’d nearly made it to graduation and needed one more physical education credit.
“I think he’s kind of mad that Chip tried out for soccer. That he’s on our team now. He and Trent were always on the same team before that.”
“Yeah, but they still hang out all the time,” Jaden said.
“I guess.”
I wondered how much of their hanging out turned into babysitting these days.
Was Trent angry about that too? Or did he like babysitting Evie? Holding her in his lap and chasing her around the house and listening to her giggle?
“I don’t know if Trent has any friends. Other than Chip, I mean. Maybe he’s mad he has to share.”
I didn’t point out that Trent was sharing Chip with me in particular. That we studied together. And I’d even been to his house. And sometimes, we sat together on the bus, and talked about nothing, and Chip rested his hand on my knee.
I couldn’t point any of that out.
I still wasn’t sure what to make of it.
“Well,” Gabe said, “I know I’m supposed to have school spirit or something, but I hope he gets creamed at the homecoming game.”
I grinned.
“That would require him getting off the bench.”
TIRED OLD QUEERS
That night, Landon cooked another one of his famous dinners for us: asparagus risotto with Italian sausage. After, we lay on my bed facing each other, with one of my arms under Landon’s head and the other draped over his hip.
Landon had his own hands folded together in front of him. I loved how, when the light caught them just right, his gray eyes had little streaks of blue in them.
Landon Edwards had beautiful eyes.
“What?” he asked.
“Just thinking.”
“About what?”
“How beautiful you are.”
He beamed at me, and leaned in to kiss me on the nose.
“You’re beautiful too.”
I shook my head, but he gently grabbed my chin to stop me.
“You are.”
“Thanks.”
“I wish you weren’t so down on yourself all the time.”
I looked down at Landon’s hands so I wouldn’t have to meet his eyes.
“I can’t help it sometimes.”
That’s what being depressed does. It’s like a supermassive black hole between your sense of self and your actual self, and all you can see is the way you look through the gravitational lensing of your own inadequacies.
“Hey. Don’t.”
“Sorry.”
“I wish you wouldn’t say sorry all the time.” Landon rested his hand on my cheek. “I wish I could reach in and scoop all that depression out of your brain. So you could be happy.”
I wrapped my fingers around his. “I am happy,” I said. “I’m just depressed too.”
My depression was part of me. Just like being gay was.
A part, but not the whole.
Landon bit his lip. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“I’m just . . .”
I thought about Dad, and his depressive episode.
And I thought about Sohrab, who was worried maybe he was depressed too.
And I thought about how sometimes, telling people I was depressed felt like its own kind of coming out.
“Being depressed doesn’t mean I’m not happy. It’s like, happy is one color. And depressed is another color. And you can paint happy, and then paint a little depression around the edges.”