Bombay's POV:
Moments after I knocked on the door, Orien answered it. He immediately stepped aside and opened the door wide. "Come on in."
He led me directly to the living room, and gestured for me to have a seat on the black leather couch that sat against the left wall, while he went straight for the wet bar that lined the right. "Can I get you a drink?"
I looked at my watch. It was just past ten in the morning. I sighed. Too early to have a headache like this. "What the hell. Bourbon on the rocks, straight up. Better make it a double."
"You got it," Orien said, pouring a gin and tonic for himself--rather heavy on the gin, I noticed--before coming over and taking a seat beside me.
"Where're Jen and Em?"
"Jenny's taken Emily to go see her grandmother in St. Paul, they should be gone most of the day."
"Good. Then no one will mind if I do this." I tilted my head back and downed my drink in one go.
Orien laughed. "No, no one will mind. I feel like doing the same thing myself, as a matter of fact." After knocking back his own drink, Ted stood up to get us seconds, and I felt a sudden pang of anger against the man. I mean, I leave the Ducks with him for a couple of years, and look what happens!
Alright Gordon, stay calm. This wasn't anyone's fault. It was hard to stay calm, however, when it felt like there was a leprechaun doing a gymnastics routine in the pit of my stomach. How could Charlie be gay? How could he not have told me? And most of all, how could I not have seen this coming?
"Ted, what the hell have you done to my Ducks?" Okay, that wasn't quite the approach I was going for. Orien just smiled crookedly and shook his head.
"I wish I knew."
"You mean you had no idea? About any of them?"
"None whatsoever. You think I'd have kept my mouth shut about something like this?"
I threw up my hands in exasperation. "How is that possible? Don't you talk to them at all? Christ Ted, I trusted you with those guys!"
"Hey, hey," he said defensively. "It's not like I was the only one in the dark. A lot of the Ducks didn't know about Fulton and Portman. I wonder how they found out about Banks and Conway?"
"Because they told them. Adam and Charlie came out to the Ducks months ago. I guess the Bashes never got around to doing the same."
The only reason I even knew this much was because I'd cornered Averman in the bathroom last night and pumped him dry for any information. I knew I should talk to Charlie, but I didn't know what to say. I felt as if I had let him down. If I had been there for him, maybe this wouldn't have happened.
I just couldn't get my head around it. How could Charlie, the same Charlie I'd known and loved for years, be a... a fudgepacker? And not just him, but three other players as well? I mean, wasn't there a limit for this kind of thing? Didn't hockey teams have, like, a homosexual carrying capacity?
I took another long drink. My headache wasn't going anywhere. Maybe they weren't really gay. After all, they're kids; maybe they're just experimenting. Yeah, and maybe I was a Chinese jet pilot.
"This is just so unexpected," Orien sighed, finishing his second drink and rubbing his eyes tiredly. "I mean, they all seemed so normal. Fulton and Portman have got to be the most masculine kids I've ever come across, Charlie's always been so well adjusted, and Adam... okay, maybe I can see it with Adam. Gordon, what are we going to do?"
"I don't know, but this can't get out, not now."
"Tell me about it. The world sure picked a hell of a time to turn gay."
Ever since the Peewee championships, the Ducks had been drawing considerable media attention, and the Goodwill Games had magnified that tenfold. Now, with two state championships under their belts and the World Juniors coming up, I had been fielding a lot of offers from schools that wanted to recruit them. Orien had been swamped with scouts and managers who were interested in the kids, and four names always came up before any of the others: Adam, Julie, Fulton and Portman.
Hockey was not exactly what you would call a progressive sport, and if this whole gay thing got out, I was afraid it could seriously jeopardize their chances at a career in professional hockey. What a mess. I gulped down the rest of my drink with a grimace.
"Maybe we can get them into counselling or something. Or better yet, one of those special programs. Three or four years ago, a couple Eton girls got caught getting a little too friendly, and they sent them to some sort of camp, and when they came back, they weren't gay anymore."
"I don't think it works like that, Ted."
"Well, we should at least tell their parents, so they can try to fix them before it's too late. They're good kids."
I raised my eyebrows. "Fix them, Ted?"
He shrugged. "Fine, guide them or whatever. You don't actually think they're serious about this, do you? I mean, come on, four guys on one team?"
"Maybe they're not, I don't know, but I think we should talk to them first before we go making phone calls. They might not be ready to tell their folks."
"But we have a responsibility to tell the parents when their kid is in trouble."
"I'm not sure being gay and being in trouble are the same thing," I said massaging my temples. I really needed another drink. "Besides, our primary responsibility is to those kids, and telling their parents might not be the best thing for them right now. Charlie's mom would probably be okay, but I don't know his stepdad. I doubt Adam's father would be too thrilled. And the Bashes? To tell you the truth, I don't think I've even seen their parents, let alone spoken to them. Have you?"
Orien shook his head. "Nope, but they've had to come in once or twice to talk to the Dean." He filled me in a bit on the game against Windsor; Portman's injury, Fulton's retaliation, and the events that had followed. It sure sounded like my Bash Brothers, alright. "It's those two that I'm having the hardest time with. I just can't imagine them as a couple of fairies. I guess they're sort of like those steel worker, prison inmate queers."
I shook my head. I didn't feel the same way as Orien. The two had always been so close, and Portman's tough-guy act could have been overcompensation, if you wanted to think like that. And Fulton? I gave up on being surprised by him ages ago. "Whose bright idea was it to let them room together anyway?" I said sullenly, while Orien got up to refill our drinks. This time, he just brought the bottles over to the table. Good. I was going to need some help to get through the day.
"It wasn't anyone's idea. We tried splitting them up, but no one else could stand to live with them, so eventually we just gave up. Besides, they told me you let them room together during the Goodwill Games."
I sighed. "Oh. Right. I forgot." As a coach, I had always prided myself on knowing my team inside and out; I really think it was one of the reasons the team worked as well as it did. However, there was an exception to this rule, and his name was Fulton Reed.
He was one of the original Ducks, and so while you'd think I'd know him better than many of the other players, he had always remained a bit of a mystery to me. It was hard to believe it had been five years since he broke my window with that shot of his. I remembered how he had tried to run away from me, how he had called me a moron when I pressed him about playing hockey. I remembered all the fights he got into, and all the times I had to break them up on the ice. I remembered how he had tried to take on an entire hockey team when one of the players cross-checked Tammy Duncan from behind. And yet I also remembered Fulton standing against the locker room wall, leaning on his hockey stick, looking far bigger and stronger than an 11-year old boy had any right to be. "I'll be a Duck," he'd said, when nobody else would.
I just never understood where he was coming from, his motivations. He was a strange kid, so many contradictions, and the fact that he kept his mouth shut all the time didn't help matters. How could I have known him for so long, and yet never met his family, or even known that he had one, for that matter?
He had walked to and from every game, and he had been the only kid on the team who didn't have someone rushing to congratulate him after we won the PeeWee finals. I remembered I would ask him if he wanted a ride, but he always said no, that he liked walking. One day Charlie and I rounded up the Ducks for an extra practice, everybody but Fulton. It turned out nobody knew his phone number, or where he lived.
"Check the alleys," Charlie had said. I had, and there I'd found him, shooting pucks into the same trunk he'd been using the day I met him, with a speed that seemed to defy all laws of motion. When we were driving back to the rink, I'd asked him where he lived, and he just shrugged and said: "Around."
All this remembering got me thinking about how much Fulton had changed since Portman joined the team. Fulton the Bash Brother was not the same Fulton I used to know, this sad, gigantic, fiercely loyal kid who never spoke. If Portman was the reason for this evolution, how could I wish heterosexuality upon him, if it would bring him back to where he used to be? I couldn't.
I stood up. "Let's go."
"Go? Go where?"
"To Eton. It's pointless to sit around here with our thumbs up our asses. We need to talk to Charlie and the others, get this whole thing cleared up."
***
Fulton's POV:
"And then I said, 'That's not a horse, that's my wife!'"
Portman groaned and Luis rolled his eyes. "That was bad, Averman. Really bad."
"What?" Averman cried indignantly. "That was a classic! You yahoos wouldn't know a good joke if it hit you in the face!"
"Hey, it's not our fault we have good taste."
"Good taste, yes, definitely good taste," Averman mumbled, rubbing his hands together and staring at the ground in his best Rainman impersonation.
"Shut up, Averman," Portman said, giving him a friendly shove that sent him flying into the lockers. "I've got a joke for you. You know how Mickey and Minnie are supposed to be married, right? Well, they want a divorce..."
I smiled. I'd heard this one before. Luis, Averman, Portman and I were walking back to the dorms after finishing a chem lab we'd had to make up. You'd think Ms. Tremblay wouldn't have made us come in on a Saturday, seeing how we'd missed the class because we were busy kicking ass in the State finals, but what can I say? The woman's a real bitch. I think she slept with Hitler or something; she's certainly old enough.
"So the judge says: 'Why do you want to divorce her, is she crazy?' Mickey says: 'No, she's fucking goofy!'"
"Okay, good one," said Averman, still chuckling. "Here's one you should appreciate, Portman. A gay couple gay walks into a bar--"
"You know Averman, it's attitudes like yours that have been keeping the gay community underground all these years," Luis broke in somberly.
"Oh, come on, it's just a joke."
"Wrong. There's no such thing as just a joke. It's bigotry, plain and simple."
After walking in on Portman and I in the gym, Luis decided that there must be more to gay people than he had previously imagined, and so he started to read up on homosexuality. I don't know sort of shit he read, but now he had become some sort of advocate for gay rights. He was always talking about inequality, and how gay marriages should be legalised, and stuff. He kept encouraging Portman and I not be ashamed of our relationship, to hold hands, or kiss, to "be free," as he put it. It was pretty funny most of the time, but after a while, it could start to wear on your nerves.
Suddenly, from somewhere behind us, came a voice I didn't recognize. The tone, however, was far more familiar: "There goes the gay pride parade."
We turned around to see a group of four girls and two guys. The girls were all decked out in cheerleading regalia, while the guys were both on the football team. It was one of the girls that had spoken, and the guys didn't seem too thrilled about it; they kept looking nervously back and forth between Portman and I.
Luis turned and walked right up to one of the cheerleaders. "Carley, what's going on?"
"Luis, how can you be hanging out with them? Haven't you heard? They're queers!"
I guess this was one of Luis' cheerleaders. He sure knew how to pick them. "No, Carley, you don't understand. I used to be the same as you. I hated and feared the entire gay community, but I was wrong. There's nothing sick or deviant about homosexuality; it's been around for hundreds of years. Some species of monkeys have even been known to--"
"Aaah! I don't want to hear this!" the girl screamed, putting her hands over her ears and running back down the hall.
The others followed her, and just when they reached the corner, the football jocks turned around. "Your little hotshot fairy friends had better watch it. They're not as big as you two, they might get hurt." And with that, they disappeared down the hall.
Averman, who had been huddled behind me the entire time, emerged. "Well, this is just great. Now the entire school will be after us. Are you two going to protect us all?"
Portman and I looked at each other anxiously. We had to find Charlie and Adam before anyone else did. We took off down the hall at a run.
"Why couldn't you guys have come out as something less controversial?" Averman panted as he tried to keep up. "Like mormons or vegetarians or something?"
***
Bombay's POV:
"Charlie, if this is what you really want, you know I'll support you no matter what. That goes for you too, Adam."
Charlie smiled. "Thanks Coach."
Suddenly, the door opened with such force that it slammed into the opposite wall with a bang. Portman, Fulton, Luis and Averman stood in the doorway.
"We have a problem," said Portman. "They know."
I looked from Charlie to Adam and back to Portman in confusion. "How bad is it?" Adam asked softly.
"Well, it sure ain't good. I don't know what'll happen on Monday, but it'll be all over the school before then. You and Charlie better stick tight to Fult and me for a while, okay?"
Charlie nodded. "I guess Beck told everyone, huh?"
Fulton shook his head. "I don't think so. Someone must have told, but it was someone who knew about Portman and me as well."
By now, I had pieced together what everyone was talking about. "Don't you think you guys are overreacting a bit? It can't be that big of a deal."
Charlie smiled sadly. "Come on, Coach, I know you're not that naïve."
"No, but I think I am," said Orien, who was looking vaguely nauseous. "I told the Varsity coach about you guys, you know to ask for advice on what to do. He promised not to tell anyone. Do you really think he told the entire Varsity team?"
"Doesn't matter," Adam said quietly. "Telling one guy would be enough."
"Oh man," Averman groaned. "This is not good."
"And to think I once numbered among those homophobes," Luis muttered angrily. "Come on Les, we'd better go warm the others."
"Yeah, warn them to stay in bed till school lets out," Averman muttered, then they both turned to go.
Adam sighed heavily. "I guess we should forget about the dance next week, huh Charlie?"
"What?" Portman cried. "Charlie, there is no way you two are not going to the dance just because a couple faggots have some self-esteem issues."
"Portman, I've told you before, when you're gay, you can't use the word 'faggot' against straight people. It creates too much confusion," Fulton said, patting his friend on the arm. "He's right though. You two have been looking forward to this thing for months--God knows why--there's no way you're missing out."
"But Fulton, the whole school will be there."
"I know, and maybe that's a good thing."
"What do you mean?"
"I don't know for sure, but don't worry. We'll think of something."
Orien and I looked at each other. There wasn't much we could do here; we knew telling the Dean would only make things worse. I had no idea what Fulton was talking about, but something in his voice made me think that he already had a plan in mind. It turned out that he did, and it was bigger, braver and crazier than anything I could have imagined.
*Aaah! Finally! Insanely large school project kept me out of circulation for almost a month! I know it's not that big a deal to you guys, but I'm anally punctual, and it drove me nuts going that long without updating. Now that all this school shit is over, I'll have more time, thank god. The final chapter in this story should be up within the week, so check back soon. I'm going to give OmniDuck another go, I think it'll work well for what I have in mind. Writing must be some sort of imagination purge for me, because going for more than three weeks without it put my imagination into overdrive, and now I'm stuffed to the brim with ideas that want to get out of my head and onto paper NOW. I'll share my future story plans with you at the end of the next chapter, as well. By the way, Cake Eater, I too love Holes, both the book and the movie, and I am with you: Zigzag is on fire! Yum!*
Moments after I knocked on the door, Orien answered it. He immediately stepped aside and opened the door wide. "Come on in."
He led me directly to the living room, and gestured for me to have a seat on the black leather couch that sat against the left wall, while he went straight for the wet bar that lined the right. "Can I get you a drink?"
I looked at my watch. It was just past ten in the morning. I sighed. Too early to have a headache like this. "What the hell. Bourbon on the rocks, straight up. Better make it a double."
"You got it," Orien said, pouring a gin and tonic for himself--rather heavy on the gin, I noticed--before coming over and taking a seat beside me.
"Where're Jen and Em?"
"Jenny's taken Emily to go see her grandmother in St. Paul, they should be gone most of the day."
"Good. Then no one will mind if I do this." I tilted my head back and downed my drink in one go.
Orien laughed. "No, no one will mind. I feel like doing the same thing myself, as a matter of fact." After knocking back his own drink, Ted stood up to get us seconds, and I felt a sudden pang of anger against the man. I mean, I leave the Ducks with him for a couple of years, and look what happens!
Alright Gordon, stay calm. This wasn't anyone's fault. It was hard to stay calm, however, when it felt like there was a leprechaun doing a gymnastics routine in the pit of my stomach. How could Charlie be gay? How could he not have told me? And most of all, how could I not have seen this coming?
"Ted, what the hell have you done to my Ducks?" Okay, that wasn't quite the approach I was going for. Orien just smiled crookedly and shook his head.
"I wish I knew."
"You mean you had no idea? About any of them?"
"None whatsoever. You think I'd have kept my mouth shut about something like this?"
I threw up my hands in exasperation. "How is that possible? Don't you talk to them at all? Christ Ted, I trusted you with those guys!"
"Hey, hey," he said defensively. "It's not like I was the only one in the dark. A lot of the Ducks didn't know about Fulton and Portman. I wonder how they found out about Banks and Conway?"
"Because they told them. Adam and Charlie came out to the Ducks months ago. I guess the Bashes never got around to doing the same."
The only reason I even knew this much was because I'd cornered Averman in the bathroom last night and pumped him dry for any information. I knew I should talk to Charlie, but I didn't know what to say. I felt as if I had let him down. If I had been there for him, maybe this wouldn't have happened.
I just couldn't get my head around it. How could Charlie, the same Charlie I'd known and loved for years, be a... a fudgepacker? And not just him, but three other players as well? I mean, wasn't there a limit for this kind of thing? Didn't hockey teams have, like, a homosexual carrying capacity?
I took another long drink. My headache wasn't going anywhere. Maybe they weren't really gay. After all, they're kids; maybe they're just experimenting. Yeah, and maybe I was a Chinese jet pilot.
"This is just so unexpected," Orien sighed, finishing his second drink and rubbing his eyes tiredly. "I mean, they all seemed so normal. Fulton and Portman have got to be the most masculine kids I've ever come across, Charlie's always been so well adjusted, and Adam... okay, maybe I can see it with Adam. Gordon, what are we going to do?"
"I don't know, but this can't get out, not now."
"Tell me about it. The world sure picked a hell of a time to turn gay."
Ever since the Peewee championships, the Ducks had been drawing considerable media attention, and the Goodwill Games had magnified that tenfold. Now, with two state championships under their belts and the World Juniors coming up, I had been fielding a lot of offers from schools that wanted to recruit them. Orien had been swamped with scouts and managers who were interested in the kids, and four names always came up before any of the others: Adam, Julie, Fulton and Portman.
Hockey was not exactly what you would call a progressive sport, and if this whole gay thing got out, I was afraid it could seriously jeopardize their chances at a career in professional hockey. What a mess. I gulped down the rest of my drink with a grimace.
"Maybe we can get them into counselling or something. Or better yet, one of those special programs. Three or four years ago, a couple Eton girls got caught getting a little too friendly, and they sent them to some sort of camp, and when they came back, they weren't gay anymore."
"I don't think it works like that, Ted."
"Well, we should at least tell their parents, so they can try to fix them before it's too late. They're good kids."
I raised my eyebrows. "Fix them, Ted?"
He shrugged. "Fine, guide them or whatever. You don't actually think they're serious about this, do you? I mean, come on, four guys on one team?"
"Maybe they're not, I don't know, but I think we should talk to them first before we go making phone calls. They might not be ready to tell their folks."
"But we have a responsibility to tell the parents when their kid is in trouble."
"I'm not sure being gay and being in trouble are the same thing," I said massaging my temples. I really needed another drink. "Besides, our primary responsibility is to those kids, and telling their parents might not be the best thing for them right now. Charlie's mom would probably be okay, but I don't know his stepdad. I doubt Adam's father would be too thrilled. And the Bashes? To tell you the truth, I don't think I've even seen their parents, let alone spoken to them. Have you?"
Orien shook his head. "Nope, but they've had to come in once or twice to talk to the Dean." He filled me in a bit on the game against Windsor; Portman's injury, Fulton's retaliation, and the events that had followed. It sure sounded like my Bash Brothers, alright. "It's those two that I'm having the hardest time with. I just can't imagine them as a couple of fairies. I guess they're sort of like those steel worker, prison inmate queers."
I shook my head. I didn't feel the same way as Orien. The two had always been so close, and Portman's tough-guy act could have been overcompensation, if you wanted to think like that. And Fulton? I gave up on being surprised by him ages ago. "Whose bright idea was it to let them room together anyway?" I said sullenly, while Orien got up to refill our drinks. This time, he just brought the bottles over to the table. Good. I was going to need some help to get through the day.
"It wasn't anyone's idea. We tried splitting them up, but no one else could stand to live with them, so eventually we just gave up. Besides, they told me you let them room together during the Goodwill Games."
I sighed. "Oh. Right. I forgot." As a coach, I had always prided myself on knowing my team inside and out; I really think it was one of the reasons the team worked as well as it did. However, there was an exception to this rule, and his name was Fulton Reed.
He was one of the original Ducks, and so while you'd think I'd know him better than many of the other players, he had always remained a bit of a mystery to me. It was hard to believe it had been five years since he broke my window with that shot of his. I remembered how he had tried to run away from me, how he had called me a moron when I pressed him about playing hockey. I remembered all the fights he got into, and all the times I had to break them up on the ice. I remembered how he had tried to take on an entire hockey team when one of the players cross-checked Tammy Duncan from behind. And yet I also remembered Fulton standing against the locker room wall, leaning on his hockey stick, looking far bigger and stronger than an 11-year old boy had any right to be. "I'll be a Duck," he'd said, when nobody else would.
I just never understood where he was coming from, his motivations. He was a strange kid, so many contradictions, and the fact that he kept his mouth shut all the time didn't help matters. How could I have known him for so long, and yet never met his family, or even known that he had one, for that matter?
He had walked to and from every game, and he had been the only kid on the team who didn't have someone rushing to congratulate him after we won the PeeWee finals. I remembered I would ask him if he wanted a ride, but he always said no, that he liked walking. One day Charlie and I rounded up the Ducks for an extra practice, everybody but Fulton. It turned out nobody knew his phone number, or where he lived.
"Check the alleys," Charlie had said. I had, and there I'd found him, shooting pucks into the same trunk he'd been using the day I met him, with a speed that seemed to defy all laws of motion. When we were driving back to the rink, I'd asked him where he lived, and he just shrugged and said: "Around."
All this remembering got me thinking about how much Fulton had changed since Portman joined the team. Fulton the Bash Brother was not the same Fulton I used to know, this sad, gigantic, fiercely loyal kid who never spoke. If Portman was the reason for this evolution, how could I wish heterosexuality upon him, if it would bring him back to where he used to be? I couldn't.
I stood up. "Let's go."
"Go? Go where?"
"To Eton. It's pointless to sit around here with our thumbs up our asses. We need to talk to Charlie and the others, get this whole thing cleared up."
***
Fulton's POV:
"And then I said, 'That's not a horse, that's my wife!'"
Portman groaned and Luis rolled his eyes. "That was bad, Averman. Really bad."
"What?" Averman cried indignantly. "That was a classic! You yahoos wouldn't know a good joke if it hit you in the face!"
"Hey, it's not our fault we have good taste."
"Good taste, yes, definitely good taste," Averman mumbled, rubbing his hands together and staring at the ground in his best Rainman impersonation.
"Shut up, Averman," Portman said, giving him a friendly shove that sent him flying into the lockers. "I've got a joke for you. You know how Mickey and Minnie are supposed to be married, right? Well, they want a divorce..."
I smiled. I'd heard this one before. Luis, Averman, Portman and I were walking back to the dorms after finishing a chem lab we'd had to make up. You'd think Ms. Tremblay wouldn't have made us come in on a Saturday, seeing how we'd missed the class because we were busy kicking ass in the State finals, but what can I say? The woman's a real bitch. I think she slept with Hitler or something; she's certainly old enough.
"So the judge says: 'Why do you want to divorce her, is she crazy?' Mickey says: 'No, she's fucking goofy!'"
"Okay, good one," said Averman, still chuckling. "Here's one you should appreciate, Portman. A gay couple gay walks into a bar--"
"You know Averman, it's attitudes like yours that have been keeping the gay community underground all these years," Luis broke in somberly.
"Oh, come on, it's just a joke."
"Wrong. There's no such thing as just a joke. It's bigotry, plain and simple."
After walking in on Portman and I in the gym, Luis decided that there must be more to gay people than he had previously imagined, and so he started to read up on homosexuality. I don't know sort of shit he read, but now he had become some sort of advocate for gay rights. He was always talking about inequality, and how gay marriages should be legalised, and stuff. He kept encouraging Portman and I not be ashamed of our relationship, to hold hands, or kiss, to "be free," as he put it. It was pretty funny most of the time, but after a while, it could start to wear on your nerves.
Suddenly, from somewhere behind us, came a voice I didn't recognize. The tone, however, was far more familiar: "There goes the gay pride parade."
We turned around to see a group of four girls and two guys. The girls were all decked out in cheerleading regalia, while the guys were both on the football team. It was one of the girls that had spoken, and the guys didn't seem too thrilled about it; they kept looking nervously back and forth between Portman and I.
Luis turned and walked right up to one of the cheerleaders. "Carley, what's going on?"
"Luis, how can you be hanging out with them? Haven't you heard? They're queers!"
I guess this was one of Luis' cheerleaders. He sure knew how to pick them. "No, Carley, you don't understand. I used to be the same as you. I hated and feared the entire gay community, but I was wrong. There's nothing sick or deviant about homosexuality; it's been around for hundreds of years. Some species of monkeys have even been known to--"
"Aaah! I don't want to hear this!" the girl screamed, putting her hands over her ears and running back down the hall.
The others followed her, and just when they reached the corner, the football jocks turned around. "Your little hotshot fairy friends had better watch it. They're not as big as you two, they might get hurt." And with that, they disappeared down the hall.
Averman, who had been huddled behind me the entire time, emerged. "Well, this is just great. Now the entire school will be after us. Are you two going to protect us all?"
Portman and I looked at each other anxiously. We had to find Charlie and Adam before anyone else did. We took off down the hall at a run.
"Why couldn't you guys have come out as something less controversial?" Averman panted as he tried to keep up. "Like mormons or vegetarians or something?"
***
Bombay's POV:
"Charlie, if this is what you really want, you know I'll support you no matter what. That goes for you too, Adam."
Charlie smiled. "Thanks Coach."
Suddenly, the door opened with such force that it slammed into the opposite wall with a bang. Portman, Fulton, Luis and Averman stood in the doorway.
"We have a problem," said Portman. "They know."
I looked from Charlie to Adam and back to Portman in confusion. "How bad is it?" Adam asked softly.
"Well, it sure ain't good. I don't know what'll happen on Monday, but it'll be all over the school before then. You and Charlie better stick tight to Fult and me for a while, okay?"
Charlie nodded. "I guess Beck told everyone, huh?"
Fulton shook his head. "I don't think so. Someone must have told, but it was someone who knew about Portman and me as well."
By now, I had pieced together what everyone was talking about. "Don't you think you guys are overreacting a bit? It can't be that big of a deal."
Charlie smiled sadly. "Come on, Coach, I know you're not that naïve."
"No, but I think I am," said Orien, who was looking vaguely nauseous. "I told the Varsity coach about you guys, you know to ask for advice on what to do. He promised not to tell anyone. Do you really think he told the entire Varsity team?"
"Doesn't matter," Adam said quietly. "Telling one guy would be enough."
"Oh man," Averman groaned. "This is not good."
"And to think I once numbered among those homophobes," Luis muttered angrily. "Come on Les, we'd better go warm the others."
"Yeah, warn them to stay in bed till school lets out," Averman muttered, then they both turned to go.
Adam sighed heavily. "I guess we should forget about the dance next week, huh Charlie?"
"What?" Portman cried. "Charlie, there is no way you two are not going to the dance just because a couple faggots have some self-esteem issues."
"Portman, I've told you before, when you're gay, you can't use the word 'faggot' against straight people. It creates too much confusion," Fulton said, patting his friend on the arm. "He's right though. You two have been looking forward to this thing for months--God knows why--there's no way you're missing out."
"But Fulton, the whole school will be there."
"I know, and maybe that's a good thing."
"What do you mean?"
"I don't know for sure, but don't worry. We'll think of something."
Orien and I looked at each other. There wasn't much we could do here; we knew telling the Dean would only make things worse. I had no idea what Fulton was talking about, but something in his voice made me think that he already had a plan in mind. It turned out that he did, and it was bigger, braver and crazier than anything I could have imagined.
*Aaah! Finally! Insanely large school project kept me out of circulation for almost a month! I know it's not that big a deal to you guys, but I'm anally punctual, and it drove me nuts going that long without updating. Now that all this school shit is over, I'll have more time, thank god. The final chapter in this story should be up within the week, so check back soon. I'm going to give OmniDuck another go, I think it'll work well for what I have in mind. Writing must be some sort of imagination purge for me, because going for more than three weeks without it put my imagination into overdrive, and now I'm stuffed to the brim with ideas that want to get out of my head and onto paper NOW. I'll share my future story plans with you at the end of the next chapter, as well. By the way, Cake Eater, I too love Holes, both the book and the movie, and I am with you: Zigzag is on fire! Yum!*