Campus Visit

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Alex remembered clearly how he and Damian had become friends. They were eight years old. They had known each other since starting kindergarten. Rancho Amantes was a small town with only about twenty students in each grade, so you knew everyone. During his first few years at school, Alex had hung around with the more athletic boys, the ones who liked shooting hoops, which was Alex’s favorite recess activity.

Damian Garza, the skinny black-haired kid whose jeans were always ripped at the knees, was more of a loner. He immersed himself in scratch paper and colored pencils during class, and on the playground he did things like arranging rocks into patterns on the ground, seemingly unaware of the other kids bouncing wildly around him.

Damian’s parents owned the orange groves in the hills east of town. Alex knew that, as did everyone else, for a couple of times a year Damian’s mom brought in a crate of oranges for the class to enjoy. Maybe because of that, people tended to be nice to Damian when they talked to him, but that simply wasn’t very often. He got the right answers in class if the teachers asked him a question, but he didn’t raise his hand and usually didn’t try to play with anyone.

Though Damian’s family couldn’t have been rich—farmers usually weren’t—they had a certain grand status in Alex’s mind because of the land they owned. They seemed more exotic, at any rate, than Alex’s own family. His dad was a handyman, and his mom had been his part-time office manager before he married her and got her pregnant. She stayed home now with Alex and his three siblings. He had an older brother and sister, and one younger sister.

Then one spring day when he was eight, during Alex’s game of hoops at recess, another boy accused him of traveling. Alex denied it. The boy taunted and re-accused him. Alex lost his temper and shoved him. The teacher supervising the playground pulled Alex out of the game and, ignoring Alex’s protests that he was innocent, sternly told him to go play somewhere else for the rest of recess.

Alex stormed away, kicked wood chips for a while, and finally crawled into the cement tunnel that lay in the playground next to the monkey bars.

Inside crouched Damian Garza, drawing with a piece of chalk. Alex looked around and found half the tunnel’s interior surface covered with designs and shapes—spirals, stars, trees, circles, pyramids, deer, dogs, lightning bolts.

Damian barely glanced at him and went on drawing.

“This looks cool,” Alex told him.

“Thanks.”

“Where’d you get the chalk?”

Damian gave him a complicit, shy smile. “From the room.”

Alex grinned. They both knew their teacher wouldn’t approve of anyone filching chalk from her precious board.

Damian pulled an extra piece from his pocket. “Want to draw?”

“Sure.” Alex took it, but found himself at a loss for ideas when faced with the blank concrete. Finally he wrote his initials in big block letters. “What else should I write?”

Damian glanced at him with a hint of mischief. “I know some bad words in Spanish.”

That started a long chain of profane words, in both Spanish and English, written with ever-increasing levels of giggles. Alex and Damian filled the tunnel with them until the bell buzzed to signal the end of recess.

A teacher saw them coming out of the tunnel with chalk dust all over their hands and knees. She peeked inside and found the obscene graffiti. Damian and Alex were diverted straight to the principal’s office. They were made to stay after school and scrub out the tunnel with sponges and a bucket of water, as well as writing an apology letter to the teachers and their fellow students.

By the end of that ridiculous ordeal, they were the best of friends, and had remained that way ever since. Even when Alex began sensing that he liked boys in the same way Damian and most other guys liked girls, he kept getting along with Damian and always enjoyed his company. Somehow he knew, even before coming out, that Damian would support him, no matter who else freaked out.

But Alex never suspected until this past week that he’d someday get to enjoy Damian’s favors in bed. And clearly the shift in dynamics was shaking Damian’s world too.

They went out to dinner at a Southwestern grill near campus. Ruffled paper streamers in orange, red, and yellow crisscrossed the ceiling. Murals of desert cacti and Baja surfers sprawled across the walls. Their small table stood near a side window from which they could see across the rooftops to the Pacific Ocean, sparkling beneath a hazy sunset. Alex thought Damian might appreciate the view, for on past visits, Damian often gazed a long time at the ocean and remarked that he liked seeing so much water, living as he did in the dry Central Valley.

But today Damian chewed his lower lip and studied the other people in the crowded restaurant instead, his gaze moving from one table to the next, almost systematically. He shared the chips and salsa their waitress brought, but ate more slowly than Alex. To Alex’s lightweight comments, Damian answered offhandedly, without more than a flicker of eye contact.

Alex longed to climb around the table and stop Damian from chewing that lip by sucking on it himself. But the idea that Damian might be ashamed of their afternoon explorations left Alex both sympathetic and annoyed. He remembered the paranoia he’d felt when appearing in public after coming out, and after indulging in his first s*x with another guy. That paranoia had turned out to be silly and pointless, and he wanted to yank Damian off that path.

“They can’t tell, you know,” Alex finally said.

Damian’s gaze shot to his face and held there. “Who? What?”

Alex waved a chip to indicate the other patrons of the grill. “No one can tell what you’ve been doing. Even if they could, it doesn’t matter. It’s not illegal.”

Damian bowed his unruly head. “I know. That wasn’t what I was thinking.”

Alex scooped up some salsa with the chip, and shoved it into his mouth. Wasn’t going to be the pushy date who tried to worm into his buddy’s brain and haul out every thought. No, sir. He stayed quiet, allowing Damian to speak if he wanted to.

The tactic worked. “I was actually wondering about them.” Damian nodded toward the restaurant’s interior. “Other people. Two guys or two girls together at a table—I guess, before, I always figured they were just friends. Now I wonder.”

Alex cast a studious squint around the room himself. “Those two women under the piñata, I suspect them. But only because I’ve seen the one in the purple sweater at l***q club meetings. Even so, that could be just her friend.”

Damian looked dubious, frowning at one table after another. Alex added, “No one can read your mind. If we were holding hands and leaning across the table to whisper in each other’s ears, then yeah, they’d probably guess.”

A nervous smile crossed Damian’s lips. “You ever gotten confident enough to do that in public?”

“Rarely.” Alex dipped in for more salsa. “Even around here, you never know who might be watching, ready to get all offended and cuss you out. Or beat you up later.”

Damian sighed heavily. “That’s what I figured.”

“But, I don’t let it get me all depressed and scared. There’s a line you can walk. Proud to be what you are in your private life, but keeping it mostly private. It’s not that hard.”

“So you say.”

“Dude, everyone has a private s*x life that contains stuff they’d rather not advertise. Everyone. Even your parents.”

That got the effect Alex wanted. Damian produced a comedic shudder. “I doubt that. But thank you for the nightmares.”

The waitress arrived with their food, and they picked up their forks and dug in.

“By the way,” Damian said through a mouthful of tamale, “guess who my folks hired to help with the harvest this year? Max Dooley.”

Alex snorted in disgust. “Does he still belch in people’s faces and use ‘gay’ as his favorite insult?”

“I assume he doesn’t do that around my parents, but with everyone else, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Once an asswipe, always an asswipe,” Alex agreed.

“And my parents are giving him money.” Damian shook his head in grim astonishment.

Alex could have pursued the topic of Damian’s parents. He still shivered at the memory of the cold glares they’d given him when he showed up to hang out with Damian in high school after the news of Alex’s being gay had spread. They’d been polite enough hosts before that, but afterward? Yikes.

Alex knew plenty of Catholics who had no problem with gays—hell, his own parents were Catholic; they attended the same church as the Garzas. And they’d gotten over their religious issues in order to make peace with their son. But Damian’s folks were not among that modern-thinking bunch. No wonder Damian hid his desires so long and was freaking out over having just jerked off another guy.

Someday, Alex figured, he and Damian would have to hash out the problems the Garza parents had loaded onto their son’s conscience. But not just then. Taking pity on his best friend, Alex asked instead about Damian’s classes and post-graduation plans. That got Damian talking in a more natural fashion, and by the time the tamales and cervezas were cleared off their table, they were laughing over anecdotes about their classmates.

They split the bill—like friends, not dates—and Alex glanced out the window again. The red sun shimmered on the horizon, just touching the ocean.

“Walk on the beach?” he suggested.

Damian pulled on his dark blue fleece jacket. “Let’s do it.”