Truth, Pride, Victory, Love

Chapter 1

“You’re in a lot of activities.”

By the time I got into high school five years later, I’d joined the Academic Olympics team, chorus, band—first-chair trombone since fifth grade—drama club, and also the Dover Sharks soccer, basketball, and track teams. I also played Little League baseball in town. We’d gone two years undefeated, thanks in no small part to my pitching.

My mother sat me down at the kitchen table for a serious conversation during ninth-grade finals week. Mama never wore any jewelry, not even a wedding ring. I noticed that for the first time then, because I was looking at her hands, just like she was. The way she kept wringing and opening and closing them, it was hard to look anywhere else. I got the feeling, as the conversation went on, it was difficult for her to look me in the eye too.

“Some of the things you do are expensive. They take up a lot of time, and though it hurts me to ask you to choose, I think next year we are going to have to cut back.”

I believed her when she said it hurt. I just kind of didn’t care.

Dropped off safe-haven/baby-Moses style at the local firehouse a few months into my existence, I’d been fostered by an older white couple for a while, then eventually adopted by Angela and Marvet Watson—Mama and Dad. Our family was like a reverse Diff’rent Strokes—a short, precocious, somewhat Caucasian-looking little stinker being raised by a black family. The other disparity was our financial situation. Nowhere near as wealthy as the Drummonds, my parents both worked yet still probably had a bank balance lower than Mrs. Garrett’s. As for my biological makeup, well, I could have been black for all any of us knew. Despite the fact I sometimes felt as white as Mrs. Smeckler’s dry-erase board from back in the day, most people probably saw something else when noticing the color of my skin.

One time, Jeff Ackerman asked, “What are you supposed to be?” Since it wasn’t Halloween, and since we were in the middle of the chapter in our seventh-grade history books about nationalities and heritage, I figured he was asking about that. My coloring was definitely up for debate, even within my own family. I had coarse and kinky hair, good rhythm, and I could jump. My father had pointed all that out to me more than once. “I’m pretty sure you’re at least half-black,” he often said. When I repeated those stereotypes and Dad’s conclusion to Jeff, he called me racist. I thought that was ignorant. I figured my father would as well. “Did it hurt you when I said it?” Dad asked me. “The thing about being able to dance and play ball?”

“No.”

“Not a twinge of discomfort, not a jolt in your chest or a knot in your gut?”

“No.” I was being completely truthful.

“Would the same words…the same hackneyed labels hurt from someone else…from this Jeff kid, maybe?”

I had to think about that. “I’m not sure.”

“How come?”

“Well…I figured it was kind of a joke with you. It’s also the God’s honest truth. I got moves on the dance floor and the court.”

“Do you now?” My father smiled.

“Yeah, no matter what race I am. If Jeff said it…” I thought some more. “I guess racism is more about how a person acts towards someone overall—on a daily basis—than it is about a possibly inappropriate sentence or two.” I also had a pretty good vocabulary for my age. “Right? More about…”

My dad offered a word that wouldn’t come to my mind. “Intent?”

“Yeah. That.”

“So you know the definition?”

“Yes.”

Dad kept staring at me, wanting proof.

“It means why they say what they say.”

“Or why you do.”

“Me?”

“What you say as a joke could rub someone the wrong way just as easily…about race, about a boy’s mannerisms being girly, about a girl being butch because her fastball’s faster than yours…”

My father wasn’t speaking hypothetically. He was teaching me a lesson regarding past transgressions I didn’t even realize he’d known about. I huffed. “Why does everything have to be so complicated?”

Dad smiled again. “That’s what a lot of people ask. Sometimes it’s all pretty subtle.” He ruffled my tight dark curls. “If you don’t know prejudice when you hear it, trust your gut to know when you feel it. As long as you’re aware of the intentions behind your own words and act accordingly from now on…as long as you can defend what you say, apologize when you can’t, and even when the best of intentions go awry, because that will happen too…I think you’ll be okay.”

My father never talked down to me. That was probably why I was as smart as I was. He always encouraged me too, and that was why I never shied away from trying new things. I’d always figured I was lucky to excel at so many of them. Yeah. Money was sometimes tight, but my parents had always handed it over without comment when it came to school. Therefore, I figured education was a priority. Now that things had changed, I chose to blame my sister, Beth. She was pretty nasty to me lately. My neighborhood bud, Cal, said it was because pregnant women were grouchy. Beth’s boyfriend, Julius, had been coming around a few years. I caught them kissing all the time, often with his hand on her butt.

“Gross!” I hadn’t really meant to give myself away—to let them know I’d been snooping—but the declaration had come quite loudly.

“You won’t think so someday,” Julius had told me.

“Yuck. I’m never kissing a girl!” It was a vow—even barely on the precipice of puberty, yet already quite enthralled at the way Julius’s tight jeans hugged the curves of his ass—I was pretty sure I’d never break.

Beth wasn’t moving out. She wasn’t marrying Julius, yet he was at our house all the time. Food for him, food for the baby coming in July, that was why I couldn’t be in any more school activities.

“Okay. If that’s how it has to be…” I hoisted myself up from the wooden kitchen chair with my palms on the table, pretending I was frail with overwhelming dismay. “I’ll think it over. It might take a day or two to decide which things it will hurt the least to quit.” I stopped in the doorway, my shoulders slumped, my voice shaky. “Just a little over two years away from filling out college applications, I was fixin’ to sign up for more things next fall, and even more as a junior and a senior, not dropping out of all but one.” I tossed the last spade full of guilt. “Unless I can’t even go to college. If that’s how it’s going down, who the hell even cares?”

I’d made my mother too sad to yell at me for cursing. I felt good about that as I slammed the bedroom door to make her feel worse.

“You’re gonna break it.”

“Shut up, Devon.” I barely got the three words out without crying, not so much because I was being forced to quit stuff, more due to the image in my mind of how I’d left my mother in the other room.

“We don’t say ‘shut up’ in this house,” he reminded me.

“Who are you, Mrs. Smeckler?”

“No. I’m Devon.” I shared a room with my baby brother, ten by the time I’d turned fifteen. He was slow, at least according to the school system. I would tend to disagree.

As I looked at all my gold medals from the Scholastic Olympics championships, and the ones from All-State Band, the playbills from all of my shows, my name often listed first as the lead, I wondered what I would do to make my parents proud of me if I couldn’t participate in extracurricular activities in senior high. I thought the first thing I might try was acting more mature—not right that minute, but definitely soon.

A few days later, Mama and I were back on speaking terms after I told her I was sorry. I still had no idea which one of my many interests to follow, but I had a couple months to decide, since we were just starting summer vacation.

“Come on!” My sister, Beth, yelled, interrupting my first official no-school nap only an hour after I’d first gotten up for the day.

“Come on where?” I hollered back.

“We’re fixin’ to go to the pool.”

“Fixin’…” It was one of those words we Watsons used a lot. Though we lived in New York, our parents had both grown up in the south. When they moved north for work, they brought some of the vernacular with them.

“What pool?” And why did she sound so pissed, as if she’d called me fourteen times when I was pretty sure it had only been once?

“They’re opening the pool today, idiot.”

Oh yeah—the pregnancy.

She appeared in my doorway, blocking the sunlight from the hallway window. “Hurry your ugly ass up!”

“What pool?” I asked again, despite her mood.

Julius stood behind her in trunks and no shirt. His skin was flawless, and his chest muscles were well-developed and tight. When I got to the hallway, Devon was out there too, in the same state of half-dress. Apparently they both knew what pool. Unlike Julius’s, Devon’s boyish dark-toned belly stuck out as round as our sister’s.

“Duh.” When Beth shook her head, her giant boobs shook too. “The town pool…the one they finally put in.”

“No kidding. We got a pool?” I didn’t keep up on local news very well.

“How can you not…?” She shook her head again. “We’re leaving. Come now or stay home.”

“Can pregnant women even swim?”

I got a whack upside the head for that one, even though, as it turned out, Beth had no intention of doing so.

* * * *

“The pool is in there.” She and Julius selected a pair of chaises outside, so far from any water there was absolutely no danger of the tiny bathing suit, holding back a whole lot of t**s and tummy, coming in contact with even a drop.

“You’re not coming in?” I asked.

“Nope.” Her plan all along had been to dump us off on another babysitter.

“Black people don’t swim,” Julius added.

That was a pity, right there, because I knew for a fact Julius looked damned fine wet.

“I’m going to,” Devon said.

“Me too,” I proudly declared, forgetting, as I often did, that Julius’s stereotypical, in-jest proclamation might not really apply to me.

“Watch him,” Beth ordered.

“I will,” I told her. “Stay where a lifeguard can see you, Dev.” I figure that covered it.

The front and back walls of the structure surrounding the pool were more like a partition, currently open all the way. The side walls, however, were stationary, with tiny louver windows up high that did very little to move the sultry air around. Basically, unless one was in the water, it was hot as f**k. So, that’s where I stayed—and I loved it!

Tiring of kiddie splashing after about ten minutes, I left Devon in the capable hands of a pool attendant handling a group of younger kids and wandered over to where some old guy with sculpted abs but gray chest hair was teaching teens about technique. Though I’d never swum before, I was a natural. Mr. Washboard Stomach said so, and I wasn’t surprised. I’d yet to find anything I wasn’t good at, and had the certificates and medals to prove it.

Almost immediately, swimming felt like something I could do for the rest of my life. Maybe it was that charge I always felt, that whole eel thing. I was part white, part black, part sea creature. I could believe that. No problem. There was something else about the water, though—how it touched me everywhere. Wind, the bitter coldness of it or its sultry warmth in summer, could be blocked by clothing, hair, or by putting a hand up against it. Sunlight was easy to shield and keep away from one’s flesh. Water, it had its way with me. It got between my fingers when I put them to my ears and eyes. It worked freely through and up inside my swim trunks, invading and teasing places on my adolescent body I was only beginning to think about wanting to be touched. There was a sound under there too, sort of like a hum or maybe more like a constant audible vibration, like when my dad forgot to turn the old stereo off at Grampa’s after he was finished playing records from decades ago. Between that and the uninhibited nature of its caress, the water in that pool felt like my first illicit teenage lover.

I couldn’t put any of that into words, not then, but I loved every minute in that pool, and that’s what I told my parents that very night, back at the kitchen table.

* * * *

“Okay.” I sat. “I’ve decided. I want to swim and nothing else.”

“Swimming? Swimming is not a student activity. It’s a community one,” my mother said, folding dishtowels she’d brought in from the line.

“So?”

“So…I think you should do something school related, something to list on a college application.”

Apparently higher education was still an option. “Why can’t I put swimming on there?”

“Reed.” There was a certain way my father said my name to let me know I was skating on thin ice.

“Because,” Mama said, “that’s more for fun than any sort of—”

A sound came out of me that interrupted her sentence, a sound she hated. “I can’t be in band,” I said sourly. In middle school and ninth, we used instruments provided by the school. Starting in tenth grade, we had to purchase our own. Trombones, though made of a far less precious metal, were as costly as if formed from pure eighteen-karat gold. My parents had promised they’d find a way to get one if I insisted on sticking with music, but I knew it would cause quite the hardship. “And that’s okay. I get it.” My Jekyll-and-Hyde, brat-versus-mature back and forth was probably giving Mama whiplash. “This is free,” I said. “You show up. You swim. Coach Keller said he could pit some of us against each other…against the clock. We raced a couple times today. It was fun.”

“Fine.”

Mama offered Dad the same look for the one word I’d gotten for the sound.

“But keep an open mind.” He said that a lot. “If something else piques your interest later on, come to us, and we’ll do everything we can to support you in it.”

I believed that with my whole heart, despite my temper flares and childish grunts and sarcasm. “Thanks. And I’m sorry…still…that I was such a brat the other day.”

“What day was that?” my mother asked with a smile. They never held a grudge. My parents were cool like that.

* * * *

Once school started again, Coach Keller—the fogey with the six-pack—formed a swimming team and put me on it. My friend, Cal, joined too. Cal and I lived next door to each other, which wasn’t really the same as being school friends, in my experience. He was one year ahead. We never sat together on the bus. Nor did we share any classes or eat lunch at the same table, not in elementary school, in middle school, or junior high. Cal just ended up at my house a lot because of proximity and the fact our parents all went to the same church. A couple times a week, we played hoops in the driveway until it got dark. That somehow led to us messing around with each other all one summer, right around the time our bodies were begging us to and our brains had no idea how to shut it down or what we were supposed do. A lot of things came naturally, even without the Internet. It took quite a while for the term gay to come up between us. At the beginning, before I started searching the Web, even the idea of it didn’t, not to me, anyway. It all ended just about the time the hottest days of the year did, just about the time that three-letter-word was uttered, and though I still waited for Cal to make another move after getting all sweaty in my driveway or all wet at swim practice, he never did. We got tighter, though, as we hung out more.

In the weeks that followed, Coach Keller set up competitions with other community teams. He never asked for any money, even though he drove us in his minivan and dropped us off at home afterward. We competed all that school year, and throughout the summer months as well, with the same few teams over and over. There weren’t any medals or trophies at the end, which totally bummed me out, but Coach did keep track of who won—mostly me.

“You’re good,” he told me, as if my already-huge ego and pride needed a boost. He would usually buy us pizza if we came out on top as a team. That didn’t happen very often. I didn’t see why I couldn’t get a pizza all my own every time I won or touched first in a relay, which was always.

“I miss you in everything.” My best school friend, Caryn, pouted as she gave me a hug after a local meet she’d come to watch. Caryn and I had first become acquainted back in kindergarten. I pulled back the swing just as she was going to sit on it. It wasn’t out of meanness. Truly it wasn’t. Harvey Lange and I had planned a little contest to see who could swing longer without puking after jamming our sloppy joes down our gullets in record time. I was a competitive little brat from birth, I think, and when Caryn got to the swings before I did, ruining my chance to come out victorious, I did what I had to do. Though she’d bawled her eyes out, she never did tell on me. We became besties forever instead. She’d been by my side from that day forward, in Mrs. Smeckler’s class, in band, Academic Olympics, and on stage. Unfortunately, she hated the water.

“Get over it,” I replied. I was far too cool and manly to get mushy back, though honestly, I missed her too. I missed her a lot. I’d made a few buddies on the swim team, but none were as awesome as Caryn or Cal.

Eventually, I missed the competition too. I creamed my opponents way too easily, and that made swimming lose a bit of its luster and appeal. I stuck with it, though, and my junior year in high school, some sort of synergy between the school and the town pool suddenly resulted in Dover High having a team as well. Finally our mascot made sense! The Dover High Sharks were about to compete in water, and I was damned excited.

There were dues, and though I can’t imagine my parents were thrilled about paying them, at least “the swimming thing” was now a school activity that might look good to college entrance boards. Either way, they didn’t object. I, on the other hand, protested like Johnnie Cochran at the OJ trial when Coach Keller showed me what part of those dues was going toward.

“That’s what you expect us to wear? In front of people?” Frankly I found it hard to believe something made from such a small amount of fabric could cost so much money. “My underwear covers more than that will.”

“Everyone will look exactly the same.”

“You know that’s not true. There are two girls on the team, and Guy Vitolo has a huge gut and a tiny, little—”

“You know what I mean. It’s not like you’ll stand out.”

“I’m not worried about standing out. I’m worried about hanging out…or sticking out…or falling out, if you get my drift.”

“I do.” Coach Keller was a regular in the locker room and had no doubt noticed the difference between me and Guy. “You’ll get used to them.” Coach turned a little red. “Trust me. I did.”

“You wore one of these?” I held up the tiny blue briefs.

“All throughout my illustrious career.”

“As what?”

“A swimmer, smartass. Came close to Olympic competition.”

“No kidding.” Now I was impressed. “Why didn’t I know this? Tell me about it.”

“Was on the US team. Made it to the qualifying round, and then I pulled a tendon in my shoulder.” He shrugged and winced.

“It still hurts?”

“In some ways, yeah. But that was the end. No more swimming.” He offered a frown. “Now hit the water. We have our first meet in a week.”

There weren’t many schools close by with pools. Our first competition was over an hour and a half away—north, not south. We ended up at some snooty, rich-looking school called Albany Mountain Prep. Soon after we got there, I changed in a locker room as big as my whole house, right in front of everyone else on our team. The boys, that is. I wasn’t embarrassed by the size and shape of my body. It held up pretty well in comparison to the naked male ones I’d managed to see on Tumblr on the library computer, once I managed to bypass the age restriction software with the number off my father’s driver’s license. My problem had always been with my face, skin tone, and hair. The same thick, kinky dark spirals that grew out of my head had started sprigging out of my body, and since my swimsuit didn’t cover a lot of it, I’d expected to be self-conscious parading around in it. I pulled it off, however—the look, I mean, not the actual suit. Though I was constantly yanking it from where it got stuck in various nooks and crannies.

The truth was I worked hard on my body, running, lifting, and working out in the basement on an old machine my father had bought in the nineties. Chest, gut, and pit hair just meant I was a man ahead of a lot of the others. I figured there was nothing wrong with being proud of that. Mrs. Smeckler’s definition of the notion of pride said nothing about it being sinful. Furthermore, the more I had going on below the neck, the more focus it drew from the hideousness above it.

Nevertheless, we all wore sweatpants until it was time to compete. The shyer guys wore jackets too, as there turned out to be a lot more downtime in scholastic swimming than at the informal community matchups. In the end, I was kind of happy not to have to sit on the bench with my package on display the whole time, as I glanced across the pool at the opposing team with more than a passing interest in the boys on their side. Sure, I was sizing up the competition, but by the age of sixteen going on seventeen—which I sang in my head every time I thought about how old I was, and still did now at seventeen going on eighteen—there was more to it than that.

I was attracted to men, and I’d known it a long time. That meant my sweatpants were actually a blessing, as I sat there eyeballing the Albany Mountain Prep Pirates. Once I got past the fact that we were a water creature and they needed a ship—thus giving us an advantage—I started comparing package sizes, a definite no-no. I really didn’t want to pop a woody, so staying above the neck while checking out my rivals was a better bet. Cute, cute, meh…I went down the row of twelve guys, three of whom hadn’t bothered with sweats. That was when my focus moved lower down their bodies. Nothing to cover. Nothing to see there. Whoa! Stop, I told myself. My roomy sweatpants would only do so much to hide my hard-on, and soon I was going to have to stand and take them off, so I focused my leer above the guy’s navel, and finally to his face, a familiar one.

“Mathias?”

“Who?” Cal asked.

I hadn’t seen Mathias Webber since fourth grade, but just as Mrs. Smeckler somehow still recognized me in the supermarket, I knew it was him. “No one,” I told Cal. Maybe it was some dude who just looked like him. But then the guy waved. He looked right at me and smiled.

He was a lot taller, and a lot bigger—more muscular. Then again, so was I. His hair was buzzed shorter than the grass in our front yard in July, and pretty much the same burnt-straw hue, definitely darker than the almost-platinum color it was when I’d first become aware he existed. Mathias’s gray eyes still shone, with exuberance now, not sadness or fear. The four-eyes look was gone, leaving me to wonder if he’d gotten contacts or just took off his glasses to swim.

“Hey.” I waved back like a homecoming queen in a parade float convertible. Can he see me? Duh. He waved first. Of course he can.

“‘Hey’ who?” Cal asked.

“Nobody.” I wanted to walk across the water between us like Jesus, and plant a big kiss on Mathias Webber’s mouth, like Luke kissing Noah on As the World Turns before the show got canceled, or…Well, I hadn’t seen much gay kissing yet in my life by the year 2011, other than the soap opera pairing on a VCR tape I smuggled out of the living room to watch again and again. I’d seen a little bit of gay s*x online, but s*x was s*x and kissing was sometimes hotter, which made me wonder immediately why I felt the urge to kiss Mathias. Was it the protrusion in his Speedo, his sculpted physique—chilled and pointy n*****s, square jaw, perfect nose, and those beautiful eyes—or was it something more?