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The Hidden Lives of Virgins

RODDER BUMPED INTO Mick Rafferty who was coming out of the guidance office as he was going in.
“Sorry, Mr. Rafferty,” Rod smiled brightly. Then: “You look a little grown up for guidance.”
“Is anyone too grown up for guidance?”
“You’ve been hanging around Mr. Stearne too long,” Rod said.
“I’ve just been looking at some international programs for students. You know?” Mick shook the pamphlets around.
“I’m looking for an art school.”
Mick raised an eyebrow as if to say, “You?”
Rod’s brow furrowed.
Mick chuckled: “Ah, the football face that won the championship!”
Rod laughed and said, “Did I look that mean?”
“In a word, yes. Art schools? Come on over here,” Mick said.
“Don’t you have a class?”
“In a few minutes. But this guidance counselor doesn’t know anything.“
“Maybe you should take over.”
“Maybe I’ve thought about it,” Mick gave the teenager a half smile. “Right there. That shelf. Those are all the high brow ones. Your Juilliards and stuff are on the top. Then, below that, everything else.”
Rodder bit down on his bottom lip, and looked over the shelf, nodding.
“You alright, Rod?” Mick Rafferty inquired.
“Yeah, sir,” Rod answered.

“Blackjack!” Cedric shouted, and threw down the card.
“Shit!” Ida swore and Ralph shook his head, laying down his hand.
The doorbell rang.
“Vaughan!” Cedric shouted. “Vaughan!”
“I don’t think he’s here,” Ida said.
“He might be ignoring you,” Ralph suggested.
“I know, I would.” Ida stood up, pulled her wallet out of her back pocket, and forked over the money she had lost to her friend.
“Pleasure doing business with you.”
“Kiss my ass,” Ida returned as Cedric went down the hallway to answer the door.
“Rod!” Cedric said in surprise. “Madeleine’s not here.”
“Who is it!” Ida shouted.
“Rod!” Cedric shouted back.
“Bring him in for a drink!”
They both ignored her.
“I know she’s not here, sir,” Rod said. “That’s why I’m here. Can I talk to you a minute?”
“Cedric!” Ida shouted. “Rod!”
“Hold on, old woman!” Cedric shouted back.
Cedric led Rod down the hall and into the study. He flicked on the light and gestured for Rod to enter.
Rodder opened up his Starter jacket and showed Cedric:
“An application to art school? This is real nice, Rod, but not your style and.…” Cedric frowned and looked up at the boy.
“Not your name either.”
“It’s a surprise. If it doesn’t work out, well then she doesn’t have to know, but if it does...” Rod said. “I have everything I need to send it in except— ”
“You don’t have an application fee,” Cedric said, turning it over.
“I don’t care about that,” Rodder shoved the matter away with his hand.
“I do,” Cedric said, going to his desk. “I’m not having you send off applications for other people... especially if the other people is my daughter, and then also flip the bill yourself.”
“Please, Mr. Fitzgerald,” Rod said so firmly that Cedric looked up at him in earnest. “I want to do this. I just need....”
“Her grades? Her records?”
“Yeah.”
Cedric smiled and said, “She’s a lucky one. I’ll tell you that, Roderigo Luis. My daughter’s a lucky one.”

“Hey Kenzie, take a peak at this,” Derrick Todd said that night when he was over at the house. “Against your sister’s wishes I thought you should have a look at this.”
“Whaddo you mean against my wishes,” Lindsay said petulantly. “I was just pretending.”
“What is it?” Mackenzie took up the list.
“It’s the invite list for everyone who’s anyone to the party of the year!”
Ian raised an eyebrow from where he sat beside Mackenzie. “Am I on it?”
Derrick turned red and said, “By association. It’s sort of a given.”
“Actually,” Lindsay said. “There are certain people we assumed wouldn’t want to be on it.”
“Oh,” Ian said. “Then you were right to count me out.”
“Am I on it?” Tina smiled prettily.
“No,” Lindsay said.
“Then it seems like everyone who’s no one to me,” she said.
“I meant everyone who’s anyone in the junior and sophomore class,” Derrick amended.
“You got some people crossed out on this list,” Mackenzie noticed.
“Some of them were cool, but they had issues,” Derrick said.
“Like Jaime Tolliver. What’s wrong with him?”
“God, Mackenzie wake up!” Lindsay stood up. “He’s the head of the Gay Student Union.”
“Yeah,” Derrick said. “This is Jamnia. No faggots at my party.”
“I think you need to leave,” Tina said suddenly.
“What?” Derrick said.
“You can’t throw my - ” Lindsay started.
“You need to leave,” Tina said again. “It’s no assholes at my house.”

LINDSAY TRIED TO STOP HIM, but Derrick Todd stopped at the corner table of the cafeteria the next day while the two of them were leaving.
“Tina,” he said. “I just wanted to say that I’m sorry for whatever I said.”
“Whatever?” Tina said. Turning to Vaughan, she rolled her eyes and said, “Welcome to the Midwest!”
“I don’t get it,” Derrick said, looking around, honestly clueless.
“Todd,” Vaughan said. “You might as well plan a party, say no niggers allowed, and then shrug and say you don’t get it.”
“I- ” Derrick started. “I would never call anyone that. And I’m not like that.”
“But you would call people faggots?” Tina said.
“Look,” Derrick threw up his hands. “Social lesson learned. No more fags. I won’t say fags. What’s the big deal?”
Suddenly Mackenzie said, “The big deal is I’m gay.”
“What?” snapped Lindsay.
Rodder, who had been left out all this time, only cocked his head the same as Derrick.
Finally Derrick said, “Mackenzie, did you just say- ? ”
“I said I’m gay,” Mackenzie repeated. “It’s none of your business. But there! It’s all out and loud and all over the place.”
“God, this can’t be happening,” Lindsay said. “You are not gay.”
“Yes I am!”
“You’re not!”
“And I’m his boyfriend,” Ian added.
“What?” Rodder’s eyes rolled.
Lindsay smacked Ian across the face, and Ian hopped out of his chair followed by Roy. Derrick stood between them and Lindsay.
“What’s going on?” Ashley came over. “I try to pretend we’re not related, but you all are acting ridiculous.”
Ross had seen two fellow football players and three of his siblings and came over too.
“Mackenzie’s saying stupid things,” Lindsay told them. The circle was getting wider.
“The only one who’s saying stupid things is you,” Mackenzie said.
“Take it back. Take back everything you just said!” his twin shouted.
“Don’t take back a goddamned thing!” Ian shouted.
“You shut up!”
“I’ll smack you back this time, bitch!”
“I’ll join him,” Vaughan said in a low voice.
“Guys, let’s calm down,” Rod said, trying to moderate, but it was the presence of George Stearne, coming toward them, accompanied by a lunch monitor that succeeded in this.
Ross broke the silence by saying: “Guys, someone please tell me what’s going on.”
Mackenzie turned to his brother and said, “Ross, I’m gay is what’s going on.”
Everyone remained quiet.
Ashley threw back her head and laughed.
“Holy shit!” she murmured, and shook her head.

As Vaughan, Mackenzie and Ian went down the hall, Mackenzie said, “Can you feel them pointing at us?”
“Burning right into my scalp,” Ian replied.
“Vaughan,” Mackenzie said, turning to his friend as they neared his locker, “you don’t have to deal with this. I mean, they’ll probably think you’re gay and - ”
“And what? Someone has already taken great care to write FAGGOT across my locker, ” Vaughan muttered. “Besides, who the hell else am I gonna hang out with?”
“This shit isn’t fair to you,” Mackenzie told his friend.
Vaughan frowned sourly. “Fuck fair. What’s fair got to do with anything?”
They almost collided with Matt Abelard and Jaime Tolliver, himself, head of the Gay Student Union.
“Scuse me!” Mackenzie said.
Tolliver looked at Mackenzie. He looked at Ian.
“Is it true?” he said.
Mackenzie nodded.
“You?” he said to Vaughan.
“Sorry,” Vaughan shrugged.
“That’s alright,” he grinned back. “Everyone can’t be.”
“I’ll be an honorary homosexual if I don’t have to pay membership fees,” Vaughan offered.
Jaime Tolliver smiled. “My people’ll definitely talk to your people. Anyway, don’t worry. I got you guyses backs. If that counts for anything.”
Mackenzie looked around the hall. He felt, though he was probably wrong, that everyone was looking back at him.
“It counts for a lot right now,” he said.

It did not take long for things to spread. Before the end of the day there were pink triangle Post-Its pasted to Ian and Vaughan and Mackenzie’s lockers. Ian saw his first, and was about to rip them off and swear when he realized they had been put there by the Gay and Lesbian Student Union.
“It’s their welcome sign,” Vaughan said placidly. Lockers were alphabetically assigned - only the Freshmen and seniors had separate locker areas, so the boys were all more or less together.
“Well, look,” Vaughan took a Post-It off of his locker. “Janey Watkins writes to say hi. I always liked her. Never knew she was bi though,” he murmured. “Whaddo yours say?”
“Vaughan,” Mackenzie said. “This is silly, and it’s dangerous.”
“Mackenzie, relax,” Vaughan said.
“Vaughan is one of those rare people,” Ian said, “that doesn’t care what people say about him.” He was flipping over a piece of paper scribbled on by Michael Radcliffe, the guy with the drooping lip from band who always talked about masturbation.
“Like you?” said Mackenzie.
“I care,” Ian said. “I just try not to look like it.”

Jane MacDonald, who had spent the year popping up next to Mackenzie and hitting on him as much as possible, sidled up to him after sixth period and said, “Is it true?”
Mackenzie looked down at her and said, “If what you’re talking about is what I think you’re talking about then, yeah... It’s true.”
Jane was quiet for a second, and then she said, “Oh,” and walked away.

On the porch steps, Lindsay had not only bothered to talk to her sister for once, but chose to argue with her. Tina and Lindsay were going back and forth, Tina leaning against the wall, her black hair falling straight behind her, blowing out smoke while Lindsay railed on and on. Luke stood bored beside Tina. Derrick looked anxious.
A couple of burnouts came out to light up, and one said, “Hey, Fosters? Is it hereditary?”
“I don’t know what you mean, Arthur,” Tina said to Snake. “But I’m surprised you could even get the word hereditary out of your mouth.”
“I mean,” Snake Roberts, formerly called Arthur, expanded, “Your dad’s pretty sweet too. He tried to cup my ass back in gym class two years ago.”
“You’re a liar!” Lindsay snapped. But Tina just said, “You should have said yes. My mother assures me he’s the fuck of the century.”
“Maybe you should try him yourself,” said Snake. “Or are you two a bunch of dykes?”
Tina was surprised to see not only Derrick’s hand ball into a fist and move for Snake, but Luke move too.
She shook her head at both of them. Quietly, she stepped in front of Derrick.
“Yeah, I’m a dyke,” Tina said. “I would have answered sooner except I was still trying to get the last of your mother’s pussy hair from between my teeth.”
“Shit man, she burnt you!” Rand McGafferty tittered, and high fived another one of Snake’s burnout friends.
“She talked about your mama,” another burnout said.
Snake blenched.
“You leave my mother out of this.”
“I can’t even remember your mother’s name,” Tina said. “Of course she wasn’t up for much conversation. Neither was I. My mouth was full.”
“I’m warning you!”
Derrick looked very serious for once. He loomed over Snake and said, “I think you’d better go now.”
Snake’s eyes went beady and he stared up at Derrick who stared down at him. Then another burnout said, “Come on, man. Fuck this. It’s not worth it.”
When they left, Tina said to Derrick, “How did you do that?”
He shrugged and said, modestly. “It’s an old football trick. For pipsqueaks such as myself.”
“Against my will,” Luke told him, “I’m starting to like you, man.”

By the end of gym class, Kevin had heard enough rumors, and when someone had called Roy a faggot, “Just like his cousin,” and Kevin had stopped a fight, he really began wondering. He paced around the gymnasium in his jogging suit, waiting for Roy to finish dressing.
“Roy,” he called the gangly boy over when he had come upstairs from the locker room.
Roy looked a little nervous, which wasn’t like him. He’d started to warm up since being around Ryan. The boy came toward him.
“Can I ask you a question, Roy?”
“Yes,” Roy ducked his head.
“It’s about... There are rumors. Ah...”
“Sir,” Roy surprised Kevin. “people shouldn’t pay attention to rumors.”
Kevin cocked his head and looked surprised.
“Am I right, sir?” Roy said. “I don’t even know who my dad is, and I used to hear rumors. But... I started to grow up. It’s not right, playing with rumors. Is it?”
Kevin was dumbfounded on several accounts, and said, “Well, no Roy. I guess it’s not.”
Roy nodded sharply. Then he turned his blue gaze away from Kevin, and was gone.

MACKENZIE WAS GLAD the day was over. He could not be like Vaughan, who seemed to ride on the tides of infamy. He was exhausted. He wanted to be plain Mackenzie, though he was acutely aware that he had brought this on himself. He and his two friends, backpacks strapped on, were plodding down the hall into the main lobby, and out of the entrance on Michael Street as he thought, I was the one who proclaimed it on the roof tops, or, at least, the table tops of the cafeteria. He wondered if it was too late to turn back. Why should he?
“Why should I?” Mackenzie said out loud.
“What?” Ian turned to him.
“Nothing,” Mackenzie shook his head.
“Why should you, indeed!” Vaughan murmured, reaching for his cigarettes.
As they were heading down Michael Street, toward the Fitzgerald house, Derrick Todd’s car stopped.
They came near it. He rolled down the windows. Lindsay, in the passenger seat, was trying her best to ignore them.
“I wanted to know if you guys would still come to my party?” Derrick said. “It’ll be cooler now. I mean, I really want you all. The theme now is “No Losers”. “No Assholes who say Dumb Things”. If you’re up to it?”
Vaughan looked at Mackenzie, who nodded.
“Yeah,” Mackenzie said. “That’ll be cool.”
Derrick made a gun out of his right hand, fired, and said, “See ya there, then.”
Ian leaned into the car and said, repeating Derrick’s gesture, “See ya, Lindsay.”
She glared at him. He just smiled.
The car drove off.
“I’m starting to like that guy,” Vaughan confessed.
When they were within ten feet of the white house, Bone McArthur’s car was the next to stop, but it was Ashley who spoke, leaning over the football player.
“So, Kenzie, is it real?” Ash demanded. Bone didn’t bother to look at anyone. He just looked tiredly ahead at the street.
“Yeah,” he said.
She gave him a half mocking smile, and then said, “Welcome to the world of the outcasts, baby brother.” To Bone she said: “Drive.”
And the car roared away.

MORE TOMORROW
 
Wow so Mackenzie, Ian and Vaughan are out at school? I am interested to see what happens next. I don't know what to think of Derrick, at first I didn't like him but he is growing on me a bit. It was a nice gesture from him at the end of the portion. Great writing and I look forward to reading whatever happens next tomorrow! I hope you are having a nice night.
 
Well, Mackenzie and Ian are out. Vaughan is just left holding the bag. I'm not entirely sure if Ian chose to come out, but there it is, and repercussions shall follow. Yes, it's a good night, and I wish the same for you.
 
THERE WAS NOTHING PARTICULARLY “GAY” about Jaime Tolliver. He was no nonsense and always cut to the chase. He actually would have made a good twin for Mackenzie. They shopped out of the same stores, and had the same square haircut and dry sense of humor. He sat across the table from Mackenzie, Ian, and Vaughan in the Fitzgerald house where he’d heard he could find them, and described himself, with a small smile, as a very non-practicing, non-denominational Christian who was the child of non-practicing Pentecostals.
“We don’t hang around the rest of the family very often,” he said in his Midwestern nasal, and then switched off into a Southern drawl, and wailed, “‘Merciful Fawthur, we just wanna thank you and give you the glawry, and we now prah fer all the Sawdummites who ere destined to the eternal fars of hail damnation.’ They can pronounce damnation. That’s the one word they can pronounce.” His smile was fierce.
“Man, God is pink!” declared Jaime’s foil. Once again, Jaime looked at J.D. Amasson, who called himself J.D. Amateur, and vowed that there was no way this queen would ever be president of the Gay and Lesbian Student Union. Jaime was thinking ahead to his graduation next year, and thinking how good it would be if Mackenzie could take over.
“If God was pink,” Jaime said, witheringly, “we wouldn’t need to have a Gay and Lesbian Student Union.
“We just came over to say, ‘Hey,’ ” Jaime said. “And you don’t have to join anything, but we meet on Wednesdays at about four.” Jaime gestured vaguely out of the kitchen window, “at the school.”
“How come yawl didn’t come out till today?” Amateur said. He cocked his head at Vaughan, “Are you single?”
“Vaughan’s straight,” Ian said.
“Shit. I thought maybe you all might be into… You know?”
“No,” Mackenzie replied, politely, “I’m afraid we don’t know.”
“Three ways.” Amateur said.
Vaughan coughed on his water, but Ian merely answered, “I’m afraid we’re not,” and smiled.
“And we were ‘out’ ,” Mackenzie said, “to the people who counted.”
Jaime’s eyebrows raised.
“I don’t see that what goes on in my bedroom needs to be broadcast to the whole school,” Mackenzie went on.
“But when it’s politics- ” Jaime started.
“When’s it politics?” Mackenzie said. “When’s my love life politics?”
“When it’s your whole life, and you could be killed or worse, maybe, for it.”
“Worse?” J.D. said, the light in the kitchen glinted on his double earring.
“Being Black isn’t political,” Jaime said, gesturing with an open hand to Vaughan, “but when you live in Alabama, or even good old Ohio, and can’t go to vote, could get lynched- then it’s political. Sex isn’t political. It’s personal, it’s in the dark, but when a Black man could get killed for being with a white woman, when they couldn’t marry, then it was political. And it’s political now. It’s the same thing with us, so it is your duty to come out,” Jaime said.
“I don’t know if I agree with all that,” Ian murmured, sitting back.
“No?” Jaime said, sounding fevered. Then he sighed. “Sorry. This isn’t even my house. I just... I have feelings about this.”
Amateur rolled his eyes, “Tell Rich Tafel over here we all have feelings.”
“I wish I was Rich Tafel,” Jaime said. “That man is- ”
“Hot,” Mackenzie finished.
Ian and Vaughan looked at him.
Mackenzie colored, and turned to Jaime for confirmation.
“I think he’s very hot,” Jaime Tolliver said.

Amateur left at around four, but Jaime stayed until nearly supper. Despite Cedric’s enticements of biscuit chicken quiche, he said he had to be home, and the phone rang as he was leaving.
He was out the door when Vaughan came with the cordless and handed it to Mackenzie.
“Are you all everywhere?” Vaughan wondered.
“Wha?” Mackenzie said to his friend. “Hello. Wha? Simon! It’s Simon. What’s up?”
Simon told him how he had called the Fosters and Tina—who was the coolest—picked up and gave him this number, then told him to ask about the whole day. When he had asked, Mackenzie told him.
“You know what?” Simon said, “I sort of envy that.”
“That the whole school knows me as gay Mackenzie now.”
“Yeah. I mean,” said Simon, “at least the whole school knows you’re Ian’s. No one at Willoughby knows Drew is mine.”
“I see what you mean,” Mackenzie said, his brow furrowing.

“In a minute, George!” Mick Rafferty shouted to the knock on the door, but when he opened it and looked out into the hallway it was: “Ashley?”
“Hello, Mr.Rafferty.”
“Ashley, what are you doing here? It’s Friday.”
“I just came to say hello,” she said. “I’ve got the car. I’ve got Tina’s car tonight, and I just came by to say hello and thank you for everything.”
Mick was about to say, “This is inappropriate,” but he didn’t really want to be appropriate, and that would have probably hurt Ashley. So he said, “You didn’t have to do that. Come all the way over here.”
“Well,” Ashley smiled simply, and nodded her head, “I wanted to. To let you know I appreciated you. And I thought that maybe—”
“Mick,” she heard a voice behind her, and turned around.
It was Stearne, looking as wary as ever, with that evil little goatee.
“Ms. Foster,” he greeted her.
“Mr. Stearne,” Ashley felt herself cooling. Mick realized his hard- on was wilting, which meant he realized he’d had a hard- on in the first place.
“Ashley just came by to say hi and thank me,” Mick told Stearne, sounding a little too breathy and jovial to his own ears.
Stearne just continued to stare at Ashley.
“I’ll be going, now,” Ashley said.
“Goo’night, Ash,” Mick said.
“Goodnight, Ms. Foster,” said Stearne.
Ashley took a brief moment to give George Stearne an incredibly nasty smile as she pulled her hand through her hair, and then she said, “Goodnight, sirs,” and strutted down the hallway.

Ashley got in the car and drove three blocks north to Bellamy Street. People could call it a ghetto if they wanted to, but it wasn’t any worse than any other section of Jamnia. Well, maybe a little worse. Some of the houses had couches and Lazy Boys sitting on the porch. Some of the porches were collapsing. There were more than a few cars on cinder blocks.
“Bellamy and Junction Street,” Ashley remembered her grandfather saying before he died, “Niggers and hillbillies all living together in contented peace, and munching on collard greens.”
Colonel had not been pleased by the arrangement.
Ashley parked her car in front of a little peach painted house that someone had added too many dormer windows onto in the hopes of making it cute. The gutters were falling, and needed to be repainted. Someone should have thought of that.
She knocked on the door.
A Black woman who looked like she was about to call Ashley every kind of bitch in the world answered and said, “Can I help you?’ It sounded more like a challenge than anything else.
For not the first time Ashley wondered why Black women had to be such bitches and said, “Is Hakim home?”
His mother cocked her head, narrowed her eyes, but said, “Um hum. Come on in. You lettin’ all the heat out.”

“George, what’s wrong?” Mick said, putting his beer mug down.
“Nothing’s wrong,” he said.
“You need to talk to me. If you don’t talk to anyone else, talk to me. I swear. Nothing’s happening with Ashley.”
“Do you want it to?”
“George, that’s silly.”
“No it isn’t,” George said, sadly, looking not put together and professional, but like a small twenty-four year old who had spent the bulk of his life in Lawrence County, Ohio.
“Do you want something to happen?” Stearne asked him, “because if you want it to, that’s half the people needed for an affair. And really, Mick, it’s not about you. Sometimes I’m not just thinking about you. I’ve got...” He turned back to his beer. “I’ve got shit on my mind.”
“If you don’t want to talk about it.”
George shook his head and said, toward the mirror behind the bar, “No, Mick. I do not want to talk about it. Not now.”

Hakim grunted one last time, and then pumped three times quickly, jackhammering her until he groaned and his body arched as he shot. Her thighs rode his waist. Her ass was cold on the porcelain of the sink.
For a few seconds, the big basketball player leaned into her, his head on her shoulder, and then he pulled out. For a moment she saw his penis, which was big and black with a purple head. She saw the ebony hips she had straddled with their ass dimples. Then they were gone in his underwear and jeans.
She had barely redressed herself when he put out his hand and said, “come on.” Out in the living room of Jerone’s, apartment the television was loud as hell, and she could smell a blunt burning.
“Thanks, dog,” she heard Hakim say.
“Sho, no thang,” Jerone said. He needed a haircut. Ashley was sorry to say that the Afro would never be back in style. Jerone’s eyes lingered over her, leering. She wanted to smack him. She wanted to fuck him. Either thing would show him, though she wasn’t sure what she was trying to show.
Ashley dropped Hakim back off at his house. They had not talked. Okay, so she knew what she was trying to show: that she had power. There was a power in reducing a man to a stud bull. There was a defeated look in his eyes if it was someone she hated. And she admitted now as she turned onto Main Street, she had fucked men just because she hated them. But she had wanted more tonight. She had wanted... Well, she hadn’t wanted to be ghetto fucked, which is what she had been. And she hadn’t wanted to know that she’d probably be all too compliant in doing it again.

“When’s the last time?” Mick said.
“Hum?”
Both of George Stearne’s eyebrows raised as they were coming back to Mick’s apartment.
“You know,” Mick said. “The last time you... You know?”
“Oh, my God, Mick!” George grinned.
“Unless you were going to tell me you never....”
“You know better than that,” George said. “It’s been... a while. I’ve sort of fallen into the identity of the sexless schoolteacher. Why?”
“I don’t know,” Mick said. “Just, sometimes I actually forget I haven’t... been having sex. And then it’s like, ‘My God, how long has it been!’ It’s almost a crime.”
George Stearne followed Mick up the stairs.
“Something tells me it’s probably not a crime,” Stearne said. “Not to have sex.”
“You ever been tempted by a student?”
“God, man!”
“I think you like Ashley.”
Stearne laughed so hard, Mick knew he was wrong.
“But you do like a student?” he pressed on.
“Mick, this isn’t junior high, man. You don’t go around ‘liking people’.” He made quote marks with his fingers as they re-entered the apartment.
“Okay, then. Is there a student you want to throw on a desktop and do?”
“No,” Stearne said shortly. “And if we’re gonna have this conversation, please tell me where you put your Scotch.”
“Under the island.”
“Osco brand,” Stearne commented from the kitchen. “Wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Mick talked over himself pissing into the toilet.
“So, there is no student you... admire?”
The toilet flushed, Mick washed his hands. When Stearne still hadn’t answered, Mick came out grinning.
“There is someone?”
George Stearne grinned back. “I’m thinking. I’m thinking. And... It could never happen anyway.”
“You know what they say,” Mick told him. “Once they’re eighteen, it’s legal.”

In the kitchen on 1959 Michael Street, Ida, between Ralph and Cedric, looked from Ian to Mackenzie to Tina. Vaughan had just come back into the kitchen.
“Well, say something, Grandma,” Tina said.
As Ida fumbled in her crushed pack of cigarettes, she said, “I’m trying to think of something that won’t sound completely stupid. Does your Ma know?” she said to Mackenzie.
Mackenzie ducked his head.
“Well, don’t duck your head, boy,” Ida said, not unkindly, as she lit her cigarette. She repeated: “Does your ma know?”
“No, ma’am,” Mackenzie said.
“Are you gonna tell her?” Tina said.
Tina gave her granddaughter a look that had, “No, idiot!’” written all over it.
Mackenzie sighed and said, “Thank God! I don’t know if I’m ready for Mom and Dad.”
“Well, everyone at the house knows,” Ida said. “And everyone at your school, and your father works at the school. Kevin’s not that stupid. I’m sure he’ll find out before long.”
Mackenzie looked sort of bleak. His grandmother put a hand over his. “Relax. I have enough on your mom and dad that as long as I’m alive, they’d better not get pissed with one of their kids.”
“And you?” she said to Ian.
The spiky haired boy raised an eyebrow.
“I don’t need to ask if your family knows. I’ve lived in this town almost sixty years. The Canes don’t know,” she said, shaking her head and blowing out smoke.
“Well, that’s it. I’m finished with you. You kids should be getting to your little party.”
When they had left with kisses and nods and goodbyes, and it was just the elders, Ida shook her head.
“Shit sure has changed. And it’s not just Kenzie. It’s everything,” she said to Ralph and Cedric. “Isn’t it?”

SPRING DID NOT WANT TO be kept waiting. As soon as the first week of March rolled around, ice turned to rain, and grey snow gave way to the grass underneath. The trees were black and bare still, but there was a young beauty to them. It was unseasonably warm the Friday night of the party when the Todds would be out of town, leaving Derrick with the house to himself.
“My little brother’s staying with friends tonight,” Derrick told everyone. He only told a few people that he’d paid Aidan off to stay with friends. Derrick’s other brother was in college.
“This will be a party to remember,” he declared.
Lindsay had her doubts, but Derrick was used to her having doubts.

This week there had only been a few fag name callings. The major drama had actually happened in the Gay and Lesbian Student Union. Vaughan had heard of it. He didn’t come because he didn’t believe in committees.
“You know what I’m learning?” Mackenzie said.
“Pray tell?”
“We don’t get along.”
“People in general. Or gay people?”
“I meant gay people,” Mackenzie said. “And I know Ian doesn’t want to come to the meetings. He’s not like anyone else there. Come to think of it, neither am I. Actually, no one’s really like anyone else except for J.D. and that crowd.”
“I don’t like Amateur,” Vaughan said frankly.
“I just thought that, you know, we would all be united.”
“Gay unity?” Vaughan said. “Like Black unity?”
“Yeah.”
“Why do you think me and Madeleine never go to the Afro-American Club meetings?” he said simply.

Ashley had resigned herself to Hakim. She did not want to spend her life with Bone McArthur. She was dating him, but not really. And he was jealous, and had to be coddled. And he wasn’t enough. So when she was finished with him or vice versa, she’d turn to Hakim who had nothing but a five minute fuck with his head turned in the other direction to offer. It was usually in the bathroom of a friend’s house. Last night it had been on his floor before his mother came home. As she was driving back across town to the house on Logan Street, Ashley tried to count how many guys she’d been with since her first sexual experience. When she lost count around her sixteenth birthday, she gave up on the enterprise.
On her way home she passed the brick apartment building where Mr. Rafferty lived. The light was on. For just a moment she saw into it before the red light turned green, and she had to go past the bus depot. He was a kind man. He was sweet and handsome when he smiled. She’d let him in. She thought if he ever came inside of her, he could change everything.
But maybe it was the sweet people it was best to stay away from. They had all these complex emotions, and they only got pissed off at you, or embarrassed after being with you. Then they wouldn’t even look at a girl. Rodder never looked at her. Bone regarded her the same as ever. Hakim seemed to forget he’d fucked her. Until he wanted some again. For Ashley, this was the easiest.

“Kenzie! Vaughan!” Derrick Todd flagged them down.
Mackenzie turned around.
“Don’t forget. Starts at eight.”
“Which means we shouldn’t arrive until at least ten,” Vaughan said.
“For someone who never bothered with the social scene you’re pretty savvy, Fitzgerald,” Derrick said, chomping his gum. “But someone has to be unfashionably early or no one’ll come.”
“And your self esteem’ll wither?” Ian said, shutting his locker and grinning.
Derrick turned him a surprisingly arch look and said, “Something like that.”

TOMORROW NIGHT, THINGS GET HOT AT DERRICK TODD'S PARTY
 
Wow lots going on in this great portion! Looks like Ashley and Hakim have a thing going. I wonder where that will lead. I wish high school wasn't the homophobic place it always seems to be. At leas Ian and Mackenzie are handling it well. I am excited to read what happens and Derrick's party. Great writing and I look forward to more tomorrow!
 
I VERY MUCH FORGOT I WAS POSTING THIS TONIGHT.... WELL, HERE IT IS....


THE TODDS LIVED in the web of secluded streets that hung from the south end of the city, the new houses in winding cul de sacs with new born trees way out west of, Vaughan read in disbelief, “Country Club Road.” They shot south through farm fields, then past the Red Barn.
“Very nice, Todd,” Vaughan said, walking into the house, and looking around the foyer. He and Ian and Mackenzie were among the first to arrive. There were the usual suspects. Dice McCafferty along with Bone McArthur. Rodder and Luke showed up with Madeleine and Tina after their Friday night gig in Belmont. Derrick made much of Tina, and Lindsay sulked in disgust. Her friends from band, Jane Bradshaw and Kristina Meriwether, were there. And the Carmel sisters, Judy Lynn and Rana Jay were there from the Color Guard. In high school, where skinny was everything, they were called the Fat Sisters, and could not compete with the likes of Stephanie Tyler and Fawn Alexander or Joanne Furlow: cheerleaders. They knew it. So they ate their hearts out, and then they sat near the refreshment table, and just ate.
Some came to the party who Vaughan did not expect. Hakim Woodsome showed up with Claudia on his shoulder.
“Madeleine, Girl,” Claudia told her cousin, “I finally got Hakim in line. I told him I’m not giving him any, and he said he was fine with that.”
“Well,” Madeleine said, shrugging, “just make sure he isn’t getting it somewhere else.”
“The problem with you, Madeleine,” Claudia told her cousin, “is that you think if you don’t give it, he won’t stay.”
Madeleine blew smoke out of her nostrils, and looked in the direction of Rodder, who was standing with his hands in his pockets, talking earnestly to a circle of guys.
“I don’t give it to keep him. I give it cause I like to get it,” she said.
Vaughan remarked that the odd thing was that at the Fitzgerald house you’d almost never hear R&B music made after 1975, and at Derrick’s house the stereo thumped from R.Kelly to Aaliyah to Mary J. Blige as the house filled up with guests.
“I hate to say this,” Luke shouted over the music as he and Tina tried to dance, “but I almost think your grandma’s house is cooler.”
Tina was about to reply when Derrick popped up and stuck a long neck bottle in Luke’s hand, and another in Tina’s. She winked at him, and then leaned in close to whisper to Luke, “But grandma’s not handing out tallboys. Relax, I’m starting to like Todd.”

Come on everybody get on up
cause you know we gots to get it crunk
Mary J. is in the spot tonight
as I’ma make it feel alright

(make it alright)

Come on baby just party with me
let loose and set your body free
leave your situations at the door
so when you step inside
jump
on
the floor...


Mackenzie ran out and grabbed Vaughan, pulling him out among the dancers, “Come on! Do you mind?” He asked Ian.
Smacking his gum, Ian smiled at Vaughan and said: “Not if you don’t. But I get the next dance.”
“I’ll be ready,” Mackenzie said.
“Not you,” Ian grinned and pointed at Vaughan.
“Tonight, my friend, you’re going to make a name for yourself,” Mackenzie said.
“And that name,” Vaughan intoned, “is ‘fag’.”
“Fag hag,” Mackenzie commented, moving out onto the floor.
“Do they have male fag hags?”
“You. Come on, we can dance better than any of these clowns.”

It’s only gonna be a matter of time
before you get lose
and start to lose your mind
cop you a drink
go ahead and rock your ice
cause we celebrating
no more drama
in our lives

with a great track pumpin’
everybody’s jumpin’
go ahead and twist your back
and get your body bumpin’
I told you- leave your situations at the door
SO GRAB SOMEBODY AND GET YOUR ASS ON THE DANCE FLOOR !

Vaughan was right. They could dance better than the rest of those clowns. Vaughan and Mackenzie had been born dancing. Vaughan danced whenever he walked. All of Vaughan’s gestures were smooth and fluid. When Mackenzie was on the football field as a kid, he danced through touchdowns. He danced through his part on stage this year. Now he moved lithe as ever on the floor, uninhibited.
Vaughan marveled, “You’re white. I should have known you had too much rhythm to be straight!”
“I don’t know how to take that,” Mackenzie said.
“Take it as a compliment.” The two of them matched steps, moved in perfect rhythm, “You’re much too cool for the straight world.”

When Jaime Tolliver showed up, one of the cheerleaders said, “I used to think he was so hot.”
“He still is,” replied Teresa Somerhale. “He’s just gay.”
Jaime made a beeline for Vaughan, Ian and Mackenzie, and he told Vaughan, “I’m afraid I’m about to kill your hypothesis because I have absolutely no rhythm.”
Things remained more or less sane until around midnight when J.D. Amateur showed up.
“This is when things are going to get bad,” Jaime predicted.
From the first minute when people began to bristle, and Bone McArthur, beside Ashley, said, “What’s he doing here?” they could tell things were probably going to escalate. J.D. had come to be camp as hell and scare the shit out of the blessed straight.
Meanwhile Tina and Luke, who were straight, but not blessed, and not particularly impressed, wandered toward Mackenzie.
“Have you seen Ross?” Tina said over the music.
Mackenzie shook his head.
Tina and Luke left, followed by Mackenzie, who lifted a finger to tell his friends he’d be right back. They threaded through the crowds until Tina found Lindsay and Derrick.
“I think I saw him with DeeDee Strahorne.”
Tina raised an eyebrow at Derrick, and was heading up the stairs. Ashley and Bone were making out at the top of the stairs, and they looked up when the three others reached them.
“Ash, where’s Ross?”
Bone shot his thumb in the direction of a closed door next to the bathroom.
Tina moved forward. Ashley said, “What’s wrong? He’s gotta do it sometime. Kenzie over here never will.”
“Firstly,” Tina said calmly, “you are stupid. Secondly, you are a whore. And thirdly you are a stupid whore. All of this aside, I’m going to get my brother.”
Ashley opened her mouth to speak, but it was Mackenzie who passed Tina and, walked over Ashley and Bone to open the door.
Ross’s pants and underwear were down around his knees, and his bare ass was exposed when he looked up. Dee Dee Strahorne had been helping Ross pull up her skirt and panties. A Durex was on the bed.
“Why don’t you leave?” Mackenzie suggested to DeeDee.
She opened her mouth.
“Now,” he said, and smiled calmly. Where was Tina?
DeeDee pulled down her skirt, and walked out with as much dignity as possible while Ross, trembling, dressed, and Mackenzie, closing the door with his back muttered after DeeDee, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass.”
“Who the hell do you think you are?” Ross demanded. The music from downstairs was thumping beneath them and into the walls.
“I’m your brother.”
“Fine time to act like one. You didn’t think about being my brother, you didn’t think about the shit I’d have to live with! You, running around telling the whole world you’re a fag. That’s right, I said a fag, Kenzie! Between the three of us Ryan’s a nut- ”
“Ryan is not—”
“And you’re a fucking queer. One of the Foster brothers better get some pussy.”
“So this is...” Mackenzie looked amused, hell, was amused, “family duty?”
“Oh, don’t get all high with me,” Ross did not see the humor in any of this. He wanted to knock that cute look off of his brother’s face. “Move. Move!” he told Mackenzie, whose back was still to the door.
Mackenzie shrugged, and moved. Ross went out of the hall.
“I don’t get you,” Ross said, sourly.
“I’m looking out for you.”
“If I was sucking someone’s dick I bet you’d be all for it,” Ross said.
“You’re fourteen,” Mackenzie hissed.
“And you’re a fag!” Ross shouted, which was the same time that Luke at the head of the stairs, along with Tina, was about to hop in the general direction of anyone who called Mackenzie a faggot, and the same time that they heard someone shout “Fag,” downstairs. Then there was a general roaring and shouting that rose above the music.
They all looked at each other for confirmation, Ross not included, and then headed down the steps into what looked like hell.
Out of the blacklight and loud music came the voice of Rick Shaker shouting off names like, “J.D. Amateur! That fruit Tolliver! Ian Fucking Cane!...” half the band... Vaughan heard his name, and Tina’s.
“Fucking queers!”
And Rick’s vent had given way to other vents, and other denunciations. Tina’s name popped up again along with Roy’s and again with Ian’s. Then Luke, and then all the burnouts were fags. Derrick’s eyes roved around the house, terrified. Things were out of control, and he was desperately trying to figure out what to do before someone got killed. Or, worse, before someone broke something that belonged to his parents.
“Do something,” Lindsay hissed, clinging to him.
Before Rodder was about to go and deck Rick, the music stopped and suddenly the lights went on.
“Excuse me! Excuse me!”
They all turned around to see Derrick in his chinos and dress shirt, trying to control the trembling in his voice.
“Excuse me, everyone. I would... I would like to take a poll, quickly. I don’t want a fight. Just give me a second. Please.”
The room grew quiet. Derrick spoke again.
“Thank you. Now.... Everyone who has a problem with J.D. or Jaime or Mackenzie or Ian or Vaughan or whoever being here.... Anyone who has a problem with gay people or green people or polka dot people or people who.... just aren’t cool enough… please raise your hand.”
Rick’s was the first up. Ross’s was quick to follow suit. Tina called him a shit, and smacked him squarely on the back of the head. Hands began to go up, and Derrick began to smile. And when Lindsay saw that her boyfriend was smiling, she put her hand up in the air too because she knew that something right was finally going to be done.
“Alright,” Derrick said, warming up. “That’s right. Now let’s just separate so I can make this quick. All of you... people like me... Move to the right, near the kegs.”
He waited while this happened. Vaughan, Tina, and Luke waited, looking at Mackenzie and Ian, wondering what was about to happen.
“Okay,” Derrick said, his voice gaining confidence. He was about to grin. He turned to them. “Alright, my friends. I hear you. Us to the right,” Derrick gestured to everyone near the kegs. “Fags and miscellaneous to the left.”
Jaime was about to say something when Mackenzie touched his shoulder, and shook his head.
“Now, my friends,” Derrick turned to the right, “if you notice, right near the keg is this thing that opens and shuts. It’s called the front door. Acquaint yourselves with it. Now.”
Suddenly everyone looked up at him, and Tina started to cackle while Vaughan caught his breath. Jaime chuckled into his hand.
“Now,” Derrick repeated.
“I’m your girlfriend!” Lindsay shouted, coming toward him.
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I’m obviously not cool enough for you.”
Lindsay stood, bristling. Then she said, “I hate you, Derrick Todd.”
He shrugged.
Rick Shaker had already said, “Fuck this,” and left. Lindsay was one of the last to leave from that self appointed group.
Derrick stood on the little table, looking oddly defeated and drained as outside, engines revved and cars drove away.
When Bone McArthur said, “At least they left the beer,” it was then that Tina realized that Bone and Dice and Ashley had not gone with the others. The house was still remarkably full. Ashley caught the look on her sister’s face, and she said, indignantly, “Fags and miscellaneous make up my family. I might not like you, but I’d be a bitch if I didn’t stick by you.”
“You’re still a bitch,” Tina said, touching her sister lightly on the arm, and grinning as she turned her head.
Bone and Dice moved toward the kegs, Rodder patted Derrick on the back.
Mackenzie came near him, followed by Jaime. It was time to say thanks.
“Bullshit,” Derrick said. “It’s my fault. If I hadn’t said what I said in your house, Kenzie, none of this would have happened.”
“So maybe it’s best that you did say it?” Mackenzie shrugged.
Derrick shrugged in return, still looking tired. “I have officially lost most of my cool points,” he reported.
Suddenly Tina came to him, pushing her black hair out of her face. She walked up to Derrick and kissed him on the cheek.
He turned completely red.
“Mr. Todd,” she said earnestly, “you have never been more cool to me than you are at this very moment.”

WE WILL RETURN IN A LITTLE WHILE TO JAMNIA, BUT WHEN WE GET BACK, IN PART FOUR, WE WILL BE TAKING A JOURNEY TO THE PAST
 
Wow a lot of homophobia at the party. I am glad Derrick handled it the way he did. I know Ross is very young but there isn't an excuse for what he said in my opinion. Great writing and I look forward to the journey into the past!
 
Wow lots going on in this great portion! Looks like Ashley and Hakim have a thing going. I wonder where that will lead. I wish high school wasn't the homophobic place it always seems to be. At leas Ian and Mackenzie are handling it well. I am excited to read what happens and Derrick's party. Great writing and I look forward to more tomorrow!

Wow a lot of homophobia at the party. I am glad Derrick handled it the way he did. I know Ross is very young but there isn't an excuse for what he said in my opinion. Great writing and I look forward to the journey into the past!


Combined response to comments from tonight and last night: Frankly, speaking, Ashley's a slut, so don't look for this to mean something. i have heard that high schools are better now, but primary schools certainly are not. This is actually one of my favorite scenes where a lot of people show their true colors. Ross has certainly shown his. But there will be more to follow! The shit is just beginning to hit the fan.
 
In part four we we will delve into the deep past, but before we get there, we will see the fall out from Derrick's party



P A R T

F O U R






D U F R E S N E

Will I cease to be?
Or will I remember
Beyond the world,
Our last meeting together?

- Lady Izumi Shikibu

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

ALL OF THEM KNELT IN the darkened chapel of Holy Spirit Monastery. This seemed like as good a place and as good a position as any to be on Ash Wednesday. Ian’s eyes kept darting all over the place, taking in the little statues peering out of their grottoes, the Christ painted over the altar, the friars in their long robes, in their stalls chanting across the space of the stone floor to each other:

Hear us, O Lord, for bounteous is Your kindness;
in your great mercy turn toward us, O Lord.

Save me, O God,
for the waters threaten my life.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit,
as it was in the beginning, is now
and ever shall be...

Mackenzie’s eyes were closed, and his face was in his hands. His golden hair needed cutting, and had fallen into his face, over his hands. Mackenzie was murmuring something over and over again. Ian wasn’t sure if he was alright or not. He looked across Kenzie toward Vaughan, and then Tina, to see if all Catholics looked like this. Vaughan’s rosary was draped and threaded through his fingers, the black beads shiny, but his eyes were open and there was a little smile on his face. Tina’s eyes were closed. She looked, despite the black hair, like the statue of the Virgin Mary in the corner by the altar.

The monks sang again:


Hear us, O Lord, for bounteous is Your kindness;
in your great mercy turn toward us, O Lord.

Mackenzie was murmuring quicker into his hands, and Vaughan dropped his head and closed his eyes. Beside Tina, Luke, who was also looking around, caught Ian’s eye. They were both odd men out here.

“...AND THIS IS Tina, and this is Luke.” In the common room, Vaughan introduced the last of his friends to Brother Paul.
“I’ve never been in a monastery,” Luke said, still looking around, craning his neck.
Father Julian smiled and told Luke, “You know what we call that part...? That you’re looking at?”
Luke looked at Julian, waiting for an answer.
“The ceiling.”

That evening Vaughan and Ian and Mackenzie went walking down Michael Street, past the school. The days were getting a little warmer and a little longer. After sunset, the sky held remains of the light.
“You know, I wanted to tell him,” Mackenzie said. “I wanted to tell Brother Paul... and Father Julian too. I had this urge to put my arm around you,” he hooked an arm around Ian to demonstrate, “and say, ‘This is my boyfriend.’ ”
Ian lifted his head and hooted.
“Oh, my God, Vaughan, what would the good brothers have said to that?”
Vaughan frowned, and then said to Ian, “I don’t know that they’d be as surprised as you might think.”


“WHERE’S ASHLEY?” TINA SAID AS she came into the house with Mackenzie.
“She’s spending the night with a friend,” her mother replied. “Please put the last of the dishes out. Mackenzie, pour drinks.”
“What’s his name?” Tina said, going to the cupboard.
“Tina!” Kevin: rebuking her from his seat at the table.
Avoiding her father’s gaze, Tina made a face as she pulled down four yellow plates, and heard Mackenzie cracking ice into the tray.
“She’s with Cassidy, Tina,” Aileen said, wearily.
Tina snorted.
“Your sister really does have friends,” Aileen added.
She was surprised to hear Lindsay say, “No she really doesn’t.”
Kevin looked at his youngest daughter, as if surprised she could talk at all.
“She’s got clients,” Lindsay continued, “but I don’t know about friends.”
Ross snorted at this. Kevin and Aileen said, at the same time, “Now that’s enough.”
“You’re right, it is enough,” Lindsay agreed, tiredly. “I’m sick of being good in this house, and everyone else gets to do whatever they want to. Ryan over here swears up a storm.”
“Ryan has a problem,” Kevin said, not looking at his youngest son.
“And Ashley runs out and does whatever she wants to with anyone.”
“And Tina smokes, and swears, and dyes her hair black,” Ross added, “and Mackenzie and his boyfriend just...”
Whatever the rest of the phrase was, Tina had to catch the glass Mackenzie almost dropped.
“You need to shut up, Ross,” she told her brother sternly, and put a glass down in front of him.
“No, I won’t shut up. Mackenzie running around flaunting his gayness for the whole world to see is killing my social life. Next year I’m just going to be the guy with the faggot for a brother- ”
“That’s enough,” Kevin reached across the table to hit Ross at the same time that Aileen was about to swat him.
“No one calls anyone that in this house,” Kevin said. Then he forced out the next sentence, “That kind of stuff does not go on... in this family.”
“They’re calling Tina a dyke too,” Ross said.
Tina reached out and smacked her brother square across his face.
Ross rubbed his red face and said, “It’s true. I’m not making it up. And you know it too,” he accused his father. “How can’t you? It’s all over the school. You’re just ignoring it.”
Aileen was flustered. She didn’t know what to say, so she just put down Ross’s plate in front of him, and said, “Your brother doesn’t have a boyfriend.”
Mackenzie felt as if all of this was happening around him to somebody else. Pinpricks were going up and down his body. He felt like he was drowning inside of his skin. His palms did not sweat; they dried out.
Lindsay, who really didn’t have a boyfriend, said, maliciously, “Oh, yes he does.”
And then Mackenzie heard someone say in a calm, almost dead voice, “Ian Cane is my boyfriend.”
He had said it.
It seemed as if time stopped. For a timeless time there was utter silence, and then all was in an uproar, and Kevin got up to go to the phone, eyeing his oldest son the whole time.
“Kevin, sit down,” Aileen said. “What are you doing?”
“Are you lying to me?” Kevin said to Mackenzie.
“No, sir.”
“Give me that boy’s number.”
Mackenzie swallowed and said, “No, sir.”
“Aileen, give me the phone book.”
“Kevin, please, sit down.”
“Aileen!”
Aileen sighed, and reached under the island. Irritated, she flipped through the pages and read off Sam Cane’s number.
“I knew that boy was no good,” Kevin murmured dialing up the house. “He’s probably a drug addict. Forget... whatever he talked you into, son. You are not gay.”
“He didn’t talk me into anything,” Mackenzie heard himself saying. “It was me. I talked him into it. I was... that way, already. I was—”
“We don’t raise that stuff in this house,” Kevin told his son, confidently.
“You sound just like Grandfather,” Tina said, her eyes narrowed.
“You better watch your mouth, Miss.”
To everyone’s surprise, she lowered her eyes.
“Hello,” he said to the phone. “Is this Sam Cane? Are you Ian Cane’s father? Well this is Coach Foster. This is Kevin Foster. Yes. Yes. I want to talk to you. I’ll be over there very shortly. I want to talk about your son.”
The whole time Mackenzie had said nothing. Tina stood beside her brother, equally quiet. When Kevin hung up the phone, Tina turned to Lindsay, looked her in the eye, and smacked the shit out of her.
“Martina!”
Aileen moved to pick her daughter up.
“You’re a bitch!” Tina barked at her sister. “And you’re an ungrateful little fuck,” she told Ross. She took the opportunity to shove him again.
Ryan began banging the table and shouting, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
“None of that in my house!” Kevin roared,
“And you’re worse,” Tina told her father.
“Tina this is really enough from you,” Aileen told her.
“And maybe you’re the worst,” she told her mother, “for just sitting here.”
“You will not talk to your mother that way- ”
“No,” she said. “I’ll talk to you this way.”
“I did not ask for this shit!” Kevin shouted at the ceiling. “Aily, you should have gone to the clinic when all this shit started, just like my father said.”
And then Kevin seemed to realize what he’d said, and his daughter stared back at him with his eyes.
He didn’t know what to say. He began stammering.
Tina took in the whole mess of the kitchen with her eyes. For once she realized just how handsome her brother was with his fine bones and his sensitive face, like a statue, and as powerless to do anything. She caught his wrist, and then moved past Kevin, going out the side door.
Her brother walked beside her, wordlessly.
“Fuck’em,” Tina muttered, taking out her cigarettes. “Just fuck ‘em!”

Ashley had learned to deal with the truth that Tina’s car was not joint property. It had not even been a gift. It was Tina’s outright, and when Ashley drove, she did so on her sister’s sufferance. She was glad that her sister didn’t need it tonight. Her twin had been nicer since she’d started going to that monastery. Part of Ashley imagined herself going as well. Maybe God could clean up some of the crap in her life.
And it was just getting crappier, I mean, really. She wished she did drugs. It was the one vice she didn’t have. She wanted to go to her cousin’s house and buy some weed, but then she’d have to learn how to smoke it. Besides, she had the feeling that something stronger might be required.
Ashley didn’t know where to get cocaine, so she waited until it was night, then drove over to Main Street, and parked on George, by the bus station, across the street from the titty bar. Stearne’s car was parked in front of the apartment building, and now Ashley found herself waiting for it to go away. Every time she told herself this was foolish and desperate, that it was getting cold in the car, she would rev up the engine and warm the car up a little, then turn it off and say, “Five more minutes.” She did not look at her watch. She did not want to know how long she was waiting for Mr. Stearne to leave.

WHEN KEVIN FOSTER REACHED THE house on Sandcastle Road, Ian was sitting between his parents. Kevin remembered Sam Cane from high school, and now recalled that he had looked a little bit like Ian- except for the spiky hair. Mrs. Cane looked older than she should. Ian looked wary.
“Mr. and Mrs. Cane,” Kevin shook their hands. He nodded, coldly, toward Ian, who did not respond.
“What’s all this, Kevin,” Sam said. He had always suspected Ian was up to something, but he didn’t like finding it out second hand.
“I think,” Kevin said, and wiped his mouth, “I think your son is seeing my son.”
“I know my son is seeing your son,” Sam said. “And my nephew is hanging out with your other son.”
“That’s... That’s not what I meant.” At his side, Kevin’s hands turned into fists, and his voice rose an octave.
When Kevin Foster became flustered, Ian noticed, he behaved a lot like Ryan. It was the only funny thing he could pick up about a man he didn’t really care for at the moment.
“What I mean,” Kevin said, “is that he’s... buying him things. Buying him fancy presents and corrupting my boy and treating him like his girlfriend. They’re hanging out all the time and.…”
Mrs. Cane was looking up at her son.
“Are you trying to call my kid a queer?” Sam Cane cut off Kevin.
Kevin stopped talking, and his mouth hung open. His head was cocked in mid motion. It had been exactly what he was doing, but there it was put baldly.
“I... There are rumors.”
Sam turned around, dismissing Kevin Foster. He said to Ian: “Son, are you a faggot?”
“Sam!” his wife snapped.
“We’ll end it all right here,” Sam said, his voice level. “I don’t need someone to walk off the street and tell me stories about my only kid. I’ll just ask you to your face, E. I’ll get it from the horse’s mouth. Ian, are you a fag?”
Ian’s jaw hardened, and he looked directly at his father and said, “No, sir. But Mackenzie Foster is my boyfriend.”
Sam Cane smacked his son so hard a trickle of blood went down his lip. Ian did not move. Neither did his mother.
“I think you’d better go upstairs,” his father told him. Ian nodded, turned and headed up the steps.
For a few more minutes, Mrs. Cane looked from one man to the other, both uncivil, both murmuring about which son had screwed up the other. And then she remembered that she was Lee Cane. She had a name. Before that she’d been Lee Andrews. She had a son. She got up and went up the stairs to tap on the door.
Liz Phair was playing loudly. She tapped again above it.
“Ian, open the door!” she called.
She tried to open it and realized it was locked. This was not a surprise.
“Ian, honey, open the door,” his mother said again.
She came down the steps. Kevin Foster was gone. Lee Cane could see the lights of his car heading out of the driveway.
“He won’t open his door,” Lee said.
“The hell he won’t,” Sam Cane marched up the steps.
“Sam,” she called, but he headed up the stairs, banging on the door, while on the other side, Liz Phair sang “Johnny Feelgood... I really like it when he knocks me around... I really like it.”
He banged the door open and looked around surprised to see that no one was there and the window was wide open.
Lee Cane was not surprised at all.
Sam Cane moved to the CD player, took out Liz Phair and broke her. Lee remembered that Ian hated Liz Phair. She had been a present from Cindy. So now Lee wagered that anything that was really precious was also gone. When Sam opened the drawer that had Ian’s CDs in it, they were all gone. And now her husband’s eyes had made it to the center of the room.
As if to add insult to injury, Ian had left his bong and a bag of marijuana in the center of the bed.

WHEN SHE FINALLY SAW HIM leaving, looking short and officious as ever, Ashley muttered, “Little punk,” and revved up the engine. After his car had driven away and the red taillights were a memory, Ashley counted to about thirty, then drove across the street into the old parking space. She put every fear out of her mind and stopped the car, climbed out, and walked around. She ignored the drunk on the pavement, went inside the apartment building and walked up the old staircase. When she got to the third story apartment, she knocked on the door. Mick Rafferty answered surprised.
“Ashley, it’s late- ”
“I’m failing. You helped me with science, but I’ve screwed up in math, and now they’re saying they’ll fail me.”
“They can’t fail you for just one class.”
“It’s not just one class,” Ashley said. “It’s four years of bad classes, and me being stupid that they’re failing me for.”
“You won’t fail.”
“I won’t graduate,” her voice was hysterical. She was pretty sure that this had almost been an act, but it wasn’t anymore. No, it really never had been. If it had been an act, she wouldn’t have sat in that car for two hours, waiting for George Stearne to leave. She was sobbing now. She told him the truth.
“Ashley, that’s ridiculous,” he told her. “You should have come up.”
“He hates me,” Ashley was sobbing. “He hates me.”
“No, he doesn’t,” Mick told her.
“He does,” she sniffed. “Because he knows what I am.”
The apartment next door opened, and Mrs. Henley stuck her head out, looking irritated.
“Maybe you should come on inside, Ash,” Mick Rafferty told her.
She came in, sobbing, and then he closed the door.
“Let me get you something to drink,” Mick said. He went to the refrigerator while Ashley collected herself at the entrance of the kitchen.
“Is Coke good?”
She nodded.
“Great.” Mick said, adding with a grin, “It’s all we have.” Then he said, “Hold on.” He gave her the Coke, and went to the bathroom. He came back a few seconds later with a wet cloth and said, “Wipe down your face.”
“I’m puffy and ugly.”
“You’re just puffy,” he said, smiling kindly. “And only puffy a little.”
They sat down on the couch, and Mick flicked on the television.
“Your problem, Ashley, is that you think you can’t get away from your past.”
“You didn’t,” she said. She turned red and said, “I’m sorry.”
Mick shrugged. “Serves me right. Always telling you about getting out of Jamnia, and I’ve been here my whole life.”
“You went to college someplace else. Didn’t you teach some place else?”
Mick nodded. “Then I came back.”
She watched him, wondering what he’d do if she kissed him, and needing to be with him right now. Maybe he’d throw her out. Maybe he’d demand she leave.
Ashley got up and straddled him. Mick opened his mouth to say something, but she kissed him.
He looked at her, a little terrified, a little handsome to her. She wanted to put her hands in his small curls.
“Ashley,” his throat was dry.
His dick was hard.
“I wanted to know what you would do,” she said quietly. “What you would say. I’m almost eighteen. I’ll be eighteen in a few days,” she said.
And then she kissed him again. This time she straddled him fully. His legs came together so she dropped neatly to his lap. Ashley locked her hands in Mick Rafferty’s hair. His mouth began tasting hers, and his hands were in her hair. She began to lift up her top. She unhooked her bra. Mick didn’t say anything. He just closed his eyes and began kissing her throat and her neck. When she pulled off her bra, her breasts popped out free and firm, the nipples large and brown, and he began sucking on them, rubbing the sides of his bristly cheek along her sides, sucking her breasts again.
Clumsily, Mick put her down under him. He unhooked his pants, and pulled them down. Ashley pulled down his boxers, and he pulled off her pants and her underwear. They both gasped a little as he situated himself between her thighs, and then she guided him inside of her.
This was what she’d wanted the whole time. This was the something stronger. She murmured softly in his ears, not wanting to scare him by sounding like a slut, but wanting to urge him on, meeting him thrust for thrust, hooking her legs harder about his waist, aware of how long she’d wanted it, and aware that Mick Rafferty might be the kind of man who wouldn’t do this to her a second time. She made free caressing his ass, and running her nails down his back, taking in the dimensions of his torso, shouting out as he moved in her harder, more expertly, taking his time, knowing what he was doing, going from a gentle thrust to love making, tasting nipples and throat, pulling out to rub his face in her secret places, plunging back in, sucking and fucking, harder and harder.
They were clinging hard to each other. She shouted first. He came with a strangled shout, and then the two of them lay bunched up together.
Ashley felt sore, Mick’s large body was between her legs and across her body. His arms were around her, his heavy head, damp and gasping, lay on her shoulder.
“Let’s go to bed,” he told her.
“But my car.”
“Worry about it later.”

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Wow shit really hit that fan with Mackenzie's Dad. Poor Mackenzie and Ian. I am very interested to see how this part of the story turns out. So Mick Rafferty slept with Ashley? Interesting. I think that is going to be another source of tension in the story for sure. Great writing and I look forward to more tomorrow!
 
Well, I can guarantee you Mick having sex with Ashley is going to bring up some new things. Did you see it coming? How do you feel about it?
 
It is silly. He definitely did that. Hw's definitely better than that. Mr Stearne warned him way back in chapter two I think. We'll see what happens......
 
THERE WOULD BE NO SLEEPING IN the Fitzgerald house tonight. Tina had come over in search of Madeleine and Luke only to learn that Luke was testing out the factory to see if it was livable again. Coconut had gone with him. Madeleine was with Rodder.
“Well, then I’ll be going, Mr. Fitzgerald,” Tina told Cedric. “Kenzie, are you staying?”
Mackenzie turned to Cedric for an answer.
The older man frowned at him:
“Since when have you asked my permission to stay here?”

Upstairs Mackenzie was pacing up and down Vaughan’s room.
“I wish you’d quit that,” Vaughan said, looking up from his book.
Mackenzie turned to his friend.
“Did you want to go to sleep?” Mackenzie said.
“Not really, but you’re bugging the hell out of me with all that pacing.”
“I’m sorry. I’m just mad right now. I feel... I’m pissed right now.”
“This would be the time when most people break down and cry.”
“I’m not into all that,” Mackenzie said.
“I always wondered why,” said Vaughan, sitting up in bed and putting the book away.
His friend looked at him.
“No one could ever made you cry,” Vaughan said. “I always wondered why, and now I think I get it?”
“What?”
“You thought it would make you look like a sissy.”
“Isn’t that why everybody refuses to cry?”
“No, Kenzie. Everyone else refuses to cry in public. You never cry at all.”
“That one time... when I told you about me and Ian, and we fought... I almost cried. I did cry. I just didn’t gush. Do you want me to gush? You don’t either, you know.”
“I know.”
“I’ve never seen you cry about your mother.”
“Maybe it’s because I’m expected to, and maybe you never cry because gay people are supposed to, and all other boys don’t do it because they don’t want to look gay, but you didn’t do it because you didn’t—”
“Want to look like myself?” Mackenzie raised an eyebrow.
There was a knock on the door, and Vaughan said, “Come in, Dad.”
But it was Ian, white as a sheet, with a busted lip, wide eyed and crazy.
“Oh, my God!” Vaughan got up off the bed. Mackenzie got to Ian first, the blond boy’s face hardening like an eagle’s.
“What the hell happened to you?” he said, examining Ian’s face.
“I’ll go get the peroxide,” Vaughan said, and left his room.
“Your dad came over,” Ian tried not to sound like he was blaming Mackenzie.
“It was Ross... And Lindsay. They started stuff at the house tonight. They told my parents,” Mackenzie said. “I couldn’t do anything. I- I should have called you. I- ”
“Don’t worry,” Ian shook his head. “I know what it’s like. I know now.” He licked his busted lip, and winced.
Vaughan came back with a cotton swab and the brown bottle of peroxide. Mackenzie uncapped it, and began to work on the other boy’s lip.
“My dad knocked the shit out of me when I said you were my boyfriend,” Ian told Mackenzie with what Vaughan thought was the hint of a proud grin. “Then he told me to go upstairs. The moment he did that, I didn’t even think twice. I just packed up everything I liked, dropped it out of the window, climbed out, and got on my bike. I put my clothes and all that stuff about a block away from the house. We can get it tomorrow.”
Ian smiled, and reached into his pocket. “I took my car keys. It’s still my fucking car. But I didn’t want to make noise. So I rode the bike. I rode and rode until I got here. This was the first safe place I could think of.” He turned to Vaughan. “Can I stay here?”
“Did you have to ask?”
Ian took a deep breath and nodded his thanks.
“You’re cold,” Mackenzie accused him. “You’re frozen.”
“I told you I’ve been riding across town.”
Mackenzie put down the bottle, and threw the bloody swabs in the trash can by the door.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said.
Vaughan said, “We’ll worry about all that tomorrow.”
~ ~ ~

“Officer, please don’t ticket me,” she smacked her gum and tried to flirt with him. Aunt Meghan had said something about flirting with cops, how they could not resist it.
“Let me see your license.”
“I ah... I don’t have it on me.”
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen?”
“Really?”
“Maybe,” she smiled.
The officer did not plan on leaving. Ashley showed him leg. He was balding, and a little fat, but still youngish. The details of the conversation faded with time, but not the feeling of it, as if power were being hurled back and forth in an exhaustion of wills.
In the end the officer was fondling her, and she couldn’t see his eyes through his shades.
“What could I do, officer? To stop you from ticketing me?”
“Well now I could arrest you for driving without a permit, driving underage, and soliciting.”
“Soliciting?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he sounded like such a rube. And then he imitated her, his voice lifting higher, “ ‘What could I do, officer? To stop you from ticketing me?’ ”
She was irritated. He reached into his jacket and laid a small baggie of white powder on the dashboard. “And I could have you on possession of illegal substances.”
Before this whole thing could turn into a desperate game of, “What do you want?” Ashley said, “I know what you want.”
And so she gave it to him in the back of Kirk’s truck. It didn’t take long. It almost felt good. It would be a long time and another person altogether before it did feel good. When he was finished, Ashley smiled and looked up at him.
“You know,” she said, satisfied, “I could have you now.”
“What?” the cop said, hitching up his pants.
“I’m fourteen,” she said.
That evening, when she came through the door after avoiding what would have been her first traffic ticket, Aileen and Kevin were sitting at the kitchen table.
“Where have you been?” her mother asked, the corner of her mouth tight on her cigarette.
“Out with Cassidy.”
“You should have called,” said her father.
“I know,” Ashley shrugged. “I’m sorry.”
His gaze was heavy and blue, but not piercing. She had always believed that gaze would pierce the truth. But now she saw that it could not.
They could not know that Ashley had been driving around in her cousin Kirk’s car for a few weeks now, unable to wait till sixteen which—when you are fourteen—seems like it will never come. Kirk had taught she and Tina the basic maneuvers but, for once, Tina had had the since to obey the law. She never drove by herself, and certainly never took the truck out in the open where she was visible.
Even at fourteen, what Ashley wanted was to be visible, and to be an adult.
She got pulled over to the side of the road about ten minutes outside of Bashan being visible.

~ ~ ~
Well she was nearly eighteen now, her body spooned to Mick Rafferty’s, his arm draped over her shoulder, protecting her, his gentle snoring in her ear. His body was moist and warm beside her. He and his bed smelled like iron in the room in the apartment off of Main Street. Eighteen wheelers passed through town on their way to the highway. Now she heard one roar past the building.
Ashley did not care about everything else that was going on. She had the distinct feeling right now that it would all be alright.

AILEEN FOSTER CAME DOWN THE stairs in her nightgown. Kevin was sitting up watching the television, his eyes reflecting the blue glare of the screen.
“Where are they?” he said. “Kenzie and Tina?”
“They could be any number of places,” said Aileen, “and all of them safe.”
“I ought to get up and get them,” he said. “Especially after what she said to me.”
“And what about what you said to her?” Aileen said.
Kevin turned around and looked at her.
“Oh, yes,” Aileen said. “You forgot about that whole clinic business, didn’t you?”
“Oh, shit,” Kevin said.
Aileen nodded.
“Don’t you go out of this house again tonight, Kevin Foster.” She turned around and stopped at the base of the stairs.
“You’re not the only parent here, alright? You’re not the only one who’s got shit to deal with.”
“Aily!”
“Good night,” she said, and headed up the stairs.

SAM CANE WAS ON THE rampage that night. He drove to his sister’s and terrified the house demanding to know where Ian was.
“I don’t know,” Race said, crossing her arms over her chest.
Sam told her the whole story. Roy had come down to protect his mother.
“Go back upstairs,” Race said to the boy.
Roy ignored her.
Everything Sam said he punctuated with: “That goddamned, Kevin Foster.”
“Mr. Foster’s good,” Roy finally said.
“Oh, you think so, huh?” said Sam.
“Sam!”
“If you knew- ” Sam began, but Race said in a deadly voice, “If you say something stupid I’ll kick you in your balls, and then while you’re rolling on the floor clip ‘em off with a butcher knife. Swear to God.”
Sam was silent. He glared at his nephew. The boy glared back.
“Race, ask your boy to tell me where my son is.”
“How should I know?” Roy snapped.
“Don’t mouth off to me,” Sam commanded.
“In this house,” Race told her brother, “the one who is mouthing off is you. Go home, Sam.”
“I’m not going- ”
“I said go home,” Race said again. “Before I call the police. Or, hell, before me and Roy just get tired and beat the shit out of you. Please go home. You’ve done enough for one night.”
When her brother turned around with a curse and left, Race immediately said to her son, “Roy, will you tell me where Ian is? Do you know where he might be?”
Roy told his mother, “Ian probably went to the Fitzgeralds.”
Race smiled.
“Mr. Fitzgerald was my teacher back in high school.”
“He was?”
Race nodded, “He and his wife had their children later. There’s a considerable age difference between us. You know he and your friend Ryan’s grandmother...? They grew up together.”
“Oh.”
“Now what’s his number? I need to see if Ian’s safe. And I need to warn Cedric Fitzgerald about Sam.”

THE THREE OF them slept together that night, Mackenzie on Vaughan’s left and Ian on his right.
Vaughan awoke to Madeleine’s voice in the hallway. The light was on, and she and Cedric were talking.
“Are you serious?” she was saying. “When...? Yeah... Yeah... ”
Vaughan felt better now that his sister knew. He felt her knowing would accomplish something.
Mackenzie always slept sprawled out and on his side, mouth half open. If you had told him that he had contracted a disease whereby he would slowly turn into a rutabaga, and he only had one month left to live, he would still sleep like a baby. On his other side, Vaughan felt the rigidity of Ian, lying on his back, awake. He turned to his other friend to see the black haired boy biting his upper lip. In the little moonlight that came through the curtains he could see his friend’s face wet with tears.
“Ian!” he whispered.
The other boy’s eyes opened. Slowly he sat up. Vaughan rose up slowly, trying not to wake Mackenzie, who groaned in his sleep, and twisted over muttering something.
“He hit me Vaughan,” Ian said after drying his face with the end of his tee shirt. “How could he do something like that? How could you hit your own son?”


THAT MARCH MORNING CEDRIC FITZGERALD had gone through half a pack of Pall Malls before eight o’clock. To be fair, Ralph Hanley was helping him smoke them.
“Kevin Foster came by,” Cedric told him. “Real early. I threw him out. Without a word.”
“Didn’t you let him stay here when- ”
“When his father- the Colonel-that-son-of-a-bitch- gave him trouble all those years ago. And he thinks I’ve changed. Mackenzie’s almost my own flesh and blood. He’s basically Vaughan’s twin, and he thinks I’m going to send him back home! Well to hell with that! To hell with him! I’m disgusted with him. And I’m a little ashamed. I told him that.
“He told me Mackenzie was gay,” Cedric said with a little chuckle.
“And.… I told him I knew. He seemed surprised. Of course I knew! And he told me about Ian and I told him I knew that too. Had known for a long time.
“But then he told me about Ian’s lip, how he got it. Then I told him I should bust his lip, and I told him if Sam Cane came up here, well then I would bust his lip wide open too. And I mean it.”
Cedric shut up when he heard feet coming down the hall.
When the boys entered the kitchen, Cedric said, “You know where the food is.”
“Mr. Fitzgerald, Sir,” said Ian. “I want to thank you for letting me stay here last night.”
“You can stay here as long as you want.”
“Thank you, Sir,”
“And you can stop calling me sir, too.”
“I heard my Dad this morning,” Mackenzie said. “He... left?”
“Do you see him?”
“No, Cedric,” Mackenzie smiled and went to the refrigerator where he took out three yogurts and handed them to his friends. “Morning, Father,” he said to Ralph. “Ian, do you know Father Ralph?” he introduced him. “My pastor. Vaughan’s goddad.”
Mackenzie addressed Cedric: “My dad- ”
“I sent him away. I told him he had a lot of nerve. I told him that you were like my son too.”
Mackenzie put down his yogurt, and a strange look crossed his face. Then he hugged Cedric tight.
“I love, you,” Mackenzie whispered to him.
“Good, Mackenzie. I love you too.”
Mackenzie pulled away and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Yes, Vaughan,” he said to his friend. “It does happen sometimes.”
Ian was mystified by the comment. Ralph said, “You all need to get to school.”
Vaughan nodded, and was the first out the door, murmuring, “I have a feeling sparks are going to fly today at Jamnia High.”
Madeleine was coming down the stairs now.
“Two Fitzgeralds, two Canes, six Fosters, and a boatload of drama. You bet your ass sparks are gonna fly today, baby brother!”
When they were gone, Ralph stole another one of his friend’s cigarettes and said, “That bit about letting Ian stay here as long as he wanted?”
“Um hum?”
“You might want to rethink that.”
“What?”
“Kevin won’t fight you. Sam Cane might. Sam Can might make it hell.”
“You want me to send Ian back home, Ralph? You know I’ve never turned anyone from this door.”
“And I don’t want you to send him back home. I want you to send him to my home.”
Cedric cocked his head.
“Not the rectory,” Ralph shook his head, and the cigarette smoke shook with it. “Holy Spirit. No one will ever look for him in a monastery.”

MORE TOMORROW
 
Wow lots going on and so much drama. I am very interested to read what happens next and see where this story ends up. Great writing and I look forward to more tomorrow!
 
Father Julian picked up the phone.
“Ralph. Ralph? Yeah, sure. I remember him. Yeah. Send him on over. This evening. Ralph... No, I don’t care... Yeah, yeah. I’m married to a man myself.”
The monk laughed and hung up.

“Well that’s that,” Ralph told Cedric, slipping on his fedora. “Ready for Mass?”
Cedric nodded, and followed his friend onto the street.
“I am glad that I know you, Ralph Hanley. You are the most amazing thing, I swear.”
“Friendship is a good thing,” Ralph said. “As we have just seen in the last hour. Those boys will be friends forever.” He added. “I hope.”
Cedric looked at Ralph, and realized: “I don’t think I even remember meeting you. You were just always.... around.”
“You did meet me,” Ralph told him. “I even remember the date. I was going to the movies. I still have the ticket stub somewhere in the rectory.”
“You know the date?”
“Oh, yes, “ Ralph climbed into the driver’s seat, and Cedric got in the passenger’s.
“It was October 14th, 1959.”

i i

Cedric Fitzgerald was fifteen, and well into fifteen before he remembered where and how he had met Ralph Hanley. By then it was 1965 and a number of things had changed for the Black people of Crawford Street, the first being that they were Black and no longer Negroes. Cedric had to do a lot of thinking to remember the day he’d left home in tears and walked all the way off of Crawford onto Price, where the Negroes were no longer necessarily Creole.
“What are you crying about?”
And this had startled Cedric because at the time he had thought he was alone, in the little park between the theatre and the drug store. He looked up into the tree to see another boy hanging, earnestly and admirably, by the inside of his knees.
The boy’s tone was not nasty, but concerned. His wide green eyes blinked once, twice, solemnly and slowly, waiting for the story.
“My mother left,” he said, Not “mama,” as he might have said in his house.
“Why?”
“To chase a man,” he quoted his grandmother.
“What about your Daddy?”
“She’s not married to him.”
“Did she divorce him?”
“She never married him.”
“Ohhh,” The boy took this in. He blinked his large grey-green eyes and then said, “We’re Catholic.”
“So are we. From New Orleans. My mama still chases men, though.”
The boy seemed to be considering this. In one swift moment he dropped from the tree and stood on his feet. He was taller than Cedric.
“My name’s Ralph,” he said.
“I’m Dominic.”
Which is a fine time to add that Cedric’s baptismal name was Dominic, and it was some time before he used Cedric and this for reasons entirely professional.
“Dominic DuFresne,” said Cedric Fitzgerald, and so now it is also time to say that it was many years before he took the name Fitzgerald, and the reasons for this come later.
This was all from their original encounter that either of them could remember. What Ralph could remember was telling the ersatz Dominic that he had just been to the pictures and saw a horrible film where some white woman screamed the whole time. To this day Ralph could not remember what that movie was.
Dominic returned to the house as the bells of Our Lady of Jamnia were telling the neighborhood that it was five-thirty. He couldn’t remember ever setting foot in there. It was a place Negroes did not go. They had their own church. It was beautiful. It was also inconveniently far away. When Dominic entered the house on Crawford Street it was filled with the smell of stewed shrimp and gumbo, and his grandmother said, “Don’t make any noise,” though she shouted it. “You grandfather’s saying his rosary.”
Earlier that day, when he’d come downstairs from his room, his grandmother had said, “Your mama’s left. Start saying your rosary.”
“With or without the Fatima prayer?”
“Don’t be silly!”
But he wasn’t trying to be. He really didn’t get it. He knew his father was not a Catholic, and he wondered what it would be like to be like the Negroes on Price Street and Birnham. They had a church close by. They had two in fact, and the Baptists hooped and hollered and praised the Lord, and the Methodists got to be reserved and go to Communion once a month. In either church drinking and smoking and having a good time was pretty much a sign of being backslidden whereas, Dominic had already noticed at the age of nine, in a Catholic house these were just a way of life. Almost proof that you were Catholic. But as he set to the black beads, trying to remember the Creed, he thought it would be nice, maybe, not to grow up having to hear about Purgatory and Limbo, to actually know what the priest was gibbering while he turned his back to you, to not have to burn your fingernail clippings and hair remains in the fire place, to not have a thousand votives lit all around the house, year round.
He would probably have to confess this to the priest, this sometime desire to be a Protestant.
The house on Crawford was a large, long two story, almost totally plain on the outside, square and made of red brick with a white French Quarter style porch and balcony. In the summers his aunts and uncles would sit out on it while his grandmother would call them “Common and plebeian”.
“You’re just like the niggers on Price Street,” she would say, and her sister, Evelyn would say, “Yeah, Estelle, you got that shit right. We are just like the niggahs on Price Street.”
Dominic loved his aunt and hated his grandmother. The family portraits were all on the wall, and moving from over the old hutch where they kept the fine china, all across the large place that served as the living room and divided into the dining room. Through the photos you could trace the family’s history.
Even at the age of seven, looking like a light skinned witch, Dominic could see his grandmother kneeling, swathed in her white Communion gown, veil pulled back from her face, the same black beads he carried now draped and threaded through her fingers.
“Estelle Sandavaul, 1902.”
She was Spanish.
Yes this was one thing Estelle always pointed out. Unlike this crass lot of niggers a generation removed from the plantation, Louisiana Negroes had race. Some were French, some were Spanish. Not a few were Indians or had kept tribal ties. Some were even Irish, but the less said about them the better. Estelle was proud of the fact that the Sandavauls had never been slaves. Many years later Cedric would learn what Dominic could not, that the Sandavauls had lost all their land and, of course, at one point in time, someone had to have been a slave because no matter where you came from or how far you were from the plantation, how else had Negroes gotten here?
But back to Estelle.
Estelle had not seen Louisiana since she was ten, which was when the last of the Sandavaul properties was sold and all that was left to the family was the little house in the bayou. It was then 1905, and the family had sent her up to cousins in Indiana where- for reasons unknown- a group of Creoles had ended up. They had a little neighborhood and a fine church.
But Creoles are Creoles and Catholics are Catholics. Negroes are Negroes. They find each other, and about the same time the community had started up in Indiana one had started up in Ohio across the river. The people of Condalisa Street in Canaan, Indiana, were frequently on Crawford Street in Jamnia, Ohio, and vice versa. So it was not too long before Estelle’s cousins—the Raleighs, were hosting Henri DuFresne.
No one thought it odd that he took her into his house when she was eleven. It was just as well. They didn’t need another mouth to feed. He sent her to convent school making sure she was a good Catholic. She wanted to be a nun. She expressed her intentions. Mother Superior told her this would not be possible. She was to marry. At fifteen she was turned out of the convent with a statue of the Virgin Mary. Her mother sent her a gown, and she was wed to Henri DuFresne. The man was significantly older and seemed to have spent all of his energy on first raising the girl to womanhood and next taking her virginity with a ferocious gusto.
She had no children. He had no ill will. Estelle disappeared into the fabric of the plain brick house on Crawford and no one saw her again for seven years.

It was the birth of Jasper that changed everything.
It was years before Dominic would understand that his grandmother hated Jasper. And then he believed it was because Jasper chose to dress like a woman though he was a man. Or vice versa. He was nearly a teenager before he deduced the real reason for Estelle’s hatred. It was something everyone else had always known, but never found a reason to explain to the boy.
Jasper was Stanley’s son, but he was not Estelle’s.
The moment Estelle found out about Jasper, about Stanley running around making children and sewing oats, she did what she hated. Firstly, she left the house. Secondly she left it for a place only the desperate would go. She went to visit her sister-in-law, Marie Madeleine.
Now, in the same way every Irish Catholic family has a drunk, and every Italian family—no matter how respectable—has a mafia connection they may not want to talk about, every Negro family has at least one practitioner of the dark arts, sometimes effective, sometimes not so much.
Marie Madeleine had not darkened the stoop of or cast her shadow into the nave of a house of God since she was twelve, and a priest in Metairie, Louisiana had told her she was going to hell. She spat in his face, blinding him for life. She made her living selling love potions, making curses, casting spells, reading palms, cards, anything else you asked her to read and just generally frightening the hell out of people. She was a truly remarkable woman.
She was dead by the time Dominic was born, and there were no photographs of her because she believed photographs stole one’s soul—which is why she had a photograph of everyone she hated. What fascinated Dominic about the aunt he only heard about was not that she was six foot three and dressed like a man, or that she was black as night and smelled like sage or that she had five children all by different fathers, all with unpronounceable French names which had been shortened to something stupid, but that she wore a patch over her eye, and never over the same eye two days in a row, and that she was reputed to have been bald as a cue.
Years later, Estelle commented that what was most amazing to her about Marie Madeline was that she had managed to couple with even one man, let alone five. The day Estelle finally came to her sister-in-law’s door, Flipsy, her oldest son, answered. Estelle DuFresne looked at the sister-in-law who had not troubled to make an appearance at her wedding, and privately thought this was the ugliest woman she had ever seen.
The exact details of the story are not to be had, for it was not something Estelle liked to discuss. In fact, if not for Evelyn getting drunk one night in 1966 and spilling the beans, Dominic would certainly have never known. The rest of the family knew it because of Cousin Flipsy. He told. In the end what was known was that Estelle finally grew desperate enough to resort to witchcraft for her first child. And it worked.
It worked in pairs.
Later that year Anne and her sister, the third in a long line of Madeleines, were born. They called her Maddie. Both girls were yellow like caramel, and they had long, hair that was like brown sugar in your fingers, and wide green eyes. Of course this would make them think there was just nothing prettier than themselves. This belief helped to get Anne pregnant by the ripe age of thirteen, and she left home, though the details were not clear on which order these events had happened. Maddie was kind enough to wait until she was sixteen to really screw up, and then she ran off to Chicago. Every year or so she would come back with a present and another bastard child to grow up in the house, and then she was gone. This was just as well. Anne lived down the street near the Lebanese. Maddie was never to be seen.
By then Estelle’s womb was like a floodgate and she’d already had Mary Agnes, Claire whom they called Clairie, and, lastly, Gladys.
Who was currently gone.
“She,” Dominic’s grandmother informed the boy, “has been a source of endless trouble to me.”
Gladys was the one that supplied the grandchild with the least amount of scandal around his origins. She was eleven years younger than Anne and Maddie and her first memory of Anne was the year 1935. Gladys always talked about the funeral. She’d been seven then and her sister was good and grown. She remembered the black dresses and the huge hats and her sister, weeping, supported between two old cousins. And there was this little ornate coffin, the size of a shoebox.
“It was like a music box, Dom. It was the saddest thing I’d ever seen. No. Anne was the saddest thing I’d ever seen. When she watched them lower that boy into the ground...”
This was the beginning of Anne being an almost reformed woman.
Anne had come back in black to the brick house on Crawford Street. Estelle came up to bring her daughter meals. Anne never came down. Gladys would sneak up the stairs to catch a sight of her marvelously grief stricken sister.
“I wanted her to be my mama,” Gladys said. “She was so beautiful, and my real mama.... Your grandmother... She is one bitch, I swear.”
And so Gladys spent a long time with her oldest sister, who needed a sister and maybe a child to replace the one she’d lost. But it was not Gladys who would bring her out of the room.
It was Evelyn.

MORE TOMORROW
 
It was interesting to read some of the history of characters such as Cedric. Thanks for sharing that. Excellent writing and I look forward to more tomorrow. I hope you have had a nice night. :)
 
It has been a strange night, but a good one. We will return to these people we've just met tonight, for they are pretty important and important for reasons you can't even begin to guess. More tomorrow. Incidentally, do you still have the Rossford family trees?
 
“You know she never liked me,” Evelyn said one loud Christmas night when she was filling Dominic’s glass with wine. “Drink that up, nephew. Drink it up! You’re eleven!”
Dominic always suspected Evelyn was right. Evelyn told everything. Evelyn was the source of the true story of the Sandavauls and of the DuFresnes. The Fitzgeralds too. Everyone told her their story, and what she wasn’t told she found out. And she didn’t believe in keeping secrets. Not even her own.
Evelyn was the significantly younger sister of Estelle, in fact only a year older than Anne and Maddie. She was dark as chocolate and loud as thunder, flashy as lightning, beautiful and hot as the bayou. She was spicy like New Orleans. Estelle had always hinted that her younger sister was a bastard. Evelyn looked around the table and pointed at all the brothers, sisters, cousins gathered,
“Well, who the hell here ain’t a bastard?” she demanded.
Evelyn Sandavaul had been born long after the death of Estelle’s mother, so Estelle was quick to point out they were only half sisters if that. Evelyn never seemed to mind her sister’s coldness. She’d been living on the first floor of 1133 Crawford since their father had died, leaving her the last of his money and directions to head up to Ohio.
Perhaps Evelyn didn’t mind being hated for the same reason that Estelle didn’t mind hating her, which was because old Henri DuFresne began to suggest that she might not mind coming to his bed.
“I hit that old lecherous niggah in the head with a statue of Saint Jude,” Evelyn told Dominic many years later. “No. Don’t laugh. I did. He got his shit together after that. Honestly, running after a young tender virgin such as myself!”
It was Evelyn’s loudness that had brought Anne out of black and into dancing. Evelyn’s fantastic friends came up from New Orleans, and they mixed well enough with the bad crowd from the west end of Crawford. The crowd of gamblers and the crowd of men who liked to be women and vice versa that Jasper DuFresne kept company with whenever he/she chose. This was a source of perpetual horror for Estelle who wanted something respectable. And then, ten years before Dominic was born, Estelle lay down and gave birth one last time.
This was the only son. She had such hopes for him, and named him Stephen Octavian Thaddeus. But that geichy, alligator tail eating, witchcraft practicing crowd of sinners got a hold of him quickly, and before long he was rechristined “Gigelo”, later “Jigelo,” because they called him “Jig” for short.
By then Estelle did not protest. She even began calling the boy Jigelo, herself.
It was useless to fight hell sometimes.

There were a few sins that Estelle could never forgive her sister for.
There was the sin of Brown.
He had been a friend of Evelyn’s from back in the day. Brown was an insanely old man, in Estelle’s opinion, extremely geichy, who came down from Chicago, but had been living in New Orleans and for some reason appealed to Anne. He was a gambler and it was suspected that he worked outside the law. He always had presents for her. He eventually moved to Price Street. They were married at Queen of Peace. They never had any children. By then they were both too old for it. But they always had a spare room for Gladys, and she occupied the place of only daughter.
Estelle hated Brown until the day she died. Brown was so old he didn’t die long afterward, but there was also the sin of Flipsy.
“Flipsy is incest!” Estelle declared.
“Your husband’s nephew ain’t no blood to me!”
“Well, at least marry him, Ev.”
“Naw, ma’am, Flipsy ain’t the marrying type. And he’s not the type I’d ever want to marry. He’s got a big dick and when I put one leg in the east and one in the west he really knows how to stir my Mississippi— ”
“Ev- !”
“Naw, he do, Estelle. I ain’t lying there. But that’s not enough to make a good husband, or a half decent daddy. He ain’t shit for that. And I do want kids. But I can handle that end my damn self.”
“How’s my sister feel about all this?” Grandfather asked, probably, because deep inside he still wanted a piece of Evelyn.
“Aw, shit, Marie Madeleine don’t even know she in this world! That bitch din lost her mind. Happens to all witches. Probably talking to spirits or what not.”
However anyone felt about it, Evelyn stayed with Flipsy to the tune of three children, all baptized, all sent to Catholic school, one ending up in the seminary, none known to Dominic. The youngest one, Jason, was still around, by 1950. But he had faded out of the picture by the time Dominic was old enough to know anything about life.
The last unforgivable offense was Cedric Fitzgerald. He, too, was one of those yellow niggers and what’s more, a Methodist. He ran around with that fast crowd always smoking and drinking, gambling and carousing downstairs in Evelyn’s part of the house, but always courteous if they should ever have to come upstairs for something, which they tried not to do because this would mean facing Estelle.
Estelle would have taken no note of him. Gladys had wondered for sometime if she’d end up a nun, like Clairie, the good sister, because she didn’t feel anything about anyone ever. Evelyn had taken her aside and said, “You’ll know cause your clit will light up like a junebug when you see your man. I promise.”
Gladys wandered downstairs one night at the end of 1948, and she saw Cedric Fitzgerald Senior, all broad smiles, with a little mustache, brown hair in little curls. He wore silky suits and his pants fit close and when Gladys, on her way upstairs, saw him drop a cigarette he had just rolled. He bent over to pick it up, and she saw his marvelous ass. And it was just like that. Her clit lit up. He turned around. Their eyes met. Whatever lit up in a man lit up in him. It was only a few days later in his room on Price Street she learned what lit up in a man, and her eyes lingered on it in wonder.
“Ain’t you never seen this before?” he asked.
She shook her head.
And then she saw lots of it.
The pregnancy happened fairly quickly, and the whole time Cedric talked of marriage. But the night she had the baby in the house on Crawford Street, he waited until she fell asleep, and then climbed out of the window for the first train to nowhere in particular.
In a heartbroken faith that he would come back, Gladys named the baby Cedric Fitzgerald. Estelle, heartless as ever, sat on the edge of the bed and said, “Well, now you’re a goddamned fool for sure, girl. And in case you didn’t know, the priest will never baptize a baby with a name like Cedric.” So she added, “Dominic” to his name, and then she said, “I won’t have a Fitzgerald living in my house, and so quick as that the baby became Cedric Dominic DuFresne,” and Estelle was quick to forget the Cedric.

Evelyn desired that her nephew have a man in his life. But there was no man to be found, and then she was never a woman to solve only one person’s problem, but if she could Ev found one solution that met several needs. When she worked she worked at a cafe with a loud, crass Irish widow who had a taste for Lebanese men and swinging jazz. Evelyn never really liked Aisling (pronounced Ashleen) O’Muil, but she liked her little girl who was just dying to get away from the cafe and make a little money.
“Girl, are you afraid of Negroes?” she asked her one day.
“I ain’t afraid of nobody,” the red headed girl had said.
“You want a job? You want to baby sit my nephew? I pay good.”
The girl said she would, and the next day she fell in love with the seven year old who was fascinated by her as well, entranced by his first close up look at a white person.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Fourteen.”
“Are you Polish?”
“Hell, no! I’m not a goddamned Polock. I’m Irish!”
“You got a name?”
“My name’s Ida!”


THE NIGHT OF THE DAY GLADYS left, Evelyn took Dominic around town. She walked him down Michael Street. Back then there were more large houses and trees, and an old brick sanitarium that always fascinated him. It was set back at the end of a long avenue of elms under which ran the road to the entrance. The black gate was always locked, and the two pillars were large and made of brick with green copper plates reading:

MORLEY SANITARIUM

“It’s like a convent for crazy folks,” Evelyn told Cedric, laughing, as they sat on the lip of one of the pillars. She watched a large old car roll by, the moon shining on its dovetails.
“Your mama’s a little crazy,” Evelyn told Dominic, taking out a cigarette. “You have to understand that. She’s got a fire in her, and she just wants to be loved. Now, that ain’t no excuse for a mama running off and leaving her child. But it is an explanation, and sometimes an explanation goes a long way toward healing.” Evelyn shook her head and took the boy’s hand. They walked back down Michael, west of the sanitarium, past the old quiet houses with lights winking out from behind the bushes.
“She just wants a big wedding. That’s what she wants. To wear a gown with a long white veil, and she thinks this man’ll do it for her. I hate to say it but this time your Granny’s right. She is a damned fool.”
Evelyn threw back her head and laughed.
Dominic looked up at her.
“Tell me what you want,” said Evelyn. “One thing, and I swear I’ll get it for you. Got three kids. Two are worthless as shit. Michael’s gon be a priest. I swore to God when I was with Flipsy, I said, ‘Lord, I’m gon do right by you. I’m gon give you someone someday who can love you the way I couldn’t cause I was too dirty to.”
“You’re not dirty,” Dominic insisted.
Evelyn laughed and said, “Dom, you don’t know how nasty I am. But my point is that Michael don’t need nothing I can give him. Jesus and Pope Pius’ll take care of that. So I can give to you. And besides, I like you better, anyway. Wadn’t none of my kids no fun.”
Dominic cleared his throat. There were three old houses set behind their hedges, from deep yards behind old gates. Dominic pointed at the middle one, a white Victorian with a turret, and a large grey porch with round rocks, blue, pink and grey that made up the rail and the pillars.
“Can you get me that?”
Evelyn scowled at her great-nephew.
“Boy, what you gon do with a house?”
“Live in it.”
Dominic threw up his hands, and his eyes went big, “Anyone who wants to can come and live in it with me! It’ll be like your house. Only bigger.”
“Well, hot damn!” Evelyn clapped her hands, “that’s a good enough reason for me. One day, maybe, when you’ve forgotten you asked, I’ll do what I can do. For now let’s go home.”

Gladys called every night. She talked as long as the operator would let her, and ended every phone call with “Hugs and kisses,” and “Love you, Baby.” She traveled with the Man whose name neither Dominic nor Dominic as Cedric was ever to learn. One night she was in Chicago. The next it was Iowa City. Then St. Louis, Kansas City, Little Rock. Places he had never heard of: Lincoln, Cheyenne. In the end California.
And in the end she came back. Gladys locked herself in the same room that Anne had locked herself in over thirty years ago. She did not exit for three days and three nights and when she did she said, “I swear to God, I’ll never be that kind of a fool again.”
“I knew you’d come back,” Estelle said. “They always do. Just like that worthless Cedric of yours. Why don’t you go down and let him give you some comfort?”
Gladys fixed her mother with a nasty glare, and then said, “Maybe I will, old woman. Maybe I will!”
Cedric had come back. He had only been gone a year when he returned to Jamnia because he couldn’t make it anywhere else. Not that he could really make it in Jamnia, but it was the hell he knew, so... And Gladys talked of how she didn’t want him and how he was worthless, but she was still back in his bed before long. And it had to be his bed. There was no question about any of that business going on at 1133 Crawford. Bastards might be born here, but they were never conceived.
Dominic never cared one way or the other for his father. In fact, it was a long time before Dominic understood what a father was, and then it was an understanding of himself. With the exception of Jigelo and Grandad, the whole family was female. Women had babies who turned out to be other women. Sometimes they had boys. What boys did was unknown. Sex was something that Dominic was only vaguely aware of, so he was also ignorant of the male contribution to reproduction. Grandfather was already very old when Dominic had been born. As the years passed he simply faded away, going further into the back of the house and the back of his mind. The one splash Grandfather made was in 1956 when Maddie had come home, high as a kite and fleeing the law. He had crossed the room, and knocked her to the ground with the flat of his hand. He’d gone on in Creole for a long time and ended in:
“You shan’t shame me in my house! You shan’t!”
The second splash he made was in 1961 when he died.


SO MUCH COVERED, SO MUCH TO DISCUSS. MORE TOMORROW.
 
You were right about a lot being covered! This history of some of the characters is very interesting. I learnt a lot I did not know about Cedric. I also feel sad at the deaths and losses mentioned but as I learnt a few years ago when my aunt died suddenly in her early 60's, death can happen at any time. Great writing and I look forward to more tomorrow! Its Friday for me here so I hope you have a great Friday and weekend! :)
 
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