Going Down Read online

  Going Down

  Three things have not changed in the ten years since I graduated from Mortimer Preparatory Academy. In no particular order they are as follows:

  When Bentley Hammersmith IV shakes your hand, smiles at you, and says "Call me Ben," you still feel like the most important person in the world.

  Chris Wattersford still shakes your hand too hard and says "You can call me Watt," in a way that sounds more like a command, not a greeting.

  I am still a loser who would rather talk about jazz than sports.

  There are also three things that have changed since I took off the green and gold plaid tie for the last time and finally escaped the place that had made my parents happy and me miserable for most of my adolescence. They are these:

  Ben Hammersmith is still so handsome he makes my chest hurt when he walks into the room. His shoulders are still square, his chest is still broad, his smile is perfect and, to add to it all, there is the beginning of silver in the scruff on his chin and at the edge of his temples. He's too young to be going grey, and yet somehow it looks like his hair was always meant to be this way. I know this, because, as I am standing in line at the bar for a drink, he is standing ahead of me and, at one point, turns around, looks me up and down and then fires up that perfect smile. I fight not to shrink back. A decade ago, I would have burst into flames at the sight of that smile.

  "Hi. Ben." His hand is warm and firm around mine.

  "Lucas."

  "Yeah? What year did you graduate?"

  I almost say "The same as you, asshole," but that is not how I want to start tonight, and also, at that exact moment, he cocks his head to one side, and I see the fine silver strands at the edge of his hairline. I'm so mesmerized, wondering how they got there, if they're real or just a trick of the light, and why they somehow make his eyes shine even brighter, that all I can manage to say is "Two thousand nine."

  He blinks, grins, and it’s satisfying to watch Ben Hammersmith squirm. Because not only did we graduate in the same year, we were both Mortimer Fours: The subset of students who did all four years of high school at Mortimer, rather than transferring in when Mommy and Daddy realized you were never going to make it into Yale without a boost—even if you were a legacy—after you bombed your freshman year somewhere else. By the time we all graduated, Mortimer Fours made up less than half the senior class. It was nice to know that my face had made an impression.

  And it continues to make an impression, because Ben's attention is already somewhere else, clapping shoulders with Kevin Park. Of course, because even if he doesn't remember me, Ben is still too perfect to be a complete jerk, he has the good grace to glance over his shoulder and give me an apologetic smile, which means I can't hate him as much as I would otherwise, because once Ben Hammersmith smiles at you, a bouquet of kittens and roses bursts to life in your insides and you can't stay mad.

  The second thing that has changed since school is, for better or worse, Chris 'Watt' Wattersford has gained about eighty pounds and—this might be the 'worse' part—most of it is muscle. He'd always been a big guy, even when we were fifteen, but now he'd block out the sun if he stepped in front of you. Felicity—a.k.a. 'Fee', a.k.a. my BFF, a.k.a. my human shield against all potential Mortimer asshattery tonight—told me Watt owns a chain of bodybuilding gyms with locations up and down the eastern seaboard and an advertising deal with the NFL. And clearly he is using his own persona to promote his product, because as I try to find anywhere else to look but at perfect Ben Hammersmith with his perfect smile and his utterly excusable reasons for not remembering that I sat next to him in Modern Western Civilizations for an entire fucking year, the next place my eyes land is on the brick wall of Watt's chest.

  "Luke Sanderson," he says with a grin that has haunted some of my weirder nightmares for the last one hundred and twenty months.

  It's amazing how quickly your body remembers old fight or flight responses.

  "Chris. How you been?" We're grown-ups now. I can make small talk.

  His face is the color of a spray-tanned tomato, and it glows when he smiles. "Call me Watt."

  "Sure," I say. "How have you been, Watt?" I glance back at the bar. The line is moving. Ben is ordering something. The bartender is grinning at him like they're best friends. Ben has that effect on people, even bartenders.

  I jump when the big hand comes down on my shoulder.

  "I'm real good." Watt squeezes and I can only assume he hasn't yet gotten full control of the death grip the government scientists gave him when they exploded his body into the Ur-Watt. I'm pretty sure I can feel my clavicles touch in the middle and I wince.

  "That's great." I don't turn around. Turning around will imply that I want to talk to Watt and, it turns out, ten years is not enough to wash away the memories of all the harassment, the quiet jabs, the stares and laughter from Watt and the rest of his football cronies as I passed them in the meal hall.

  "How you been, Luke?"

  "Fine."

  "I was real sorry to hear about your dad." Watt comes from old Texas cattle money. No amount of prep school and a presumably Ivy League education has ever fully succeeded in killing off his accent.

  "Thank you."

  We move forward. Kevin, even though he technically barged the line, is ordering a Manhattan. The bartender gives him a smile, but it is clearly not the best friends smile he gave Ben. Kevin was the editor of The Mort, the school newspaper, and also captain of the crew team. He was charming, back when we were all awkward, but he's no Ben.

  "You here with anyone?" Watt says.

  And there it is.

  Look, I know, from anyone else, this would be an innocuous question. A way to skip over ten years of small talk to get down to the brass tacks of 'did you ever find anyone who could tolerate you long enough to marry you?' My graduating class isn't thirty years old yet; lots of us aren't married. But why not cut to the chase so you can brag about your elopement in a yurt on top of a mountain in the Dakotas?

  Side note: I've heard this is how Gloria Sanchez-Pryce (I guess she's Gloria Sanchez-Pryce-Cumberland-Capello now. This is what Felicity told me anyway) got married. There's a YouTube video of it somewhere. Reportedly it made the rounds in the reunion Facebook group, but since I don't Facebook anymore because I value my privacy, I haven't actually seen it.

  In any case, Watt's question could be a leading one so he could tell me about how he and Mrs. Watt decided that instead of accepting wedding gifts, they'd rescued thirty retired sled dogs and found them loving fur-ever homes. But it's not, because it's Watt.

  He asks if I'm here with anyone, because what he wants to know is if I'm still gay. Because Chris Wattersford has always thought 'gay' is a punchline, not an identity.

  "No, I'm here by myself," I say as Kevin takes his drink and walks away, leaving me—finally—at the front of the line. The bartender smiles at me like I'm only halfway interesting.

  "What can I get you?" he says.

  "By yourself?" Watt says. He was never ever good at taking the hint, and it appears that has not changed either. "But I would have thought—"

  "Do you have any organic wine?" Sulfites mean I will break out in hives by tomorrow morning.

  The bartender frowns. "The Sauvignon Blanc is from New Zealand?" That's no guarantee of its organicness though, unless it was made by hobbits.

  "I'll have a vodka soda. Grey Goose." It's a waste of good vodka to just pour it on soda, but it will take me longer to drink, and it's the only brand I've been able to find that doesn't make the back of my throat itchy.

  "Vodka?" Watt says, loud enough that the people around us can hear if they care to listen. "I was sure you'd have ordered something, I don't know . . . fruitier."

  It seems that, thanks to all the cutbacks and th
e general trash fire status of our administration, the government scientists gave Watt new-bigger-better biceps, but they didn't give him better insults.

  The bartender hands me the glass. I toast Watt. "I don't mind fruity. Mango margaritas especially. You have to get the rim right though. Do you like a salty rim, Chris?"

  Watt's tomato face turns redder. I suck quietly on my straw. When he says nothing else, I walk away, feeling proud that I finally got the timing down on my comebacks. Ten years too late, but whatever.

  Because here is the last thing that has changed since high school. Yes, I am still a loser who would rather talk chord progressions than game tapes. I live alone. I am attracted to and like to sleep with other men. The fact I haven't actually gotten laid in almost a year is irrelevant. And yes, most alcohol makes me itchy. I can't eat kiwis, strawberries, pineapples, or farmed Atlantic salmon without my lips swelling up like an inflatable doll's.

  But ten years later, I no longer care what people like Watt think about any of that.

  Or that's what I tell myself. My teenage self is very close to the surface tonight.

  Later, as we're finishing our desserts and coffee, Headmaster Dixon rises.

  "Mortimer Men and Women," he says. The man must be almost a hundred years old. He's like the Dumbledore of New England prep schools, except I'm pretty sure at this point he's just staying alive out of spite and a fear that, when he no longer runs the place, the old traditions will die. I'm all for that. Ostracizing the gay kid who doesn't even know for sure he's gay yet is a tradition that should have gone out with trans fats and Bill Cosby Jell-o ads.

  The room is noisy, most people are several glasses of wine deep and busy chatting over their coffee and dessert. Headmaster Dixon clears his throat. When we were sixteen, that sound, along with his glare over the lectern, would have been enough to shut us all up, but now it's just a wisp on the cabernet-lubricated breeze.

  So of course, what happens next is Ben Hammersmith stands up, gently tapping the side of his glass with a spoon and smiling in a way that makes the assembled masses sigh and regret that they would ever be so discourteous as to not dote on the Headmaster's every word. Even Dixon nods at Ben beatifically, as if a worthy successor has finally emerged to take his place.

  "Mortimer Men and Women," Dixon says. "Every year, we welcome you back into the fold, because we hope that you view Mortimer as your home, no matter how far abroad you may roam."

  Sitting beside me, Fee snorts. "At least the showers drain in a reasonable amount of time at our house."

  I grin. In our sophomore year, the old plumbing of Benedict House, the girls' dorm, finally gave way, which caused the showers to back up, as they were wont to do when a hundred teenage girls all tried to shower within the space of an hour before heading to classes. It took most of the first semester for the construction crews to find all the places where the pipes collapsed and, as a result, two of the communal showers in Portsmouth House, the sophomore boys' dorm, were cordoned off with elaborate sheeting and panels erected to keep pubescent boys from ogling the girls in their bathrobes as they made their way in for showers in the morning.

  The arrival of girls in our dorm was far less interesting to me than it was to almost all my dorm-mates, and that should have been the first clue that there was something different about me. I was way more interested in the brightly colored bottles they carried with them, the ones that smelled like citrus and sunlight. I wanted to smell like that too. Or I did, until it turned out that their drug store brand shampoos made my neck and shoulders break out in welts. Nothing but the overpriced all-natural shampoos will work on my hyper-reactive skin. It smells like aloe and my grandmother's bathroom, but at least I can wear sleeveless shirts at the gym without worrying people that I have leprosy.

  Felicity nudges me with a discreet Dixon-esque cough and I come back to the present just in time to hear the Headmaster say "Of course, not all of you come back to us every year. It is inevitable that we lose some of our best and brightest every year." His eyes, crystal blue on the inside, rheumy yellow on the outside find mine in the crowd.

  Oh fuck. Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck.

  Fee’s hand slides into mine. "Too late to run."

  "It's never too late." The organizing committee tried to sit me up front at the table with the other guests of honor, but the seating chart had me sitting next to Mrs. Davenport, the head of the advancement department, and her perfume was so strong I started swelling before I had even unbuttoned my suit coat. The organizers let me sit at the back of the room with Felicity and her wife Riya without much protest. Despite Mrs. Davenport's insistence on the phone throughout the summer that my presence would be the crowning jewel of the event, maybe she knew how much I didn't want to be there. After all, it's not every day your father gets a building named after him on the campus of the school that gave him his start in life.

  May he rest in peace.

  Headmaster Dixon is still talking, reminding the gathered horde of my father's sterling accomplishments during his years as a Mortimer Man. Fee is squeezing my hand so hard I'm worried maybe she participated in the same drug trial as Watt, but I know she's just trying to keep me from bolting.

  "With us tonight is Adrian Sanderson's son Lucas, himself a Mortimer Man, class of 2009. During his time here, Lucas played in our performance orchestra and . . ." He pauses, looking down at his notes. I know he's scanning for more of my accomplishments. If anyone remembers that I used to referee for volleyball league every fall, it clearly hasn't made Dixon's cut.

  "Don't hurt yourself," I mutter between my teeth. Fee smothers a laugh.

  The Headmaster regroups. "Although the ground breaking on the new wing of the Adrian Sanderson library won't occur until next spring, we thought you might like to hear from someone who knew Adrian best."

  "Unfortunately, his latest wife wasn't available," Riya whispers behind me.

  So they get me instead.

  "Would you please welcome," Dixon says, raising a hand toward me. "Lucas Sanderson, Mortimer class of two thousand nine, to say a few words."

  There is polite applause as I stand and make my way to the front. Watt whistles as I go by. It's so sad that tormenting me is still entertaining to him. You'd think he'd find something new to make him happy by now.

  I shake Dixon's hand as I approach the podium. His eyes are unfocused, and I know he remembers me as well as Ben Hammersmith does.

  "Your father will be missed," he says.

  "Yes, but not his money," I say, but Dixon is already heading back to the table where Mrs. Davenport's perfume has undoubtedly tainted their entire meal.

  I stand in front of them and reach into the inside pocket of my suit jacket. Even from this distance, I can see Felicity's eyes widen and I smirk. Because only Fee knows that there are two speeches in my pocket. There is the one I wrote over the summer when I realized that Davenport wasn't going to take 'no' for an answer. It's the speech that will tell this room exactly who my father was, and what I think of the people here. But Felicity tricked me into reading it for her this morning and when I was done she said I absolutely could not read it, even if I had gone to the trouble of typing it out on neat white pages so I could be sure to get every word right.

  "I know your dad was an asshole, but you'll regret it if you go off on the whole room. It's not worth it," she said. I disagreed, but in the fourteen years that we've known each other, she has never steered me wrong.

  So, tucked next to it in my jacket, is a second speech, which I wrote by hand this morning on pieces of tiny hotel notepad paper, while Fee loomed over my shoulder. It's this speech I pull out at the lectern now.

  "Ladies and gentlemen. Mortimer Men and Women. My father would be so happy to see you all gathered here today."

  It's an awful speech. Vanilla platitudes about how much this school meant to him. And it did, I guess. So much so that when I came home at Thanksgiving that first year and told him I wasn't going back, he wouldn't accept my decision.


  "You're too adrift," he said. "You need direction. Mortimer will give you that direction."

  What he meant was that Mortimer would turn me into an attorney, or a doctor, or a congressman. When I graduated and went to Oberlin and spent the summer between listening to Dave Brubeck on loop, he decided I was officially lost at sea.

  But when I'm done talking, the room applauds politely. Watt dabs at the corner of his eye with a napkin while the other guys and their wives or dates at his table laugh at his antics. And it doesn't matter, because my work here is done. The knot between my shoulders, the one that I thought was there because the suit coat was too tight, vanishes. It turns out the damn thing fits fine after all. Walking back to my table feels like a days-long odyssey because people keep stopping me to shake my hand and tell me how sorry they are for my loss and how great the new library wing will be to memorialize my father.

  Felicity gives me a hug. "Way to not be an asshole, Luke," she says in my ear. I squeeze her hard, mostly because I can still feel eyes on my back and I'm not ready to turn around yet.

  I had planned to leave as soon as dinner is over, but Fee and Riya insist I stay and dance with them. It's the first time they've been out of the house since their baby daughter came home over a year ago, and they're determined to have a good time. And, despite it all, Felicity has been my best friend since our first day of Mortimer orientation, and I would feel shitty for bailing on them when they need some goofy fun more than I need to slink back to my hotel room and get on with my life.

  And it's not bad, really. I'm a terrible dancer, but so are they, and we give the YMCA our all, singing at the top of our lungs. And when the DJ starts The Macarena and half the dance floor groans and runs for the walls, Felicity and Riya get in front and behind me and we do our best raunchy interpretation and laugh our heads off.

  Riya goes to the bar to get us more drinks, and I start to make noises like I should be leaving, but Felicity wraps me up in her arms as the DJ plays Coldplay and holds me close until I start swaying with her.