“You gotta stop buying these, man,” Cody said one afternoon when Nate brought him a U.S. News & World Report with AIDS in bright-red letters across the cover. Cody sat on his couch, eyeing the magazine on the coffee table as if it were a venomous snake that might strike at any time.
“We’ll bury it in the bottom of the trash after we read it,” Nate said, tossing his jacket aside and sitting down next to him.
“That’s not what I mean. Eventually, somebody’s gonna notice that you buy every magazine about fags and AIDS. Somebody’s gonna put it together.”
“I make sure I go to different cashiers every time, and if they ask, I tell them it’s for a school report.” Nate reached out and took Cody’s hand. “And we’re not ‘fags.’ Don’t say it that way. That’s like using the n-word. We’re gay, that’s all. Or homosexual, if you like that better. But don’t use their words against us.”
Cody only shrugged, and Nate tried not to be frustrated. It wasn’t that Cody actually thought they were doing anything wrong, but after hearing the word so many times, he’d somehow grown used to it. It was almost as if by refusing to let something as small as a word bother him, he might prove he was stronger than the town thought. At the very least, he could prove that he was above the rumors.
Nate understood, on some level, but he couldn’t quite subscribe to the same mind-set, no matter how hard he tried. He grew hyperaware of every time the word “fag” was used at school.
It was a lot.
And more and more often, it was directed at him.
The stack of college applications in Nate’s desk drawer remained blank. There wasn’t much he could do about school until he knew where they were going. Maybe he’d be stuck at a community college instead of a university, but he was okay with that. When his dad asked, Nate flat-out lied and told him he’d applied.
He’d have to deal with the truth eventually, but he wanted to have more answers first.
On February fourth, Liberace died. Nate was sure most of the people at school had never even listened to his music, but suddenly, Nate felt the stares of the other students more often. He saw them ducking their heads to whisper as he and Cody passed. A few days later, somebody scrawled the word “fag” across his locker door with a thick, black marker.
“We need to cool it,” Cody told him that afternoon as Nate drove him to the Tomahawk after school.
It was one of those days where the sun was shining and the sky was bluer than it had ever been in Texas, but the steady wind was cold enough to numb any exposed flesh. Nate kept one hand on the steering wheel and held the stiff fingers of his other hand in front of the car’s vent, waiting for the heat to come up to temperature. “Cool what?”
“This. Us. Always being together.”
“What, we’re supposed to stop being friends just because they don’t like it?”
Cody sighed, leaning his head against the passenger window, rubbing the fingers of his right hand together and bouncing his knee in a way that told Nate he was dying for a cigarette but trying to fight it. “We’re more than that, aren’t we?”
“You know we are. Why? Is this your way of breaking up with me?”
Cody’s head jerked Nate’s direction. “Breaking up? You make it sound like we’re going steady or something.”
Nate shrugged and gave up on the heat in order to use both hands on the wheel as they turned onto Main Street. “I don’t know. You have another name for what we’ve been doing?”
Cody almost smiled, turning away to look out the window. “Guess I just hadn’t thought of it that way.”
“So if you’re not breaking up with me, then what? What’re you worried about?”
Cody pulled the pack of cigarettes from his pocket, but didn’t move to shake one loose. “Look, I’m not saying we should actually stop seeing each other. I’m just saying, we stop letting them see it, that’s all.”
“As far as they know, we drive to and from school together, and we sit next to each other in social studies. That’s it. We’re not doing anything wrong.”
Cody didn’t argue. He gave up and lit a cigarette instead.
Valentine’s Day fell on a Saturday. It was also the day of the high school girl-ask-boy dance, and the day before Nate’s birthday. He spent the entire week leading up to the dance trying to avoid any girl who might ask him. Luckily, that list seemed to have decreased significantly since fall. Only Stacy Miller approached him, and Nate lied and said he was grounded for the weekend.
He didn’t tell Cody about his birthday, either, only because he knew Cody would feel bad about not getting him a gift. Besides, what Nate wanted most couldn’t be bought in a store.