Don't Judge a Book by Its Cover (3 page)

“Thanks, dude,” he said. “If you hadn’t been here we’d never have gotten this done.” And my life was now complete. I had been hugged and complimented by a god among men. As fast as the hug had happened, Bill was racing off to his car. He said he had to get home or his dad would be super mad. I watched him run across the parking lot. It really was like watching a gazelle lope across the African plains. The man was poetry in motion, the way his beautifully muscled body moved. All too quickly it was over as he hopped into an old car. I heard the car struggle to start, and then he was driving away.

“Crap!” I said.
I should have asked him for a ride.
No. He was in a hurry. He wouldn’t want to slow things down by giving me a ride. And besides, I would be way outside my high school caste by thinking I could ride in the same conveyance as a god among men. My family lived in town, more or less. It wasn’t really
in
town but since there wasn’t much town it sort of qualified. We were more like town-adjacent. Our house was inside the town limits but only just barely. And it was on the far side of town at that.

With no alternative, I set off on the walk home. I knew it would take me about an hour to get home by walking, but I didn’t know of any alternative, so walk I did. That afternoon I took a much-earned nap, and that night I jerked off with a whole fresh new set of images of my hunk in motion. Yes, I thought of him as my hunk even though I had no claim to him other than in my mind. But my mind was a powerful place—I just didn’t realize the extent of it yet.

T
HE
following week was much like any other at school. Every morning started too early. In every gym class some guy picked on me or mocked me for something I had inadvertently done or not done. Every violation of the jock handbook was viewed as a crime against nature. They couldn’t seem to believe that I had a penis and didn’t know about certain things. Over the years I had learned to endure, not happily, but to endure.

I saw Bill once during the week, not to speak and certainly not for a conversation. Our worlds were different. We might live in the same town and go to the same school and take some of the same classes, but we were like different planets in different orbits of the same sun. You could occasionally observe some of the other planets, as we all orbited the sun, but that was about it. So it was with me and Bill. A glimpse here and there was the rule.

While it was rare for me to stay after school, on Thursday night I stayed to work on something in the computer lab. I had a computer at home that could do anything the school computers could, but I had told the lab coordinator that I would help get something installed and set up on the school machines.

I knew that I would be late getting out that day, and for the first time in recorded history my mother had let me drive to school. I was pleased beyond belief, even though I knew she had probably done it simply to avoid having to go back out in the dark and cold to pick me up. I didn’t care—I had the car!

My week had been busy, so I hadn’t paid much attention to anything happening more than two feet in front of me. So it came as a bit of a surprise to me to walk outside the school building at seven o’clock that night and find snow on the ground. Not just a little dusting of snow. No! Real snow. Big snow. Lots of snow. Like nearly a foot of snow.
When did this happen?
Actually, since it was snowing like mad, it wasn’t over—it was still happening. Damn! It was a good thing that I wasn’t put off by driving in snow. Growing up where I did it was sort of a fact of life. You live in the upper northeast and you have to learn how to drive on snow and on hills—sometimes both at the same time. So I wasn’t scared, just surprised. Really, really surprised.

Turning my coat collar up to protect my neck from the snow and wind, I started to trudge my way to the student parking lot. Of course, the faculty parking lot was right outside the door, but the student lot was around the corner and down the hill—the equivalent of over the river and through the woods. And it felt like every step somehow dumped more snow into my sneakers. If I’d known we were gonna have snow I might have worn boots. No, actually, I wouldn’t. Who was I kidding? Wearing boots just wasn’t cool. And teenagers majored in cool.

When I finally reached my car there was—surprise, surprise!—a foot of snow on my car, just like there was on the ground. Imagine that! I got the car started up to try to warm up a little (and make sure the thing would start) and found a snowbrush in the back end so I could get the windows cleaned off. This wasn’t a light, fluffy snow—no, it was a wet, heavy snow, and moving it off my car took a lot of effort.

As I was brushing off the last window, I heard something I couldn’t quite place. It sounded like a clicking sound. I looked around, because I thought I was alone. Aside from the teacher’s car in the upper parking lot, I thought I was the last one out for the night. And then I spotted another car and realized that someone else was there late as well. With so much snow I couldn’t tell who it was and didn’t really care. If I hadn’t heard the clicking sound I wouldn’t have paid any attention. What the hell was that sound, anyway?

While I was looking around, a person got out of the other car and swore, “Damn!” I thought I recognized that voice. If I hadn’t, I would have kept on with what I was doing, gotten in my car, and taken off. But I recognized the voice because I had heard the same voice say the same word a week ago on Saturday morning—when we were unloading the truck from hell. It was Bill the jock.

I tossed my snow brush back into the back of my mother’s car, for the first time thanking God that she drove an old, heavy SUV, and drove across the parking lot to the other car to see if there was anything I could do to help. I knew even less about auto mechanics than I did about sports, so I had no idea what I was going to do to help. Maybe I could stand on the sidelines and cheer or something. No, probably not, but it was a good thought.

I stopped my mother’s car right by Bill’s when I saw him simply standing there in the snow—without a coat! Was the man insane? He was gonna freeze to death, and he was entirely too pretty to allow that to happen. Rolling down my window, I asked, “Hey, Bill. You got car trouble?”

“Yes! Damned thing won’t start, and I don’t know anything about fixing cars. Do you?”

“No. Sorry.” Thinking quickly, I asked, “Can I give you a ride home? Where do you live?”

He told me roughly where he lived, and I sighed—it wasn’t close. His place was a good ten miles out of town and not exactly just off a major thruway. No, we were back to the over the river and through the woods idea, and then some. He lived way back in the hills, and this wasn’t a Robert Frost beautiful hillside on a snowy eve—well, actually it was, but there was no poetry involved tonight.

So I was really conflicted. I wanted to have Bill owe me a favor, and I really wanted to spend some serious time in the same car with him, but I really didn’t relish the thought of driving way back into the hills on a night that was cold, windy, and treacherous, with an indeterminate amount of snow still to come. But I couldn’t just drive away and leave him. “Get in. I’ll drive you,” I said, quietly hoping that I didn’t drive off the road and end up in a snowbank to be lost until spring.

“No,” he said, “I can’t ask you to do that on a night like this. It’s too far. I’ll walk.”

“The hell you will!” I said, a little more aggressively than I had intended. “Get in the damned car. You’re not gonna walk ten miles in this stuff! You wouldn’t get home until spring! Get in!”

“I can’t ask you to do that,” he tried again.

“You’re not asking me—I volunteered. But if you don’t get in here now I’m rescinding the offer.”

He smiled a hint of his radiant smile, grabbed a backpack from the backseat of his old car, and walked around to get into mine. By now I’d had the heat running for several minutes so it was nice and warm inside. As he jumped in and closed his door he said, “Oh, nice. I was about to freeze my nuts off out there.”

“Well, we can’t have that happen. No guy wants to lose his nuts—we’re too attached to the little ones.”

The heat of the car was causing the snow that had accumulated in Bill’s beautiful black hair to melt. Reaching around into the backseat, I found an old towel that I knew my mother usually kept in the car for just such occasions. I handed the towel to him and said, “Dry yourself off—my mother will be pissed if you leave a big puddle on her seat.”

“Thanks,” he said. “Can’t believe that tonight of all nights this had to happen. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you were here and you’re willing to do this! This is way above and beyond the call of friendship.”

So he thought of us as friends? Oh my! Be still my heart. Those few words alone made this entire venture worthwhile.

“Glad I could help.”

I navigated out of the student parking lot, up the little incline to the side road that ran by the school, and noticed that the road hadn’t been plowed. “Plows haven’t been through yet,” he noted.

“Did you know this was coming?” I asked. “Caught me totally off guard. I’ve been so busy this week I haven’t paid any attention to much beyond school and homework.”

“No, I missed this one totally. What are you doing here so late, anyway?” he asked, which was a logical question.

“I was helping install some updates in the computer lab. It took longer than I expected.”

From the school road, I turned onto the usually busy main route that ran from the school past a couple of churches, the local county fairgrounds, another school, and a couple of car dealerships. Toss in a couple of gas stations and you’ve got the entire town. Usually there would be a lot of traffic on the road with people coming home from work or out to run some errand, but tonight the road was just about deserted—and unplowed. Once again I felt grateful to my dad for holding onto this SUV when he got a new one. A smaller car would have had some serious trouble navigating unplowed roads tonight.

As we approached the one traffic light in town it turned red. It just seemed stupid to sit there when there wasn’t another car in sight, but I did because I was a good boy and was convinced that the second I turned left on a red light someone would be right there to see me and tell my mom—or worse, my dad. Then I’d never get to drive the car again.

When the light turned green I made the left and crossed a rickety old bridge—okay, it wasn’t rickety but it was definitely old. On the other side of the river, which tonight was invisible in the blizzard outside, I started up a big hill that led out of town toward Bill’s place. This road was also unplowed, and except for tire tracks from a couple of cars that had passed this way earlier, it was a mess. “Where the hell is the road crew tonight?” I asked aloud.

Bill saw the terrible road conditions and said once again, “Hey, man, these roads are a mess. I really can’t ask you to do this. This is too much.”

I might have been a basic student who spent his years in high school trying to blend into the woodwork, to be invisible, but I was also a bit ballsy—I just kept it under wraps most of the time at school. But this seemed a good time to haul out my ballsiness. “Bill, shut up,” I simply said. “You can’t walk home in this stuff! I’m a good driver.” I couldn’t resist saying with a smile, “But you’re gonna owe me big time for this.” I was keeping my hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road so I didn’t look to see how he reacted to that last statement. I hoped I hadn’t overstepped some bro-code line with that one, even though it was exactly how I felt.

He was quiet for a moment as I skillfully navigated up and over a big hill that led east out of town. “Thanks, man,” he said. “I do owe you one. Two, actually, since you helped me so much last Saturday with that damned truck.”

“Those girls were close to useless, weren’t they?” I said, again hoping I hadn’t overstepped a line. There were so many lines that other guys knew about but I hadn’t been told about, and I spent my entire life afraid I was violating some guy code.

I guess that I was doing okay, because I heard Bill laugh. “Yeah, they were.”

About another mile down the road, which was literally down the road since the hill we had gone up had to come back down, I slowed when I spotted flashing lights in the middle of the road. Proceeding slowly, we noticed that it was a police car with a cop standing in the road, waving two flashlights to get us to stop.

Rolling down my window I asked, “What’s happening?”

“Sorry, guys, but the road’s closed. Two plows and a couple of tractor-trailers all came together in a bad wreck. No one’s getting through here for some time tonight.” The cop had flagged us down at a crossroads. “You can go left, right, or you can head back, but no one’s getting through ahead tonight.”

I looked over at my passenger and asked, “Is there another way to your house?” I knew that the road to the right might work but would easily add twenty miles to the drive, and over some nasty back hill roads.

“Yeah, but you’re gonna let me out here,” he said, unbuckling his seatbelt.

“And where do you think you’re going?” I asked, knowing full well that we were back to the “I’m independent and don’t want to put any of my friends to any trouble” guy.