Saints of Augustine (15 page)

“You're serious?”

“Yeah, I'm serious. I don't want to talk about it.”

Charlie opened his mouth, but then just let it hang there without speaking, staring at Sam. “Get out of here,” he said finally.

“What do you mean?” Sam asked, feeling his stomach tighten.

“I mean get out of here. I can't be your friend, Sam. I can't be friends with someone who's going to clam up about himself, who isn't going to
trust
me with what's going on in his life—especially not someone who already blew me off once.”

“It's not about trust,” Sam said.

“Whatever. That was a nice brand-new friendship. It was great for about two seconds. But it's over. Get out.”

“You're kicking me out?” Sam asked. “After dragging me all the way out here?”

“I didn't drag you anywhere. You wouldn't have come if you didn't want to. Just get out. You can sleep on the porch, and I'll drive you back in the morning, but I don't want you in here.”

“Charlie, that's not fair.”

“
Fair?
I think it's
totally
fair. It doesn't feel too good, though, does it?”

“You don't understand.”

“No, I don't. You know all about me, but I don't know a damn thing about you.”

Sam looked around the empty room, as if it were filled with people and he were searching for someone who was on his side. “Come on. Don't do this.”

“Out!” Charlie snapped. He pointed toward the glass door.

There was nothing to do but leave.

Charlie paced the floor
of the empty living room, furious.

What the hell was wrong with Sam? How hard could it be just to
talk
about what was going on? Granted, Charlie had clammed up around everybody in his life for the past year or so, but he would have been open with Sam, if they'd stayed friends. At least he thought so. He might not even be in the mess he was in with Derrick Harding if Sam hadn't trashed their friendship so abruptly. But then, he'd had that thought before, and he knew it led nowhere. He
heard the echo of Kate's words:
You have to take some responsibility for your actions. You have to
own
some of this.

What made him really mad, though, was that, out of the blue, he and Sam had had what felt like a solid chance of putting their friendship back together, and yet Sam couldn't even meet him halfway in their attempt to mend things. Charlie was angry at himself for opening up to someone who had turned into a sponge, soaking up other people's personal stuff and never giving anything back. That wasn't friendship. That was leeching. Maybe Sam, who was slated to be the new editor of the Cernak
Fountain
when school started up again, was turning into some kind of gonzo investigative reporter, collecting information. Charlie pictured an exposé about his life splashed across the front page of the first issue:
BASKETBALL STAR TURNS POTHEAD
,
FIGHTS WITH DRUNKEN FATHER
,
LOSES GIRL
.

He walked over to the sliding glass door at the back of the house and saw that Sam wasn't on the back porch. For a moment, Charlie wondered if he'd just left—if he'd hoofed it back through the palm
scrub and was standing out on A1A now with his thumb raised, trying to hitch a ride…somewhere, since he didn't want to go back home.

Why
didn't Sam want to go home? What had happened? It was eating at Charlie, and the very fact that he cared made him even angrier. Then he spotted a dark shape, far out on the beach: Sam, sitting cross-legged, facing the ocean.
To hell with him
, he thought. But that suddenly brought back to his mind the stupid game he'd come up with the night he was stoned on the basketball court. Smacking the ball against the wall, trying to hammer out every person in his life. The black eye he'd given himself. Maybe he wasn't quite the island he wanted to be.

After thinking about this for a few minutes, he grunted, grabbed the canvas tarp off the floor, and pulled open the glass door.

He felt the warm air move across the sweat that coated his arms and neck. The sand was an eerie shade of blue, almost neon, ribboned with wet streaks and stretching on for what seemed like miles. He followed the trail of Sam's footprints, and he cleared his throat to announce himself as he got
closer, but Sam just kept facing the distant, rolling whisper of the surf. He'd taken off his running shoes and socks. They were sitting beside him.

Charlie kicked off his own shoes and unfolded the tarp. It was stiff with dried paint, but it would be better than sitting on damp sand. He sank down onto half of it and smacked the other side. “Sit on this before you soak your jeans.”

“They're already soaked.”

“Well, sit on it, anyway.”

Sam didn't move.

“You know,” Charlie said, “you're not going to be able to stay here.”

“So you own the beach now?”

“No, I mean
here.
” He pointed at the sand. “This spot will be about six feet under water when the tide comes in.”

“Oh,” Sam said. “Duh. I know that.”

“Well, just sit on the damn tarp, would you? I know you're angry. I'm angry, too. Let's clear the air, and then we never have to talk again,
ever
. Okay?”

Sam looked over at the empty stretch of tarp. He looked up at Charlie. Then he lifted his body and
scooted like a crab several feet to the left until he was sitting on the tarp. He dusted his hands together and refolded his arms over his knees, staring back out at the Atlantic. “So clear the air.”

Charlie just breathed for several moments, trying to control his anger. “I really need you to tell me one thing. Just one thing.”

“What,” Sam said flatly.

“Why did you stop being my friend?”

“You really want to know?”

“I'm
telling
you I want to know.”

“Because of Chris Kovan.”

Charlie's mind drew a blank. “Who's Chris Kovan?”

“He used to go to Cernak,” Sam said, still staring forward. “He moved to New Mexico last year.”

Tall and loud, Charlie remembered. Used to work in the school store. “The gay guy?”

He heard the air rush out of Sam's mouth. “Yeah. The gay guy. Nicely put, only that wasn't what you called him when he was still living here.”

“What did I call him?”

“A fag.”

“Well, so what? Wait a minute…were you
friends with that guy, or something? I never saw you hang out together.”

“We didn't. I hardly knew him. Neither did you. We just saw him sitting in the commons one day, and you said, ‘That guy's such a fag.'”

“What's that got to do with us?”

Sam's bare feet were sticking out beyond the end of the tarp. He gouged his heels into the wet sand. “I didn't want to
hear
it, okay? It
offended
me.”

“Well…” Charlie's mind jumped from thought to thought, wanting to say the right thing. “It's not like I'm a racist or anything.”

“I'm gay,” Sam said suddenly.

“No, you're not.”

“What do you mean, no, I'm not?”

The response had just fallen out of Charlie's mouth. It seemed impossible that Sam was gay. He didn't talk gay. He didn't
act
gay.

“I know what I am. I know what I like. I could lie to you and say I'm confused, or bi, or whatever, but I'm not confused. I'm gay. I've never said that to another living person, but there it is. And it's the truth.”

“Just slow down. I told you I've been smoking
pot, okay. But you don't have to try to one-up me with this gay thing.”

“See how good I am at hiding it?” Sam said, turning to look at him. “You had no idea. The day you made that comment about Chris Kovan, I think I even made some comment back. Something like ‘Yeah, he's a real homo.' I shouldn't have, but I did, because I didn't want you or anyone else to know what I was. But it told me how you feel about gay people.”

“So you're mad at me for saying that?” Charlie said, digging his own feet into the sand. “You'd never said anything about it before, so how was I supposed to know? I made a crack, I said a dumb thing. Okay. But it's not like you were a black guy and I said something racist to your face.”

“No, but what if I were a black guy who looked white? You could have easily said something. And that would have pissed me off, too.”

“This is like science fiction,” Charlie said. “I mean, what if I make a crack about alligators around some guy on the basketball team, and then he unzips his human suit and he's really an alligator? Is that my
fault? I mean, how am I supposed to know something that's a total secret from the world?”

“I don't know,” Sam said, looking down at his hands clasped together over his knees.

“So you ended our friendship over
that
? Without even telling me what I'd done wrong?”

“No, that was just part of it,” Sam said. “There's more.” He hesitated. He looked at Charlie, then looked away again. Instead of telling him what the ‘more' was, he said, “I feel like a total freak around my family now. And something awful happened tonight. That's the only reason I stopped when I saw you. I was just really upset about something.”

“You obviously want to tell me about it.”

“You don't want to hear it.”

“Don't tell me what I don't want to hear,” Charlie snapped. “That's what you did the last time. Or you
assumed
it, without even giving me the chance to react. I want to hear!”

“My mom and dad are split up. Did you know that? My dad's living up in Ponte Vedra Beach with this guy, David. They're a couple. Like, a
couple
. And my mom isn't too happy about it, as you might
imagine. She's got this awful boyfriend, Teddy, who's practically moved into our house, and he's always making these homophobic remarks, and the other day she asked me point-blank if I was gay, and I told her no. I lied to her face.”

“Wait a minute,” Charlie said, trying to keep up. “You're telling me your
dad's
gay?”

“Yeah. Isn't that a riot? Can't you just hear the talk? Sam Findley's dad's a homo, and he's turned Sam into one, too. There's all kinds of twisted stuff going on over at the Findley house.”

“Whoa,” Charlie said. “Why don't you stop putting words in everybody's mouth and just tell me what happened? I mean, tonight. What happened tonight that had you so freaked out?”

“I'm such a dumbass,” Sam said, and rubbed a hand against his eyes.

“It's all right.”

“It's not all right! I met this great guy a couple of weeks ago, and we went out on a date tonight. Can you imagine that? Me, on a date? I've never been on a date with anyone in my whole life. And Justin—this guy—he seemed to really like me. And so—this
is going to totally gross you out…”

“Shut up,” Charlie said. “Just tell me.”

“We were kind of…making out in his car, in my driveway. And my mom saw us.”

“Wow. She saw you? With this guy? Like that?” Charlie's own problems suddenly seemed a little less earth-shattering compared to all of this. But he made himself say, “It's not the end of the world, Sam.”

“I flipped out!” Sam cried. “I didn't want her to see us, and I didn't even want to
look
at Justin, so I shoved him, and practically fell out of his car, trying to get away from them both. I just
ran
. How pathetic is that? Why would he ever want to talk to me again? He's got to think I'm the biggest freak in the universe. And my mom's probably thrown all my stuff out into the front yard by now.”

“You know,” Charlie said, “you've got a real bad habit of thinking you know everything that's in other people's heads. It's probably not as bad as you think.”

“It's worse,” Sam said. He sniffed and lifted his head. He stared out at the water. “Do you have any idea what it's like, screwing up so bad that your
whole life just feels ruined?”

Charlie sat quietly for a moment. He pinched the front of his T-shirt and snapped it away from his chest, stirring the warm air. He said, “Let's walk.”

 

They carried their shoes. Charlie carried the tarp, thrown over one shoulder. They walked out as far as they could, until the coastline was nothing but a string of tiny, scattered house lights and their feet were splashing through the water; then they followed the waterline.

He wanted to tell Sam everything now. He talked about his mom, her illness, how slowly she'd gotten sick, and how quickly she'd slid downhill. He didn't cry as he spoke, and he realized how good it felt just to be saying it out loud: His mom was gone, she was never coming back, and it made him sad every day of his life.

“You know,” Sam said, “you should just be up front with your dad. Tell him you want to talk about her. Tell him you want to go out to the cemetery.”

“I know I should. But he'll get so upset. And he'll probably start drinking even more.”

“So he gets upset. As far as the drinking goes, that's
got to be dealt with anyway. He should get some help. But it's normal to be upset when someone dies, right?

“Yeah.”

“So you have to talk to him. He can't read your mind.”

“Thankfully.”

“I can't read it either.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning, you still haven't told me what really happened to your car.”

“Well, that's a whole nother story….”

Then he told Sam about Derrick Harding and the money he owed him. When he said the amount, Sam's jaw dropped.

“How do you smoke five hundred dollars' worth of pot?”

“Like this,” Charlie said. He held two fingers up to his lips and sucked in air. “It wasn't that hard.”

He told Sam why he was in the electronics store that afternoon trying to return his stereo. And about the envelope he'd stuffed under Derrick's door. Then he told him about Derrick and Wade coming over to the house and smashing up his car.

“They did that
tonight
?”

“Yeah. I tried to stop them, but they tore out of there before I could.”

“Wait—what color car does Derrick drive?”

“Silver. An Eclipse. But I've already ruled out retaliation, if that's what you're thinking.”

“We saw them! Justin and I saw them leaving the neighborhood. They must have been doing sixty.”

“Sounds like them.”

“You should call the police. I could be a witness to their getaway!”

“Hello? I don't
think
that cop got my license plate tonight, but what if he did? The police would be really interested in getting their hands on me and Derrick both. Plus, if they got hold of him and worked him over, he'd squeal about me being a regular customer. Speaking of which—” He stopped, dug the Baggie out of his pocket, and opened it. He turned it over, and the ocean breeze scattered it over the sand.

“That was pot?”

“That was pot.”

“There are going to be some happy seagulls in the morning,” Sam said. “You have this whole gang
ster life I didn't even know about.”

“Well, what about you? You have this whole…gay life.”