Closeted | Boy x Boy

~Vier~

Rock, paper, scissors, sh-

"Abe!" Mr. Summers barked, slamming his book shut.

I looked up from a jolt from my hands, and felt Marley bash her rock down on my scissors. I waved my hand briefly to try and get rid of the pain, glaring at her. "Ouch," I said. She stuck out her tongue.

Mr. Summers sighed. "Are you two finished? I would like to continue this, or would you like to come teach my class? Huh? You want to go through four years of college just to be ignored by a bunch of bratty teenagers? No? Didn't think so."

I rolled my eyes and turned back around in my seat so that I was facing the front of the room. We were nearing the end of the trimester, which meant we needed an end-of-the semester project to do for English. Mr. Summer was trying to tell us about it, before he decided to interrupt his own class by disrupting our game of rock-paper-scissors.

I glanced over at Marley, who made a gagging motion with her finger. I snickered behind my hand. I heard a sharp inhale behind me, and turned my head slightly. Jay was messing with his pencil, tapping the eraser against his desk and staring blankly at the polished wood. He blew a strand of hair away from his face, and looked up at me, meeting my green eyes with his own steely gray gaze. I felt my cheeks grow hot, and I turned back around with a scoff. I still didn't like him. 

"I hate these projects as much as you guys do, probably even more, since I have to grade all of your shitty reports on this bs." Mr. Summers shuffled the stack of papers in his hand. "This trimester our project revolves around poetry. You need to go to the library or to a bookstore or something and find a book on poetry over two hundred pages long. Then you can go through each poem, find seven that stick out to you, and right a five sentence paragraph on what you think each of those poems mean. And yes, you will have partners." Mr. Summers swept the room with his tired gaze. "I don't want any of you finding children's book or nursery rhymes. A rhyme isn't a poem. The books you find must not be in the children's section, or even in the junior readers. Poems are some of the simplest things to read, and because they're so hard to understand is why we're doing this project. You're being graded on effort, there are technically no wrong answers, just answers without any depth behind them."

I leaned my head on my hand, bored. I didn't really understand the project any better, but I definitely understood why Mr. Summers was an English teacher. He could go on and on about details, and sometimes it was nice to hear in the background, but right now I was still upset about what had happened last week with Jay and the lunch table. Now as long as I got lunch as one of the first people I could make it to the table in time to sit with my friends, and even though most of them still talked to me and included me in the conversations, they still treated Jay like some sort of foreign prince. The worst part about it was that Jay was actually interesting, and he had a lot to talk about, like how he came out in a really homophobic neighborhood and had to grow up hearing about how homophobic their past was. He knew a lot of about politics, and talked about European leaders in a way that made it actually seemed interesting. I liked to close my eyes, pretend it wasn't Jay talking, and just enjoy the thick German accent rambling a couple seats down from me. 

He was still annoyingly attractive, and annoyingly interesting, and annoyingly muscular. His legs were like two tree trunks, and his chest was like the hood of a car, and his body was toned and dark. I understood why the girls liked him, but hated it at the same time. Marley was getting fed up with my constant complaining, but I couldn't help it. It felt like everyone but her would choose Jay, the person they had known for a week, over the guy that had known for more than a few years. Just because we weren't best friends didn't make Jay better than me. He wasn't. Was he?

Marley was giving me what she called "The Jay Look", because everytime she thought I was thinking about him she would give me a look of annoyed disbelief, and just slowly shake her head at me. She was giving me it right now, her eyebrow arched disapprovingly. I didn't know why she kept insisting there was something more to why I didn't like Jay. I wasn't gay- she knew that. She knew that. 

"Abe-" Mr. Summers snapped his fingers. "Can you tell the class what I was just talking about?"

A couple people snickered. I was tempted to give a sarcastic answer to make them laugh, but Mr. Summers didn't look like he was in the mood for anymore of my bullshit, so I held my tongue. "Poetry. Project is on poetry, you get your partner, yada, yada, yada," I said. Marley laughed behind her hand. I was glad at least she found it funny.

Mr. Summers nodded stiffly. "Yes, yes that's correct. So, do you know who your partner is?"

I glanced sideways at Marley.

"No, Abe, Miss Freed is not your partner. I've been reading the names off for the past five minutes, but you've been gawking at your shoes for the past ten. Can anyone please tell our distracted friend here who is partner is for the poetry project?"

Nobody spoke up.

Marley looked at me seriously, then jerked her head backwards. Jay tapped me on the shoulder. I turned, dumbfounded, and looked at the boy. "Seriously?" I asked, blinking rapidly.

Jay smirked at me, his dark lips turning upwards into a sly grin. "Aren't you lucky," he said teasingly, resting his chin on his hand as he stared at me. I met his gaze defiantly at first, and then like a beaten dog I felt my ears droop and my tail tuck between my legs in defeat, and I turned back around, slouching in my seat. I was not going to have fun.