"Thank you for joining us, Mr. Bernal," Coach Martel said as everybody took their seats.
"Please, call me Gabriel." That was my dad's attempt at sounding like a man of the people, even though there was no doubt that half of the town still couldn't look at him without hiding their contempt.
"Gabriel, then. Call me Joe."
Coach put one hand on top of the other on his desk. He also doubled as the Lit teacher, which seemed a useful combination when it came to him coming up with creative ways to call us lazy and unmotivated at practice. Next to him was Assistant Coach Florian Gauthier, and finally there was dad and I. We got the call on Saturday morning after the game, and for the first time since memory dad had dropped everything work related, dashed across town and here he was. I hadn't been told what the topic of conversation was, so I was just as confused and stressed out.
Had they found me out somehow? Was it when Dean had put me under the shower spray that maybe they saw my clothes cling in a weird way? Did they see boobs somehow? Should I have put socks down my underwear all the while?
What would happen to dad when this came out?
"Do you know why I've called you in today?" Coach asked.
Dad took such a long time to react that it didn't go unnoticed. Finally said, "Ah, I don't, really. Please enlighten me."
His accent was getting thicker, which was the only sign he had of showing distress. When he was well and truly upset he switched all the way to Spanish, because jumbled up feelings were a lot easier to express in our mother tongue. It made me even more nervous to see how close he was to that point already.
The two coaches looked at each other with a hefty dose of sympathy. To my surprise it was Gauthier who spoke.
"We think your son has something like PTSD."
Both my dad and I remained immobile.
My head raced through the events of the past few days, wondering what gave that away. Hoping that somehow the other, bigger secret was still safe.
I felt dad deflate just a fraction next to me. "What do you mean?" he asked.
"Last Friday on the return from the game, your son here seemed to have very vivid, unpleasant nightmares," Coach Martel said, motioning a hand toward me. "It took quite a few of us to calm him down."
Oh. Yeah. That was what.
I tucked my chin against my chest and looked down at my hands. I could feel my dad's eyes bore two holes into my skull, willing me to look up so that he could extricate the full story through just his glare alone. I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of that kinda drama in front of the coaches. It was sure to not go well.
"It may not exactly be PTSD," Gauthier continued. "However he shows similar symptoms. Fretful sleep, panic attacks and a definite violent streak."
I drew in a sharp breath and looked up. Everybody was awfully serene in this room, as though they expected me to blow up at any given second. The problem was that he was right. I'd been diagnosed years ago, and it had become manageable enough that it stopped getting in the way of just living. To be blatantly talked about in these terms in my face was still painful, though. I wanted to lash out, deny it, tell them they were wrong and that they were overreacting. That I was normal.
But I wasn't. And I also wasn't going to show them just how fucked up I was on the inside. So I remained sitting still, my hands clasped on my lap and hoping that outside I seemed just as calm as they were.
I didn't know what dad's thought process was, but he surprised every one of us by saying, "I know that. Has he caused trouble for you and the team?"
I looked at him and he now conveniently avoided my eyes.
Coach Martel cleared his throat. "Well, no. I do have to report it to the school board, just in case. And I'm not going to lie, but we'll have to keep a closer eye on him now that we know this."
I sunk farther into my seat. The one perk of being new to a school where nobody knew my past was officially over with this revelation. Now everybody was going to know that I was cuckoo banana pants. That always tended to put me at a distance from everybody. Nobody wanted to deal with complicated people, people whose eyes glazed over with memories that felt more real than what was going on around them.
"We would have appreciated it if you'd told us right off the bat," Coach Martel admonished dad, who scratched his head in return.
"To be honest I was under the impression from the previous therapist that my kid here was well on the way to recovery." He gave me a look. The kind that said we need to talk. "I didn't know he had relapsed."
I hoped my look conveyed that I didn't.
"I can offer my services as counsellor," Gauthier said, leaning forward. "I'm not precisely a certified therapist, but I'm somewhat versed in PTSD as a nurse."
Dad nodded. "Thank you."
I wanted to scream no, thank you. Good intentions or not, Gauthier was a creep who creeped me out with a type of creepiness that I couldn't explain without sounding foolish.
"Will that be all?" dad asked, standing up and brushing himself off like this had been no biggie. Technically, knowing how much worse this conversation could've been, it really hadn't been.
I could tell Coach was expecting more confrontation and the development threw him for a loop. He stood up and shook dad's hand. "This is it. For now," he added, and the meaning of it was clear as day.
I was going to be under scrutiny now. Which meant I had to make sure to stay on my best behavior. As a boy. And that meant no kissing Dean and giving myself away, no matter how much I wanted to. No matter that he'd offered his kissing services.
We walked out of the cramped office and I felt like my body was tightly wound. Dad seemed to have the same problem, but probably for different reasons.
This was confirmed when, as we walked down the halls of the empty school, he said, "Why didn't you tell me?"
It took me a while to figure he was not asking me about that moment in the shower stall when Dean had made the most beautiful, unexpected confession ever.
I shrugged and wiped my face clean of any possible giveaways. "I didn't think much of it, to be honest. It must have been a bigger deal to them than it was to me."
He sighed. "I wish you'd told me, anyway."
My first reflex was to say that it wasn't like we ever talked, anyway. But that had been changing lately, since he admitted the reason why we were in the middle of freaking Alberta. The fact that we were partners in the crime of deceiving an entire town with my supposed gender, and that I know shared just a little bit of the burden he had, meant that I couldn't just be a dick like I was used to.
I opted for a happy middle and said, "Well, I'm okay, papá. You don't need to worry about me."
We walked out of the school by the front doors, expecting a long, awkward walk home as we both stewed over the mess our lives were, but that was going to have to wait for another time. Because a group of people outside blocked our way.
To my surprise it was my friends.
"How was it?" Lena Lee asked from somewhere under the many layers of clothes she wore. Even though the roads were clear and there was no snow in sight, the cold was punishing.
I asked all of them. "Were you waiting for me?"
Pace flapped his arms in the winter clothes version of a shrug. "Well, coach called you and your dad out. We got worried."
My traitorous eyes went to Dean at the back. He was kicking at the same spot on the pavement and pretended I wasn't even there.
Weirdo.
"How did you know we were here?" dad asked, and I thought it was an accurate question.
Hunter replied, "My dad was there while you guys were negotiating union stuff. He told me."
That jarred my memory and I looked at the both of them. "I thought you'd fired Hunter's dad and others."
Dad just said, "I'm negotiating a rehire."
How...?
But that was a question for when we got home.
"Are you still in the team, then?" Brian asked. I tore my eyes away from dad and looked at each of them.
"Wait, what?" I asked.
"It seemed serious," Brian added.
"No one every gets called to the coaches' office unless it's something really bad," said Hunter. "We were wondering if you touched someone inappropriately or something — ouch!"
The last portion was elicited by Brian's elbow. I didn't miss how Dean finally looked up at the conjecture that I'd been called in for something like that, and I thought of the time I spent with my limbs wrapped all around him as I came down form the panic attack.
"No!" I raised my palms up and shook them. "No, I just have PTSD, is all."
They all looked at me, including my dad.
Nobody said a word for what felt like forever. At the end I sighed.
"Listen, since you've all seen me having an episode already, and the fact of the matter is that I might have another one sooner or later..." I drew in a deep breath and said, "You might as well know that the reason my family left Venezuela is because I saw my mom get murdered in front of my eyes while I was being kidnapped for ransom."
Six pairs of eyes widened in equal, comical measure.
Even though I sounded cool as a cucumber, as though it was someone else's story what I'd just shared, my heart clenched and a thick lump settled in my throat.
I did the flappy shrug thing and said, "So there you have it, I'm damaged goods and it occasionally shows. If this makes me too weird for you, fine. If you run away and tell the whole town, I don't care. I'm done pretending I'm normal and if that keeps driving everybody away, I guess I'm just going to keep being by myself forever. That seems to have worked so far."
I gave a weird laugh, as if to clear away the dark quality of my words. As if to show I was tough and didn't care what anybody thought. As if I didn't hurt for all the times I tried to make friends, only to be cast away because I had too much baggage to deal with.
But I cared. And I hurt. And I just didn't want to have to get too attached to then go through the friendship breakup again.
And then Dean broke rank. He squeezed in between Lena Lee and Pace and stood an arm's length in front of me, looking down with dark blue eyes that seemed to read my every thought.
He smacked me upside the head.
"Why would you think we'd abandon you?" he asked and it almost sounded like he was upset I'd even consider it.
Wide eyed I looked all around me. The circle had grown closer. They'd breached the distance at the same time as he did. My dad seemed as startled as I was. I opened and closed my mouth, but only a puff of warm air came out.
"Oh my goodness, Charlie," Lena Lee said as she took my hand in hers. "I had no idea. I'm so sorry."
"Yeah, man. That's fucked up." Hunter's face was all scrunched up. "Anyone would have PTSD after something like that."
"We're here for you," Pace said and Brian nodded next to him. They patted my shoulder and my eyes started welling up. I saw the smile start to bloom in Dean's face and I had to look down and take it out of sight, lest I started wailing and threw myself at him.
"Thank you, guys," I said with a thread of voice.
Right there, in the cold surrounded by all of these people, I was glad I'd moved to Canada.