Chapter Three: My Street Cred is Dead
The best thing about tutoring Harvey?
I had no clue when, or where, I would be doing it, so I didn’t really have an answer. Not that I thought there were any good things about having to tutor him.
I waited an entire week dreading having to ask Harvey about it. I mean, what girl in her right mind would walk up to him and start a conversation? I wasn’t a complete idiot. It was probably an invitation to get gangbanged.
I wasn’t really sure what getting gangbanged meant, since I had only heard Nick make a joke about it once. I had made a note to Google it, soon. In the meantime it sounded horrid enough for the occasion.
I wasn’t ready to get my face beat in either, though. I needed my face if I was planning to use it in college to at least get one boyfriend. That’s the thing, adults respect you for not having a relationship until you’re older, but once you start nearing adulthood they start feeling bad for you. Which is horrible because you already feel pretty bad for yourself and don’t need everyone else thinking there’s something wrong with you.
So, I spent most of Tuesday night pacing like an idiot in my room, with Nick watching me eat candy bars.
I had this horrible habit of eating when I was stressed or worried about something. I could stuff anything in my mouth when I was having a bad day. That night was no different, and I think Nick finally realized that if he didn’t stop me soon I would have exploded.
“You’ve been walking around for, like, an hour. Do you finally want to tell me what’s wrong?” Nick asked. He was casually stretched out on my comforter, chewing on a candy bar himself. Nick had been my best friend since I could remember. In fact, at one point I’d even had a massive crush on him. It was, thankfully, short-lived and when he’d finally come out our freshman year of high school I hadn’t even batted an eyelash. It was kind of difficult to ignore your best friend checking out the same guys you were, so I had already known he was gay, maybe even before he did.
“Are you sure you really want to know?” I asked him dramatically.
Nick knew I had a tendency of overdramatizing things, so he just rolled his eyes and kept staring at me.
“Livvie, just say it!” he finally ordered, after I’d held out for longer than usual.
“I have to tutor Harvey Lockwell,” I said as quickly as I could, then closed my eyes, waiting for Nick to freak out.
Instead, the silence went on for the longest time, so I had to open my eyes again after it became unbearable. Nick was looking at me with his mouth open, making his pretty eyes widen in the process. Nick was too pretty, prettier than me. No wonder I’d had that short-lived crush, I thought as I watched him process what I had just said.
“You. Lucky. Bitch,” he finally said, draping a hand over his heart. The action made me giggle, so I swatted him in the arm.
“Not even! I kind of, sort of, maybe forgot to find out when and where, so now I have to ask Harvey,” I informed him, wringing my hands close to my chest.
“Oh,” was all Nick said in response. I could tell his mind was racing, thinking of ways to help me solve my problem. That was the best part about Nick—he always tried to help me out of my embarrassing situations. I had a lot of embarrassing situations happen to me. I was an embarrassment magnet.
“Now I have to ask him, but—”
“Oh,” Nick said again, cutting in. I hadn’t needed to finish my thought; even Nick knew that Harvey was trouble.
“Well, you’re going to have to. What if you don’t ask and you stand him up?” Nick said.
I hadn’t thought of the possibility of standing Harvey Lockwell up. No one stood him up. Now, that was an invitation to get gangbanged.
“Fine, but I don’t even know where to find him! He’s never in class!” I half yelled, plopping myself on the bed beside Nick.
I internally chuckled at the irony of my situation. I needed to find him to tutor him, but I couldn’t because he was never in class—which was probably the reason he needed the tutoring! It could have been because for all his good looks Harvey just didn’t understand certain subjects in school, but I could still remember the time in fourth grade when we went head to head in the school spelling bee. I doubted he even recalled, but I could still picture him beating me. Ambidextrous. He’d beaten me with ambidextrous because he knew there was an o when I didn’t. Fourth-grade Harvey had been smarter than me.
“Livvie, my sweet Livvie,” Nick snickered, looking down at me like a parent. “If you want to talk to Harvey you’re going to have to visit The Cave,” he told me in a low tone which made the little hairs on my arms stand up. I didn’t have a clue as to what the heck he was talking about, but even the name sounded intimidating.
“What’s that?” I asked, bringing a candy into my mouth in the heat of the moment.
“It’s an alley behind the gym and the cafeteria. Harvey and his friends are there most of the time.” Nick shrugged. Did everyone know this except me?
“I didn’t know they hung out there,” I finally said, chewing on my candy bar some more.
“If you ever went to gym you’d probably smell them from the track.” Nick shrugged again before stealing the last piece of my candy and popping it into his mouth.
I ignored his comment, deciding not to press more. I immediately thought of all the ways things could go wrong if indeed I did decide to go looking for Harvey.
“Could you—” I was about to ask Nick to come with me when I did go looking for Harvey, but Nick started to shake his head violently.
“That wouldn’t be such a good idea for me, Livvie,” Nick said quietly while looking down at his hands.
I wanted to ask why, until it hit me. Nick would probably get beat up by Harvey and his friends, just because of who he was. I was momentarily mad, but I didn’t want Nick to notice. It really wasn’t fair that Nick was judged so much at school. We lived in a pretty small town where there weren’t many other people who were gay. Last time I checked, Gunnison had a population of 5,854 people and not too many of them played for the other team.
It made it extremely difficult for Nick to make more friends or even go out. I always wanted to tell people off when they gave him weird looks and whispered under their breaths at school, but I was too scared. At least Nick was comfortable enough with himself to accept who he was.
“You’re right. Plus, what could possibly go wrong?” I said like a total dork, trying to make Nick feel better.
It sort of worked, because Nick gave me a small smile. Small and partially sad, but a smile.
We finally stopped talking about my Harvey situation and put on a movie to watch. My mom was almost never home, so Nick tended to sleep over a lot. Not that she would really care, since I was pretty sure I had mentioned he was gay in the past. Before we started the movie, I took the time to make my way into Brian’s room. It wasn’t very late, so I found him sitting Indian style on the floor, playing with his Ninja Turtles action figures. Even though my little brother could make me want to rip all of my hair out, I still loved him to no end. Because my mom wasn’t ever around, I usually took care of him every day after school.
I was practically his real mom if you really thought about it.
“How’s it going?” I asked him, closing the door softly behind me. My brother looked a lot like me. He had the same wavy brown hair and green eyes. He had just recently turned twelve and was more obsessed with his action figures and his video games than what should be considered normal for a kid his age. The kid was weird, but it was no wonder we were related. If anyone were to ask me, I would say that my little brother was the smartest kid on the planet, but I would probably be biased.
“Wanna play Ninja Turtles with me? I’ll let you be Donatello,” Brian asked me excitedly. Sometimes I felt guilty about all the time he spent by himself. Our mom never took him to hang out at a friend’s house or even to play at the park. I couldn’t, because I didn’t have a car and the only person who ever took me places was Nick. We were both too busy with school. I couldn’t even remember a time when Brian had brought a friend home from school. Heck, I wasn’t even sure he had friends. Sometimes the frustration of having such a distant mother really drove me insane.
Why couldn’t she do what she was supposed to?
I hadn’t gotten pregnant. Why did I have to take care of my little brother?
I knew that last part sounded selfish, but sometimes I felt that the reason I had so few friends was because I never had time to actually go out and live like a normal teen.
Brushing my frustrations aside, I focused my attention on ordering Brian to get ready for bed. I promised to play Ninja Turtles with him the next day; in exchange, he would fall asleep.
I spent the next fifteen minutes asking him about school and what he had done that day. When the only thing I could see from under the covers was the top of his head, I gave him a kiss on the forehead and made my way out. My brother wasn’t like regular kids. I waited outside his bedroom door for a few minutes, smiling softly when I saw the soft glow emanate from under his door. I left my brother in his room, playing video games in the dark, believing that I wasn’t aware of his gaming habits. He could stay up as long as he wanted; he deserved it.
The rest of the night consisted of watching movies with Nick until we fell asleep. I tried not to think of my impending visit to The Cave and talking to Harvey again.
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I really had a knack for putting things off until they came up behind me and bit me in the butt.
Let me explain more thoroughly.
The next day at school I practically kept away from the gym and cafeteria as if they were the sole source of the modern plague. I didn’t want to seek Harvey out to talk to him. In fact, if a zombie apocalypse were to have broken out that day I would have welcomed it warmly.
When lunchtime finally rolled around I realized that I had no other choice. It was then or never. Taking in a shaky breath, I made my way to where Nick had described. I hadn’t even known that there was a secret place where Harvey hung out, so it took me a while to find it.
I felt like such a dork when I realized that I had my sack lunch in my hand. I usually hated the food they gave out in the cafeteria, ever since an incident in eighth grade. One minute I’d been happily biting into a cheeseburger, when all of a sudden I’d felt the unnerving presence of, literally, a hairball in my mouth. Having to pull out a big wad of hair that had been smack in the middle of my burger had really traumatized me.
I had been bringing my own lunch ever since.
Now there I was, approaching The Cave with my lunch bag in one hand and my backpack straps on my shoulders. I scanned my eyes until I spotted a small opening in between the cafeteria building and the gym. There was a large dumpster covering half of the entrance, leaving just enough space for a person to fit in.
My toes curled inside my Converse when the thought of having to actually go in there crossed my mind. I swiftly pulled my shoulders back and slid my way through the opening. All was well, except my humongous backpack got caught in the tight opening and I was temporarily lodged in between the wall and the dumpster. I had to grunt and pull myself forward with all my strength until my backpack finally decided to follow me inside. The entire alley was sort of dark and musky, making walking difficult for someone who was already challenged.
The alley looked to be pretty long, once I squinted my eyes, and it seemed to curve to the right. Things were freaking scary at that point. I had practically walked halfway inside, but I was ready to bolt from that place quick.
Without thinking twice, I turned around and started to run towards the dumpster opening.
That was until I felt someone or something grab my wrist and pull me back.
I yelled like a little girl at that point.