Russel Middlebrook: Double Feature Part 13

"Oh, you know. You go to a high school, you get a certain reputation, a certain circle of friends."

"Cliques," I said. "Yes, I know."

"Well, I have a clique, obviously. And they're all great 44 people. I like them a lot. But you know how it is in high school. You can't really go out beyond your little clique. You're sort of stuck with the friends you have." I nodded. I knew this too.

"Anyway," Leah went on, "I just decided maybe it was time to meet some new friends." She looked over at me and smiled. "And I think maybe I did." I blushed. This is also not like me. I do not blush, literally or figuratively.

We kept walking. It was late, but there was foot traffic on the sidewalk, and the stores were all still open.

"What about you?" asked Leah.

"What about me?" I said. I wasn't sure what she was asking. Did she mean something about my friends?

"Hey," said Leah with a giggle, "you can answer the question however you want! What about you?"

"Well, I like my friends too," I said, thinking. "There's Gunnar. Russel, who's probably my best friend. And Russel's boyfriend, Otto."

Note my pointed use of subtext: I wanted Leah to know that there were queer people in my circle of friends. It was a very good thing Russel and Otto have gender-specific names.

We kept walking, but Leah didn't say anything. Finally, I looked over at her. She was staring at me again, smiling. 45 She halted suddenly. "Listen," she said. "Why don't we stop beating around the bush?"

"Huh?" I said.

"You want to know if I'm into girls," she said. "And I am. You also want to know if I'm into you. And so far, yeah, I'm into you too."

I stared at her. Subtext was definitely not Leah's thing. She said exactly what she thought, which is why she kept striking me speechless.

Subtext wasn't my thing either. I could be just as blunt as she.

"Good," I said to her. "Because so far, I'm pretty into you too."

That Monday at school, I met Russel in the hallway. "How's it going with your parents?" I asked. His parents had recently discovered that he's gay, and things were not going well. He recounted how they had even made him go see a priest the night before.

I was dying to finally tell him all about Leah-there was no reason not to now-but the whole thing with his parents had to take precedence. There was a lot for him to talk about, and I didn't want to steal his thunder. Still, 46 I at least wanted to come clean about my s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up and telling Kevin about Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies.

"Here's the thing," I said. "I have a confession to make. It was an accident, but I still feel really bad."

"Yeah?" said Russel. "I've got something I want to tell you too."

Before I could say anything else, however, a voice nearby said, "Did you hear? Kevin Land came out! He's gay!" Russel's eyes popped open. I was pretty flabbergasted too. Suddenly everything that Kevin had been doing made perfect sense. He probably thought he was doing this really brave, impressive thing by coming out. However, the school had a gay-straight-bis.e.xual alliance now, not to mention openly queer people like Russel and me; Kevin knew nothing that bad was going to happen to him. He'd come out exactly eight months after it might have made a difference.

The truth is, Kevin was just lonely and doing what he had to do to get Russel back. It was all a scheme. First, he'd been keeping in contact with me in order to get inside information on Russel. When I had told him about Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies, he had realized it was time to strike. He had joined the cast of the movie specifically to reestablish ties with Russel. 47 There was still the question of his being closeted, however, so now he had come out to the whole school, to finally win Russel over for good. It was all a scheme, but even I had to acknowledge that it had been expertly conceived and executed.

I felt so horrible for the part I'd played in Kevin's grand plan, even if it had been an accident.

Russel looked at me. "This doesn't change anything," he said. "Nothing at all."

"Of course not!" I said. "You're with Otto now!" Russel was smart-too smart to even consider going back to Kevin.

"Right," he said. "I'm with Otto." The truth, however, was that there did seem to be a note of hesitation in his voice.

I decided this wasn't a good time to tell Russel how I'd helped Kevin.

As for Leah, I decided I could tell him about that later too.

48.

CHAPTER FOUR.

I was dying to see Leah again, and I couldn't wait for the following weekend when I'd see her at the movie shoot.

She'd given me her phone number, so I decided to call and 49 just ask her out. She liked to be outspoken? Well, that happened to be my specialty. There was no way she was going to out-outspeak me.

"h.e.l.lo?" she said on the other end of the phone.

"Hey," I said. "It's Min."

"Min! I was just thinking about you. What's up?"

"I just wanted to know if you wanted to go to a movie or something. Like after school on Wednesday?"

"You mean like a date?" she said, cutting right to the chase.

Leah had upped me yet again. I had truly finally met my match.

"Yes," I said, smiling into the phone. "Like a date." "Unquestionably! Where should we meet?"

We went to a monster movie, of course. We sat in the back and held hands through the whole thing. One thing we did not do, however, was talk. Ironically, this made me like Leah even more, because I happen to detest people who talk in movies.

Afterward, we sat in the empty theater. I also like people who stay and sit through the credits. It's not so much that I care about the actual credits-though every now and then you do see something interesting. I just appreciate having a 50 couple of minutes of quiet transition time, to slowly work my way back from the world of the movie to the "real" world. It's like after a ma.s.sage, and the therapist leaves you alone in the room to gather your thoughts and get dressed again.

Finally, the credits finished rolling, so I turned to Leah and said, "Well, what did you think?"

Leah considered the question. "It had a point," she said at last. "The monster was clearly supposed to represent Marlene's unconscious fear of her father."

"So?" I asked.

"So I don't like it when monster movies have points. Monsters should be monsters, not metaphors for something else."

"I think Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies has a point. I'm not sure what it is, but I think it has one."

"Yeah, I know," she said. "Something about social conformity in high school. Like that hasn't been done a million times before!"

"Are there any dead grandmas?" I asked.

Leah squinted at me. "Are there any what?"

"Dead grandmas. In the popcorn." I nodded to the empty bag of popcorn that we'd shared during the movie.

She kept looking at me with this absolutely blank look on her face.

"Don't you know what a dead grandma is?" I said.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," said Leah. 51 "Well, you know what an old maid is, right?"

"An unpopped popcorn kernel?"

"No," I said firmly. "An old maid is a half-popped popcorn kernel. A dead grandma is an unpopped popcorn kernel. I happen to love them. They're almost better than real popcorn. Crunchier."

Leah snorted. "Dead grandmas, huh? Well, that's news to me!"

"You learn something new every day. Now give me the bag. I want to see if there are any."

Leah handed me the bag. I was in luck. There were lots of them.

I slouched down in my padded seat and started gnawing on the kernels. "So," I said. "When did you come out anyway?"

"Oh," said Leah. "I haven't come out."

Suddenly I crunched down on a dead grandma that was not only unpopped but uncooked. I almost broke a tooth.

"What?" I said to Leah. "You haven't?"

She shook her head.

"But-" I started. How could this be? Leah was so confident, so outspoken. How could she not have come out?

"What?"

"I'm just really surprised no one knows you're gay. You 52 are gay, right? Not bi?"

She stared up at the blank movie screen. "Yeah, pretty gay. And no, no one knows."

I placed the dead grandmas aside and sat upright in my chair. "Seriously?" I said. "You're not out to anyone? Not even your friends?"

"Especially not my friends. My parents would have an easier time of it than they would. It would just blow their little minds."

I s.h.i.+fted in my seat. Suddenly I realized that the floor to one side of me wasn't just sticky; it was gooey. There's a difference. I think it was someone's ketchup.

"What?" Leah asked me.

"Well, if your friends won't accept you, why are they your friends?"

Leah laughed. "It's complicated. They're good people. They're just kind of simple, most of them. They've led sheltered lives. You know, houses in the suburbs, lots of mega-churches. Most of them have never met an actual gay person."

"Well, maybe that's why you should come out. You could change their minds."

"Maybe so." Leah turned from the movie screen to me. "What is it? You seem upset."

Upset wasn't the right word. I felt like a balloon slowly leaking air. It wasn't just that I think us queer folks have a 53 responsibility to be honest and open-to not buy into the mind-set that we have anything to be "ashamed" of, or that we have to go through the elaborate charade of pretending to be straight just to avoid "offending" someone. It was also the fact that I'd done this before-I'd been in a relations.h.i.+p in hiding-and it hadn't worked. At all.

"I'm just surprised," I said.

"Here's the way I see it," explained Leah. "I know who I am. I'm gay. I'm completely comfortable with that fact. I have been for a long time. But I'm also a high school student. I like my friends and my life. I like those friends and that life a lot." The worker cleaning the aisles of the theater between shows was slowly working his way closer to us, so Leah lowered her voice, which suddenly seemed so out of character. "If I come out, it'll be a really big deal, and I know for a fact a lot of my good friends won't be able to accept it. So I figure, why push it? Why not enjoy high school? Then when I get to college, people will be different. I can come out then."

"And what am I?" I said before I could stop myself. "Your little walk on the wild side?" Now I was upset.

Leah didn't catch the sarcasm in my voice. "Yeah!" She laughed. "Who I like isn't really anyone else's business anyway, is it?"

54 We both fell silent as the theater cleaner pa.s.sed us by.

Leah kept looking at me. "Is this a problem?" My head was reeling. "Well, I don't know," I admitted. "Like I said, I'm surprised. I've just never really heard of your att.i.tude before." Even Kevin had had the good grace to at least feel guilty about being closeted.

"Oh. Well, do you want to go get some dinner? We can talk about it some more. I know this great place that does Korean barbecue."

I stood up. "No," I said. "I think I should be going home."

I really needed to talk to someone. Usually it was Russel I went to with problems like this, but he had so much going on with his parents that I decided I didn't want to bother him. Instead, I called Gunnar from my car and asked him if we could talk.

"Talk?" he said from his car. "About what?"

"I need your advice."

"Advice?"

"About a relations.h.i.+p," I said.

"And you're asking me?"

"Well, yes."

"Hot d.a.m.n!" he said. "I'm on a roll!"

"What?" I said. 55 "Never mind. Look, I'm just on my way to Radio Shack. Why don't you meet me there?"

Gunnar was on his way to Radio Shack? Somehow this just figured.

Once at the store, I found him seated cross-legged on the floor in one of the back aisles. "Hi," I said. He didn't greet me. "Did you know that over ten thousand film and video productions are released worldwide every year?" he said. "That's almost five times what it was twenty years ago. Of course that includes many TV movies, but it doesn't include TV shows."

"I didn't know that," I said. "Why exactly do you care?" "I'm thinking of making my own movie. But it won't count as a 'release' unless I manage to sell the distribution rights."

"Ah," I said. What was I doing? I was planning to have a heart-toheart in the Radio Shack? This was a mistake. Gunnar just wasn't the kind of friend you talked to about girlfriend troubles. He was the kind of friend you talked to about, well, the annual number of film and video releases.

"So." He flashed me a grin. "You said you needed some 56 advice?" Then he picked up a small box from the shelf and started reading the back.

"It's nothing," I said. "Just some girl. Look, I think I should leave you-"