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Chapter Nine

“I…I wasn’t!”

Dixon’s face was red with anger, and he slid the backpack over his shoulder. “No? What were you doing with it?”

There was no good explanation, so he stayed silent, which wasn’t a great idea.

“That’s what I thought. I’d turn you over my knee if I didn’t think you’d like it.

When we get back tomorrow, you take off.

You’re done. I’m not seeing people that came here for a pleasant experience being denied that by a little fuck like you,” Dixon spat, then pulled a power bar from his back pocket.

“You’re hungry, here. You’re used to getting shit handed to you. Far be it for me to change that.”

The bar landed on his thigh and that’s where it stayed while more tears came. He lay on his blanket and cried more than he had in years. In fact, Alan came back to witness it. “Are you okay?”

“Leave me alone!”

Alan forced him to on his back and while his image swam in Jovian’s tear-blurred vision, he said, “No. You are too used to going it alone, I think. You know, my partner used to be like you. He pushed everyone away so no one could ever hurt him. He put a wall around himself, and that wall didn’t come down easily.

We almost broke up a hundred times over it until he finally realized not everyone was out to get him. ”

“Don’t act like you know me! You don’t know me!”

“Yeah, I think I do. You took a dislike for me because of Dixon; you thought I was some kind of competition for you.”

As he slowly sat upright, he asked in a whisper, “How did you know that?”

“Because my partner told me all about how everyone that was nice to him wanted something he had. It was the only way to justify not trusting anyone.”

Jovian felt like he was seen for the first time in his life. It was unsettling, to say the least.

“Listen, if it makes you feel any better, I’ve seen Dixon looking at you. Like… looking , if you know what I mean.”

As he fell back onto the blanket, he groaned, “He hates me.”

“He just wants you, they all just want you, to take things seriously.”

“I take things seriously,” Jovian mumbled, then a flood of new tears came.

“Sure, your looks, your clothes, your makeup, and all that is fine, but you need to care about more if you want to relate to other people in our community.”

It was exactly what the drag queens and bartender told him. “What if I just can’t relate to them?” Jovian turned and dragged himself back again so he could look Alan in the eye. “I didn’t suffer the stuff everyone else did.”

“Neither did I. My parents were understanding and supportive, my friends all accepted me, I was bullied once, but it was for my size, not sexuality. That stopped when my mom took me to martial arts lessons.”

“Then how do you relate to them?”

“Maybe relate is a step too far. Maybe some sympathy? Listen to them and know that it’s almost as hard to talk about some of this stuff as it is to live it.”

“It is? Why?”

Alan sat more comfortably and threw a log onto the fire. “Because it’s like reliving it. When I was getting bullied, I didn’t tell my mom for a long time. I was embarrassed, and I thought she might retaliate for me, telling the principal, or the guy’s parents, which—”

“Would make it worse. I know.”

“Exactly. So, I kept it to myself for months until I couldn’t anymore, because I came home with a black eye.

Telling her everything, it was so hard, but in the end, it felt like I’d lost some of the weight of it.

She understood, and she helped in the best way she could, by getting me lessons and supporting me through them. ”

Realizing he’d felt bullied since he arrived, he knew how it felt. The only difference was, however, he deserved it. Not that he’d admit that, ever.

“Listen, Jovian, it’s not too late. If you want to stay, I can help. Mike and Kathy can help.”

“They’re kicking me out.”

“Because Coach thought you were stealing from me. All I have to do is explain I told you that you could have my cookie.”

The tears stopped. His breathing ramped up, however, as he stared at Alan, dumbfounded. “Why? What’s in it for you?”

“Maybe I’d just like to have a new friend. Or maybe I see you better than you see yourself.”

Still unable to figure his motives, Jovian felt something coming over him that was as unfamiliar as it was frightening. He wanted to have a new friend too, maybe more than anything else in the entire world.

“Is it a deal, Jovian? If I tell Coach you weren’t stealing from me, will you, I don’t know, try a little harder?”

Jovian thought it over and knew life would be so much easier if he went back to his old life.

Still, that life had been terribly lonely.

Ci and his mother being his only friends, and Ci only when she wasn’t with all her other friends or with a steady guy.

When she had a steady guy, Jovian didn’t hear from her for weeks.

Maybe Alan, Mike and Kathy wouldn’t fit in with Ci’s choices for friends, and Jovian’s, but he weighed them to have more friends like Ci and knew there was little comparison. “Okay. Yeah, I’ll try, but I can’t promise anything.”

“No promises, just…trying.”

“Okay. Fine. But you’re not taking my makeup! I still want to look good while I’m…doing the growth thing or whatever you call it.”

After Alan went to Dixon, Dixon came over to Jovian and apologized, though his apology wasn’t given without a lot of growling and side-eyeing. “I know I got it wrong and misjudged, but you can’t blame me. That is something you’d do.”

“I don’t need to steal,” he said in his defense, even so, Dixon scowled at him.

“Maybe not usually, but get hungry for once in your privileged life, and you’d steal fast enough,” he said, then snapped his mouth shut and shook his head. “Listen, I’m sorry. That…was uncalled for.”

The tears could have thawed him from the chills. It was amazing, but even as Dixon was being mean to him, he still got chills just looking at the guy. “Not really. I guess I have that and more coming. I’m…sorry too.”

Dixon squatted down to better talk to him. “You are?”

“Yeah. I am. I know I’m not the nicest person, and I don’t take things seriously that I should, maybe. But…in my defense, I never had it hard like other people.”

“I think maybe you have, but you just choose to ignore it. You make an excuse for why people don’t like you and it makes you carry on like nothing happened, but deep in your guts, you are a wounded little boy.”

Dixon got up and left the area completely, but most of all, he left Jovian reeling about what was just said.

Did everyone know more about him than he knew about himself? It was getting old, and he was about to decide they were right in the first place, and he could just leave the second he got back to the main camp.

Still…as his body warmed from the chill Dixon always seemed to give him, he found that he wanted more than he’d had. Men ignoring him, never giving him more than a fuck, no one liking him except his mother and Ci.

That entire night, while he grew hungry, thirsty, and lonely, he stayed awake, fighting with himself. To stay, to go, to stay, to go. Get in his car with the clothes the camp hadn’t ruined, and drive himself back to his beautifully decorated apartment, and go back to the life he knew.

The life that was comfortable, and…lonely.

Even if they didn’t like him much, the men at Chaps were there, and they knew his name and they pretended to like him, even though Jovian knew it was a pretense. But if he left the camp early, he wouldn’t be welcome at Chaps. He wouldn’t be welcome anywhere, but then again, had he ever been?

Alan woke up early and Jovian turned over to see him stoking the fire. “You kept it going all night?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Well, great.” Alan looked over and then laughed. “Not that you couldn’t sleep, that the fire was going all night.”

“Oh. Yeah, um, I don’t know what to do, but I already know what you’re gonna tell me. I’m…I don’t want to go and yet I do. I’m not good with changes, and hard things, like this camp?”

“Hard? Hard because you don’t know how to start a campfire?”

“That’s one thing. I don’t know how to…be like you. To be like Mike and Kathy, or anyone, and to join in things that aren’t makeovers or shopping trips. I’m a shallow, disinterested asshole, okay? Even if I stayed, it doesn’t mean anyone will end up liking me, including you.”

“This is all true, Jovian, but if you were so sure, why would you be up all night, debating it with yourself?”

After opening his mouth to argue, he found he couldn’t. “I really hate that you know what’s in my head!”

“I know,” he said with a laugh. “Want to split my cookie?”

As much as his stomach argued with him at the thought that he’d better work on making amends, like some alcoholic in AA. He was officially going to join his own chapter of Brats Anonymous.

“How about save me half if I can’t forage us up some grub, or whatever these hillbillies call it.”

“Whatever, these…what?”

After a hard roll of his eyes, he got to his feet. “I can’t do it all at once! Give me a break!”

Looking around every tree and rock within twenty feet of their camp, Jovian was exhausted, but he was also starving. The old him, which clung like a frightened child, would just go back to the camp and take half the cookie, being done with the entire ordeal.

The new him. Well, he was more stubborn. He wanted to shove it in all their faces, how he could do what they do, and do it just fine.

On a trail, he started going uphill, farther from the camp, but on a trail, so he felt safe enough.

His eyes were tired from both not sleeping and from them roaming over the landscape.

All that dark green and dark brown, with the occasional gray of the stones or whatever color of brown or rust they were.

It was straining his already tired eyes to the point they blurred.

Still, he continued hunting for food for him and…

his friend? Was Alan a friend? Stopping in the center of the trail, he thought that over and concluded he had no real clue what a friend was supposed to be.

Ciana wasn’t really a friend. When he thought about it, he’d needed her several times and she’d had better things to do.

“Hmm. I guess I have no idea.”

After getting to the end of the trail, he turned back around and headed downhill. Discouraged, he thought he could have been a hero, but instead, he’d get back to the camp and Alan with nothing. More hungry and much thirstier.

He walked on and a spot of white caught his eye in that sea of brown and green. He thought it was a light-colored stone, but as he stepped off the trail, he saw it was actually white.

Finding two, not one but two bags, he picked them up and saw four bottles of water in one and an entire box of donuts in the other, along with three strips of beef jerky. “The mother load! Holy crap!”

He was so happy that he ran all the way back to camp, dropping the two bags in front of Alan near the fire. “Look at that.”

“You’re kidding! You found two? I looked everywhere!”

Proud, maybe for the first time ever, Jovian said, “Yeah. I almost gave up.”

“But you didn’t. Wow, Jovian, that’s amazing. Want a donut?”

Jovian would have turned that down a few days ago, but he was starving. “What’s a few carbs between…between friends? Right?”

“Right.”