Page 24 of The Understatement of the Year

He gave his head a single, violent shake. “For everything. The whole frickin’ thing. It’s way too late to say it. But I am. Sorry, I mean.”

Whoa. More silence from me, while I waited for the world to stop tilting. “Okay,” I said, taking in some extra oxygen.

“I’m sorry Iran.” He put his head down in his hands, and I could see his chest rise and fall with each breath that sawed in and out.

Well, fuck. A part of me had been waiting five years to hear this. But now that he’d actually apologized, I found that it hurt too much to talk about it. “Um, thanks for the sentiment. But I ran too, dude. It’s just that you ran faster.”

See, running away wasn’t Graham’s crime. Running from thugs who are yelling “sick little faggots!” is not a bad call. The real damage was that Graham never spoke to me again. And as far as I knew, he never told a soul that he was there the day I was attacked.

Although, if I’d been thinking straight in that E.R., I probably wouldn’t have told anyone either. But they gave me painkillers at the hospital. So my parents were treated to a sloppy version of events. It was enough to freak them out for good.

By the time the police arrived to ask me why the thugs had beat me up, I said what my parents told me to say. “They wanted my wallet.” The cops didn’t even bother to ask why I still had it. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t fooling anyone.

My parents’ solution was to get me the hell out of Dodge. They thought that if they sent me away from Graham, I wouldn’t stay gay. “Vermont will be good for you,” they’d said when they brought up my grandmother. “You’ll go there to heal.”

Permanently, though.

Yeah. Thinking about this was really not my favorite activity.

Graham was still slumped into his hands at the table. He looked like a man who was waiting to be executed for his crimes. And even though I’d been mad at him for five years, I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “Okay, Graham. Here’s what we’re going to do.”

I waited until he picked his head up to look at me. It was the first time he’d made eye contact on purpose since I’d come to Harkness.

“I’m going to stop torturing you,” I said. “No more…” I didn’t even know what to call the taunting I’d done to him. “I won’t bring it up again.”

“I deserved it,” he said.

Hearing say that really took me back, because that was a classic Graham response. He had that still-waters-run-deep thing going on. Whenever we fought about XBox, or whether one of us had slighted the other one — whatever fifteen-year-olds argued about — he felt it deeply.

“Fine,” I said. “So this is how you’re going to make it better. You’re going to stop looking like you want to puke every time I walk through a door. I didn’t come to Harkness to wreck your life. I came to play hockey. There’s a lot of guys in that room who’d like to toss me out on my ass, so you can try to stop being one of them.”

His face was as somber as I’d ever seen it. “Okay,” he said finally.

“I mean it. Let’s forget every fucked up thing that happened. We won’t talk about that shit ever again. But in the locker room, we have a truce.”

“All right,” he said slowly.

“I’m not expecting you to stick up for me,” I added quickly. “Just chill the fuck out. Can you do that?”

His nod was slow. But it was serious.

There was a knock on the door. “Rikker? Graham?” Bella’s voice called.

“Yeah?” we both replied at once.

She twisted the lever. “It’s locked, morons.”

Graham got up quickly, his long legs eating up the distance to the door in just a few strides. When he opened the door, Bella came in, her glance traveling the quiet room, as if taking our temperature. “Whatcha doing?” she asked.

“Heroin,” Graham said. “With a side of meth, and a vodka chaser.”

For the first time in over five years, I laughed at one of Graham’s dry jokes.

Bella looked from him to me and back again. “Okay then. I was just checking to make sure that everyone is in for the night.”

“You can check us off,” I said. I got up off the bed and picked up my duffel, rummaging inside for flannel pants and my toothbrush.

As I passed Bella on the way into the bathroom, she said, “Hey, Graham, did Rikker tell you that youwereon the same team for part of high school?”