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“Real friends let me do what I want. They don’t make me sit in their musky office and talk about boring shit.” He folds his arms and slouches in his chair, smirking.
I give the air a sniff. “I thought I got rid of the odor.”
“Smells like my grandpa’s nutsack.”
I consider him for a second. “You know, maybe a ‘real friend’ knows what’s best for you and would try to help you no matter what,” I kindly suggest, “and it doesn’t always involve something pleasant. I’m concerned about your grades.”
“I’m concerned about your face.”
Watch me save the world. Watch me grip my desk tightly and, with every ounce of patience I have left today, save this damned world. “You did really well last year. Your teachers had only good stuff to say. Ms. Thomas wrote that you were her most promising student. That’s really great, Frederick!”
He rolls his eyes and looks off, annoyed.
I sit on the edge of my desk. In an instant, I’m that thinks-he’s-the-cool-new-school-counselor cliché who pretends that he’s totally not twenty-five years old. I’m trying to act like I’m on the same level as the teenager—who bleeds with attitude in front of me. “Can you tell me what’s different this year? Remember that everything you say stays between us.”
“You’re new here.”
I blink. “That I am.”
“Different counselor last year. She was older. You don’t know what it’s like at this school. How toxic it is, this fucking place.”
Again. Deaf ear. “I do, actually. I went to this school. And not too long ago, I might add.”
He scowls at me, then looks away, over it.
I’m still reaching. “Tell me what’s going on. Did something happen on the soccer team?”
“I’m not on the soccer team anymore.”
“Oh? Since when?”
“Since yesterday.”
His attitude and the cockiness in his eyes reminds me way too much of a certain someone I used to know. I pat his folder that sits on my desk. “I … didn’t know you played piano,” I note, changing the subject and offering a little smile. “Ms. Thomas mentioned it in your file. You still play?”
Frederick looks up at me, dead-eyed. “Is this when we have a heart-to-heart and you finally reach me through some mutual love for music? Should I start opening up, shed tears, and show you on the doll where my uncle touched me?”
I choke on my own air and gape. The balls on this kid … “That’s a very serious thing you’re making light of,” I warn him.
“Everything is a ‘serious thing’. All I did was jokingly call one of my teammates a homo, and then the coach got involved, so I called him a cocksucker. I guess that’s frowned upon or something. So instead of kicking my ass—which is exactly what Coach Keys looked like he wanted to do—I was given a week of detention, suspended from the team, and sent to talk to your boring ass.”
I swallow hard and steel myself. It’s the end of the day, but I owe this kid as much energy as I gave the first one this morning. I hear words like “homo” and “fag” slung down the hallways every day from mouths I never seem to spot, but rarely do I get the chance to directly respond.
“What made you call your teammate that? Did he provoke you somehow?”
“He was being a little bitch, that’s what.”
“Did something upset you before practice?” I know something else is going on here. Maybe it’s at home. Maybe it’s in his own mind. Maybe it’s with his friends. “Lashing out at your teammates isn’t you, Frederick.”
“How would you possibly know what’s me?” he counters.
“Well, those weren’t very nice words to say to your teammate and your coach in a derogatory manner,” I point out. “You know better than that, so I’m left to wonder what got you riled up prior to practice. Do you know what it means when you call someone a ‘homo’? Or a ‘cocksucker’?”
“I’m not five years old,” he retorts. “I know what those words mean.”
“And how do you think—”
“Look, I got no problem with gay people,” Frederick spits out suddenly, spreading his hands. “They’re fucking great. Whatever. They’ll probably plan my wedding someday or teach my kid math in the fifth grade. I don’t give a crap. I just wanted to shut up my know-it-all teammate and then shut up my coach … and I just said the first stupid thing that came to mind.”
His answer transports me. Then, I find myself nodding slowly, knowingly, and look off toward the window. “I know exactly what that’s like … surprisingly.”
The moment hits me so hard, I can literally hear my own voice shouting the words in that boy’s bathroom long ago. “Shut up, faggot!” The little exclamation that started it all. And the look on Stefan Baker’s face … What a funny little irony of life, that the kid shouting the words turns out to be the gay one. It wasn’t until I was seventeen that the words ever slipped from my trembling lips: “Mom, I’m gay.” She burst into tears, blubbered on about how unsafe and cruel the world is, and then we went and got hot fudge sundaes down the street.
