How To Be Straight

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CHAPTER 3

[ Calvin ]

Gina would always tell me how much of a lame gay I was because I never talked about or drooled over any of the guys at school. That was mostly due to the fact that none of the boys were worth drooling over. They were imbeciles, assholes, and manwhores. No matter how attractive they were, I couldn't like any of them.

That was, of course, until I laid eyes on the boy who had walked up to my locker. I thought he was making his way to me, but his destination was the locker next to mine. He fiddled with the busted dial for a few seconds, letting out a frustrated groan every once in a while, then finally sighed.

I shouldn't have said anything. I was used to keeping my mouth shut and lurking in the shadows like all the irrelevant people like me did. But there was something about this boy that intrigued me.

"Do you need help?" I asked him.

He looked up to meet my gaze and I immediately became entranced by his bright cerulean eyes and plump, pink lips. "Yes, I think I do," there was an obvious accent in his voice, but I couldn't tell where it originated from. "I do not know how to open this...this..."

"Locker?" I finished for him.

Color flushed his cheeks as he looked away. "Yeah, that's right. Locker."

I surprised myself when I smiled at him. "Here, what's your combination?"

The boy's eyes flicked to mine and his eyebrows knitted in confusion. "Combination?"

It was obvious that he wasn't from around here, and that made me smile grow bigger. "Yeah, the numbers you use to open your locker."

His thick dark eyebrows shot up instantly when he realized. "Oh!" He dug his hand into the back pocket of his loose fitting jeans and pulled out a folded piece of paper. "I didn't know what those numbers were for."

He handed me the paper and I found myself smiling again. Seriously, what the hell was wrong with me? "It's okay. It happens to the best of us." After turning the combination into the dial, I clicked the locker open and took a step back. "There you go."

He shrugged his backpack off his shoulder and into the floor, beginning to rummage through it in search of his books. One by one, he placed them inside his locker. When he was finished, he ran a loose hand through the slight curls of his quiff, then refocused his attention to me. "Thank you," he said, "I just came here from another country and where I'm from, we don't call these lockers."

I titled my head to the side. "What do you call them?"

"Les casiers," he responded in a flawless, fluent accent.

If I didn't have a crush on him before, then I certainly did now. "And what language would that be in?"

"That would be French, ou la langue d'amour," he replied, "as you Americans say."

I nodded quickly as though I understood what he said. He could have been insulting me in French and I wouldn't be all that bothered because of how beautiful his voice sounded.

"Well, I'm Calvin. I would say that all my friends call me Cal, but they don't because I only have one friend and she calls me that sometimes and I hate it," I started to ramble. It seemed as though attractive people had that impact on me.

He nodded slowly. "So, just Calvin?"

I smiled. "Yeah, pretty much."

He shut his locker and swung his backpack over his shoulder. "My name is Nicolas and I could say my friends call me Nic, but that would be a lie."