The Trouble with Billy

This, Jamie thinks, is the day when I'm just going to walk in front of the bus instead of getting on it.

He doesn't, though he's not sure why. Of course, Sarah's on the bus, and he doesn't want her to have to see him splattered all over the road. Even so, turning himself into roadkill would be better than dealing with his oral presentation in English class third period (not to mention having to stare at Mrs. Rickhoff's hairy mole, which she apparently refuses to pluck).

He wouldn't have to deal with Billy Stratton, either.

“Did you hear Kate Bush is coming out with a new album this year?” Sarah asks, almost before Jamie lands in the seat next to her. Sarah is obsessed with the singer.

“Please,” he says. “It’s only been six years since Aerial. I bet the next one won’t drop until 2014 at the earliest.”

Sarah gets a triumphant look on her face, and out comes her smartphone. If there’s ever a question about something or an argument that needs settling, she consults Google on her phone, which Jamie calls the Oracle. She shows him a page in the browser.

He squints at the screen and says, “Whatever. Remember when Kate Bush News was saying every two months, ‘Announcement Imminent’?”

“Well, they were right, weren’t they?”

“Eventually, but that’s like saying ‘it’s gonna rain’ every day. Sooner or later you’ll be right.”

“Well, this site was right about Beth Ditto,” she says. “And Lady Gaga’s new album release date.”

“Beth who?” Jamie’s never heard of Beth Ditto, and he’s kind of over Gaga, at least for now. Kate Bush, though, is the glue cementing his friendship with Sarah. That, and the fact that he and Sarah are both the only children of single fathers, all of them “only” in their own way.

It started in middle school, an eighth grade dance, when Sarah requested “The Big Sky” off Hounds of Love and the DJ actually played it. Jamie was there only because his father had made him go—“You spend too much time in this house by yourself reading,” he’d said. Jamie spent most of the evening propping up a table in the corner until that song came on. Her voice was unlike any he’d heard before that: high but not airy, as if she weren’t breathing air but something even more elemental than that. The next thing he noticed was the girl twirling by herself across the mostly empty floor, her eyes closed but even so, she moved with a sense that kept her from colliding with anyone else. A few other people danced, and Sarah started bouncing up and down with more sheer joy than Jamie had ever seen in a single person. How could he not get up and join her?

The next day she brought him a mix CD of her favorite Kate Bush songs, which she slipped into his locker along with a note—“I think you need her as much as I do.” Jamie still has the CD and the note. He and Sarah have been inseparable ever since.

"Well,” he says, “I'll believe it when I see it." He waves his hand dismissively, only realizing at the end that the gesture is, well, a little fey. Someone in the seat behind him giggles, and he knows she’s laughing at him, at his hand, at the only pathetic gay in the village. He whips his head around and fixes the guilty party—a freshman, the nerve—with a look of such pure venom that the girl’s gaze immediately drops to the floor. Don’t mess with me today, missy, he thinks.

As he turns around he catches Sarah’s eye. She raises an eyebrow and purses her lips to show she’s impressed. Jamie would like to high-five her, but the nervousness is already taking hold again. They’re on the straightaway leading up to school, and there are no turns from here except the one that takes them into the parking lot. And eventually, at some point during the day, he’ll run into Billy.