Something About Us

Part Two

Part Two

Enter: Sebastian Dubois

     On Monday TJ performed a walk-by of our hallway. The stuck-up kids called this hallway The Black Hallway because they believed all the black kids had their lockers there (they would have called it the black hallway even if only five of us instead of fifteen had our lockers there).
     In September Jay-Bird snapped his padlock onto some kid’s unsuspecting locker in this hallway and all his disciples followed. The closer your locker laid to Jay-Bird’s, the more respect you had because he kept his friends close.
     It wasn’t all black kids. This was also the hallway for the bad kids, the ones who got detentions and filled up the Credit Recovery classes. They were mixed in with the others and came from all backgrounds.
    Kobe and I had our lockers on the other side of the hallway further down and closer to the office. No gay kid had ever had their locker in this hallway and no gay kid ever ventured into this hallway for fear of being ridiculed.
     That morning the hallway bustled with kids. A set of mini speakers lay in Jay-Bird’s locker and blasted a track from his latest cypher as loud as it would go. Girls walked up and down the hallway flirting with boys, twirling their hair around their fingers and rubbing up against their man of choice. Boys adjusted their snapbacks, taking off their ties and buttoning up their shirts right to the collar.
     Kobe and I were standing at our lockers when Audrey Brown – the girl who wore the seven packs of weave – approached. Her hair was so poofy her head and shoulders looked like a small hill. “Heyyy, Kobe,” she purred. She flicked her eyes over to me. “Hi Sebastian,” she added dryly as an afterthought.
      I nodded and dazed off as Audrey wasn’t here to talk to me so there was no point in cock-blocking him. I opened my locker and put back my Canadian history text-book. That class was more boring than listening to Audrey talk. Skipping class, hanging out with the smokers and the wannabe rappers under the bridge would have been a better use of my time.
      And then it happened. TJ arrived. The moment he appeared in the mouth of the hallway nearly all of the conversations just stopped. He wore a smile on his face. Just the sight of him in a world like this made my face hot. He obviously didn’t feel embarrassed but I was embarrassed for him.
      He kept his eyes low, checking out everyone’s calves. When he passed my locker I threw myself into it, looking feverishly for my Canadian History textbook. If someone saw us locking eyes I’d be dead. People were crazy and illogical when they were hateful, they might assume I was gay because I let TJ stare into my eyes.
      “Why are you struttin’ through here, fag?” Jay-Bird asked TJ. The hallway roared with laughter and TJ smiled. How could he smile through that? If that was me I would have been mortified.
       “I can walk anywhere I want. You don’t own this hallway,” TJ said lightly. The girls resounded with “Ooohs!” Jay-Bird crossed his arms over his chest and gave TJ an incredulous look.
       “Actually, I do. I run this school.”
       TJ was silent for a moment before saying; “Aren’t you twenty or something? It’s time to graduate and pass the honours onto someone else.” The hallway was dead silent with tension. I wanted to turn away but I couldn’t. Jay-Bird would wreck him. He would grab his compass from his geometry set and stab TJ in the neck. He would snap TJ in two like a stale piece of bread. He would punch him so hard his nose would break.
      Jay-Bird laughed. And then the whole hallway laughed some more nervously then others. “Look at that. A fag braver then General Jay. Now move along.” Jay-Bird stepped aside and allowed TJ to pass through. The smile on TJ’s face was huge and contagious. I found myself smiling along with him.
      General Jay looked livid enough to have snapped TJ back by the collar of his uniform shirt and to have beaten him up right there and then. Then again General Jay knew better then to scrap someone Jay-Bird wasn’t beefing with, especially after Jay-Bird had let him go like that. It would have been seen as a question of Jay-Bird’s authority.
       Tuesday morning when I opened my locker there was a blue cue card stuck to the bottom of the locker.  A bright patch of life in the rusty bottom of the painted green metal. I picked it up and noticed a number scrawled across it. I knew who it belonged to was before I even called the number.
       Still on Tuesday afternoon after I ate dinner, I went out on the backyard porch with my cell phone and the blue cue card. I sat on the wooden steps and dialled the number. Two rings and someone picked up.
      “Sebastian,” he breathed his voice airy and happy and light.
      “TJ?”
      “Yes. I’m glad you called. I wasn’t sure if you were going to or not.”
      “I wasn’t going to.”
      “So why did you then?”
       “I wanted to see who it was,” I lied. No girls who had ever wanted my number would have ever done something like that. They’d ask my friends or come ask me directly. I knew it was TJ, playing around and trying to slide his way into my life.
       “Well now you know. Why don’t you hang up then?”
       I was silent. “I thought it was really cool, what you did on Monday.”
       “What did I do?” He asked like an idiot.
      “When you stood up to Jay-Bird, you fool. That took endless balls.”
      “Really? I don’t find him that scary,” TJ said.
      “Don’t lie! He coulda took out his glock and shot you right there.”
      TJ laughed loudly. “He’s scary but he’s like a dog. You can’t let Jay-Bird know you’re afraid of him. He’ll smell the fear and get you all riled up because he knows you’re afraid.”
       “That’s true.”
       “Does he really have a glock?”
       “Yes! He keeps it in his locker.”
       “No, he doesn’t,” TJ protested. “That’s absolutely ridiculous. This is west-side Mississauga, not Detroit or something.”
      I laughed, “Well I don’t know. It’s rumoured he’s got a glock in his locker. Maybe he made it up to keep people from messing with him. Who knows?”
     “Why do you guys call him Jay-Bird?”
     “Look at his nose. It’s huge and pointy. Like a beak. You’re smart, you should have figured that out.”
      “I don’t know everything. And nicknames don’t always make sense. Look at General Jay. What is up with that?”
       I laughed then. “I don’t even know.” And we started to talk. We talked about Mrs. Lawrence and how boring she was, of  the portables and how they were so cold you had to wear your jacket inside the classroom, about how gross the Jamaican patties were in the cafeteria, how strange it was that the ribs in the rib sandwiches had no bones, about Henry Fargleman and how stuck up he was, about Ricky Badger being the grossest mother fucker alive, about the rude female janitor that choked TJ when he was in the lunch line, about Mrs. Hamilton and her unshaven legs, about how the hockey team got glorified and the way the basketball team never got a word of praise even when they won championships, we wondered if the butch guidance counsellor was a lesbian, we talked about our futures, about how he wanted to be a surgeon and how I wanted to be an art teacher, we talked about the music we liked and the food we liked and the songs that meant something to us, we talked of TV shows and newscasters and we talked until I realized my phone was burning hot against my ear.
      Around the end I said; “TJ?”
       “Mm-hm,” he answered.
      “Are you really gay like everyone says?”
      “If everyone says it, don’t you assume it’s true?”
      “No. Rumours get started and they get going and soon everyone thinks it’s the truth. I just wanted to know-“
       “Yes, I am.”
        I was silent for a while. Why was I on the phone with TJ? Gay TJ? At the same time he was TJ, the good listener. He heard in a way that Kobe didn’t. He didn’t listen to reply, he listened to understand what I was saying. He was a good conversationalist, he was funny and thoughtful.
       I took the phone away from my ear and looked at the screen. It was hot and greasy from my ear. TJ and I had talked for two hours and fifteen minutes. “Sebastian?” TJ called out. I pressed end quickly.
      I cleared my phone history after that, as if that would erase the conversation I had with TJ. It was etched into my brain and no matter how much I tried to pretend it didn’t happen it had.