Getting a Clue | ✓

Chapter 6

So we kept texting. Some days more and some days less, but all in all I finally felt like I was getting my money's worth with the unlimited texts phone plan I was on. I had unlimited national calls as well, but fuck that. My aim was still to use zero of those.

Jethro had lots of friends and he told me about things his friends did so much that it almost felt like having more than one friend, but, like, in the saddest way.

I didn't tell him I didn't have any school friends, but at some point it had to be implied, right? The closest I came to mentioning anything resembling a friend was the Wednesday boardgame gang. They were always nice, but we never so much as spoke outside of that one hour of Uno and Mouse Trap. After the semester was over we'd all select a new cop out activity for Wednesday afternoons to avoid doing sports and probably never speak again.

Most of my lunch breaks were spent in the library reading. Not, like, books. I was reading slash fan fiction on my phone.

But maybe that wasn't so bad. Jethro usually just went to hang out at his mum's work and use their microwave, and that was fine, right?

Strangely, I missed Jethro. Now, okay, I guess that doesn't sound strange, but I didn't really miss people. Not normally. I just didn't get attached to them.

It wasn't like I'd never had friends. I did, in primary school. And then we'd gone to different high schools and I'd never talked to them again because I just didn't care. But I did care about Jethro.

So I was pretty excited when the second Friday of April finally rolled around. But before we got to the actual good part of my day, I had to deal with my psychiatrist's appointment.

Dr Booker was a relatively young man who liked to pretend to be hip, but I suspected he'd been a bit of a nerd when he was my age. But that was okay. Preferable, even. He had glasses and always wore a tie, but, like, in a cool way. Coolish? He was doing his own thing and I respected that.

And, of course, the first thing he said when he saw me was, "You got a haircut."

I was almost glad I knew so few people so I could minimise the number of times I had to go through this conversation.

"Yup," I said.

"His friend did it," my dad said. He still sounded proud when he said that. Was I that lame that having a friend was this much of an achievement? I guess so.

"Oh, a friend?" Dr Booker asked.

"Yup," I said again. "I have one of those now."

"The son of a coworker of mine," my dad explained.

"Another boy?" Dr Booker asked, and I could see exactly where this line of questioning was going. I hoped my crush wasn't as blindingly obvious to Jethro as it seemed to be to everyone else.

"He's refused to say whether he's cute or not, but I've considered the question for myself and I think the answer is yes, he is," my dad said.

"Do you want that sort of relationship with this boy, Casper?"

"Can we not?" I asked. "He's straight."

"What?" my dad practically shouted. "No he isn't."

"What do you know? Did you ask him?"

"Well... did you?"

No I hadn't, but I'd made a baseless assumption and that was basically the same, right?

What the fuck. He couldn't not be straight. Other guys just... generally were straight. Assuming they were had always just made things easier in the past.