First & Then(5)

When I was a freshman, I had braces and more pimples than I could count. I didn’t wear makeup. I didn’t own short-shorts. I had never tasted alcohol, and I certainly didn’t know how or why you would ever want to blow anything.

Being in this class kind of made me feel like the stereotypical old man who sits with his cane outside of the grocery store in cheesy movies, ranting “In my day…” Sodas cost a nickel. Kids respected their elders. Freshmen didn’t show cleavage. Or wear thongs. Or—my eyes widened but my mouth stayed clamped shut—tan BITE ME onto their backsides.

With no one to share in my disbelief, I kept it inside, mentally noting that maybe I should do like the Reeding application says and write it in the story of my life. Chapter One: How the TS freshman locker room has more push-up bras than a sale at Victoria’s Secret.

Most of the boys weren’t any better. They acted like the guys on teen soaps, preening and showing off, but the fact that they were as close to middle school as the senior guys were to college made calling them freshmen almost laughable. Freshboys was more like it.

If I had to be with these kids for two semesters, I wanted to surround myself with the quieter ones, the ones who looked and acted their age. The regular ones. But there were so few of them that I think the prostitots and freshboys were what was considered normal.

As for Foster, he didn’t resemble anything closely related to normal. Unfortunately, the only thing he was closely related to in this class was me.

“Hey, Devon! Dev!”

He jumped up and down, waving his arms in my direction as I left the locker room. I took a deep breath and went over to him.

He was wearing the same TS gym uniform as the rest of us, but even that couldn’t look right. All the boys ordered their shorts big so that they hung down at their knees or lower. Foster’s were well above his knees, and his shirt was crammed in unevenly around the waistline. His socks were pulled up as far as they could go, and the laces on the cross trainers my mother had insisted on buying him were tied in big fat bows.

I could tell—in my very high school roots, my senior class inner core—I could tell that no one was going to push Foster around. They wouldn’t slam his books to the ground when they saw him after class. They wouldn’t pull his chair out from under him in the cafeteria.

“Hey, Foster!” A couple of PTs nearby waved at Foster. Foster, looking mildly confused, wiggled a few fingers in their direction. They all giggled, but it sure wasn’t because they thought Foster was cute.

What these kids would do was laugh at him, and somehow that seemed just as bad to me. How do you stop people from laughing at you? How do you make them take you seriously?

By being cool. By fitting in. By … becoming friends with Fonzie. Fuck if I know.

I gave Foster a weary “Hello” and then wandered over under a basketball hoop, trying to inconspicuously distance myself from him. I wanted to maintain my senior mystique, but it’s pretty hard to seem grown up and sophisticated when you’re wearing cotton briefs in a locker room full of girls with BITE ME butts.

Foster bounced along after me. “Hey, Dev, have you met everyone? Do you know everyone yet?”

I realized he was referring to the other freshmen.

“Uh … no.”

“You don’t talk to the girls in the locker room?”

“No.”

“Not even Gracie Holtzer? You haven’t met Gracie Holtzer?”

He gestured to what must’ve been the queen prostitot, a girl whose hair was so painstakingly flat-ironed that not one single twist of frizz dared leap off her chestnut mane. She tossed that silken hair back over her shoulder and smiled coyly at a band of freshboys standing nearby.

“Not even Gracie Holtzer,” I said, glancing now at Foster. He wasn’t looking at Gracie Holtzer the way the other boys were. They were all just shy of lighting themselves on fire to get her attention. Foster, however, was eyeing her like he eyed the wasp nest in the eaves of our back shed. It was a look of mingled curiosity and fear.

“Let’s circle up!” Mr. Sellers emerged from his office, clapping his hands and heading to the center of the floor. The other students made their way over and formed a large, lopsided circle around him, which I dutifully joined, Foster in tow.

The girls whispered loudly to each other while Mr. Sellers started talking to us about fall sports. I tried to pay attention for the sake of not having to rehash the latest Cosmo tips, but my attention was broken, ironically enough, when the whispers all at once ceased. I looked around the circle and realized that all eyes were on the door.

A very familiar frame stood there. Any student at Temple Sterling probably could’ve picked it out of a lineup, even without a bright red 25 emblazoned across the chest.

I thought back to the bathroom stalls—there under CELEBRATE TEMPLE STERLING’S OWN ALL-AMERICAN, under AN EXCITING AND UNEXPECTED OPPORTUNITY, was the black-and-white image of this face.

I had never really seen Ezra Lynley close up. We had never had any classes together. It was always me in the bleachers and him on the field.

He wasn’t thick-necked and red-faced like some of the football guys, but he wasn’t scrawny, either. Strong enough to take a tackle, but light enough to run in that way he was famous for. And he had nice bones, as my mom would say. His jaw curved nicely, and his nose had this great line to it, but all in all, as the gym class and I stood shamelessly appraising him, I felt like his face left something to be desired. The right features had been assembled, but there was no shine to his eyes, and the spot on Cas’s mouth where a smile always seemed to lurk lay particularly slack on him.