Recollections

Pete

Youth is a dense thing. I am 13 and I got high for the first time with Pete, Chris, and Chis' older brother. All I can remember is the sweet warm spring haze of adolescent boys and the stench of weed tempting the air. I sang "The Bear Necessities" as I walked the curb like a tightrope.

Stefanie was on my bus because we lived in the suburbs, an hour and a half bus-ride to and from school each day. At 5 am I would stagger on, take a seat next to Stefanie, who was always clutching a bottle of Starbucks frappucino. I turned my CD player on and stared out the window or let my eyes fall shut to the sounds of KoRn and Papa Roach. Dark times if only for the fashion. Stefanie, a goth of sorts, would frequently push her long sleeves down further in an attempt to elicit concern. Almost proudly she would show the reddened cuts on ivory skin and speak of cats scratching her, or a particularly hard-to-climb fence. Our talks were sparse at times, but the bus ride acted as bookends to my day. One sleepy morning, we must have had quite a serious talk. By the end of the day, as I stepped onto the bus, I was informed we had been dating all day. I was out by then but Stefanie was dead set in what she wanted. She was a pest in that way.

I met Peter in the 8th grade. Clad in an orange Quicksilver shirt and a preppy haircut pushed forward with too much gel. He yelled "faggot" at me across the courtyard.

Time moved fast then. By the second half of the school year Peter started going by Pete, smoking weed, and listening to Sublime. In a year's time he'd have full-on dreads. His hateful glances were gradually worn to a complacent, hazy smile -- his sly features seemed to float about like a Chesire cat. He had green eyes, dark brown hair. He always said he had "chicken legs", which he hid with oversized sagging jeans and rastafarian t-shirts. Stefanie had talked Pete into dating her.

It was around this time Pete and I started hanging out. It comes in flashes. Walking from the bus to his house on the east side by the old airport. In his father's den, in the dim light of a TV screen showing Tool, Primus music videos. The secretive tokes, the laughing that only weed brings. It was late. We had school the next morning.

We are in his bed and he is on top of me. Pete is kissing me. I am unfastening his woven belt and the push to slide off his jeans. I pull his hard cock through the fly of his faded blue plaid boxers and suck. He thrusts and tries and fails to stay silent as he shoots his load down my throat.

He laughs in the way that straight men do after the undeniable. This comes before the monologued "don't tell anyone." He is surprisingly sensual still, a testament to his softened nature. I notice the clock above his head reads midnight, and slip down onto the blankets below the bed, where I will sleep so as not to arouse suspicion.

Pete's dad gives us a ride to school. As I walk into the same courtyard Pete had called me a 'faggot' in a semester earlier, I am hit by a bawling body of black cloth. Stefanie is sobbing. She confides, "Our phone started ringing at midnight last night. My grandpa had a heart attack and died." The next three years I waited for Stefanie to get so out of line that it warranted me telling her the truth. She didn't and I didn't and I like to think I've grown since then.

The last anyone ever heard of Pete, he was married to a black neo-nazi girl. I can find no remaining trace of him except the deep spots, the wet cloth, my mind.