William moved the food about on his plate as he sat at the dinner table with his parents. He pushed at the collard greens with his fork. His mother decided to start a conversation.
“I heard a boy was attacked yesterday in school. I heard it was pretty bad.”
William’s eyebrows raised before the rest of his body. This was it, this was the opening, this is how to do it, he thought. I knew the boy mom, he was, is a friend of mine from the Gay-Straight Alliance, I don’t know why I went there but mom, I’m gay, really I am, it’s not a phase.
“Apparently it was a couple of boys who attacked him. Do you know them?”
“No,” he said, “I mean well sort of, they played sports but we weren’t, aren’t, friends or anything.”
“Did you know the boy?”
He opened his mouth to answer that he did.
“There’s a rumor they attacked him because he’s gay. I heard it was pretty bad.”
William inhaled deeply and looked back to his plate. It could have been easy, he thought, but there was something in the way she said the term gay that made him uneasy. Then there was the fact of violence. If he said it right then she might think he could be a victim. He looked down the table to his father who sat with an tired but inquiring expression. But he couldn’t, didn’t want to, look his father in the eye then so he looked back to his mother. It was easier to lie to her.
“I don’t know, I guess,” he said. “I mean I heard that.” He thought about taking it one step further and mentioning the rumors but then he worried that she would think it was true or possibly true and then maybe he would have deserved it.
“School is no place for fighting,” his father said.
William looked to the man who was proud of his pronouncement about the way things should be. This was the same man who had bragged about the fights he had been in when he was young, not in school, but out of school. The man who was proud to have been in boxing as a youth, raced his Mustang in college.
“They should have been in the ring with gloves,” his father added.
“Honey,” his mother replied stopping his pontificating.
William felt the urge to speak, to explain somehow to his parents how things actually were.
“It wouldn’t have even been a fair fight,” he said. “The guy who got beat up is like a hundred pounds soaking wet. The other guys are real jocks on the wrestling team, baseball team.” The thought of them, all of them at school the next day, the day after that made his blood rush to the skin. If he had been there he would have had to fight them, all of them, and it wasn’t going away. It was something he would have to deal with the rest of his life.
“Well, I just meant that we used to have rules about these things,” his father said.
“Do kids like him get bullied a lot?” his mother asked.
The question struck a nerve in William’s body. Was he a kid like him? He could have been, maybe he should have been. He didn’t want anything to be wrong with it. He thought about telling them about how kids like him get bullied, kids like him get attacked and pushed around in the halls, but he had a sinking feeling in his stomach.
“I don’t know,” William said. “I mean yeah, kids get picked on but it’s not always just kids like him. I mean nobody really means anything by it.”
“Well those boys certainly meant something by it.” William looked up to his mother who had somehow, he felt, gotten the upper hand in the conversation. “And I don’t want to hear about you taking part in something like that.”
He furrowed his brows and he felt his heart quiver inside his chest. He was shocked that his mother could have shown compassion yet think that he might have or could be involved in something like that. He thought about the locker room with all the guys and Shane in the hospital. He didn’t think he could have attacked him but he had taken place in other acts of hazing and other acts of violence, subtle things. Would he have defended Shane in that locker room or watched his friend get beaten? He didn’t want to answer the question.
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