The Games I Play

Apollo Adams

Monday, September 1st

Here we go. The first day of official torment and hell--Junior year. You’d think by now I would have the hang of it, but if you believed that, you would be sorely mistaken. You see, Lucia High School is not the school for me. It will never be the school for me. It never has been the school for me, for all that I can remember.

My mother gave me the name Apollo after the heroic Greek god. I’d like to say the name is fulfilling, but it isn’t. I spend the majority of my days sitting in the library reading or on the stage performing rather than playing football or some manly shit as my parents wish. You would think being gay in a small town shapes you. It doesn’t. If anything, it makes you develop in a screwed-up way.

Being gay in a small town is almost like a simple squirrel fighting a fierce lion. The lion always wins, right? Wrong. What if the squirrel felt a different way after the fight? A sense of freshness. What if the squirrel had never fought before, and now he has different confidence about fighting the lion? A sense of determination. What if it doesn’t matter? A sense of honesty. Because we all know the lion rips the squirrel to shreds with his teeth, and it’s a bloody mess. That is high school for me. No one gives you a handbook on how to be the best version of yourself without pissing off others. For me, it’s being a straight-passing boy in school.

Screw that. I learned it takes more energy to care what everyone else thinks rather than how I feel. High school is shit. Every time I stare up at the big grim building, it towers over me almost knowing I don’t want to go inside. I feel like one of the kids in Monster House in the scene where the board makes perfect teeth and tries to swallow them whole. My therapist says I need to try and face my fears head-on to show there is nothing to be scared of. Here I go, world. Here is me trying to care for once.

I walk through the front doors. I walk down the hall filled full of lockers. I search for my number. I twist my combo into the lock.

As I grab my things, I look around at the school. This place is already full of school spirit. I want to vomit. Our school colors-- ugly blue and piss yellow-- are supposed to symbolize something important, but I always forget. Lucia’s mascot is the Trojan Horse; it symbolizes how our school always finds a way to get into someone’s community and destroy it.

This school would be less harmful if there weren’t so much blue and yellow posted everywhere, but there would still be one problem. The two most popular boys in the school. They run the social chain here at Lucia High. They are the school trashers. The students who “never break school code”, but we all know what they do. Ignorance is bliss could be plastered on the walls of this school, and no one would bat an eye.

First off we have Robert Jarvis, a tall brunette linebacker. His jersey number is sixty-nine. Number one asshole in this school. Outed me as gay and didn’t give two shits doing it. Ah, and Marcus King. Oh, what can I say about him? Only to quote Janis Ian, “And evil takes a human form in Marcus King. Don’t be fooled because he may seem like your typical selfish, back-stabbing douche-faced jerk-bag, but in reality, he’s so much more than that.” He is the smartest football player, like being the tallest dwarf. Quarterbacks, am I right?

The one thing I will honor Marcus King for is how attractive he truly is. I want to hate his appearance and everything that comes with it, including the cocky sexy personality. He is a six-foot, seven beautiful ginger glass of water. His eyes are a nice shade of brown. His hair is a darker red ginger rather than a strawberry-blonde color. He has nice freckles in the right places all over his face. His eyebrows are thick and form football-shaped eyes. He has the most dazzling smile. The kind of smile that shows an emotion of happiness mixed with lust.

He is like human perfection, rom-com gold. He is the person everyone in this school wants to be. He is a boy that, if you hang out with him, you suddenly become popular. Think of him almost as a filter on life. He coats others with a sense of want– a lust for popularity and fame– in this run-off high school. Everyone except me sees that filter.

Marcus King gets away with everything. It doesn’t matter who you are, or what he did to you, he has too much star power at this school. If you cross Marcus’s path, you will not win the battle.

Except for me.

There was one time, I got away with it. It was freshman year. He was a sophomore and the new starting quarterback of the school. I was trying to get to a class, but he was in the way. I had no idea about this Marcus King guy other than everyone, I mean everyone, was talking about how hot he was or how much of an asshole he was. Everyone except me, but I didn’t care. Worse things were going on in my life that needed to be dealt with than worrying about Marcus King. He was standing in front of the class I needed to go to. I asked him to move, not caring that it was him. He pushed me onto the floor.

“Who do you think you are?!” he looked down at me in a sort of condescending way, like he knew that I was less than him and would never amount to who he is. It pissed me off. Hard. I retaliated.

“A kid trying to get to class,” I said as I stood up. “Now move!” I pushed my way through him. He just stared at me as if no one would ever do that. I remember how long he stared at me from then on. It would be only three months later that Robert Jarvis outed me during a pep assembly. Ever since that day during freshman year, Marcus always stares at me in an intimidating way. I try to pretend like I don’t see him, and I think it’s been working.

He starts to walk past me and I can feel his presence. It almost gives me chills in a fucked up way. As much as I absolutely hate him, I find him so charming and mysterious. As he walks by, he nods his head up to me. We look eye to eye for only a second. My body heats up, and I feel the chills disappear. The eye contact breaks when Robert jumps in front of Marcus. They finish walking down the “red carpet” of the school with a couple of comments about the gay kid, and I yank my stuff out of my locker in a quick swipe.

Bullying. A sore subject for a treacherous hero like me. It’s my Achilles heel. My weak spot. I try to avoid people as much as possible, but just like the myth, it is inevitable. It follows me where I go. If it senses I have a good day, it pries into my life and ruins the only chance I get to feel happy. I like to tell people it doesn’t bother me, but it bothers me a lot. More than I let people see it does. Thankfully, it has gotten a lot better. I don’t have to take different routes around the school unless I don’t want to be called names in the halls, but I’ve gotten used to that.

They never tell you how hard it actually is to have thick skin. They just say it will get better with time or that it will go away. It never goes away.

After I grab my things out of my locker, I turn around to see Shiloh in my view.

“Howdy their partner, gettin’ into any trouble recently?” She smiles, grinning stupidly. She has her cowboy voice on. We use it when we miss each other and we have since we were kids.

“No there, ma’am. Rangle up any of dem cows yet?” I say in a Southern slur. She giggles. Shiloh is my best friend. We have been friends since we met each other in Kindergarten. She was always there for me, and I was always there for her. She is the comedic relief in my life. Not only that but, she helps me stay who I am and not lose that.

“Only if it makes my Mr. Adams happy!” We both erupt into a fit of laughter.

“How was your summer?” she asks back to her normal tone.

It takes me a second to respond. I have to come up with an idea that isn’t Oh yeah, my summer was great, all I did was sit in my bed and wallow about my life. I look up at her hair. She must have dyed it over the summer, for now, it is a subtle dark pink that I adore. She used to have cotton candy blue hair. I loved it, but the pink is better. It highlighters her tan skin better.

“What is the first class of the year?” she asks me. I smile. The thing about Shiloh is she is so caring for me. She is a true best friend, and sometimes it makes me look like a bad person. She reminds me that I am a good person though.

Then I sigh. “English,” I say as I roll my eyes, already sick from being contained in these walls.

English, my beloved. English and music have always been such a comfort blanket for me. Fiction has always been somewhere for me to hide from how this town has treated me. And c’mon– who doesn’t love being curled up in a good book?

My mom and I used to have a race where we would read the Twilight series and then watch all the movies to see who could finish first. I always won, but I think she always let me. That was also before I came out.

But when I came out, I started to drift from my parents. They started to become “busier” with their lives. Family dinners became dinners without Apollo; he could heat them up later. My mom used to do a lot of bonding things with me, but now we can’t even hold a conversation. My dad shut me out right away. That part hurt the most. I had a feeling he would not take it well, but I didn’t know it would be that bad. He and I were very close. We hung out every weekend because I had no one else to hang out with. I had Shiloh, but I would never tell her about my parents. She’d care too much and I don’t want her to have to deal with that.

They never took anything away from me other than their presence, but somehow it feels like they took everything away from me. I started to learn how to do things on my own.

This all wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for Robert.

As I walk through the halls, I get a couple of name-calls and rude comments. Being gay sucks, especially here, but I didn’t ask for this. So, I take what I can get and make the most out of it. Usually, that means letting the words bounce off my skin instead of crying in the bathroom during my free hour.

I will say– it has been a long time since the bullying was physical. It used to be that I had to take different routes around the school to avoid the many bullies. The majority of the incidents were from Robert. He was ruthless. It was non-stop hell last year. He wouldn’t stop. The worst would happen when Marcus was around. Robert would beat me up, and Marcus just batted an eye. It makes that whole reality I created become just a fake one. Sometimes living in this town makes me want to forget who I am, but I try to stand my mental ground.

As Whizzer from Falsettos on Broadway says, “These are the games I play.”