Him

Sunday is the day the coaches have off. Pat’s wife usually takes the kids on an outing. They’re all going fishing on East Lake tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, the coaches usually have a drunken Saturday night followed by a sleep-in on Sunday.

We’ve just eaten a six o’clock dinner with all our teenage charges, so we’re officially free. Wes has been at camp for four days now, but we’re usually too beat at night to do anything but chill in our room. So I’m going a little stir-crazy.

“What should we do tonight?” I ask Wes, who is lying on his bed. “You have a car, right? Let’s put ’er to use.”

“My car is a dude,” he says, swiping through some app.

“Of course it is. What are you doing, anyway?” The app keeps making a strange notification sound that’s unfamiliar to me.

“Checking out Brandr. Pretty entertaining in a small town.”

That shuts me up for a moment. Brandr is a gay hook-up app. I’m suddenly ornery because I just assumed we were going out tonight. Together. Maybe that was a stupid assumption, but that’s how it always was before.

“So…” I clear my throat. “How does that work?”

He chuckles. “Come here and see. It’s hysterical. All the worst traits of humanity on display in one place.”

Intrigued now, I sit down on his bed, and he props himself on an elbow to show me. We’re leaning over the phone together, the same way we did when we were teenagers. Except we haven’t been on a bed together since…well. That night. And I’m conscious of the fact that we don’t fit so well. We’re taking up most of the surface, but I’m still practically sitting on top of him. I can feel the crinkle of his leg hair brushing mine when he leans in to show me the screen.

“It’s like a menu board. Each picture is a dude.”

Some of the pictures are close-ups but some are impossible to see. There’s a number tagging each one, too. 0.7 mi. and 1.3 mi. “It tells you how close everybody is? That’s a little creepy.”

“That’s part of the fun. If someone acts creepy, you can just block them forever. One click and they’re history. The bios are the funny part. Check this out.” He taps one of the tiles and some dude’s picture fills the screen. It says: Online now, 0.9 mi away.

“He’s too old for you,” I say immediately. “And what’s with the socks?” The guy has gray hair and leans against a red convertible. He’s in decent shape, but nobody should wear socks that tall with shorts. That’s just wrong.

I won’t lie. This is weirding me out—the idea that this man is staring down at his screen somewhere on the other end of town, tapping Wes’s picture…

Wes just laughs. “Looking at Brandr in a small town is always amusing. The odds are good, but the goods are odd.” He scrolls the picture to the bottom where the guy has added his 140 characters or whatever. The headline is “Looking 2 get naked with muscles.” And below that: If I’m online then I’m lkng to get naked. Kissing, body contact & more just ask. No fems. Sorry only attracted to whites.

“What the fuck?” I stutter.

“Sounds like a charmer, doesn’t he? That’s the internet for you.” Wes bails out of that jerk’s profile. But then his phone makes a noise and a little window pops up.

“Hey,” it says, and there’s a thumbnail of some other guy beside it.

“Someone’s talking to you,” I mutter. And now I hate this app more than I thought possible. Competing for my friend’s attention isn’t fun. So I stand up and shuck off my Elites T-shirt. I’m getting out of here tonight whether Wes comes along or not. I pull on a polo shirt, which is as dressy as a guy ever gets in Lake Placid.

“You want to head out?” he asks from the bed.

“Yeah.” When I turn around, he’s changing his clothes, too. Thank Christ.

“To think that we can be out after dark without climbing out of the windows,” Wes cracks. “That’s just weird.” He’s dressed in hiking shorts and boots, and pulling a black wife-beater over his head, leaving his arms bare.

“You can jump off the fire escape if you want,” I tell him. “But I’m taking the stairs.”

“Where are we headed?”

I grab my keys and phone. “If your manly car is available, let’s go to Owl’s Head.”

He stops in the middle of tying his shoelaces. “Yeah? I thought we’d go to a bar.”

“We’re going to do both,” I say. “But only if you can move your ass out that door.”

Wes drives a newish Honda Pilot with a sweet stereo and leather seats. But it’s a mess. I have to move several copies of USA Hockey off the passenger’s seat and throw away an old McDonald’s bag. “This is…nice,” I tease as I chase an empty cup off the floor.

“I’m not going to gay up my ride for you, Canning. Let’s go. We’re racing the daylight.”

Owl’s Head is a short hike we used to do with the group as campers. It’s a few miles out of town, and there aren’t any other cars at the trailhead when we arrive. Wes bleeps the locks, and then we’re scrambling uphill over rocks and tree roots.

I love this. Hockey is great, but it keeps you indoors. My summer sport is surfing, but I’ve always loved a good hike.

Did I mention I’m from California?

“Slow down,” Wes pants at one point.

I stop, holding on to a sapling to wait for him. “Too much for Toronto’s recruit to handle? I’d better call my bookie. Who are you playing first?”

He smacks me on the ass. “I stopped to take a picture, asshole. Carry on.”

The views really are intense. We’re climbing up a ledge, basically, and Adirondack peaks stand out all around us, dark against the early evening sky. “It’s just two more turns,” I promise.

It takes us thirty minutes to reach the bald, rocky outcroppings at the top just as the sun prepares to set behind a distant peak. Panting a little from the climb, I plop down on a sun-warmed rock and take it in.

“What a dump,” Wes jokes, sitting beside me.

“Right?”

I’ve probably climbed this hill every summer for the last nine years. When we were fourteen, it was fun to scare each other by sitting way out on the ledge. When we were seventeen, we probably came all the way up here without really seeing it. Wes and I would have been arguing about hockey. Or football. Or some dumbass movie. We climbed because that was the activity on the day’s itinerary.

It had startled me this past year to realize everything I did from here on out I did for myself. College graduation is the end of the road map. It’s all uncharted territory from this point, and I’m the one in the driver’s seat.

The distant clouds turn orange-pink while I watch. My friend sits beside me, lost in his own thoughts. “We’re going to lose the light,” he says eventually.

“We still have time.” Another beat of silence goes by before I ask, “What are you thinking about, anyway?”

He chuckles. “Freshman year of college. What a dick I was to everyone.”

“Yeah?” I’m surprised Wes is going all introspective like me. I would have thought he was sitting there trying to figure out the best way to prank Pat and blame it on the kids.

“Yeah. Rough year. Lots of hazing.”

I sneak a look at him for the first time since we sat down. “Same here. Those seniors were psycho, seriously. Never seen anything like it.” I clear my throat. “That fall I kept thinking, Wes is not going to believe this shit when I tell him…” I let the sentence die. That was probably too harsh. If we’re friends again, I shouldn’t let my anger bubble back to the surface.

He makes an irritated sound in the back of his throat. “Sorry.”

“I know,” I say quickly.

“But I spent that first semester just praying those assholes didn’t figure out I liked dick. And since I wasn’t so comfortable with that idea myself…” He sighs. “I wasn’t very good company that year, anyway.”

Something goes a little wrong in my stomach at the idea of Wes being scared. My whole life I’d thought of him as fearless. Nobody is. Intellectually I know that. But even the other night when he’d told me he had struggled with being gay. I don’t think I really got it.

“That sucks,” I say softly.

He shrugs. “Didn’t kill me. Just made me work twice as hard. Maybe I wouldn’t have ended up as a first liner if those jackasses hadn’t put the fear of God into me every fucking day.”

“That’s looking on the bright side.”

“Canning, we’re going to lose the daylight,” he reminds me.

He’s right. The sky has already faded to a soft purple in some places. I hastily stand up. “Let’s go, then.”

It’s counterintuitive, but on a steep hike the way down is much harder than the way up. Every step threatens to sweep your feet out from under you. We don’t speak at all during our descent. We’re too busy concentrating on where to place each foot and which branches will make a steadying hand-hold.

The dark is coming on fast. We’re almost there when the path becomes truly difficult to see. I can hear Wes’s footfalls behind me, and the skittering sound of the pebbles he displaces with each step. I’d bet cash money that Wes is in the zone like I am right now, thinking only of the task at hand. When the body is busy, the mind shuts up for a while.

It’s almost totally dark, but I know we’re just yards from the trailhead. That’s when I hear Wes stumble. There’s a grunt and the sound of feet sliding on dirt. My heart catches as I hear him go down a few paces behind me. “Fuck,” he grumbles.

I turn around and find him splayed out on the ground. Shit. I’ve dragged Toronto’s new forward up a fucking mountain in the dark. If he’s sprained something, it’s all on me. “You okay?” Feeling sick, I make my way uphill again to where he is.

“Yeah,” he says, but that’s not proof. A hockey player always says that, even when it’s not true. But then Wes sits up from the shadows.

I stick out a hand and he closes his fingers around it and squeezes. The pressure of his grasp calms me down. With a tug from me he’s on his feet again, and the warmth of his hand leaves mine. But I don’t turn around and head down yet. “Seriously, did you twist anything?”

The shadow of Wes shifts his weight from one foot to the other and back again. “Nope. Banged my knee on a rock. But it’s nothing.” He scrapes his hands together to dust them off.

Letting out a breath I don’t even know I’m holding, I turn around and pick my way even more slowly down the hill.

Wes’s car waits for us in the dark. I hop into the passenger seat, relieved that my hike hasn’t injured anyone. The dome light shows me a smiling Wes, but there’s dirt on his shirt. I reach over and brush it off, undoing the damage.

He gives me a wink. “You copping a feel?” Laughing at his own joke, he cranks the engine. “Where are we headed?”

“Anyplace. Your pick.”

Wes turns the car around and heads back to the main road. “We passed a bar before this turnoff. Lou’s, or something. You ever been there?”

I shake my head. “Never have wheels, so I always drink in town.”

“We’ll give it a try,” he says.