All the characters and events in this story are fictitious. Any resemblance to real people, either living or dead, is entirely unintentional.
The story is copyrighted and may not be reproduced in any way without the express permission of the author who can be contacted at: pjalexander1753@gmail.com
A Very Ordinary Boy (Part 2)
From Chapter 10:
Yeah, making-out could definitely help. It would so give me something else to think about. And if you wanted to do another dance, well, I wouldn't turn that down! No? You don't want to get me over-excited? Don't you know that just having you here in the room with me makes me excited? I meant what I said a little earlier, you know. I totally do think that I might be falling in love with you. And I know that's not a cool thing to say, especially as we're only just getting to know each other, and that admitting to it could frighten you off. But even knowing all that, I still want to be upfront with you, even if it's not a good move. What do you mean, you want me to shut the fuck up? Oh, you mean you can't kiss me if I keep talking. Not another word. I promise.
Chapter 11:
This week has been insane. I completely think I would have lost it if you hadn't been here every day to listen to me and hold my hand (and other things!)
Like I said before -- Monday was it? Or Tuesday? -- after I'd spent the weekend arguing with myself, having no clue about what was the best thing to do. I mean, the only stuff I knew about RJ was what Rosa and gran had told me -- not 100% helpful or reliable, so that's when I decided to do some looking on-line. And the stuff I found did give me some pretty useful information. One site even had a video of a sort of pretend RJ meeting which made it look totally scary, but then there were real interviews with young guys, round about our age, who had gone through the whole RJ process and they said it was the best thing they could ever have done and they totally said anyone who got the chance should do it. So that decided things for me and I finally made up my mind to go ahead. But then, having come to a decision, I realised that I had no fucking idea what to do next. I messaged Tani. After all, it was her that had come up with the idea in the first place, so I figured that she was the right person to help set things up. But, after we'd spoken on the phone and she got on the case, she didn't get off to a great start. She talked to someone called Veronica Lamar at Social Services who told her that, yes, she was a trained RJ mediator but, because Noah had never been formally charged with what he did to me and so hadn't been to court, she wasn't allowed to set up an official RJ mediation meeting, and that there was no way around that and nothing she could do about it. Tani said this Lamar woman was obviously a serious rules person and there was no way she was gonna change her mind. Tani was all for giving up right there and then but this Ms. Lamar person (that's what she likes to be called, not her first name. Grown-ups are so weird.) said it would be possible to set up something that looked and worked exactly like RJ, but strictly unofficial. Me, I couldn't see what difference it would make, official or not, but Ms. Lamar said she'd only get involved if that was understood and accepted right off the bat. So I told Tani, okay, let's go for it. She agreed.
Tani's next job was to get Noah on board which, like she said, turned out to be a lot easier than she expected. Later on she told me that, ever since he'd found out about me being in hospital and the reason why I was there, he'd been having a really hard time. (Poor Noah!) He'd been getting into trouble with his dad for not turning up for work, he'd stopped going out and even dropped out of social media. He said he'd do it -- the RJ -- but only if his dad didn't get told, and that meant that no-one in his family could know about it, like Michelle or old Mrs. Harrington. Why not? Cause they're his cousin and his aunt. Come on, keep up! (What? Yes, I am uncomfortably aware that I'm up'. You should know by now -- I always am when you're here. Give me a minute to get my junk more comfortable. There, done.) Anyway, Tani had to swear to never say anything about any of it to anyone, and once she'd promised him that she never would, Noah agreed to do it.
If I'm being honest I probably thought he'd not go anywhere near the idea, and that would mean I'd never actually have to go through with it but could still feel good about myself for having said I would. So when Tani messaged me to say we were good to go, I got totally panicked. Which explains why I was pretty off with you. Okay, yeah, more than just off with you', I was shitty to you and I don't blame you for keeping away for the last couple of days. But I'm glad you're back now. And just so you know, I've been thinking of ways I could make it up to you, so I hope you'll stick around till I've finished telling you about the RJ stuff, cause I'm pretty sure you're gonna think it was worth it! No, I won't tell you what I've got in mind, you've got to stay to find out later.
Shit! You've made me forget where I was up to. Oh, yeah, so, I've said I'll do it, Noah says he'll do it and Ms. Lamar is willing to mediate, and so the next thing we both have to do, that's me and Noah, is decide who else we want to have with us at the actual meeting. You know, like for moral support and stuff. For Noah it's a no-brainer, it has to be Tani. Why? Well, she's the only person he trusts to know anything about it and, like I said, she's promised to never breathe a word about it to anyone in his family. But what about me? Who did I want at this totally shit-scary meeting which, depending on how it went, might send me straight back to the psyche ward? Not an easy decision, not helped when Ms. Lamar told Tani that it had to be this week or it couldn't happen for months `cause she was scheduled to be off work and out of the area, going on a sabbatical I think she called it, so it was like, now or never.
I had a really bad night, trying to make up my mind who I wanted to have with me. I mean, how do you decide on something like that? Of course, the first person I thought about, the person I most wanted to have sitting next to me as I spilled my guts about getting raped by the boy sitting on the other side of the table, that person was you. Who better? Who do I trust more? Who else would have my back better than you? Simple answer -- no-one. But then I thought, how would that be fair to you? Putting you through something that could get really messy when we're only just getting to properly know each other. Yeah, I know you'd be totally there for me, do it like a shot if that's what I wanted, and I am 100% grateful. But I'm not willing to do anything to risk whatever it is that we've got going on. Believe me, that's the right decision.
So if not you, then who? My old back-up team, Dyl and Si, they're out of the picture, obviously, and when I thought about gran and Rosa it didn't take me long to realise that they would be great in lots of ways -- they've been keen on the RJ idea from the get-go and I'm sure they'd be totally supportive. But that's the problem. They both love me to bits, maybe too much, so the two of them would get really involved and emotional and that's the last thing I'd want in that sort of situation. And anyway, which one would I choose? And I just know I'm not ready to handle the fall-out from that decision.
Once I'd gone through the list of all the obvious choices and rejected every one of them for one reason or another, that's when I started to get worried. I mean, who else was there? So I started to think if there was anyone else that I knew who I could ask. And it wasn't as if I had all the time in the world. Ms. Lamar had made it very clear that the meeting had to be this week. So who the fuck was there? I wondered about people from school, not other kids, obviously, but what about the teachers? Chalky White? Mr. Miles? Although I felt confident that they both would agree, once I'd explained how important it was, I wasn't sure I could trust them to keep it to themselves, especially after they heard what exactly it was that Noah had done to me. No, they were both too big a risk.
By now it was about three o'clock in the morning and I was dog tired but my mind was totally wired and I was pacing up and down in here, getting more and more desperate to think of someone who cared about me, who'd have my back, who wouldn't ask too many difficult questions and who could be trusted to keep their mouth shut about the whole situation. That's when I got the fright of my life. I'd walked over to the big mirror over there and had just turned round to come back to my desk again when the door suddenly opened. Shit, I was so surprised and scared, cause my head was completely full of stuff about the RJ and I totally wasn't expecting anyone to walk in on me in the middle of the night. For a second I thought my heart had stopped beating until I realised that it was my dad standing there with a strange, sort of, "What the fuck is going on here?" look on his face. And that's when it hit me. The perfect person to be with me at the meeting was standing right in front of me. All I had to do was find the balls to explain everything to him -- and I do mean everything, including some of the more uncomfortable and embarrassing details that I'd overlooked' when we talked in the hospital - and hope he'd agree.
And he did listen. And he didn't seem too shocked or go into protective dad' mode when I told him everything about the rape, including, for the first time, who it was that had done it. But when I asked him if he'd be my wing-man he said No'. Not, "I'll think about it," or, "I really appreciate you asking me." No, nothing like that. He just said, "No." And I must have looked as if he'd kicked me in the balls because he straight away said it wasn't cause he didn't want to do it and he said he was totally proud and honoured that I'd asked him (and other dad stuff). No, he said it was because he wasn't the best person for the job and when I looked at him with a if-not-you-then-who-else?' expression on my face, he held me by the shoulders and said, "Your mum."
Mum! Are you kidding me? I couldn't believe what he'd just said. But then he started telling me what he called some home truths'. He told me that I'd been totally unfair on my mum; that she wasn't the distant and unemotional uber-professional psychologist I always make her out to be, with no interest in being a normal' mum; that I should think back a few years to when I was a kid and ask myself what sort of a mum she'd been to me then, and didn't I remember how much fun we used to have and how close we'd been? And he told me that all the decisions that had been made about how they'd do the whole parenting thing had been decisions that they'd made together so it totally wasn't fair that, ever since I'd turned 13 or 14, I'd been blaming her for the two of them being distant, and determined that I be given space to grow and develop my own personality and interests, cause he totally agreed with that decision and was just as responsible as she was. Then he reminded me that, when I was in the hospital - you know, after I'd hurt myself -- she was the one who cancelled every appointment, every meeting to spend all the time she possibly could at my bedside. And then the real bombshell. He told me that, right from the get-go, she was the one who'd been negotiating my recovery with Doctor Shiftless but keeping herself totally in the background, and how everything that Rosa and gran had done, well, they'd discussed it first with my mum to make sure it wouldn't harm my recovery. Even the RJ idea, they'd run that by my mum before talking to me about it. And she'd done all this stuff out of sight cause she knew that if I'd got so much as a sniff of her being involved with any of it in any way, then I'd blow it out of the water as yet another way of rejecting her or blaming her when things didn't work out. Fuck! What was I supposed to say to all that? The answer was, I didn't say anything. Instead I burst into tears and bawled my eyes out while my dad just held me till I was all cried out. Crying and trying to think are two things that are not easy to do at the same time, but somehow I managed it. By the time the tears had stopped I knew that my dad was right, yeah, knew that I'd been using my mum as an excuse for not having more friends, for not being honest, for not coming out. I'd got so used to her being the convenient bad guy in my life that it took the shock of my dad's `home truths' to make me face up to the fact that I couldn't go on behaving like that anymore.
That's when I had `the talk' with my mum. First off she tells me that she's known forever about me being gay, probably longer than I've known myself. And when I ask her how she knows, she just says that, all her professional life, she's been working with teenagers trying to keep their secrets, so it wasn't hard for her to recognise the signs. And no, she says I'm not obvious but there were enough clues. And suddenly we're hugging and I'm crying -- again! -- and then I'm telling her the whole story about me and Noah and she asks me if I'm sure about the RJ, and I tell her that I am and that I want to have her there with me and then we're hugging some more and this time she's the one doing the crying. Thank fuck for Kleenex. And then we're just talking, talking about everything, and time seems to melt so I'm totally shocked when my dad comes into the room and says that dinner has been delivered and if we don't come down he'll eat the lot and me and mum know that that's no joke and we realise that we're really hungry and if we don't move, like right away, there'll be nothing left.
Over dinner - Chinese, from that top place on Green Street. Yeah, the one near the little kids' playground -- we talk about the RJ, and mum tells me that she's been involved with quite a few over the years and she answers all my questions, so that by the time we're clearing away and loading the dishwasher I'm feeling completely okay about it. Actually, I realise, I'm feeling better than I have for weeks, like a huge weight has been lifted off me. Yeah, I know that's a real cliché, but it's true. And it's not just about the RJ that I feel better, it's everything, almost as if talking to my mum has been like having a magic wand wave away all my worries and insecurities. What a total fucking idiot I've been, convincing myself that my mum was somehow the major bad guy in my life when, all the time, she's the one who totally had my back.
And it was like that at the RJ meeting today -- she was awesome. I didn't have a great night -- again -- and she obviously realised that as soon as she came to check that I was up and about. I was so stressed that I couldn't even make up my mind what to wear so she very calmly helped me decide. She said it was important to feel comfortable but, at the same time, in control. We settled on a pair of dark chinos and a blue polo shirt. After having some breakfast (don't ask me what, I totally don't remember) she mentioned me that I'd not done any driving practice for, like, weeks and asked me to drive us down to the community hall where the meeting was gonna be held. Thinking about it afterwards I realised she'd suggested me driving `cause she thought it would take my mind off the meeting, and it totally worked. She'd warned me that seeing Noah was gonna be difficult and I so wasn't looking forward to it, no, not one bit, but when me and mum walked into the building and saw him and Tani sitting together in the reception area, all my anxiety just vanished away.
He looked awful, I mean, like a ghost or a zombie. It was obvious that no-one had helped him decide what to wear that morning and I'd be willing to bet that he hadn't had any sleep, maybe not for days. He was hunched over in his chair, arms crossed and staring at the floor. Tani's arm was around his shoulders and when she saw that we'd arrived she smiled at us and then she must have whispered to tell him `cause he glanced up and there was such a look of panic in his eyes that I almost went over to tell him that everything was okay -- almost.
Mum went to the reception desk and came back to say that Ms. Lamar was waiting for us upstairs, in meeting room 3. Mum went over to tell Tani and Noah and said that we'd go up first, so I could meet Ms. Lamar, and that the two of them should join us just as soon as they felt they were ready.
Meeting room 3, it sounds so normal and ordinary, but as me and mum went up the stairs and then along the hallway towards the door, it felt as if I was going to my own personal Room 101. You know, that book by George Orwell -- 1984? The one where the main guy has to face his greatest fear and has a cage with a hungry rat in it strapped to his face. Yeah, totally OTT I know, but that's how I felt. I didn't even mind when my mum took hold of my hand and gave it a squeeze as she knocked on the door of meeting room 3.
It turns out that mum and Ms. Lamar know each other professionally'. She's a social worker and my mum has worked with some of the kids she supports. She, that's Ms. Lamar, gave me the creeps from the get go. She shook hands with the two of us and introduced herself -- Veronica Lamar, Ms., underlined. Her hair was pulled back into a pony tail, she had thick glasses and was wearing a black skirt with matching jacket and a white shirt. It was as if she was on her way to a job interview at a bank and she definitely wanted us to know that she was doing us a HUGE favour by agreeing to be there at all. It was a good thing that I'd done some research and that my mum had filled in lots of blanks cause Ms. Lamar didn't say anything about what was gonna happen in the meeting. In fact, she made a big deal of looking at her watch and asking us if we knew when, "The other participants might be putting in an appearance." About two seconds later Tani and Noah arrived, Ms. Lamar went through the introduction stuff with them and then we all sat down,
I'd expected there to be tables and chairs but instead there was just a small circle of chairs in the middle of the room and a table with a jug of water and some plastic cups over to one side. Apart from that, and a TV screen fixed on one wall, the room was empty. Getting sat down was awkward. For a start there were no instructions from Ms. Lamar about who should go where. There was some uncomfortable shuffling about and avoiding of eye contact until my mum suggested that the two of us could sit together on one side of the circle, with Tani and Noah doing the same on the other side, with Ms. Lamar in between the two pairs.
As an author, it's REALLY encouraging to know that there are people out there who are taking the time to read what I've written, and then bothering to send a response. So please, do feel free to write to me at the email address given at the top of the chapter. I welcome all comments and guarantee to write back. PJ
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