Page 23 of Ancient History

“One of my favorite memories of teaching gym was this scrawny, short kid I had a while back. It was the baseball unit. He dreaded going up to bat. He faked being sick to get out of gym class. But I told him, I said ‘Jerry, you let me help you and you take this seriously, I guarantee you’re going to hit a home run by the end of the quarter.’

“I worked with him, gave him feedback on his swings. I kept telling him he could do this. He just had to keep working at it. Eventually, he’d be by the dugout, practicing swings by himself, or watching his teammates’ stances. He started to believe in himself. And do you know what happened?”

“He hit a home run?”

Raleigh held up three fingers. “Three of ‘em. I told Coach Shablanski about him, and he’s now on the baseball team.”

He slammed his hand on his table, his excitement unable to be contained with words.

“That is fucking awesome.” I clinked my beer bottle against his. I was pumped to teach gym almost as much as I was to coach soccer. Hell, I was pumped for both! “That’s what I love about coaching. It’s like we have special powers to see the potential of every player, but they can’t see it yet, and it’s our job to bring it out.”

“Right on.” Raleigh had an easy way about him, like he was born popular and knew it. “Are you going to get your certification in physical education?”

“What certification?”

“You haven’t looked into getting certified to teach? Right now, you can substitute teach with a Bachelor’s Degree. But you need to take the certification exam to be a full-time teacher on staff and get all the benefits. Then you have 5 years to get your Master’s degree once you’re hired.”

“That’s a lot of school.” Currently, I was paid like a temp: less money and no insurance. I wasn't sure I wanted to teach. Originally, I thought about coaching on the side and getting another job during the school day. That hadn’t panned out yet, and I was unsure what I’d do. After I left pro soccer, I drifted between different jobs, none of them a career. I thought my career was going to be a pro athlete signing multi-million dollar contracts. I hadn’t found my Plan B yet.

Raleigh waved his empty beer bottle at the waitress, and a minute later, she came back with two fresh ones for us.

“Thanks, Natasha,” he said, reading her nametag. “You’re the best.”

“I do what I can,” she deadpanned.

Raleigh checked her out as she walked away. “She’s cute.”

Here it came. Whether it was at a bar or in the locker room, there’d inevitably come the discussion about which girls were hot. I would nod and play along while trying to steer us to a new conversation topic.

He looked at me wondering what I thought.

“Yeah. She’s cute.” I could feel Pop rolling his eyes.

And I saw a vision of Amos from high school, looking at me with the same heartbreak subsuming his eyes.

“I have a girlfriend, but you should ask her out.” Raleigh cocked an eyebrow at me.

I shrugged it off with a grunt non-answer.

When I got home, I joined Pop on the couch to watch TV, but I felt restless. I went up to my room and shut the door, pacing in the small space.

I didn’t know why I was still semi in the closet. I didn’t want my players to look at me differently. I didn’t want my new friend Raleigh to either. There’d been some progress made in sports, but not a lot. The homophobic jokes teammates cracked in locker rooms in high school, college, and Nashville were seared into my brain.

Once Amos and I broke up, it was like I stopped being gay. I didn’t date. Were it not for the porn I occasionally watched, nobody would be able to tell.

After what happened with Amos, I couldn’t bring myself to risk hurting another person. And I couldn’t risk hurting myself. I might’ve been the one who mucked things up with Amos, but my heart broke, too. I put on a smile at prom for all to see, but when I got home, I sobbed on my bed until the sun came up the next morning. I didn’t know it was possible to miss somebody this hard, like every cell in my body ached.

Maybe it was time to tiptoe outside the closet. Amos had moved on. He was out, presumably dating, living his life in the present, not the past. I opened the Milkman app and officially activated the profile Pop had created for me.

It was both one small step and one giant leap for Hutch Hawkins.

7

AMOS

For the rest of the week, things went exactly as I intended. Hutch and I were cordial, but not friendly, and definitely not flirty. We didn’t talk to each other unless it was work-related. We ate in mundane silence at lunch. He called me Mr. Bright.

I didn’t like it.

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