Openly Straight by Bill Konigsberg Read Free Book Online

win games, so why worry about the miseducation of the soccer team?”
    “Were you one of the disgruntled?” I asked.
    “Nah. I was gruntled.”
    That cracked me up. I liked Ben. He was smart. So was Bryce, who had used the word scads in our writing class. I hoped I could make them see that we should be friends. And just as I was thinkingup a good comeback, he was gone, hustling down the aisle to his locker.
    As I started to get undressed, I saw the first few guys head into the shower area. I felt my heart beat faster as I glimpsed my teammates walking by, some wrapped in towels, some with towels draped over their shoulders. In Boulder, as the gay guy, it was an unspoken rule that I wouldn’t gawk at my fellow athletes. That would be considered rude, you know? And, basically, I just figured it was a tradeoff: They accepted me, I didn’t stare at them naked. It worked.
    Here, no such unspoken pact had been made; why would there be? And I felt a little guilty and a bit tingly, entering the sacred shower room with my fellow straight teammates.
    The thing about Natick guys was this: They really were genuinely nice. I had never been in a shower room that wasn’t filled with name-calling and insults. Once faggot had been taken away from my Boulder teammates, they’d found other ones — dumbass, shit breath, dick face — that they used with abandon. Here, the guys were mostly talking about, of all things, soccer.
    “We gotta be better this year,” Steve said. “Schroeder’s gone, but Bryce is our boy.”
    I looked over at Bryce. It was almost like he wasn’t there; Steve had spoken about him in the third person rather than the second. It was weird.
    “Add Rafe and his speed and we got a serious shot to win it all, right?”
    Steve turned to me and smiled, which made my heart spin even more, since he was just about perfect, physically. It gave me a chanceto look at him, since he was looking at me. He had a six-pack, the kind I was not quite muscular enough to have.
    I looked over at Ben. He was silently soaping and rinsing. His torso was thick — not fat, just bigger — and well sculpted. The curve of his back was graceful, his neck strong. Teen People would probably choose Steve, but something about Ben made me think he was even more attractive.
    Steve continued to work the room, and I realized it was basically his space. Whatever Steve said or did, people listened. I’d never been part of a group like that, so it was interesting, like a National Geographic special on wolves that I might watch with my dad.
    And I was part of the pack.

Albie and Toby came into our room while I was reading A Separate Peace for lit class that night.
    “Hey,” I said, pretending to be engrossed in my book, even though my interest in Gene and Finny was pretty low. I had gotten along with Albie and Toby over the weekend when we’d been in the room together. They were weird but harmless. Albie said strange things and never laughed, which made me a little uncomfortable. Toby said even stranger things and laughed a lot. I hadn’t seen either of them much out of the room, and when I did, a nod was all I’d give them. I liked them fine, but clearly if I had to choose between my jock friends and these two, it wasn’t going to be a tough choice.
    “Greetings and salutations,” said Albie.
    I saw he was wearing huge camouflage shorts, and what happened next was not exactly expected. He dug four Styrofoam bowls out of his desk drawer and put them on the desk. He then stood on his toes and proceeded to turn his pockets inside out. Lucky Charms poured into the bowls. Each pocket seemed to fill two bowls to therim. There was some overflow that landed on the floor, and without thinking, I stood up to go over and clean up the spill, but Albie put out his hand to stop me. He then bent down and picked up the cereal bits that had landed on the floor and placed them in the garbage.
    “Progress!” I said, smiling, and he bowed at me.
    “Here goes