Coda 02 -A to Z

feel a little bit excited.
    I find my excitement wanin’, though, when we get inside and start to climb. And climb and climb and climb. There’s an escalator, but there’s a huge line of people waitin’ to get on it, and Matt and Jared don’t even look at it. They just walk right by, and ’course I follow ’em. Up and up and up.
    “Where the hell we sittin’?” I finally ask.
“Fifth level,” Jared tells me, “middle of the north end zone. That’s where they get the coaches’ film, you know. They’re actually great seats.”
    “Plus,” Matt says to me, under his breath, “they’re cheap.” Jared just laughs. “That too.”
    We finally get to our seats and flag down a beer vendor. The best part of the whole thing is before the game. The team comes out, then some chick with a killer voice sings the national anthem. Then the jets fly over. They fly in from the south, so we see ’em comin’: straight at us and over our heads, so close you can practically feel the wind comin’ off ’em, and so loud the whole stadium shakes. The crowd goes wild, and it’s almost enough to give me goose bumps.
    The game finally starts. I’m not really a football fan, and sometimes I have a hard time understandin’ what’s goin’ on. Couple times I wish I could ask somebody what the hell just happened. Nobody to talk to, though. Somehow we ended up with Jared in the middle, me and Matt on either side of him. Jared’s so engrossed in the game, I know better than to try to talk to him. Sure as hell not gonna talk to the nutty lady on the other side of me either. She’s got blue and orange paint all over her face, and she hasn’t stopped screamin’ for the whole game. I gotta admit she scares the shit outta me. Wish Matt was sittin’ next to me. He’s a big fan, too, but his team’s not playin’, and I know he’d at least help me understand what the hell’s goin’ on.
    Halftime finally comes. “The donkeys are losing!” Matt says triumphantly to Jared, givin’ him that half-assed smile he uses instead of a real one. “Looks like you’re buying.”
    Jared groans but hands his binoculars to Matt and then leaves to buy beer. Once he’s gone, I look over and find Matt’s usin’ the binoculars to scope out somethin’ down on the field.
    “What you lookin’ at?” I ask him.
“The cheerleaders,” he says, without takin’ his eyes off the field. “What else?” Sure enough, when I actually look, I see they’re dancin’ ’round in the end zone below us.
    “Are you serious?” I ask.

    Now he puts the binoculars down and looks over at me like I asked him if ghosts really say boo . “Yeah. Why?”
    “You’re lookin’ at chicks ?” He blushes a little but doesn’t answer. I know he told me he was straight before Jared. Still, guess I sorta thought all this time that once he decided to be with Jared, he started actually bein’ queer like the rest of us. Never occurred to me women might still be his first choice. “You look at guys too?” I ask.
    He leans back in his seat and shakes his head. “No.” “What about Jared?” I ask.
“What about him?”
“You look at him, right?”
He shrugs. “That’s different.”
“Different how?”
    “Just is.” He starts scratchin’ at the label on his beer bottle like he always does when he starts to get uncomfortable. “Because I’m with him. And because of the way I feel about him.”
    “But you’re attracted to him, too, right?”

    He glances sideways at me in exasperation, and then goes back to fidgetin’ with the label. “You know I am.”

    “You like lookin’ at him?”

    “Of course.” He’s startin’ to sound defensive now, and I wonder if I should drop it, but I can’t.

    “You know he’s hot, right?”

    His head whips my direction so fast, I think he’s gonna get whiplash. “What?”
    “Jared’s hot. You know that, right? I mean, he’s got that whole surfer boy thing goin’ on. Nice body from all that bike ridin’. Great smile. All those freckles.” I can see as I’m talkin’ he’s gettin’ more and more uncomfortable. And more than that, I think he’s gettin’ mad too. I never actually seen Matt lose his cool before. Know I shouldn’t, but I can’t help but push his buttons a little more now that I found them. “He have freckles like that all over? I mean he’s got a pretty nice ass. If he has those freckles down his back, too, I can only imagine—”
    “What the hell?!?” Matt snaps,