Talker

pay for school when it gave out.
    Tate nodded as though this happened every day. “See, I used
    to be a skater, right? But the second, third, sixth time I broke my
    wrist, one of the coaches at my school threw me on the track in my
    running shoes and told me to keep my feet on the ground. He
    helped get me my scholarship, so we’re, like, you know, the same.”
    Brian looked at that vulnerable expression, a sort of “please,
    please let us be the same” expression, and wondered that
    someone who would ink the side of his face and shave his head
    and wear pipe-cleaning, hip-dropping skinny jeans and sparkly
    sequined T-shirts would need to be “the same” as anyone. But that
    was only because he’d just met Tate, and was sitting on his left
    side.
    But the boy seemed to be waiting for an answer, and Brian
    dredged up the only one he could think of.
    “You broke your wrist six times?”

    Now

    TATE was lacing up his running shoes when he told Brian about his
    new hobby.
    Brian thought very seriously about throwing up. He changed
    his mind and thought about throwing his fist through the wal . But
    Tate kept talking, as blind as bacterium to Brian’s complete
    emotional supernova, and by the time he was done, his innocent
    Talker | Amy Lane
    6
    question about why Brian looked like he’d swalowed a poisoned rat
    elicited a three-word answer that had Tate cringing.
    F uck you, asshole.
    It rang between them for a stunned moment, and Tate let the
    façade of “tough-tat-boy” drop. “What’s wrong?” he asked,
    genuinely hurt. It was hard to see hurt on his face. F or one thing,
    the tattoo tended to mask his emotions, which Brian was pretty sure
    was what Tate had intended in the first place. It was also difficult to
    see Tate hurt—so much about Tate was like a crumpled bal of
    brittle cel ophane, transparent and broken.
    Brian had learned not to see the tattoos anymore, or the
    piercings or the hair, and he’d learned to real y love the way Tate
    always bounced on his toes or twitched, even when he was
    standing stil .
    That was Tate—always hearing fantastic strains of alien music
    and succumbing to the urge to dance.
    So even though looking at Tate was an exercise in
    misdirection—the carefully designed hair, body (he’d final y had his
    sleeve tattoo done), clothes, face—all of it was made to attract
    attention, to draw it away from the things he didn’t want people to
    see. Brian had made a study of looking beyond that.
    Which was why this new “hobby” scared the shit out of him.

    Talker | Amy Lane
    7

    P a rt II
    Appearance Lies

    THEY were in their second year of track before they got to be really
    good friends. That was mostly Brian’s fault—he’d been orphaned
    young and raised by his aunt in the hil s, and had difficulty reading
    social cues, so he hadn’t known how to take Tate’s tentatively
    extended hand in friendship and run with it.
    It didn’t help that Tate kept expecting him to be as mean-
    spirited as the rest of the guys on the track team. Brian ignored
    those guys—he didn’t like mean people, he was starting to real y
    like Tate’s music, and he enjoyed track meets for the bus rides
    only, and that was because of Tate.
    Besides, they had to test early and often for drugs, so
    whatever made Tate move like that had to be something in his own
    head.
    And Tate (or Talker, as the guys cal ed him sometimes) kept
    sitting next to Brian on the bus or lingering near him to talk during
    practice, and that was good. The track team alone was bigger than
    Brian’s homeschool cadre, grades K-12.
    After that first meeting, he real y looked forward to those bus
    rides with that twitching, chatting person who seemed to seek out
    his attention. He certainly wasn’t going to turn down that offer of
    companionship because Talker was openly gay. Not even after a
    Talker | Amy Lane
    8
    girl in his English class with big, dark eyes started chatting him up
    and blew him into having a girlfriend.
    Talker was different than the other kids on the team, the ones
    who expected Brian to contribute something witty or sarcastic.
    Talker would talk about movies or music or Web sites for hours,
    without pause, without even waiting for an answer or to see if Brian
    was listening.
    Brian was always listening. He learned more about pop culture
    and living with masses of his fel ow human beings on those bus
    rides than he could ever fully relay to Tate Walker. Tate, however,
    was always very