Don't Judge a Book by Its Cover Read online

  Thank God I was able to bluff it by saying something like, “That’s a lot of boxes. We’re gonna be here all day.” Fortunately that worked, and he was distracted by the obvious.

  Since we couldn’t do anything until the girls appeared, and when they did we moved like dock workers on speed, we had time on our hands. Bill had asked me earlier about the calculus test we had coming up soon, so I asked him if he was ready. He was a smart guy, so I assumed he would have no problem. But he claimed that he didn’t feel ready and that he was seriously worried about this one. Most guys would have taken time with primo jock numero uno to talk about sports of some sort, but not me—I couldn’t do that in any way, shape, or form. So we talked calculus.

  “What part has you worried?” I asked.

  “That last chapter was a real ballbuster.” I hope he knew that talking about his balls was not helping me. Before I could continue that line of discussion, the prima donnas had returned and were ready for another batch of boxes. At Bill’s suggestion I tried putting a couple of extra boxes on the cart, but the girls objected too much so I had to take a couple back off. Okay, so we were moving in the wrong direction here.

  When he could see how slow this was going, Bill said something surprising. “My dad is gonna kill me. I’m supposed to help him this afternoon.” I never would have pictured Mr. Handsome Hunk Super Jock scared of anything. This was a revelation. There was a chink in the armor of the knight.

  Bill hopped down from the truck, too fast for me to watch him move, and pulled down something I hadn’t seen—and he apparently hadn’t either until just then. “Ah ha!” he shouted. Another dolly. “I hope the driver doesn’t mind us using it,” he said.

  “How would he know? Have you seen the man since he parked the truck?”

  Bill had to agree with me. The dolly was a nice one that collapsed for transport but then folded out to haul boxes in a number of different configurations. Bill climbed back up into the truck—oh, yeah, baby, show me that moneymaker! The man could make some serious money if he ever decided to be a stripper—and moved some more boxes over the back end of the truck. I wanted to tell him I’d rather have his back end than the truck’s back end, but there just wasn’t a good way to work that into a conversation, and besides he probably would rather die than have a math nerd touch his body, so instead I just focused on manual labor and packed the dolly with boxes.

  Faster than the girls had done, I pulled the heavy dolly to and through the doors of the school and into the storeroom we were authorized to use. While the girls puttered and complained, I unloaded my dolly and raced back outside to the waiting Bill. He seemed anxious and was concerned about his dad, so maybe if I helped him finish up and get out of there he might like me. Did that make me sound like a big old girl? Hell yes! But desperate times called for desperate measures.

  Back at the truck I loaded another batch of boxes onto the dolly and headed back into the school. The girls were finally moving, but I still beat them back to the truck. I could feel a shared surge of testosterone with Bill when he smiled. Was it getting warmer? I shed my jacket and worked in just my jeans and long-sleeved work shirt. I loaded boxes on the girls’ dolly and then did my own, racing past them again. I was getting pissed because the faster I moved the slower they seemed to move. It seemed that they knew I was gonna do 90 percent of the work so they didn’t see a need to hustle. If I hadn’t disliked them already, I would now have a really good reason to dislike them.

  Back and forth I went, loading, packing, unloading boxes. Really, who in the world was gonna eat all of this damned chocolate? Was there a major emotional crisis looming that was going to require the population of our valley to eat its own weight in chocolate? I didn’t understand it.

  Back and forth, again and again, over and over, yadda yadda. You get the picture. I worked like a big dog. The girls moved slower, until they became irrelevant. On one of my trips back to the truck I stopped for a minute to catch my breath. Bill asked me, “Where the hell are the girls?”

  “They said they needed to pee about twenty minutes ago, and that was the last I saw of them.”

  “Damn!” he swore. “I thought some of the guys were gonna show up to help this morning.” And then he said something that was music to my ears. “I’m really glad you’re here.” Oh, baby, whisper sweet nothings in my ear like that, and I’m gonna melt right here on the spot. “Those damned girls are probably out back smoking weed… or blowing the truck driver.”

  Interesting. Bill is acquainted with the concept of a blowjob. Well, duh! What guy wasn’t? Blowjobs were sort of the holy grail of high school males. Everyone wanted to get one, everyone swore that they had witnessed one or had a buddy who got one last night, but really it was just shared male mythology in action.

  I didn’t say anything, but moved back to grab more boxes and load my cart yet again. I lost track of how many trips I made, but I was starting to sweat like a pig—and it was a cold day. Bill was working hard too, and he had shed his jacket at some point. When I noticed that his shirt was soaked with sweat under the arms and along the back I nearly lost it. That shirt. That gorgeous, glorious shirt that fit him like a second skin, all molded to his body. His glorious, hunky body. The only thing I was more grateful for at that moment was it wasn’t the front that was stuck to his body. Had his nipples been in play, and had they been tight and pointy, I really would have lost it right on the spot and humped him despite the threat of death, or teen ridicule, which was equivalent to death. I could hear it now. I could hear Bill telling all of his jock buddies, “Oh, you wouldn’t believe what the little faggot did! He was practically humping my leg!” It wasn’t the Bill I was seeing working like another big dog, but still in my mind I knew that the other Bill had to be lurking just below the surface, waiting to snap me back to my lower place on the food chain. High school was all about levels of society, and people didn’t move from one level to another easily or often. Bill and I were in different castes, and at the end of this task I knew that we would each have to return to our own place in our society.

  Finally, with no help from the girls who finally did reappear, we were near the end of the task. I had lost track of time and didn’t care. Bill’s sweat had spread and was looking super hot on his body. I had caught a countless number of glances of his torn jeans and the skin and hair underneath, so I was a happy man—a tired, sweaty man, but a happy man. That day had given me new fantasy material for weeks to come.

  When the last box was removed and moved into the school, Bill and I folded the cart back up and packed it back inside the truck. Unexpectedly, he gave me a massive smile and reached his hand out to me in some odd combination of high five, handshake, and hug. I didn’t know what to call it, aside from hot. Bill had hugged me! Holy sweet baby Jesus! Bill Hunk had hugged me!

  “Thanks, dude,” he said. “If you hadn’t been here we’d never have gotten this done.” And my life was now complete. I had been hugged and complimented by a god among men. As fast as the hug had happened, Bill was racing off to his car. He said he had to get home or his dad would be super mad. I watched him run across the parking lot. It really was like watching a gazelle lope across the African plains. The man was poetry in motion, the way his beautifully muscled body moved. All too quickly it was over as he hopped into an old car. I heard the car struggle to start, and then he was driving away.

  “Crap!” I said. I should have asked him for a ride. No. He was in a hurry. He wouldn’t want to slow things down by giving me a ride. And besides, I would be way outside my high school caste by thinking I could ride in the same conveyance as a god among men. My family lived in town, more or less. It wasn’t really in town but since there wasn’t much town it sort of qualified. We were more like town-adjacent. Our house was inside the town limits but only just barely. And it was on the far side of town at that.

  With no alternative, I set off on the walk home. I knew it would take me about an hour to get home by walking, but I didn’t know of any alt
ernative, so walk I did. That afternoon I took a much-earned nap, and that night I jerked off with a whole fresh new set of images of my hunk in motion. Yes, I thought of him as my hunk even though I had no claim to him other than in my mind. But my mind was a powerful place—I just didn’t realize the extent of it yet.

  Chapter 2

  THE following week was much like any other at school. Every morning started too early. In every gym class some guy picked on me or mocked me for something I had inadvertently done or not done. Every violation of the jock handbook was viewed as a crime against nature. They couldn’t seem to believe that I had a penis and didn’t know about certain things. Over the years I had learned to endure, not happily, but to endure.

  I saw Bill once during the week, not to speak and certainly not for a conversation. Our worlds were different. We might live in the same town and go to the same school and take some of the same classes, but we were like different planets in different orbits of the same sun. You could occasionally observe some of the other planets, as we all orbited the sun, but that was about it. So it was with me and Bill. A glimpse here and there was the rule.

  While it was rare for me to stay after school, on Thursday night I stayed to work on something in the computer lab. I had a computer at home that could do anything the school computers could, but I had told the lab coordinator that I would help get something installed and set up on the school machines.

  I knew that I would be late getting out that day, and for the first time in recorded history my mother had let me drive to school. I was pleased beyond belief, even though I knew she had probably done it simply to avoid having to go back out in the dark and cold to pick me up. I didn’t care—I had the car!

  My week had been busy, so I hadn’t paid much attention to anything happening more than two feet in front of me. So it came as a bit of a surprise to me to walk outside the school building at seven o’clock that night and find snow on the ground. Not just a little dusting of snow. No! Real snow. Big snow. Lots of snow. Like nearly a foot of snow. When did this happen? Actually, since it was snowing like mad, it wasn’t over—it was still happening. Damn! It was a good thing that I wasn’t put off by driving in snow. Growing up where I did it was sort of a fact of life. You live in the upper northeast and you have to learn how to drive on snow and on hills—sometimes both at the same time. So I wasn’t scared, just surprised. Really, really surprised.

  Turning my coat collar up to protect my neck from the snow and wind, I started to trudge my way to the student parking lot. Of course, the faculty parking lot was right outside the door, but the student lot was around the corner and down the hill—the equivalent of over the river and through the woods. And it felt like every step somehow dumped more snow into my sneakers. If I’d known we were gonna have snow I might have worn boots. No, actually, I wouldn’t. Who was I kidding? Wearing boots just wasn’t cool. And teenagers majored in cool.

  When I finally reached my car there was—surprise, surprise!—a foot of snow on my car, just like there was on the ground. Imagine that! I got the car started up to try to warm up a little (and make sure the thing would start) and found a snowbrush in the back end so I could get the windows cleaned off. This wasn’t a light, fluffy snow—no, it was a wet, heavy snow, and moving it off my car took a lot of effort.

  As I was brushing off the last window, I heard something I couldn’t quite place. It sounded like a clicking sound. I looked around, because I thought I was alone. Aside from the teacher’s car in the upper parking lot, I thought I was the last one out for the night. And then I spotted another car and realized that someone else was there late as well. With so much snow I couldn’t tell who it was and didn’t really care. If I hadn’t heard the clicking sound I wouldn’t have paid any attention. What the hell was that sound, anyway?

  While I was looking around, a person got out of the other car and swore, “Damn!” I thought I recognized that voice. If I hadn’t, I would have kept on with what I was doing, gotten in my car, and taken off. But I recognized the voice because I had heard the same voice say the same word a week ago on Saturday morning—when we were unloading the truck from hell. It was Bill the jock.

  I tossed my snow brush back into the back of my mother’s car, for the first time thanking God that she drove an old, heavy SUV, and drove across the parking lot to the other car to see if there was anything I could do to help. I knew even less about auto mechanics than I did about sports, so I had no idea what I was going to do to help. Maybe I could stand on the sidelines and cheer or something. No, probably not, but it was a good thought.

  I stopped my mother’s car right by Bill’s when I saw him simply standing there in the snow—without a coat! Was the man insane? He was gonna freeze to death, and he was entirely too pretty to allow that to happen. Rolling down my window, I asked, “Hey, Bill. You got car trouble?”

  “Yes! Damned thing won’t start, and I don’t know anything about fixing cars. Do you?”

  “No. Sorry.” Thinking quickly, I asked, “Can I give you a ride home? Where do you live?”

  He told me roughly where he lived, and I sighed—it wasn’t close. His place was a good ten miles out of town and not exactly just off a major thruway. No, we were back to the over the river and through the woods idea, and then some. He lived way back in the hills, and this wasn’t a Robert Frost beautiful hillside on a snowy eve—well, actually it was, but there was no poetry involved tonight.

  So I was really conflicted. I wanted to have Bill owe me a favor, and I really wanted to spend some serious time in the same car with him, but I really didn’t relish the thought of driving way back into the hills on a night that was cold, windy, and treacherous, with an indeterminate amount of snow still to come. But I couldn’t just drive away and leave him. “Get in. I’ll drive you,” I said, quietly hoping that I didn’t drive off the road and end up in a snowbank to be lost until spring.

  “No,” he said, “I can’t ask you to do that on a night like this. It’s too far. I’ll walk.”

  “The hell you will!” I said, a little more aggressively than I had intended. “Get in the damned car. You’re not gonna walk ten miles in this stuff! You wouldn’t get home until spring! Get in!”

  “I can’t ask you to do that,” he tried again.

  “You’re not asking me—I volunteered. But if you don’t get in here now I’m rescinding the offer.”

  He smiled a hint of his radiant smile, grabbed a backpack from the backseat of his old car, and walked around to get into mine. By now I’d had the heat running for several minutes so it was nice and warm inside. As he jumped in and closed his door he said, “Oh, nice. I was about to freeze my nuts off out there.”

  “Well, we can’t have that happen. No guy wants to lose his nuts—we’re too attached to the little ones.”

  The heat of the car was causing the snow that had accumulated in Bill’s beautiful black hair to melt. Reaching around into the backseat, I found an old towel that I knew my mother usually kept in the car for just such occasions. I handed the towel to him and said, “Dry yourself off—my mother will be pissed if you leave a big puddle on her seat.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “Can’t believe that tonight of all nights this had to happen. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that you were here and you’re willing to do this! This is way above and beyond the call of friendship.”

  So he thought of us as friends? Oh my! Be still my heart. Those few words alone made this entire venture worthwhile.

  “Glad I could help.”

  I navigated out of the student parking lot, up the little incline to the side road that ran by the school, and noticed that the road hadn’t been plowed. “Plows haven’t been through yet,” he noted.

  “Did you know this was coming?” I asked. “Caught me totally off guard. I’ve been so busy this week I haven’t paid any attention to much beyond school and homework.”

  “No, I missed this one totally. What are you doing here so late, anyway?” he asked, which
was a logical question.

  “I was helping install some updates in the computer lab. It took longer than I expected.”

  From the school road, I turned onto the usually busy main route that ran from the school past a couple of churches, the local county fairgrounds, another school, and a couple of car dealerships. Toss in a couple of gas stations and you’ve got the entire town. Usually there would be a lot of traffic on the road with people coming home from work or out to run some errand, but tonight the road was just about deserted—and unplowed. Once again I felt grateful to my dad for holding onto this SUV when he got a new one. A smaller car would have had some serious trouble navigating unplowed roads tonight.

  As we approached the one traffic light in town it turned red. It just seemed stupid to sit there when there wasn’t another car in sight, but I did because I was a good boy and was convinced that the second I turned left on a red light someone would be right there to see me and tell my mom—or worse, my dad. Then I’d never get to drive the car again.

  When the light turned green I made the left and crossed a rickety old bridge—okay, it wasn’t rickety but it was definitely old. On the other side of the river, which tonight was invisible in the blizzard outside, I started up a big hill that led out of town toward Bill’s place. This road was also unplowed, and except for tire tracks from a couple of cars that had passed this way earlier, it was a mess. “Where the hell is the road crew tonight?” I asked aloud.

  Bill saw the terrible road conditions and said once again, “Hey, man, these roads are a mess. I really can’t ask you to do this. This is too much.”

  I might have been a basic student who spent his years in high school trying to blend into the woodwork, to be invisible, but I was also a bit ballsy—I just kept it under wraps most of the time at school. But this seemed a good time to haul out my ballsiness. “Bill, shut up,” I simply said. “You can’t walk home in this stuff! I’m a good driver.” I couldn’t resist saying with a smile, “But you’re gonna owe me big time for this.” I was keeping my hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road so I didn’t look to see how he reacted to that last statement. I hoped I hadn’t overstepped some bro-code line with that one, even though it was exactly how I felt.