Free Everybody Has Those Thoughts So It Doesn't Mean You're Gay by Cristian Youngmiller Page B

mini-golf.”
    Jack smiled.
     
    *****
     

    3
    The mini-golf course where Jack and his father played was old. That meant that there was an unusual amount of sand on the parking lot, the giant clown head on the 7th hole no longer made that creepy laughing noise, and if you placed your ball in the right place, you could putt your ball along a groove in the artificial turf.
    Jack’s friends hadn’t discovered the grooves. That was the secret to all of Jack’s victories. He wasn’t sure if his father had, and when Jack asked his father why it was that he kept winning, his father replied “I’m a doctor, and my specialty is in kick-buttockaphy”. But that wasn’t one of the types of doctors that Jack had learned about in school so Jack didn’t know what that meant.
    “I think I’m going to beat you this time, dad,” Jack said, feeling his confidence come back to him.
    “Well it’s important that you believe that son,” Jack’s father replied with a smile.
    Jack’s first putt was exactly where he wanted it to go. Jack had placed his ball on the very edge of the groove in the artificial grass, and like a marble it rolled around the course and into the cup. It was a hole in one.

    “Beat that,” Jack proclaimed while holding his putter over his head in victory.
    “I don’t know if I can. That’s a good shot.”
    But exactly on cue, Jack’s father lined up the shot and rolled it in too. It was another hole in one.
    “How’d you do that?” Jack asked.
    Jack’s dad smiled back. “I’m just that good,” he replied.
    The two walked over to the next hole.
    “So now I have a question for you,” Jack’s dad said to Jack who was lining up his next putt. “What happened during your game of Truth or Dare?”
    Jack stepped out of his shot for a second. But after a breath, he stepped back in, missed the groove and knew he would need three putts to finish the hole.
    A little peeved by his dad’s timing, Jack waited for the moment that his father was about to putt before he spoke.
    “I guess we were playing Truth or Dare and Billy asked me what my strangest dream was,” Jack said, interrupting his dad’s stroke.
    Jack’s dad stood without putting. “What did you say?”
    “Well, I had this really strange dream once where Billy and I were walking along this really narrow mountain path. And as we were walking Billy slipped and I grabbed him. He reached up and grabbed my shirt and it ripped. I then went to get a better grip, but he slipped out of my hand and fell.
    I didn’t know what to do so I got on my knees and looked over the cliff. And when I looked over he hadn’t actually fallen. He was holding onto the ledge.
    So I reached down, grabbed his arm and pulled him up. And when I pulled him onto the ledge, because it was so narrow, he rolled onto me.
    And we were both completely out of breath so neither of us could move. But at the same time we were both really relieved that he hadn’t fallen. And then after a second…” Jack stopped talking and looked up at his dad. “We… kissed.”

    Jack’s dad paused for a moment with almost no reaction on his face. Then after a few seconds, his dad broke the silence. “And this is why your friends said that you were gay?”
    Jack, with a guilty look on his face, nodded his head yes.
    Jack’s dad refocused himself, leaned over his putt and sent the ball past the windmill blades and onto the backside of the hole. This was certainly going to be a two putt for him.

    “Jack, dreams are funny things. Our brain is like a computer in a way. Just like a computer we have our short term memory; in computers it’s called ram. And we have our long term memory; in a computer that would be the hard drive. And do you know how when you shut down a program or turn off a computer it doesn’t always turn off as soon as you press the button?”
    “Yeah,” Jack said as he continued putting.
    “Well, that delay happens because the computer is moving all of the information