Free The Battle for Jericho by Gene Gant Page A

flipping through it as if he was looking for something, but it was obvious he was actually waiting for my answer.
    It should be equally obvious that I’m not much of a quick thinker in panic situations. “Uh… what? What did you say?”
    “You heard me, man. What’s up with you and Hutch?” Mac made a quick glance across the sprawling room at the librarian’s desk. Her eyes were glued to her computer monitor, and apparently she couldn’t hear us. Otherwise, she’d have already been staring in our direction. Mac looked at me. “You two mad at each other or something?”
    “What’re you talking about, Mac?”
    “You barely said ten words to him all day. You wouldn’t even look at each other in the cafeteria. Did he do something to you?”
    “No!” The librarian shot me the evil eye. I pulled back, hiding behind Mac. Lowering my voice, I said, “No, man, me and Hutch are cool. I just have a lot of things on my mind….”
    “Like what?”
    “Uh… just stuff, man. It’s nothing.”
    “Yeah, okay.” Mac scowled, angry with me. “You act like you’re losing your freaking mind sometimes. But you don’t wanna talk, hey, that’s fine with me.” He turned his attention to the notes he’d taken in his French class.
    I went back to my book, but I couldn’t concentrate now and just stared at the page, the words blurring. Mac’s anger stood like a wall between us. He was just trying to be a friend to me, and I hated myself for making him feel shut out. That made what I had to do next even harder. “Uh… about this afternoon, man. After school, we… Hutch and I—”
    “I’m not riding with Hutch today. Gina Marie’s got a rehearsal with the Glee Club after school, and I’m gonna hang around for that. I wanna try and hook up with her.”
    “Okay, cool. Good luck with that.”
     
     
    H UTCH and I had come to some kind of agreement that day. We must have done it telepathically, because we sure didn’t talk it over. Things were different between us now that we knew we were both members of the same club, and I had a nervous feeling that the difference would be obvious somehow to everybody else who saw us. The way I felt about Hutch had changed. Knowing that his parents had beaten him for going gay, knowing that they were only a heartbeat away from throwing him to the wolves, I got this little ache in my heart every time I looked at him now. I wanted to stand by him, be there for him, the way I supported Lissandra when things got crazy in her life. I wanted to hold his hand.
    But I couldn’t let anybody at school catch me looking at him that way. That wouldn’t be good for either of us. So I kind of ignored him at school, and he did the same to me. The idea was to keep anyone from suspecting there was anything unusual going on between us. Ironically enough, as my conversation with Mac in the library demonstrated, Hutch and I wound up drawing the very kind of attention to ourselves we were trying to avoid.
    After the final bell rang, I said my see-ya-laters to the friends in my economics class and went down to meet Hutch in the student parking lot beside the school. He was already there, waiting for me. I made it a point to smile and loudly greet him with, “What’s up, dude!” the way I always did with my friends.
    There was just a flicker of nervousness in Hutch—he sneaked a sideways glance to either side, perhaps checking to see if we were getting any suspicious looks—before he returned the smile. “Hey, Jerry. Let’s roll.”
    Hutch and I climbed into his mom’s canary yellow Acura sports coupe (in my family, it was my dad who had the midlife crisis and splurged on an expensive shiny sports car), and he picked up Highway 22, heading west toward Nashville. We didn’t look at each other, and we didn’t talk.
    He was like that in school—quiet, laid-back. Very friendly once you got to know him, and he would definitely stand by you when you needed it. But he wasn’t the kind to draw a lot