Free End of the Innocence by John Goode

the top down. Normally I would have said a lime-green any kind of car would be extremely gay, but somehow the bug worked for him. He offered me the pack in his other hand. “You smoke?”
    “Uh, no,” I answered, waving them off.
    “Good, don’t start. They are an ugly, ugly habit.” He tossed his cigarette away and got into the car. I got into the passenger seat, although I had no idea where we were heading. He turned off the loud house music that had started the minute he turned the key in the ignition. “Buckle up,” he ordered as he backed the car out of its parking space. “This is the only neon green car people can’t seem to see coming a mile away. Already been in two accidents in it. I’m just waiting for the front end to fall off one day.”
    I slowly put the seat belt on as I examined the car’s structural integrity.
    We headed left on East Avenue, traveling farther out of Foster instead of toward downtown. “Where are we going?” I asked after a few minutes.
    “To the past,” he answered cryptically and lit another smoke.
    “I doubt you can get this thing over eighty-eight miles an hour,” I mumbled, looking out the window.
    “That’s cute, McFly. Very topical,” he said, turning the music back on. “I speak fluent nerd.”
    I settled in and stopped talking.
    My thoughts began to wander as I waited for us to end up wherever we were going. If you’d asked me if I would end up driving in the car of a guy I had just met to the surface of Mars, I would have told you no way. But here I was trusting someone based on nothing more than the word of my boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend that the guy driving was to be trusted.
    “Hey,” I said, sitting up suddenly. “Tell me about Jennifer.”
    He gave me a quick glance to see if I was joking. “What about her?” he asked cautiously.
    “Why doesn’t she hate me?” I asked, getting to the heart of the matter.
    He laughed at that. “Oh, she did. Trust me. She hated you both something fierce.”
    “So then why the one-eighty?”
    He paused for a moment. “You mean three-sixty.”
    “No, if she did a three-sixty she’d end up in the same place she started. A one-eighty is ending up facing the opposite way,” I explained to him.
    He did a slow double take and then shook his head. “You really are a complete brain, aren’t you?” I nodded but prompted him to continue. “Well, she was obviously thrown by the whole ‘My boyfriend is now gay’ thing, but I talked her down from climbing a water tower.”
    I didn’t get the reference, but I figured it out enough to know she had been mad. “What did you say?”
    He kept his eyes on the road as he began to explain. “I told her that in towns like Foster, being gay was akin to being a vampire, and not the sparkly kind. Which means you hide yourself deep underground or risk a pack of villagers trying to hunt you down with pitchforks and torches and burn you alive.”
    I was about to comment on the fact he mixed his Dracula metaphor up with Frankenstein, but in the end, a monster was a monster.
    “So I explained to her that if Brad had the guts to come out in front of everyone, then the least she could do is try to imagine what it must have been like to force himself to be something he wasn’t for so long. When she didn’t like that, I told her to imagine she had to pretend to like girls for the past eighteen years and see how she felt about it.”
    I was equally impressed and humbled that he had our back even before he knew us.
    “So why haven’t I ever heard of you before?” It was something that had been bugging me since Jennifer introduced us. I was under the impression that there were no gay guys in Foster at all. Yet here was what could politely be referred to as an openly gay person, and yet he had never been mentioned before.
    He glanced once and then again at me like he was waiting for me to add something else onto my question. “Okay, really?” he asked. “You really want to ask