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1.

“Make a new friend!”

It was my mum’s usual advice, and it had a bittersweet kind of humour to it. It was an in joke for the pair of us, except that not far beneath the surface it wasn’t very funny at all. She said it to me each and every time I walked out of the door on the first day at each and every new school. Which was more times a year than you might think.

Not that it was my fault to be starting a new school yet again. It was all my mum’s doing, and she was well aware that it wasn’t the best situation for a young lad to be in. She couldn’t help it, I suppose. With my dad nowhere to be found she was the sole bread-winner for the family, and even though the family was just us two, it was still a tough call to keep us going. She worked pretty hard, but always on projects, and when the project ended, it was onto the next one, in the next town. She was a consultant of sorts, on civil engineering projects. Even now I can’t stand to see some of the stuff she built, because of what it meant for my childhood.

When you move around a lot, friends are hard to make and harder to keep. I guess these days it would be easier, because of the internet, but when I was young it hadn’t yet taken off, and Facebook was but a twinkle in some geek’s eye. So each time we left for a new town, and sometimes that was three or four times a year, all my friends would be left behind. If, that is, I had managed to make any.

I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. This isn’t meant to be a sob story. I’m not trying to get therapy for free by telling you all this. It just helps with the context. I was a fairly messed up kid, but without any real ambition to be bad, so I just muddled through being extraordinarily plain. It was easier for me to blend into the background and make the non-controversial choice for friends. Even now I can walk into a room and pick the safest, most boring person to make friends with within about five seconds. They’ll be the ones with whom an association never leads to excitement or long-term commitment, but also, crucially, never leads to trouble.

So it was that, at the grand old age of thirteen years and four days (what a birthday that had been! Actually, no, that’s unfair – my mum was great, it’s just you hope to be seeing in your teenage years with your mates, right?), I was off to school number fourteen of my short life. That’s a lot, by the way, just in case you didn’t have anything to measure it by. A lot.

Anyway, I knew the drill by now. I wandered a bit in the general direction of the school, until I saw some people wearing the same uniform as me, and then followed them. Thank God for school uniforms – I’d have been lost without them. Quite literally. This brought me to the school gates, and from there it was a fairly easy task to find someone who knew what they were doing (i.e. an adult) and ask where the office was.

All these places were the same. You’d sit down with the deputy headmaster (sometimes the head, but not often) and he’d go over your record.

“So, three schools in the last four years, eh?” would be practically the first question out of their mouth. Behind it all I knew they were thinking ‘trouble-maker’, but then their eyes would alight on my clean-as-a-whistle disciplinary record and they would have to take a mental step backwards. Some were smoother about it than others, and on one rare occasion the guy had actually read my file before I turned up in his office, but usually there was a brief, awkward phase of carefully worded questions. I got used to putting them out of their misery quickly, if I thought they were nice.

Then it would be on to the introductions. I would be shown my new class, who by now would be bored in some lesson or other and be quite keen for the interruption. Then I’d be shown to my desk and expected to be up to speed almost straight away. That was usually it. Some of the nicer schools would catch up with me a few days later, see how I was getting on. Most didn’t, though. I was just left to it, really.

Actually, that wasn’t so bad. I never really thrived on attention, so to slip quickly into the routine was all that I really desired. To be ignored for the first few days was alright. It would have been preferable for some really cool kid to come along and invite me into their inner circle, but the reality is that kids are kids, and they steered clear of what they didn’t know.

2.

Making friends wasn’t actually that hard, if you knew where to look. For good, safe, intelligent friends, a good place to start is the library. Kids who are in the library at lunch time are usually there because (a) they’re smart, and (b) they’re not that great at making friends. I’m no intellectual heavyweight (as I’m sure you guessed from the writing!), but I do like my mates to be able to string a sentence together, and often that requires them to be smarter than the average bear.

This particular day (the one I started talking about a long, long time ago), I sauntered into the library with my classmate radar on. It was pretty rare to score a hit directly, but almost as soon as I had walked through the doors I spotted a kid who had been in my first lesson of the day, English.

The funny thing is that although I can look back and realise that he was really rather good looking, at the time I hardly noticed. All that mattered was that he was my age, in my class and clearly didn’t have that many friends of his own. I went over to him straight away.

“Do you mind if I read here?” I asked. That was always the opening gambit. Never just say ‘do you want to be friends?’. It makes you look a bit special.

“Sure,” he said in a high, tiny voice, only audible because of the hush in the library. He smiled at me, too, which was a good sign. I sat down and pulled my battered copy of Lord of the Rings out of my bag and started to read. Occasionally I would glance across at him – I can’t remember what he was reading – and once when our eyes met he gave me another smile, yet another encouraging sign.

We sat that way for the remainder of lunch, just reading our own books. That’s the technique, really – don’t freak them out by trying to be their best friend on day one. Let them realise you have things in common. Let them make the first overt move toward friendship.

Mum was, of course, out when I got home. It hardly bothered me, if I’m honest. I just got on with the job of doing my homework (got some on day one!) and getting some food. I was watching TV when she got home, and gave all the usual non-committal teenager answers to her questions – I was getting into the act pretty quickly!

The next day was pretty much like my first. I met the same boy in the library again, and by this time I knew his name was Jake. It’s funny, relating this makes it seem as though I were stalking him, and in a way I was. I needed a friend, just someone to keep me sane, and I’d sort of made my mind up it would be him. Either way, we spent the lunchtime in the same physical space, if not actually together in the truest sense.

The afternoon brought one of those moments which in hindsight was a turning point in my whole existence. They rarely seem that way at the time though, do they? I got back to my locker  and opened it to get a few books for double chemistry, and found a note on top of the pile of stuff in there. Having made a mental note to change the combination on my lock, I pocketed the missive and rushed to chemistry, not wanting to be late.
 

3.

In a quieter moment, I opened the note. It was unsigned, but the content was clear enough. Five words: ‘Careful of Jake the Homo’. My stomach lurched. At the time I didn’t understand why I started to shake as I read and re-read it, though looking back it was probably a mixture of anger and excitement. I pulled out a pen and spread the note on the table, carefully writing ‘fuck that!’ below the warning. Jake, next to whom I’d already determined to sit as often as possible, frowned slightly as I subtly passed the note to him. When he read the original, and then my addition, a mixture of emotions crowded his face.

Uppermost was happiness, a shy smile curling the corners of his mouth. But not far beneath the surface was pain, and a lot of it. Suddenly I felt my stomach drop. Jake had been hurt a great deal, whether or not there was anything to the accusation. Being the only son of a single mother I was always slightly more sensitive than the other guys in my year, and even though we’d hardly shared a word I felt that Jake and I had the opportunity to be good friends, and already it hurt me to see him this way. I smiled warmly at him, and his eyes finally reflected the curling of the corners of his mouth. We shared what is often referred to as a ‘moment’, though really it was nothing more than young friends confirming that they were indeed that.

We were brought out of our reverie rather sharply by the teacher, who was suddenly reprimanding Jake for not paying attention. Immediately I owned up, desperate to save my new friend’s skin, keen that he shouldn’t get in trouble for something I had done. I was told to see the teacher after the class, and to take the note with me.

As he left with the rest of the class, Jake gave me a slight smile and raised his eyebrows, signs of solidarity. I flashed a quick grin at him, then went to face my fate.

4.

The teacher was fairly young, probably not long out of university. He held out a hand for the note without saying a word. I watched him as he read it, and watched the blood come into his face. He was very, very angry, and I suddenly realised I was in a word of trouble. His voice, though, when he spoke, was calm and cool. Or should I say, full of ice.

“Sit down, Matt,” he said.

I obeyed, and then was surprised to see him pulling one of the class chairs round and sitting down across the table from me.

“Where did the note come from, Matt?”

I shrugged. It was true, I had no idea who had written it.

“It was just in my locker after lunch, sir.”

“And did you write the bit on the bottom?”

I blushed fairly strongly at this point. I’d written one of the rudest words I could have, and the teacher had read it. Normally, I would have been in detention for that.

“Why did you write that?”

“I wanted to show Jake I didn’t like what they wrote, sir.”

“I don’t like it either, Matt. Not one bit. Are you sure you can’t tell me who wrote that note?”

I shook my head.

“Alright then, you can go. No more passing notes in class, alright?”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

He nodded and I left the classroom, somewhat relieved to be getting away with it. That often happened for me when I was the new boy, but this felt different. There was some other reason I’d got away with it this time. Mr. Mitchell had been really bothered by what the note said, and I didn’t think it was the swearword I’d written that upset him.

5.

I didn’t see Jake again that afternoon. Most of the kids had already left by the time I got back to my locker and worked out which books I needed to take home. He was there in the library the next day, though, and waved ‘hi’ as I approached.

“Thanks for yesterday,” he said as I sat down. “Did you get in a lot of trouble?”

I shook my head.

“Nah, it was no problem. He just let me off with a warning.”

“Thanks for the other thing, too. You know...”

He tailed off, and I could see his eyes beginning to well up a little. I gave him a smile, and he blinked away a couple of tears.

“It’s OK,” I said. “I meant it, too. Fuck them!”

The last was said as quietly as I could manage it – what a rubbish rebel I made. But it made Jake giggle, and that made it worth the risk of getting into trouble for the second time in as many days.

“I looked for you outside school yesterday afternoon, but you weren’t about,” I continued.

“Oh, right,” he replied, looking somewhat uncomfortable. “Yeah. My mum picks me up. It’s easier that way.”

I looked puzzled, and said nothing, which seemed to encourage Jake to continue.

“It’s to do with what they wrote in the note,” he explained. “They beat me up once and now my mum won’t let me walk here or home on my own.”

“Oh.”

That was all I could think of to say. What was I meant to say? I was a thirteen year old boy, not full of life experiences and insightful comment. Fortunately, Jake seemed keen to continue.

“It’s not true, you know,” he said.

“What’s not true?”

“What they said about me. That I’m a homo.”

“Oh.”

There it was again. The monosyllabic, unhelpful reply. I’d always prided myself that I was a better conversationalist than I was proving to be. Jake seemed quite willing to hold up both ends by himself, though.

“There was this boy in my old school. He started saying we’d done stuff and somehow he found out something about me, and they found out it was true and they said that meant we’d been messing around playing with our dicks and stuff. Then I came here but one of the other boys from my old school came here too, and they started saying things about me again. Nothing I could say would stop them.”

Suddenly I felt really bad for Jake. He sounded genuine, and for some reason some kids had made his life hell. He looked so small sitting there explaining everything was wrong, and I could feel myself on the verge of tears for him. Damn, I had to get a grip.
“That’s really crap,” I said, stating the obvious. Still, it was better than what I had been saying. Jake shrugged, but I could tell that he was struggling to maintain control. Then he was no longer struggling. He lost it.

Jake did what any young teenager would do under the circumstances. Rather than sitting there and crying in front of his friend, he fled.

I don’t know where he went, but he still made it to the afternoon lesson. He sat down next to me with a rather sheepish look on his face. He gave me a brief flash of a smile which didn’t touch his red-rimmed eyes, and then ignored me for the rest of the lesson.
That night I felt pretty rubbish. I didn’t think Jake was angry with me, but I still felt our friendship was going wrong. It put me totally off-kilter. I didn’t even go through the typical nightly routine of a thirteen year old boy. It was a day which stuck in the memory.
 

6.

The next day was a watershed. I made it into the library as normal, but there was no sign of Jake. That worried me a little, and as I sat there reflecting on the situation it got more and more worrying. Just as I was beginning to run through ways I could possibly contact Jake, he sauntered through the door as though nothing had ever been wrong.

I gave him a small wave as he came over to my table, which he returned before seating himself. He didn’t pull a book out of his bag, but just sat there with a strangely excited, or possibly nervous look on his face.

“Hi Zack!”

It was nerves, I decided. Something was making him extremely anxious.

“Do you have time to talk? Somewhere else.”

I nodded, and followed Jake out of the library. We found a quieter corner of the school to have our chat, and I finally found out what it was that was making Jake so jittery.

“It’s my birthday in a few weeks,” he said. “Normally I don’t do anything with people from school. No-one would want to do anything. But I was talking to my mum about you and she said I should ask you if you wanted to come with us to Alton Towers.”

For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Alton Towers is a theme park, easily the best in the UK, though nothing like a match for Disney. It was a great place for a couple of teenage boys to spend the day, and I readily agreed. Even if it wasn’t something so cool, I would have assented. I was rapidly growing to think of Jake as the best friend I’d ever had, and I’d known him less than a week.

His response upon hearing my positive reply was to jump slightly into the air, pumping his fist. It was then that I realised how much my acceptance meant to him, and once again my heart went out to him. I wasn’t the best friend a boy could ever have, but right at that point in time I was the only one he had.

7.

Over the following weeks Jake and I became increasingly close as  friends. We began to visit each other’s houses, and I met his mum, and introduced him to mine. It was all pretty much typical young mates stuff, riding bikes, watching TV, playing video games, that sort of thing. We just seemed to have that natural affinity for one another that makes the friendships formed at that stage of life typically stronger than any others. We became inseparable, and that’s where the problems started.

As I’m sure you’ve guessed from the narrative to this point, the kids we went to school with weren’t the most well-informed, new age bunch of teens in the world. They’d already made Jake’s life hell, even though as he had insisted to me he wasn’t gay. And now, because of my friendship with him, they turned on me, too.

It was only little things at first, but then the abuse became very personal. It angered me not so much that they were bullying me, but that they were so wrong. I simply wasn’t what they were accusing me of being. I wasn’t Jake’s boyfriend, or as they delightfully put it, ‘bum chum’, but they relentlessly wheeled out the insult as though it were the gospel truth, and no amount of protesting would make the taunting cease.

We dealt with it by withdrawing – mature, huh? I suppose at least we didn’t turn to violence and gun down our classmates. Though where we would have got a gun is beyond me. We had each other as friends, and we came to the unspoken agreement that that was all we really needed. As long as we didn’t have to face it alone, it was almost bearable. It’s funny – speaking about it in these terms makes it seem like our relationship was a foregone conclusion, and yet at the time we were both so adamant that it was nothing more than friendship in adversity.

8.

The day of Jake’s birthday trip fell two days after his actual birthday. It was a Saturday, predictably enough, since we were in term time, and I was, for the first time in our friendship, going to stay the night at his house afterwards. We were absolutely bouncing off the ceiling with excitement, acting much younger than our thirteen years. There was something rather liberating about having a friend who was so unwilling to judge my behaviour, and I took advantage of the fact, acting like a bit of a clown because I knew Jake wouldn’t care. In fact, it was the opposite. Normally such a quiet boy, Jake was suddenly full of chatter, bursting with things to say, and I found myself fascinated by the way he could talk about a topic for so long without repeating himself. He just held my attention, and if I’d had half a head on my shoulders I would have realised why.
We had the best day out I think I’ve ever had. I can’t remember a time when I’ve spent so long laughing. I wrote in my diary at the time (how else do you think I remember this stuff?) that I couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather have as my best friend. Again, with the benefit of hindsight...

We were pretty tired heading back to Jake’s house. It was a two hour drive, and we were both asleep not ten minutes into the journey. It turned out to be just what we needed, though, because as soon as we were back at Jake’s and woke up again, we were as lively as ever, and ready for a night of videos. Jake had already persuaded his dad to get us a load from Blockbusters, and now we were going to spend the whole evening in the TV room watching them and generally having a great time. And the best part of all, Jake’s parents were actually going away for the night and leaving us on our own! They needed to be at an appointment about the custody status of Jake’s half brother the next morning (which lawyer has meetings on a Sunday?), and the meeting was a hundred miles away, so they were straight out the door after making sure we weren’t going to trash the place.
Well, the first thing we had to do was sort ourselves out for the evening. We grabbed all of the food we thought we could conceivably eat, about twenty cans of Coke and all of the videos, and settled down to watch our way through them.

We’d already decided to sleep in sleeping bags in the TV room, since there was no-one to tell us to go to bed, and we’d both already got changed into our sleeping clothes – shorts and t-shirt for me, and just a pair of jogging bottoms for Jake. I don’t recall being surprised that he was topless, but as we got straight into our sleeping bags I decided to join him, hauling off my top and throwing it across the room, bringing a rather childish giggle from Jake.

We sat next to each other on the sofa, in our separate sleeping bags, for the first half an hour or so, but pretty soon it became clear that we were both too hot. Jake was the first to react, pushing it down and off his feet into a pile on the floor. I followed suit straight away, and there we both were, sat on the sofa together in not a great deal of clothing.
Normally, that would have been a major issue for me. I was skinny as hell, and hated my body, hated being seen this way. But somehow the fact that I knew Jake wasn’t going to take the piss meant that I was ok with being topless in front of him in such a casual situation. Yeah, we’d both been that way in swimming lessons at school, but there was something fundamentally different about just the two of us doing it in his parent’s house on our own.

“What are you going to do if you get really hot?” I asked. I don’t know what compelled me to do so. It was clearly a very loaded question, but it was utterly non-premeditated. I certainly didn’t expect Jake to pull his pants off and thrown them across the room to land on my t-shirt. That I did not expect.

9.

I gawped. He just sat back, naked as the day he was born, with everything on show, arms folded across his chest. He had a very serious look on his face, but it was apparently quite forced as only a few seconds later he dissolved into a giggling fit of epic proportions.

Still he didn’t cover himself up, though, and as I laughed myself, drawn in by his enthusiasm, I kept an eye on the most private part of his body. I couldn’t have told you at the time what drew me to Jake in this way. I chastised myself later for not turning away, or at least for having taken such an active interest. Perhaps I had subconsciously convinced myself that it was just idle curiosity, and that all boys checked other boys out, if just for the sake of comparison. Of course, whatever the motive, I did make that comparison. If you were keeping a checklist, you’d probably have called it a draw and referred it to the judges.

His giggling fit over, Jake turned to look at me, his head slightly on its side. He was smiling still, and thank God I smiled back, otherwise I think he would have had a massive crisis of confidence and probably fled the room. It certainly would have ruined the friendship. For some reason, under his gaze, I felt compelled to join him, and quickly whipped off my shorts, also throwing them as far as I could, scoring extra points for managing to drape them over the door handle.

Jake just watched me for a moment, eyes slightly widened. It was pretty obvious what had caused his shock. I’d known that I was excited, but hadn’t really joined the dots when I impulsively pulled off my shorts. I was naked, just like Jake, but unlike Jake I was also showing quite visual signs that I was very much enjoying what was happening. I followed his gaze, and when I looked back up and our eyes met, Jake nearly killed himself laughing.

When he recovered this time, he turned back to watching the film, though I noticed when I glanced over that not only had he joined me in a state of excitement, but he also had a hand idly toying with the long skin which overhung its end. He wasn’t playing with himself, not properly anyway, but the hand was still there. Totally flummoxed by what was happening, I decided to put it out of my mind and watch the film.

By the time the credits rolled, we were both back to being normal boys, and it was as though our nakedness meant nothing. We chatted about the film, wandered about the house to go and take a leak, that sort of thing, and with no mention of the fact that we were unclothed. Indeed, the remainder of the evening passed the same way, with no further notice taken of our nudity.
 

10.

I left just after midday the next day. When I made it home I was immediately sent to the shower by my mother, who seemed to be able to smell that I hadn’t bathed that morning. How sensitive the noses of mothers, eh? I could remember that shower even if I hadn’t poured my heart out to my diary that night, because for the first time in my life as I hunted for an image to fill my mind at the point of no return, it was a boy’s young, smooth groin which filled my mind’s eye. Jake’s groin.

Guilt flooded my body like adrenaline, doubling me over as it made my stomach churn. Only by force did I prevent myself from throwing up all over the bathroom. I gasped for air, floored by the feeling’s washing through me. I had violated so many unsaid oaths that I felt retribution would be instantly forthcoming, that God, my belief in whom was still alive if rapidly dwindling, would strike me down now and not bother waiting for judgement day. I staggered to my room, towel around my waist, and fell back onto my bed. What’s worse, ten minutes later I did it again.

I could hardly bear to look at myself in the mirror. Every time I thought about what I’d done, my stomach lurched a little, as if in fear. I think that may actually have been it, in fact. I feared discovery. I feared that suddenly everyone knew I was gay. That’s how I thought of myself, too – as suddenly being gay just because I’d thought of my best friend in the whole world at one particular moment. Well, twice, if you counted the one on my bed. And not just thought about him, not just imagined his face, but thought about that most private part of him, sat there displayed to me and only me. I was gay and the world was going to hate me. What would happen when everyone found out? Oh God, my life was over.

11.

School the next day was painful. I tried to act normally, and I think I probably did. I don’t reckon too many people noticed I was distracted.

One person was bound to sense it, though. Jake. He came straight over to me before lessons even started with this sort of half cheeky, half embarrassed look on his face. He hadn’t looked that way on the Sunday morning, so I wondered what could have caused it now.

“Hey,” he said, mock casually, and then had a small, barely contained giggling fit. I couldn’t help but laugh, too. When I finally managed to get him calmed down enough to speak, he admitted that he was still pretty hyper about what had happened on Saturday night. I, on the other hand, was less impressed with myself, because of the mental torture I was putting myself through about being gay.

Of course it affected our friendship. How could it not? Especially since every time the hormones in my body were sufficiently recharged, which was about twice a day at this point, I was forced to find a quiet place to deal with the problem, and every time a certain image would pop into my head, of a small, upright tube of pinkish flesh.

As soon as the problem was dealt with, the guilt would rush in to take its place, filling me with a sense of dread. I hated the very sight of Jake by the end of the week, just because of the feelings he stirred in me. Just looking at him sent flashes of imagery through my mind. Or imagery of flashes, I should say. Things got so bad that on Friday I refused to talk to him at all. Jake couldn’t understand, and naturally left in a huff.
 

12.

I felt even worse, of course, so bad that I couldn’t bring myself even to enjoy the simple pleasures like staying up late on a Friday night to watch TV. My mother, of course, joked that I must be coming down with something, and I hate to bite back the retort, “yes, gayness!”.

I woke in the early hours of Saturday, resolved to do something about this. I couldn’t let it go on any longer without saying something to Jake. On the one hand I knew it was suicide, but on the other I was so desperate to be free of the burden that I knew I must tell him what had been going through my mind.

I agonised over it all the way to his house. I turned my bike back twice, but both times I realised I was chickening out. I had some crazy idea in my head that he deserved to know what I was thinking about him, so that our friendship, if we still had one, was no longer based on lies, or at least untold truths.

The last few hundred yards were the worst. My stomach churned so badly that I could hardly turn the pedals. I carried on though, determined to make it at whatever cost. I think I must have been possessed, or at least appeared so to anyone who saw me urging myself along what was really quite a flat road.

13.

I knew he’d be up. Jake was always up this early, even on a Saturday. He was just one of those people who need all day to burn off enough energy to sleep at night. But by the same token I didn’t want to wake up his parents, so knocking on the front door was out of the question. I hadn’t really thought this part through, but when I got there, I realised I could hear the TV coming from the room where we had spent that fateful night, and the room was on the ground floor. It was easy enough, then, to creep up to the window and alert him by tapping on it.

He spotted me before I even had a chance to knock. His initial scowl turned to merely a look of consternation as he answered by beckoning and came over to the window. I started to try to explain, but he hushed me and indicated he was coming to the front door.

“I need to talk to you about some stuff,” I said once we’d exchanged greetings.

“What stuff?”

“Well, sort of personal stuff,” I answered.

“Oh,” he said. Now he was saying it!

“Look, I get it if you don’t want to talk to me, but I really need to say some stuff.”
He sighed, then said,

“Ok. Go round the side of the house.”

That meant we would be going into Jake’s back garden, and at the bottom of the garden was a den, hidden from view behind an old shed. His parents must have known it was there, but if they knew what happened there they never said anything. But that’s getting ahead of myself. Right now I took my bike and waited by the massive back gate.

A few seconds later it opened. Jake at least managed a weak smile this time, though it was clearly a bit forced. I realised this wasn’t going to be as easy as I had hoped.
 

14.

The den smelled as musty and damp as it always did. Weak sunlight filtered down through a dirty old sheet of corrugated plastic, which served as the roof. Jake pulled the door (an old fence panel) shut behind us, and then just looked at me with his hands in the pockets of his tracksuit pants.

“Ok,” I started. Good start. Now to just bite the bullet and go for it. “Ok, so I was pretty horrible to you during the week, and I wanted to say why. It was because I accidentally thought about you when I was... well, you know...”

Jake looked really confused for a moment, and then obviously realisation dawned on him. The look of shock on his face sent adrenaline racing around my body. There was about a 95% percent chance he was going to tip over to fully freaked out and disgusted, and so I did what all stupid boys do in that situation, I started babbling.
 
“Look, it wasn’t deliberate, ok? Well,” I added, “not the first time. But it doesn’t mean anything. I mean, we can still be friends, right?”

Jake just looked at me, processing what I’d said. I started to go again with the babbling, but he interrupted me.

“Matt, can I tell you something now?”

I just nodded my head, finally getting the idea that quiet was a good idea.

“Right. Well, you remember how I told you a boy made up loads of stuff about me and another boy?”

Nod.

“Well, it wasn’t true that I was messing about with another boy. Actually, it was the boy who was telling the stories I messed around with.”

My jaw pretty much bounced off the floor.

“See? We both have little secrets.”

“And we’re both gay...” I said, dejectedly.

Jake shrugged.

“So?”

“So what do we do now?” I asked, desperation edging into my voice.

“Well, I don’t know if I’m gay or not, Matt, but I reckon if I want to kiss you and you don’t mind, then I should.”

I just looked at him absolutely confused out of my mind. What? That didn’t follow at all...

15.

Jake closed the gap between us in one stride. In the same movement his hands went to the sides of my head, and a heartbeat later his lips touched mine.

I was still too flabbergasted to understand what was happening. Jake tried again, and thankfully this time I got it. This time I realised what was happening, and that quite frankly I loved it, and I wanted to do more of it.

It’s funny to think how quickly you learn to kiss, especially with passion involved. A minute later my lips and chin were covered in slobber from our rather wet coupling, and a surge of adrenaline close to lightning bolt strength was racing through me as a hot, soft hand reached inside my shorts and took possession of all of me.

16.

I doubled over with the shock of feeling him touch me, ripping my mouth away from his, gasping for breath. The sensation had been too much and Jake stood staring at the single wet streak which ran up his arm, seemingly in disbelief. I leaned back against the only solid wall of the den, breathing hard, shaking like a leaf and feeling weak at the knees. He came over to me and pulled me upright, grabbing me in a fierce hug which had a lot more to do with companionship than lust. For the first time since I was a small boy, I let a tear fall from the corner of my eye.

17.

We went and talked, but properly this time. I know it seems strange that two thirteen year old boys would go and talk about it, but we did. In excited whispers, of course, because his parents were still asleep upstairs. His little brother came in at one point and demanded to watch TV, so our conversation was curtailed somewhat until we struck on the ingenious notion of going to his room and talking there.

Of course, we had to be even more quiet there. My presence wouldn’t really be questioned, but his parents hated to be woken up early at the weekends, when during the week they both got up early for work. So we whispered, and then kissed again, and by the time we were done whispering, and kissing, and well... you know... anyway, by the time we were done it was very much time for me to get home before I was missed. With one last kiss I left him standing there with a rather obvious problem to either hide, or solve... by himself this time.

18.

To suggest that I saw the world through rose-tinted spectacles that day really didn’t do justice to the way I felt. Suddenly all those unpleasant emotions which had been ruining my relationship with my mum were gone. I was her happy little boy again, her best friend. She even joked that I must have found a girlfriend, and I smiled inwardly as I was able to say that in all honestly there was no chance.

The possibility of telling her about Jake and I didn’t even enter my head. It just didn’t occur to me that my mum’s reaction could be in any way positive. I just imagined her freaking out and kicking me out of the house or something. I didn’t think for a second she would see it for what it was, see that I loved Jake and that was that.

Of course, I asked if Jake could come over and stay the night, something he’d done fairly regularly in the preceding few weeks. Normally my mum would have agreed straight away, and I’d almost thanked her before my brain registered that she’d said no. That rather knocked the wind out of my sails, but to be fair she was right, she had told me several days before that she was going out for the evening, and that she was going to get one of the neighbours to look in on me from time to time. She didn’t feel it was fair on them to have the extra responsibility of having Jake around.

The fact that her reasons were good did nothing to blunt my anger. I’d just got Jake and now I wanted him all the time. With homework and chores to do during the day the only chance I was going to have to see him was the evening, and now my mum’s personal life was getting in the way of mine. I was the one meant to be having fun, not her!

There was only one thing for it – I had to persuade my mum that I was old enough to look after myself, and that I wouldn’t burn the house down if I was left to my own devices. I started almost straight away, trying my most persuasive tactics as we went round the supermarket getting the week’s food in. I carried on as we went to the DIY shop to get a replacement power socket for the living room (you pick up all sorts of things when there’s no dad on the scene and your mum was never that good with the practical things), and by the time we reached the pet shop (dog food, in prodigious quantities) I could sense that she had reached the point where she was either going to agree or lose it with me altogether. Being the annoying little kid that I was I pushed it.

19.

For the first time ever I was going to be left home alone. Of course she agreed, I always knew she would! And the best part was that in fact I wouldn’t be alone. My ‘best friend’ was coming over, and the knowledge of what might happen set my heart hammering in my ribcage, and all of the blood it pumped heading in the wrong direction... I was a giddy little kid all afternoon, definitely not acting my age.

My mum noticed how excited I was, and commented on it with a weird smile on her face. Suddenly I was paranoid, wondering if perhaps she knew something. I just made up something about there being some film on TV that we really wanted to watch. Thank God when I looked in the Radio Times it turned out that Die Hard was on that evening, and that was just the kind of movie I liked watching.

20.

Jake turned up at six o’clock, the appointed hour. He came in with a shy smile, and because I knew my mum was in the shower upstairs I closed the door and stopped him with a hand on his arm, moving in to kiss him. Oh, major butterflies time! It was practically chaste in comparison to the last time we had kissed, but instantly I went light in the head at the feeling of his soft, hot lips. His hand went briefly to the back of my head, then my shoulder, and then my lower back, pulling our hips together. When finally we parted I was blushing strongly and had a serious problem to conceal before my mum came downstairs.

“Hey,” he said as he smiled at me. His eyes betrayed a fierce battle between the pure emotion of live and the corrupting forces of unstoppable lust.

“Hi,” I replied. “My mum should be going out in about twenty minutes. She actually has a date! Can you believe that?”

Jake giggled and shook his head – after all, how was it possible that an old person would go on a date. To put into context how ridiculous our train of thought was my mum was only 34 at the time, but of course that was ancient to our eyes.

We went and sat down, making sure to be careful to sit on different sofas so my mum didn’t suspect anything when she came downstairs. When she did in due course she was very much dressed to impress, and smelled rather strongly of perfume.

“Oh, hi, Jake,” she said when she came into the living room. “Glad you could come over, Matthew’s been excited about it all afternoon.”

I cringed. I mean of course Jake knew I would be excited, but it was just the sort of thing mums said to embarrass their teenage sons. My mum gave me a triumphant smile which said ‘that’s payback for this afternoon’, and then walked out with all sorts of warnings and instructions shouted over her shoulder, none of which I listened to.

Almost as soon as she was gone, Jake gave me a wicked little smile and jumped forward off his sofa onto mine. He straddled my waist and planted his hands either side of my shoulders on the back of the sofa, and then leaned forward, his hot breath on my neck. Immediately my hands were beneath his t-shirt, tugging at the buckle of his belt.

21.

As the hot water ran down my body dragging soap suds with it, I reflected on what had just happened. My mind still spun with the reality of the situation. Jake and I were past friends now. We’d not used the word ‘boyfriend’, because for us that meant something else, something between a girl and a boy. But though we didn’t have the words to describe it, we both knew what was going on.

As I washed my most sensitive part, a bolt shot through me, a reminder of sensations only newly experienced, of a peak of euphoria so great that its impact lingered on in my body, and would do for days to come. No solitary exploration would ever again be sufficient to sate my lust, not now.

I didn’t think about it at the time, but I’ve done so any number of times since: we were really lucky in that very specific sense. The reality was that most of our classmates had never experienced love, or the opportunity to express that love physically with another. Girls were always a bit less keen to get involved with the physical side of love. Before Jake there were girls, though none of them anywhere near this serious. All were very well brought up, lovely girls, and therefore completely useless for a young boy racked with surging hormones.

I don’t mean to paint a picture of gay life being one long promiscuous orgy, but Jake and I had no compunctions about experiencing what we so desperately wanted to experience – sex, and a lot of it, as often as possible. We were in love, yes, but also in searing, overwhelming lust.

22.

The first morning waking up next to another person, next to the person with whom you are in love, is something sensational. Jake was still asleep, which was unusual for him – all the times we’d spent sleeping over at each other’s houses, before we had admitted our feelings, he had always awoken first, then made sure I was not far behind so we could begin the day. I must have worn him out, I suppose.

He lay there on his back, one arm above his head, snoring very gently. He was covered up to his chest, but beneath I was fairly sure that, like me, he was unclothed. I couldn’t resist very gently lifting the covers and glancing downwards. Whilst I was experiencing the usual morning issues that every boy of a certain age does, Jake was clearly still very asleep, because his lay inert across the top of one thigh.

I couldn’t resist. It felt naughty, but at the same time suddenly permissible. I reached down and held him, rolled him around, tweaked the tip of his foreskin. I was just so fascinated by it, almost as if I didn’t own one myself. In fact I was fascinated by the whole of his body, from his delightful face, to the beautiful soft skin of his neck, his slightly brown nipples (a contrast to my own pink ones), his delightful tummy, slightly rounded still with youth, to his scraggly, almost non-existent patch of hair and finally the thing which marked him out more than anything else as pure boy, standing tall now beneath my ministrations.

I still get a thrill to this day from waking him by dropping my head down beneath the covers, working on him in that hot, stuffy air, darkness enveloping me, heightening my sense of smell and of touch. What I did that first morning lay the foundations for a memory which has lasted a lifetime.
 

23.

We were invincible, suddenly. All the taunts and jeers of our classmates faded into the background. No, of course we didn’t flaunt it, that would have maybe tipped the balance toward violence, but nor did we hide the fact that, as we had always done, we preferred our own company to that iof a bunch of ill-informed idiots.

Of course it wasn’t all plain sailing, but by God there were compensations. As long as you were discreet, no-one saw two lads disappearing into the toilets at lunchtime. Suddenly I understood what my mum was always trying to tell me – school days really are the best days of your life, if you were lucky like we were.

The daily grind was suddenly not so painful. As soon as I saw Jake, everything was OK. Everything else faded into the background. I started to almost enjoy myself. We left the library, too, found a corner of the playground which was ours alone. Even befriended some other kids who had no other friends, though the real truth of our relationship was kept to ourselves.

My mum noticed the change, though she mistakenly took it for me settling down a bit better than I had in other places. I imagine she thought I was going through all sorts of changes, so the more relaxed Matt was simply another stage.

Of course, nothing that perfect ever lasts. Not in the real world.

24.

I stomped my foot. I actually, in the heat of anger, pounded the floor with my foot.

“You can’t do this! Not now!”

My mum was calm. She’d seen this before, though perhaps not with such passion on my part.

“Matt,” she said, her tone half conciliatory, half commanding, “we have to go. The job’s massive, and there’s a chance I might get taken on permanently at the end of it. It’s not like you’ve made a lot of friends this time round!”

Oh God that hurt. It hurt so badly that I doubled over with pain and just sobbed into my hands.

“Look, Matt,” she said, perhaps realising that she had gone too far, “perhaps the next school will be nicer. I mean, the one you’re at now can be a bit rough, can’t it?”

She referred to the state of my school bag two weeks prior to our conversation, muddied and torn after things turned a bit ugly on the way home.

“But I like it!” I protested.

“Why?” she asked, clearly confused.

“Because!”

What was I meant to tell her? That I had found love, that it wasn’t a girl but rather it was my best friend? That couldn’t happen.

“Come on, Matt, tell me. Please?”

“No!” I shouted. “You wouldn’t understand!”

“You don’t know that, Matthew. I thought we were really close. I thought I knew everything about you, but now you won’t tell me anything.”

“You wouldn’t get it, mum, OK? You just wouldn’t get it.”

I stalked out of the room, stamped my way up the stairs and slammed the door shut behind me.

25.

She came up and knocked softly on the door half an hour later. I had cried myself out, and was sitting on my bed looking around the room, trying to memorise it all before it was taken from me.

She came and sat next to me, putting an arm around my shoulders.

“Matt, I need you to tell me why you’re so upset this time. I know it’s not easy, but we’ve always been alright, haven’t we? We’ve always coped before…”

“It’s different this time, mum. It’s just really different.”

“What is it? Is it a girl?”

Oh God. There was the opening. There was my chance to just come clean. All I had to do with step through the door. How many times had I come to this point, nearly telling her and then chickening out? How often had I come within a hair’s breadth of saying everything I so desperately wanted to say?

What tipped me over the edge this time I don’t know. Perhaps it was the spectre of losing Jake when we meant so much to each other.

“No, mum, it’s not a girl. Actually, it’s a boy.”

I just left it hanging there.

26.

My mother’s face didn’t display a mixture of emotions. Actually, that doesn’t happen very often. Usually it’s one emotion or other, but not a mixture. The one emotion which reigned over all was not anger, or disgust, thankfully, but confusion. She sat there looking as if I’d spoken to her in Cantonese and expected her to understand.

The dawning of understanding was like the rain that falls at the end of a long, hot summer’s day. It comes in little dots at first, but then suddenly the heavens open and it pours down. The penny dropped for my mum, and suddenly everything fell into place.

“Oh.”

I don’t know why, but I was angry that was all she managed to come up with. I wanted more. I didn’t care what it was, good or bad, but I needed her to say something, not just look at me with that strange look on her face. It was as though I had given her the key to a puzzle she had been working on for a long time, and now the answer was plain to see.
 
“So, Jake then. Right?”

I nodded at her, and then decided she needed more than that.

“Yes, Jake. And you can’t stop me seeing him mum. You can’t!”

I’d interpreted her lack of words as a sign of discontent, though looking back it was clear she was simply trying to digest the news. She held up her hands in a conciliatory gesture.
 
“I’m not going to stop you, Matt. It’s just a bit of a shock.”

“What, that I’m gay?”

“Well, yes. I mean, you’re not exactly effeminate, are you? You’re just not how I expected a gay person to be. I thought I knew everything about you.”

I had no answer to that. Honestly, I had been a bit selfish – my mother and I usually shared everything, and yet I’d hidden something massive like this from her. My mum was looking down at the floor now, troubled.

“Do Jake’s parents know?” she asked.

“No, unless he’s told them this morning. We haven’t planned it, you know.”

“Right. Well, perhaps you ought to go over there for a while. Maybe he needs to know you let the secret out.”

I’d already planned to head over to Jake’s as soon as my chores were done for the day, and I took my mum’s suggestion as permission to skip those, so I just grabbed a jumper and went and found my bike.

27.

When I was done telling Jake everything he looked down at the floor, and when he raised his head again there were tears in the corners of his eyes.

“We’re fucked, aren’t we?” he said.

Jake never used the f-word, so I knew he was pretty upset, though whether it was about our impending separation or the realisation we were out (at least to my mum) I couldn’t be sure. There was simply too much to take into account. He was right, we were fucked.
We sat there lost in our own thoughts for ages, until his mum came up and checked on us, wanting to ask Jake whether he wanted to go shopping with her and his brother. I knew he could do with something to take his mind off things, so I suggested he go, and I would go home and talk to my mum. When we were alone he bear-hugged me, and gave me one little kiss goodbye on the cheek.

28.

There was an open bottle of wine on the kitchen table. Half gone. And two glasses. This was odd for an early Saturday evening. I knew my mum drank occasionally, but she was never really a heavy drinker, and usually it was confined to nights out. Who was the other drinker, too?

I wandered through to the living room, from which a pair of lowered voices emanated. When I walked in, there was mum, with her boyfriend, Dave. He looked up at me and gave me his usual warm smile of greeting, though my mum refused to raise her head, and when I looked closely she had clearly been crying. Dave motioned for me to sit down on the other sofa, and then spoke to my mum.

“Linda, do you want to talk to Matt about it, or should I?”

Now I was thoroughly confused. Dave had been mum’s boyfriend for a while now, since before Jake and I had been together. The date she had gone on the night Jake and I had first spent alone together in my house was with Dave, and little did I know that my mum had actually been seeing him for a while before that, through work. The way he was talking to mum had overtones, though, and I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of it.

Eventually, mum nodded her head.

“I’ll do it, Dave,” she said, then turned to me, wiping away a tear from the corner of her eye. “Matt, what you said earlier, it was a shock, OK? I didn’t deal with it properly. I didn’t realise how much Jake meant to you until I sat down and had a think about it. You spend all of your time together. His your only friend. Obviously a bit more than that, too. It made me think about all the moving around we do. I didn’t realise how bad it messed things up for you. Or me. I called Dave and got him to come over. We were talking, and it just seemed like a good idea.”

Mum stopped. Obviously she hadn’t realised that she hadn’t told me what was a good idea. I just looked at her.

“Well, what do you think?”

“About what?” I asked.
 
Fortunately, Dave was following the conversation.

“Linda, you didn’t really tell him what we were thinking.”

“Oh, didn’t I? Oh. Well, Matt, Dave and I were thinking that we really like each other. Not enough to get married just yet, but maybe enough to live together.”

“Do you mean we could stay here?” I asked.

“Well, sort of. In the area. Dave has a house over in Stokebridge. It’s no further from school than here, but it’s a nice place. What do you think?”

I didn’t know what to say. I was drained. After resigning myself to losing Jake, then coming out to my mum, then breaking the news to Jake that we would be split up, and now this, I just couldn’t cope emotionally. I put my arm on the arm of the sofa, buried my face in the crook of my arm, and cried.

29.

Ok, that’s gone by in a flash. Seems to be all so neat and tidy, and quick when I write it down like that. But it wasn’t that way, really. Looking back at my diary shows so much confusion. I can’t write it all down, because the words are garbled. There’s just feelings in a random order on a page. Several pages.

My mind was a mess, that much is pretty obvious. I didn’t want us to move in with Dave. Oh, we got on OK, but moving in with him was something else. I didn’t want things to change, didn’t want it to stop being me and my mum. Looking at it with an adult head on, I can understand how unfair that is. Why shouldn’t my mum have happiness? I did, after all. At the time, though, there was a lot of resentment.

30.

There’s another aspect to this we’ve rather skimmed over up to now. The narrative has turned rather Matt-centric, but Jake was suffering, too. The fact was that now my mum knew he was gay, and my boyfriend. That put him in a terrible position – my mum had promised that nothing would be said until he was ready, but what had been something exciting, fun, secretive now became a millstone around his neck.

He didn’t want me to come over the next day, a Sunday. He said he needed time alone. I left him to it, not wanting to argue. I waited in my room all day, my homework done, my mother out with Dave somewhere, probably looking at wallpaper or some such thing. I just sat there looking out of the window.

Until something familiar moved out there. I jumped up and looked out of the window, down into the front garden. It was Jake, and he was heading at speed for the front door.

I ran down the stairs and flew to the front door. Jake almost fell through the door, and into my arms. He was crying, and it looked like he had been from some time. He sobbed into my shoulder while I held him. These weren’t tears of joy.

31.

Jake’s father was at the door. I opened the door and there he was, being big and scary. Well, normally he was big and scary. Now he just looked defeated, and worried half to death.

“Jacob’s here?”

It was phrased as a question, but spoken as a statement of truth. I nodded anyway.

“I’m not going to barge into your house, Matt, but if you don’t let me speak to him I won’t be happy.”

Let’s get this clear – I was scared absolutely shitless of Jake’s dad. He didn’t interact all that much with me, though he had never been unfriendly as such. Now he seemed to be asking me for permission to see his own son. This was really messed up. But he didn’t seem angry. I showed him into the living room and then went to ask Jake if he wanted to see his dad.

32.

I sat awkwardly on the sofa next to Jake. He didn’t want me to leave. Told me so in very firm tones in front of his father. So I sat there feeling very much the third wheel, while Jake and his dad had the conversation they needed to have.

“Jacob, your mother was wrong. Very wrong. You know she didn’t mean what she said, right?”

“Dad, she shouted all kinds of things at me. She told me I’m sick in the head!”

Oh God, that must have hurt. Suddenly my experience with my mum looked like the perfect coming out. What on earth had happened?

“Jakey, she’s just in shock, OK? Let her calm down.”

“What if she doesn’t, dad? What if she just keeps shouting at me and saying all that stuff?”

“She won’t, mate. She won’t. Just give her a chance to get over it. Give her time. It’s a bit of a shock, that’s all.”

“You don’t seem shocked, Dad. You seem OK with it.”

Jake’s dad’s shoulders slumped. He ran a hand through his hair.

“I’m not shocked, Jakey. Or surprised. I’ve known for a while. Knew about you both.”

33.

Jake and his father left together half an hour later, just as my mum and Dave returned. They met briefly in the driveway, the conversation an awkward one, where nothing is said but plenty is communicated.

I was grilled as soon as I was through the door. What were they doing here? Was I OK? Was Jake OK? I tried to reassure them, but I was drained. The weekend had been too much for me. I just slumped on the sofa and within minutes was asleep.

I didn’t go to school the next day, or the day after that. I slept, and slept some more. My mum went to work, but each day came home early to make sure I was OK. I think she understood that I couldn’t cope with everything going on at once. Jake stayed home, too, but we didn’t see each other, at his dad’s suggestion. He was right, too. The space gave us time to wind down, to reset I suppose. When I finally came out of the far side I was refreshed and ready to face the world.

34.

Jake’s dad was wrong. His mum really didn’t grow to cope with it, not for a long time. She refused to talk to him, and nothing his dad could say would bring her round. It was only years later, when Jake nearly died in a car crash, that she finally came around.

But all that was ahead of us. For the moment, and most importantly, Jake and I were back on track. I had my mother’s blessing, and Dave’s too. In fact, he was the most chilled and supportive of any of the adults I knew at the time. Because of Jake’s mother, we couldn’t spend nights at his anymore, so when we did have a chance to we had nights at mine.
Well, actually, at Dave’s, because that’s where we ended up only a matter of weeks later. It was strange, being in someone else’s house, no matter what effort he went to, to make us feel at home. He even bought me a double bed and redecorated my room, but still it felt weird.

35.

Of course, at our age, and with the feelings we had for each other, the weirdness could only hold us back for a while. I revelled in the intimacy Jake and I shared. Each time was special, each peak greeted with a satisfied smile and a warm embrace.

I learned everything that made him tick, all the little things I could do to drive him mad before I took him over the edge. He, too, could push my buttons, touching me in places I never knew would bring such pleasure. To have someone who knew so intimately what excited me took passion to a new level. I would literally double up in pain at the intensity of the pleasure he could make me feel.

We would spend hours together, playing, exploring, working out what felt good and what felt weird. We had no guidance, so had few preconceived ideas about what we were and weren’t meant to do. The first time I felt his mouth on me was at his instigation, and I can only assume he’d heard about the idea from before, when he’d messed around with the other boy. Instantly it became the heart and soul of our games, though, the most important thing to do, the sharing of a bond of which no-one else was a part. So strong were the sensations that the very memory of the first time I tried it on him will even now bring me virtually unparalleled pleasure.

We became so close that I realised I would never again love so completely, so wholeheartedly. Jake was, and is, the perfect, only love of my life.

36.

So, how to end our tale? Well, there is plenty more to tell, I suppose, but not plenty worth telling, not compared to all that came before. Jake and I, well, we’re still together. We’ve been apart, but we’re together again. Those few months were only the beginning of the story, but it’s a story to be told another time, in another way. Thanks for reading, I hope it means something to someone.

The Very End