Strong Enough
by Nico Grey
I
He stood atop the steep overlook, his mind only peripherally aware of the space surrounding him. He sensed rolling hills spreading out in all directions, really little more than shadows beneath the evening sky. A handful of faint lights populated the darkness below.
'That must be the town,' he decided. Judah. 'But what kind of town is called Judah?' he wondered.
Above him, the night sky expanded effortlessly into the distance. Stars glittered brightly, illuminating the vastness of the firmament. The air was surprisingly warm for late August in Vermont.
The wide open space around him, the limitless sky. He shivered. 'It should feel like freedom,' he thought to himself. Instead it felt like exile.
A streak of white raced across the sky. Perhaps a straggler from the Perseid meteor showers, he speculated. 'I guess I'm supposed to make a wish.' He shrugged. There seemed little point to it.
'Happy birthday.' He shook his head. Everything felt hopeless. He looked at the brilliant display in the sky above, then at the lights from the houses spread out below, waiting at the bottom of the precipice.
He knew he lacked the strength to blow out all his candles. 'Only fifteen.' But he wasn't sure how he'd ever find the strength to light sixteen.
'God, I feel like hell tonight,' Caleb Bradford shuddered. He couldn't imagine that he would feel any better in the morning. But he turned away from the overlook and stumbled down the gentle slope on the back side of the hill.
When the school bus stopped in front of his home at 7:27 the following morning, Caleb wasn't ready. But he shuffled forward like a condemned man and climbed aboard the bus anyway.
He was not alone. As he slipped past the driver, Caleb noticed two boys and a girl, all a couple of years younger than him, scattered in seats around the bus.
It was a new experience for Caleb. When he last climbed aboard a bus, in June, he was one of more than thirty mostly loud and energetic students waiting at the bus stop, that shoved and jostled their way on board to claim the best seats available. This bus looked like it was transporting students to work on the graveyard shift.
When he and his mother arrived in Judah just a week earlier, Caleb understood that backwoods Vermont was far more sparsely populated than Keene had been. Keene, New Hampshire, after all, was a city of modest size and even home to a state college. It was a community full of active people and awash in youthful energy.
But climbing aboard a school bus in Judah for the first time was still a culture shock. The three students already on board were ignoring each other- and him- choosing to immerse their attention in their phones or some other solitary pursuit. It felt unnatural.
That wasn't the only unnatural thing on the bus either, Caleb realized. The ancient fossil piloting their conveyance was wearing sunglasses before it was even eight o'clock in the morning. And those sunglasses the old guy was wearing hadn't looked like grandpa's traditional Ray-Bans. They weren't stylish. They were concealing.
Caleb shook his head. 'Couldn't be!' he thought to himself. The guy was driving the bus!
It seemed like the bus screeched to a halt every two or three minutes, let a small number of 'tweens or teens climb on board, then lurched forward again, grinding gears and belching smoke from the exhaust.
At least the ride was expanding his limited understanding of Judah's road network, Caleb acknowledged, even if he was becoming seasick in the process. It wasn't improving his awareness of the local population. All of the boys and girls that climbed on board kept their heads down, scurried to find a seat, and then proceeded to keep to themselves.
And that, at least, was a good thing. Caleb understood that he was now a resident of Judah, and of the Silver River School District. As such, he was part of the community. But he was perfectly willing to ease himself cautiously into that status. He really wasn't particularly looking forward to getting to know people.
After a while, Caleb began to find the quiet on the bus comforting. He knew it couldn't last. Sooner or later, their ancient ferryman would steer the bus to an uncertain halt— brakes still squealing, gears grinding, and belching exhaust smoke— in front of Silver River Union High School. There his trials would really begin.
Before the bus departed Judah and began the final few miles of its journey up Route 42 to Antioch, and thence to the Silver River High School, it shuddered to a halt in front of a large, two-story house. The style was Colonial, but everything else about the home screamed modern construction and money. Lots of money.
The girl that climbed into the bus after the door wheezed open appeared to be about Caleb's age. She was stylishly dressed. Her medium-length auburn hair was perfect. Her blue eyes were bright and eager. Her expression was enthusiastic.
To Caleb, it appeared that she might be. . . popular. Worse, he realized that she was looking directly at him.
Caleb glanced down hurriedly and pretended to be absorbed in his. . . why hadn't he thought to bring his damn phone with him?! He breathed a sigh of relief when she reluctantly eased past him and found a seat farther back in the bus.
Caleb had visited Silver River Union High School, with his mother, when they arrived in Judah. He had a sense of the building layout. He had already considered how to best use the building and classroom design to avoid attention.
But the school had still been closed for the summer when he visited at the end of the previous week. The only people around at the time had been staff and students training with some of the sports teams.
Caleb knew that there were places in the school where he might go to avoid attention. He just hadn't given any additional thought to how he might make himself inconspicuous.
As soon as he entered the stream of students flowing toward the school entrance, he realized that what was normal first-day-of-school attire for Keene made him stand out like a peacock at Silver River. Without ever giving it a moment's thought as he got ready for school, he had definitely put too much effort into his appearance. No wonder that girl on the bus had connected with him so readily. She thought she had identified a kindred spirit.
Caleb had noticed a school store when he visited with his mother. But he was pretty sure it hadn't offered any plaid shirts or raccoon hats for sale. So he did the best he could on short notice. Unbuttoning the front of his shirt and raking his fingers carelessly through his hair might be enough to get him through one day, he hoped.
It was too late. He had already been noticed. As Caleb tried to slip unobtrusively through the school lobby, he could feel dozens of pair of eyes following him every step of the way.
"It looks like you survived your first day," his mother observed as she sat down at the dinner table and eyed him dispassionately.
Caleb hunched farther over his meal and mumbled an unintelligible response.
"Oh, come on, honey!" Nicole Bradford encouraged. "It couldn't have been that bad."
"It wasn't that good," he insisted. "Everybody in school was staring at me!"
"Oh, that does sound terrible!" The feigned sympathy in her voice wasn't lost on Caleb. "It must be awful to be the best looking young man in all of southern Vermont!"
"Mom!" Caleb groaned. "You know that's not why they were staring."
Nicole inspected her son carefully.
"I can't think of any other reason they'd stare," she told him. "Nobody at the school knows you. They see someone new. He's remarkably handsome. Of course they stare."
"I'm not handsome!" Caleb insisted. "They know something."
"Caleb," Nicole sighed. "Nobody at Silver River knows you. You're a new student. Maybe people this far out in the sticks just don't know any better than to stare.
"And you are handsome!" She added. "Very handsome."
Caleb knew better than to keep arguing with his mother. It wouldn't make her angry. He knew that. But it also wouldn't change her mind.
' Survived another one,' Caleb thought to himself as he stumbled off the school bus and scurried toward the school's main entrance. That girl who lived on the north side of Judah— he had heard someone at school call her Abby— still eyed him in a way that made Caleb uncomfortable every time she climbed on the bus. And he was finding it difficult to avoid her interest.
Every time the bus stopped at the girl's house, Caleb could feel dread in the pit of his stomach. He was sure that one day she would ignore his not-so-subtle social signals and confront him directly. Then he would be caught between being blatantly rude in front of everyone on the bus, with the gossip and further attention that would bring on him, or accepting a social overture that he was desperate to avoid.
But Caleb had escaped again. He prayed that his luck would continue to hold for just three more years, and that he could continue to remain, if not socially invisible, at least socially anonymous.
Caleb latched onto the formation of students headed toward the school, edged into their slipstream, and let them draw him onward toward his destination. As soon as he was inside the school lobby, he blended in casually with the rest of the jeans-and-t-shirt-clad crowd until he could take evasive action and slide along largely empty corridors toward his homeroom.
One of the great comforts in Caleb's school day was his homeroom. The teacher, who was also his history teacher, was chill and didn't intrude on the students' business unless they approached her. There were no real busybodies or bullies to disturb the rest of the group. The social cliques were usually low key, with none of the loud, intrusive personalities that Caleb had learned to dread. Most of the students in his homeroom actually preferred to sit quietly, study their phones, and wait for the school day to begin. Caleb was actually starting to like most of them in a low-key way.
The school day was also proving tolerable. One of the nice things about moving to a quiet backwater, Caleb decided, is that almost everyone living there had probably grown up together. They might be interested in new students. But as long as he didn't do anything to call much attention to himself, and showed no interest in them, it seemed likely that they would leave him alone and continue to socialize in their own familiar groups.
While Caleb tried to make sure that no one at school paid him any attention, it didn't mean that he wasn't interested in the people around him. He simply preferred to maintain some distance from them.
He had teachers that he was starting to like. His history teacher was just the right combination of educator that made class interesting, without trying to engage her students in ways that would make Caleb uncomfortable.
She provided the information. But she left it up to each student to decide whether they preferred to be active in class, or quietly do their work without calling attention to themselves.
Caleb wondered how she dealt with students whose preference was to do nothing in her class. But he didn't worry about it. He was never going to be among their number.
The students at Silver River Union High School were an interesting enough group. The seventh and eighth graders that made up the middle school rarely interacted with the older students. They had their own wing of the building, where they took their classes together. The only time Caleb saw more than brief glimpses of them was on his daily bus rides.
The high school students were probably much like high school students everywhere, Caleb speculated. They did live in a rural area. But they still studied a curriculum familiar to any high school student in Vermont. And from what he could see, it was fairly similar to what he had been studying at Keene High School the previous year.
Athletics and extracurricular programs were less extensive than those Caleb had experienced in Keene. But he supposed that was to be expected at a school with a smaller population and a much smaller annual operating budget. With the exception of a football program, Silver River did appear to have the same fall sports offerings. And from the buzz of excitement that he occasionally overheard, Silver River took their soccer program just as seriously as they took football in Keene.
The biggest difference between the two school communities was that social activities didn't seem to be pursued with as much intensity at Silver River. But it was a smaller community. Population density in the towns that made up the school district couldn't compare with that of a small city. People in his new community were more accustomed to spending time alone, or in pursuits with small peer groups.
Caleb was beginning to feel more comfortable in an environment with less social intensity. He was even starting to pay discreet attention to his fellow students. The social cliques didn't interest him. Just observing groups of a half dozen or more people interacting made him distinctly uncomfortable. But he was starting to become curious about those in friend groups of two or three people, and about the loners. He was especially curious about the loners.
He had fallen into a lunch time routine. He felt fortunate to have discovered a small, out-of-the-way table where he could enjoy his lunch in solitude. Eventually, he came to appreciate the view it afforded him of the rest of the cafeteria and the activity going on around him. Caleb had little interest in mingling with the rest of the students at Silver River High School, but he still had interest in his peers' activities.
The school itself seemed to be fairly recent construction. But the capacity of the cafeteria appeared to comfortably exceed demand for the space available. Caleb wondered if there had been a recent decline in school age population, or if the people who designed the building had simply provided extra capacity to accommodate potential growth. Whatever the explanation, there was enough room for everyone to gather comfortably into their preferred social groupings.
The mix of students in the cafeteria was fairly wide; from freshmen to seniors. Caleb was pretty sure that the seventh and eighth graders had their own lunch period, although the size of some of the younger students he saw did make him wonder.
Most of the younger looking kids tended to eat in small and medium sized groups, seeking protection in numbers, whatever their preference for companionship. The handful of solitary diners were usually older, juniors or seniors. And while small social groups appealed more to him than larger groups, Caleb really wasn't comfortable reaching out to people above his age level.
It became a habit for Caleb to covertly observe the lone diners, trying to discern why they didn't fit well into their environment. Were there obvious signs that no one would care to interact with them? Or signals that they would prefer to avoid their peers? As he enjoyed his lunch and solitude, trying to understand them became more than a distraction for him.
Unfortunately, Caleb wasn't the only person interested in loners. It felt like a carefully planned and executed ambush. He had time to set his lunch tray down, organize the food in front of him, open his milk, then his phone, settle in comfortably, and then he had company!
Caleb struggled to suppress his fight-or-flight reflex. To be completely accurate, it was mostly an urge to flee.
Without so much as a polite moment to make eye contact and seek permission, another lunch tray appeared across from Caleb, on the other side of the table. Its owner bounced into the seat across from him, positive energy flowing in a way that he found extremely unsettling. It was that girl from his bus.
"Hi!" she greeted him. "I'm Abby!" She even thrust out a hand in his direction.
'Oh, lord,' Caleb thought, 'This is exactly how it all started last time.' He considered ignoring the hand, but somehow it felt less confrontational to accept the greeting before it escalated.
"Uh, Caleb," he mumbled. "I just, uh, I work here." He felt even more confused than the expression on the girl's face.
She took a moment to interpret his response, confusion flickering across her countenance, before she dismissed the distraction and returned to her primary mission. She laughed brightly.
"You're funny," she announced. "I like you!"
'Oh, please don't!' Caleb pleaded silently.
But he was already half-resigned to his fate. He knew she had been watching him since the start of the school year. She had observed his attempts to deflect attention. But she was persistent. Caleb was familiar with this kind of girl. She was definitely someone who got what she wanted.
He tried to grin and make the best of it. Before they had finished eating lunch, somehow they had a date to ride their school bus home together. By then, he was pretty sure there was no way out of it for him. She hadn't left any loopholes. The contract appeared to be ironclad.
It came as no surprise at all to Caleb when Abby became his near-constant companion in the succeeding weeks. If he had thought about it at all, he would have recognized that fate intervened the moment she first set eyes on him as she boarded their school bus. It was a pattern repeating.
Caleb hoped that this time he would manage circumstances more wisely. He might not be able to escape fate, but he could identify the pattern forming and slow its progress. It might not end particularly well for him. But it didn't have to result in the disastrous outcome that caused him and his mother to flee Keene.
In many ways, in time he came to appreciate Abby's companionship. He wasn't antisocial by nature. He had just learned from hard experience that social interactions were a two-way street— that what he wanted from them wasn't always the same as what other parties wanted out of those interactions with him— and to guard himself against the consequences if misaligned expectations threatened to result in disaster. In short, the traffic coming the opposite way on the street could be a truck. It made sense to be wary.
Social isolation was the most reliable form of protection. But if social isolation wasn't possible— and Abby was far too persistent for it to be possible in this case— Caleb could at least find some solace in social intercourse before it bit him in the butt. And at least he was now better prepared to recognize the signs of impending disaster and avoid that result, or at least to avoid the worst of its consequences. He hoped.
Caleb hadn't really noticed Abby in the cafeteria before she suddenly made herself impossible to ignore. He suspected that she belonged to one of the larger social cliques. Everything about her screamed 'popular girl'. But for the first few weeks that they ate together, rode the bus to and from school together, and spoke on the phone every night— once she noticed his phone, there was no keeping his number from her— she was content to keep him to herself for a while.
The first sign of trouble appeared when Abby suggested that they join 'just a few' of her friends for lunch one day. Caleb was fortunate to be prepared for the suggestion. He had been anticipating it for a while.
"You go ahead," he encouraged her. "I'm really not big on being in groups of people." For a moment he was even hopeful.
" Oh!" Abby appeared to be sincerely surprised. "I thought you were eating alone because you didn't know anyone yet. . . because you were new here and all," she added. "I couldn't imagine anyone as hot as you wanting to eat alone."
Then she blushed. It was the first time she had spoken openly about any attraction.
Caleb sighed. He accepted that people— more than just his mother— thought that he was good looking.
He really didn't get it. When he looked in a mirror, all he saw was an oval face, rather ordinary features, green eyes, and flyaway pale blond hair. But there was no accounting for taste, he concluded. Some people found him attractive. Abby was apparently one of them.
"You don't really seem shy," she was babbling on. "But that's cool. I like shy guys. We can spend that much more time together."
'Oh my god!' Caleb groaned. It was better than being sucked into a large group of teenage girls. But the proposal came with a new array of perils. Sooner or later, he knew, he would disappoint her. That was territory that he didn't yet feel prepared to explore.
For several days, it seemed to Caleb that admitting to Abby he wasn't comfortable around people had actually been beneficial. In her own way, it felt like she had taken on the role of guardian, protecting him from unwelcome social interactions.
But her admission that she was attracted to him had also released her inhibitions against bringing up her feelings; first once, then again, and again, and again. Once that dam had burst, she no longer felt any compunction against releasing a flood of sentiment that was threatening to drown Caleb. If only he could have reciprocated it.
He did his best to give Abby what she wanted. But he knew that there was no romantic future for the two of them. She was irrepressibly extroverted and he was largely an introvert. Sooner or later their fundamental social needs would come into direct conflict with each other.
If he accepted her blatant overtures and they became a couple, eventually her drive toward social promiscuity would force her to spend more and more time apart from him. Or if he accepted her social needs and tried to participate in them, it was only a matter of time before he would inevitably lose his mind. Neither result was likely to be good for a long term relationship.
Then there was the other problem. Abby was a girl.
It wasn't that Caleb had anything against girls. Nothing at all, really. He tended to like girls. But it probably won't come as any surprise to frequent readers of LGBT fiction that Caleb might have other physical, emotional, and sexual attractions. He was, to phrase it delicately, 'one of them'.
Being 'one of them' didn't preclude enjoying female companionship. For Caleb, it really didn't even preclude the occasional sexual dalliance with an attractive and eager young lady, although he hadn't crossed that line yet. To be completely honest, Caleb hadn't crossed any lines yet that led to sexual involvement. . . or engagement. . . or entanglements. . . Yeah, especially not entanglements. He really hadn't experienced any sexual contact yet. . . none involving another human being.
Fifteen and never been kissed. That was Caleb. He had been on the receiving end of any number of lustful gazes. The occasional proposition. Once he had even been— well, not exactly persuaded— but he had been compelled to offer a peek to a small number of very close personal friends. Possibly a stranger, too. And possibly more than a peek.
That situation had really gotten out of hand before all was said and done. It eventually resulted in Caleb's exile. So until he found exactly the right person, Caleb was now determined to preserve his virtue completely intact. For him, it had become a matter of self preservation.
Keeping his virtue intact, however, didn't mean that Caleb wasn't allowed to look. After all, if he didn't even look, how would he ever find exactly the right person? And looking was how he first got into trouble with Abby. But at least it also helped to open a door.
While Abby was staring dreamily into Caleb's startlingly green eyes, she noticed that his eyes were. . . elsewhere. And then she began to notice that they were often. . . elsewhere. Which made her curious. She thought that Caleb's green eyes were the most interesting things she had ever seen. What, she wondered, could they be so interested in?
Abby was relieved to discover that Caleb wasn't watching other girls. But she couldn't figure out why his eyes kept straying to boys sitting alone or in small groups around the cafeteria. Even viewed through her own eyes, she didn't really understand what made these social outcasts interesting. Until she noticed that Caleb's eyes were often focused on one particularly small boy.
"What's so interesting over there?" Abby wondered.
So Caleb knew that he'd been busted. But he tried to play it cool.
"Oh, just noticing how small the freshman seem to be here at Silver River," he shrugged in an attempt to pass the observation off as casual interest.
For a moment Abby was distracted as she tried to imagine how small Caleb might have been when he was a freshman. He still wasn't very big, so she didn't really want to come right out and say anything that could embarrass him.
"Oh, like that little guy with the really long, dark hair?"
Caleb looked around. He didn't notice anyone matching that description.
"I see him in the hall between classes. Sometimes he's with a red-haired kid. I think they're both on the cross country team or something," Abby clarified.
Caleb shrugged. He might have seen the long-haired kid and his friend. He wasn't sure. But they didn't appear to be in the cafeteria at the moment. The little guy that caught his attention had gold hair. He just didn't feel comfortable pointing that out.
But Abby had noticed.
"Oh! You meant Tyler," she had a look in her eyes that Caleb found difficult to interpret. "But he's no freshman. He's a sophomore, like us."
Caleb found himself in a dilemma. He wanted to learn more. He didn't want to appear too interested. He settled for another shrug, but with enough of an inquisitive expression to invite additional information.
Unfortunately, Abby didn't seem to notice.
"You must have seen a lot of smaller guys at Keene," she decided. "It's a bigger school than Silver River."
Caleb was caught between wanting more information and wanting to avoid providing the wrong kind of information. He wasn't very successful. Although at least he kept her in the dark about his biggest secret.
"I guess," he conceded. "Maybe they didn't seem so small to me last year. I wasn't very tall either."
That did give Abby a bit of a mental thrill. She had assumed that Caleb had been a small freshman. . . and cuddly. That mental image distracted her from asking more probing questions. But it also distracted her from offering more information.
Unfortunately, that wasn't the end of the matter. A pressing need to learn more about the little guy with the golden hair. An observant and motivated companion. That combination led to Caleb's undoing.
No matter how much he tried to restrain himself, Caleb's attention always wandered toward that kid with the gold hair at least a few times during every lunch period. Abby couldn't help but notice his distraction. . . and the reason for it.
"Has he grown any taller?" she inquired one day, while Caleb was busy trying to burn an image into his mind that he could reproduce later with charcoal or colored pencils. He had been using his imagination to fill in a few details that were hidden under an over-sized gray t-shirt.
Caleb couldn't help himself. His blush gave the game away.
"Um, I don't think so?" he attempted to recover, far too late.
Abby was eyeing him very closely. Watching the gears turn in her mind made Caleb intensely uncomfortable.
A more socially adept individual might have chosen that moment to go on the offensive and create a diversion. But no one had even used the name "Caleb Bradford" and the phrase "socially adept" in the same sentence. Certainly not intentionally. So he waited, like a small animal mesmerized by the cobra's gaze.
Caleb knew that the game was up when Abby's eyes narrowed.
"You like Tyler Neeson?" Abby remember to phrase the accusation in the form of a question. But it wasn't one. Not really.
Caleb didn't need to respond. So he hung his head in shame. He waited for the inevitable public denunciation.
He jumped when he felt her hand on his wrist. He hadn't really expected to be dragged immediately before a tribunal.
He tried to break free. But her grip was strong.
He didn't believe that it would do any good, but he still turned his gaze upward, a pleading expression in his eyes. He was confused by her expression.
Sympathy.
"It's okay, Caleb," Abby assured him. "I understand. Everybody likes Tyler."
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