In Mike We Trust by P. E. Ryan

that. He’s pretty cranky.”
    â€œAll the more reason. Don’t be intimidated by him; just tell him you’re out of there. And keep that a secret,too.” Mike got in behind the wheel.
    Garth felt himself grin as he pulled open the passenger door. The visit to the bookstore, Adam’s phone number in his pocket, the prospect of being free of Peterson’s, and bringing in some money…
    Aces , as Mike would put it.

6
    T he next morning, both his mom and Mike were gone by the time he got up. A note slipped under his door read: “Out of your hair today. Need to take care of some business.—Mike.”
    He poured himself a bowl of cereal and ate it in front of the television. Then he dragged the building’s trash cans from the curb to their spot in the backyard (yet another duty that shaved a little off the rent). Finally, he stole away to his room and, even though he knew he was alone in the apartment—save for Hutch, who was sprawled across the living room couch—he closed and locked the door so that he could look at his “bag of gay goodies.”
    The local gay newspaper Mike had picked up for him had a headline article about a lesbian couple fighting for custody of their son—the kid’s natural dad wanted nothing to do with him, but the paternal grandmother was trying to snatch him out of his mom’s arms (the courtverdict was yet undecided). Another article was about a teenager in the Tidewater area who was suspended from school for wearing a T-shirt that read: GOD IS GAY . “Prove me wrong,” David, a sixteen-year-old, was quoted as saying. “Tell me who I’m hurting and I’ll apologize to them face-to-face. Otherwise, back off!” On another page were the results of a survey on sex combined with alcohol consumption, and opposite that, an advertisement for something called a “foam party” in Washington, D.C. The ad was flanked with shirtless men, some wearing baseball caps, all of them good-looking but most way too muscular for Garth’s taste. Which made him wonder, did he even have a taste?
    He examined the novels Mike had bought for him. Nothing about custody battles or circuit parties to be found there, though one of them was about a gay teenager caught up in the struggle to get himself and his younger sister away from an abusive, alcoholic dad. A little heavy for summer reading, Garth thought. The next novel was about a gay teen, his straight sister, and their competition for the same “new kid” at school. And the third was called Tale of Two Summers —what looked like a hilarious blog exchange between two best friends who were spending their first summer apart in different cities. That one he left at the top of the stack.
    But where to put the stack? None of this stuff could sit out in the open, because if his mom saw any of it, she’d know they’d gone to the gay bookstore and that he wasn’t exactly sticking to his promise. Looking for a hiding place made him angry all over again. Why couldn’t his mom see things— understand things—the way Mike did? Why should he have to hide who he was? Adam Walters certainly wasn’t hiding, and he didn’t look any worse off for it. He looked happy, in fact. Resentfully, Garth shoved the newspaper and the books into the back of his closet (there was irony for you), then stood for a moment with the DVD in his hand, gazing down at the title.
    Beautiful Thing.
    One of Adam’s favorite movies. Which was almost the only thing Garth knew about him. Well, that and his desire to make films. And his phone number. The slip of paper was still folded up and tucked into Garth’s wallet, like a cookie fortune you wanted to keep so that it might have a chance to come true—though he wasn’t sure if he would ever get up his nerve to call. Chances were Adam was just being polite and had given out his number only because Mike had been so