Absolutely Positively Not Read online

  Praise for Absolutely, Positively Not

  An ALA Best Book for Young Adults

  Winner of the Sid Fleischman Humor Award

  “A touching, sometimes hilarious coming-out story … The wry, first-person narrative is wonderful as it goes from personal angst to outright farce…. Many readers, gay and straight, will recognize Steven’s need to talk to someone.” —Booklist, starred review

  “Light, funny and warm-hearted, with a cast of quirky yet recognizable characters, a series of larger-than-life events, and an immediately likeable, sympathetic protagonist.” —Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

  “Gay teen angst has rarely been so funny…. This will entertain readers no matter which team they play for.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “LaRochelle’s eye-opening and accurate portrayal of Steven’s coming out will ring optimistically true for many teens and their friends who are struggling with sexuality issues. And it’s the delivery of his outing, coated in a healthy dose of hilarity, that makes Absolutely, Positively Not a fast-paced, funny, and frivolously frank read.” —School Library Journal

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  PRAISE

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  Everybody has at least one ugly secret, and mine is as ugly as they come.

  I square-dance.

  With my mother.

  I’m not talking once-a-year square dancing. I’m talking serious square dancing, every week, where the women wear fluffy checkered skirts that stick out a yard on either side and the men wear matching cowboy shirts and everyone wears a big plastic name tag shaped like a music note.

  And the ugliest part of this secret is … I actually like it.

  It’s not the outfits, which make us look like escapees from a clown school. It’s not the corny music either.

  What I like about square dancing is that there’s never any doubt about what to do. A promenade is always the same: men on the inside of the circle, women on the outside, escort your partner until you come back to your home position. Do what the caller tells you, and you’ll be just fine. And if you ever get confused, follow the other dancers. When we’re all in perfect step with each other, it’s like I’m part of a well-made machine. It’s beautiful.

  I realize this is the twenty-first century. Being a sixteen-year-old square dancer might be the sign of a serious social disorder. But the sorry truth is that square dancing makes me happy … at least as long as nobody else finds out about it.

  Slow down, Steven, before you get us killed!”

  My mother reached across the car and sank her fingernails into my forearm. Our family’s Buick swerved dangerously toward the ditch. I had to twist the steering wheel back to the left to avoid flying off the road.

  “Take it easy, Mom. I was only going the speed limit.”

  My mother’s grip on my arm tightened.

  “Speed limits are for experienced drivers, Steven. When you’ve had your license for six or seven years, then you can talk to me all that you want about speed limits. Right now you have a learner’s permit, which means driving at a learning speed.”

  I eased up on the gas pedal until my mother’s death grip loosened. When she finally let go we were creeping along at 18 mph in a 30 mph zone.

  “That’s better,” she said. “Don’t you feel safer? Don’t you feel like you have more control of the car?”

  I felt like I was going to be late for school.

  We crawled past City Park and the fifty-foot-tall fiber-glass hockey stick proclaiming Beaver Lake, Minnesota, HOCKEY STICK CAPITAL OF THE WORLD. The Hat Trick Café and Bruce’s Blue Line Bar & Grill lined the other side of the street. Just because the plant where my dad worked produced more hockey sticks than any other city in the country, the entire town of nine thousand was obsessed with the game.

  I hate hockey.

  We pulled into Beaver Lake Consolidated High at 7:28, two minutes before my first class.

  I grabbed my backpack and scrambled out of the car.

  “Don’t forget we’ve got you-know-what tonight,” called my mom. I had warned her against using the words “square dancing” while on school property. She slid over to take my place behind the steering wheel. “And you forgot your stocking cap! Do you want to get sick?”

  I doubted whether sprinting the ten feet from the curb to the front entrance without a hat would result in pneumonia, but I scooped up my stocking cap anyway. The first-hour bell began ringing as I reached my locker. After grabbing the books I needed for the morning, I raced to my homeroom, dodging the few stragglers still in the hall. When I dropped into my front-row desk, I was only thirty seconds late.

  My best friend, Rachel, leaned forward in her seat behind mine. “Riding with your mom again?” she asked.

  I nodded, too out of breath to speak. Then I pulled a pocket notebook from the back of my jeans, turned to a fresh page, and printed “19 minutes, 12 seconds.” That was how long it had taken me to drive from our house to school. My parents wouldn’t allow me to take my behind-the-wheel test until I had clocked two hundred hours of practice with a licensed adult driver. Only eighty-three hours and twelve minutes left to go. With a little luck, I’d have my license before it was time to put me in a retirement home.

  As I slid the notebook back into my pocket I realized we were missing our teacher. Even stranger, the blackboard was blank. Health class with Bud Corcoran never varied. For the first half hour we copied the meaningless notes covering the blackboard while Corcoran read the newspaper and drank coffee. For the second half hour Corcoran read the same notes aloud, word for word, while we studied for another class or slept. Most people slept. Our grade was determined by how many pages of notes we took.

  I turned around to face Rachel. “Where’s Corcoran?”

  “In prison, for impersonating a teacher.”

  Rachel loathed the man. I was a little less critical. I was a good note taker, and the class was an easy “A.”

  A voice from the back row spoke up. “If Corcoran doesn’t show in one minute, I’m out of here.”

  The prospect of starting the day with a free hour perked everyone up. Even the kids who had been slumped across their desks with closed eyes lifted their heads and started watching the clock.

  Twenty seconds left. Ten. The room was silent as the skinny red hand ticked off the remaining seconds.

  “Time’s up!”

  We all stood and gathered our books, then headed for the exit. Just as we were about to make our escape, the way was blocked by a tall, well-dressed man in his mid-twenties.

  The class moaned.

  “Fine way to greet your teacher,” he said as we shuffled back to our desks.

  Substitute.

  I hate substitute days. Either the class rips the sub into tiny pieces, or the sub jumps all over the class like a grizzly. Neither is fun to watch. If I want to see carnage and bloodshed, I’ll watch it on the Nature Channel.

  The teacher scrawled “Bowman” across the blackboard
in wide, relaxed letters, then tossed the tiny chalk stub across the room, where it landed in the wastebasket beneath the pencil sharpener. He lifted himself onto the edge of Corcoran’s desk so that he was sitting directly in front of me.

  “I regret to inform you that Mr. Corcoran was involved in a handball accident over the weekend.”

  Corcoran played handball? For the past two months I had never seen him move from the padded chair behind his desk. He rewarded students with extra-credit points for bringing him his lunch from the cafeteria.

  “Some of you might know me as the new assistant hockey coach, but until your teacher is back on his feet again, I’ll be helping with his class.”

  He picked up the thick three-ring folder labeled HEALTHY CHOICES FOR A HEALTHY YOU, which contained all of Corcoran’s master notes. “Let’s see what we’ve got on today’s agenda.”

  He turned to the page marked with a bookmark and cleared his throat. “‘The Importance of Chlorogenic Acid in a Young Person’s Diet.’”

  Mr. Bowman closed one eye and studied the page. I was the only one close enough to hear what he muttered: “What the hell is ‘chlorogenic acid’?

  “Forget that,” he said, snapping the folder shut and hopping off the desk. He unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled up the sleeves over his muscular arms. He shook open the newspaper he had brought along and turned to the editorial page.

  “‘Fast-Food Franchises Responsible for Rising Obesity.’” Folding his arms across his chest, he studied the class. “True or false?”

  Silence.

  Well, what did he expect? It was first hour, Monday morning.

  Most teachers would rather answer their own questions than listen to silence, but Mr. Bowman just stood there and smiled. It looked like we were in for a very quiet morning.

  “True.”

  It was Rachel, behind me. She was a vegetarian and thought fast-food restaurants were evil.

  “False,” said someone on the other side of the room. “Nobody can make you eat anything you don’t want to.”

  “Great!” said Mr. Bowman, rubbing his hands together. “We’ve got our two lawyers.” He pointed to the back two rows of the class. “You’re the jury. Everyone else is a witness for one side or the other. Lawyers, you have ten minutes to prepare your cases. Anyone who doesn’t participate stays after school and washes jockstraps for the hockey team.”

  The threat of unwashed jockstraps got everyone moving. I was the only witness who volunteered for Rachel’s side, and I was worried she would make me deliver a long speech about the perils of high-fat foods. To be honest, a plate of onion rings, a slice of pizza, and a Death by Chocolate donut was my idea of a gourmet meal.

  “You won’t have to say a word,” she promised. “I’ll do all the talking.”

  She laid me across Corcoran’s desk and referred to me as Exhibit A.

  “Observe, if you will, the effects of corporate advertising on a typical American.”

  She tapped my forehead with Corcoran’s yardstick. “Brainwashed into believing that the more you eat, the happier you’ll become.”

  She tapped my stomach. “Bloated, from a diet of greasy burgers, deep-fried french fries, and sugar-laden soft drinks.”

  She tapped my mouth. “Voiceless, against the powerful barons of the fast-food industry who rule the television and radio airwaves.”

  Despite my preference for the fats and sugars food group, I tend toward the scrawny side, so Rachel had stuffed my shirt with her backpack and some crumpled newspaper from the recycling bin. I let my tongue fall out of my mouth and tried my best to look appropriately unhealthy.

  The opposing side’s key witness stood on a desk and struck a Statue of Liberty pose. He began his rebuttal with, “I am proud to be an American who can eat and sell whatever food I choose, even if it gives me high blood pressure and kills me before I am thirty.” Surrounding him, the other students placed their hands over their hearts and hummed a medley of fast-food jingles.

  Perhaps I was biased, but I thought Rachel had made some pretty good points. Even so, the jury ruled against her, 10 to 2. She was protesting the decision and demanding the chance to take the case to a higher court when the bell rang.

  “Class dismissed,” said Mr. Bowman, pounding a stapler like a gavel. “Everyone gets an ‘A.’”

  We streamed out of class, joining the noisy crowd in the hallway making their way to their second hour.

  “That was a welcome relief,” said Rachel, stepping around a group of seniors holding an impromptu game of tackle football in the hall.

  “But you lost the debate,” I said.

  Rachel didn’t look too upset. “At least it kept me awake.”

  We reached the spot where Rachel and I parted ways until lunch.

  “And besides,” she said before she turned the corner, “I think Mr. Bowman is kind of cute.”

  She raised her eyebrows and waited for me to respond.

  Cute?

  Was Mr. Bowman cute?

  Sure, he had thick black hair that was slightly mussed, as if he had just stepped out of a convertible. And true, he dressed in sharp-looking clothes that showed off his bodybuilder’s physique. And yes, when he smiled, his sky blue eyes smiled as well, making it difficult to concentrate on anything else.

  But did I think he was cute?

  “I didn’t notice,” I said loudly, then quickly headed off to geometry.

  There is nothing wrong with a teenage boy noticing how a male teacher looks. I’ve been noticing my male teachers for years. I happen to be a very observant person. Being observant is a wholesome and admirable trait. Thomas Edison was observant. Galileo was observant. Nobody ever thinks there’s anything strange about them.

  How could I help but notice that Mr. Bowman was above average in the looks department? The guy was sitting less than two feet away! That doesn’t mean that there’s anything unusual about me. To think otherwise makes me laugh.

  Ha!

  Unfortunately, I wasn’t very observant in geometry. As Mrs. Moe explained how triangle ABC was congruent to triangle ABD, my mind kept wandering back to Mr. Bowman’s smile. And his arms. And his sharply creased dark gray cotton pants. Mr. Bowman was congruent to the best-looking guy on any late-night cable drama.

  The morning went downhill after that. It was worm dissection day in biology. We were each given an earthworm and instructed to peel back its skin and identify its major organs. My worm was the width of a toothpick. It was all I could do to stab the thing with my scalpel, let alone split its skin evenly down the middle.

  “You should have refused to do the assignment,” Rachel told me at lunch. She took a bite of her hummus sandwich, and a lock of hair swung over her eyes. Rachel dyed this lock a different color on a regular basis. Today it was navy blue. “Dissection is cruel, Steven. Even on worms.”

  I poked a fork at a limp strand of school spaghetti lying on my plate, but couldn’t make myself eat it. The pale yellow noodle looked disturbingly like a dying earthworm.

  After lunch I had another acute attack of observation. It was when I spotted Mr. Bowman walking to the teachers’ lounge. I observed him twice more that afternoon, standing outside Corcoran’s door chatting with other students, and when I stopped by his room at the end of the day, just to make sure I hadn’t missed any homework he might have assigned. He smiled when he saw me and remembered my name. Pretty observant on his part, after only one day of class.

  If Mr. Bowman was so observant, why should I be concerned about my own highly developed observational skills?

  When I got home from school, I nearly tripped on a large cardboard box blocking the kitchen door. It was another shipment of my mother’s best-selling book, The Clean Teen: A How-To Manual on Raising Tidy Teenagers.

  I pushed the carton to the side of the room next to a stack of last month’s newspapers. After searching behind the empty cereal boxes and dusty piles of junk mail on the counter, I finally found a candy bar left over from Halloween. A year
ago. My mother claimed that if she worried about being immaculate herself, she’d never have time to write.

  “Hi, Steven. How was your day?”

  I passed the study where my mom was engrossed in her latest project, a cookbook for working women. My mother never cooks. It’s my father who makes the meals at our house.

  “Fine,” I answered, stepping over a pile of dirty laundry and a bag of vacuum cleaner replacement parts.

  When I reached my room I shut the door and stood for a moment, absorbing the tranquility of the only orderly spot in the house. Everything was folded. Everything was dusted. Everything was exactly where it belonged. My mother had trained me well.

  After hanging up my backpack I climbed onto my bed, candy bar in one hand, geometry notebook in the other. I studied the notes I had scribbled in class, but it was hopeless. Nothing I had written all day made any sense.

  I leaned back and stared at the ceiling. Carefully pinned above my bed was a poster of Superman in flight. I’ve been a Superman collector for years. In fact, my closet was a small, neatly labeled, thoroughly organized tribute to the world-famous Man of Steel.

  I studied the poster for the millionth time. Mr. Bowman would make a good Superman. I pictured him in tights.

  Dang!

  I sat up, knocking my notebook to the floor.

  So what? So what if I had been thinking about Mr. Bowman every five minutes all day long? That meant nothing. He was an interesting teacher, that’s all. I bet every single one of his students was thinking about Mr. Bowman right this very moment.

  Uneasily I lay back down on my bed.

  There was no reason for me to be worried. It’s not like I was gay. I knew what the TV evangelists said about gay people. I’ve heard the wisecracks in the locker room. You don’t have to tell me about the nasty words people substitute for “homosexual.” There is nothing gay about me.