extra like hashbrowns ~ <3 blessing and a curse







suggested by the lovely teagan: a story about brandon as a kid, getting his first boycrush and things. brilliant! turned out worse than i'd hoped.



xxx Brandon’s POV xxx

Thinking back on it now, I’m surprised at how young I was when I realized I liked guys. I’ve been told by a thousand people at a thousand different times – my own mother included – that when you’re young, you can’t possibly decide something as heavy as your sexuality, but I’m pretty sure that’s bull. I’m pretty sure I was seven when I started thinking about it. I was just beginning to grasp the concept of men and women together, though I didn’t know how babies were made or anything as extravagant as that. I just knew that boys married girls, like my mom and dad did, and then they lived together and somehow got kids, such as myself. They slept in the same bed and kissed and held hands. That was the length of my knowledge.

The very first thing I remember? Tough call. I think ... one night after dinner, when I was seven, when mom was pregnant with Keith. Of course, at the time, I didn’t know she was pregnant, though I do now. She wasn’t fat yet and dad was sitting on the couch with her, which means that he must not have known she was either. That’s what made him leave. Keith. The thought of a second kid and the pressure of paying for it when we were already poor. Anyways, I was sitting on the couch at my mom’s feet, tossing a green slinky back and forth between my hands, staring at the TV. It was a ‘grown up show,’ so I couldn’t follow the plot as well as I’d like, but I wanted to watch TV anyways, I was addicted to it. I knew that Ren and Stimpy was on in a half hour, so I was antsy to get the weird boring stuff of theirs over with because then they’d leave and I wouldn’t have to be so quiet.

But there was this ... blonde guy. To this day, I’m not sure who he was. Some sort of actor, I know that for sure. But anyways, I noticed him through all the boring dialog and long words. He wasn’t in a lot of scenes, but after I saw him the first time, I kept my eye out because he had a strong jaw line and high cheekbones and though he must have been at least thirty, I found myself stopping and going, hey, he’s special. I laugh about it now because I actually thought the word special. I had no idea what sex was, so I barely knew what it meant to like someone. But I knew the blonde guy on TV was special. My parents left the room a while later and I sat there with the slinky forgotten in my lap and I told myself to spend all my Tuesdays right here in front of the TV, like I didn’t already. So, that was my first hint.

The second hint hit me in the face during second grade, and it was a pretty big one. I was sure I was gay by this time. The hint’s name was Trevor, and he was a very tall kid that moved here from Manitoba during summer vacation. Recalling all this is making me think of how much Trevor looked like Jeff: tall, blonde, statuesque ... Only no eight year old is statuesque, but he was in my mind since he was bigger than I was. I was sitting in the back of the class with this other kid who I guess was my friend, and Trevor sat a few seats ahead. I looked at him all the time and it made me sweat to think that this was a real boy that I liked and wanted to hold hands with and kiss, all in second grade. Kids didn’t do that when they were eight, or at least they didn’t back then. I still wanted to, and that just made it all the more terrifying. It singled me out in my head, and I started thinking I was a freak, which didn’t deter me from wanting Trevor.

He and I became friends a few months into the school year only because our friends became friends, so we were friends by association. I was quiet whenever I was around him but still tried to talk to him, or I tried to talk to my friends around him so he could see how funny and cool I was even if I felt like throwing up when I talked to him directly. He didn’t seem to hate me, but we weren’t really close either. We got invited to the same birthday parties, and since we were eight and also dorks, those parties didn’t involve girls, which was just fine with me. This was the point where boys started talking about girls, though I couldn’t help but notice how silent Trevor was on the matter. The guys always asked who he and I liked because we were the only ones who didn’t openly announce it. I wasn’t a dumb kid, and sadly knew I’d get beaten and deserted if I told them I liked Trevor, so I’d been lying since they started asking, claiming to like a girl in our class named Charlotte only because every guy liked her, so I could just piggyback off what they said about her. Something tells me they still didn’t believe me. Trevor, however, said nothing. He either claimed not to like anyone, or he said he wouldn’t tell. This intrigued me, even as an eight year old.

I thought about him constantly, either good thoughts or bad thoughts. The best thoughts were fantasies, not sexy ones because I was still too young to think like that, but I thought about us being better friends and holding hands and smiling and kissing. The kissing was just pecks on the mouth or cheek because all I knew of kissing was from my parents and other kids because I didn’t watch a lot of obscene television – at the time, anyways. Something tells me that my second-grade self would be appalled by my current choices in porno.

Unfortunately, as it often goes, our group of friends didn’t last too long, which was both bad and good. Bad because it means it was severing my ties with Trevor, and good because for the last few months everyone had been pressuring me to ask Charlotte out, which was so not going to happen, and never did. I knew I had to do something if I wanted Trevor as a better friend of as a boyfriend – even though that using term made me all twisty and unhappy inside – before our group of friends fragmented with coming of age.

I invited him out one day to the park to get ice cream, a common thing to do with kids our age. I would have invited him to my house because of the added privacy, but Keith was a baby and dad had left and mom’s downward slope had just begun, so I found it better to keep him away from all that. He accepted (but part of me thinks it was just for the ice cream, since I was paying) and we went one day after school in May. The park was crawling with kids, its sloped lawns covered in parents with their picnic blankets keeping hawk-like eyes on their children splashing about in the water park. Trevor walked next to me but I walked slow because I had short legs, so I had to take extra long strides to keep up with him, which made me look like a retard, but at least I didn’t keep him waiting.

We sat down on an empty patch of grass near the sidewalk and licked at our ice cream – I couldn’t look at him while he did that because even though I didn’t have the faintest notion about sucking cock, I knew tongues were a force to be reckoned with – and talked about how lame kids younger than us were, also something common among kids our age. The edge of our sneakers were touching, but I said nothing about it and certainly didn’t move away. I remember feeling flighty just from that, which I now find kind of pathetic. He made quick work of the ice cream cone and just sat there for a while and I started feeling pressured and nervous. My palms were sweating.

Then I went for it. I thought about what I’d heard other guys talk about, though my friends weren’t exactly popular with the womenfolk. In my mousy pre-pubescent voice, I told him I liked him. He didn’t understand what I was talking about at first, which made it more awkward by a thousand degrees. I said it again, adding the words “Not Charlotte” on the end, hoping he’d understand that I meant like like, a childhood phrase that never fails to amuse me. I told him just what I felt, and waited.

And you know what he did?

He stood up and left. I didn’t follow him because I felt terrible because he’d obviously rejected me. I didn’t cry, but I right now I don’t remember why. I finished my ice cream and went home and played with Keith (which meant jangling things in front of his face and watching him try to grab them) and when I went to school the next day, everyone knew. I was outed in second grade.

So, it turned out, Trevor was a douche. After the incident in the park, he suddenly hated me openly and we had a mutual hatred that lasted from that day until the last day of twelfth grade. I continued elementary school with difficulty after that. Though I wasn’t feminine in the slightest and didn’t even act gay, I was given a hard time. I fought at least one kid a day, some little macho twit that figured he was better than me just because I wanted to fuck boys – It constantly amazed me, how cruel kids were even at a young age. I hit anyone that called me a faggot or anything like that, even the smallest derogatory comment sent me over the edge. I even hit girls because to me, they were nothing special. They were fluffy things with weak ankles and nothing more, so rude girls didn’t deserve mercy any more than rude boys. I beat kids up because I had a theory: My theory was that if I proved I was stronger and more manly than everyone, they’d let me be because I wasn’t a pansy like they assumed gay men were. So I lifted cans of corn (I couldn’t afford weights) until I wasn’t completely weak, then I beat kids up. The teachers knew about me too, no one was quiet, and most of them gave me a bit of slack if I came into class with a bloody nose or when anyone complained about me. I still got in trouble for it, of course, because teachers are all about equality and I was told, no less than thirty times, that just because I was ‘homosexual’, ‘the world was not my oyster’, a term far too many principals used.

By the end of elementary school, seventh grade, I knew all about sex and it’s inner workings and had quite the stash of internet porn on my clunky Windows 98 computer I bought with paper route savings. I suppose you could call me a pervert, or ‘advanced’ if you’d like to be kind. By this time, Keith was six years old and had just begun hanging around Coy, who I only knew through Keith talking about him at dinner. Mom wasn’t around a lot, which was annoying at worst. Since I didn’t have any friends because I kept getting crushes on any that didn’t hate me to begin with, I spent a lot of time playing dad for Keith: I walked him to school and we went grocery shopping and all kinds of sentimental shit like that, but even that started to slip when he met Coy and started having a social life. To be perfectly honest, I spent all of sixth and seventh grade either doing homework, making dinner, or jacking off.

Then, a new breakthrough. High school. I was shown a new world, a wider, yet crueler one. It took me a while to decide if high school was a step up or not. I’d gotten a bad rep as the ‘poor dirty faggot’ and that quickly spread to the kids in my grade from other schools. No one liked me, except, of course, the other gays. I was greeted by at least five other guys, saying they heard and were sorry, then said something about it being hard for them too. I didn’t particularly care about what they had to say, because they bothered me. They were too feminine and to me, it was because of them that I was having such a hard time. All I wanted was a boyfriend who was funny and laid back and wouldn’t mind fucking once in a while. I didn’t think that was too much to ask for, but apparently, it was.

I still beat kids up, a little more cheerily because high school teachers didn’t care at all if I hit anyone. It was probably the poorest public school in town, so drugs and cigarettes ran rampant down hallways and teachers pretended they didn’t notice. This was where I started losing more fights because the kids had gotten bigger and I had basically stopped growing at 5’8”, maybe 5’9”, and I had six foot tall guys calling me a faggot. I got a few good hits in until they gave me a black eye or a bloody nose, and I gave up.

At sixteen, I found Chase when I was sitting in the principal's office one day, waiting to hear about a suspension that I ended up not getting because I still got good grades and stayed away from drugs only because I was never offered any. The fighting was my only problem. I had wadded up paper towel stuffed under my nose, covered in blood because everyone I fought went for my nose – which I now realize accounts for why it’s kind of crooked. So Chase was sitting in the armchair opposite mine, twirling an unlit cigarette between his fingers, looking down through his glasses at a magazine. He was built like a skeleton and was wearing all black, all tight clothes. He was kind of ugly, but that kind of ugly where you can’t quite pinpoint exactly why you’d call them ugly. He has passable skin for a teenager, and his hair was a little greasy, which was fine, but he was just ... ugly. I kept looking at him and his black fingernails, twirling the cigarette.

He caught me looking and looked up at me, eyes half-lidded and unamused. “How’d you get that?” He pointed the cigarette at my nose.

In a muffled, stuffed up voice, I said. “I got punched by that bald kid for being gay.” I told the truth because what’s the worst he could do? He looked gay too, anyways, because no straight guy should wear vans slip ons. Plus, he was skinny enough that I could take him if he started getting ornery. To my surprise, he laughed.

“Bald kid? Oh, Jeremy? Yeah, that sounds right.” His voice was odd, though I couldn’t tell why.

“Why’re you here?” I asked, uncrossing my legs. The only thing I could see him getting in trouble for would be drugs, but as I said, the teachers didn’t give two shits about that kind of thing, ever. He was certainly too skinny to fight.

“I made a kid go ballistic.” He grinned wolfishly, leaning back in the armchair. He put the magazine back on the table stacked high with them. “Coolest thing ever. So, he called me a fag, right, so I started yelling all this shit like his mom’s a stripper – which she is – and his dad beats him – which he does – and he went fuckin’ nuts and threw a computer monitor right into the goddamn whiteboard! This was in webCT, not two minutes ago, I swear. ” I must have looked shocked, because he went on. “Don’t worry, man, he deserved it. Claus, in eleventh grade? If Jeremy was ragging on you, Claus musta done something at some point in your life.” I couldn’t help but smile then. I did know Claus, and Chase was right, he was a frequent problem of mine. He wrote all over my locker this one time, drew a huge cock and put a heart next to it. I almost broke his arm, because that fucking sucked. The janitor had to paint over it cause it was heavy duty marker. I decided that this kid wasn’t too bad. “So, what’s your name?” He looked over his shoulder down the hall to the principal’s door, then to the empty secretary’s desk, then he pulled a lime green BIC out of his front pocket and lit his cigarette. He put the lighter away and pulled a pack of players extra light out, tilting it towards me There were about four left. “You smoke?”

“Nah.” I have nothing against smoking, but I like my lungs and I knew Keith wouldn’t like me smoking. “I’m Brandon.”

“Cool.” He smiled crookedly, smoking with a casual grace that told me he’d been doing it for a while. He held his other hand out to me, bridging the gap between our chairs. “Chase McLeslie.” I shook his hand, having to smile back because this guy was just so weird. The best thing was that so far, I didn’t want to fuck him. At all. And that was rare for me at the time. “So, wait, Jeremy punched you for being gay?” he asked. “Are you?”

I lowered the towel from my nose, blood smeared over my lips. “Very.” I paused, remembering what he’d said about Claus calling him a fag. “Are you?”

He chuckled, raspy like an old motor. “No, but, uh, people assume.” He waved a hand at his clothes. He looked me head to toe with appraisal in his eyes. “You don’t look gay.”

“Doesn’t stop anyone from being dicks about it.”

“Do you like The Used?”

I blinked at him a few times, rubbing the blood from under my nose. “Yeah, they’re alright.”

“Are you thinking about fucking me?”

“Not in a million years.”

“Then we should probably be friends.”

So, we became friends. Not very close ones, just because we weren’t. We sat in the smoke pit at lunch hour and talked about music or nothing, and then we were friends. We never went to each other's houses and we never asked about the others family life. I didn’t talk about guys and he didn’t talk about girls, though he clearly had some sort of girlfriend because he talked to her on his cell a lot. All we did was walk around, huck things at little kids, and listen to The Used CDs from his dinky little walkman and dinky little headphones that we had to share. Chase had a musical boner for The Used, which I found out quickly, and I ended up liking them in turn. By now Keith was nine and thought I smoked because I always came home smelling of cigarettes. I started lying to him about having girlfriends who smoked then, because I couldn’t stand it if Keith hated me. He was a cute little kid, and seeing those big stupid eyes staring at me with anything other than love made me feel twisty and sick.

Chase and I were companions of sorts and that lasted all through high school, which made things better and worse. I had someone to hang around at break, which was a plus, but the taunting from everyone else got worse because everyone and their cousin thought we were dating. Fortunately, I officially had a sidekick in fights. I still felt bad about myself, and it was hard not to when you get insulted all day. I felt useless, perverted and small and even at sixteen, nearly seventeen, I didn’t have a boyfriend, and never did. I contemplated smoking because of how Chase said it calmed him down, but I couldn’t because of Keith. So I was stuck being depressed. I lost the will to fight back when people said things to me or hit me.

Eventually, I came up with a solution that made sense at the time, but now, it was probably one of the worst decisions of my life. I thought of how I’d never even tried girls. I figured that no one loved me because I was only looking for boys. Did girls like me? I wasn’t sure. So, very long story short, I ended up having sex with Leanne, a girl who sat next to me in science class. She was kind of ugly, as far as girls go, but I casually asked Chase about her and he said she was desperate. I figured that if I had sex with her, or any girl, and liked it, all my troubles would be over. Unfortunately – or fortunately? - I hated it. I did it, but I regret it even to this day, losing my virginity to a girl. I barely remember it, it was a long time ago and I’ve spent most days since then trying to block it out. She was really loud and I probably wasn’t very good, being a virgin and all. I try not to think about it any more.

Anyways, I don’t want to talk about that. High school ended after an eternity and I became something of a stay-at-home dad to Keith. I was twenty and Keith was thirteen, just starting eighth grade in my old school. My advice to him was definitely “Don’t tell anyone I’m your brother” because word could get to older kids or the younger siblings of older kids, and I didn’t want Keith to get hurt because of me being stupid and gay. Chase and I drifted apart, and I had a job at an Esso on the outskirts of town at the time and spent all my time there or at home cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, or trying to talk to mom, when she was home. During this year she was home more frequently, though she never did motherly things. I made her meals and she sat in the living room and watched Oprah and The Price is Right while drinking some sort of hard alcohol, I never checked exactly what. My guess is either whiskey or vodka. She asked Keith about school, and he told her about Coy. It was then that I started thinking that he might be following in my footsteps, a prospect that both overjoyed and upset me, but I had to tell myself that high school will have changed a little by the time he’s sixteen (I figured he’d be sixteen when he decided to like boys, and it turns out I was right, on pure luck).

So, after that, I got a better job at Save On Foods, where I reconciled with Chase and met Jeff and fell head over heels in storybook love with him, one of the first things to go very right in my life. Lovely, blonde, domineering, sweet, creepy, obsessive, beautiful, stupid Jeff. He was an angel and treated me like a princess. I started spending more time at his apartment whenever I had free time, which I had more of since mom was away more again. We talked about everything and he was what I’d always wanted, a casual, happy boyfriend with no qualms about fucking pretty much constantly, which he certainly didn’t have a problem with. He made up for every single bad day of high school, every single cut and bruise and bloody nose and broken bone and black eye and trip to the principal’s office. Then, Keith came out with his relationship with Coy, and I couldn’t have been happier. I eventually let him find out about Jeff, which he seemed okay with, and then when he moved in with Coy down the hall, I moved in with Jeff. We got married, god bless this country, and nothing really changed, but it’s so cool to see “Brandon E Albertson” on all my mail.







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