Rusty Knob Read online

  “Jesus, they’d drop to their knees and suck your dick right in the hallway if you asked.” Penny shouts at them as we pass by. “Desperate, much? Did it hurt when you fell off the whore tree and banged every guy on the way down?”

  “Do you fuck both brothers at the same time, you nasty cunt?” I just raise a brow at Jessica, and whatever else was on the tip of her tongue dries up right quick. I know her secret, too. The pretty blonde is a closeted lesbian who uses Bren’s dick for survival in this intolerant wasteland.

  “You’re a pervert, Jess.” Penny flushes bright red. “Thanks for the visual. Because, goddamn, if that was possible, I’d be a fool not to take ‘em up on it.”

  “Eww,” I grunt, shuddering at the thought of touching either my brother or Penny. “Stop entertaining that thought,” I warn Penny when I notice her eyeing me like a prize.

  For some odd reason, Penny’s eye-fuckage bothers Jessica. “Don’t do Wynn wrong like that, Penn. That’s just gross. I see your wheels spinning.”

  Penny’s firing off before I can recover, lunging toward the four girls blocking our exit. “Shut your mouth before I fill it with Franny’s girl cock!” I snort, knowing Penny has no bite whatsoever. But then again, she has the Gillette boys watching her back, so she can talk as much shit as she wants. And talk shit, she does.

  “You need to buy your brother’s bitch a muzzle,” Jesse scoffs, and then she turns away to stomp toward her car, with her mute entourage following.

  “It makes me feel filthy.” I shudder in revulsion. “Like the way to my popularity is through my dick. They don’t see me as a person, and now you’re eyeballing the fly of my jeans.”

  “I’m your best friend, do I have to ask again?” Brown eyes rove over me from head to toe, looking for the taint of homosexuality. Penny reaches up, barely able to brush my temple with a fingertip. “You a girl in there?”

  I narrow my eyes and refuse to acknowledge such horseshit.

  “Every other guy except for Franny would unzip and yank his dick out. You ain’t like Franny, are ya, Wynn?”

  “Are you shitting me?” I shake my head in disgust, hating how even Penny is infected with the ignorance of Rusty Knob. “Francis is gay. He’s not transgender.”

  “What’s a transgender? Ain’t those buggers who dress in lady’s clothing, are they? ‘Cuz Franny dresses like a boy. Nah, that’s a tranny. What’s transgender?”

  I don’t answer Penny. Instead, I erase her fears. “Francis is just a boy who likes other boys. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Are you a fag, or whatever that word was?”

  “Neither,” I repeat for the billionth time. “Do I look like a girl, even on the inside?” I run my hands across my broad chest. “Have I ever turned my head to check out a dude?”

  “Nope,” Penny pops the P. “But your head ain’t turned to look at no girls neither.”

  “C’mon, Warren’s awaiting.” I tug my tiny, ignorant buddy behind me, refusing to acknowledge the fact that for a few years now I’ve wondered if I was asexual.

  If it wasn’t for Facebook, I might have taken a sawed-off below the chin by now. I came across a LGBTQ group for the Kentwood Area School District on accident when one of my classmates was trolling. Their bigoted slurs were infecting my news feed. I made a dummy profile and joined the group, where I easily found Bren, who was too stupid to use a different profile– same for Francis. At least Jessica and my real best friend tried to use pseudonyms.

  The stipulations of the group were that you had to be a student of one of the three schools in our district, be between fourteen and eighteen, and abide by Mentor KM’s rules. They all soothed me with facts, assuring me I’m not asexual since I do fantasize about other people while jerking off. Their comforting words confused me more, because the imaginary friends I use to get off are always faceless and genderless.

  So what the fuck am I?

  “You know you can talk to me about anything, Wynn,” Penny breathes lightly, showing her sweet and caring side. Her spunky attitude amuses me. The reckless way she manipulates my brother terrifies me. But the soft side of Penny melts my heart.

  I tug Penny against my side, wrapping my arm around her shoulders. Like the good brother I am, I escort Warren’s girl directly to him after school every day. I miss the first twenty minutes of practice because I have to meet him in the parking lot. But with all things, everybody is real accommodating for a Gillette.

  Penny and I have been friends since kindergarten, with Warren six years older than us. The day Penny followed me home after school in sixth grade, was the day my brother lost his fucking mind. Penny grew tits and bled, and Warren turned into a brainless, horned-up dog.

  Thinking back, a twelve-year-old girl should have never been on a seventeen-year-old guy’s radar. I’m that age now, and I only see them as little girls with pigtails who are trying too hard to look like sluts. Which is exactly why there are so many derogatory West Virginia jokes. There wasn’t an idiot in Rusty Knob who would interfere when Warren set his sights on Penny, because we all knew they were destined to get hitched and pop out a bunch of brats.

  “How’s my girl?” Warren tugs Penny from beneath my arm, glaring at me like he’s thinking about tearing my balls off for touching her. He wraps a possessive arm around her waist and kisses the top of her head. “Everybody treating you right?”

  Warren’s question is more of a warning. A warning he’s even issued to me. I’ve had my ass beat a handful of times because the possessive fuck thought I was lusting after Penny. We made a deal: I’ll protect Penny like my sister, knowing someday she will be, as long as he doesn’t treat her the way our father treats our mother, or the way our sister’s husband treated her. Warren can beat me if I encroach on his territory, but I’ll kill him if he ever hits Penny.

  My brother is intense. He doesn’t share. He’s violent, and his threats are promises. But he is faithful, loyal, and a good human being who will treat Penny right.

  We share the same personality traits. I dampen down my anger, and he buries his compassion. The only thing that brings out his compassion is me, and the only thing that will bring out my anger is him. Which is why Rusty Knob is terrified I might leave town someday.

  “Wynn’s my hero,” Penny sings, hugging her term paper to her breasts, causing my brother to issue me a warning glare. The brat starts giggling, loving it when Warren turns into a caveman.

  “She’s just yanking your chain.” I thump my brother in the shoulder. “You know how she tests the piss out of you, making sure you’re still interested.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Warren grunts, eyes narrowing to slits as he scans my body– a body that is taller, stronger, and firmer than his own. A body that doesn’t stir for Penny… or anybody.

  “Jesus, I’m through with you assholes for the day.” I turn on my heel and stomp away. “Go use someone else to make each other jealous. I’m your brother for God’s sake,” I shout at Penny over my shoulder. Sick the fuck of being toyed with, I turn vengeful by dropping a secret I promised to keep. “Grow up before that kid in your gut pops out!”

  “Baby?” croaking out my brother’s tight throat is the last thing I hear as I jog back to the school to hit the locker room.

  The Test

  Eyes closed, I zone out while I dress in a pair of jeans and my Circle K work shirt. I block out the noise as the rest of the team razzes each other, snapping towels and tossing insults. I’m envious of them, how they don’t have any responsibilities and get to be free.

  The townies go home to quaint little houses, where they do their homework while their mommas cook supper and their daddies give advice. They have no idea what the reality is down in the Hollers. Which is why the hillbillies resent them, and the townies look at us as other.

  I hate how I get no relief. I spend my days at school watching after Penny while trying to get an education. Then I deal with my brother’s bullshit. Followed by being run to death on the basketball court. On the days we don�
��t have a game, I work until midnight at the Circle K. Only to go home to a shack filled with a violent alcoholic and his zombiefied women.

  I actually look forward to the weekends, where my sister’s kids, Hayley and Hayden, have their visitation with Bren and his dad, Royce. The Gillettes were against having the twins around their Kennedy kin unless I was there to take care of them. So all weekend, I work odd jobs for Royce, while my niece and nephew get to spend quality time with their uncle and cousin. The more I work, the less I have to be home.

  It’s obvious Royce and Bren hate to see us go every Sunday night, but I have to get the kids back to their momma and I have to get back to mine. What’s hardest is leaving a warm, loving, family-filled home to enter Gillette Holler– otherwise known as the seventh circle of Hell.

  I want the fuck out of Rusty Knob, like yesterday.

  I was hoping for an academic scholarship if the basketball scouts didn’t like what they saw on the court. It was just my luck that they did. I received a scholarship to a state school. One that just so happened to be in Rusty Knob’s backyard, so student housing was not included. I’ll be going to school for free, but still living in that rat-hole hell our family calls a home.

  “We’re gonna be late for work again.” Jackson Duncan, my actual best friend, nudges me with his shoulder, causing me to snap out of my self-pity. I nudge him back, finding my center just by touching him.

  I lean forward on the bench, and begin lacing up my sneakers. “They’ll deal,” I murmur to myself, eyes cutting across to the idiots who populate our town–– the same idiots who will become our future workforce. I know my job is secure, no matter how late I might be once in a while. They won’t bitch when their other choices are budding wife-beating alcoholics since anyone with a brain in their head leaves for college and never comes back.

  Rusty Knob is filled with racist assholes who hate each other as much as everyone else. We might divide ourselves as Townies versus Hillbillies, but the townies are still hillbillies who don’t live in the Hollers. The mentality still weaves its way through all of us, just stronger in the isolated folk.

  No matter where you live or where you came from, the most potent slur is fag. The only openly gay person in town is currently being taunted in this very locker room.

  “Franny, bend over and show us your purdy asshole.” Bren yanks Francis by the arm, but I don’t bother intervening because the kid is giggling while he gets tickled senseless. Jack flinches next to me on the bench, but I know he won’t jump in to save Francis either.

  There are two kinds of people in this world. Those who will kick a defenseless puppy, and those who will pick it up and protect it. Francis is so small and helpless that even the bigots of this town protect him. I’m positive there are other gays in Rusty Knob, but if they look like everyday Joes, they will get lynched in fear their affliction will spread among the population. When a manly man sucks dick and loves it, the homophobes spill out the woodwork.

  A couple years back, two towns over, a gay man was dragged behind a car and left on the side of the road for dead. The men who did it to him went free because everyone’s lips glued shut when the law came ‘round. Word has it, his own family nearly beat him into the grave.

  The reason why Francis is giggling while Bren spanks his ass and tells him to go wash the dirty towels, is because no one expects Francis to find another man who is gay enough to touch him. First man to touch Rusty Knob’s Franny is a dead man, with Francis surely to follow.

  Bren and Francis are protecting themselves with the bully and the fag routine. After a bullied chubby girl shouted, “Yeah, I’m fat! So what?” Bren figured out that if Francis started acting gayer than gay, no one could come up with a good comeback. Francis embraced the slur of fag.

  Why do I know all this? My dad thinks I’m gay. My brother thinks I’m gay. Penny keeps asking if I’m a girl inside my head after reading an article about transsexuals in Cosmo. I’m the only man Francis is secure enough to ogle, only because he knows I will never kick his ass. All because I don’t go insane, drag a girl to the floor, shove my dick inside her, shoot my seed in there until she’s growing my kid in her gut and married to me before I graduate.

  I want more out of life. I’m seventeen years old and I want to get a degree and make some kind of difference, even if it’s only in a few lives. I want to matter more than the person who goes to work, does a shitty job, then comes home to scream at my kids, smack my wife around, and drink a thirty pack of liquid sandwich while my family goes without. I want to mean more than being the person my family resents behind my back as I put a leaky roof over their heads and rotten food in their guts. I deserve more, and those future kids do too.

  The higher you go in Kentwood’s educational system, the less Holler-dwelling girls there are per grade. By the time girls hit sophomore year, they start getting picked off by the senior boys, and married and pregnant by the time June rolls around. Only to be used, abused, and tossed away with their kids before they reach eighteen.

  Penny is our only hillbilly girl in the eleventh grade, with not a single one in the senior class. All the rest of the girls are on the college track, or dating boys who will go away and come back with a fancy degree and take good care of their women and any kids they have. The social divide becomes wider the older you get.

  It’s expected of me to marry and have kids right after I graduate. Since I’m nearing the end of my junior year, and the dwindling supply of hillbilly girls hasn’t caught my eye, I must be gay. That’s the only answer that is possible in the narrowest of narrow minds. I’m gay because I don’t want to impregnate a child-woman, get a dead-end job I’ll hate, where my wife and kids will run back home to where they came from when I start beating them in an alcohol haze.

  Thoroughly disgusted, “C’mon,” I mutter to Jack, yanking on his shirt sleeve. He’s the only person I speak my thoughts, because even Penny has been indoctrinated into this way of life and will never understand. Jack lives in town, but he understands how badly I want to break the cycle.

  Jack has his own secrets he doesn’t think I know, because he uses a piss-poor excuse of a pseudonym in our LGBTQ group on Facebook. I’ve figured out who everyone is from our school in the group, and why they frequent it. Jack sees too much of himself in Francis, and fears what will happen if the truth is ever revealed.

  Sad, blue eyes call to me for help, looking as if he’s going to be sick. I tug Jack up next to me, wrapping my arm around his shoulders, feeling centered and content with him by my side. He shudders, and then sighs deeply.

  Walking together unsteadily, Jack grumbles out the side of his mouth, “Get me the fuck out of here. Watching what Francis and Bren have to do to hide out in plain sight is going to make me puke.”

  As if Jack called him, Francis materializes in our path. He flashes me a pitiful look, and then in slow motion his hand is reaching out. I sigh heavily, rolling my eyes, as Francis cups my crotch in his tiny, girl-like palm.

  “You done?” I direct to the kid molesting me, already suffering through this experiment a few times before– at least this time I’m not in the communal showers. “We good?” His grip flexes, pulsing a bit, and then he removes it. “Don’t even think about it,” I warn the sadistic twinkle in his eye as I pull Jack behind me. “You start that shit, and you’ll regret it.”

  “Leave Jack alone,” Bren calls to his Franny. “We know Jessica sucked his dick last fall. Did Wynn get hard?”

  Skipping back to his partner in crime’s side, Frances laughs the entire way. “Nah, not even a twitch, boss. It’s a pity, ‘cuz Wynn’s hung like a horse.” Bren slaps Francis upside the head, not appreciating the reminder that his Franny craves cock.

  “You just mind your own business,” Bren warns Francis as I drag Jack from the locker room.

  “What do you think they’d do if you got hard?” Jack gasps when we breach the outside of the building, spilling out into the student parking lot.

  “There wasn’
t a snowballs’ chance in hell I was going to get hard,” I remind my buddy. We’ve spoken at length about how nobody turns me on. He understands that I’m not like normal folks who just know what they want.

  I remember the first time I got wood, I thought I was dying. In a blind panic, I ran to Warren to show him. He laughed, dragged my ass into the bathroom, turned on the shower, told me to get in, and then grabbed my hand and squeezed Momma’s conditioner into it. I stood in the hot shower, crying so hard I was hyperventilating, not knowing what was happening. Warren made a vague gesture with his hand, and then left the room. Like an idiot, it took me two weeks of standing in the shower with conditioner in my palm, every single time I sported wood, before I figured out what I was supposed to do.

  My dick confuses me.

  “If I would have gotten hard, I would have dropped dead on the spot,” I mutter when I snap out of my thoughts.

  “I mean…” Jack stops talking abruptly, and then veers around my pickup to get into the passenger side. When we both get into the cab and get situated, he continues. “I mean, forget about who was receiving the fag test. Most of us have been targeted. I mean, what would happen if someone actually got hard when Francis cupped them?”

  I smother a laugh as I pull out of the parking lot. “Truthfully, I think if Bren were to cup the dudes, he’d probably yank a few out of the closet. But Francis… he’s… there is something the opposite of sexual about him, and I don’t mean because he’s gay. He’s childlike. Innocent. To be protected. So I doubt he’s gotten anyone hard in his life.”

  “You’re right… I was just…” Jack takes up stuttering all the sudden. “I… I worry, because I get hard for no goddamned reason. Like if something tastes good, or if I feel sleepy, or warm and cozy, or if a stiff wind blows.”