Alec

by William di Canzio

Meantime, blessed with excellent health, Alec kept up with his schoolmates in sports. He played football because everybody did, though he liked cricket better because the persnickety rules prevented getting trampled by an oaf. (Also he thought the white clothes were smart.) With his good looks and quiet ways, he attracted the notice of girls. He enjoyed flirting with them, especially when they were sassy—like Rowena Blunt, who had a long braid, mocked the gentry, and made fun of everyone’s name, not sparing her own or that of her brother, Ivanhoe. (“I’m-a-whore Cunt,” she called him.) But Alec felt none of that lust to get under their skirts that his schoolmates hooted about. On the other hand, he did find some of those mates appealing in a way that excited him. Whenever he caught himself staring, he’d look away, because he knew that staring meant he was one of those, which was true. His schooling, however (and contrary to its intention), taught him not to despise his queerness. The insight came about this way: His teachers encouraged him, an advanced and trustworthy student, to visit the public library in Dorchester, with holdings far richer than those in the village reading room. They let him spend whole afternoons there on his own, browsing assigned subjects, among them classical history, which he liked as much as the modern stuff bored him. The myths of Greece and Rome were best, where the gods mucked things up for the human race, and then the heroes (whose ranks he ne...