The Crimson Circle 21, 22, 23, 24 and 25

jamesbreitbart@yahoo.com

Copyright 2026 by James Breitbart, all rights reserved

[9,341 words]

Chapter 21

Nolan Pierce

The Chronicle hosted a ‘watch party’ for the student elections, which basically meant they ordered pizza (and beer after the faculty adviser left for the night), and friends of the staff dropped by to hang out while we liveblogged the results.

Around 9:00 at night, my cell phone went off. It was my mom. I was expecting her and dad to come up Saturday for the game, but we had worked out an arrangement where I called her every Sunday evening after I got done with student council stuff and she didn’t call during the week, because I was so busy with homework and the newspaper. She might have just forgotten, or this might be an emergency.

I stepped outside to take the call. “Hi, mom.”

“Hi, honey. So, your cousin Shane broke his arm on his new dirt bike.”

“Oh.” I owed my little sister five dollars, having bet her that Shane would make it through Christmas.

“…which means that Grandma Marge can’t watch Abby and Evan.”

“Oh, I under…”

“So, we’ll be driving up Friday night after they get out of school. We probably won’t get in until midnight, but if you’re willing to stay up you can meet us at the hotel.”

“My dorm has a curfew.” A custom more honored in the breach than the observance, but useful at the moment, although maybe midnight when Abby and Evan were asleep would be the best time to come out. “Does your hotel do a free breakfast?”

“No, I don’t know what we’re going to do about that. This is kind of stretching the budget.”

“They let you eat in the dining hall.”

“Oh, so we get to see what you’re suffering through?”

I laughed. Actually, the food here was pretty decent, if a tad monotonous after a few months. “They gussy it up a bit for the parents.”

“That’s a relief. Find someplace fun we can take you out to dinner.”

“Will do.”

“Are you busy now?”

“Actually, the student council elections are tonight and I’m liveblogging them.”

“Oh, well, it sounds like you need to get back to that.”

“Yeah.”

“We’ll see you Saturday. Love you.”

“Love you, bye.”

I went back into the party to discover that final results had been announced. We did better than expected, leaving the plebs with only two seats on the conduct council, which would make it trivially easy for Lydia Han, who was taking over from Nell as President, to assign all-society panels when it would prove helpful. We couldn’t celebrate openly, but Julia messaged me on AIM.

“Good work”

Feeling more than a little proud of myself, I stuck around until the party broke up. As we were walking back, we ran into a group that was coming back from the Wilson Together watch party. They were in good spirits and seemed to have drank more than us.

We got back to the dorm, and after a brief conversation with Jasper in which I tried not to rub it in too much, into my room where I had a threesome with Owen and Noah.

The next day’s Crimson Circle meeting started with Ellie calling me, Julia, and all of the successful Crimson Circle candidates to the front of the hall to congratulate us on our work. We took a bow in front of the assembly, which included a larger than usual number of alumni who had come to visit their kids on parents’ weekend. The alumni talked a lot and the dinner ran late. I didn’t get back to my dorm until after midnight, and opened my phone to find a text from my Mom that they had gotten in all right.

Of course, Abby and Evan were up bright and early the next day, and Mom texted me at 7:00 to tell me they were on their way. I took a quick shower – no time for sex – and met them in front of my dorm. I saw Haley and a few of her friends walking towards the dorm and hurried my family along to the dining hall. She was about the last person on campus I wanted to introduce them to.

Abby, who thought she knew everything there was to know about boarding school from Harry Potter, peppered me with questions.

“Does your school have prefects?”

“Yes, but it’s just a senior who lives on our floor and gives us detention if we’re out after curfew.”

“Did you get detention?”

“No, because I’m a good kid who obeys the rules.”

Abby rolled her eyes, and when we got to the cafeteria she and Evan both went straight for the waffle station, which of course had a huge line. I grabbed a bagel and a Greek yogurt and snagged a table for five, spotting my chance. When Mom and Dad sat down, I cleared my throat.

“There’s something I wanted to talk to you about, preferably without Abby and Evan.”

Mom looked concerned. “Honey, I know it’s a lot, but you worked so hard to get in here.”

“Remember how much you nagged us?” Dad added, unhelpful even for what he mistakenly thought I wanted to talk to them about. They seemed to have assumed that I wasn’t fitting in and wanted to come home.

“Let’s try to stick it out until the end of the semester and then…”

“Mom, that’s not what I meant. I…”

“Look, they’ve got a waffle station!” Evan had returned bearing two waffles covered with an ungodly amount of whipped cream and chocolate chips. Abby followed soon after with a slightly more restrained concoction.

“Goodness!” Mom exclaimed, “that’s an awful lot of sugar.”

It was so much sugar that Evan was already starting to get hyper by the time we left the dining hall, and I suggested that we walk toward the quad to let him burn some of it off. Mom shooed Abby away so the three of us could have a modicum of privacy.

“I know making friends in a new place is hard, but I’m sure once the kids get to know you they’ll like you.”

“It’s not that, it’s…EVAN LEAVE THE SQUIRRELS ALONE PLEASE!” I decided that a private conversation was a lost cause as long as the kids were in earshot, and that I’d better cut my losses. “You know what, why don’t I take you back to the dorm and introduce you to some of my friends?”

Evan had to use the restroom, which the rest of us stood outside awkwardly, and I introduced my friends and their parents as they passed – Asher, Theo, Finn, and Dylan. We also ran into Jasper and his father, who made an effort to schmooze my parents. It was obvious to me that he had just chewed out Jas for trying to out my Crimson Circle membership, but no one said anything directly and my parents were totally oblivious. Rick Whitfield asked if my parents were going to the headmaster’s reception before I was able to extricate myself. We finally collected Evan, who had apparently taken time out to explore the bathroom.

“How come there are no stalls in your shower?”

“I guess because that’s how they built it. Why were you in the shower?”

“There was a boy in there. He told me to go away.”

“Well, yeah, because he probably didn’t want you to watch him take a shower.”

“Evan…” Mom was trying, but Evan was undeterred.

“So, do you take turns or does everybody just get in there together?”

“Everyone just gets in there together.”

“Ew! So you have to see each other naked!”

“Evan, I have some bad news for you about middle school.”

Abby made a face. “Don’t remind me. By the way, was that the same Rick Whitfield Uncle Mitch likes to watch on TV?”

“Yes.”

“God, I bet his son’s a huge jerkface.”

“Abby, be nice,” Mom scolded, then turned to me, “he’s not being mean to you, is he?”

I decided to drop a hint. “I don’t think he approves of my lifestyle but we’re civil to one another.”

We walked to the auditorium, where the theater department was hosting a showcase of scenes from various plays for the parents. Owen was playing Romeo in the balcony scene, and I had planned for it to be the first time my parents got to see him in the flesh, even if an introduction was out of the question because he didn’t want my parents to get sucked into the drama with his mom. Unfortunately, Evan was fidgeting throughout the performance, and Mom had to take him out of the hall, so she missed Owen’s scene.

Evan calmed down a bit over the course of the game, although I knew he’d already earned himself a long lecture on the drive home. I had planned to introduce my parents to some of the more exotic restaurants in town, but I doubted Evan or Abby would find anything they liked at Bangkok Bistro or the Spice Road. I scaled back my ambitions to Café Amarante, an Italian place that Finn had mentioned going to when Conor was a freshman. He hadn’t mentioned the prices, and I downgraded my order from the Linguine with mussels that he’d mentioned to the eggplant parm when I saw the menu.

Mom ordered chicken piccata and nervously interrogated me about school throughout the meal. Abby chimed in with commentary about the dormitories. I think she was disappointed that the Colonial Revival architecture didn’t actually look anything like Hogwarts. After the waitress came by with the check, she announced that they would leave Abby in charge of Evan at the hotel and drop me back off at the dorm. It was massively unfair to Abby, but it gave me the space I needed.

I started working up my courage in the elevator on the way down from their room, and was about to finally let it out when we got into the car, but of course Mom had to talk over me.

“Nolan, whatever you did, your father and I will always love you.”

I finally let my frustration boil over. “God, Mom, do you have to automatically assume I did something bad?”

“Well, what is it?”

“I’m gay.”

“Oh. We still love you, no matter what.” Mom launched into a speech that she had clearly rehearsed. Dad stayed quiet. Unless Mom had warned him, I was pretty sure that this was all coming as a surprise.

They walked upstairs with me, and it turned out that Noah was still out, so they came into my room. Mom gave me a teary hug. Dad shook my hand, and asked the question that had evidently been on his mind.

“Did you want to come up here because you thought we’d be mad?”

“It’s not you,” I answered, “It’s Sissipahaw. It’s Uncle Mitch, Reverend Pike, Mason Griggs.”

“I thought you and Mason were friends,” Mom protested.

“We were, until seventh grade when Ty called him my boyfriend as a joke, and then he dropped me like a hot potato. There was no way I could ever come out down there. You saw what they did to Jonah Talbot.” Jonah Talbot was three years older than me and had come out a couple of years before, which had been treated like he’d confessed to a crime. The school had tried to investigate him for ‘sexual harassment,’ and when they cleared him, Mrs. McClure had gone on a rant about how the school was failing it’s duty to protect children from sin at a meeting of the church deacons. That was when I had first realized that Mom knew about me. Jonah had gone away to the state School of the Arts in Winston-Salem.

“I’ll try to talk to Mitch,” Dad said, “I won’t tell him about…this, but I’ll try to get him to tone it down at Thanksgiving. Your grandparents…”

“Don’t need to know. I know.”







Chapter 22

Kendra Liu

The second-to-last weekend in October was family weekend, where the Wilson school invites parents and siblings of current students onto campus for a home football game and a bunch of stuff to show off the education their kids are getting. It meant that the campus would be crawling with kids who weren’t students and nobody expected to recognize, the perfect opportunity to install more cameras.

Business was booming. Dylan had managed to sell 20 videos already, and he promised that once he got videos from the showers we would all be millionaires. He had ordered some fancy surveillance cameras that he could install in the light fixtures of the showers, so Saturday morning, he and Jordie hit the showers in the freshman dormitories (we knew from listening in on dorm-room conversations that the third floor of Beattie would put on quite the show), while Ty and I took the locker rooms in the gym.

We met back up in Haley’s apartment – her nudist cleaning service having been suspended for the special occasion. Jordie and Dylan were really keyed up.

“Holy shit! Dude! You almost got caught!” Dylan exclaimed.

“What happened?” Haley asked, genuinely worried.

“Some little kid came in as I was putting the camera in the shower on your third floor,” Dylan answered, “I think it was Nolan Pierce’s little brother. He had the same dumb accent. I told him to scram.”

“Shit! What are we going to do if he tells?”

“He doesn’t know my name and he can’t describe me very well. He’s, like, a little kid.”

“And I think he’s retarded or something,” Jordie added.

“Still, that’s cutting it kind of close.”

“We have all the cameras we need,” Jordie insisted.

“The batteries should last through Christmas Break,” Dylan said, “if you can get us access to student IDs and the passwords we’ll need to hack the security cameras, we can just replace them then.”

“We need to keep an eye on Pierce to be safe.”

“We have an eye on him, remember.”

That night we ordered pizza and settled into Jordie’s room to watch kids come in from parents’ weekend. Haley wanted to keep an eye on Nolan Pierce to make sure he didn’t go around telling people about the strange kid his brother had seen in the shower, Jordy wanted to see if they’d say anything telling about the Illuminati, and I just wanted to see some dicks.

I was the first to have their wish gratified. Finn Callahan had taken parents’ weekend as an opportunity to introduce himself (and his father) to his girlfriend’s parents. His roommate, Dylan, had introduced Sloane Kensington to his parents, but hers couldn’t make it out from LA. Dylan and Sloane went back to his room right after the game, said goodbye to his parents and younger siblings, and proceeded to fuck each other’s brains out. We had installed extra cameras in his room, so we were able to watch from multiple angles and zoom in on his massive dick going in and out of her slit as she rode him.

Finn didn’t get back until much later, and he knocked on the door, which was unusual for him. By this point in the year the boys of Beattie seemed comfortable barging in on their roommates, but I guess it was different with parents around.

“Who is it?” Dylan asked. He was still cuddled up together with Sloane.

“Just Finn.”

“Come on in.”

Finn came inside and immediately began stripping naked.

“How was the date?” Sloane asked.

“It was torture! Serena was wearing one of those really tight sweaters she has…you know that lavender one? But with her Dad there I couldn’t touch her.”

“You’ve got blue balls?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe.”

“I can help with that. Dylan, are you ready to go again?

“I will be if you let me watch,” Dylan answered.

Sloane sat up and opened her legs. Finn ate her out while Dylan massaged her breasts and called out encouragement. Once he was hard again, he suggested that they change positions. Dylan lay on the bed with his legs spread and Sloane straddled his face. Finn lubed Dylan up and fucked him in the ass while he ate out Sloane. When Finn had come, Sloane moved down and rode Dylan’s dick again,, milking his cock as she reached climax.

When she pulled off, I realized with some embarrassment that I had been instinctively rubbing my crotch. Hoping that no one had noticed, I moved my hand away and feigned boredom, telling Jordie that I’d rather try to find something on TV than continue to watch the soap opera on Beattie Hall. He agreed and muted the feed so that we could channel surf until Nolan Pierce returned to the dorm with his parents.

“Turn that off!” Jordie shouted. We obeyed, turning off the TV and returning to Jordie’s computer monitor.

“Is the brother with him?” Haley asked.

“No, but it looks like his mom’s been crying. Shit, you think the kid said something?”

Jordie turned up the volume.

“Did you want to come to up here because you thought we’d be mad?” Pierce’s father asked.

“Why would they be mad at him if his brother caught us?” Dylan asked.

“It’s not you,” Dylan insisted “It’s Sissipahaw. It’s Uncle Mitch, Reverend Pike, Mason Griggs.”

“He’s not talking about coming upstairs,” I realized, “he’s talking about coming to Wilson in the first place.”

“I thought you and Mason were friends,” his mom said.

“We were,” Nolan answered with a hint of bitterness in his voice, “until seventh grade when Ty called him my boyfriend as a joke, and then he dropped me like a hot potato. There was no way I could ever come out down there. You saw what they did to Jonah Talbot.”

Haley breathed a sigh of relief, “It had nothing to do with us at all. He was just coming out to his parents.”

“Awwww….” Jordie said with sarcastically feigned sympathy, “little Nolan came out to his mommy and daddy.”

I didn’t think it was so funny. It felt like something we shouldn’t have watched, and not in the fun transgressive way that watching their sexual escapades and secret society machinations did. It felt like we really were doing something wrong.

I told the others I needed to get home before curfew and went home, passing a restless night. The more I thought about it, the more the whole thing seemed wrong. By the next morning, I had decided that we should probably stop.

I went over to Jordie’s. He was excited about something he’d seen on the camera feeds. “Dude, come look at this!”

He pulled up a video from the previous morning. It was Rick Whitfield yelling at his son Jasper.

“What’s he mad about?” I asked.

“Apparently Daddy was in the Crimson Circle, and he’s not happy that little Jasper didn’t make the cut.” Jordie played the tape.

“Jasper, there are rules and there are rules that only apply to plebs,” Rick Whitfield shouted.

“What’s a pleb?”

“It’s what they call people who aren’t in secret societies. When I post this it’s going to be fucking huge!”

“You’re posting this shit?”

“Yeah, I’m posting all of it. Dylan gave me the account information. This part’s going to totally destroy his career.” Jordie fast-forwarded a bit to show me Rick Whitfield yelling:

“Jesus Christ, Jas. Nobody actually cares about that shit! We just use it to get the rubes riled up.” Jasper was crying.

“Jordie,” I said, “I don’t think we should be posting these videos anymore.”

“Why not?”

“I think it’s mean.”

“Mean? Seriously? You’re worried about being mean to these assholes?”

“They don’t really seem like assholes.”

“They’re pretentious rich fucks who are going to grow up to send kids like you and me off to war so they can bag contracts for Halliburton.”

“Jordie, no one’s sending you off to war.” And Nolan Pierce didn’t seem like a pretentious rich fuck. If there was anyone the kids at Beattie were excluding, it was Jasper Whitfield.

“Let’s talk about this with the others.”

Jordie called everyone, and when they had assembled in his room, announced that “Kendra wants to call the whole thing off.”

“After watching that conversation with Nolan and his parents, I think it’s kind of mean that we’re blasting their private business all over the internet without their permission.”

“It’s not just their business. These kids are in the Illuminati!” Presumably they were very junior Illuminati, and what we had overheard so far sounded pretty harmless.

“I don’t think Nolan Pierce is that rich,” I protested.

“Nolan’s as stuck-up as the rest of them,” Haley argued, “he’s barely said a word to me all semester.”

“You’re making him clean your apartment naked!” Now that I thought about it, it was kind of weird that Ms. Hodes was doing that.

Haley and Jordie were both adamant, and Dylan sided with them, but Ty started to swing toward me. Simone suggested a compromise.

“If the Illuminati really does control the media, this is never going to get on the news, and they’ll never find out about it. Posting the pornos can’t hurt them if they never know, can it?”

Something about the idea felt wrong, but I couldn’t see any logical argument against it. We agreed, to Jordie’s annoyance, to keep selling the porn videos but stop posting the other videos. When I got home, I had an email from Jordie. As something of a peace offering, he had cut together a compilation video of the hottest boy-on-boy action.

I locked the door to my bedroom, took off my clothes, lay down in bed, and pressed play.







Chapter 23

Nolan Pierce

With parents’ weekend out of the way, the next item on the calendar was Halloween. The day itself, along with the school-sanctioned celebrations (they had kids from town come in and trick-or-treat at the dorms, and a tour of supposedly haunted locations on campus – half of which were actually near society meeting places). The unofficial celebration, hosted jointly by the five societies in the basement of the Roosevelt gym, would be Saturday.

The society guys from my hall had decided on a group costume. It was a chance for me to get guys to show up to the party barefoot, and to finally live up to my surname and have my ears pierced. Jude had assured me that if he did the piercing Thursday, it would heal enough for me to take it out when I was visiting family over Thanksgiving.

The plan was for Jude to come over and do the piercings for anyone who wanted them Thursday after the streaking club. I had skipped the last week’s meeting because of the elections, and quickly found that streaking was much less fun on a night when the temperature was in the 40s.

With apologies to Lindsey and Molly, Jamie announced that the streaking club would resume in the spring, and we huddled up under a blanket while Jude got his piercing equipment ready.

“I can also do a real tattoo if anyone’s interested.”

“I want to get one to piss off my parents but I don’t want it to be pirate themed,” Owen said.

“I want to get one for my mom,” Noah announced, “but later.”

Only slightly disappointed, Jude did the piercings for me, Dylan, and Henry. Since we were already naked, we decided to have an orgy afterwards. I managed to suck everyone’s toes before Henry bent me over the bed and fucked me while Dylan stuck his cock in my mouth. When they’d both cum, I lay back on the bed and Jude rode me until I came while Finn flip-flopped with Noah.

We gathered the next Saturday to put on the remainder of our costumes, which Jamie had convinced Mr. Duvall to donate. They were left over from a production of The Pirates of Penzance. Mr. Duvall had said he didn’t want them back, but I had an idea for a pirate-themed play rattling around in my brain.

We all ditched the shoes, even though it was another cold night. Jamie had said that the party would end up being warm. After getting into our costumes, we pregamed with some weed provided by Jamie and walked over to the gym.

The party was already in full swing by the time we got there – loud techno music playing on speakers and stolen Christmas lights for atmosphere. I realized I was nervous again. There were kids from all over the school, society members and plebs, and I didn’t know how the plebs would react to me and Owen being an item.

We were interrupted by Trip Calder, who must have spotted us standing around looking nervous. He was known on campus as the guy you went to if you wanted something harder than pot, which was handled by Jamie, and tonight was no exception.

“You want to party?” Trip opened his leather jacket (he hadn’t bothered with a costume) to reveal a roll of tablets.

“Is that molly?” Owen asked.

“Yeah.”

“Where’d you get it.”

“Mutual friends,” code for the Illuminati drug trafficking network set up to give members access to safe highs and raise some money on the side. “It’s clean.”

“Cool.” Owen took a tablet and I followed his lead, as did the rest of our groups. After about half an hour I felt it start to kick in, a euphoric high that was better than pot. The lights seemed brighter, the music seemed better, and I felt at one with everyone in the room, which quickly dissolved into a blur of lights and bodies.

I lost track of time as I danced with a procession of boys, each of whom I felt as though I was in love with. I was vaguely conscious that I was beginning to get hot and grind my teeth, but I didn’t care.

At some point, Jamie and Conor Callahan appeared and started dragging me and Owen off the dance floor. I protested lightly, too happy to really be angry at them. They dragged us up to the locker room showers and began ripping off our clothes. I thought they wanted to have sex and started kissing Owen, but Jamie turned the shower on.

I gasped when the cold water hit me.

“Nolan, try to keep your mouth open.”

“I love you,” I said.

“Don’t have sex,” Jamie instructed, “you need to get your heart rate down.”

They kept us under the cold water for a few minutes, and then led us outside. It was another cold night, but I still felt warm inside even though I was naked.

By the time we got back to the dorm, the high was starting to wear off, and I found myself overwhelmingly sleepy. Jamie stripped naked and dragged me into bed with him. I fell asleep in his arms and woke up to find him sitting across from me with a cafeteria to-go tray on his lap. It had a blueberry muffin and an assortment of fruit, and Jamie handed me a large cup of orange juice.

“Drink this. You need to replace your electrolytes.”

I suddenly realized that I was thirsty and drank about half the orange juice in one go. The memories of the previous night came flooding back to me as I ate the muffin.

“What was all that stuff with the shower?” I asked Jamie.

“You and Owen were starting to get overheated. The two of you are a little smaller so the dosage was higher for you”

“Wait, you mean I OD’d?”

“Technically, but not that bad. The other guys are fine.”

“Where is Owen?”

“I had Conor spend the night with him in his room. You’re both going to be fine, you’re just going to feel like crap today. I’d recommend going back to your room and crashing after the senate meeting, and next time you want to do e, just take half a tablet.”

I decided that next time could wait for a few months, or maybe a year, and went to check on Owen. He was still asleep, but Conor said he was going to be fine, so I took a shower and got dressed before the senate meeting.







Chapter 24

Abby Pierce

Mom and Dad took the long way home coming back from Nolan’s school, because they wanted to avoid New York City traffic. I wanted to see New York City, even if only from the car, but Mom said that we might stop in Washington if we came to pick him up for summer vacation.

The trip was made even longer by Mom and Dad’s bad mood. Evan had been his usual annoying self throughout the trip, and they were both giving him a lecture about not embarrassing Nolan in front of his friends. No one ever complained about Evan embarrassing me in front of my friends, but I guess my friends already knew Evan. He would be grounded for a week when he got home, which he whined about the whole way through Pennsylvania.

It was about 7:00 in the evening by the time we got home. Mom heated up frozen fish sticks for dinner and then sent Evan to his room. She and dad went to their own room for a whispered conversation of the Serious Adult kind. Evan misbehaving was hardly unusual enough for a Serious Adult Conversation, so I started to suspect that something weird was going on.

The next day at lunch, all my friends were eager to hear about Nolan’s school.

“Is it like Hogwarts?” Naomi asked.

“Well, it looks more like UNC,” I admitted, “only smaller. But they do have prefects, and ghost stories. They say on Friday evenings you can hear voices coming from the basement of the science building that’s been locked up since the ‘50s.”

“Cool!” Benji exclaimed, “so, what did y’all do up there?”

“We ate breakfast in Nolan’s cafeteria – they have a waffle maker…”

“Sweet!” Grant and Zach yelled at the same time.

“Nolan said they gussied the food up a little when the parents were there, but even on a regular day he says it’s loads better than the cafeteria food here. And then we met some kids on Nolan’s hall.”

“Are they all rich?”

“Pretty much. His roommate’s dad is a brain surgeon. One of the other dads is some kind of TV talk-show host. We ended up talking to him longer than I wanted to, and then we went to the theater and they had kids from the drama department act out scenes from all different plays. It was weird because they didn’t have any sets or anything and the kids were doing, like, Romeo and Juliet in just jeans and a t-shirt, and Evan was acting up.”

“Ugh, I’m sorry.” Molly commiserated.

“I think Evan embarrassed Nolan in front of all his rich friends. But then we went to the football game and out to dinner.”

When I got home from band practice, it seemed like my hypothesis that Evan had embarrassed Nolan was correct. Mom and Dad were having another Serious Adult Conversation that I could overhear snippets of through my open bedroom door.

“Do you really think he’s fitting in up there? I felt like we were the country cousins come to town the whole time I was up there, and that Jasper kid…”

“Every other kid seemed happy to see him. And he’s writing those articles for the school paper. I don’t know what those kids are arguing about half the time, but I mean he’s already getting his articles on the front page. If what he told us is true, he’s probably better off up there than down here.”

“It was true. Don’t get your hopes up about that.”

“I always knew he was sensitive.”

“I knew from the look on his face that time Brenda McClure got all spun up about the Talbot boy at the deacons’ meeting. If she could keep her damn mouth shut maybe we wouldn’t have to drive 500 miles to see our son.”

“Well…”

“I checked out books from the library. You can’t tell him it’s a phase or he’s confused. He’ll think it means we won’t love him unless he changes it and they can’t change it.”

“Well, he was okay with us keeping it secret from the rest of the family.”

That got my attention. Nolan had a secret! Something to do with his boarding school that he had told Mom and Dad about but no one else in the family could know. Well, Nolan and Mom and Dad thought no one else could know, but I thought different.

Fortunately, I had computers for my elective that quarter, and the teacher supervised us very lightly. I opened up Google and searched for ‘Nolan Pierce,’ but for some reason I kept coming up with stuff about Walker Texas Ranger. I tried another tack ‘Wilson School Secrets.” This was more promising. According to Wikipedia, Nolan’s school had five secret societies that initiated students and supposedly ran the school behind the scenes.

I went back to the search results and scrolled until I found a blog from a current Wilson student. His name was Owen Delvecchio, and he was a member of the student senate. I had only a vague idea of what a student government did from TV (it seemed like every Disney Channel show had an episode where a character ran for student body president promising to abolish detentions and serve ice cream in the cafeteria every day, only to find out they didn’t get to do anything), but on one of his phone calls home Nolan had mentioned that he was writing about his school’s student council for the school paper. Maybe this would be promising.

I opened the blog and read through the titles: Wilson’s Diversity Problem Starts at the Admissions Office, Don’t Tell Teens to ‘Calm Down’ About the Supreme Court, My Statement Concerning Recent Allegations. Allegations sounded juicy. I clicked the title and began to read.

As many of you know, a member of the student group known as Renew Wilson took advantage of the public comment session at this week’s senate meeting to lodge a public accusation that Nolan Pierce, a freshman at Wilson and intern for the Wilson Chronicle, is a member of a secret society. Now we were getting somewhere. Specifically, this individual alleged that he had personally seen the tattoo that indicates membership of the Crimson Circle on Nolan in the showers. One, TMI. Two, Nolan had a tattoo! That was so cool! Mom and Dad would flip! Maybe that was the big secret?

In the short period I have known Nolan through the Chronicle, I have found him to be strongly committed to fair and impartial reporting. My initial reaction was that these allegations seemed extremely implausible. After all, Nolan is a working-class scholarship student, a far cry from the elites the societies typically recruit. Nevertheless, because the societies continue to refuse to make information on their membership publicly available, I was unable to rule out his involvement. I felt it was my duty to the student body to ensure that they received impartial information from school-funded sources, and asked Nolan to explain himself.

Nolan contacted me and asked me and a delegation from Students for a Fairer Wilson to meet him in the common room of his dormitory. A delegation from Renew Wilson was also present. Nolan appeared in the common room naked WHAT!? and showed us his tattoo. I immediately recognized the design, produced below, as a symbol of the LGBT community.

The symbol looked like two circles with arrows coming out of them. I had no idea what it meant, or what the LGBT Community was. Maybe another secret society that Nolan had joined.

From my perspective, this whole unfortunate incident raises two concerns. First, Jasper’s failure to recognize the symbolism of this tattoo demonstrates a concerning lack of awareness of LGBT culture. So LGBT had something to do with culture. It made sense, as Nolan was a big fan of cultural stuff. Kids at school called him a nerd. Clearly, Wilson must invest more resources in educating students about the LGBT community, both through the curriculum and through mandatory cocurricular programming. Secondly, it is more clear than ever that transparency in organizational membership is essential, both to protecting the democratic process from manipulation by the societies and to protecting innocent students such as Nolan from false accusations. Regardless of the outcome of next week’s elections, I intend to put forth legislation in my final semester on the senate that will require all students to disclose membership in any secret society on pain of violating the honor code.

That was the end of the blog post, and the teacher was beginning to walk down my row, so I quickly closed the window and started working on my assignment, but I had a lot of questions for Nolan when he came home from Thanksgiving.





Chapter 25

Nolan Pierce

Getting back home for Thanksgiving was something of an odyssey. I had to get up early for the free shuttle bus to the train station in New Haven, then change trains in DC to end up arriving in High Point near 1:00 a.m., assuming the train ran on time, which it didn’t. We got stuck behind a freight train somewhere south of Richmond, and I had to text my parents that I would be late.

Fortunately, I had brought plenty of reading material – The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which Owen had suggested, Catch-22, a postmodern mediation on artistic compromise set in an architectural firm that Jamie’s dad had written, and The Handmaid’s Tale, which Delvecchio had recommended but I suspected hadn’t actually red, and I was reading to stay on his good side ahead of next semester’s student government shenanigans.

It was closer to 2:00 by the time I got off the train, and close to 3:00 by the time I got home. Mom promised to let me sleep in, but I was woken up around 9:30 by someone shaking my shoulder.

“Evan, go away,” I muttered.

“It’s me.”

I opened my eyes to see Abby staring expectantly back at me. “Aren’t you a little old for this?”

“I want to see your tattoo.”

“What?”

“Your tattoo.”

“Who told you I had a tattoo?”

“I read it on a blog.”

“Delvecchio’s blog?”

“Yes. Owen Delvecchio.”

“Fuck.”

Abby giggled. “He said someone accused you of being in a secret society and he made you strip naked to prove you were actually in an LGBT community. What’s LGBT?”

“I cannot have this conversation without coffee. Are Mom and Dad up?”

“No. They got in late last night.”

“So did I.”

“Yeah, but you’re not old.”

Grumbling, I stood up and padded into the kitchen, where I made a very strong pot of coffee and made Abby sit quietly while I drank a cup and tried to remember the exact content of Delvecchio’s blog post.

“So, this blog post, if I remember correctly, Delvecchio said that Jas accused me of being in the Crimson Circle, and I had to prove that I wasn’t.”

“So, you got naked in front of a bunch of people.”

“Right.”

“Wasn’t that weird?”

“You get used to it.”

“And you have a tattoo, but it’s for some other club.”

“Another club.”

“The LGBT club. What does that mean?”

“It’s not a club, it’s…listen, Abby, this stuff is really complicated.”

“You’re going to tell me it’s grown up.”

“Kind of, but it’s uncomfortable for me to talk about too.”

“I’m only two years younger than you.”

I sighed in exasperation. “Look, if I show you the tattoo, will you let me hold off on talking about LGBT until later.”

“Ok.”

I stood up and pulled down my pajama pants, mooning my sister in the kitchen of my family home. I was going to kill Delvecchio when I got back.

“Wait, you have two?”

“The one on the left is the Crimson Circle. I’ll explain that later, too. Now have you seen enough?”

“I guess so.”

Mom and Dad came into the kitchen a few minutes later and thanked me for making coffee. Dad made biscuits and gravy for breakfast, a delicacy I couldn’t get at Wilson. I told them I wanted to see some of my friends before everyone scattered for the holiday, and retrieved my bike from the shed for a tour of Sissipahaw.

Kenny Barlow was riding his bike in the cul-de-sac and rode over to me as soon as he saw me.

“Nolan! You’re back!”

“Yeah, for Thanksgiving.”

Kenny quickly filled me in on what was going on in Sissipahaw, providing me with the unfiltered gossip that Abby couldn’t tell me over the phone with Mom and Dad in earshot.

“Did you hear about Tyler?”

“No.”

“He got arrested!”

“What?”

“For shoplifting.”

“Shit!” Tyler Keever had been my friend and protector in sixth grade, picking out the lost little boy in the crowd of new students and inviting me to sit with him and his crowd of skate-punks. He’d looked out for me that year, protecting me from the bullies and very patiently teaching me to skateboard. I still had a scar above my right eye from the makeshift half-pipe he’d set up in his backyard. He’d been the oldest of our group, and when he got to high school he’d fallen in with a harder crowd. Everyone knew they shoplifted, not because they actually wanted the shit they were stealing but because there was nothing better to do in Sissipahaw on a weekday.

I postponed my plans to visit Cassie and Micah and rode my bike out to Tyler’s house. His half-brothers Cody and Blake were playing in the front yard.

“You can’t see Tyler,” Blake announced solemnly, “he’s grounded until Christmas.”

“If that’s Jace Havelock,” Tyler’s mom shouted from inside the house, “tell him to go away!”

“It’s Nolan!” Cody yelled back.

“Oh, Nolan! He can come in!”

Mrs. Holt ran to the front door and wrapped me in a great, big hug. “Nolan! It’s so good to see you!”

“Tyler got arrested!” Blake yelled gleefully.

Mrs. Holt sighed. “Maybe you can talk some sense into him. I swear that boy will be the death of me.”

Awakened by the commotion, Tyler stumbled out of his room in his pajamas. He’d gotten a haircut since I’d last seen him and had a major case of bedhead. “What’s going on? Oh, Nolan!”

“Why don’t you two catch up in your room,” Mrs. Holt suggested, “Blake and Cody you go back outside and stay out of their hair.”

Tyler led me into his room. It was cleaner than I ever remembered it and all the posters had been taken down. “Guess you heard I got busted.”

“Yeah, I think your mom wants me to set you on the straight and narrow.”

Tyler laughed ruefully. “Yeah. Dale hit the fucking roof. They searched my room, found my stash, tore down all the posters. He said he didn’t want me being a bad influence on his kids.”

“Shit.”

“Mom says they’ll give me my board and guitar back after Christmas, if I don’t fuck up again. Not that I have a chance to. It’s just school, community service, and back home.”

“How bad is it?”

“400 hours. Goes off my record when I turn 18.”

“What was it?”

“Huh?”

“What did you steal?”

“A rotisserie chicken.”

“What the fuck did you want a rotisserie chicken for?”

“Savannah managed to sneak one out under her sweater. Right in front of the store manager.”

“He probably thought she was pregnant.” All the adults in town just knew Savannah Vickers was going to end up pregnant before she graduated, if she graduated. They were probably right, but it wasn’t really her fault.

Tyler clearly needed to vent, so I let him for several hours. The haircut had been his lawyer’s idea, but Dale was making him keep it short, and making noises about sending him to live with his father if he got in any more trouble. The friends he’d made in high school were now forbidden from coming to the house, and most of our friends from middle school were now forbidden by their parents from seeing him. I was the first friend he’d gotten to talk to in a while, but there was also an undercurrent of jealousy. I’d gotten out of Sissipahaw; it looked like Tyler was going to drown there if he didn’t come up with a better way to fight back against all the bullshit.

When he’d finally run through all the injustices he’d suffered over the last three months, Tyler turned to me. “So, how’s boarding school? Are they nice to you or do they think you’re some dumb hick like us.”

“They’re nice to me. I joined a secret society.”

Tyler sounded intrigued. “What is that, like, you worship Satan and shit?”

“No,” I gave him one of the lines the Crimson Circle had suggested for discussing it back home. “It’s basically like a fraternity, but the high school version.”

“So, are you going to start wearing all Abercrombie and Fitch now?”

I laughed. “You want to know something? If Cody Huxley showed up at Wilson with that fauxhawk and that big Aeropostale jacket he always wears, everyone would think he was going to some kind of costume party.”

Tyler finally laughed. “Shit.”

I decided that Tyler would be a good test run for the conversation I was going to have to have with Abby. He knew I was ‘different’ somehow from the day we met. That was why he’d befriended me.

“Tyler, can I tell you something?”

“Is it funny?”

“It’s serious.”

Tyler sat up and looked at me intently. “Okay.”

“I’m gay.”

“Woah. Cool man.” Tyler reached across the bed and hugged me. “So, at your school…”

“I’m out up there.”

“The other kids are cool with it?”

“Most are. It’s like the reverse of here. The homophobic kids are the ones nobody likes. If they called me a faggot or something they’d get in trouble with the teachers, and more trouble with the secret societies. I have a boyfriend up there.”

“What’s his name?”

“Owen.” I told Tyler all about Owen, what he looked like, the play he was in, all the shit with his parents. When I’d finished, I realized that the entire day was gone, and I needed to get home for supper.

The sun was setting as I biked home, leafless trees silhouetted against the late-fall sky. The barren landscape matched my darkening mood. I didn’t know how I was going to save Tyler. By the time I graduated, he was either going to be in jail or still sneaking smokes behind Food Lion, and the subtle, probably subconscious jealousy he’d let show would have curdled into resentment of my success, unless there was some way I could nudge him onto a better path.

My mood did not improve the next day, which was Sunday. Skipping church was out of the question, and of course everyone made a fuss over me. Reverend Proctor, Mrs. Vickers, all the kids from youth group and the youth pastor, Pastor Graves.

“Of course you’ll be coming to youth group tonight?” Pastor Graves asked.

Mom answered before I could. “Yes, Nolan and Abby will both be going.”

Youth group followed a standardized protocol. Games, pizza, and then a sermon. Pastor Graves made a point of sitting with me at dinner. The other kids were peppering me with questions.

“Are all the other kids rich?”

“Yeah, but they’re not like snooty about it or anything.”

“What’s the dress code like?”

“You have to wear a collared shirt to class, and no jeans. But the student council’s petitioning them to change it. Once you’re out of class it’s more casual.”

“Are you finding a church home up there?” Pastor Graves asked.

“There’s an interdenominational chapel on campus, with a youth group that meets Sunday afternoons.” Out of force of habit, I had worded my response so that it wouldn’t technically be a lie. If Pastor Graves googled the school to fact check me, he would discover that there actually was a chapel and youth group, just as I had described. I doubted that he actually would, but it was a good skill to practice.

“That’s good. I know you’re in a very different place, lots of different kinds of people.”

I played dumb. The remark about ‘different kinds of people had been a jab at the godless heathens Pastor Graves knew Wilson was overrun with, but I pretended to believe he was talking about the school’s ethnic diversity. I made a remark to the effect that it was heartwarming to see kids of different races sitting together in the dining hall, which you didn’t see much of in the cafeteria in Sissipahaw Middle.

Pastor Graves nodded. “That’s good, you know I always say that we are all brothers and sisters in Christ, regardless of what we look like. Of course, we’re all sinners too, and I’ve heard a lot of these liberal schools have turned a blind eye to sin under the guise of tolerance.”

“What do you mean?”

“Handing out condoms in the student health center, letting confused students indulge in ‘gay’ relationships, that sort of thing.” There was a juvenile titter around the table when he said ‘condoms.’

“I haven’t seen anything like that.” Abby was sitting next to me, and she had known me long enough to know when I was lying.

“Well, that’s good, but you need to watch out. People out there will tempt you into excusing sin by saying it’s keeping an open mind. You know, I always say if you open your mind too far your brains will fall out.”

“That’s a good thing to remember.” It would make a great line for the play I was writing.

“They may even try to tempt you into sin. They call it experimenting, but we don’t need to experiment. God has already marked out a path for us to follow.”

“I know, sir.” I cut the conversation short, but Pastor Graves had obviously planned his sermon for the week around me. The thesis was that as we got out into the world, we would find that the world refused to call out sin for what it was, and he made a point to reference the sin of homosexuality specifically. That got another round of tittering. I guessed that he had figured out I was gay but didn’t realize that I was already leading a ‘gay lifestyle’ at school. He was trying to buck me up to resist temptation while setting me up to be an object lesson if and when I did succumb. He was probably going to try to keep an eye on me through Abby, so she needed to know what was going on regardless of whether she’d seen my tattoo or read about the ‘LGBT community.’

That night, I waited until Abby and Evan were safely in bed, and came out into the kitchen where Mom and Dad were getting meals prepped for the week.

“I think I need to talk to Abby,” I announced quietly.

“What about?” Mom asked.

“The thing we talked about at parents’ weekend.”

“You said we weren’t going to tell the family.”

“I said grandparents specifically. Pastor Graves was harping on it at youth group. He knows.”

“Honey, we never told him. I promise.”

“He can tell by my mannerisms. That’s how they all know. He’s going to ask Abby about me without making it obvious that’s what he’s asking about.”

“He really does mean well.”

“Still, I don’t want to put her in a position where she doesn’t know what’s going on.”

“You’re probably right.”

The next morning, Mom and Dad both had work and Abby and Evan both had school. Evan was more than a little resentful that I got to go and he didn’t until Mom pointed out that my school year had started earlier than his. I stayed in bed, listening to the chaos around me, until Abby and Evan had been hustled out the door to the bus stop. I put the stud earrings that I had taken out before getting on the train back in, and walked out to the kitchen where Mom and Dad were quickly draining cups of coffee.

They both did a double-take when they saw the earrings, but neither said anything. “Does Abby have band practice today?” I asked.

“No, they switched it up to Tuesday Thursday,” Mom answered. That meant that she would get home while Evan was still at his afterschool program. I would have a chance to talk to her, but first I wanted to check up on some old friends.

I fired up my laptop and reworked my play script to incorporate some lines from Pastor Graves until it was lunchtime. Then I pedaled my bike over to Sissipahaw High. The security was as crappy as ever. If somebody wanted to shoot it up, it would be a piece of cake, but my intentions were far more benign.

I found my old friends occupying a table at the back of the cafeteria, and sat down across from them like I’d been doing it all year.

“Nolan?” Parker asked.

“Yep. I’m home for Thanksgiving.”

“And you’re eating lunch here?” Cassie asked.

“God, no! I had a sandwich before I left. I just came to say hi.”

“I bet you’re getting lobster every day at that school in Connecticut,” Micah joked.

“Not quite, but it’s a lot better than this shit.”

“So, what, you came to rub it in?”

“I just wanted to see you guys. Where’s Tyler?”

“Tutoring,” Cassie answered. Everyone looked slightly uncomfortable for a beat, and then she added, “we didn’t know you wanted to see him.”

“I saw him day before yesterday. I guess he’s been going through some shit. I have an idea that might help him. Can you meet me behind the Food Lion parking lot on Thursday at midnight?

“What for?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“But Thursday’s Thanksgiving.”

“I know. Everyone else in town will be passed out from tryptophan.”

Curiosity won out over caution, and they all agreed to go. I excused myself and went home to wait for Abby. When she got home, I was waiting at the kitchen table with two cans of ice-cold Coke. Mom never let us drink soda, so they were a real treat.

“Cool, thanks.” Abby sat down and opened her Coke. Only then did she notice the earrings. “Nolan, did you pierce your ears this morning?”

“Back at school. I took them out when I came home but I need to leave them in some of the time, so they don’t close up. We need to talk.”

“Are you finally going to tell me about your clubs?”

“Yes, but it’s more serious than I think you realized.” Abby’s face grew stern, and I pressed forward. “Abby, I’m gay.”

Abby looked scared, and was quiet for a long minute, leaving her Coke untouched. She finally asked. “Did you turn gay at school?”

“No. I’ve always been gay. I’ve known since I was about your age. I applied to Wilson because I knew it would be easier for me up there. Kids up there don’t call me a fag or act like it’s a sin or anything.”

“Pastor Graves says it’s a sin.”

“I know. You can believe him if you want. You can hate me if you want. Just promise me you won’t tell him or anyone else in Sissipahaw. People would start to talk about Mom and Dad, and they don’t deserve that on my account.”

There was another long silence. Abby started to tear up, but she hugged me tight and said firmly “I don’t hate you.”