Read Openly Straight for Free Online Page A

way you use singular detail, the way to show a lot with a little. Butthere was something else, a few other things, actually, that I noticed about that piece. Anyone?”
    “Sentence length,” said Bryce, not looking at me. “Scads of short sentences.”
    “Yes!” Mr. Scarborough cried. “Precisely. Did anyone else have a feeling as though it was hard to breathe, listening to that piece? Extremely tight, clipped, controlled. That can be fixed by varying sentence length. Anything else?”
    Some other kid said, “Why the hell would someone leave their hot girlfriend and move across the country to an all-boys school?”
    The room got really quiet, and it was like I could hear all my internal organs turning over inside me. I scanned what I’d written. Girlfriend? I hadn’t said “girlfriend.” And then I wondered if a part of me wanted them to think that.
    “Well, that’s a question for a different time, perhaps,” Mr. Scarborough said, clearing his throat. “But I think you make a valid point. Are we getting the full story? What’s missing here? Where is Rafe’s focus, emotionally?”
    No one had an answer for that one. Everyone just sort of stared, brain-dead-like, and I felt this sinking sensation in my chest and I wasn’t sure why.
    I thought about when I was training for Speaking Out, the gay advocacy group that Mom talked me into joining last year, which got me speaking engagements at high schools across the state. They taught us this game that we took to the schools. You ask everyone to write down three major facts about themselves. Then you put the kids in groups and ask them to introduce themselves without mentioningany of the three things. The exercise is supposed to help kids understand how hard it is for gay people when they are told, like, “It’s okay if you’re gay, just don’t talk about it.”
    That exercise sometimes worked, sometimes didn’t, depending on the crowd. But sitting in Mr. Scarborough’s writing seminar, it occurred to me that this was that lesson in action.
    The bell rang, and we started packing up.
    Mr. Scarborough said, “Before you go, I wanted to announce that I’m the advisor for the school literary magazine, and we’re looking for new staff people, so let me know if you’re interested. As for this class, you’ll all keep journals. I’ll read them. I will not share them with other students, and I will not ask you to read from them. So you may feel free to write whatever you feel is important. But it must be about you. Your life. Tell me who you are.”
    Great , I thought. How the hell was I going to do that?

    At our first soccer practice, Mr. Donnelly lined us up against a wall in the gymnasium. He was our dorm adviser at East and a history teacher. Maybe thirty or thirty-five, he appeared to be going for older; he wore big wire-rimmed glasses that seemed like they were meant to look bookish. His black hair was parted on the side and combed over the top of his head.
    “The Romans dominated the world for hundreds of years. Does anyone care to guess why?” he asked as we sat in front of him on the gymnasium floor.
    I almost raised my hand. Legions, right? Military strategy and organization? I didn’t remember a ton from tenth-grade history, but I knew a few things still.
    “Leg strength,” he said. “No one had thighs like the Romans.”
    That was not what I’d expected to hear. It got me interested, at least.
    “The proof was in the famous marathons, discovered by the Romans, as you might recall. Did you know that the first Roman army ran all the way from Damascus to Constantinople? The French, and the Germans, and the … Danish … couldn’t keep up. Those Romans had stamina. Do you know what that means? Do you?”
    I looked around. Were there hidden cameras somewhere? Were we being punked? Even I knew the Greeks had invented the marathon. I looked over at Steve, but his expression was totally blank. I caught Ben’s eye, and he looked away, but not before