Changing Jamie Read online

  Changing Jamie

  By Dakota Chase

  Jamie doesn’t know how he’d face life without his best friend, Billy, even though they don’t seem to have much in common. Billy is out and proud while Jamie is still in the closet. Billy’s family has plenty of money to keep him outfitted in the latest styles, while Jamie has a jerk of a stepfather and a miserable home life. Billy goes on glamorous dates with sexy, older guys, while Jamie is lonely and secretly pining for one of his high school’s star athletes.

  Just as he expected, Jamie is lost when Billy starts keeping secrets from him. Jamie’s reached his limit at home, where his stepfather’s abuse is getting worse. At school he’s roped into tutoring his crush, Dylan, in English, but Jamie has no idea how to talk to the hot track runner. Just when he most needs Billy to lean on, Jamie discovers Billy is bug chasing—trying to catch HIV. The knowledge not only destroys their friendship, but forces Jamie to reassess his entire life. It’s up to him to protect Billy, stay on top of things at school, deal with his first relationship with another boy, and put a stop to his stepdad’s mistreatment for good.

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Epilogue

  A Note from the Author

  More from Dakota Chase

  Readers love Mad About the Hatter by Dakota Chase

  About the Author

  By Dakota Chase

  Visit Harmony Ink Press

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  THE WORLD changed the year after I turned seventeen, but no one noticed except me.

  I admit it was subtle. Everything looked the same. The sky was still blue, the grass green, and all that crap. Telephone poles studded the streets, and pigeons dotted the rooftops like fat gray-and-white pimples. Trucks bottomed out on the dip between Harper and Vine as they always did, tailgates clanking and mufflers scraping the road. Postal workers delivered mail, phones rang, early morning TV still sucked.

  My name was still Jamie Waters; I still lived in my mom’s house on Midland Avenue. My eyes were still blue, and my hair was that funky color that couldn’t quite decide if it wanted to be blonde or brown. I was a text-messaging demon with the fastest fingers in town, and I wasn’t just a Guitar Hero, I was a Guitar God, rocking out whenever I got the chance.

  Things had changed, though, and after I figured out exactly what those changes were, I knew my life would never be the same again.

  The morning I first noticed that something was out of whack started out like any other—with my alarm clock dancing on my nightstand at the butt crack of dawn, doing that crazy vibrating thing it does when I’ve got the volume maxed out. I always had it set that way so I wouldn’t sleep straight through it. My mom used to say I slept like the dead, even as a baby. Kind of a creepy thing to say to a little kid—used to give me nightmares.

  Anyway, the alarm went off, and I woke up—eventually, after beating the crap out the snooze button a half-dozen times—showered, shaved, dressed, and slapped a Pop-Tart into the toaster. My first class was at 8:20, which left me exactly twenty-three minutes to ride the seven blocks to school. That was plenty of time, more than usual.

  Except I had the weirdest feeling that morning. Something just wasn’t right. Not wrong, exactly. Not like when you realize you’ve forgotten your wallet and do that funky self-frisk thing, smacking your butt and your hips with your hands like you’re hoping it’s hiding in there somewhere. You know the feeling. It’s the one when your chest gets tight and your heart starts to thump in your throat, and you say things under your breath that would make Grandma eat her knitting needles because how in hell are you going to pay the waitress for those two double cheeseburgers you just ate if you don’t have your wallet?

  Not that kind of wrong.

  Just… not right.

  I couldn’t put my finger on anything specific, though, couldn’t figure out what was off. I felt okay. I didn’t have a fever, a sore throat, or the sniffles, and I hadn’t grown any extra body parts during the night. The house looked fine—no sign a serial killer had broken in, no names scrawled in blood on the wall over the sofa.

  My mom was in the kitchen, already dressed for work, throwing carrots, potatoes, and beef cubes into the Crock Pot. It was Thursday, which meant we’d be having beef sludge for dinner. I never blamed Mom for not being Susie Homemaker. She was a server down at the Good Eats Dine-In—had been for as long as I could remember—and I knew she worked her ass off serving burgers and whatever else passed for food in that grease pit. Beef sludge was one of the few meals she could manage on a workday.

  I did blame her for Doug, though. Still do.

  My dad died when I was three. I don’t remember much about him, except he was a big man and a cop. I have two framed photographs of him on my dresser. He’s in his uniform in both of them—he’s holding me in his arms in one, and he’s straddling his police motorcycle in the other. He’d died the winter after Mom had snapped that last photo. He’d skidded on a patch of ice and had slid underneath the wheels of a semi. End of story.

  Doug Stevens is my mom’s second husband. She met him at the diner two years ago and married him six months later. He’s a construction worker, or so he says. Personally, I’ve never seen him build anything more complex than a sandwich. Doug spends all of his time bitching about being unemployed and watching repeats of Orange County Chopper or Build It Bigger. If the show has a hammer, an engine, or a bulldozer in it, he’ll watch it. From the moment he moved into the house, he had claimed the television as his own personal property. I’m almost surprised he hadn’t pissed on it to mark his territory.

  “Darlene!” Doug yelled from his armchair in the living room. He was wearing his standard attire: a white wifebeater, a pair of blue boxers, and black socks. “Who’s been screwing with the DVR? I didn’t record this crap! That fag boy’s been touching my shit again!”

  That fag boy would be me.

  Yeah, I’m gay, but I’m not out—not to my mom and Doug, or to anyone else, for that matter, except my best friend, Billy. I’m not looking forward to having that particular conversation with my mom, and I’m definitely not going to do it while Doug is sitting in the living room screaming about fag boys and the latest episode of Dancing with the Stars that I’d recorded. I think he calls me “fag boy” not as a reference to my sexuality, but because he hates me, and in his tiny, bigoted mind, it’s the worst insult he could possible throw at me. It would really piss him off to know I am queer. I almost want to tell him just to see if I could get that vein in the middle of his forehead to explode.

  The fact of the matter is that I could have been a football jock, spent all of my free time up to my elbows in car parts, and papered my bedroom with the latest Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition, and Doug would still think I was scum because I wasn’t his biological son. I had realized early on that nothing I could do or say would be good enough for him. Knowing that didn’t stop me from trying when I was younger, or from hating his fat guts when I failed.

  Billy says it’s Doug’s problem, not mine, and he’s probably right. He knows all about parents’ hang-ups, especially with g
ay kids. His own parents had tried to bury him in ritzy boarding schools since he came out to them three years ago. Did Billy get upset about it? No. He came home and rubbed their noses in his latest expulsion paperwork like they were a pair of naughty puppies, and went right on being himself.

  Sometimes Billy is my hero.

  “Don’t forget your lunch, Jamie. I’m working a double today, so I won’t be home until midnight. The Crock Pot will be done by five,” my mother said, ignoring Doug. She has the ability to tune him out the way most people tune out elevator music or the sound of traffic. Unfortunately, that also means she never says a word to him when he gets on my case or calls me names. Maybe she just doesn’t want to get between us or make things worse. More likely, she doesn’t want his temper turned back on her.

  That’s the reason I still blame her for him being a part of our lives. She married him, not me, but I’m the one who has to put up with his crap.

  “Mom, I’ve got track after school today. I won’t be home until six, maybe seven,” I said, just to remind her I had a life of my own. I didn’t, not really, but she didn’t need to know that. Going out for track was one of the things I’d done to try to get Doug’s approval. It hadn’t worked, but surprisingly I found I was good at running and liked it. Besides, Dylan Anderson was on the track team, and I’d had a crush on him since our first year in junior high, back when I didn’t even know it was a crush—or wouldn’t admit it. Either way works.

  The toaster spat up my Pop-Tart, and I snatched it up, tossing it from hand to hand until it cooled enough to stuff into my mouth. I loved those pockets of sugar. Instant rush.

  I grabbed the paper sack from the fridge, the one I knew without looking would contain two meatloaf sandwiches made from last night’s leftovers, and shoved it into my backpack. I took a few quick gulps of milk from the container while I was in there, hidden by the fridge door, before closing it. After getting the obligatory peck on the cheek from Mom, I trotted out the kitchen door.

  Outside, everything was where it was supposed to be. My bike was still leaning against the side of the house where I’d left it the night before. There were a few cars on the street despite the early hour—people driving to work, construction workers on the way to the job. A patrol car cruised by, and a cable repair truck.

  No matter how normal everything looked, something still didn’t feel right.

  I remember shaking the feeling off, telling myself to get a grip, that I didn’t live in the middle of some freaking splatter flick, that there weren’t pod people growing in the basement or zombies hiding in the shadows waiting to eat my brain. There were no aliens, no giant rabid hamsters in the sewers—nothing but ordinary, forgettable people living ordinary, forgettable lives.

  Nothing was wrong. Nothing was different.

  I remember thinking that maybe if I said it enough, it would be true.

  BENJAMIN JACKSON Good High School, named after one of the town’s illustrious founding fathers and affectionately called BJ Good by three generations of snickering students, was a squat, two-story, red brick building. It sprawled over a few acres of hilly ground in the center of town. The hills were pretty steep, which made them great for snowboarding in winter, but they sucked ass when spring rains turned them to mud.

  Parking at BJ Good was at a premium; the lot was tiny, and the only ones allowed to drive their own cars to school were the staff and seniors. Even so, student-parking passes cost a hundred bucks a year, so most of the seniors opted to either take the bus or chip in for one pass and carpool. A hundred dollars is steep when the only jobs in town available to teenagers paid minimum wage, hence the reason I rode a bike to school. Even if I had owned a car, which I didn’t, I would never fork over cold hard cash to the school for the privilege of parking on their precious asphalt. Not gonna happen in this lifetime. I had about a billion other uses for my meager savings.

  I slid the front wheel of my bike into the aluminum bicycle rack and clicked the lock. As I made my way toward the front doors of the school, I heard someone calling my name.

  “Hey, Jamie! Wait up!”

  I turned and spotted a head of bright red hair bobbing in the sea of students behind me. I flattened myself against the wall of the building to wait for Billy to catch up.

  William Prichard-Everest III, aka Billy, was a piece of work if ever there was one. He was openly gay, and his hair wasn’t the only thing about him that was flaming. Billy was as out as a guy could get, short of taking out a full-page ad in the school newspaper. He took great pride in wearing his sexuality on his sleeve, partly because it was just the way he was made, brutally honest and completely not giving a shit, and partly because it royally pissed off every authority figure in his life from his socialite parents to the principal.

  Today, Billy was dressed almost conservatively, in a rainbow-colored T-shirt and cargo pants. He was smiling broadly, which told me one of two things had happened—either Billy had finally managed to give his parents simultaneous brain aneurysms, or he’d gotten the date he’d been after with the hot guy who worked in the paint department at Home Depot.

  My money was on the date. He didn’t look happy enough for it to have been the aneurysms.

  “Guess who has a date tomorrow night with Robbie-the-Hunk?” Billy squealed, bouncing up and down in his bright red Converse sneakers.

  “Robbie-the-Hunk does know you’re jailbait, right?” I asked, feeling the sudden need to knock Billy down just a peg or two. I was a little jealous because he had yet another date, while I was still trying to work up the nerve to hook up with someone—anyone—for the first time.

  “For God’s sake, Jamie, he didn’t card me when he asked me to the movies,” Billy said, rolling his eyes.

  “You’re only seventeen, Billy,” I reminded him, as if it was going to make a difference. I knew I sounded like the parental units, but I couldn’t stop myself. Something told me that Robbie-the-Hunk, while pretty to look at and no doubt delightful to hold, was going to be trouble with a capital T. Billy was my friend. If he got into trouble again, this time his parents might ship him off to a boarding school somewhere in Siberia. Suddenly, I realized the feeling I’d had all day, that sense of wrongness, had to do with Billy. He was different somehow.

  I knew Billy better than anyone, and I could tell there was something off about him today. Something he wasn’t telling me. Like the time he had swiped the key to the music room and replaced all the classical CDs with death metal. Mrs. Ramsey, the teacher, almost had a stroke when she put in what she thought was Bach and instead got an earful of Cannibal Corpse.

  It had been hysterical, but he could’ve let me in on it. He’d just said he didn’t want me to get in trouble if he got caught. He wouldn’t do anything really stupid, though, would he? Nah. He was smarter than that.

  Besides, I admit it. I was jealous. Robbie-the-Hunk was six feet of sexy stuffed into a pair of tight Levi’s. That had to be it. I was just feeling snarky.

  “Seventeen and a half—I’ve only got six more months until I can Free Willy and have fun whenever I want.”

  “You have enough fun now to qualify as a three-ring circus,” I retorted. “How old is he, anyway? He looks like he’s pushing thirty.”

  “Who cares? He’s gorgeous!”

  “He’s ancient.”

  The first bell rang before we could say anything else, and like the good little drones we were, we turned and hustled to our respective homerooms. Billy and I had the same lunch period, and I made a mental note to continue the conversation in the cafeteria. Maybe this date Billy had with Robbie-the-Hunk was the reason for the unease I’d been feeling all day.

  Chapter Two

  DYLAN WAS in the school showers, steamy clouds puffing up, fogging the bathroom mirror. I could smell the strong scent of his soap and feel the heat of the water in the air. I heard the slick sounds of a wet washcloth and Dylan’s voice as he softly hummed along with the music in his head.

  Dylan Anderson was the hottest
thing on two feet, in my humble opinion. Skimming the six-foot mark, Dylan had impossibly wide shoulders, a narrow waist, legs that went on forever, and the finest butt in town. His hair was thick, black, and wavy; his eyes were blue-green and a shade darker than the turquoise stone in his class ring. He was the starter for the school’s track team, owned a blue ’92 Mustang hardtop, and when he made appearances in my daydreams, was usually naked.

  I approached the shower stall, stripping out of my T-shirt and jeans as I went. Dylan heard me and turned, blinking water out of his eyes. He wasn’t surprised to see me—he’d been hoping I’d be there—but when he opened his mouth to invite me under the spray, the voice that came out wasn’t his usual baritone.

  “Mr. Waters, perhaps you would like to explain to the class the theory of Occam’s razor? Mr. Waters?”

  My head snapped up, eyes front, as Mrs. Sero’s grating voice cut through my pleasant daydream, shredding it painfully, like a pair of dull, rusty blades through paper. She stood at the head of the classroom with her hands on her hips, looking like a withered, angry garden gnome. Mrs. Sero was not even an inch over five-feet tall, possibly ninety-five pounds soaking wet, and the oldest living creature in the universe, but she still managed to cow students twice her size and a third her age with a single, malevolent glare.

  Me included.

  A few students snickered around me, but the rest sat staring into space, twirling pencils in their fingers, tapping pens against notebooks, and generally just existing until the bell rang. Let’s face it—most of us didn’t care about Occam’s razor. We cared about the Whos, as in Who was dating Who, Who was available, Who was not, Who might be breaking up with Who in the near future, and whether that Who might be interested in another particular Who. We cared about Who made the starting lineup for the team, Who was applying for which college, whose parents gave Who a new car for their birthday, and Who just got the newest CD/DVD/video game/fill in the blank. The civic-minded among us cared about Who was doing what about the environment, Who was running for office, and Who was saving the whales or beating baby seals with big sticks.