The Ongoing Reformation of Micah Johnson by Sean Kennedy Page B

awaiting him.
    The huge crowd of seventeen-year-old boys and their families milling around the bus and saying their good-byes made him realise that if he had been nervous the past couple of weeks about the camp, it was absolutely nothing compared to what he was feeling now.
    There seemed to be no other loners like him. Even the kids who weren’t being chaperoned by their parents until the second they stepped on the bus seemed to have found each other like long-lost friends and were now kicking and hand-balling a number of footballs, narrowly avoiding hitting anybody else who happened to be rushing between the buses and their families.
    It just accentuated Micah’s loneliness and upped his fear factor.
    “Hey, isn’t that Declan?” Alex asked.
    There was nothing he wanted more than to run over to Dec and be assured that Micah would be okay, and it was in no way harder than anything else he had ever done, by someone who had been through this before. But Dec was currently surrounded by a large group of boys basking in the shadow of an AFL legend. What was so different? Boys very much like these wouldn’t give Micah the time of day because he was queer, yet Dec was still being lauded over.
    But he guessed that was the major difference. Dec was a famous ex-AFL player. Celebrity trumped everything else.
    Plus they probably weren’t as scared of Dec’s gayness—after all, he was an adult—and famous, fame wiped a whole lot of reservations. Of course, that hadn’t stopped adults of any sexual orientation from trying to get it on with a teenager before, but they were less suspicious of him.
    But a gay kid their own age? Heavens, they’d be convinced Micah wanted to shag all of them and twice on Tuesday.
    Being straight, they were clueless about how careful gay people were among straight people. Especially straight people in groups. The change room was not a fantasy come to life; it was a place for a gay person to be even more reserved and try not to draw attention to themselves lest anything they do be misconstrued as a seduction. Straight men acted more homoerotically with each other than a gay man ever did with a straight man in such a setting.
    Even Micah’s dalliance with the other boy in the change room so long ago had been because he was another gay kid—the move would never have been made with a het.
    He’d learned pretty early on how to protect himself the best way he could. Straight guys never knew that fear—and Micah knew girls would have told them a few million things about that feeling and in far greater detail.
    “Micah!” Declan called out, and the boys around him turned instantly, like the Midwich cuckoos sensing an outsider. They parted to let him through, leaving enough space so there was no accidental touching.
    “Oh, hey.”
    Declan grinned at him, and Micah knew he was already sizing him up, looking for any display of nerves.
    Or the possibility of bolting and Dec having to arrange another road trip to retrieve him.
    “You ready for this?” By now the other boys, sensing they weren’t a part of this inner circle—and to try to get an edge on everybody else, Micah suspected; he would have to see if he could exploit his friendship with Declan and take advantage of their weakness for celebrity—drifted away.
    “As ready as I can be,” Micah said.
    “That’s the spirit!”
    Micah was surprised by Simon appearing behind Dec’s shoulder. “Those buses are death traps, and I bet you metal bands wouldn’t even take them on tour. I’m pretty sure if you scraped the paint off the side of them, they would probably be advertising Gloria Estefan’s 1990 tour.”
    Micah had no idea what he was talking about—just another of Simon’s obscure pop culture references. Dec seemed to get it, anyway, judging by the creasing of his eyes.
    “The positivity is just flowing off you two,” Dec said.
    “Don’t worry, Micah,” Simon said. “Just don’t sit at the front with the driver. That’ll be