[Read] Hot Desk Extract: Freddy Weir - Why We Run

As part of The Wheeler Centre’s Hot Desk Fellowship program, Freddy Weir worked on a young adult novel, Why We Run. It tells the story of Ryan Flores: a 16-year-old trans boy with two mums and a great academic record. With those credentials, fitting in at a new school seems impossible. But everything changes when he receives the unwavering acceptance of Oliver Sinclair – an enigmatic, academically apathetic cross-country star.

Eventually, Ryan realises two frightening things:

He’s in love with Oliver (obviously)

Oliver is a serious danger to himself.

Told over the span of a decade, this book is a queer romance that – for once – ends in triumph, not tragedy. This excerpt falls a few months into Oliver and Ryan’s friendship, when they’re starting to understand each other. As friends. Just as friends, right?

 

^{Image: Misc by Madeline Spanier}

At this point, Oliver and I had almost developed a short-hand language for our music taste – a specific rating system and nearly-democratic process for deciding which album to listen to in our after-school sessions. At first, Oliver got to pick new music, and I got to pick older ones I wanted him to listen to. Every two weeks, we’d swap roles to accommodate the volume of albums we wanted to share. We ended up meeting twice a week instead of just after Chemistry. It was, without a doubt, my favourite thing in the universe. 

From these sessions, I had a collection of Oliver Sinclair original drawings – most of them of album covers, innuendos in songs, even a couple of his mock-up drawings for art assessments. I never threw a single one away. In return, I gave him homework answers and worksheets – he’d draw while I copied out my notes by hand. We both knew I could have photocopied them or take a photo of them, but then we wouldn’t have an excuse to sit together like that.

I think, in Oliver, I found someone who so effortlessly countered my anxieties: if I felt like I wasn’t smart enough, fast enough, cool enough, man enough, one look from Oliver could change my mind. The way Oliver saw me started to change how I saw myself.

I trusted so much of him. I wanted to tell him everything and, at the same time, I knew I never would.

“What was it like at your old school?” Oliver asked as we sat by the lockers, sometime near mid-term. “You seem to think we’re all weird here.”

I was taken off guard. “I mean, it was fine,” I told him. “I’m glad I’m here instead.”

He tilted his head to the side, like he was trying to make sense of it – like he was trying to find the question he really wanted to ask.
            “It must have been hard to leave, though, right?” he said. “Like, the devil you know, the devil you don’t?”

I shrugged, looking up from my notes. “Not really. I mean, I felt like I was getting to be someone new, somewhere new.”

He nodded. “I guess that makes sense.”

There was a pause before he spoke again.
            “My parents keep threatening to send me to a new school,” he told me, “If my grades don’t get better. A boarding school.”
            “Like, right now?”

He nodded. “They’re convinced I’m doing something dreadful with my life – I don’t even know what they think. When I just mostly spend my time doing this.”

“And running so fast you make the rest of us look bad,” I said.

“I promise you don’t look bad at all.”

He smiled at me and I felt his gaze like a sunburn. There wasn’t a single response I could have given him that didn’t betray how I felt completely. At that point – and at all points after that, I could barely understand how someone wouldn’t have been impressed by him. Even if those people were his parents. All emotions aside, Oliver’s infractions against the school seemed pretty minor to me. At my old school, kids were smoking in the toilets, breaking into classrooms and stealing school property, keying teachers ‘cars. Oliver did none of that, to my knowledge. Sure, he skipped classes more than any other student, and he seemed to concentrate in an absolute minority of lessons. But he wasn’t doing anything that bad. Nothing that couldn’t be explained by regular teenage apathy. And it felt wrong to call him apathetic when there were things he seemed to care so deeply about.

Oliver had gone back to his drawing and he really seemed to be concentrating. After a minute or two, he stopped hiding the page with his arm. He paused the music we were listening to.

“Who’s this?” he said, pointing to the sketch, which he was doing this time on an actual page of his Chemistry textbook. Horrifying, I know. What he’d drawn was equally horrifying. An uncanny rendition of my own face stared back at me from the page. Everything from my unkempt eyebrows and the cluster of freckles below my left eye, to the slightly-too-soft curve of my cheeks – the thing I always thought would get in the way of me passing as a ‘real man’ in the eyes of others.

I hated how much I liked that drawing. It was one of those rare moments when I could look at myself with real fondness.

He smiled, and I realised he seemed a little nervous. I tried not to look too shocked.

“Can you tell who it is, or did I mess it up?” he said, looking down at the drawing as if he was about to scribble it out.

“No!” I said, “Are you kidding? Oliver, it’s amazing.”

“You like it?”

“I really do!”

He beamed at me.

“I like drawing your face,” he said, quietly, “You have a nice face to draw.”

I tried not to look embarrassed.

“What does that mean?”

He shrugged. “The proportions are pretty unique, for one. Your eyes are like about a third bigger than normal, I swear. Plus, details, I guess. I don’t know.”

Now he looked properly embarrassed. I scrambled for ways to break the unnameable tension.

“I can’t believe you’re doing that to your textbook,” I told him, “Honestly, you won’t be able to sell it.”
            “There’s some good art in here,” he told me, “It’s already priceless.”

“Can I look?” I asked, holding out my hands for the book.

He shook his head. “No. Absolutely not.”

“What, are you drawing nudes?” I joked.

He shrugged. “What’s wrong with that?”

“Girls are going to be offended if they sit next to you in class and see you drawing naked ladies or something.”

“But I don’t sit next to girls in class. I sit next to you.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Besides,” he said, his voice low, “I’m not drawing that.”

“So what are you drawing?” I asked.

He gave me a sly smile.

“I just showed you.”

He carefully pulled out the page and handed it to me.

“Well,” he said, “This one’s yours now.”

He’d written his name at the bottom. O.Sinclair.

 When I got home, I hid the drawing in my desk drawer under a pile of worksheets and exercise books. I wasn’t quite sure why I felt like I needed to hide it.

Every now and then, when my bedroom door was firmly closed, I’d get it out and just stare.