About Changing Jamie

Written by Dakota Chase
Print Information:
184 pages / 48000 words / 5x8 trade paperback
ISBN: 978-1-60370-351-2, 1-60370-351-9
eBook Information:
127 pages / 48000 words
Available file types - html, lit, pdf, prc
ISBN: 978-1-60370-476-2, 1-60370-476-0

Jamie’s pretty much your average gay teenager. He’s not out with his folks, he’s got a crush on a fellow high school athlete, and his life isn’t perfect. It’s a good thing he has his friend, Billy, to take his mind off things, and to show him that all things are possible.

Billy seems to be all Jamie isn’t. Billy’s openly gay, he has enough money to follow fashion trends, and he’s got dates all the time. Lots of them. With older men. When Billy starts acting weird and hiding things from him, Jamie’s whole life seems to tilt off its axis.

His stepfather, who has never been the greatest role model, escalates his behavior until Jamie dreads going home. His English teacher assigns him tutoring sessions with the object of his crush, the gorgeous track star Dylan. Jamie’s not even sure he can talk to Dylan, let alone tutor him, but it’s impossible to talk to Billy about it. Billy’s too wrapped up in a very dangerous game they call bug chasing: trying to catch HIV.

Learning about Billy’s risk-taking nearly shatters their friendship, and forces Jamie to look at the world in a whole new way. Can Jamie try to keep Billy safe and still stay on top of homework, a new boyfriend, and keeping his step-father in line?

Sample

The world changed the year after I turned seventeen, but no one noticed except me.

I admit that 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 blond 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 that 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 that I wouldn’t sleep straight though it. My mom used to say that 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 so than usual.

Except that I had the weirdest feeling that morning that 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 that serial killers had broken in; no maniac had scrawled my name 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 that we’d be having beef sludge for dinner. I never blamed Mom for not being Susie Homemaker. She was a server down at the Curbside Diner; had been for as long as I could remember, and I knew that she worked her ass off serving burgers and whatever else passed for food in that grease pit. Beef sludge was the 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 photographs of him framed 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 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 claimed the television as his own personal property. I’m almost surprised he didn’t piss 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 for 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 that 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 can possible throw at me. It would really piss him off to know that I am queer. I almost want to tell him just to see if I can get that vein in the middle of his forehead to explode.