My Summers With Benny

  For Alex, finding a guy like Benny living next door is a great surprise, but their future together holds more than Alex ever dreamed possible.

  Fourteen-year-old Alex Moran spends every summer with his father and this year his dad has moved next door to Benny Harper and his aunt. When he meets Benny, he finds an outgoing boy his own age that shares his love of reptiles. Benny doesn’t have any other friends though because he’s been HIV positive from birth and no one understands. They’re even afraid of him, which is something Alex doesn’t understand at all.

  They spend nearly every day together during that first summer and each summer after that they come back together. Their lives change as they grow up, but their friendship only gets stronger until it gives way to love and Alex realizes that his dad moving next door to Benny was the best thing to ever happen to him.

  Nothing is as good as being in love with his best friend, and over the years Alex realizes just how much Benny means to him. He doesn’t know how long he’ll ever have with Benny, but whatever time he does have he’s determined to make the most of it.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  My Summers With Benny

  Copyright © 2016 Caitlin Ricci

  ISBN: 978-1-4874-0604-2

  Cover art by Latrisha Waters

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.

  Published by eXtasy Books Inc or

  Devine Destinies, an imprint of eXtasy Books Inc

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  www.eXtasybooks.com or www.devinedestinies.com

  My Summers With Benny

  By

  Caitlin Ricci

  Chapter One

  Five Summers Ago

  When I was fourteen, my dad moved from Denver to Franktown. It was half an hour south of where his house had been if he took the highway. If he took the street roads, like he preferred to, sometimes it took an hour if we got stuck in traffic. I loved my dad, but I really didn’t like how he went the long way whenever he picked me up from my mom’s townhouse in downtown Denver. Ever since I was three and they split up, I’d been spending the weekends with my dad in Aurora and during the week, I’d be with my mom. During the summers, I’d be with my dad which was great because I could still see the friends I’d made during the summers I’d spent in Aurora.

  But with my dad in Franktown, I suddenly didn’t have any friends nearby. I’d kept the same schools with my weekday friends since I’d started first grade and only two of the ten guys I hung out with on the weekends and during the summer had moved away when their parents had been transferred.

  Now though it was me who was leaving everyone and spending the summer in a big yellow house on the south end of Franktown. I’d seen more horse trailers than cop cars and there wasn’t even a mall that I’d been able to see. Just a lot of houses with barns in their backyards like I’d stepped into some kind of rural horse community.

  My dad didn’t have horse property, but he did have a really big backyard, especially compared to my mom’s which was barely big enough for her little herb garden. Dad’s house had yellow vinyl siding and white shutters. There were pink flowers in long patches of dirt along the front of his house and down either side of the curving sidewalk. What I noticed though, more than anything else, was that in the house next to my dad’s on the right, in one of the upstairs rooms, a boy was looking down at me as I got out of my dad’s car.

  “Who’s that?” I asked my dad as I grabbed my blue suitcase out of his backseat. I already had my backpack over my shoulder.

  He looked up at the house, too, and put his hand over his eyes to block out the sun. Once he saw the boy, he smiled and gave him a wave before turning his attention back to me. “That’s Benny Harper. Maybe you should try to make friends with him over the summer. I don’t think he gets out much. But then again I’ve only been in the house a month now.”

  A guy my age that didn’t have friends? That was weird. I was still watching Benny as I asked my dad, “Is there something wrong with him?”

  My dad slung his arm around my shoulders and pulled me away from looking up at Benny and back toward my dad’s house. “Come on. Don’t be rude. Let me show you around the house. There’s two bedrooms left so I want you to pick the one you like most.” I let my dad pull me away as he started to show me around his new house.

  After I’d claimed my room and Dad and I had eaten pizza for dinner, I was told to go next door and make friends with Benny. It was weird having my dad tell me to go meet someone since I’d always been able to find friends on my own. But maybe there really was something wrong with Benny that made it hard for him to make friends. As I went over and knocked on his front door, I was picturing a guy my age that was horribly disfigured. The image I had in my mind of him having a third arm or something like that had me nervous.

  I shouldn’t have been though, because Benny looked completely normal when he opened the door. He was maybe four inches shorter than me, and his hair was at least a few shades lighter than mine, but he had brown hair, too. He gave me a shy smile as he looked up at me. “Hi.”

  “Hey. I’m Alex Moran. My dad lives next door so I’ll be around this summer and uh...” I’d run out of things to say. And he was just staring at me now.

  “I’m Benny. Want to see my ball python?”

  I grinned at him. “Hell yeah. You’re really allowed to have a snake?”

  Benny nodded and I followed him into the house and upstairs to his room. Which was painted black. On all the walls.

  “Uh...” I turned in a slow circle. “Do you have something against color?”

  Benny laughed and reached over to turn off the single overhead light. It was daylight outside, since it wasn’t even seven o’clock yet, but even with light coming in through his two bedroom windows, I could see why he had black walls. Because once his lights were out, his room became filled with stars.

  “Glow in the dark paint,” I said, completely impressed. And he seemed to have painted every wall and the ceiling. I closed the door to check my suspicions and yeah, there were dots on the back of his bedroom door, too. And it was painted black, too.

  Benny turned the lights back on. “I really like astronomy.”

  “Clearly.” He smiled at me and I smiled back at him. And some of his blush went away.

  He walked over to a big glass cage right next to his desk and opened up the screen. I hadn’t seen a snake hiding in there, but once he moved the big rock hide, I saw that his snake had buried herself in the dirt she was laying in.

  “Her name’s Cassi, it’s short for Cassiopeia who was this really beautiful Greek queen. And it’s a constellation.” He put his hand around her body and pulled her up and away from the glass cage. She wrapped herself around his arm and I leaned closer to him in order to see her better.

  I knew, because I’d wanted a ball python for so long, that
she had the normal coloring with the dark browns and yellows with a creamy belly. Being normal though, instead of something like an albino, didn’t make her any less beautiful to me. “How old is she?”

  “Sixteen months. I love her, but she has to stay here when I go back to Florida after the summer break is over. It sucks.”

  I stepped back, giving him some room as he unwound her from his arm and laid her gently on his bed. Which had a galaxy on it, I thought. Maybe. I wasn’t very good with astronomy. I knew the planets in order, but that was about it.

  “I go back to live with my mom in August,” I said as I watched Cassi start to unwind herself from the ball she’d coiled into when Benny had let her go and begin to stretch out across his comforter.

  He plopped down next to her. “Sit down, too.” I did and he smiled at me. For a little bit we both petted his snake as she lay there lazily between us as if she had no intention of trying to get away. She was so slow in her movements that I didn’t think she’d be able to get very far even if she did try to get off his bed though. “I live with my mom during the school year, too, though my aunt is trying to get custody of me. She’s at work right now. She’s a nurse aid at an Alzheimer’s nursing home and she won’t be back until after eleven. They call it second shift—she calls it a pain in her butt. She says that at least it’s not the night shift though.”

  I looked around his room for something to talk about and found the obvious answer staring right back at me. “Are you going to try to be an astronaut?”

  He shook his head, instantly surprising me because I thought that’d been so clear from how much he seemed to like stars and stuff. His pet snake was named after a constellation for crying out loud. “No. I wish though. But I’ve got HIV and I’m pretty sure NASA doesn’t let guys like me into their programs.”

  I’d heard of HIV before, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember much about it now. I didn’t want to say anything stupid so I just said, “That sucks.”

  “Yeah, it does.” He played with his hair a bit. Mine, I liked kept to short spikes so that it stayed out of my face, but his was so long that it fell in his eyes and against his cheeks. It was even a little curly at the ends. “I was born with it,” he tacked on. “In case you were wondering how I got it.”

  I hadn’t been, but mostly because I couldn’t remember anything about HIV. There was something about sex in the health class I took, but really that wasn’t a big deal to me so I hadn’t paid attention.

  “Cool.” I cringed. “Not cool. Sorry. It’s definitely not cool.”

  He laughed and I was just grateful he wasn’t kicking me out of his house. “No worries. No one really knows what to say when I tell them I have it. But I make sure to tell everyone right away anyway. Because it’s important. You know? Like, I’d want to know if I was them, so I tell them. My aunt says I should be more selective about who I tell, but I figure I’d want people to know and then they can decide if they want to be my friend or not. And if they did, but then they found out months later, I think they’d feel betrayed. Or maybe like I’d lied to them.”

  “I’m taking it that you don’t have many friends. Huh?” I wasn’t saying it to be mean, but whatever HIV was, he made it sound like it was a big deal. And he was right, if it was something major, then a friend should be told.

  Benny shrugged but he was looking at me like he was sad. “Not really.”

  I smiled at him. “Well, you got me until the end of the summer.”

  He laughed. “Cool.”

  About an hour later Dad texted me to come home and I said goodnight to Benny. Once I was back at my dad’s house, I grabbed my laptop and headed to the dining room table. Since it was almost nine, Mom would have insisted that I start getting ready for bed. But it was summer and Dad was still watching TV.

  He came in to get a drink while I was researching HIV. “Why are you looking up STDs?” he asked me as he leaned over my shoulder. “Anything I should know about?”

  I shrugged. Did he need to know that Benny had HIV? Maybe, maybe not. But he could probably help me clear a few things up that weren’t really making sense to me. “Benny has HIV and I’m trying to figure out what that is and what it means.”

  Dad laughed lightly and sat down next to me. He had a beer for himself and a glass of milk for me, which I drank half down before looking back at my laptop screen. “Well that’s a relief. I thought for a second there you were having sex and I was going to have to call your mom and you know how much she would have freaked out since you aren’t allowed to date for another year.”

  I laughed, too. I didn’t want to date and I definitely wasn’t thinking about sex. There was no one at my school that even brought up those kinds of feelings that he and I had talked about last summer. “Do you know anything about it? All I’m finding is that AIDS comes from HIV, and that’s a really bad thing, but not everyone that has HIV has AIDS and there’s medication he can take to make him healthier, but there’s no cure. Right?”

  Dad pulled my laptop away from me and I frowned at him as he closed it. “Here’s what I know about it. Benny is probably on medication, I’m guessing. And you can get HIV from him, but not through hugging or shaking hands or anything you’d normally do. You can share food with him and you can drink out of the same glass as him. But if he’s got a cut on his hand or something and you have a cut on your hand, then you have to be careful. And you can’t have sex with him without protection.”

  My cheeks were instantly red. “Dad!”

  “Well... you can’t.” Thankfully he looked just as uncomfortable as I felt.

  I was quick to get away from the sex talk. “So I can be friends with him?”

  Dad shrugged and took a sip of his beer. “Sure. I don’t see why not. Just be careful. And if you boys want to start exploring—”

  I held up my hands in defeat. “Dad! No! Enough!” I got up from the table and finished my milk in a hurry.

  “All the books said it was normal when you hit puberty! When I was your age I—”

  “Not listening!” I covered my hands over my ears and started to hum as loudly as I could. Talking to my dad about sex stuff was bad enough, but now he wanted to tell me about what he did when he was my age? No way in hell did I want to hear about that.

  He came over and took my hands off my ears. “Okay. You win. Just come talk to me when you hit that point with whoever eventually, okay? Guy or girl, I’m here for you. Deal?”

  “Sure. I know.” I wasn’t totally on board with the whole dating anyone thing yet. Most days I didn’t even really like people. “Can I get a ball python? Benny has one and she’s really sweet.”

  He groaned and picked up his beer from the dining room table. “Not right now. Come watch a movie with me.”

  “That’s not a no.” I was smiling now.

  He laughed. “It’s not a yes either, Alex.” He was quiet for a few moments while I followed him into the living room and we got comfortable on the couch together. “Do you think you might be bi still? I know you were questioning it last year. It’s okay if you are, or if you’ve realized you’re gay or straight. Whatever you decide you are, I want you to know that I’m happy for you.”

  I nodded. “I know, Dad.” Coming out to Mom had been so much easier because of how great Dad had been about it last summer. “But what if I don’t like anybody and I don’t have those feelings everyone else seems to have and what if I think dating is stupid because of how it makes the guys I know act?”

  He ruffled my spikes. “Then I’d say you’re the best kid in the world.”

  “Mom says it might mean that I’ve got antisocial tendencies. She gave me a test, which she said was inconclusive.”

  He rolled his eyes and I could see that he was trying hard not to say something mean about Mom, which I was really glad about. They got along, mostly. But sometimes they didn’t and when they didn’t, it was really bad. I got sent out of the house sometimes when they were on the phon
e with each other and things were really bad. “Your mom’s a psychiatrist. It’s her job to analyze everyone. Try not to read too much into it. Okay?”

  I smiled over at him and put my feet up on the coffee table, just like he had. “Sure. Thanks, Dad.”

  “Yep. You going to see Benny again tomorrow?”

  I hadn’t really thought about it. “Can I?”

  “I think that would be nice. He probably doesn’t have many friends since he’s sick.”

  It made me happy that Dad was thinking the same way I had. I wanted to be his friend, but not because he didn’t have any. I just liked him.

  By the end of summer, I’d spent a few hours every day with Benny. Dad still had to work during the week and his aunt worked all the time and grabbed extra shifts when she could, too, so a lot of the summer it was just us. We hung out. We got fast food. We even saw a few movies and snuck Cassi in with us. It was great.

  But then August came and I had to say goodbye to him. I really didn’t want to do that. Back when Dad had lived in Aurora, I hadn’t really had a problem saying bye to the friends I had there. But that was probably because with them, I could see them when Dad had me on the weekends during the school year. I wasn’t going to get that with Benny. So when August first came and Mom was there to pick me up from Dad’s house, I said bye to Benny on his front lawn and knew I wouldn’t see him again until next summer which really sucked.

  “See you,” I said.

  He smiled at me and hugged me tight. I hadn’t been prepared for a hug and he knocked me back a foot before I recovered. I wasn’t really a hugger, but it didn’t bother me that he was. I just stood there hugging him for a bit. “I’m gonna miss you,” he said.

  “Me, too. Next summer?” We pulled back away from each other and he offered me his fist, which I bumped.