He’s played it straight (pun intended) for all of that time, hiding his sexuality from everyone – including himself – hooking up with girls (provided he’s drunk, but not too drunk to be able to get it up), and allowing his fear of discovery to rule his life. When Rikker’s ultra conservative, Bible-thumping parents send him away to live with his grandmother in Vermont, it turns out to have been the best thing they could have done for him (although it wasn’t their intention!), as there, Rikker finds love and acceptance from his grandmother and his new friends, while Graham is heartbroken and weighed down by guilt over the fact that he abandoned his best friend and lover to violence because of his own cowardice and selfishness.įive years later, Graham is in his sophomore year at Harkness College and is one of the stars of the college hockey team. After the attack, Graham doesn’t call or visit Rikker in the hospital and cuts all contact with his friend, terrified people will find out he (Graham) is queer.
They’re young, they’re happy, they’re more than half-way in love… but an ill-timed kiss sees them become the victims of a violent attack, one in which Rikker is badly injured while Graham escapes unscathed – physically at least – because he runs off, leaving Rikker to fend for himself.
They spent a lot of their teenage years playing video games in Michael’s basement room until one day, a tussle turns into a kiss, turns into a make-out session – and from then on, their basement activities are split between video games and games of a different kind. Rikker and Graham have known each other since they were kids and were best buddies all through school.
But unlike Wes and Jamie in HIM, Rikker and Graham had already acknowledged their mutual attraction and begun to explore the physical side of it before things crashed and burned between them, and their friendship ended for very different reasons, which ultimately forced one of them so far back into the closet, it’s a wonder he didn’t end up in Narnia. The premise of Sarina Bowen’s The Understatement of the Year bears more than a passing resemblance to HIM – one of her collaborations with Elle Kennedy – because it’s centred around ice-hockey, and the two leads – Michael Graham and John Rikker (voiced here by Christian Fox and Teddy Hamilton respectively) – are childhood friends whose friendship ends abruptly, for reasons one of them doesn’t understand. Vintage Review – audiobook released 2016, review from 2019 Narrated by Teddy Hamilton and Christian Fox
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