Chapter 17
“Motherfucker!” Jem shouted at the flash of pain.
Tean peeled the shirt back a little more and made a noise that Jem had come to recognize as the nonverbal equivalent of don’t be a baby. “He didn’t break the skin.”
“He didn’t break the skin? Tean, he bit me.”
“I know. But look at the bright side: now we don’t have to worry about infection.”
“The bright side,” Jem muttered in Daniel’s direction.
The boy didn’t notice. He sat with his face pressed against his knees, refusing to look at them.
He’d fled in nothing but the shorts and tee Jem had seen him in at the park—not even shoes.
His bare feet were scraped from his run through the hospital and parking garage.
Wrapped in Tean’s jacket now, the boy gave no evidence that he felt the cold, even though he must have been freezing.
Jem picked up Daniel’s improvised weapon and held it out for Tean’s inspection. “He tried to stab me in the eye with this.”
Tean considered the ballpoint pen. “He probably stole it from a nurse.”
“Yeah, that wasn’t the part I was worried about. I was more focused on the part about sticking it in my eye.”
With a sigh, Tean nodded.
“Hey, dipshit,” Jem said.
Daniel stayed as he was, face buried in his knees.
Voice rising, Jem called, “I’m talking to you!”
Tean shot Jem, of all people, a dirty look and crouched in front of the boy. “Daniel, if you won’t talk to us, we’re going to have to call your mom.”
Daniel shook his head, but it was better than nothing.
“Then you’d better talk to us,” Tean said with a lot more patience than Jem currently felt. Maybe that was because Tean hadn’t been bitten by a rabid teenager.
Face still hidden, Daniel said, “I’ll run away again.”
“And what?” Jem said. “Get your bitch ass killed? A second time?”
Daniel’s head whipped up, and he glared at Jem.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Jem said. “I saved your life, and you bit me.”
The boy tried to hold the glare, but color crept into his cheeks. He pulled Tean’s jacket a little more closely around himself, dropped his gaze, and shivered.
“Maybe you should apologize to Jem,” Tean said. “And thank him for helping you.”
“I didn’t know that was him!” For the first time, Daniel sounded like what he was: a teenage boy in deep shit. The mixture of outrage and defensiveness was so unexpected, so…normal that Jem almost smiled.
“Maybe if you hadn’t acted rashly you would have,” Tean said. “We were coming to talk to you.”
“My mom wouldn’t have let you.”
Tean nodded, but what he said was “What about that apology?”
More color flooded the boy’s face. He stared somewhere around Jem’s sneakers and mumbled. “Sorry.”
“And?”
“Thanks.” But even Daniel must have felt this wasn’t enough, because he added, “Thank you.”
“And you knocked me down,” Jem said. “And I think I jacked up my shoulder. And I got kicked in the back when I was saving your life.”
“Jem,” Tean said.
“What? He thinks he’s such hot shit. Where’d you learn that thing with the pen?”
The question must have caught the boy off guard; the fixed, sullen resistance on his face flickered, and he said, “My dad.”
“That was dope.”
“Jem!”
“What? It was. You’re fast, too.”
Daniel gave a thin-shouldered shrug, and he sounded like he was trying not to sound pleased when he said, “You’re faster.”
“Well, yeah.” And then Jem grinned.
After a moment, a half-smile shifted the shadows on the boy’s face. It didn’t break them up. It didn’t brighten anything. But it did move the darkness around a bit, and that, more than anything so far, gave Jem hope.
“Do you want to tell us what you think you’re doing?” Tean asked.
The wariness dropped into place again, and Daniel’s gaze unfocused.
“Start with the part where you had Brennon’s phone,” Jem said.
But Daniel looked past him, through him.
“Bonehead,” Jem said, “we’re trying to help you.”
“And your dad,” Tean said quietly. And even more quietly, he said, “And Brennon.”
Daniel blinked, but not quickly enough to keep back the tears. One fell and landed on his cheek and ran slowly down. Another traced a path along his nose.
“Kid—” Jem said.
“Don’t call me that.” He didn’t exactly help himself when he snuffled and wiped at the tears with his wrist, but his voice was hard when he said, “I’m not a kid.”
Tean wanted to argue the point, Jem could tell, but he gave a tiny shake of his head to discourage the doc. “All right,” Jem said. “Fair enough. You’re making adult decisions. Stupid ones. But it’s your life. So, what? You’re running away from home?”
“I’m not going back there.” He looked like he tried not to speak, but the words broke free anyway. “They hate me.”
“They don’t—” Tean began.
Jem sliced the air with one hand, and Tean stopped. “Where are you going?”
Daniel looked away.
“What’s the big plan?” Jem asked. “You’re pretty fucking sure of yourself. Where are you going next?”
Tean’s jacket rustled as the boy clutched it.
“A shelter?” Jem said. “A friend’s house?”
“Daniel, we’re trying to help,” Tean said.
“Don’t bother,” Jem said. “He’s got no idea what he’s doing. We’ll give him back to his mom—”
“BYU is just up the hill,” Daniel said, his voice threatening to crack. “The dorms are right there. There are always people who leave stuff lying around. There’s a lost-and-found in the laundry room.”
“So, what? You get a change of clothes? Maybe finally get yourself a pair of shoes? And then what?”
Daniel shook his head.
“Convince the college kids to adopt you? Let you be their mascot?”
“Jem,” Tean said.
“Get a job? Make the big bucks at the Creamery?”
“This isn’t productive.”
Jem snapped his fingers. “I got it. You’re going to find some old dude and play boyfriends again. That was Brennon’s whole thing, right? ‘I love you, I’m going to take care of you, you mean everything to me—’”
“He did love me! You don’t know what you’re talking about!” The boy’s shouts rang out in the enclosed space, but no one came to investigate. His thin chest rose and fell rapidly. “And I don’t have to tell you anything because people like you don’t understand!”
“I bet Brennon told you that. Nobody would understand. That’s why you had to keep it a secret.”
“And he was right. Nobody understands. But he loved me. And I loved him. That’s what mattered.”
“It’s not that simple,” Tean said gently. “Daniel, you’re not old enough to make that kind of decision. That’s why we have laws to protect you. And Brennon knew you weren’t old enough.”
“I am old enough. Why is eighteen a magic number? I’m mature for my age. I know what I want. He didn’t lie to me or trick me or anything. We loved each other. That’s all that matters.”
“No, it’s not. I know that’s hard to hear, but what he did was wrong.”
“Like it was wrong for you to fuck my dad?” Daniel asked, wiping more tears away. “Like that?”
Tean didn’t move. Then his mouth quirked once, as though he might be trying to smile. He raised one hand, like pressing pause, and his fingers were trembling.
“Go take a minute,” Jem said.
Tean ducked his head in what might have passed for a nod, but he didn’t rise.
“Go on,” Jem said, squeezing Tean’s arm. “Walk it off.”
“Daniel—” Tean said, but he stopped, and he sounded confused. Finally, he said, “I’m sorry.”
He rose awkwardly, like his body could only move one side at a time, and made his way into the parking garage with unsteady steps.
“Real fucking nice,” Jem told Daniel.
“What? He did, didn’t he?” With a kiddie attempt at malice, he added, “You didn’t know?”
“You want people to treat you like an adult? Start acting like one. Life’s complicated. People do things they’re not proud of because they feel like they have to, because they don’t know how not to.”
“Why is that true for him and my dad, but everybody acts like me and Bren were so messed up?”
“I couldn’t give a shit about you and Brennon, but then, Tean and I don’t always see things the same. What I do care about is you making my boyfriend feel bad. And you making my life harder in every fucking way imaginable. And oh yeah, you bit me.”
Daniel was silent for a moment. He wiped his nose. When he spoke, his voice had softened. “Bren’s the first person who didn’t want me to be somebody else.”
Jem waited.
“You’ve met my mom and dad,” Daniel said.
“My whole life, you know what they did? They took me to church, and people told me how bad it was to be gay. I went to Mutual, and people told me how bad it was to be gay. We had Family Home Evening, and my parents told me how bad it was to be gay. We’d go to family parties, and my uncles would make jokes about fags, and my grandpa talked about his friend’s grandson who came out, and how he would have taken any of us who tried that into the woods and shot us, and it wouldn’t be a sin.
“And then Uncle Tean would come around, and my parents would act like they were all friends, and nobody ever explained why they were friends with him if he was such a bad person. Until I was like thirteen or fourteen, they told me that he just hadn’t found the right girl.
” Daniel made a noise that was somewhere between disgusted and disbelieving, and it was so unexpectedly adult that Jem grinned in spite of himself.
Daniel flashed him a startled smile in return.
“I guess technically they’re right?” Jem said.
Daniel made that sound again. “I knew something was wrong with me. I could tell. And I hated it. I hated being different. Hated myself for being different. And they kept dragging me to these—to these fucking therapists, and they’d ask me if I was depressed or if I was thinking of hurting myself.
One of them asked me if I could identify any patterns in relationships with my family.
And I’d sit there, wanting to scream that I wasn’t depressed or bipolar or anything, I just wanted to suck a dick. ”
He glanced at Jem, obviously hoping for shock, but Jem shrugged. “It happens to the best of us.”