Chapter 17 #2
“They put me on all these meds. I felt like a zombie, and that was worse. But when I didn’t feel like a zombie, I just wanted—I just wanted it to stop hurting, and all I could do was—” He cut off, and he didn’t continue.
“Did you try talking to them?” Jem asked. “Your parents, I mean.”
Daniel shot him a look.
“I’m not saying it would have been easy,” Jem said. “It’s not my life; I’m not saying I would have done anything differently. I’m just asking.”
“I told my dad,” Daniel said softly. “He was driving me home from a church dance. I hadn’t danced with anyone all night, but there was this guy there, and I’d seen him before, and he was so—” Daniel cut off.
“It was just the two of us in the car. And I kept telling myself they still loved Uncle Tean even if they thought he was a bad person, and it would be okay, and I could do this.”
“How’d it go?”
“He listened. He didn’t shout or anything, like I thought he would.
It wasn’t a long drive, but he didn’t say anything for a while.
I felt like I was going to explode. Then he said a lot of guys think that when they’re my age.
They get confused. They don’t know what they’re feeling.
And it’s okay, and he was glad I told him, but he didn’t want me to rush into anything, because I had the rest of my life to figure things out.
And maybe we could talk about it again in a few years and see if I still felt the same way.
And then we went inside, and he acted like nothing had happened.
” Daniel stared off into the darkness of the garage.
“It wasn’t even a whole year later when he left.
Because he was going to be ‘true to himself.’”
Jem settled onto the curb. Next to him, Daniel breathed raggedly, wiping his eyes again.
“I’m sorry,” Jem said quietly.
Daniel shook his head.
“That was super shitty,” Jem said.
“Fuck him. Fuck him. Fuck. Him.” Daniel broke off, sniffled, and put his head in his hands.
The murmur of voices that, until now, had registered distantly—all the people who had been displaced from the hospital by the fire alarm—was gone.
Everyone must have gone back inside. The emergency was over.
Nothing to see here. The wind went through the parking garage with a hollow note, like an enormous chime.
Jem put a hand on Daniel’s shoulder. The boy was still—so still. “Okay,” Jem said. “Now it’s time to tell me about Brennon.”
Daniel shivered, but he raised his head. When he blinked red-rimmed eyes, they looked sticky with drying tears, but his voice was surprisingly steady. “He’s in my ward. In my parents’ ward.”
“That’s how you met him?”
“I didn’t meet him, really. I’ve known him my whole life. But we started seeing each other when he was my Young Men president.”
It was the way he said it: seeing each other.
“You know what I want to know,” Jem said.
The silence lasted until Jem thought he might have to ask again, but Daniel said, “I kissed him.”
“Out of the blue? That must have been a surprise.”
A blush climbed the boy’s cheekbones. “No.” That single word had all of a teenager’s contempt for anyone older than twenty.
“We talked. A lot. He knew I was gay. I could tell he wanted to tell me something, but he was afraid. He wasn’t like other adults.
He was cool. He was, like, a friend. So, I told him he could tell me anything.
That he could trust me. It took a long time—he was so messed up, you know, from growing up in the church, and, like, by his age, it was really hard for him to be honest about himself. ”
The combination of that insight into Brennon’s character, delivered with Daniel’s kid-like lack of experience, made Jem want to close his eyes.
“That’s when I kissed him,” Daniel said, a note of pride entering his voice. “When he told me he was gay too. He hadn’t ever told anyone that. He was so brave. That’s when I fell in love with him.” As Daniel delivered the final words, his expression hardened into a challenge.
“What?” Jem said.
“We loved each other. We were in love.”
“Yeah, I heard you.”
Something close to frustration darted through Daniel’s face, and Jem had to work not to laugh, because he got the feeling that what Daniel was really trying to say—what he wanted to say—was Fight me.
“And it wasn’t bad,” Daniel said with that same note that was somewhere between bratty and defiant. “It wasn’t ugly or—or abusive. I don’t feel bad about it or sad or mad or anything except happy.”
“Great,” Jem said. “I don’t care.”
For the second time, frustration—now trailed by confusion—made its way across the boy’s features.
“Everybody says it was bad. Everybody talks about him like he hurt me. But he didn’t.
We never did anything I didn’t want to do.
We never did anything that I didn’t start.
Bren never wanted me to feel uncomfortable. ”
I bet, Jem thought. But he said, “Okay.”
“You don’t believe me. But did you know the age of consent in lots of countries is fourteen or fifteen?
The only reason it’s eighteen is because Americans are all so sexually repressed.
I know what I’m doing. I can make my own choices.
It’s not like some switch is going to flip in my brain when I turn eighteen.
And neuroscience shows that the brain doesn’t finish maturing until the twenties, so if we’re going to do this by science, then the age of consent needs to be a lot higher. ”
“Well, that would seriously bum out an entire generation of college fuckboys,” Jem said.
“I was totally capable of saying no to Bren whenever I wanted—”
Jem bup-bupped him into silence and held up a hand. “Zero fucks given, Danny-me-lad. Zero. Save it for somebody else.”
Helplessness softened the line of Daniel’s mouth.
“I know,” Jem said. “You want to prove everybody wrong. Don’t worry, you’ll get plenty of chances.”
“My whole life, everyone made me feel bad for who I liked and what I wanted. I’m not going to let them make me feel bad about this.”
“Is that why you’re running away?”
The lockdown happened so quickly that it caught Jem off guard. Face set, Daniel cut his gaze away.
Now, what the hell did that mean?
Jem considered the boy. What secret had Jem just stepped on? Was it a secret? Or embarrassment? Or pure stubborn opposition? No, it was a secret. But what—
“Oh shit,” Jem said, and he rubbed his forehead. “You think you’re going to kill this guy?”
Daniel didn’t answer. But he shifted on the curb, as though readying himself to launch to his feet, and fear tightened his jaw.
“That’s why you were out in that park? Jesus Christ, kid, you were bait?”
Daniel’s nostrils flared, but he didn’t answer.
“You’d better start talking,” Jem said, “or I’m going to march your ass upstairs and tell Mommy you need to be locked up until we find this guy.”
“He killed Bren! He killed him! And now Bren’s gone, and I can’t do anything!” Fresh tears slid down Daniel’s cheeks, but he didn’t seem to notice them. “I have to do something!”
“Yeah, well, getting yourself killed isn’t going to help Brennon.”
“I can take care of myself!”
Jem raised an eyebrow.
The boy had the good grace to blush, and his shoulders rose a few inches. “He was stronger than I thought,” he muttered, staring at the asphalt. “He surprised me.”
“Yeah, he would have surprised your ass into an early grave if I hadn’t shown up. Jesus Christ.” Jem’s bruised shoulder was starting to throb. He stretched, buying himself time to think, but he couldn’t come up with anything better than “Start from the beginning.”
“We met in the parking lot—”
“Nope. All the way back.”
Struggle played out in Daniel’s face, but only for a moment. “I went over to see Bren Sunday night. I wanted to go before that, because I knew my dad had—you know. And I didn’t know how bad it was. Or if Bren was okay. Or anything.”
Jem groaned.
“I had to!” Daniel said.
“What happened?”
“He was—” The click in Daniel’s throat caught Jem by surprise, and when the boy spoke again, his voice grew thick.
“He was downstairs. I always met him down there because nobody else uses the basement. The doors are mostly glass, so I saw him first. He had a bruise—” Daniel gestured to his cheekbone.
“—and he was moving funny, like maybe he was sore. But he looked okay. I was so glad he was okay. And I was about to knock when I realized he was getting ready to go out.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’d showered. He was putting on clothes—nice stuff, the stuff he’d wear when we went on dates sometimes.” Daniel hesitated. And then he said, “He kept checking his phone.”
“He was hooking up with someone.”
Daniel gave a miserable nod. “I knocked, and I asked him what he was doing. Just like that. I didn’t ask him how he was, or if he was okay, or anything.
And he didn’t want to tell me, so I grabbed his phone.
He was on Prowler.” Daniel paused, as though weighing something, and said, “It’s an app for gay guys. ”
“Yeah, believe it or not, you didn’t invent being gay. What did he do?”
“He told me to give it back. But I didn’t. He was planning on meeting up with someone—not at home, obviously, because he couldn’t. But at the park.” Shame made Daniel’s voice small. “We got in a huge fight.”
“You didn’t know he’d been fucking other guys?”
Daniel flinched. “He hadn’t! But we couldn’t be together now that my parents knew.
That’s what he said. And he had to move on.
I told him I was going to be sixteen in six months.
I told him I could get emancipated, and then we could live together, like we’d talked about.
He…he laughed. And the phone kept buzzing because he was still getting messages.
And he said I didn’t know what I was talking about because I was just a kid.
And I said I knew I loved him. And he told me I ruined his life. ”
“What a fuck.”