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He nodded and said, “Yeah, and check this out.” He proceeded to lay down on the floor, looking up almost dreamily. I shrugged and followed suit, but I was truly surprised by the view I found when I did so. The planetarium was far enough from town that there were no lights to dim the stars, nothing to obscure the view. Lying on the floor of the observation room, we may as well have been on the beach of a remote island, with nothing but sky for miles. I hadn’t meant to lay down as close to him as I had, but feeling his body heat, I realized our hands were almost touching.
“I really like it here,” he said softly, “I come here when things get too heavy, you know? When I just need to get away. The ocean has always been my favorite escape, but there were lots of times as a kid that I couldn’t get there. So I’d go out and look at the sky, instead. I’d dream of flying up there, away from everything. Dream that maybe somewhere out there was a better life for me.” He stopped speaking abruptly, as though he’d over shared.
I could feel the emotion rolling off him, even though he was trying not to let it show. I inexplicably wanted to fix whatever had upset him, but I wasn’t sure what to say. “I liked looking at the stars as a kid, too,” I offered. “I’d always try to find the constellations. Like, there’s Orion.” I pointed, but when I looked over, I realized he was looking at me. He had that little smile he’d first given me on the day we got coffee.
When my eyes met his, the smile got wider. “Thanks for riding with me. That guy sets off every one of my internal alarms.”
“No problem,” I replied, “I already don’t like him, and I haven’t even met him.”
He gave a little laugh, but then looked back at the sky. The smile dimmed just a little when he said, “So now that you know a little more about me, what do you think? Still admire me?” He didn’t sound at all certain that I would. With all the confidence he’d exuded while working, that surprised me a little. He sounded almost self-deprecating, as though perhaps people had made him feel like he was less than them because of what he did for a living. And he sounded like he thought I’d be one of them.
“Are you kidding me? Of course I do. I told you I admire the fact that you are unrepentantly yourself. You’re out there, just wearing skirts or whatever you want and you’re working your way through college in pursuit of being a science nerd and saving the whole planet. There are so many things going on with you, you’re like a kaleidoscope.” Ok. So I was possibly not completely sober at that point. The amusement on his face was clear as he turned to look at me, and I just kept going. “Yeah. You’re like this amazing kaleidoscope of all these different things and it’s pretty awesome. You know what, though? You didn’t tell me you were a dancer when we were talking about art. And that was most definitely an art form. You take whatever you do, and you make it something…something beautiful. It’s…” At that point I realized I’d probably stuck my foot in my mouth more than once, so I just trailed off.
Jamie laughed, though. “Well, I’m sure Brad would have something different to say about it.”
I scrunched up my face in disgust. At that point I liked Brad about as much as I liked Weird Wally. “Man, fuck Brad,” I said, annoyed. “He had no right to talk to you the way he did. He didn’t have a right to speak to you at all, let alone say anything about your clothes, or your nationality, or your name for fuck’s sake.” Yes, the alcohol was definitely letting me take a load off. “His name is stupid, anyway. I like your name. Jamie. I thought at first that it was maybe a little too vanilla for you, because you’re pretty damn interesting, but you know what? I think you own it and make it interesting, too.”
Though he was still thoroughly amused by my word vomit, I noticed his face darken slightly when he said, “Thanks. It was given to me by the state of Florida.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant and realized that maybe I wasn’t quite on my thought processing game like I should be. “So you’re from here, originally? What do you mean, Florida named you?”
He was quiet for a second, and he looked back up at the sky. Finally, he said, “I mean I was named by the government. James was the last name of the firefighter who opened the station door to a knock and found a cardboard box with a newborn baby in it. Bryant Street was where the fire station was located. So the unwanted baby in the box earned the name James Bryant. There was no information in the box with me. Just a hungry baby on a blanket in a blue onesie and a wet diaper. I’ll never know my heritage.”
Dear God. I suddenly completely understood why he’d been upset when Brad had questioned his name and asked him if he was Mexican. It hadn’t just been the fact that Brad was a racist asshat. Jamie let a lot of things slide. But Jamie didn’t know where he came from, and his name hadn’t been lovingly given to him in a hospital at his birth. I knew things like that happened, but I’d never met anyone it had happened to, and my heart went out to him, knowing I could never understand how something like that must feel. I wanted to hug him. “Jamie,” I whispered.
He glanced at me and must have seen the emotion on my face. Something passed over his own. Trust maybe, almost like he could tell it wasn’t pity I was feeling, but an attempt to understand him. “I’m ok now,” he assured me, “And I know they had their reasons. I’ve heard it all. I know they may have thought they were doing what was best for me, but it doesn’t change the fact that I wasn’t wanted. And that part didn’t change for most of my life. I wasn’t one of those babies that got put on the news and was immediately adopted by some loving family who couldn’t have kids of their own. My childhood was spent being pulled from one foster home to the next…some worse than others.”
He paused, taking a breath. “I ran away more than once. When I was thirteen, one was bad enough that I lived in the woods for weeks. I foraged for edible plants and stayed near a stream. I’d read so many different types of books as an escape that I managed not to kill myself by eating something poisonous. I was only sent back because some hikers stumbled upon me, a kid alone in the woods. Then I was put right back into the system.”
He looked annoyed that he’d been turned in, but then found the subject he’d started on. “I always had hope, though, even on the worst days, when I looked at the ocean or the sky. It made me understand that the world was bigger than what I could see, or what I was going through, and that there was more out there for me.”
His words were breaking my heart. If he understood that as a kid, it was obvious he’d grown up much too fast. I wanted to go back in time and make his entire life better. I knew I was prying, but I was invested by then. “You mentioned your sister.”
He looked at me again, studying my face. I could tell he wasn’t used to opening up to people, especially people he didn’t know that well. I’m not sure what he saw there. Empathy, maybe, or care. Whatever it was, he kept talking. “Bouncing around all my life, I never knew what family meant. I didn’t know what it was like to be loved. I had a few good homes, but they usually lasted less than a year. There were just so many kids who needed help, too many for the good ones to help them all. There were always reasons I had to leave, even though I tried to be a good kid, and I finally just got used to it. Some of the bad ones were just hateful and neglectful. Some let us go hungry while we watched their own kids eat. Some hit us.”
I cringed, wanting to find those people and pound them into the ground for harming the kids they’d willingly allowed to be entrusted to them. My fists balled at my sides, and he seemed to notice, but he didn’t comment on it. He sighed, but he must have trusted me, because he looked away again and said, “Two of the men molested me. Those were the ones I ran away from.” He paused, as though letting it sink in. Almost as though he wanted to put it all out there and let me decide, after I knew everything, if I still wanted to be around him. If I still found him a beautiful kaleidoscope of amazing things like my drunk ass had just told him. It was almost like he was waiting for me to decide he was damaged goods and run far away.
“Jesus, Jamie, I’m so sorry. I don’t….I can’t tell you I understand how you feel because I know I don’t. But I hope that you know, really know, that you never did anything to deserve any of it. I’m sorry life was so unfair to you because it really was. I hope you know that the people who did those things to you are worthless pieces of shit. And I hope you know that right now, I’d like to go find every one of them and put them in the hospital for you.” I meant it. I could not believe anyone would do those things to an innocent child entrusted to their care.
He finally looked back over at me, and though his eyes were shining, it was definitely trust I saw in them. He went on, “When I was sixteen, they placed me in a temporary home on an emergency basis. The guy in the home I’d been in had hit me, and by then I was old enough that I hit him back. He called my social worker. She ended up believing me and there was a whole investigation, but she didn’t have anywhere for me to go that night. She called the only person she thought might take me for a little while until they found somewhere more permanent. The woman was a widow, but she and her husband had fostered for a long time before he’d died of cancer a few years before.
“She had a daughter a year older than me, a girl she’d fostered from a young age and had adopted when she was still a little kid. It was just the two of them, but she told the social worker to bring me right over. Going into that home, even though I didn’t fully understand it at the time, it was the first time I caught a glimpse of what it was like to be loved. She hugged me as soon as I got there, held me in her living room in the middle of the night in her pajamas and told me how sorry she was that someone had hit me. I couldn’t believe she just accepted me so easily, with no fear, even though she knew I’d hit my last foster parent. Even though I was just some kid she didn’t even know who was bigger than her and had never had anyone but himself. Everything in my life seemed to hit me all at once with that hug, because I felt something in it, something I’d never felt before. Without meaning to, I started crying. I knew I could trust her somehow, and I’d never met anyone I trusted. Maybe after all the bad people I encountered I was a decent judge of character, but I don’t know. She sat me down in her living room and asked me to talk to her. I just started going through everything, from starting out unwanted to all the things I’d been through over the years. She was the first person I ever felt like I could talk to, and she never failed my trust. She felt like family almost right away. She was crying with me, still hugging me and telling me how sorry she was. The worst part of that night was that I knew it was temporary. A couple of weeks to months at most until they placed me somewhere else. She hadn’t even been planning on fostering anymore until they’d come to her, late at night and desperate.
“Being there was the happiest I’d ever been in my life, and I tried not to think about the end. We had family movie nights twice a week and made crazy concoctions out of popcorn. We had game nights on Sundays. She took me to a church that never seemed to mind if I was myself there, and even though a lot of my other foster families hated me for who I was and refused to let me wear make-up or hit me for trying on a skirt, she told me that God loved me, no matter what. She said he’d made me who I was and that I should never try to dim the shine I’d been given. She told me she didn’t know why I’d had to go through the things I did but she knew I was here for a reason, that I had a purpose, and I clung to that. No one had ever told me that. She started taking me to therapy sessions on her own dime. She let me wear whatever I wanted, and her daughter never minded if I borrowed her clothes. They even took me shopping in the girl’s junior’s department. She helped me with my homework and helped me get my grades up, because no one, including me, had cared much before. School had never been that hard for me, but she told me she could tell I wasn’t a B student and knew I could do better if I had a little help. No one had ever had that kind of faith in me. Her daughter and I made her a birthday cake together that tasted good, even though it looked terrible. Her daughter was the best friend I’d ever had, and she yelled at bullies for me when we went out.”
Jamie paused, swallowed, and gazed up at the sky. “I’d been there a full three months when she called me downstairs. I had dread in my heart that was nearly pulling me to the floor, because I knew that was it. The speech I’d been trying not to think about the whole time. The one where she’d let me know they’d found me a more permanent home. Her daughter was sitting in the kitchen with her, and there was a folder in the middle of the table. I thought she must be doing the honor of letting me know where I was going because she thought it’d be easier on me coming from her. I was determined not to cry until she couldn’t see me.”
He took a breath. “But then she said, ‘Jamie, I hope you’re ok with this.’ She opened the folder and pushed it toward me as she went on, ‘I just finished the adoption paperwork, sweetie. You’re officially my son.’ I literally fell to the floor in tears. How she would want some used and abused, gender-bending sixteen-year-old, almost an adult and out of the system, to be someone she vowed to love and care about for life is something I’ll never understand. I asked her as much. She could have been rid of me in two years, anyway, as a foster. She told me that she didn’t want to be rid of me. She told me that she loved me and wanted me to be family for life. My new sister hugged me and handed me the choker Brad broke. It was a welcome to the family gift.”
That was why it had meant so much to him. It was a token of the moment he’d realized he could truly be loved. That he was worth loving. I closed my eyes sadly. “I’m so sorry it was broken.”
He looked over at me. “It’s ok. I have a new one now that lets me know that maybe other people can give a shit about me, too.”
I gave him a little smile. I bumped his pinkie with mine. He bumped mine back, and we lay there hesitantly playing finger tag on the planetarium floor. “I do give a shit about you,” I whispered, and the words were heavier than they even sounded.
I sighed. He’d just opened his heart to me, and I wanted to share, too. I wanted him to know that I was worthy of the trust he’d just bestowed upon me. And suddenly, I wanted him to be the person who finally knew about the Caden I’d locked up in a box with pretty wrappings.
“My childhood was pretty average. There wasn’t really any trauma. My family was tightknit, and I have one sister, as well. My parents are still married. Three of my grandparents are still alive. We had family reunions once a year and went to church every Sunday, which is where the only real secret from my youth comes in. The only thing I have that no one else knows about. Besides a couple of people. One who doesn’t want to know. And Gavin.”
