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another boy, and then a little boy down the street said that Carter tried to touch him. Then everyone turned on him.”
My mouth and heart fall to the pit of my stomach. My insides echo and rattle, not used to the commotion. It’s been a while since I’ve felt this aware of myself, of how I feel about the things happening around me. I seem to care a whole lot more about what’s going on in my world now that Landon is a part of it.
“And did he?” Somehow I already know.
Landon’s head shakes furiously. “No. He would never. The people around us were so toxic, so disgustingly vile, and too simple to even understand how simpleminded they were. They were the kind of people who would claim they were”—Landon hooks his fingers into quotes in the air—“?‘okay with gay people’ as long as they didn’t hit on them, yet when asked if they are homophobic, they’d say no.”
I know people like that. Most of the Barbies at my school were like that. They would say the most offensive things to me, but in their case, I suspect they knew exactly what they were doing. Because of the color of my skin, I had a girl ask which gas station my family owned, even though my dad had saved her mom’s ass from the skin cancer she got from sunbathing for too long.
“So then Carter went from the plat joke to the plat villain. It became like a witch hunt. Just how many of the young boys had been around Carter? Out of all the boys he rode bikes with, how many did he try to touch? Out of all the boys he had helped with their homework over the years, how many had he tried to force himself on? Even though no one else came forward against Carter, and the boy who accused him said he’d just been lying—that his older brother put him up to it because Carter ‘creeped him out’—the accusations became a thing. And his dad didn’t need another reason to take his anger out on him. When the whispers turned to shouts and the shouts turned to three big black letters painted on the side of the house, his dad had enough. It took me and Dakota to get his dad off of him that night. He missed school the next morning.”
Landon’s voice crumbles and I move to his lap. He wraps his arms around me, holding me to him like it will somehow comfort him. I wipe at the tears on my cheeks, not sure when they’d begun to fall. Landon’s words are painting too vivid of a picture. I remember the night Dakota was hiding under the kitchen table. My stomach lurches. That poor girl.
“We came home and found him. She didn’t want to leave.” Landon clears his throat and I wrap my arms around him, holding his head to my body. “I had to drag her out of that room, Nora. She snapped, she wasn’t even in her body when I pulled her out of his bedroom. She screamed and screamed and even tried to claw her way back in there before the police came and got him down. He’d hung himself in the night, as injured as he was after his father’s beating.”
A shiver takes over Landon’s body and I’m sobbing into his hair. I can’t imagine their pain and the trauma that came along with such an event at a young age. No wonder the two of them are the way they are. If Dakota didn’t have Landon, where would she be today?
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” I rub my hand down his back. I shouldn’t have pressured him to tell me. This was much more than I expected to get when I began this sick little game. “I shouldn’t have forced this out of you.” I apologize profusely over his head. Images of the unfair treatment of a teenage boy because of who he liked to kiss break my heart. Suicide in any form is awful, but suicide among teens is especially hard to come to terms with. When you’re young everything feels so important—every crisis is your whole world and it’s impossible to see a light at the end of the tunnel. There’s no comfort when thinking of the empty future of an innocent child.
“Shh.” His arms hook around my back. “Shh. It’s okay.”
He’s comforting me? I move my hands to his jaw and lift his face to mine. “I could live a thousand lives and never deserve you.”
The truth sits heavy with me as he pulls me tight to his chest. I’m falling in love with him and he doesn’t even have to do anything. I’m going to fall in love with him, and he doesn’t even have to love me back.
