Page 167 of Checking Out the Librarian

Jonathan

Ta-da, off to do things before work. Must exercise and do lots of things! Later

Connor

Where do you have my boyfriend

What is the ransom

And then Jonathan added a photo of Pawsley in a tiny toy cowboy hat, snapped in the moment when the kitten was starting to raise a paw to bat it off his head, but it looked like he was waving.

“You’re spending a lot of time texting, not just scrolling, if I can be so bold as to comment.” His sister was hanging over the stall door, staring hard at the phone in his hand, as if she wanted to take it away.

Connor shoved it in his back pocket and picked up his pitchfork. Each of their four horses donated about forty pounds of manure a day, so there was a lot of forking and shoveling. “What?”

“Just noticing you’re on your phone more than usual.”

“I have friends. Not a crime.” He continued removing last night’s waste from Cashew’s stall and didn’t let himself think about whether people around here, people he’d known all his life, thought the type of friend he was texting, a boyfriend, was or should be a crime.

Jess wouldn’t think that. He knew her. He should tell her first, before Mom.

“Friends plural, or friend, singular, like a special friend?”

“Like a not-your-business friend.” He heard the grumpiness in his voice and tossed more manure. He wanted to look at his phone. Jess needed to fuck off.

“My big bother likes someone!”

This morning the familiar nickname irritated him, and he kept silent as he pitched another load into the wheelbarrow.

“Come on, tell me!” Jessica continued.

“No. It doesn’t matter.” That felt like lying. Everything he said to his family felt like lying.

“I think it does.” She took a deep breath and closed the distance between them until she could put her hand on his shoulder, which was weird enough anytime, but at six a.m. in the barn? Really fucking weird. “I think maybe we both like the same type of people, big bother.”

Connor retreated two steps but knew he shouldn’t ignore Jess. She hated that as much as Jonathan did and never quit if she was being ignored. But he didn’t have a joke to make, and he really couldn’t say she was wrong either, because—lying.

“Hey.”

He lifted the handles of the wheelbarrow and pushed it away, heading for the doors, even though he hadn’t finished the last stall.

She kept talking and walking, walking without stopping the talking. “I didn’t mention it, but I was looking you up the other day, wanted to see your school mug shot or something, and it turns out your softball team had some pretty good press when they won the Eugene championship.”

He knew exactly the article she’d seen, the one where Trixie said they were queer power and they weren’t going back. The photo had been taken in that golden moment after their victory but before Jonathan had overheard the conversation that almost broke them. That night had sucked, and here it was, coming around again to gut punch his life plans.

Acid churned in his stomach. He should have grabbed a couple slices of sourdough before coming to turn out the horses and start the chores.

He put one foot in front of the other and headed out of the barn to dump the manure.

“Looked like a great bunch of people. Fun,” Jess said from behind him. Still following him and still talking.

“Just people.” He’d concealed the team and the championship from his family precisely so that no one would look them up. His friends, his entire summer, was another thing he’d been lying about. He was a man made of lies, wrapped in lies, because even lies of omission were still lies.

The ramp to the manure dumpster was only about thirty feet past the back door of the barn. When the wheeled trailer filled, every three or four days, they pulled it out to the big compost pile farther from the buildings and paddock. Horse shit composted well. His mother’s chickens loved the fly grubs, her huge garden loved the compost, and they spread it in the fields, too. Win-win.

“I get that, I do. People. And love is love, you know.”

She didn’t need to keep following him, but in the twenty-four years since she’d learned to walk, he’d never managed to get her to stop.