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“The usual,” Theo murmured before opening his eyes. “Was in the middle of a freak-out session. Needed to calm down so I could actually get on the bus.”
“You weren’t sure you wanted to come here?” I asked. “Because of Ford?”
“I never had any intention of coming here,” Theo admitted. I’d resumed running my finger up and down the scar. “Six months ago when Ford said I should come for a visit, I just told him what he wanted to hear.”
“What changed your mind?”
The moment Theo’s eyes shifted away from mine, I knew we were in sensitive territory.
“Timing, I guess,” he finally answered. “I was unemployed, had just lost my apartment and just wanted to get out of the city for a while.”
“You had nowhere else you could go?”
Theo’s eyes drifted shut as he shook his head.
“What about your friends? Your parents?”
“My last friend was Ford, and even though my parents are glad to know that spending a good chunk of their life savings saved their son from the bowels of hell, they didn’t exactly put out the welcome home sign when Father Abbott let me go. After they came to see for themselves that I was cured, they left me enough money for a bus ticket to anywhere but their place and some extra to get a place to live.”
“They’d moved to Phoenix, right?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Theo confirmed. His voice held that emptiness to it like it always did when he brought up his past. Knowing everything I did, I couldn’t fault him for it. Going to that safe place in his head was just another coping mechanism he’d needed to survive the hell he’d been living in from the moment Jimmy Cornell had opened that athletic shed’s door.
“Why Minneapolis?” I asked.
“I was actually heading here because I didn’t know where else to go,” Theo said. He opened his eyes again. “I had to transfer to a different bus in Minneapolis to get to Pelican Bay and there was a long wait. As each hour passed, I got more and more nervous.”
“About seeing Ford again?”
Theo was quiet for a long time. At some point I’d moved my finger to his slightly open palm. When I’d begun toying with each of his fingers, he’d started to do the same thing to me. His eyes shifted to our joined hands.
“That was part of it. I think I had this vision of us meeting up again and just putting the past behind us and doing what we’d planned—go off to college somewhere that wasn’t here, get a place together, be…free. As I sat in that bus station and each hour went by, I began to accept the truth. I had Ford’s number. I could have called him to make sure he even wanted to see me. I think…” Theo paused for several seconds before he looked at me. “I think I was trying to go back to my old life, you know?”
I nodded because I completely understood. How many times had I wanted to go back to the days before I’d left my brother behind so I could leave to pursue a supposed dream that hadn’t been anything more than me trying to escape the man who’d cast me aside after my mother had died—who’d allowed a new woman to come into his life and exclude her new stepson from the only family he’d had left?
“What changed your mind?” I asked.
“I went to the bathroom to try and calm down. I’d already started cutting myself by then. Before I even got to one of the stalls, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. It was the first time I’d really seen myself in years. I didn’t recognize myself. I’d lost so much weight that my face didn’t look the same anymore. My cheeks were sharper, my skin was pale, and my eyes… there was just nothing there. That little part of the old me that was left inside, the part Father Abbott was never able to reach, just kind of fizzled away in that moment.” Theo dropped his eyes back to our hands. “There was no going back,” he said simply.
“So what did you do?” I asked.
“Tried to move forward. Found an apartment, got a night job as a janitor, and took some college courses during the day.”
“What happened?”
Theo remained silent as he played with my hand. “I found this story on the internet about a guy from Ireland earlier tonight,” he began. It didn’t surprise me in the least that he was avoiding answering my question about his life in Minneapolis.
“He was about the same age as me when he realized he liked boys instead of girls, but he knew if he admitted it, he’d lose everything. It was the late sixties, I think, and his family were very faithful Catholics. So he never told anyone, but then when he was in his early teens, he fell in love with a boy who lived a couple towns away. It took him months to work up the nerve to talk to the boy. They became friends and then eventually more when the boy admitted his love. The other boy felt the same way, but they knew they had to hide it. The first boy had a scholarship or something like that for college and the other boy was set to go to a different college. They didn’t know what to do.”
“Fate was going to tear them apart,” I murmured.
“It did so much more than that,” Theo responded. “The relationship was discovered. The second boy denied it, but the first boy eventually admitted he loved the second boy. He was sent directly to the priest who ran the school. The priest told him he had a disease but that it was curable. The boy didn’t want to lose his college scholarship, so he agreed to get therapy. He was sent to a sanitarium for outpatient therapy. The doctor said the treatment would cure the boy. He didn’t really understand it but agreed. He was made to change into a hospital gown and was strapped to a chair. They began to show him pictures of men and women. He said he felt that first jolt of electricity everywhere and that he screamed in pain. He begged to be released from the chair, but they finished the session. He lost track of how many times they shocked him. He was assured the treatment was normal and he’d be cured soon.”
“What happened to the other boy?” I asked.
“The boys secretly started seeing each other again whenever they could. The first boy kept going to the treatments to protect the second boy. He knew there would be less suspicion cast on both of them if he went along with getting cured. Just before the first boy turned eighteen, he saw the boy he loved get killed in a biking accident. The boy was devastated. He couldn’t even publicly mourn his loss. After that, the only chance he had of getting out of that small town was his scholarship. It was all he had left. So he went to a few more treatments but it was so painful, especially because they would bring up the name of the boy he’d loved so much and he’d have to say out loud that he hadn’t loved the boy. It broke him. He stopped going to the treatments, gave up his chance at college and got a job at a factory instead. He went to gay clubs and had sex with a lot of men but never developed a relationship with anyone. He couldn’t give up the boy he still loved.”
“What happened to him?” I asked. My heart broke for the nameless, faceless boy.
