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Who did that? No one I knew. That was hero stuff.
Sighing, I ran a hand over my face. I should’ve probably told someone about what had happened this morning, but I hadn’t. Today was off in more ways than one. My friend Chet, who shared all my classes, hadn’t come to school, either. His absence worried me. Uneasy, I glanced up to pay attention to where I was walking. We talked every day even though we’d decided... we weren’t going to be together. For Chet not to come to school today was beyond weird. He’d made it to class when he’d had the flu last year because his parents were like mine—there was no such thing as a day off. Everyone worked, every day, no matter what, and that went double for school. Of course, he’d gotten the entire class sick, and everyone had been mad at him.
Shaking my head, I picked up my pace. I was supposed to help Mom clean at the church this afternoon because the last person they’d hired from the trailer park to do it had walked off with some candleholders, and while they hadn’t been expensive, there were no second chances at the church. I frowned at the memory. Dad had called the cops on the poor woman. I shrugged it off.
The church came into view, and I had a moment where quiet pleasure rushed through me. It was a familiar building I’d been coming to my entire life. The walls were tall and made of white stone, and at the very top was a white wooden bell tower covered by a steepled roof. The golden bell inside gleamed. When I was younger, my life goal had been to get big enough to pull the bell rope on Sundays. Now being the bell ringer was my job and some of the shine had worn off, but I still smiled upward as I climbed the wide stone stairs to the double red front doors. The door on the left was always unlocked, so I tugged on it—and nearly ripped my arm off.
My fingers stung from pulling the immobile handle. I tried again. Had something happened? I stared at the door, then jogged around the side of the building. No, my parents’ cars were there... along with Chet’s dad’s truck.
My stomach sank and my hands shook as I wiped them on my jeans. Why was Chet here? I crept around the church toward the front door before deciding to go around through the back. I got out the brass key I’d been given two years ago. The rear entrance was a much smaller door, not meant for the crowd at the front, and I unlocked it and snuck inside.
I came face-to-face with Dad, who yanked me farther into the hallway and around a corner, quick as a copperhead striking.
“What’s going on?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” He glared at me. We looked nothing alike, something I’d wondered about more than once. He shook his head at me. His receding blond hair was ruffled, as if he’d been running his hands through it. He’d rolled his black shirt sleeves to the elbows, something he usually did while he was pacing and thinking.
Glancing up, I froze, and Dad dragged me a few more steps into a room. It was a Sunday school classroom for teenagers, and I led the class sometimes. There were charts of family trees from the Bible on the walls, and on one side of the room was a bookshelf full of Bibles, in case someone unfortunate enough not to own their own copy ever came in.
They’d rarely been used.
At the front was a projector screen for when Dad thought we should watch important documentaries. I knew every inch of this room, and even seeing Chet in it was fine. It was his parents, looking ready to murder, who were out of place. Mom had tears streaming down her face. She was dressed to clean in jeans and a T-shirt with her bleached blonde hair up in a ponytail. She even had yellow cleaning gloves sitting on the chair beside her, so whatever was going on had interrupted the plan for the day.
“Chet?”
He shook his head. He was taller than me and wider, and he was doing a bad job of hiding with his shoulders slumped and his head down.
Chet’s father glared at me, standing. “We have to talk to you boys,” he said sternly.
The rest of the parents in the room nodded.
Chet slunk down in his chair.
My heart rate picked up. This wasn’t happening. “About what?” I asked softly, but I knew already. I willed Chet to look at me, but he didn’t.
“About what you boys have been doing!” Mom yelled, verging on hysterical.
I stared at her. “We haven’t done anything,” I said, feeling like I was about to faint. And it was true. We hadn’t. We’d held hands once after Sunday school. We’d talked a lot. Ultimately, we’d decided not to do anything at all because of... well, this. We still had to live with our parents. We still had to get through college. We didn’t like each other enough to try to be anything other than what our parents expected right now. He wasn’t my type.
We hadn’t said the wordgay.
We hadn’t dared breathe it.
Even though we’d held hands and sat too close while we talked about the ways we were different from the other people in the church, the word had never escaped into the air between us. It had all been talking around that word. To say it out loud was to risk this very thing happening right now.
I shuddered and forced a smile.
“You haven’t done anything?” Chet’s mother came toward me, and I half expected Dad to get between us, but he only shook his head and flashed a disappointed look that made me feel ten years old. “Chet said he talked to you about being....” She looked physically pained. “Chet said that he’s homosexual and you told him you are, too. And you didn’t tell anyone else he was having these awful thoughts!” She hissed out an annoyed sound, and I backed up a step.
“Gay people don’t exist. They’re people looking for attention.” I parroted what Mom had said a thousand times, and when I glanced her way, her shoulders had settled and she wasn’t looking quite so livid anymore. “I told him he could talk to me about anything, and he talked to me about feeling like he didn’t belong in the church. He never said the word gay.”
None of that was a lie, and I wished he would look at me, but he didn’t. How had this happened? Had he come out to his parents? I cleared my throat.
“Sit,” Dad thundered and escorted me to a chair. When I didn’t put my butt in the seat fast enough, he shoved me down. “You’re going to hear this, too. We’re having a talk when we’re done. After the Richmonds called us, we tore apart your room.” The gleam in Dad’s eyes meant a nuclear explosion was on the horizon.
The bottom dropped out of my stomach.
They’d done that once when I was thirteen and someone had told them I was smoking. I hadn’t been, but they’d ripped every piece of my room to shreds looking for cigarettes. I’d learned then not to keep anything in my room, but when I’d turned eighteen, I’d stupidly thought they might treat me more like an adult. I’d had one manga in there, shoved between the end of my bed and the wall so I could pull it out at night. There was no playing it off. With a name likeDick Fight Island, everyone would know what it was about without even opening the pages. My face heated and there was no stopping it.
