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Plastic clicked. A motor came on. Auggie startled at the noises, and then he had to suppress a laugh as he spotted the Roomba leaving its docking station to patrol the house for dust that might have escaped its notice.
“Please,” Baylee said, her voice soft and crushed. “Please leave.”
“Did you talk to Shaniyah?”
“I want you to leave.”
“Did you know someone killed Shaniyah? Someone didn’t want Shaniyah telling people something, something she’d learned. Someone didn’t want a secret coming to light. And so they killed her.”
The words hung in the air. Everything felt frozen, like they’d all become part of the perfect Vasquez dollhouse. Then the Roomba bumped into the sideboard, and a decorative candle wobbled, and the world spun into motion again.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Baylee said. “I would never—” Some of the force came back into her voice. “I want you to leave right now. Get out, or I’m calling the police.”
“The police are going to talk to you, Mrs. Vasquez,” Theo said as he stood. “You can be sure of that. And they’re going to ask the same questions. And they’re going to ask your husband. And they’re going to ask Keelan. And they’re going to ask Keelan’s friends. And every secret you think you can keep, it’s going to come out into the light. Get ready for it.”
Auggie stayed on the sofa, and he waited until Baylee looked at him. Then he said, “I think you love your son a lot.”
She stared. Her cheeks were red, and she looked on the brink of tears, but the mask had fallen away, and the woman facing him now was iron.
“I don’t know if it helps you to hear that Keelan actually isn’t gay. Or, at least, that’s not how he identifies. I think he’d probably call himself straight. There are a lot of explanations for what was going on between him and Leon. It might have been just for fun. It might have been, like you said, a phase. It might be—actually, it definitely is—part of Keelan figuring out who he is and what he likes. He might be bi. He might not ever want to put a label on it. He’s growing up at a time when he’s got a lot of options. I think that’s a good thing; I think you should too.”
She was silent for a moment. Then she said stiffly, “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“I didn’t come out until I was in college, but when I was a teenager, I did what Keelan did. I tried things out. I told myself it was just for fun.”
“So, you’re saying he is gay.”
Would that be so terrible, Auggie wanted to ask. Would it be such a horrible thing? He could see, looking into her face, that for Baylee Vasquez, it would be. He didn’t know why. Religion, maybe. Or social standing. Or some knee-jerk reaction to the life she’d envisioned for her son. But Auggie didn’t think he’d ever know, and he wasn’t sure it mattered.
“No, I’m saying I’m gay, but when I was Keelan’s age, I was just trying to figure out who I was. That’s not really the important part. The important part is that, even if you’re happy and well-adjusted and confident, which Keelan seems to be, it’s scary. Because there’s a lot of pressure. And because you don’t know how people are going to react. And you’re worried something might be wrong with you. Teenagers feel those things even when they’re a hundred percent straight; they all go through that uncertainty, the scariness of not knowing who they are and being afraid to find out.”
She swallowed and pulled at her shirt again, but her eyes didn’t leave Auggie.
“One thing that helped me was my brother. He made sure I knew that he didn’t care who I loved. If I was straight, fantastic. If I was gay, great—he already had all sorts of jokes.”
Her eyes cut away. “Keelan knows we love him.”
“If you want to hear the flip side of the coin,” Theo said, “my family didn’t want anything to do with me when I came out. I was in my twenties, and it took me that long because my parents let us know, in no uncertain terms, what would happen if any of us turned out to be gay. You want to talk about unhappiness and uncertainty? That’s how you mess a child up.”
“Ray and I have never—never told Keelan anything like that.” She seemed to catch herself and added, “We would never.”
“You don’t have to say it,” Theo said. “Kids pick up on it. It’s not hard to tell you don’t like gay people, Mrs. Vasquez. Your son has picked up on it; you can be sure of that. And that means he feels like he has to hide this from you. In the long run, kids who can’t talk to their parents about their romantic and sexual lives pay a high price. They deal with a lot of internalized negativity, a lot of shame. They begin sexual activity without the knowledge they need. Some of that has to do with safe sex, but some of it is just about picking partners and making good choices. If you love Keelan—and I agree with Auggie, I think you do—then you need to get a handle on how you feel about gay people, and then you need to have a conversation with him. Maybe the first real, open conversation you’ve ever had with him.”
“And it’s going to be awkward as fuck,” Auggie said.
For some reason, that made her laugh, and she wiped her eyes and shook her head. She was silent for so long that Theo finally held out his hand to Auggie and said, “We’ll see ourselves out. If you change your mind—”
“She came here.” The words were thick, and Baylee fanned herself with one hand as she swallowed. “That girl. Shaniyah. She came to the house one afternoon. Keelan was gone, thank God. That’s all I could think. Thank God. Thank God he’s not here. She wanted to talk about—about Leon. Like you said. About Keelan and Leon. And I just…couldn’t. I couldn’t. I couldn’t sit in my kitchen with a girl I didn’t know, sit there with a girl saying these awful things about my son.”
Silence pooled in the room. Auggie could see it: the argument escalating, Baylee’s fear making her lose control, the final moment when anything was better than facing the truth about her son. She might have grabbed something heavy. They were in the kitchen; she might have picked up a knife.
“What did you do?” Theo asked.
“Do?” Baylee sounded surprised by the question. “I made her leave.”
Auggie sat forward. “You made her leave?”
“Of course. I wasn’t going to sit there and listen to that. To be accused of doing something to Leon so that he’d leave my son alone. I asked her to leave, and I warned her that if she came back, I’d call the police.”
