GRAHAM LET himself into the house, moving quietly so as not to wake his parents. The moment he crossed the threshold, however, he saw that the kitchen and dining room lights blazed. Oh shit. This wasn’t going to be good.
“Graham?” His mom ran from the dining room, her satin robe billowing behind her. She launched herself at him. “Oh my God, you’re okay? Where were you?” Her face was pale, and her hands trembled where they clutched at his shirt.
“What’s the matter?” He looked from her to his father, who stood in the doorway to the kitchen. His hair was a mess, sticking up as though he’d run his hands through it a number of times. Deep furrows crossed his brow, making him look older than he was.
His mother pushed back until she held him at arm’s length. “Where have you been? We’ve been going out of our minds. We were about to call the police.”
“What? Why?”
“You were gone again,” his father said quietly, his stiff, stoic face a clear sign that he was forcing back extreme emotion. “I got up to get a drink of water and saw your door was open and you weren’t in bed. I checked the rest of the house and you were gone. Your car was gone and there was no note, no message. You were just… gone.”
“Connor called. He needed a ride home from a party.” What was going on? Why were his parents freaking out?
“You had no business leaving the house at this time of night. At the very least,” he said, speaking over Graham’s protest, “you should have let us know what was happening. We wouldn’t have stopped you from helping a friend.”
“I didn’t want to wake you up. It was one in the morning.”
“You could have left a note!” There was a screeching quality to his mother’s voice that he’d never heard before. “Graham, we thought something had happened to you. The last time you snuck out in the middle of the night you—” Her voice broke and all the tension left her body. She released her grip on his shirt and wrapped her arms over her stomach, shoulders hunched in. Sobs wracked her body. “I can’t go through that again.”
Graham stumbled back against the entryway wall, knees suddenly weak. “Oh God, I’m sorry. It didn’t occur to me that you’d wake up, that you’d think….”
“You almost died. We almost lost you. And it could have happened again and we wouldn’t have known.” Tears ran freely down her face. She’d never looked fragile before, and it was his fault.
His father walked over to Graham’s mother and pulled her against his side. “What you did was careless and disrespectful. Anything could have happened, and there would have been nothing we could do.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“We’ll talk about it in the morning. We need to get to bed.” His father urged his mother forward. When they reached the hallway, he turned to Graham. “Next time, leave a note.” His voice was full of disappointment. It sent bone-deep chills through Graham’s body. His father could have been talking to a misbehaving employee. Graham tried to swallow past the lump of shame lodged in his throat.
He couldn’t even get mad at his parents. He wanted to. They were unreasonable about his safety. But could he blame them? It had been over a year, but the result of that night defined his life. It changed what he wore, how he carried himself, and his relationship with his parents. Some of the changes were good, others, not so much. Being happy, or at least sure of who he was: good. The doubt and anxiety he always had to push aside: not so good.
After turning off the remaining lights on the first level, Graham went upstairs to his room. Weariness and doubt hung heavy on his shoulders, making the trip seem longer than it was. He lay on his bed, staring into the velvet darkness of the room, his mind going too many directions for sleep to take him. After a few frustrated minutes, he turned on the light on his nightstand and tossed aside the covers and went to the closet.
Graham retrieved the shoe box hidden on the top shelf and sat down with it at his desk. His mouth dried. He’d come this far, but he wasn’t sure he could actually open the box. Inside was a collection of newspaper articles, photographs, medical reports, and cards he’d received while recovering from his assault. He’d collected the mementos obsessively during his physical and emotional therapy. A tangible “never again” reminder of all he’d been through.
He hadn’t opened the box since they’d moved to Green Valley. Somehow he’d hoped the new location would be a fresh start, a chance to be the real Graham, without the shadow of the attack hanging over him. In some ways that was true. Since he’d been here, he’d refused to apologize for being gay. Hell, he had the T-shirt collection to celebrate it. Granted, people no longer looked at him with sympathetic eyes or viewed him as some kind of spokesperson opposing violence against gays, but the attack still influenced too much of his life. The fear for his safety was the worst. He hated that he now viewed everyone and everything through a filter of doubt and suspicion.
Then there was Connor.
After the fiasco with Brandon, he’d promised himself that he’d never again be someone’s dirty little secret. His attraction to Connor had him second-guessing that decision. He could understand why Connor wasn’t ready to come out to the world. After all, he’d only really admitted it to himself a few weeks ago. Graham should give Connor all the time he needed to come to grips with this new aspect of his personality. There was no timeline or rule for coming out, and Graham would never deliberately push someone into doing it before they were ready.
Which left him stuck squarely between a rock and a hard place. He was tempted to be with Connor in secret, but he’d probably end up hating Connor for it. Or he could beg Connor to come out so that they could be together openly. Which might push Connor away for good. He didn’t like either option, which meant he’d probably have to take option C—ignore his feelings for Connor and hope to stay friends. He only hoped he could overcome the temptation of taking Connor any way he could get him.
“And in case you have doubts about it…,” he muttered to himself and lifted the lid on the shoe box.
The top of the pile was a piece of newsprint with Graham’s school picture next to the headline “Local Teen in Intensive Care After Apparent Gay Bashing Attack.” The accompanying article began, “In one of the most violent attacks St. Louis has seen against a gay teenager in recent years, sixteen-year-old Graham Parker faces months of surgery and physical therapy. The attack by local teens left Parker with third-degree burns over 20 percent of his body, cracked ribs, and a broken wrist….”
Below the article was a postcard. It was blank, white, except for the writing on it, which was thick and black. “You’re an abomination. You deserve what you got. As you burned on earth, you will burn in hell.”
Graham dug into the box and pulled out a stack of photos. Each picture showed a different injury at various stages of healing. For the most part when he looked at them, he could distance himself, as though he were looking at pictures on the television of someone else. Blackened skin that had to be scoured away. Patches of donor skin grafted onto his chest and back. Two black eyes and a broken nose. They all belonged to someone else, someone not real. Someone not him.
There was a light tapping at his door. He looked up and his dad peeked in, figure highlighted by the golden light from the hallway. “Couldn’t sleep?”
Graham placed the photos back into the box. “Nope. You?”
His dad shook his head. “Nope. Want to talk about it?”
“I don’t know.” He leaned back in his chair and looked at his father. Man, he looked tired. “Do you resent me?” The words came out before his brain had a chance to process them. He hadn’t even known he’d been thinking it.
“What? No.” His dad sat on the edge of Graham’s bed, hands clasped between his knees. “Why would you think that?”
“I….” Graham cleared his throat and continued. “We moved from St. Louis to Green Valley because of me. You never would have even considered it before… before. And now you have to travel to go to your meetings and Mom had to quit her job, and it’s all my fault.”
“No, Graham, no. There is no fault. It’s a choice we made. For you, to protect you, yes, but not because of you. We love you. Things were getting out of control in St. Louis, and you were miserable. Between the hate mail and the protesters and those that wanted to use you, to make you into some sort of political poster child, St. Louis wasn’t a healthy environment for you.”
“Yeah, but—”
“There are no buts,” his dad interrupted. “In case you didn’t know, there’s nothing we wouldn’t do for you, nothing we wouldn’t sacrifice. It’s what being a parent is about.”
“See, you say things like that, proving how awesome you are, which makes me feel terrible because I do stupid stuff like leave the house in the middle of night without letting anyone know where I went. And then you’re pissed and Mom’s scared and I feel like crap.”
“Graham, I wasn’t pissed. I was scared. You came in, and I wanted to hug you and strangle you at the same time. We’d spent the last hour and a half with worst-case scenarios running through our heads and remembering. It was hard to process, that’s all.”
Graham looked at his box of memories. “You know, I keep this so I remember every minute. I don’t want to forget any of it, that way I won’t make the same mistakes again. I documented every step, every feeling of that process. I don’t know, I never asked what you guys went through, what it was like for you.”
“You had enough on your plate. You didn’t need the burden of our reactions too.” He reached over and grabbed the shoe box off the desk. He peered in and blanched. “Jesus, Graham, why did you keep all of this?”
“I told you, I didn’t want to forget.”
His father placed the lid on the box and set it aside. “Do you really think you’re going to forget?”
“Not forget, exactly, more like I’ll repeat the mistakes. Like tonight. Because I wasn’t thinking, you and Mom had to relive parts of that nightmare. Sometimes I need to remember the cause and effect.”
“I think you’ve relived enough for tonight.” His father handed him the box. “Why don’t you do yourself a favor and get rid of that box. It’s poisonous. In the meantime, try and get some sleep.”
Graham held the box against his chest. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Were you, are you, okay with me being gay? With everything that happened, I never really got to tell you, you know, in person. It was one more thing that sort of came up in the rest of that mess.”
His father sighed and looked at his slippers. Graham’s heart stuttered in his chest. What if his dad was disgusted, or worse, disappointed?
“Here’s the thing,” he said. “I wish you had felt like you could tell me and your mother. The way we found out was difficult. And it hurt that you didn’t think you could trust us to react positively. Your mom took it a little hard, more the shock of it than anything. The thought that you might like boys better than girls never really crossed her mind. But she loves you, and once she wrapped her head around it, it was fine, just one more piece of you.”
“She hates that I’m obvious about it. She worries what people will think.”
“She’s afraid about what others will do, not what they think. She loves you, and she’s proud of you for being true to yourself. But you have to understand, as parents, we weren’t able to protect you from something horrible. Being helpless is hard on a parent. We couldn’t protect you then, so she’s determined to try and protect you now.”
“So it’s not that she wants me to be someone else?”
“No. She’s proud of who you are. But she worries, and the shirts and makeup give her something tangible to focus on.”
“How about you? You’ve never let on that it bothers you, but you’ve never really acknowledged it either.”
“It doesn’t matter to me who you’re attracted to. No more than it matters to me whether you like rock music or country.”
Graham snorted.
“Okay, bad example. My point, though, is that it’s part of who you are and I accept you for who you are. Besides, unlike your mother, I sort of suspected you might be gay before everything that went down last year.”
“No way! Seriously? How?”
“Oh, nothing concrete. You weren’t what I’d call obvious about it. You know, nothing that I would call swishy.”
The laugh that burst from Graham’s chest surprised him. “Dad, swishy is such a horrible stereotype.”
“Yeah, I know, but you know what I mean. You didn’t fall into a lot of the stereotypes. Sometime during your middle school years, I started to notice little things. You’d watch other boys while they were watching girls. But the real clue was when you started high school.”
His father’s wide grin made Graham distinctly nervous. “What was that?”
“You didn’t delete your browser history.”
It took a minute. The seemingly unrelated comment stumped him. Then it became all too clear. “Oh. My. God.” The blood drained from his head only to surge back in a blush.
When he was a freshman in high school, he’d been exploring his sexuality. That exploration had led to many hours on the Internet. Amazing what the right keyword search came up with. The results were enough to keep any fifteen-year-old boy glued to the computer for hours of entertainment and… education.
“Kill me now,” Graham moaned, burying his head in his arms.
“Well, let’s say that it was pretty clear where your interests lay.”
Graham released a heartfelt groan. His father knew Graham had watched gay porn. Never again would he forget to delete his browser history.
“Good night, Graham. Things will look better in the light of morning and after a few hours of sleep.”
“So we’re good?” Graham lifted his head.
“We’re good.” His dad stood up and headed toward the door.
“Good night.” Graham got up and turned off the light before slipping into bed.