“Yup. Wearing my seat belt.”
“Have you considered what could happen if we were in an accident?”
Silver glanced around at the cars and trucks whizzing by as they squeezed into the early rush hour traffic on the interstate and shrugged. “Probably get creamed. And not in the fun way,” he added with a leer.
“Riding with your legs like that is more dangerous.”
“Oh, I seem to remember you liking a ride with my legs up around my shoulders once or twice—or was that around your shoulders?” Silver turned to see how Zeb took that.
Instead of the flush of heat and gulping swallow Silver had been counting on, he found a jaw clenched tight enough that a muscle jumped in a spasmodic tic.
“You won’t be up to your usual running away if both your legs end up amputated.”
Silver stared down at his knees. “I’d have crawled. To get away from that camp. To stay me.” He glared back at Zeb. “And who the fuck are you to talk about running? Haiti, seriously?”
“I called.”
“Yeah, on my eighteenth birthday.” Silver rolled his eyes.
“No. I tried calling a few days after you showed up that night. When I couldn’t reach you that way, I checked some of the places I thought you might be.”
Silver had already been on his way to Baltimore. Not that it would have fixed anything, but he was curious. Zeb sounded like that had meant something to him. Tipping his head to get more than a side view, he asked, “How hard did you look?”
Zeb glanced over, then back at the road before he let out a long breath, blunt fingers stretching and then regripping the steering wheel. “I’d had to resign. I got to keep my teaching certification because they didn’t press charges. But only because I met their requirements. Ten years in prison is a long time, Jordan.”
If Zeb had lived long enough to serve it. Silver pictured him trying to calmly intervene in a knife fight. The theater in his head expanded to IMAX size in time for him to watch the blade go into Zeb’s gut, perfectly capturing both the spread of dark blood on prison orange and the pained confusion on Zeb’s face. The AC blasting in the car was suddenly a little too effective as the hair all over Silver’s body stood on end.
“Actually, it wouldn’t have been that long,” Zeb said dryly. “Sex offenders don’t have a long lifespan in prison.”
Zeb’s wry sense of humor had popped up at some of the weirdest times and had always been something Silver loved about him. But with that scene playing out in his head, he couldn’t laugh. And he couldn’t control a shiver.
Zeb reached out and turned down the AC. “I’m not trying to boss you around. I just don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Everybody hurts.”
Zeb sighed. “Michael Stipe aside, it doesn’t mean I can’t care about you.”
In his best Alec Guinness imitation, Silver intoned, “You cannot escape your destiny.”
Zeb gave him a wry smile. “Thanks for the insight, Obi-Wan, but I was talking about your feet on the dashboard.”
“Oh.” Silver glanced at his feet, then dropped them into the footwell on top of his Chucks.
The next couple of miles were quiet but nowhere near as awkward as when Silver had first gotten in the car. Until one phrase started to repeat itself in his head. Zeb had called himself a sex offender. Like he was a pedophile or something. That was nuts. Silver might have been sixteen, but if anybody was the offender, he was. He’d pushed things as fast as he could, though Zeb had put the brakes on penetration for the first nine weeks and three days.
Cinematic memory or not, Silver wasn’t likely to forget losing his virginity. Or when he’d lost it the other way two days later.
On the subject of sex and laws telling you how to have it, Silver had another question, considering they were talking now and they were still five miles from New Freedom. “If you were so freaked out about being arrested as a sex offender, how come you wouldn’t back down that night with the cops?”
There was the reaction he’d been looking for earlier, the flush and the thick swallows. But not for the right reason.
After a pause Zeb said, “When I saw you that night, I lost it. I couldn’t think about anything else. I didn’t think about anything else.”
“Anything else but what?”
“You.” Zeb’s tongue moistened his lips. “I had to make sure you were all right.”
“And you thought getting arrested was a good way to do that?”
“Behold my master plan.”
Silver had missed that smile. Not the warm and friendly one Zeb gave to everyone. No, this was from the real guy, the one who didn’t throw sunshine around like some kind of happy bubble. The one with the crooked grin.
Zeb shot a look over to the passenger seat. “Worked, though, didn’t it?”
“How the fuck do you call getting arrested a success?”
“I found out how you were.”
Silver snorted and folded his arms. “I didn’t tell you shit while we were in jail.”
“But I know now.” Zeb did his smile again, then reached over to lightly shove Silver’s knee. “And you are all right.”
All of the easiness between them disappeared as soon as they took the exit. It was still two miles from town, and another two to the shiny new development near the golf course where Silver had lived between the ages of thirteen and seventeen plus two months. His breath sped up, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t make the transition out of himself and into that wide-angle lens. If he were shooting the scene, he’d use some kind of effect to make everything look washed-out and pale. But everything was bright under the June sun. Even the cows on the outlying farms gleamed like they were freshly washed. An unnatural freaky land where everyone was white and straight and knew each other’s business. Eli was right. It was a fucking cult.
It was a miracle the shit hadn’t hit the fan before when Zeb got the job at the local school. If Zeb hadn’t lived almost all the way up in York, Silver would never have been able to pull off lying so long.
“The coffeehouse closed,” Zeb said as he took the left off Front Street.
“Yes, I can see that.” Silver hated the mockery in his own voice. Hated everything about how he felt right then. Because it felt like it had before. Before Zeb and a sweet six months of someone who saw who Jordan Barnett really was and said he loved him anyway.
Before had meant constantly failing to live up to whatever it was Thomas and Cheryl expected in a son. Where earning a B in a hard class was practically failing. Or making the second-team doubles in tennis wasn’t any better than being cut. Then listening to the talk of perversion and disgusting deviants, knowing it was about him, though he wouldn’t dare say it out loud.
Silver wiped his hands on the work pants he’d worn instead of jeans—as if he really gave a shit what they thought of his clothes. As soon as he had his birth certificate and social security card, he’d never have to even say their names again.
As Zeb passed the last few close-together houses, his jaw did the tight-tic thing, knuckles showing bone-white on the steering wheel. Was he mad because Silver had been such a shit? The coffeehouse, their first date, trading a few details while the electricity built between them so they left half-filled cups to check out how the Star Wars DVDs looked on Zeb’s new hi-def TV. The DVDs never made it out of the box. They didn’t get as far as Silver wanted, but far enough to let him know he’d wanted more.
Silver pulled at the knees of his slacks to loosen the crotch. “Did you ever wonder what would have happened if we’d met when we—if I was older?”
“No.”
Ouch.
Okay. Silver wanted to say he couldn’t blame him, but of course he did. It had been something Silver had liked to tell himself some nights when he couldn’t find a place to sleep. Nights when he felt like he was a short doze away from freezing to death. Nights when he’d suck or fuck anyone to keep warm, to have a place to sack out for a few hours. He’d walk and walk
and believe Zeb hadn’t turned him away. Hadn’t told Silver to never come show his face again. That Silver’s age had been the only thing keeping them apart.
Silver was staring hard at the edges of the golf course as the GPS ordered them to turn left, but he felt Zeb’s gaze and looked back to face him.
“I don’t have to.” Zeb’s voice didn’t give Silver a clue about whether that was good or bad.
Zeb stopped the car right before the Appleblossom Road cul-de-sac. “Do you want me to come with you?”
“I think that probably won’t help me get the stuff I need. But thanks.”
Zeb nodded.
“You can go take care of whatever you needed to do. I’ll meet you back here.” Silver climbed out of the car, trying to unhunch his shoulders as he stood next to the manicured lawn.
“My stuff won’t take long,” Zeb said.
Silver didn’t look back while he walked past the first three houses, but he didn’t hear the car pull away either. Maybe because there was other stuff going on. Kids whizzing by on bikes. Cars pulling into their drives, doors slamming as people came home from work. He felt people looking at him, someone walking in a neighborhood devoted to wheels. Did they recognize him, remember him? The tall, pretty blond boy who’d kept to himself. Would they stare more when he went to the front door and rang the bell? He could go around back, take the key out of the fake rock, and let himself in through the garage. Had they kept his car? The one he’d earned for keeping straight As through sophomore year. Funny to learn it wasn’t his, though he’d worked part-time at the golf course to contribute to insurance and pay for gas. The phone wasn’t his. The computer.
The clothes or anything else in his bedroom. At seventeen, he hadn’t owned a damned thing if his parents said he didn’t.
The front door, then, since this wasn’t his house anymore. His hand shook when he pushed the bell, so he shoved them both in his back pockets. They had all the power. Everything he’d done since he left had been so no one could dictate to him again, and now he was back begging at their door. He felt less shame about having been a hustler. If he was fucked over then, it was on his own terms. He’d made the choice. And he dealt with what consequences there were.
His father answered the door. “Come in and sit down.”
Silver stepped in and aside so his father could shut the door. The grim lines in the lightly golf-tanned face were probably what a patient got when Dr. Barnett was about to deliver the bad news about melanoma. As his father moved toward the sitting room, Silver realized he was now taller than his father, enough to look down on the light brown wavy hair and see the gray roots.
If Silver was in for a lecture, he’d take it, but only if he got what he needed in exchange. “Are you going to give me what I came for?”
“I said I would.”
Yeah, but he’d also said You’re my son and I’ll always love you and This is for your own good when he’d sent Silver off to Camp Path to Glory. Silver wasn’t dumb enough to take people’s word for it anymore. The tweaker who’d named him Silver had taught him that. Always get the money up front.
With an exaggerated sigh more drama queen than even Eli could pull off, Silver’s father went to the mantel and held up a manila folder, then used it to point to a chair in the sitting room. After a quick glance to see that his school pictures were conspicuously absent from the mantel, Silver focused on the folder that didn’t leave his father’s hand. Silver sat on the edge of the chair. The golfing tan was darker on his father’s forearms, tough sale for a dermatologist, or maybe the years were catching up to him.
His father sat, crossing one khaki-panted leg over the other and opening the folder on his lap so Silver could see what was in it. It didn’t look like what he’d expected. The blue social security card he recognized, and his license, but not the paper that looked like a form covered with boxes. It wasn’t anything like the framed certificate he remembered seeing in his father’s home office, the one with the scrollwork and gold paint and tiny inked footprint declaring the birth of Jordan Samuel Barnett on August 4 at 2:35 p.m.
Silver ran a quick film in his head, him overpowering his father, yanking away the folder, and running to the entrance of the development, down the highway to catch Zeb, get himself the fuck out of here. A couple of weeks ago, he might have done something so stupid.
Now he played the film out to the unavoidable ending: the cops picking him up at the gallery, Eli and Gavin and Zeb shaking their heads in disgust for having wasted so much on Silver, who would always fuck up, never be worth it.
“Where’s….” he rejected a couple of choice words before settling on “your wife?”
“Your mother,” Thomas corrected sharply, “is upstairs resting. She has a migraine.”
Silver nodded, curling his tongue back against his palate to stop the words that would demand his father accept some reality. Migraine was the unchallenged cover for his mother working her way through her second bottle of wine.
Silver knew he should probably wait his father out. Speaking first put Silver in the weaker position, but he only wanted to leave. It had been made clear three years ago this wasn’t his home, and it sure as hell wasn’t his life anymore.
“Why am I here?”
His father skirted the question. “Impressive representation you have. My own attorney recognized the name of the firm.” He scrutinized Silver’s less-than-impressive, washed-out-to-dullness black slacks and thrift-store shirt.
Silver ignored the how-can-you-afford-that-lawyer question his father didn’t ask aloud. “Thanks.” So maybe it was sarcastic gratitude, but given how much anger Silver was sitting on, he figured he was doing the best he could.
“Exactly how are you supporting yourself?”
Score one for me. He’d made his father say it out loud. “I’m working.”
“Without your social security card?”
Silver studied his father. He was desperate to know the worst, believed the worst—though the worst in Silver’s father’s mind would be Silver living with some sugar daddy. His father had no idea what the worst really was.
“Something you want to ask?” Silver leaned back in the uncomfortably rigid chair.
Who’d have thought the old man cared?
His father’s gaze broke away, shifting to the side. Silver wanted to pump his fist in triumph.
“I’ve only ever wanted the best for you, son.”
“Your definition of it.”
“Can you honestly tell me you have been living a life that would make me proud? Yourself proud? One that pleases the sight of the Lord?”
“You obviously have the answer all figured out.” There wasn’t any point in getting into it with his father if it was going to turn into a battle over religion. Nothing he could say to win that fight.
“So you agree.”
“I didn’t say that. Maybe I haven’t always been proud of what I’ve had to do, but I’m not the one who threw a seventeen-year-old on the street.” Silver heard his voice rise and had to grip the chair arms to keep from following it out of the chair.
“Don’t be so dramatic. We sent you to people who could help.”
“Help me? They were helping some kids to kill themselves.”
His father waved that off. “Some children are already too disturbed to save.”
“I’m not disturbed. I’m gay.”
And there was the disgust Silver knew so well.
“No one is homosexual, Jordan. It isn’t something a person can be. People are molested or confused or led into that behavior. As you were.”
Silver wanted to laugh. “By Z—” He froze. Zeb was out there, in New Freedom. And even if his rejection had been the biggest betrayal of all, Silver couldn’t pay him back by putting his name in the head of a close-minded bigot like the one in front of him. He took a deep breath and rose to his feet. “May I please have the folder?”
He could fake politeness with the right words but couldn’t do anything about
the way anger scraped his voice raw.
His father stood, the folder in both hands, his brow furrowed but his eyes open, as if he really meant what he said. “I’m offering you a chance to get your life back. You could go to college. Whatever situation you’ve found yourself in, you can change. You can be forgiven.”
For half a second, Silver thought maybe his father wasn’t hopeless. Maybe he wanted to be the dad Silver remembered before they’d moved here from West Virginia. Before they’d bought this big house and everything changed.
But that invitation was only extended to an imaginary straight version of his son. “No, thanks.”
“You could spare a thought for your mother’s health.”
“Her health? There’s nothing wrong with her a few weeks in rehab couldn’t fix.” In a blur, his father backhanded him across the face.
Silver’s ears rang and blood filled his mouth. Controlling the urge to spit it back, he swallowed the coppery mess and worked his jaw for a minute, glancing down at the papers that had dropped when his father lashed out. “That’s a new tactic. Watch what I learned in Sunday school.” He turned his other cheek toward his father. “Go ahead. I can take it.”
The old man trembled, then shoved his hands in his pockets.
“I’ll just take these, then.” Silver bent and scooped the papers back into the folder.
His father stood silent, fists clearly visible in the pockets of his khakis, weathered cheeks flushed.
“Guess what, Dad?” Silver put as much disgust in that word as he could. “I was a whore. Sold my ass on the street. And I hated myself for it.” His lip was still bleeding, and he wiped it on the back of his hand, almost a smile stretching the hot, swelling skin as he remembered Zeb and his first aid kit. Ready to drive Silver’s sorry, bleeding self out of danger. “But I’d rather have lived like that than let you try to change me. Or make me ashamed enough to lie.”
Silver strode into the foyer to find his mother coming down the stairs, a tight grip on the railing, her body rigid as she tried to look sober. She’d been faking it so long, she was pretty good at it.
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