CHAPTER 6
2224 Words
CHAPTER 6
NOAH SHOVED THE PHONE into his pocket.
Kennedy was trying to form the words to an apology when somebody stepped in through the front door.
“I’m sorry it’s so late. Are Carl and Sandy already sleeping?” Nick, the youth pastor from Carl’s church, slipped into the dining room, making as little noise as he could in his somewhat clunky leather sandals. If Kennedy had thought she was disoriented waking up to a pitch-black house, it was nothing compared to this. She kept checking out the window to make sure it really was nighttime.
Nick was wearing beige cargo shorts and a T-shirt with Jesus and three of his disciples walking down Abbey Road. A speech bubble showed them singing, “All you need is love,” and included a Bible reference from 1 John.
He gave Noah a side hug. “How you doing, brother? I was thinking I could take you out for coffee if it’s not too late.”
Noah hesitated. His hand hovered over the pocket of his pants.
“Or we could chat here if you don’t feel like going out. Whatever you want. I just want you to know I’m here for you.”
He still didn’t respond. Kennedy wondered if the next three days living at the Lindgrens’ would feel this awkward. Why was she always getting in everybody’s way? She should be asleep now, not hanging out in the hallway while a youth pastor stopped by to check on a teen who most likely had been kicked out of his own home when his dad found out he was gay.
Why did she have to be awake for this?
“Tell you what.” Nick flipped off his sandals. “I’m gonna get myself a glass of water. Me and some of the other guys were playing ultimate after youth group, and I’m parched. Once I’m done with that, you can tell me what you want to do.”
Nick had to pass Kennedy on his way to the kitchen, and it was the first time he indicated he’d noticed her. “Oh, hey. When did you fly in?”
“I landed right around noon.”
“You must be tired.”
Kennedy wished she was. “Actually, I’ve been asleep since lunchtime. I just woke up.”
Nick shook his head, and his blond dreadlocks shook around his shoulders. “Man, that’s rough.”
Noah’s cell phone beeped again. His profile looked sickly in its green glow.
Nick finished a noisy gulp of water from the Lindgrens’ sink. “All right, man. Wanna grab a snack? I’ve got a chill album in the bus. My uncle and his friends just put out a new ...”
“I gotta go.” Noah shoved the phone back in his pocket and put on his shoes.
“Where you headed?” Nick asked. “I’ll give you a ride.”
Noah walked right by him. “I need to go home.”
Nick frowned. “You sure? Back when we were texting, you said your dad ...”
“I need to go home,” he repeated.
Nick shrugged. “No prob. As long as you feel safe there.”
Noah let out a little snort. Kennedy didn’t like the sound of it.
Nick was slipping on his sandals again. “Well, I guess I’ll drive you home then, all right?”
“What’s going on out here?” Sandy’s sleepy voice emerged from the doorway of the master bedroom. She was tying the sash of her pink bathrobe as she came down the hall. “Nick? Is that you?”
He gave her a hug when she opened her arms to him. “Sorry for bothering you. I’d been texting a little with Noah and thought I’d pop over to see if he wanted to spend some time together. I wasn’t trying to wake you up.”
“Don’t worry about that.” Sandy brushed some hair out of her eyes. Kennedy hardly ever saw it down out of its braid. It was thicker than she would have guessed, with almost as much gray as brown. “Kennedy, did you get some good sleep?”
“Yeah, just not at the right time.”
Sandy gave her a pat on the back. “I’m sorry, hon. I told Carl he should wake you up, but then Woong and I had to run out to do some shopping, and Carl got called away for a hospital visit, and by the time we all got home and got dinner going it was so late already we weren’t sure if maybe you’d just sleep straight through the night. I guess that didn’t happen, did it?”
“No.” Kennedy had to match Sandy’s smile even though she didn’t find the situation amusing at all. The dorms opened in three days. She had to be ready, which meant she had to be on East Coast time.
Like, yesterday.
“So you’re awake for good, are you?”
“Probably until tomorrow night,” Kennedy answered. If she could make it that long without some sort of a nap.
“Well, let me get dressed, and I’ll keep you company while these boys go out and do their thing. You’re probably ready for breakfast of some sort, aren’t you?”
“That’s ok,” Kennedy assured her. “I really don’t need ...”
Sandy waved her hand in the air. “Don’t mention it. Lord knows I’ve lost enough sleep with Woong over the past few weeks. I probably couldn’t sleep straight through the night if I ...”
“She can come with us,” Nick interrupted, shooting Kennedy a glance from the other side of the room.
“No.” Sandy tied her apron over her bathrobe and then stared down at herself as if she couldn’t figure out what she’d just done. “You boys need some together time. It’s been a long day for Noah, and ...”
“I’m just dropping him off at home, that’s all,” Nick replied. “You don’t mind if Kennedy tags along, do you?”
Noah shrugged. “Whatever.”
“So you’re going home?” Sandy opened a cupboard and stared at its contents blankly before shutting it again. “What was I getting?” she mumbled to herself.
“You just go back to sleep.” Nick prodded her out of the kitchen as if she were a lost child. “I’ll take Noah home, and Kennedy can come with me so she has something to do.”
“Aren’t you tired?” Sandy was fidgeting with the strings of her apron, but Kennedy couldn’t tell if she was trying to take the whole thing off or tighten her knot. “You need your sleep, too.”
“Not as much as you do.” Nick guided her down the hall, and Sandy kind of floated back to her room, still fussing with her apron asking herself, “Now what was I doing with this old thing again?”
Nick gave Kennedy a little smile. “Sorry. I wasn’t trying to shanghai you or anything. I just wanted her to get some sleep.”
“Yeah, she needs it.” Kennedy had to admit she was a little jealous. She’d give up her Shakespeare sonnet book and quite a few of the tragedies for a chance to go to bed now and wake up in the morning like a normal East Coaster.
“All right, Noah, so if all we’re doing is taking you home, you really don’t mind if Kennedy tags along?” He turned back toward her. “If you feel like getting out for a bit, that is.”
She was feeling a little cooped up, and she had no idea what she’d do all night while the Lindgrens slept. She had plenty of books to keep her company, but her eyes were sore from all that dry air blowing into her contacts on the plane. She glanced at Noah to try to gauge his reaction.
“Whatever she wants.” He didn’t look at her. Kennedy got the feeling he didn’t care who took him home as long as he got there. What had changed? Why was he so eager to get back to his dad’s all of a sudden?
Nick jingled his keys on their colorful lanyard. “Well, you both ready?”
“I guess so.” Kennedy followed Nick to the youth group bus. “You painted a new Moses?” she asked when they got to the driveway.
Nick pointed at the passenger door. “Yeah, we pimped it up right before we drove out to the Awakening Festival. They do it every August out in New Hampshire. Christian bands from all over. We took twenty teens or so. Wanted to give the bus a fresher look before we hit the road.”
Kennedy looked at the painting of Moses parting the Red Sea. Last year, the scene had been pretty typical, something you might have found in a children’s Bible storybook if it weren’t for all the colorful tropical fish that were twice the size of Moses’ head swimming around the waves. But now, instead of an old man with a beard, Moses was a rock guitarist on roller skates, holding up a large microphone instead of a staff.
“Pretty cool, isn’t it?” Nick sounded so proud, Kennedy didn’t have the heart to reply.
“So my uncle got a new member for the Babylon Eunuchs,” Nick was saying once the van was running and they were all buckled in their seats. “They added a saxophone. Hear him in the background?” He turned up the volume on the stereo, and Kennedy tried not to wince at the music. If you could even call it that. The saxophonist seemed to be the only band member with talent, but his impressive riffs and licks just made the other musicians sound even more like amateurs.
Not that it took much.
“So, crazy day, eh?” Nick asked.
Noah shrugged. “I guess so.”
“You patch things up with your dad? I kind of thought you’d be at the Lindgrens’ for a while.”
Another shrug. In the background, the leader of the Babylon Eunuchs cawed on about peace flooding his soul, setting him free. Free from what? Kennedy wondered. The lyrics were so vague, the band could have been droning on about a junior-high romance if it weren’t for an occasional reference to the Holy Spirit.
It wasn’t any of her business what was going on with Noah, but still she was curious. Had his dad just found out he was gay? Is that what caused the big blow-up at Carl and Sandy’s? Kennedy had been sheltered enough she didn’t know much about the gay lifestyle until she got to Harvard, and there it was plastered all over the place. Her roommate Willow argued that everybody was bisexual, with some people on one end of the spectrum where they were mainly attracted to men, some on the other attracted to women, and everyone else in a happy sort of middle ground where they could swing either way. But there were so many questions. She knew her dad lamented about gay-friendly churches, but she had never actually known a gay Christian. What did that make Noah? Was he gay or was he Christian? Or could he be both?
There was something else even more puzzling. Noah said God had made him that way. He hadn’t chosen to be like that. It went against everything she read about in her dad’s conservative political magazines or those family-values blogs he sometimes sent her links to. The writers there all made it sound like homosexuals were some sort of deviant cultural subset that “traded in” the heterosexual lifestyle for an alternative one. But what did that mean for people like Noah? Had he somehow “traded in” his straightness to become gay? And what did he actually mean by gay? Did that mean Noah was in a relationship with another boy? How serious of a relationship did it have to be to be considered gay? Or did being gay come first? Were you gay as soon as you started experiencing same-s*x attractions?
Kennedy had crushes before. She didn’t remember choosing any of them. The fact that she was committed to a life of s****l purity before marriage didn’t mean she didn’t like the idea of being kissed. Of being held. It wasn’t wrong for her to picture that happening to her one day, was it? Where was the line drawn between normal biology and sinful lust? And was that line different for people who were attracted to members of the same s*x?
She didn’t know which was giving her more of a headache: these weighty theological questions that never seemed to arrive at any logical conclusion, the disorientation she felt at being wide awake an hour before midnight, or the terrible music spewing out of Nick’s stereo.
The Abernathys lived in a house in Weston that would have made Baptista’s mansion in The Taming of the Shrew look like a makeshift shanty. By the time Nick got them into their gated community and then past the security gate surrounding the family estate, the Babylon Eunuchs’ instrumentals mercifully faded away as the last song ended. Kennedy hoped Nick wouldn’t notice and start the whole half an hour of drivel all over again.
“You sure everything’s all right?” Nick asked, and Kennedy wondered why he would drop Noah off here if he wasn’t sure he’d be safe. Was Wayne the kind of dad who’d beat his kid for coming out of the closet? Kennedy couldn’t tell. Wayne was a mystery, always presenting whatever side the public would find most endearing, but somehow managing to come across as the most genuine and sincere politician you could expect to meet. He’d dropped out of the state governor race last fall after his daughter was kidnapped. He said his family needed him, and he had determined to make them his priority. He and his wife Vivian had adopted their young nephew, Charlie, and were raising him as their own. By all appearances, they were a caring, close-knit family. But of course appearances could deceive, especially when you were talking about someone who could manipulate public opinion as well as Wayne.
Noah thanked Nick for the ride. “I’ll shut the gate once you’re out.” He hopped out of the bus after the last of the security checkpoints. Kennedy wondered if Julius Caesar had been any more protected than the Abernathys.
“You sure you’re doing all right? Kennedy and I don’t have anywhere else to be. We can just drive around and talk if you want to.”
“I’m fine. It’s ok.” There was something soft in Noah’s smile that reminded Kennedy of his little sister Jodie.
“You need something, you text me. Got that?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Thanks.”
He shut the door to the bus, but Nick rolled the window down right away. “Hey.”
Noah turned around. “Yeah?”
“You stay safe. Got it?” There was something heavy in Nick’s tone. Something more serious than Kennedy was used to hearing from the youth pastor with his outlandish dreadlocks and crazy shirts.
Noah gave one more nod and a tired half-smile. “Yeah, ok. I will.”
- Writer
