Kennedy Stern Christian Suspense Complete Box Set (Books 1-9)

Straightened-3

“I can’t accept that, Pastor. I just can’t.”

The door to Carl’s study burst open, and Wayne’s voice flooded down the hall.

“Now, listen here,” Carl was saying, “I know your son. He’s a good kid who loves you. And you’re a good dad who loves him. We’ve got to find a way to ...”

“It’s unnatural.” Wayne shook his head. “And it’s sinful. You said so yourself, right from the pulpit. The Bible calls it an abomination. There’s no way to get around it. An abomination is an abomination.”

Carl planted himself in the hall so Wayne couldn’t pass. With his arms crossed and his feet spread out, Kennedy got a hint of what he might have looked like as a linebacker playing for the Saints before he went into full-time ministry. “I think we’re talking about two different things here. The Bible’s referring to very clear-cut cases of living outside of God’s standards of purity. But your son just told you he ...”

Wayne let out a harsh noise from the back of his throat. “He just what? Fantasizes about men? And you’re telling me that’s not a sin, that just because he hasn’t gone to bed with ...”

Sandy made a noisy show of stacking and rearranging the dishes on the table. Both men turned.

“Maybe we should talk about this again in the den,” Carl suggested.

“I need to get out of here.” It was Noah now, standing behind the two men but refusing to raise his eyes to either.

“Listen here, son.” Carl put his hand on Noah’s back, but he squirmed away.

“I’m done. I’m not doing this anymore. Now that you know that this is the way I am ...”

“But that’s what I’m trying to tell you,” his father interrupted. “This isn’t who you are. You’re confused. Something happened to you.” There was pleading in his tone.

Kennedy kept her eyes down, certain she wasn’t supposed to be listening in on this conversation. But where could she go?

“Someone did this to you.” Wayne spoke with conviction. Compassion. There was a slight tremor in his voice. Was he about to cry? “Who was it? Who did this to you?” He reached toward his son, but Noah slapped his hand away.

“Who did this to me?” His whole body trembled along with his voice. His words were laden with emotion, as if Kennedy could wring them out and smell his tears and sweat and fear and pain. “Ask God. The same one who calls people like me an abomination.”

Wayne sighed. “I didn’t mean ...”

“Yes, you did.” Noah shouldered his way past Carl and his dad. “I’m taking the T. I’ll see you later.”

“Where are you going?” Wayne demanded.

Noah didn’t turn around or offer any answer. The door slammed shut behind him, its dull thud reverberating through the silence of the house.

Wayne deflated. Kennedy wondered if he would go after his son. Carl and he stood planted in their places for several seconds until the microwave timer beeped. Sandy got up absently. “That’s for Woong. I’m going to tell him he can be out of time-out.” She sighed heavily. “Have a seat, everyone. I think we’ll just do something easy like grilled cheese for lunch.”

CHAPTER 4“I’d like to apologize for my son’s outburst.” Wayne wiped his mouth with one of Sandy’s floral-patterned cloth napkins.

Kennedy blinked her heavy eyelids. Somewhere in the back of her brain, her mind was shouting at her that she didn’t belong. Not here. Not now.

“Don’t worry about it.” Sandy filled his glass with more lemonade. “This is a big deal, what God’s doing in your family. It’s not going to be easy. Carl and I just want you to know that if you and Vivian ever need ...”

“I don’t know what went wrong.” Wayne shook his head. “I mean, we did Boy Scouts every week until he was in tenth grade. He did sports. I coached his Little League team three summers in a row.” He looked across the table at Carl, his eyes imploring. “Where did I go wrong?”

Carl hadn’t touched his grilled cheese sandwich. “You know, brother, five years ago I’d probably be asking those same questions right there with you. I’d be asking you if there was any abuse in the past, any members of the family or babysitters or someone who might have introduced him to that lifestyle. But you know, I don’t think it’s as simple as that anymore. I was at the Christian bookstore the other day. Had a book there, something like Raising Kids Straight. The whole thing was about giving parents a formula where if they did this, that, and the other thing, they could rest assured that their girls would grow up to be attracted to men and their boys attracted to women. But you know what? Some people struggle differently than others.” He took his wife’s hand. “It’s quite possible your son would have dealt with these feelings no matter how you brought him up.”

Wayne clenched his jaw shut. Kennedy saw his forearm bulge as he held onto his dainty lemonade glass. “That’s not helping any, Pastor. The Bible says that if you raise children up the way they should go that when they’re old they won’t depart from it. Proverbs 22:6. Had that one memorized since the day Noah was born. Made God a promise I was going to do right by my boy. And I did. I know I’ve been busy. Work stuff. Travels. But you know me. I’ve been there for my son. Elections and campaigns and extra sessions and shutdowns, and I’ve still been there for my son. Talked to him every day of his life, even if I wasn’t there to tuck him in bed. Boy Scouts, Little League, I went to as many of his games as I could if I was in town. I’ve done everything I could for that kid.”

“We know that,” Carl said.

“Then how could he do this to us?” Wayne’s voice broke, and Kennedy’s soul screamed with questions of her own.

“More,” Woong demanded from the other end of the table, and Sandy absently set another sandwich on his plate.

Carl rested his forearms on the table. “I’m not sure your son chose to be gay. You heard him in there just a few minutes ago telling us how often he’s begged God to change him.”

“So why didn’t he?” Wayne nearly sobbed.

Kennedy could hardly lift her eyes, not only from the jetlag but the confidential nature of this entire conversation. She shouldn’t be here. She should excuse herself to another room, but at this point would that make Wayne feel even more awkward?

As Kennedy did her best to act inconspicuous, she tried to figure out what she believed. Was Carl right? Would Noah have ended up like this no matter how he was raised? Was being gay a choice you made, like becoming a vegetarian? Or was it something different? Something more intrinsic?

Wayne hung his head in his hands. “I just wish ...”

“What’s gay?” Woong asked the question loudly and clearly, without any hint of an accent.

Sandy stood up and reached across the table for the fruit salad. “All right, pumpkin. You’ve had enough grains and dairy. I think it’s time for you to get another helping of ...”

“Does it mean sick?” he asked.

“Being gay,” Carl explained, and Kennedy watched him adroitly avoid Sandy’s well-aimed glare, “is when a person of one gender finds him or herself romantically and physically attracted to a member of the same gender. It’s a complicated psychological and biological issue with all kinds of theological implications that has become very divisive in contemporary Christian circles. The more conservative scholars tend to agree that ...”

“What’s he saying?” Woong asked Kennedy.

“Here, son.” Sandy plopped a heaping spoonful of strawberries and bananas on his plate. “I want you to eat up plenty of fruit so you’ll get lots of good, healthy vitamins.”

Nobody mentioned Wayne or his son for the rest of the meal. Kennedy excused herself to the guest room as soon as lunch was over. Sandy was taking Woong out for an afternoon of clothes shopping, and Kennedy didn’t exactly want to be a third wheel while Carl and Wayne worked through whatever personal matters they were going to discuss.

Kennedy wondered about Noah’s past. She’d lived a fairly sheltered life in Yanji, where homosexuality was never discussed on any public level. Gay pride and gay rights were unheard of. Even her parents never discussed the subject with her, unless it was her dad complaining about the pervasive gay agenda he saw in the media or American public policy. She had pieced together most of her understanding of the homosexual lifestyle from lunchroom gossip at her high school or an occasional sitcom her dad played in the background. She’d heard it rumored that her aunt’s ex-husband’s son was living some flamboyant lifestyle in a penthouse in Greenwich Village, but she hadn’t seen him in a decade and couldn’t even remember his name.

Kennedy’s body pulled her toward the bed, but she had resolved to stay awake until sunset. She was going to be taking biology and organic chemistry this term, with two afternoons of labs a week. She wasn’t going to start her semester in a half-fog from jetlag.

For students on the pre-med track, the first year was something of a gateway. If you made it through two semesters of general chemistry and didn’t flunk out of lab or get sidetracked by something else like sociology or gender studies, you knew you had it in you to complete your four years of undergrad and fulfill all the prerequisites for medical school. Since she was part of the early admissions program, Kennedy was guaranteed a spot in Harvard Med School after graduating, but she still had to keep up her GPA and complete the same pre-med courses as everyone else. She was looking forward to her Shakespeare class as a nice way to give her mind a break from all the science and lab work she’d be focusing on.

All things considered, she was on the right path for a promising academic career. Professor Adell from her chemistry lab had emailed her over the summer to tell her she was the first student she’d had in over ten years to get a hundred percent on her final exam. There was a hint that if Kennedy wanted, Adell could probably find her a position as a TA during her junior or senior year. Her parents had been proud, and her mom had sent out a mass email to all her friends and relatives bragging about Kennedy’s grades. She should be happy. But part of her dreaded going back to campus in four days, dreaded a semester without her best friend at Harvard with her.

She and Reuben had stayed in touch all summer, sometimes video chatting, sometimes texting at all hours of the day or night. She could look forward to long emails from Nairobi just about every day, and they had even started their own informal book club where they took turns recommending their favorite classics to each other and talking by phone each week about what they’d read. All that time together, and it wasn’t until last week that they broached the subject they’d both avoided.

Reuben wasn’t coming back to Harvard. Money was tight. His dad had taken a significant pay cut when the government in Kenya turned over, and the news anchor who broke the story about Reuben’s condition had embarrassed the family enough they probably wouldn’t have sent him back even if they could afford it.

Three whole months Kennedy spent in denial. Three months wishing and praying God would work some miracle to bring Reuben back to Cambridge. Twice she had worked up the nerve to write Carl and Sandy to ask if he could board with them to cut down some of the costs of campus living, but the emails were still sitting in her drafts folder.

It was so weird to think of a semester without him by her side.

She pulled one of her Shakespeare volumes out of her backpack. She knew she’d have to go back and read some of the histories for her class, but right now she wasn’t in the mood for kings and battles. She turned to Othello. Good, but pretty depressing. What about Twelfth Night? That would work out better for an evening like this.

No, not evening. It was the middle of the day. How long would it take for her body to adjust to East Coast time?

She propped the pillows up on her bed so she could lean against the headboard comfortably, and she felt her body relax into a pool of heaviness as she started the first act. If music be the food of love, play on. She could have recited the opening lines from memory if she wanted.