Straightened-5
2008 Words
“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.”
CHAPTER 7Nick invited Kennedy up to the passenger seat once they pulled out of the Abernathys’ fortress. She figured if she didn’t get him talking soon, he’d be tempted to fill the silence with more from the Babylon Eunuchs, so she jumped up front and buckled quickly.
“You ever been in their house before?” he asked, giving the Abernathys’ mansion one last glance in his rear-view mirror.
Kennedy shook her head.
“I went with the Lindgrens to a Christmas party there a couple years ago. Nice place.”
Part of Kennedy wished he’d say more. Wished he’d tell her a little bit of Noah’s story, even though she knew it was none of her business. Her dad would chide her if he knew what she was thinking. Her whole life she’d grown up hearing his adages. Don’t judge someone just because they sin differently than you. Don’t judge someone who fails a test you yourself have yet to pass. Don’t judge someone until you’ve crawled into his skin and walked around a little bit. He stole that last one from the novelist Harper Lee, but it was probably Kennedy’s favorite quote of them all.
“So.” Nick drummed a little beat on the bus’s steering wheel, while on the dashboard his Peter, James, and John bobble heads bounced around with enormous smiles painted on their caricatured faces. “You tired? You want me to take you back to the Lindgrens’ to get some sleep?”
“It’s not too bad.” She couldn’t sleep now even if the fairies from A Midsummer Night’s Dream were singing her lullabies. She glanced at the Frisbees strewn across the floor of the bus, along with some crushed water bottles and empty Gatorade containers. “But you’ve had a long night. I don’t want to keep you up.”
Nick waved his hand. “Don’t worry about me. I had two energy drinks before youth group started. I’m in the same boat as you. Won’t be getting to sleep for another two or three hours at least.”
Neither one spoke. Kennedy stared out the window at the ornate lamps lining the Newton streets. What would it be like to live out here? The Abernathys’ home was modest compared to a few of the other estates they passed. She thought about Woong, wondered what his life had been like living on the streets before he ended up at that South Korean orphanage. How was it that some people could live in such superfluous luxury while half the world’s children were starving or malnourished? How could they be so calloused? So cruel to shut their ears to the cries of the needy?
Then again, it wasn’t as if her own family was living in a hovel in Yanji. They owned a big home in an upscale expat neighborhood and more often than not had at least a few live-in housekeepers, gardeners, and security workers. She didn’t have to work a campus job to buy her textbooks. Thanks to an inheritance from her grandmother, she wouldn’t even need to take out student loans until med school. When she went hungry at Harvard, it was because she hadn’t taken the time to eat, not because she was too poor to buy food or because the rains had failed to produce a crop. Maybe she was more privileged than she cared to admit.
When they left the gated community, Nick turned on a new CD.
- Writer
