Straightened-6
2029 Words
“Is this Potter’s Clay?” Kennedy asked. “I haven’t heard them since junior high.”
“I’m impressed. I don’t find many people around today who know Potter’s Clay.”
“I’m a little surprised anybody still listens to them anymore.”
Nick chuckled. “Don’t be dissing on Potter’s now. Not unless you want me to turn this bus around and drive you straight home.”
Kennedy smiled and tried to remember the last time she and Nick had done anything alone together. Probably that one night last winter when they’d gone out for clam chowder at the little walk-up restaurant stand in Harvard Square.
“You hungry?” Nick’s dreadlocks whipped around slightly as he turned toward her for a quick glance. “We could stop somewhere if you want.”
“That sounds nice.” What else was she supposed to do when her body was already awake for the day? She’d have to try to make it another twenty hours before she went to sleep again. Then maybe she could get herself back on East Coast schedule before she started her classes.
“I know this neat little bakery in Harvard Square. It’s a drive, but it’s not like we’ll be fighting traffic. What do you say?”
There was only one bakery Kennedy knew of near campus that stayed open this late. “Are you talking about L’Aroma? My roommate goes there all the time.”
“No kidding? It’s a great little shop. So you up for it?”
Kennedy had been hooked at the word bakery. Her mouth watered as readily as Pavlov’s pack of lab dogs’. “Sure. That sounds great.”
They drove along in comfortable silence. Kennedy wondered what Reuben was doing right about now. It was morning in Kenya.
Lucky him.
She had spent a lot of time over the summer talking to both God and her mom about her relationship with Reuben. Of course, as soon as her mom heard about his diagnosis, she was against anything that even hinted at romance developing between them. She tried to be sympathetic, but Kennedy knew she was relieved that he wasn’t coming back to campus in the fall.
It didn’t make sense. People could be together with HIV. It wasn’t the death sentence it had been a decade or two ago. Reuben was getting good medical care at Nairobi Hospital, and there were ways for patients to keep their loved ones from getting the virus themselves.
It could have worked out. That’s what made the whole situation so depressing. It wasn’t as if it were a breakup, because they had never actually been dating, but that almost made it worse. When you broke up with somebody, you could at least tell yourself you’d tried and it hadn’t worked out. Why would you want to be with someone who didn’t want to be with you? But Kennedy didn’t have any of those nice platitudes to fall back on. She hadn’t chosen to say good-bye to Reuben at the end of last semester. Would she even see him again? She still couldn’t pinpoint exactly where home was for her, but Kenya was a long way off no matter how you looked at it.
“I think I’m mostly a night owl. What about you?” Sometimes Nick’s thoughts materialized out of a vacuum. She didn’t know if it was some sort of social awkwardness or just the result of him being so comfortable with his own personal musings.
“I stay up late when I’m studying,” she replied, “but if there’s nothing else going on I guess I’m more of a morning person. Except when I’m jetlagged.”
“What time is it over at your parents’?”
“Right around noon.”
Nick let out a low whistle. “That’s got to be crazy to adjust to.”
“Yeah, it’s actually easier going from here to there for some reason. Coming back to the States has always felt harder.”
“So what exactly is it your parents do in China?” Nick asked.
Kennedy was glad to have some trivial chitchat to offer. It beat moping in the bus, pining away for Reuben, while the apostles’ heads bobbled up and down with their mocking grins. “They work along the North Korean border. Take in refugees. A year ago they had a whole group of them. Gave them training and then sent them back to North Korea as underground missionaries.”
“Sounds dangerous.”
“Yeah. One of the girls came back home. Back to my parents’, I mean. She’d been captured. Tortured pretty bad, I think.”
“That’s intense. What about your parents? Do they ever get in trouble or anything?”
“The police stop by. They’re at least under suspicion at this point. That’s why they haven’t taken in any new refugees lately. They’ve started to move more toward brothel rescues there in Yanji, which is less likely to get them in trouble with the law. Except now it’s the pimps and stuff they’ve got to worry about.”
“Sound like they’re amazing believers.”
Kennedy had never really thought about her parents in those terms. Amazing? Maybe. If you were to look at their ministry, at least. But she had the feeling that if Nick saw her parents’ day-to-day lives, he might not be so impressed. Her dad spent fifty or sixty hours a week at his printing business, his legal front for living in China. Her mom had gotten so addicted to this TV medical drama she’d made Kennedy buy her a fourteen-disc DVD set in the States to bring to Yanji over the summer. Her parents argued and bickered all the time, and her mom was now menopausal and let everyone and everything within a mile radius know about it.
Probably not the picture Nick had when he called them such amazing believers.
He pulled the bus into the L’Aroma Bakery parking lot. There were a few other customers there, but it was quiet inside. They ordered at the counter and took their food and drinks to a table in the back.
“I wonder how Noah’s doing.” Nick took out his cell phone. “No messages yet. I guess that’s a good sign.”
“Are you two pretty close?”
Nick took a bite of his egg and veggie burrito. “Sort of,” he said with his mouth full. “We got to talking a lot over the summer. That’s when all this stuff started coming out.”
Kennedy tried to guess if he was making a pun as she took a sip from her hot chocolate, careful to keep her nose out of the whipped cream.
“Today was the first time he told his dad. We had talked about it before then, but he never felt quite ready. I told him I’d go with him, and as far as I knew, that’s what the plan was. I don’t know why it all happened today. I wonder how Mr. Abernathy took it.”
“I was there when he and Noah were talking with Carl. He was pretty upset.”
Nick wiped his mouth on a napkin. “I’m not surprised. Senator Abernathy’s been the most conservative member of the state house when it comes to gay rights and these so-called family values.”
There was something mocking in the way he said the phrase. She wasn’t sure how to read him.
He laughed mirthlessly. “Not gonna look too good to all his constituents when it comes out that Mr. Homophobe himself has a son who’s gay.” He shook his head, and the tip of one dreadlock nearly landed in his salsa.
Kennedy figured she’d probably come across sounding like a child, but Nick dealt with kids for a living. Maybe he wouldn’t mind. “I have a question.” She paused, wondering how to best word it. “When you say Noah’s gay, what exactly do you mean?”
Nick’s eyes widened, and Kennedy imagined him trying to figure out how to explain the intricacies of male homosexual intimacy to a nineteen-year-old college virgin.
She hurried on to explain better. “I mean, I wasn’t trying to overhear, but they were talking all over the place, and it was getting pretty loud, and Noah said he hadn’t ever ... He told his dad he wasn’t ... He’s never ...”
“Actually had s*x with a man?” Nick finished for her, and Kennedy’s face warmed to the temperature of her cocoa.
She nodded, keeping her eyes on the shavings of nutmeg on top of her whipped cream.
“That’s a really good question.”
She let out her breath. Why did these talks always have to be so awkward? Her dad forced her into conversations about so many weird, random topics, like how to file a s****l harassment complaint or how to react if she thought a date spiked her drink. But then there were other subjects they never broached at all.
Like whether or not a Christian boy who’s never slept with anybody could be gay.
Nick took a noisy gulp of his herbal tea. “So, there’s some people who say that you’re not gay until you’ve actually had gay s*x. That’s probably where the confusion comes in.”
Kennedy was glad L’Aroma wasn’t very crowded. She didn’t think this was the kind of conversation she’d like to have with a dozen other diners listening in.
“But then again, if you were to ask me if I’m gay or straight, it’s not like I need to have slept with a woman to know that I’m straight, right?”
“I guess so.” In the back of Kennedy’s mind, she was wondering if listening to the Babylon Eunuchs would be more pleasant than this.
“So it all boils down to identity. And that’s kind of a loaded word, because the way we’ve been throwing it around makes it sound kind of like it’s this big choice, right? Like today I identify as a white male. Well, there’s more to it than that, and that’s where we get someone like Noah Abernathy. It’s not like he woke up one day and said to himself, Gee, I could use some extra attention. Guess I’ll say that I’m gay. In fact, he went years hiding it from everyone. You just look at his father, and you’ll know why. This is the same guy who championed that photographer who refused to shoot photos at a lesbian wedding. The family-values set made her into this huge martyr when she got sued, said it’s her right to refuse to participate in a supposedly sinful ceremony, but did you see her boycotting weddings of adulterers? Did she boycott weddings where the bride and groom had been living together years before they finally made their commitment legal? No. So you get all these people like Senator Abernathy talking about family values and lamenting this so-called gay agenda, and so of course his son’s gonna try to hide the fact that he’s attracted to other boys.”
Nick paused long enough to meet Kennedy’s eyes.
“What was your question? Oh, right. What does it mean to be gay. In Noah’s case, it means feeling so ashamed of who you are that you beg God every day to change you. You go to sleep just hoping and praying you’ll wake up and find yourself attracted to girls. It means sneaking Playboys into the bathroom, hoping it’ll do something for you, only it doesn’t. It means finally getting the nerve to tell your dad about what’s going on and have him kick you out of the house because you’re an abomination. That’s what being gay means. In fact, it has very little to do with who’s sleeping with who.”
Kennedy thought she understood, but that only led to even more complicated questions. She wasn’t sure where to start. She knew there were Christians who argued that gay relationships could be just as godly and righteous as a marriage between a husband and wife, but she had always seen them as some sort of “other,” entities she read about in her dad’s pro-family publications who were trying to undermine traditional marriage across the entire United States. Where did Nick stand? He worked for Pastor Carl, who had no problem teaching from the pulpit that homosexuality was a sin. Kennedy had just assumed that’s what every Christian believed, at least every mainstream evangelical.
Was she wrong?
Nick scooped up a big bite of egg that had fallen out of his burrito. “So, back when I was in high school ...”
Kennedy didn’t know if he was changing the subject or continuing on with the original conversation. She didn’t have the chance to find out. Nick’s phone rang, that same one-line chorus she had heard in the car on his uncle’s album.
“Hey, Pastor Carl.”
His face turned serious. Worried.
“No, we dropped him off nearly an hour ago ... Yeah, Kennedy’s still with me ... Are you serious? You’ve got to be joking.”
Nick stared at the phone, and Kennedy felt the base of her abdominal wall plummet toward the ground.
“Yeah, we’ll be there as soon as we can. Ok, bye.”
He turned off his phone and took a deep breath.
“The Abernathys’ home burned down. They say Noah’s missing and his dad’s dead.”
CHAPTER 8Kennedy and Nick didn’t talk or listen to any music as they raced back to the Lindgrens’. Kennedy was certain she had dreamed up this whole night. She was probably still so jetlagged she was in Carl and Sandy’s guest room coming up with some elaborately bizarre daydream. Or maybe she hadn’t even arrived in Massachusetts yet. Maybe she was dozing off on the plane from Seattle, sitting next to the cute French businessman who would ask her a dozen questions about China when she woke up.
- Writer
