Innocent (Inequitable Trilogy Book 2) Read online

  The good thing was, that early “miracle” designation helped me escape most of my father’s expectations. I hated playing organized sports and I wasn’t good at them. I was small for my age. Everything I survived, and my accompanying health issues, combined with my surprise conception after years of failures, meant my father didn’t push the issue when it came to sports. Although I loved hiking and mountain biking, and enjoyed going fishing with my father, because I enjoyed the peaceful contemplation aspects of it. Especially the rhythms and mechanics of fly fishing.

  That was the one thing my father and I bonded over when I was a kid—fishing.

  I started reading at three, thanks to Mom’s tutelage. I also started drawing and showed a natural aptitude for it, which my father wasn’t happy about, at first.

  But when I was eight, for Father’s Day I gave him a framed colored pencil drawing I made of a rainbow trout. My parents’ friends from church gushed about how talented their little miracle was. That, surely, God had given me a blessing to make up for my shitty start in life.

  Their unintentional religious-based guilt-trip seemed to put Dad at ease that it was okay to encourage my artistic skills. Wasn’t like I’d ever throw or catch a winning touchdown pass, or smack a triple play out of the park, right? And hey, he could take me fishing, and I was never grossed out about bait, or gutting and cleaning fish. So that was something “manly” he could do with me.

  Doing dirty, hard work has never grossed me out. I earned my father’s respect for that, too. While I wasn’t good at mechanical things, I never hesitated to get my hands dirty when asked to do so. To my father’s credit, he seemed more impressed by my attempts and willingness to help, even if I ended up standing there doing little more than handing him tools. To him, I was trying.

  On the weekends when we weren’t going fishing, I took my sketchbooks and pencils and headed out on my bike for the woods in the nearby national park. When I returned home late in the day, I usually had dozens of realistic renderings that I eagerly showed my parents.

  One of the few times, other than when we went fishing, that my father proudly nodded and paid attention to me. I even won a few awards in school and at county fairs for my artwork.

  Playing with colors and shapes fascinated me. I usually ended up designing sets for our school plays. The way things fit together intrigued me, and my parents’ minister theorized I might go on to become an engineer or architect. Which was nothing to be ashamed of, he assured my parents.

  Throughout my life, one of the many secrets I kept from my parents is how much I haaaated most everything to do with church. The minister was boring, when he wasn’t being terrifying. I loved the music, and loved staring up at the curved rafters in the sanctuary while dreaming about cathedrals I’d studied, their arches and stonework.

  My mother never let on to my father how much TV I watched whenever I was stuck home sick. I spent enough time in bed on school days that, when I was seven, I got my own small TV in my room, a second-hand one, and they hooked it up to cable.

  There was so much normal-kid stuff I missed out on, I guess Mom guilt-tripped Dad into paying the extra expense for me.

  Wasn’t like they had Little League fees to pony up on my behalf.

  I saw a whole world that felt a million miles away on that little screen. I always wanted to go to New York City, but my parents shot down that idea every time. They hated the city with a passion, as did many of their friends. The general consensus among them was that regions like ours supported the metropolis, and yet we were the ones getting shit on while the world thought New York City was the entirety of our state.

  As an adult, I guess I can see their point of view, even if I disagree with it.

  One of the things having a TV helped teach me was that I was different, and there were others out there like me. I knew for a long time it wasn’t just being sick a lot that set me apart from my peers.

  By the time I was in middle school, and had seen Pride celebrations on TV, I’d done enough reading and research to put a name to my difference. The days when I was home sick and Mom was working, I watched a lot of stuff—and conducted online research—that I’m sure they wouldn’t have approved of.

  I taught myself what I needed to know, including the fact that I would need to continue harboring my biggest secret, if I wanted to protect myself.

  Especially so following a Christmas vacation I spent in Florida with my Grandmother Miriam, who I called Mimi. I was ten, and she was my only living grandparent, my father’s mother. She and Grandpa Jordan, who I was named after, had moved to Tallahassee, Florida, when I was three, after he retired from the state’s Department of Transportation. Unfortunately, I barely remember him, because I was only five when he died of cancer.

  I didn’t get to see Mimi as much as I wanted, but I talked to her several times a week on the phone. She sent me a tablet for my tenth birthday, and then we could video chat for our talks.

  Her Christmas gift to me that year was flying me down to Florida to spend the winter break with her. It wasn’t the first time I’d flown there, but this was the most special trip because it was the first time I would travel by myself. She booked a direct flight for me with few stops, so I wouldn’t have to change planes. I might have been small for my age, but I was also smarter and had more common sense than most of my peers, making people think I was older than I really was.

  Usually, Mimi flew up, visited with us a few days, and then I flew back with her for a few weeks in the summer. She’d fly home with me at the end of summer, spend a few more days visiting my parents and seeing old friends, and then return to Florida.

  I loved Florida, especially in the winter. I loved everything about it and hated leaving at the end of my visits. I always felt more like I was at home there than I did with my parents. I had my own room and everything.

  It was around this time I also got really good at skipping a majority of church, either by claiming I didn’t feel good, or that I had schoolwork to do, or that I was working on art projects for competition in the county fair—anything. I would make myself go about once a month to keep Mom and Dad happy, and I shamelessly used my “sickly nature” to my advantage.

  Everyone thought I was so sweet and innocent. The truth was, I learned early on to be a chameleon. To wear my innocence and health issues as a disguise. A series of masks I could pick and choose from as needed.

  Some might call that sociopathic—I call it survival.

  I usually wasn’t picked on in school by the other kids because I learned how to blend in, or would play to my weaknesses for sympathy to make them look like “saviors.” Even bullies don’t want targets who are so easy it makes them look like assholes. I was never a threat to them and always an asset. Either by helping them with schoolwork or making them look good by being the friend they watched out for and earned praise from adults for taking care of. I never appeared “needy,” so there was nothing they could leverage against me.

  I survived.

  I’ve always been a survivor, even as a baby.

  Back to that special Christmas with Mimi. I’d been sending her pictures of my drawings, but I had made a few for her that I presented to her when I arrived. It wasn’t like I could afford to buy her a present.

  She teared up as she looked at them and then hugged me. I’d used photos I’d taken on my previous visit to draw pictures of some of her favorite places in the Tallahassee area.

  We went the next day so she could get them professionally framed, which blew me away. Usually, Mom and Dad hunted for cheap frames from discount stores or helped me comb through thrift shops and garage sales for frames that would work.

  And she had friends over for dinner that night, including Edwin and Paul, who were older men.

  A couple.

  I’d met them before but, for some reason, I’d thought they were just friends.

  That night, the conversation definitely indicated they were more, and I realized that I had missed a lot of context du
ring previous visits.

  It was no big deal to Mimi or her other friends that Edwin and Paul were together. When Mimi discovered me alone on the screened lanai later that evening, huddled in a ball and crying, she lowered herself to the concrete pool deck next to me, wrapped her arms tightly around me, held me, and told me she loved me, no matter what.

  That she would always love me, and that I was perfect just the way I was.

  That I could always tell her anything I needed to, and nothing could ever change her love for me. Because I was her little miracle, and nothing as beautiful and sweet as I was, so talented and smart, could be “wrong,” no matter what anyone else might ever tell me.

  Still unable to speak my secret and shed my disguise, I let her hold me, rock me, and for a brief moment in time I thought about begging to stay with her and never going home.

  Because I knew my parents, especially my father, would likely never accept me the way she did if they knew the truth about me.

  At that time, that was the closest I’d ever come to anyone knowing my secret.

  I was Al and Melissa Walsh’s son, after all. Good, proper churchgoers who’d been issued a heavier burden than most by God, and yet they’d persevered.

  I was their miracle. Their blessing. Their proof that their faith in God was justified.

  And while my parents were far from rich, my father was well-known in the community and highly respected, because he helped keep the local farms running with his mechanical skills.

  Now that I’d flown by myself, I ended up taking more trips to visit Mimi, sometimes even just a long weekend. She used any excuse she could to fly me down for visits.

  Mimi never mentioned the evening she held me as I cried, but I met more of her friends from diverse backgrounds. I learned how to play mahjong, amazed everyone with my artistic skills, and realized that there was a rapidly deepening divide between me and my parents that couldn’t be sustained much longer.

  I got to play drag queen one night and rocked a rendition of “Chapstick.”

  Hallelujah.

  My disguise was in serious danger of slipping and exposing me.

  Then the summer between seventh and eighth grade happened.

  Chapter Four

  Seventh grade was secretly brutal on me for a number of reasons.

  The first being that friends of my parents, from their church, lost their oldest son.

  He was seventeen, and while I sort of knew him from Sunday School and the youth group there, we weren’t close friends. He’d always acted a little standoffish with me, and he was five years older than me.

  I didn’t know the details of his sudden and unexpected death. It was discussed by adults in hushed tones that fell silent whenever I was nearby. There was nothing about it in the papers, and the funeral was small and barely talked about, which was highly unusual in a community that could just about turn funeral food into a cottage industry all its own.

  It wasn’t until several weeks later when I overheard kids at school talking about it and found out the guy had killed himself.

  Because his parents had disowned him after he came out to them, and they’d told him his choices were to “repent” and go to a conversion therapy camp, or to forget that he had a family. They threw him out and his siblings disowned him, too.

  His whole family discarded him.

  A few months later, I overheard my parents talking with friends of theirs about it, and the general consensus among all of them was that it was better in God’s eyes to have a dead kid than a gay one, because at least if he knew Jesus, he was probably saved, versus living in sin.

  Maintaining my disguise became a desperate daily struggle.

  I had mostly outgrown my sickly childhood. I guess my parents were so wrapped up in trying to pay the bills and make ends meet by that point that Mom totally missed out on the fact that she didn’t have to take me to the doctor anymore except for my annual school physical and routine vaccinations. While I was never going to reach my father’s six-three, I had gained a few inches in height, and built lean muscles from all my hours biking and hiking, and was no longer the shortest, smallest guy in my class.

  I also had to start pretending that, like my friends, I was interested in girls. I knew if I didn’t, combined with everything else, my parents might start suspecting something.

  Unfortunately, all this was compounded by having to maintain the disguise around my friends and teachers, too, because everyone knew everyone else in our community.

  I had no one I could trust with my secret, except Mimi, and she lived over two thousand miles away. To me, that might as well be a million miles.

  I knew, deep in my heart, I was nearly at my breaking point. I didn’t want to live like this, in constant fear, worried that my parents might ship me off to some religious camp to browbeat me into “praying the gay away” if they discovered my secret.

  Or disowning me.

  Or wishing I was dead.

  Three weeks before the end of the school year, Mimi called me one afternoon to confirm what date my summer vacation would start. She wanted to buy my airplane ticket for my impending visit.

  I made sure I was still alone in the house before whispering the question to her.

  “If anything ever happened and I couldn’t live here, Mimi, could I come live with you?”

  Her silence scared me, at first. When she spoke, her tone sounded firm and borderline angry. “What happened, Jor?” She was the only one who called me that. Well, and her friends did, too. To my parents, I was always Jordan.

  “N-nothing, ma’am. I’m just…asking.”

  “You listen to me, baby boy. You always have a home with me. Always.”

  Yeah, I cried. I locked myself in my bedroom, and cried, and asked her if I could send a couple of boxes of stuff for her to hold for me. I had started saving my allowance in case I needed to buy an emergency ticket to Mimi’s, or, at the very least, a ride to the airport.

  Because…I knew.

  Deep in my heart, I knew how this would play out.

  I was, after all, a survivor. Maybe it was some sixth sense, or just plain common sense born of me learning how to be hypervigilant and pay attention to people to read them to play chameleon.

  That’s why when I packed my four large suitcases for my trip, because Mimi always paid for me to bring extra bags so I’d have room to bring stuff home with me, I didn’t have to waste valuable space packing my favorite books and other items.

  I also knew I wouldn’t need my heavy winter clothes down in Florida.

  Without my parents’ knowledge, I shipped the things I didn’t want to leave behind, because there was a UPS Store a short walk from our house.

  The clerk was a friend of my parents, but she believed me when I told her I was sending old toys and clothes to my grandmother to give to friends of hers with kids my age who’d lost their house in a hurricane.

  She bought it completely.

  Because of my disguise.

  Because everyone assumed I was so innocent.

  * * * *

  I can’t sleep the night before I leave. My stomach is so knotted I can’t eat any breakfast. Even as I—ironically—pray during the drive to the airport, I suspect I’ll never see my parents or their home again. Fortunately, Mimi always buys me a one-way ticket for my summer vacations, so that hasn’t raised any suspicions.

  Because I am a minor, my parents are able to get special passes to walk me all the way to the gate.

  I think I’m going to chicken out, but as they call my flight to board, I finally draw in a breath, feel a warm calm settle over me, and shed my disguise.

  “I have to tell you something before I leave.” I step back from them, out of reach. My left hand’s clutched around the strap of my backpack over my shoulder. Inside my backpack, among other things, I also carry my birth certificate and my school and vaccination records, papers I sneaked out of my parents’ filing cabinet in their bedroom while they were at work, at Mimi’s sugges
tion.

  In my right hand, I hold my boarding pass.

  My literal ticket to freedom.

  My parents frown. “Tell us what?” Mom asks.

  I nudge my glasses up on my nose. “I love you both.” I take another step back. “But I’m gay.”

  I don’t blame them for being confused. As passengers start moving to queue at the gate, my father’s face contorts in rage. “What?”

  Easing back yet another step, I nod. Around me, sounds fade away as I watch realization dawn across Mom’s features.

  “I like guys, Dad. I’m gay.”

  An older woman who’d walked up next to me stops, looks at me in surprise, then whirls around and stares at my parents.

  My father’s fists clench as he steps toward me.

  To this day, I have no idea what that woman’s name is, but she’s my fierce guardian angel in that moment. She’s three inches shorter than me and nearly as wide as she is tall, probably about Mimi’s age. She steps between me and my parents and pushes me behind her and toward the gate.

  “Go, baby boy. I got your back. Run.”

  I stumble backward, caught in the press of other passengers converging as my father roars over the woman’s shoulder at me. “You better not be gay when you come home, do you hear me! Don’t you fucking come home gay! I’ll kick your goddamned faggot ass myself!”

  I suddenly have a wall of passengers between me and them, all of them facing my parents and shielding me from them. A gate attendant grabs my boarding pass from me, scans it, and then takes my hand and runs with me down the jetway, even as my father angrily rants behind me. She hands me off to a flight attendant with a quick whispered message in the other woman’s ear. That woman suddenly looks angrily firm and drapes her arm protectively around my shoulders as she leads me to my seat.

  I remember feeling terrified my parents would have cops drag me off the plane, but they didn’t. I don’t remember much about the flight, except I cried myself to sleep before our first stop. There were several stops, but I didn’t have to change planes. I think my guardian angel got off in Virginia, but the flight crew was the same all the way to Tallahassee.