“…Lee?” he said, his voice thready and high. As I got closer, his face was in shadow and I saw him holding his phone clenched in his hand. The screen was dark and the light from the security lights of the building reflected off a spiderweb crack that now spread across the screen. There were bloody fingerprints smeared across the screen.
Tobi looked up at me, fear and anxiety clearly written on his face, but anger was there, too.
“Mason, baby…? What happened?” I asked moving closer to the two men, desperate to wrap my arms around Mason but unsure if that was the right thing to do.
Mason kept moving convulsively over his phone, and I looked down to see his hands gripping his phone tightly and I realized his fingers were cut and bleeding from swiping across the shattered screen.
Mason looked up at me and as soon as I walked into a pool of light, he launched himself at me. I barely had time to brace myself before he crashed into me. His arms wrapped around me and I could feel his heart pounding crazily in his chest. I held him tightly, my arms sliding up and down his body as I tried to calm him. My hands ran down his sides checking for injuries, but finding none.
“Baby, what happened?” I asked, my throat constricting as I tried to figure out what to do. “Are you okay? Do you need to go to the hospital?” I asked, clutching him tightly, then looking over at Tobi for an answer.
Before Tobi could respond, Mason’s voice whispered, “No, no hospital. Can we just… go?Please?” he begged, his eyes glassy in thelimited light. They were red-rimmed and shiny. “I just want to go home.” He said, his voice small and thin.
“Of course,” I said, helping him stand and move to the Jeep, Tobi supporting his other side. I led them back around the corner of the building to the car.
As worried as I was about him right now, a small part of my heart leapt when he said “home”.
“Tobi?” I asked, as I shut the door, securing Mason inside. “What the hell happened?” I demanded as I walked around the car.
Tobi shook his head. “I, uh, I don’t know,” he said. “I thought it was just a normal one of this new preacher’s ‘pray the gay away’ sessions. Then they brought Mason in.”
“I fought them, Lee, really I did. But he told me to run, to call you.” The kid’s shoulders were shaking and I reached my hand out to grip them reassuringly. After a moment, he continued.
“I got away from them, but my mom took my phone. I was trying to find a way back into the building to call you when I found him like this.”
“That was a smart thing to do,” I said, admiration at the kid’s cool thinking and ingenuity battling with the anger filling me at the planning that had gone into this.
I nodded, concerned about the way he was rubbing his arms, but also focused on Mason as he sat, unusually still in the car.
“Did they hurt you?” I asked Tobi, trying to peer at the kid and see if I saw any wounds.
He shook his head. “Usually they just do this stupid prayer circle where they walk around you and pray and yell Bible verses at you.” His face was pale in the blue-white light, his eyes unfocused. “I usually just stand there and let them get it out of their systems. I just couldn’t stand it when they brought Mason in and started. I wasn’t there for the whole thing.”
I saw him swallow nervously.
“Tobi, how often does this happen?” I asked, though I guessed it was a common occurrence.
“Ever since the new preacher came to town about six months ago, it’s been happening all the time. A couple of times a month,” he said.
“What else happened?” I questioned.
“I don’t know,” he said, tears brimming in his eyes. “I saw a bunch of people leave and I thought that everything was over.” He shrugged and sighed. “I was just coming out of hiding when I saw the door fly open, and Mason ran out. He ran into the field, and then I heard a bunch of them come out after him, yelling for him. I stayed hidden until they’d taken off, then came back up to the building. I found him just like that,” he said, nodding toward where Mason sat in the car.
“Fucking bastards,” I growled as my hand flew out and slammed into the side of the SUV. Guilt ran through me as I saw Mason jump inside the car. “How long?” I asked. “How long was he out there?” I demanded.
“I don’t know. Thirty or forty-five minutes, I’d guess?” Not long enough for any serious damage. The teen in front of me shuddered and I realized the chill night air wasn’t doing him any good, either.
“Get in the car. I’ll get the heat going and you can call your parents,” I started.
“No!” He yelled sharply, catching me by surprise as I was pulling my phone out of my pocket, then he continued. “No. They go to that church. They… they were with the people in that ‘prayer circle’,” he explained, the shame and anger filling his face. “And you need to know, it… it was my fault,” he continued, his eyes avoiding mine.
“What do you mean, ‘your fault’?” I asked, feeling my eyes narrowing despite my best efforts. All my instincts were telling me to get in the car and start comforting Mason, but another part needed to know what I was dealing with.
“You can’t control what those people do, Tobi, even your parents,” I began. “You’re not responsible.”
“Iam,” he said loudly, stopping me as I reached to open the back door of the Jeep. “It was my fault that Mason was there,” he said, his voice quiet. “Dad found my phone and found a picture of Mason, Jeri and I from the other day at the comic store,” he continued. “I should have deleted it or saved it to the cloud somewhere he didn’t knowabout. He saw the poster behind him on the wall and did an internet search on him and found out who he was. He and Mom searched my room after that and found the graphic novel Mason gave me,” he finished.
The tears that had been threatening in his eyes spilled over.
