I can’t put it off any longer. I have to ask her the question. “Julia, did my dad ever visit Ellis?” I sense movement behind me, hear a dry cough as if someone might be about to interrupt. No one does. “Did he…” It takes all I have just to force the words out. “Did my dad offer Ellis money to stop seeing me?”
Silence down the line. Silence that confirms everything.
“Dylan,” she says. “Oh, sweetheart. I’m not sure I—”
“Please just tell me,” I say. “I have to know.”
She takes a moment. “All right. It was a month or so back. I was sitting in the kitchen when I overheard your dad speaking to El out in the hall. I couldn’t believe what he was saying, so I marched straight out there and told him to sling his hook. Afterwards, we talked. I thought you had a right to know, but El, he made me swear I’d never tell you. He said it would hurt you too much.”
I grip the phone hard and close my eyes. “Thank you, Julia.”
“Dylan, wait. What your parents did, it was cruel and thoughtless.” She sighs. “But they’re still your parents.”
I tell her I’ll come round soon, that we’ll go through your room together, El, and that I’ll help as she packs your life away. And then I hang up and turn back to face them.
Another secret you kept locked away in your journal, El. Why didn’t you tell me? Because it would smash my family to pieces? Didn’t you understand that some things are already so broken a little more smashing won’t do them any harm?
I can’t rage at them any more. I just ask my questions.
“Why did you hate him?”
“Dylan…” Mum begins, her face ashen.
“Here we go,” Chris cuts in, “melodrama hour.”
“Shut up, Chris,” Dad says, which seems to startle both Mum and my pea-brained sibling. Dad spreads his hands like he’s making an appeal to the jury, except he isn’t that kind of solicitor. “Look, son, we thought you might possibly find out about this. That Ellis’s aunt might let something slip. That’s why we’ve been trying to sit down with you these past couple of days, in case you heard it from someone else and got the wrong end of the stick.”
“The wrong end of the stick?” I brandish the cartoon. “How am I possibly misinterpreting this?”
My mind flies back to the night of the Easter dance and my conversation with Mike.“And they’re cool with El?”he’d asked, and I’d cut him off. Because even to Mike, who knows the McKees and their funny little ways, I couldn’t straight out admit that theyweren’tcool with you. That look Mum and Dad shot each other when we told them, the look you didn’t catch, it said it all really. By then they had already tried to bribe you so that you’d stop seeing me.
“When did all this start?” I say. “Did you suspect we were together at the barbecue? I guess you must have. Then, what? You popped round to Mount Pleasant for a little word with El? You’re all such bloody hypocrites,” I mutter. “You signed the petitions to give people like me the rights we should have had anyway. You pretend to hate the people who hate us. But you’re as bad as they are. You only really want to accept the ‘safe’ gays, like me. The ones who find a nice quiet boyfriend and go away and do our gay stuff out of sight and don’t insist upon ourselves.”
Chris laughs. “Have you been taking your mental pills, bro? Because it sounds like you need them.”
This time it’s my mum who surprises herself by telling Chris to shut up.
“I want to ask you something,” I say.
Dad nods. “I’ll give you an honest answer, if I can.”
“Always a qualification, isn’t there, Dad? Always a get-out clause. All right, here it is: if any of you had been there that night at the lake, would you have let him drown? Just because you thought El monopolized me and made me gay and that sort of disgusted you.” I look directly at Chris and he looks away. “Or because you thought he was corrupting me somehow?” I turn to Mum, who has her hands covering her mouth. “Or because, on the basis of one meeting, you decided he wasn’t good enough for your precious son?” My dad returns my glance but I see something change in his face. A certainty gone, a doubt creeping in. “You won’t know this, but El’s parents beat him senseless and disowned him when he told them who he was. They threw him onto the street and forgot about him. You’re not as bad as them, not even close, but by rejecting him you’ve rejected me too.”
“We thought we were doing the right thing,” my dad says slowly. “We didn’t think he was… Yes, all right, Dylan, yes, we didn’t think he was good enough for you.”
“And he wasn’t!” Chris spits through drawn-back lips. “We all said it. Who knew where that dirty little estate rat had been putting his prick. Did you want to end up with AIDS or something, lying in a hospital bed next to Mike?”
“Get out!” my dad roars at him.
Chris looks dumbstruck. He turns to Mum, who has no words for him. After a few miserable seconds, he lopes out of the room.
“We just thought, if we could put a bit of distance between the two of you, this whole obsession would blow over.” Mum begins to move towards me, then sees something in me that clearly frightens her. I don’t want my mum to be frightened of me, but I don’t know how else to look. “I was just concerned about your safety, Dylan. To look at you, no one would know…but Ellis? I was frightened that by being with him you were putting yourself at risk. You know how people can be. But maybe we were wrong.” She pauses and glances at my dad. “I think…I think we were wrong.”
I shrug. “It’s too late now, Mum. He’s already dead. But there is one thing I want you to know – Ellis was determined that he’d never,evertell me what Dad tried to do. Because he wanted to protect me from my own family, I guess. This kid you doubted and despised? He was better than all of us.”
I start towards the hall and Mum reaches for my arm.
“Dylan, what are you going to do? Please, we just didn’t realize how deeply you felt about Ellis. If we had—”
