Annoyed that Brandon was baiting him, I turned toward him, yelling, “Just dial the fucking numbers.”
In my moment of distraction, Mr. Murphy twisted out of my grip. In the seconds it took me to turn back to him, he was already reaching for something behind his back. “No,” I screamed, diving in front of the gun. “Bran—” My attempt to warn him was cut short. The bullet sliced through my shoulder, sending a rippled wave of hot pain over my entire body. “Oh, fuck!” I cursed.
I dropped to the floor, blood flowing from the open wound. Curling into a ball, I needed to protect myself from the lunatic waving a gun around my living room. The kickback from the shot sent the very drunk Mr. Murphy back into the wall. His legs gave out from underneath and he landed in a heap of drunken limbs on my hallway floor.
Before I could get to my feet to kick the gun away from him, Brandon raced to us and kicked the gun out of the way. “Yes, he just fired. Yes, someone was hit,” he spoke into the phone. “Yes, he’s okay.” He looked at me, nodding that it would be all right. They were on their way, and unless Mr. Murphy possessed the superhuman strength to buck a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound lead weight like Brandon off his back, then there was no way he was going to hurt either of us anymore.
After a long night in the emergency room, and a day spent sleeping off some pain medication, Monday morning rolled around far too quickly. Luckily, it was the week before school started, so camp was over, which meant I had nowhere I needed to be.
Aside from my arm being crazy sore, the pain wasn’t too horrible. Brandon and I escaped what could have been a deadly situation with very little harm.
At least that was what I thought until I grabbed the newspaper from my front porch. The headline staring back at me caused me almost as much pain as the bullet lancing through my body.
Gay Teacher Attacked in Hate Crime
The words registered in my brain at the same instant that my phone rang. With the paper dangling in my hand, I picked up the receiver.
“Hey, man,” Brandon said, his voice sounding off somehow. “How you holding up?”
“Okay. Just sore.”
“Listen, I wanted to get to you before—”
“I already saw,” I admitted. Before either of us could say anything else, the call waiting interrupted me. “I’ve got another call. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Hello,” I answered, feeling defeated already. And I’d only been out of bed for fifteen minutes.
“Mr. MacMillian,” an unfamiliar voice addressed me, sounding far too formal to put me at ease.
“Yes, speaking,” I repaid his cordial, yet cold tone.
“This is Dr. Weber.” It took me a few seconds to register the name, my brain still in a foggy haze. That was when my stomach took a turn for the worse. Everyone knew a call from your superintendent at ten in the morning, the week before school started, when your name was a newspaper headline, outing you in a super conservative community, was never a good thing.
The five minute, very one-sided conversation upended my world in a way I never thought possible. In short, I was being asked to take a paid leave of absence until all this nonsense—his words, not mine—with Mr. Murphy was cleared up. He even had the audacity to suggest that perhaps I had misunderstood the purpose of his visit to my home.
Though he mentioned nothing of my sexuality, something about which I was sure his lawyer had forewarned him, I knew with every fiber of my being that me being gay had everything to do with not being allowed back to work next week. There were a slew of curses I wanted to yell, but I knew it was in my best interest to keep my mouth shut and talk to my union rep and then my lawyer. This was not the way I’d intended to come out at work—hell, if I ever decided to do that at all. And the way I’d just been treated was further proof of what I’d known all along.
I never belonged here.
