“You never know,” she says.
“I think my parents thought I might be gay because I was a weird kid who loved Dolly Parton, so they talked a lot about how evil it was so I… would change my mind, I guess?”
“Exactly how that works,” Andi says.
“Joke’s on them, they picked the wrong kid,” I say. “They ended up sending Elliott to a conversion camp when he was fifteen.”
Andi gasps, loud in the quiet, dark night, turns her floodlight gaze back on me. “Ohfuck,” she says. “Is he—okay, now?”
“Well, they could only afford the day camp where the abuse was emotional and psychological instead of physical,” I tell her, and I sound sarcastic and brittle, even to myself. “Apparently, the beatings are more expensive. And God knows our house didn’t have the space for a prayer closet, so, lucky him.”
She’s staring at me, the leafless twig still between her fingers, and I have to look away. Thinking about what I did and didn’t do as a teenager can feel like strangulation, long, shadowy fingers of my old self wrapping around my neck. Turns out no matter what, we can never leave ourselves behind.
“I,” I start, and I don’t want to tell her this. She knows everything I did to her and her parents back then and she can still smile when she looks at me, sometimes; why confess more? “At first, I was glad,” I say. “I wanted him to stop being gay so he wouldn’t have to go to hell. But he didn’t get changed, he only got hurt. Obviously. And I didn’t know what to do, so I joined the Army and left the minute I could. He lives in Boston now and doesn’t talk to our parents. I don’t blame him.”
“I wouldn’t either.”
We sit in silence for a while, and for the first time all day, it’s comfortable, like the quiet is a blanket we’re both wrapped under, minds whirring.
“I thought if I told my parents about your dad and Rick, they’d help them… not like men,” I admit. “I thought, I don’t know, that your dad would start dating a woman instead and he and Rick would be regular friends, and you could have a normal family and none of you would go to hell anymore.”
I exhale hard enough that the flame on the lighter goes out.
“God, that sounds so stupid,” I mutter.
“You were a kid.”
“I was twelve. It’s not that young.”
“You were pretty sheltered,” she says, and now she’s watching me flick the lighter on and off, too. “It’s a miracle they let you hang out with me.”
“They thought your dad was a sweet, Godly widower who was doing his best to raise a daughter alone and that I could be a strong moral influence in your life,” I tell her.
Andi bursts out laughing and it’s so, so loud in the snow-soaked night that something startles in a nearby tree, but it’s good, like a burst of music. I can’t help but smile at her.
“Wow, they got that wrong,” she says.
“I was a great influence.”
“You taught me how to climb barbed-wire fences and carve sticks into spears with a pocketknife.”
“You could’ve learned that anywhere.”
“But I didn’t. I learned from you.”
I put the lighter back in my pocket because my hand is freezing, and I stretch my legs out again. My ankle protests, and I force myself not to make a face.
“I thought you’d be angry,” I tell her.
Andi blows out a breath, the twig in her hand bobbing up and down.
“I used to be,” she says. “I was for years.”
I wait, silent. Something I’m good at, for once.
“I couldn’t stay angry,” she says. “You were kind of a dick about it, don’t get me wrong—”
I snort, closing my eyes. She’s right.
