What the fuck do you want?
Why won’t you leave me alone?
You ruined everything.
Pressure built in his head.He closed his eyes again.Sunlight made the insides of his eyelids red, and his face was hot.
Be calm.You have to stay calm.
But when had staying calm ever helped him?For that matter, when had he ever beenableto stay calm?His whole life, he’d tried, and it had been like trying to hold on to water.
Deep breaths.In through your nose, out through your mouth.
It’s good to recognize your emotions, Hudson said.Had said many times, as a matter of fact; maybe part of the training for being a therapist required you to learn not to mind when you had to repeat yourself.It’s good to know when you’re feeling out of control.But you’re allowed to feel all those things.You’re allowed to feel hurt.You’re allowed to feel angry.When you’re angry, he said, you’re defending yourself.What are you defending yourself from right now?
Not Jem.
The thought was like the sunlight: bright and turned on its edge.The tightness in his chest eased.He wasn’t angry with Jem.For that matter, he wasn’t even angry with Brigitte—at least, not really.Sure, he would always be angry that she had failed Jem.He could be angry that she’d lied about Stephen.But this blackout wave of rage that came crashing over him—that wasn’t about her.
On the bed next to him, the phone was ready to buzz again.With a whining complaint from his dad about how unfair his mother was being.With his mom’s cultivated helplessness, all the ways she’d let herself not know how to do things.With their combined sense that their tragedy was automatically his tragedy, and since he had always fixed their problems before, he ought to fix this one now too.
I’m angry at you, he thought.I’m so fucking angry at you.
Something broke open inside him.The thoughts rushed through him, words and images and glittering spikes of fury.The jokes about fags leaving mud tracks.Dusty Sunday School classrooms, the regular cycle of lessons about the family, divinely ordained to be between a man and a woman.Church leaders talking about the threat to the family—which meant the threat that anybody but a man and a woman might love each other.This is wrong.You’re wrong.You’re bad.And so, the bad parts had to be secrets.
What had come after—the years of hiding himself, of thinking he didn’t deserve to be happy, of choosing not to let himself be happy.Even after coming out, when he’d been so sure that he’d left all of it behind, it had still been there.
We love you.But.
And after his parents, it had been Ammon.The promise of happiness.The promise of acceptance.But always, at the same time, being kept a secret.First, because Ammon wasn’t ready to come out.Then because Ammon was married.And by then, because it was simply what they did, and Tean had let it happen because, a part of him could recognize now, he thought it was what he deserved: to be invisible, to be second, to be—because Ammon never would say the words—unloved.For years, he’d done what he’d been ashamed of doing because he thought he should be ashamed of everything.
Hudson called itconfirming the belief.Confirming, through his own behavior, all the things he’d been taught as a child.That homosexuals were home-wreckers.That they were selfish.That they weren’t capable of healthy relationships.That they didn’t deserve the same rights and dignity and happiness as everyone else.All the poison he’d swallowed at home and church—and then he’d gone out and proven them all right.
You can’t blame yourself,Hudson said.You were a child.You wanted to be loved and accepted like all children do.You made a trade, burying parts of yourself in exchange for a chance at acceptance.
They had been sitting in Hudson’s office, and it had been a December afternoon, the clouds like a wool cap cut to fit the mountains, and Tean had said,And look what I got instead.
His eyes were puffy and stinging.He got up and wiped them on a towel.He made himself go into the main room, where the fire was still burning.He turned down the flames.
The little notebook was slightly curved from being carried in his pocket and pressed against his thigh.The photo inside was bent too.A serious, dark-haired boy with glasses.And behind the glasses, anxiety pinballing around inside his head, already at eleven.Because what if someone found out?
It’s a simple exercise, Hudson said.But not an easy one.Here you are at a formative age.You don’t have anyone around you who’s giving you the help you need.What do you want to tell this boy now?What do you wish someone had said to him?What would you tell him, from what you’ve learned and experienced, that you want him to know?
As Hudson said, it wasn’t a complicated assignment.And Tean knew, at an intellectual level, what the correct answers would be.He’d always been good at giving the correct answers.You’re worth loving, and someone will love you one day.You deserve to be happy.There’s nothing wrong with you.A voice in his head that sounded like an old commercial said,Accept no substitutes.
But he stared at the page, and he couldn’t write.
After a while, he went into the kitchenette.He filled a glass with water.His hand wasn’t steady, and the water sloshed against the sides of the glass.His head hurt, but distantly.Jem would probably tell him to eat something.
He would have been blonder.Children almost always had lighter hair that darkened as they aged.No beard, of course, and that would have been different.But the eyes would have been the same.The slightly crooked front teeth.The smile.Eleven-year-old Jem would have looked like Dennis the Menace when he smiled.
Whatever it was that ran through him, it was physical: a wave that rippled up through his body.His hand shook.Water lapped over the rim of the glass and ran down the back of his hand.He set the glass down, and it chittered against the marble countertop.He pressed dripping fingers against his jeans.Fumbled the notebook out and held it open with one hand pressed against the thin pages.
His eyes were wet.
He wrote,Dear Jem, at the top of the page.
And then he started to write.
