But he didn’t saystairs.He didn’t saysteps.He saidup.Even through the panic, Tean couldn’t help noticing.
Kai’s stepfather had butched him up.And that meant he couldn’t go around lisping like a fag.
“Come out, come out.I want to talk to you.”
Tean’s hand found an opening in the piece of furniture—the dresser?—and a drawer opened.He reached inside.Something heavy.Something he could use as a weapon.
Shoes.
Hopelessness twisted with rage.
“We can talk,” Kai said.“And then you can go.”
Think.Think.You have to be smarter than him.You have to think, or he’s going to kill you.
Prey ran.But where was Tean going to run?Run circles in this concrete box until Kai got bored and gutted him?
Think.
Prey didn’t always run.
Prey hid.
Prey disappeared.
Something opened in Tean’s chest—part bottomless pit, and part something else, something verging on excitement.
All the cardboard boxes.
And to Jem’s perpetual despair, Tean was wearing so much brown.
He backed down the passageway until he reached the rack of clothing.He crouched, pushed through the hanging garments, and crashed into something on the other side—a bike, he realized as he grappled with it, trying to keep it from falling.He managed to prop it against the wall, and then he drew himself into a ball as far back behind the clothes as he could manage.He just needed Kai to pass him.He just needed an opening so he could get to the stairs.
“We left you alone,” Kai said.His voice was moving closer now.“We didn’t bother you or your…friend.”
Because you were afraid of us, Tean thought.He drew his knees closer to his chest.Because you were afraid of Jem.
“You could have left me alone too.”Another footstep.And the next time he spoke, his voice was clearer, and Tean knew Kai had reached the path between the boxes.“We’re doing a great work.We’re doing a wonderful thing.You know Rydel.What he did to the men he met.What he didwiththem.Do you know what he did to Zeb?You wouldn’t believe it.To his own brother.”
It was there onhis—the faint slushiness of thes.
“And he took that boy, too.Do you know what he would have done to that boy?That boy never did anything wrong.Children are pure.It’s our job to protect them, understand?We’re doing that work.Protecting children from groomers, from pedophiles.”
It wasn’t necessarily a new argument, Tean knew.Someone had always been around to make the case that homosexuals wereallgroomers.That they were only able to continue their existence by perverting children and inducting them into the lifestyle.And how many butchers had hidden behind the excuse that they were only doing it to protect children?Maybe, for Zeb who had been abused when he was young, there was even some twisted degree of truth to it.But Tean could hear the echo in Kai’s voice of his stepfather, of the man who’d taken it upon himself to beat the queer out of his adopted son.
“Hey!”Kai’s voice was almost next to him now.“I’m talking to you!”
Tean knew he needed to stay still, but the suddenness of Kai’s voice, the volume, the proximity—it made him lean back slightly.He reached to steady himself, and his hand came down on a snake.
For a moment, his brain went white.Somehow, he didn’t cry out.He didn’t jerk away.And then he realized he wasn’t touching a snake.He’d put his hand down on what must have been a spare inner tube for the bicycle: soft, flexible, the right dimensions for his brain to jump to the worst possible conclusion.
“Talk to me,” Kai said.He stopped exactly in front of where Tean was hiding.Tean turned his face down; the human brain was programmed to recognize faces.He had a sudden vision of himself, the brown of his clothes blending in with the boxes around him, and a giggle started to rise up.Jem would be horrified.A moment later, Kai shouted, “Talk!”
With his face pressed to his knees, Tean couldn’t see anything.All he could do was listen to Kai’s breathing growing more ragged.
“You ought to be grateful!”Kai’s voice threatened to crack.“This needed to be done a long time ago!Think about how different your life would be if someone had helped you!”
The vision flashed into Tean’s mind of Tess’s burned face and broken fingers.
