Page 16 of Innocent

Chapter Four

Seventh grade was secretly brutal on me for a number of reasons.

The first being that friends of my parents, from their church, lost their oldest son.

He was seventeen, and while I sort of knew him from Sunday School and the youth group there, we weren’t close friends. He’d always acted a little standoffish with me, and he was five years older than me.

I didn’t know the details of his sudden and unexpected death. It was discussed by adults in hushed tones that fell silent whenever I was nearby. There was nothing about it in the papers, and the funeral was small and barely talked about, which was highly unusual in a community that could just about turn funeral food into a cottage industry all its own.

It wasn’t until several weeks later when I overheard kids at school talking about it and found out the guy had killed himself.

Because his parents had disowned him after he came out to them, and they’d told him his choices were to “repent” and go to a conversion therapy camp, or to forget that he had a family. They threw him out and his siblings disowned him, too.

His whole family discarded him.

A few months later, I overheard my parents talking with friends of theirs about it, and the general consensus among all of them was that it was better in God’s eyes to have a dead kid than a gay one, because at least if he knew Jesus, he was probably saved, versus living in sin.

Maintaining my disguise became a desperate daily struggle.

I had mostly outgrown my sickly childhood. I guess my parents were so wrapped up in trying to pay the bills and make ends meet by that point that Mom totally missed out on the fact that she didn’t have to take me to the doctor anymore except for my annual school physical and routine vaccinations. While I was never going to reach my father’s six-three, I had gained a few inches in height, and built lean muscles from all my hours biking and hiking, and was no longer the shortest, smallest guy in my class.

I also had to start pretending that, like my friends, I was interested in girls. I knew if I didn’t, combined with everything else, my parents might start suspecting something.

Unfortunately, all this was compounded by having to maintain the disguise around my friends and teachers, too, because everyone knew everyone else in our community.

I had no one I could trust with my secret, except Mimi, and she lived over two thousand miles away. To me, that might as well be a million miles.

I knew, deep in my heart, I was nearly at my breaking point. I didn’t want to live like this, in constant fear, worried that my parents might ship me off to some religious camp to browbeat me into “praying the gay away” if they discovered my secret.

Or disowning me.

Or wishing I was dead.

Three weeks before the end of the school year, Mimi called me one afternoon to confirm what date my summer vacation would start. She wanted to buy my airplane ticket for my impending visit.

I made sure I was still alone in the house before whispering the question to her.

“If anything ever happened and I couldn’t live here, Mimi, could I come live with you?”

Her silence scared me, at first. When she spoke, her tone sounded firm and borderline angry. “What happened, Jor?” She was the only one who called me that. Well, and her friends did, too. To my parents, I was always Jordan.

“N-nothing, ma’am. I’m just…asking.”

“You listen to me, baby boy. Youalwayshave a home with me.Always.”

Yeah, I cried. I locked myself in my bedroom, and cried, and asked her if I could send a couple of boxes of stuff for her to hold for me. I had started saving my allowance in case I needed to buy an emergency ticket to Mimi’s, or, at the very least, a ride to the airport.

Because…Iknew.

Deep in my heart, Iknewhow this would play out.

I was, after all, a survivor. Maybe it was some sixth sense, or just plain common sense born of me learning how to be hypervigilant and pay attention to people to read them to play chameleon.

That’s why when I packed my four large suitcases for my trip, because Mimi always paid for me to bring extra bags so I’d have room to bring stuff home with me, I didn’t have to waste valuable space packing my favorite books and other items.

I also knew I wouldn’t need my heavy winter clothes down in Florida.

Without my parents’ knowledge, I shipped the things I didn’t want to leave behind, because there was a UPS Store a short walk from our house.