Page 17 of Innocent

The clerk was a friend of my parents, but she believed me when I told her I was sending old toys and clothes to my grandmother to give to friends of hers with kids my age who’d lost their house in a hurricane.

She bought it completely.

Because of my disguise.

Because everyone assumed I was so innocent.

* * * *

I can’t sleep the night before I leave. My stomach is so knotted I can’t eat any breakfast. Even as I—ironically—pray during the drive to the airport, I suspect I’ll never see my parents or their home again. Fortunately, Mimi always buys me a one-way ticket for my summer vacations, so that hasn’t raised any suspicions.

Because I am a minor, my parents are able to get special passes to walk me all the way to the gate.

I think I’m going to chicken out, but as they call my flight to board, I finally draw in a breath, feel a warm calm settle over me, and shed my disguise.

“I have to tell you something before I leave.” I step back from them, out of reach. My left hand’s clutched around the strap of my backpack over my shoulder. Inside my backpack, among other things, I also carry my birth certificate and my school and vaccination records, papers I sneaked out of my parents’ filing cabinet in their bedroom while they were at work, at Mimi’s suggestion.

In my right hand, I hold my boarding pass.

My literal ticket to freedom.

My parents frown. “Tell us what?” Mom asks.

I nudge my glasses up on my nose. “I love you both.” I take another step back. “But I’m gay.”

I don’t blame them for being confused. As passengers start moving to queue at the gate, my father’s face contorts in rage. “What?”

Easing back yet another step, I nod. Around me, sounds fade away as I watch realization dawn across Mom’s features.

“I like guys, Dad. I’m gay.”

An older woman who’d walked up next to me stops, looks at me in surprise, then whirls around and stares at my parents.

My father’s fists clench as he steps toward me.

To this day, I have no idea what that woman’s name is, but she’s my fierce guardian angel in that moment. She’s three inches shorter than me and nearly as wide as she is tall, probably about Mimi’s age. She steps between me and my parents and pushes me behind her and toward the gate.

“Go, baby boy. I got your back.Run.”

I stumble backward, caught in the press of other passengers converging as my father roars over the woman’s shoulder at me. “You better not be gay when you come home, do youhearme! Don’t youfuckingcome home gay! I’ll kick your goddamned faggot ass myself!”

I suddenly have a wall of passengers between me and them, all of them facing my parents and shielding me from them. A gate attendant grabs my boarding pass from me, scans it, and then takes my hand and runs with me down the jetway, even as my father angrily rants behind me. She hands me off to a flight attendant with a quick whispered message in the other woman’s ear. That woman suddenly looks angrily firm and drapes her arm protectively around my shoulders as she leads me to my seat.

I remember feeling terrified my parents would have cops drag me off the plane, but they didn’t. I don’t remember much about the flight, except I cried myself to sleep before our first stop. There were several stops, but I didn’t have to change planes. I think my guardian angel got off in Virginia, but the flight crew was the same all the way to Tallahassee.

Before we make the final approach a little before three that afternoon, the flight attendant who’d put me on the plane stops by my seat. I made the final leg seated alone in my row.

She kindly smiles. “Who’s meeting you at the airport, sweetie?”

I sniffle. “Mimi. My grandmother.”

She pats my shoulder and, when we land, she comes back, grabs me first, and walks me off the plane herself and into Mimi’s waiting, open arms, where I sob with relief to be with her again.

Mimi never would tell me exactly what transpired while I was on the way to Florida. I’m guessing phone calls, where my father angrily screamed at her, and she likely screamed back.

But sitting in her car at the airport, with the engine and AC running, she puts her phone in speaker mode and calls them.

My father answers. “What doyouwant?”