by Cody Wagner
Preacher Montgomery squinted at me as if he were coming up with something big. “You know what I think will help?”
My dad perked up. “What’s that?”
“A cleansing camp.”
“WHAT!” I heard myself shout. I started shaking my head and looked at my father, eyes pleading.
The preacher pointed at me and waggled his finger. “You see, that’s the gay begging. It doesn’t want to be exorcised.” He looked at my father. “Yes, it’s imperative he get to a camp. And it just so happens I received this today.” He glanced up at the ceiling, said, “It’s a sign,” and handed my father something.
I couldn’t help but lean over and take a look at my demise. It was a brochure that had been crumpled then unfolded. Clouds danced across a blue background. My heart jerked to a stop, and, as the air molecules around me slowed, I read the words at the top.
Sanctuary Preparatory Academy—A Healing Home for Gay Kids
Images of that guy Timothy with his stupid smile and messy hair slammed into my head. I pictured him knocking on the preacher’s door early this morning. He held up the brochure like Oliver Twist.
“Please, sir. Ruin someone’s life.”
I bet he was so damned proud of himself.
“Is this a good place?” my dad asked.
“I got off the phone with them earlier,” Preacher Montgomery said. “I was very impressed.”
“Why?” my dad said.
“Listen to this.” Preacher opened the brochure and cleared his throat.
“Sanctuary Prep Academy is more than just a two-week camp; we are a full-time boarding school created to help your children learn in a healing environment. Our staff ensures your gay confused child gets the time, attention, and dedication he or she deserves to fight the gay.”
“No,” I gasped. The place was a boarding school? I’d be giving up my high school experience in Pamata. I may have been unpopular and friendless here, but at least I knew where I stood. Pamata was home.
I grabbed Dad’s arm. He pulled away, placing his hands in his lap. I felt my world crumbling around me as Dad and Preacher Montgomery talked about the school as if I weren’t there. They stopped referring to me by name; I heard “the boy” several times. I wondered when that would change to “it” and put my face in my hands. I wasn’t in for a few weeks of hell—I was being sent there full-time.
* * * * *
Summer’s supposed to be a time of playing video games and basketball, of watching TV all night. It’s not, I repeat NOT, supposed to be spent packing and going to a cleansing camp. The experience was excruciating. Mom spent hours at her library, researching home remedies for homosexuality. Dad wouldn’t look at me. It’s like I was a ghost. Or, better yet, Medusa; he didn’t want to turn into stone.
I spent the better part of three weeks alone in my room. I tried telling my parents this didn’t just happen overnight, but they ignored me. They thought being gay also made me a liar. My normally sensible parents were treating me like a convict. Gone were the fun shirts and board games, replaced with overly formal silent dinners, complete with saying, “Please pass the mashed potatoes,” instead of just grabbing them like we used to. They even removed the lock from my bedroom door and conducted surprise check-ins.
To make matters worse, Mom and Dad wouldn’t let Molly visit me. My sister and I weren’t super close or anything, but I guess they worried she’d get contaminated, which only made me want to talk to her more. To get around it, we began communicating through the heater vents on our floor. Our house had channels dug through the foundation that ended in rectangular heater vents. Because my room was next to Molly’s, we could whisper in one vent and the sound carried to the other.
Lying on our stomachs, faces pressed into the wall like kids in timeout, Molly and I spent hours talking. Most of the time, she asked questions. She wanted to know why Mom and Dad were so upset. I told her it was a big misunderstanding. She believed me. Actually, she more than believed me.
“Sounds like they’re the ones who don’t munderstand.” (She said munderstand, which was annoyingly cute).
“Yeah.” That was all I could say.
She tried to tell stories to take my mind off things. Her favorite was Winnie the Pooh and the Zeeks, about Winnie and Piglet slaughtering aliens from another planet to save the Hundred Acre Wood. Exciting stuff.
That was how the weeks passed: eating, sleeping, thinking, and listening to wacky stories.
I also worried about what would happen to me at Sanctuary Prep Academy. I really believed sexuality is a part of self, and didn’t think I’d change. I didn’t want to change. But what if they had some sort of special “straight” serum or something? The idea of someone strapping me to a chair, prying my eyes open, and forcing me to watch girls in bikinis stinks of crazy, but I sure as hell obsessed over it.
It was the worst summer since the Paleozoic era.
The night before Dad and I left for Sanctuary Prep Academy, I stared at the huge gray suitcase plopped on my tiny bed. If I had let Mom help, we could have used a smaller one. She had the ability to cram a miraculous amount of clothes into a lunch bag. But I didn’t want her help. I just wanted to be alone. Besides, it would have felt weird, her helping me get ready for the crappiest place on earth. It would be like her preparing me for the gas chamber. So I packed by myself, throwing underwear, shorts, shirts, and socks across the room, trying to land them into my suitcase. I figured I might as well make a game of it.
When the suitcase was overflowing, I sat on it, yanked the zipper closed, and rolled off onto the bed. Mom wouldn’t let me remove the plastic covering from the mattress, and it crinkled under my blue sheets.
That’s when it really hit me: I was leaving. And my parents expected me to come back a different person. I wouldn’t. I refused. Then I realized I’d have to fake it either way. Ugh. The idea was so depressing, my lungs felt like they were being crushed, and I put my face in my hands.
That’s when I heard a tiny, hesitant knock at the door. I moaned; everyone was so tentative now.
“Go away,” I said.
The doorknob turned.
“Go away,” I said, louder.
The door pushed open and Molly stood there. She was hugging her bag of stuffed M&Ms. It was the weirdest toy I’d ever seen, a giant bag stuffed with cloth candies. But she loved it. I admit it was so unique, I liked her for it (even if she could be annoying and throw them all over the floor when she got mad). Still, I didn’t want to see anyone.
“Did you hear me? Go!”
She flinched and stood, debating with herself. Then, like a snail, she inched into the room. Overall, Molly was a good sister. But, being the youngest, she was spoiled and always got her way. She liked to ignore people. I wasn’t in the mood.
“Molly!” I pointed at the door.
She reached the bed and dropped the M&M bag to climb up onto the mattress. When she was on top, she turned sideways and laid her head in my lap without saying a word. I couldn’t take it. I began crying. It was awkward—I had cried more the last couple weeks than in my entire life. Sensing my embarrassment, she closed her eyes and hugged my foot. Spoiled or not, she was the most receptive kid I’d ever seen.
When everything was out and my cries withered to heavy breathing, she got up as if nothing had happened, climbed off the bed, grabbed her stuffed toy, walked out of the room, and shut the door behind her. I stared at the wall for a long time, hoping she wouldn’t change.
Three
Sanctuary Preparatory
Academy
The following afternoon, Dad loaded my ginormous suitcase into our white Camry. Normally, I looked forward to road trips with him. This one was going to suck. Fortunately, I had retaliation plans. After saying good bye to Mom and Molly (Mom cried and Molly whispered, “Zeek,” in my ear), I climbed into the back seat. Dad froze for a second. I swear I saw the tiniest look of hurt on his face when he realized I wasn’t sitting next to him.
I
didn’t care and, before the car was even started, I had my headphones stuck into an old MP3 player (Dad refused to let me bring my cell phone). Reaching into my backpack, I pulled out a book, and skimmed through it without actually reading. There. If he was pretending I didn’t exist, I would do the exact same thing.
The drive to Forreston, Arkansas, was long, uncomfortable, and full of pit-stops and one-syllable grunts. At one convenience store, Dad got beef jerky and tossed it in my lap. It was a peace offering of sorts, but I hurled it to the front seat. He looked in the rear view mirror, hurt, and I glanced down. I told myself, Shouldn’t I try to show him I’m the same person? I pushed the thought aside and acted like I didn’t care.
That evening, we stopped at a hotel in Fort Smith, just inside the Arkansas border. While the town was quaint, with lots of red brick buildings, our place was a dump. I guess with all the money they were spending on “healing” me, a decent room wasn’t in the budget. The walls were plain and cracked. A microscopic painting of a cactus hung over the particle board desk. Dad and I checked the walls and sheets for bedbugs before unpacking.
Being forced into one small room was awkward. I tried pretending I was alone, but it was hard avoiding someone who passed within a few inches of me just go to the bathroom. Most of the evening consisted of one of us muttering, “Excuse me,” as we shuffled around.
Later that night, when we were both in bed and the lights were off, I spoke to him. I told myself I wasn’t going to, but couldn’t help it. Come tomorrow, I knew I might not see or talk to him for months. Because it was in a neutral setting (unlike the car and house that now felt tainted), this was my last chance to get that all-important question off my chest.
“Why are you doing this?”
Dad wasn’t asleep, but didn’t respond for several seconds. I grew nervous, thinking he wouldn’t say anything at all, but he finally muttered, “We just want you to get better.”
“Was I broken before?”
Silence.
“You know I’m the same person I was a few months ago,” I said.
“We just want you to get better.”
“You just said that.”
Silence.
I was aggravated, determined to hear one rational thought.
“Remember the time we played H-O-R-S-E,” I said. “And we made up that new rule where the ball had to bounce off the ground for each shot?”
I took his stupid silence as affirmation and continued, “You accidentally bounced the ball on the roof, but it rolled down and went in the basket?”
I knew he remembered. We spent an hour trying to recreate the shot; it was one-in-a-million. We had such a blast.
I turned to him, propped my head up with my hand, and said, “You know you’re destroying that, right?”
After a few seconds, he repeated, “We just want you to get better.”
I punched the headboard behind me. “Stop saying that!”
I heard a rustle on his mattress and knew I had startled him. Violence wasn’t the smartest move, but I had to let it out. Fourteen years of history and that’s all he’d say to me? He was like a robot, powered by the preacher’s batteries. Giving up, I rolled over away from him. If he wasn’t going to try, I wasn’t either.
For a split second, I was tempted to wait until Dad fell asleep, grab my crap, and make a run for it. No, scratch that. I’d leave my stuff behind and live like a hobo. That way, I could revel in the misery caused by my parents. I pictured myself toothless, and roasting a dead rat over a barrel fire. The thought actually made me feel better.
In reality, I couldn’t bail. Everything was so fresh, Dad would blame my running away on ‘the gay.’ That just didn’t seem right, and I figured I’d bide my time and hope I could convince them I was OK before hitting the streets.
* * * * *
The next morning, we packed in silence, loaded the car in silence, and hit the road in silence. I had my headphones in, but wasn’t listening. I sat thinking about about Sanctuary Prep Academy, about the future. In ten years, I could have a boyfriend. Or, if the brainwashing miraculously worked, I could have a girlfriend (we’d both be miserable). In ten years, I could be homeless, jobless, penniless. I could be dead in ten years. Scary.
It was early afternoon when we finally entered the grounds, about ten miles from Forreston, a small town with a Dairy Queen (I wondered if anyone had ever escaped for a Blizzard). I peeked through my fingers and saw a tall, rusting pole with a flag dangling from it. The top half of the flag was red and the bottom half white. A blue border surrounded it. I had no idea what it meant—probably something awful.
Tightening my legs, as if bracing for impact, I looked behind the flagpole to see a wrought metal sign hanging from the entrance. Other than some symbols I didn’t understand, it was made up of big, swirly cursive letters that read:
Sanctuary Preparatory Academy
I groaned and flung silent curses at it. This was going to suck, and I vowed to become an emotionless zombie until Dad left.
The campus was huge. It contained a road forming a huge lasso with buildings situated inside and out. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised at the size; they’d need classrooms and dormitories and whatnot. The quality of the place did surprise me. Talk about run down. No, everything was clean and well kept. It was just plain.
The buildings were all white brick. Trees sprouted up everywhere, like random mushroom patches. Mismatched pines surrounded the campus like a giant wall. I wondered if they were setup to keep us in or prevent the gay from leaking out?
Then I saw kids. Guys and girls chased each other across the yellowing grass or walked around the giant road loop like cattle. Others lay on their backs, watching clouds skitter across the sky. I stared at them and pushed my face into the window. They were gay! This was like the funeral, part two. I was looking at actual gay kids. My teeth began chattering.
Starting around the loop, we drove past a concrete outdoor basketball court. A handful of students were playing a game of three-on-three. More gay kids. One of them looked really good. I perked up a bit; being tall, I loved basketball. Maybe I could bury myself in it for the next year.
Trying to gauge his skill, I watched the guy drive to the basket. Making the layup, he turned and caught me looking. Suddenly, his eyes shot up into his head and he fell to his knees, arms stuck straight up, and yelled, “Heal me!”
I flinched. What the hell was that?
That snapped me out of my “gay kid” trance. Pushing back, I shifted my focus to a smattering of buildings to my left. Were they like special healing centers? I didn’t know what that would even mean, and couldn’t help but imagine tin foil hats attached to car batteries. My heart beat faster and my knee bounced up and down.
Dad slowed at the top of the giant loop, and parked in front of a clean, three-story brick building with a large stone placard that read Admissions and Registration. He got out, opened my door, and turned without speaking. I climbed out and slung my back pack over my shoulder. Keeping my headphones smashed into my ears, I followed him in.
A big round desk sat in the middle. An overly pleasant woman typed at a computer on the desk. She clacked away on her keyboard as if it were a grand piano. Probably typing up more recruiting brochures. Disgusted, I glanced around. The walls were plain and white.
That is, except for the awful, disgusting, hideous posters.
Posters smothered the far wall like paint, and smaller posters filled in any gaps. One showed a guy wearing a super tight shirt and short shorts. It read, Know the signs. A similar one, depicting a girl wearing flannel and sandals, jutted out next to it. The word “GAY” crushed her. Hundreds of such posters lined the wall from top-to-bottom. I turned away, nauseated.
“Hi! You must be Blaize,” the woman behind the desk said.
“He is,” my dad said.
Hearing my name, I debated making a break for it. But where would I go? Dairy Queen? That was stupid. There was no escape, at least not yet, and I wa
s dying to let my frustration out. This place was crazy! I walked with Dad and shifted back and forth as he filled out paperwork. The wait—like I was in line for the electric chair—swelled my agitation.
“Wow, you remembered my name! Are you sure I’m not Turd Heap or Trash Boy?” OK, I admit it: that was mean to say right in front of the receptionist, but I wanted to see my dad squirm. He’d been ignoring and belittling me for days, and the words just came out.
Dad gaped at me then at the woman, who’d pushed back a few inches.
He tried yammering something, but I smiled pleasantly at the reception. “All he’s called me the last few weeks is ‘that boy’. Why don’t you tell her all about it, Dad?”
Red blotches sprouted on Dad’s face. I’d never talked to him that way before and he was paralyzed.
“I don’t . . . I mean . . . ,” he stammered.
The woman regained her composure, scooted forward, and patted his hand. “We understand, Mr. Trales.”
The two of them turned to look at me at the exact same time, like they’d identified a murderer in a lineup. Dad shook his head like Preacher Montgomery had. The woman patted his hand again and his shoulders relaxed. I fled back into zombie mode, trembling from shame and nerves. Honestly, I didn’t even know where the outburst came from. The frustration and anger combined into a recipe that gave me mouth diarrhea.
Dad flew threw the rest of the papers, asking zero questions. I guessed he was eager to get out of the way and let me start “healing”. Unfortunately, I was wrong.
When he signed the last paper, the woman clasped her hands. “Mr. Trales, why don’t you stay for dinner? You can see the dorms and join your son in the cafeteria.”
I stared at my dad thinking, Noooooo.
He nodded. “Sounds great, thanks.”
I was so tired of that nod.
The woman grinned. “Wonderful. Someone will be here shortly to show you the way.”
