I feel chilled. “Are you serious? Connor, what happened?”
“I’m not sure. He said something about a girl.”
“Callista,” I supply. “She’s … they’re close. Or, they were,” I correct myself. “I think they’re talking again.” I shake away my nervousness, remembering the pain in Justin’s face when Callista texted him last night. “Look, Connor, Justin would never go anywhere without saying something at least to me. Ever. I’m sure he left a note somewhere.”
Connor’s voice is unhappy. “If you find him, would you give me a call? It’s cool if he doesn’t want to talk to me, but …”
“Sure. No problem,” I say, going back into the house. “I’ll look for a note right now.”
But there’s nothing in the kitchen, no note on Justin’s bed or on the nightstand next to his bed. I don’t find his MP3 player, which makes me think he’s running, until I find his running shoes.
I text his phone. Where R U?
When I hear the ring tone I programmed coming from the bed, I can’t breathe.
I’m going to kill him.
“Dad?” My feet thud up the stairs. “Do you know where Justin is?”
Dad sits up, blinking. “What, honey?”
“Justin. Where. Is. Justin.” My voice is edged.
Dad rubs his face, more than half asleep. “Don’t know. I thought he was downstairs.”
“Did you hear the door open?” I ask. “Do you maybe remember him saying he was going for a walk or something?”
Dad shakes his head. “We were both right here, Belly. We would have noticed him coming by.”
“I wouldn’t have,” I remind him. “I was working. I would have heard the door, but I didn’t hear anything.”
Dad scrubs a hand across his hair. “Well, give his cell a ring, and—”
“It’s in his room, and so are his running shoes. Dad, I think he left. Connor called me and said Justin was upset about a girl, and I looked and looked for him, and he’s not here, and he didn’t tell me anything or leave a note, and I don’t know where he would have gone. You’ve gotta help me look for him.”
Dad looks stunned. “Bel, slow down and run that by me again.”
I repeat myself, explaining that Connor phoned and said that this was “an emergency, maybe.” Dad frowns.
“Bring me Justin’s phone,” he says abruptly, bending to slip his feet into his shoes.
Dad’s pulled on a different shirt by the time I race up the stairs and hand him Justin’s phone. Dad frowns as he scrolls through the last calls. “Who’s Calli D?” he asks.
“Callista Douglas,” I say. “She texted him last night. He was supposed to call her.”
He hands me the phone. “Well, she called him a few hours ago. Take a look at the texts, will you? We might be worrying for nothing.”
“He hasn’t sent any texts since yesterday,” I report, scrolling through the messages. “Just somebody named Viking, and I don’t know who that is.”
“Maybe Connor knows.”
“I don’t know why he would just go off somewhere,” I fret. “Should we call Mom?”
My father swallows hard, and the muscles in his throat are visible. “Not yet. Not yet. This could be nothing, Belly. You know how your brother is when he’s thinking.” Dad tries to give me a “don’t worry” pat on the shoulder, but his hand lands too heavily. His eyes are wide, the whites around them showing clearly as his gaze darts around the room.
“Okay, then. Listen—I’m going to look for him. I’ll drive around for a while. If I can’t find him walking through town by seven, we’ll ask your mom if she’s heard from him today. No reason to get her upset.”
“Okay.” I head for the stairs. “Let me get a sweater.”
“No—Belly, you need to stay here so you can call me if he shows up.”
“Right.” I stop moving and cross my arms. “I knew that.”
Dad gives me a quick hug and heads toward the garage. “If you think of anything, give me a call,” he says.
“I will.” A moment later, I hear the garage door lift, then close behind him. I stand in the middle of the room for a moment, holding myself, then I sit on the couch.
Justin’s probably just walking around in the neighborhood, I reason to myself. He’ll turn up in a little while.
But when my phone rings a half hour later, it’s Connor.
“Did you find him?” he blurts.
“No,” I say, my voice shaking. “Connor, you have to tell me exactly what happened.”
Connor hesitates. “Conversations in the chat room are confidential.”
“Connor—”
“He’s been posting on the forum, and he basically said he’d had to blow off this girl, and that he couldn’t do this anymore, and he was afraid she’d find out about your dad when he came home.”
“Couldn’t do what anymore?”
“I don’t know.” Connor’s voice is tense.
“Dad’s driving around looking. If we don’t find him by seven, we’re calling Mom.”
I take a breath. “Connor, where is he? We don’t know where anything is in Buchannan, except the theater. Maybe he’s at Dr. Hoenig’s office?”
“Is that your therapist?”
“Yeah. I should call Dad and tell him to drive to her office.”
“Call me when you find him.”
“I will.”
Dr. Hoenig’s office is closed, and when Dad checks, there’s no one in the parking lot. At seven-thirty, Dad finally comes home, a lot more worried than when he started out, and begins making calls.
The hospital has no record of Justin, or of any accidents in the last few hours with John Doe victims. Because Justin is a minor, Dad could file an official report of a missing person, but he’s not convinced that Justin is, as the officer said, “a danger to himself or others,” and decides to hold off.
Dad describes what Justin was wearing—shorts, a goofy Hobbits Are Tolkien Minorities T-shirt, and ratty canvas sneakers. Maybe a windbreaker. We check his room and find his jacket there. The dispatcher assures Dad that the police driving through town will be on a general lookout for a boy of his description.
Finally, Dad explains the situation to Mom, who is surprisingly calm—at first.
“It looks like he just walked off without much of a plan,” Dad finishes, regret in his voice. “It’s not like him to leave his phone.”
Mom’s voice on the speakerphone is tinny. “There’s a flight at nine. If he doesn’t turn up—”
“I’ll let you know,” Dad says grimly. He rubs his face. “I wish I hadn’t dropped off.”
“He’s not a toddler who wandered away,” Mom points out. “He’s sixteen, and he should have left a note, taken his phone, and taken responsibility.” Now her voice is angry, and I know for sure that she’s scared.
Dad glances at me as I start heading downstairs. I can’t deal with any more.
“God, where is he?” I whisper, standing in the middle of his room. Justin’s things are put away neatly like they are when he’s at home, and I go over his room again, sliding my hand under his pillow, looking on the floor beneath the night table, looking in the bathroom—anywhere for a note, a clue, anything. But there’s nothing.
At seven-thirty, my phone chirps. Connor.
“Tell me you’ve heard from him,” I beg.
“No.” Connor sighs. “I was just calling to see if he was home.”
“Dad’s at the airport waiting for Mom’s flight to come in,” I say. “Connor, I don’t understand this. Justin’s never left me before, ever. When we were little, both of us ran away from home—together.”
I can hear the smile in Connor’s voice. “How far did you get?”
“To next door,” I say, and laugh a little. “She had these little deer statues in her yard we thought were cool. We were gone all of four minutes.” I laugh again, but my breath hitches. I press my hand against my chest.
“This sucks.” Connor sighs again. �
��If I could do anything—”
“Can you come over?” I blurt, hating how shaky my voice sounds.
“I’ll borrow Maddie’s car and be there in twenty minutes.”
Checking Out
Justin
“It’s just some stuff. It’s not something I can go into, okay?”
“Um, okay.”
“I’m sorry. Look, I’ll call you when I get home—”
“You don’t have to. I’ve got to go.”
“Wait. Callista, I’m sorry—”
If I stay in the house another second, I know I’m going to break something. I slip in the earbuds of my MP3 player and flick through my playlist until I find something loud.
There’s a low cement wall around a few plants near the curb across the street where I put up my heel and stretch my tight calves, watching a flock of noisy blackbirds threaten a few starlings over the oak tree at the end of the court. I bend forward, putting my head as close to my knee as I can, then switch legs. My muscles are reluctant, burning with strain, and I fill my head with the pain, glad to do anything but think.
I follow the sidewalk beside a row of straight, broad tree trunks. The slightly fuzzy effect of their newly opened leaves makes me think of a little kid’s drawing. Everything is so bright and shiny in this neighborhood that it’s hard not to smile at the postman walking along ahead of me, stuffing mail and newspapers in the sidewalk boxes. Heading off across the hill behind Dad’s town house, I pick up the dusty walking trail and follow it down at a ground-eating lope. The puffs of dust kicking up make me glad I didn’t wear my good running shoes.
A few blocks from home, I realize I probably should have called Viking—who I discovered was Connor when he sent me his number. He’s a good friend so far, but I don’t think I can explain how I feel about this. The people in the chat room mean well, but they don’t understand. Callista is a really nice girl with a decent, normal family. Our friends in Medanos are normal, status quo types—nice house, a couple of kids, a couple of cars. We’re not identical, by any means, but basically we’re all the same type—people with jobs, people who went to college, people who go to church. Normal people.
That’s not us anymore. How would it look if Callista got back together with me? Wrong. Unless she likes answering questions about the guy with the drag queen dad, I think I’ll do her a favor and stay away from her.
She’ll understand it’s a favor, eventually.
I walk fast, stretching my legs and shaking all the thoughts from my brain with my pace. After a series of long hills, the trail stops at the edge of the road. I cross to the parking lot and read a small sign announcing that this is Buchannan Valley College’s East Lot.
The library is just a few buildings away. I push through the doors to find things busy and noisy. Groups of students sit at tables, working on projects, and every seat in the computer station is busy. I’ve spent hours in the library at school and at Medanos Junior College, scanning journals and magazines, formulating defensive arguments for all kinds of cases. It feels a little strange to be in a college library with no purpose and no deadline, but I find a couch in the periodicals section and dig in. It’s a perfect distraction.
At first I just stick to what’s around me—a random journal from a nearby shelf, the sports section in the local paper, the New York Times. Then I head for the computers and research “boarding schools”—and give that up when I realize how expensive most of them are. Mom and Dad will never agree to me leaving home for that much money.
When a group moves into the periodicals area, I snag a few pieces of recycled scratch paper and a golf pencil from a computer kiosk and settle into a study carrel in the silent basement stacks to write a letter. After the words Dear Callista, I cross out sentences and whole paragraphs as I attempt to explain about Dad, about the way things have been. It comes out sounding like a policy debate defense, full of evidence and argument and nothing I really feel.
I wad it up and sit staring for a while, feeling tired.
You can’t force people to react like you want them to. You can’t create a way to think about things that don’t even cross most people’s minds. No matter what I try to say to Callista to make it better, the obvious truth remains: Dad is coming home, and eventually, Callista will find out about him. And freak.
But what’s the worst thing that could happen?
One of Mr. Lester’s little tricks in forensics for breaking through our panic about having to speak in public was to have us freewrite for two minutes on the worst things that could happen to us during our event. Afterward, we divided our lists into two categories—legitimate worries and stage fright/paranoia. It turned out that, as a group, we were a lot more paranoid than we thought.
Okay, yeah, we could trip on the way to the platform, lose all of our evidence cards five minutes before an event, knock over the team’s water pitcher, stutter, lose our voices—but chances are that even if one of those things happened, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal. We all trained so hard for our events that most of us could rattle off our points blindfolded or if wakened from a sound sleep.
I remember laughing as Mr. Lester read our Worst lists out loud. Writing them really helped; none of the stuff I’ve dreaded has ever happened during an event.
Okay, so I never imagined Dad walking into the auditorium in drag. But none of the stuff on my actual list ever happened.
I turn over a fresh sheet of scratch paper.
What’s the worst thing that could happen with Callista?
Slowly, the words come to me.
She could stop speaking to me.
She could out Dad to her friends.
She could decide to make us her missionary project and be scary-nice.
She could act like she doesn’t notice and secretly talk trash about us.
She could …
It doesn’t take long to run out of ideas. I cross out a few stupid ones as paranoid—really, Callista’s not going to beat me up or get someone to run me down in their car. She can’t make me feel any way, and she can’t do anything I haven’t already done to myself.
Didn’t I already stop speaking to Callista—to protect myself from when she decided to stop speaking to me? Isn’t Dad getting ready to out himself? All of my biggest worries have to do with embarrassment, humiliation, and fear—and just like during a forensics event, none of that is anything I can do anything about, except breathe and live through it.
Which completely sucks.
I draw a line under my list and write another one.
What’s the worst thing that can happen in Medanos?
Immediately the list looks more realistic and less paranoid.
People could ask Pastor Max to make us leave church.
We might get kicked out of school.
Mom could lose catering jobs.
People could vandalize our house.
People could harass Dad.
People could hurt one of us.
People …
It would really hurt all of us to be asked to leave our church. It would be hard on Mom not to hang out with her Girls’ Night Out women’s group. I can’t see Pastor Max deciding that we’re a bad influence, but I know a few conservative families get wound up about things and like to control how everything looks at church. Dad coming down the center aisle in Mom’s old linen suit would really freak them out—and me too.
Would Pastor Max ask us to leave? Would Dad even do that? If we get asked to leave a church, it’s not like that changes God’s mind about us. And we could always join another church.
I leave my first worry with a question mark next to it.
I cross out my second worry. Unless Ys and I do something to break school rules, we can’t get kicked out of school because of Dad—unless the school wants to deal with Poppy and the American Civil Liberties Union. No one wants to deal with Poppy when he’s in lawyer mode.
The third worry is realistic—people might decide against having Mom do their catering b
ecause of Dad. Mom’s business could lose money, and she might have to work harder and lay off her staff.
This really scares me for a moment, before I realize something: Mom might also gain new clients because of Dad. It’s a weird thought, but a good one. Maybe someone would feel safer with Mom because she’s married to Dad.
The next three worries on the list are just too real. I hear in the news all the time about violence against gay and lesbian people. It gives me a stomachache to think that Dad is putting himself out there by being transgender. Someone could hurt him—or Mom—or Ys. It makes me sick with fear and anger.
I want to get online and find statistics for our state, for our city. Have there been any recent incidents? Do we live in a bad area for violence against gay and lesbian and transpeople? Should we move?
I stretch out my legs and prop my feet on the chair across from me, thinking hard. There has to be something we can do to protect ourselves. Does en|GNDR have resources for self-defense classes? I don’t realize I’m drumming my fingers until I earn an annoyed look from the guy browsing the shelves next to me.
Shut it down, Justin.
I reach for my pencil again.
Fact: Random violence happens—no matter where you live.
Fact: Some racist could attack us for being African Americans. But no one has.
Fact: These last three questions probably fall at least a little under the category of “paranoid.” Who are these “people”? Why do they suddenly know who we are and what we’re doing?
Other than asking Dad to be careful and praying for him like always, there’s nothing I can do about any of this. Just like every other day of my life, when I say goodbye to Dad when he flies down to supervise a building site, when Mom has a late job and I go to bed before she comes home—all I can do is make sure they know I love them, say my prayers, and let it go.
Stuff happens. None of us control anything.
“The library will be closing in ten minutes,” a nasal voice interrupts, and I frown. Closing? What time is it? I have no idea how long I’ve been here, pulling one idea out of the air, rejecting it, pulling out another one. Standing, I pat my pockets for my phone to check the time and realize I don’t even have my backpack. I shrug. I didn’t know how long of a walk I was going to take, so everything is back at Dad’s.
Happy Families Page 14
