“No, come in. Please.”
“Hello, darling,” Mom said warmly as we joined her bedside.
“Hi, Mrs. Whitmore.”
“Nancy, please. Remember?”
“Right. Okay.”
Mom loves Violet. We can make her happy. What else matters?
I took Violet’s hand that was so small and fragile in mine. “Violet and I are going to the Homecoming dance together after the game on Friday.”
“Is that so? How lovely.”
Violet gave a little laugh. “He’s the King and there was a glitch in the matrix, so I ended up as Queen. I think he’s contractually obligated.”
“Ha, no. I’m happy to,” I said. My palms were getting sweaty. I dropped her hand and quickly lunged for my backpack where I’d left it on the floor. “I gotta get to practice.” I kissed Mom on her silk scarf. “Bye, Mom.”
“Be safe, dear.”
I remembered to spare a glance for my Homecoming Queen. “Call you later?”
“Uh, sure.”
“Great.” I pecked her on the cheek and hurried out.
In my room, I dumped my backpack on the floor and flopped onto my bed.
“So that was awkward,” I muttered to the ceiling. “What the hell is wrong with me?”
Who else knows you’re gay? a voice whispered back.
“Fuck.”
I’d kept Holden’s question out of my thoughts for the entire sleepless weekend. But as my eyes drifted closed for the few minutes of rest I had between school and practice, it snuck in and burrowed down deep, demanding an answer.
He said it as a joke. To mess with the footballer who was stuck in a closet with a guy. It didn’t mean anything.
Except when the words landed, they struck hard. I’d felt it. He’d seen it.
I spat another curse and tore off the bed to get ready for practice. Holden didn’t know what he was asking. There were no openly gay players in the NFL and hardly any at the college level. It just didn’t happen and yet my entire life was geared to one thing and one thing only—go pro.
It wasn’t solid or exact, but that was the only answer I had.
Chapter Six
“You are here,” Coach Braun says, “because your parents want what’s best for you. They want to save you from the mistakes you’ve been making and the false ideas you have about what is natural and what is not. They want to save you from yourself.”
His black eyes find me, and he nods once. “Him.”
Rough hands grab me by the shoulders and drag me across the rocky expanse between the campfire and the lake. Pain scrapes my bare feet and is numbed by the water, an icy ache that crawls up my naked skin and sinks into my bones. Its cold climbs higher, up to my waist, my chest—I can’t breathe—and then I’m dunked under.
I come up sputtering, jaw quivering. Strong hands—like iron claws in my shoulders—drag me back to shore. I kick and scream, thrashing with numb limbs that won’t cooperate.
“Let me go!” I cry out hoarsely, lips hardly forming the words. “Let me go! Let me go…”
Let me go.
Leave me to the water.
I’d rather slip into its frigid depths than believe my parents wanted this for me…
I gasped awake, shivering under a cold sweat, kicking and thrashing at a smothering weight.
“Let me go…”
The Alaskan wilderness faded and my bedroom in the guesthouse materialized around me, my breath wheezing in and out of my lungs. A slant of gold light fell across the wood floors.
“I’m here. Not there. Here.”
My hands made fists in the bedsheets, anchoring myself to the room, to the house. When my heart slowed its panicked pounding, I climbed out of bed and staggered to the bathroom. I made the shower as hot as I could stand, turning my face up to the spray so that my tears were lost in the searing water.
After, I wiped away the fog on the bathroom mirror and my reflection stared back. Hollow and haunted with shining, red-rimmed eyes. Thoughts and memories raced through my head, whispering. Sinister.
They sent you there on purpose. They knew, and they sent you anyway…
The reflection burst into a spiderweb of cracks and I pulled my fist from the center of it. Three knuckles on my left hand dripped red into the white porcelain sink. But that pain was sharp and alive and awake. Not a dream. It was real and it was mine.
My breathing calmed, and I tilted my chin up and set my jaw. The reflection that glared back at me was now hard. Cold. I held my bloody fist up like a promise.
“Never again…”
After dressing in black slacks, black turtleneck, and my thickest long gray coat, I strode out of the guesthouse, past the pool, and to the main house. Mags and Reg were at breakfast, Beatriz in the kitchen at her customary spot at the counter, humming.
“Ah, Holden!” Uncle Reginald said. “Good morning. Just in time for breakfast. Would you like—?”
“The mirror in my bathroom needs to be replaced,” I stated.
“Oh?” Aunt Mags touched her neck. Her gaze dropped to the bandages I’d wrapped around my left hand. “What happened?”
“My fist had an impromptu meeting with the mirror. Seven years bad luck. Or was it seventeen? I can never remember. Não, obrigado,” I said, waving off Beatriz’s sack lunch. I patted my flask in my coat pocket. “I’m on a liquid diet. Ciao.”
I left without looking at Beatriz’s soft, confused gaze or else I’d crumble. I couldn’t look at any of them with their eager, hopeful, “Let’s be a family” expressions.
They didn’t save me then. They can’t save me now.
Outside, I reached for my flask. The first taste burned some of the memory-dream out of me. A second gulp, and I
