The Summer I Wasn't Me (18 page)

The
Great
Gatsby
sits on my dresser, filled with the soured evidence of whatever it was Carolyn and I had. I can’t bring myself to open it.

The little sleep I do manage to get is tainted by an awful dream of being stranded, all alone, on an island version of Washington, DC. There are no boats or bridges or tunnels, and every time I try to swim to civilization, a strong current pulls me back. I go to the statue of Abraham Lincoln to plead for help, and the only response he gives me is a line from
Gatsby
: “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.”

The next morning, I pull Matthew aside on the walk to the dining cabin.

“Okay with you if I join team New Horizons Is Bullshit?” I whisper, cranky from my night of sleep deprivation.

He raises his eyebrows. “Really?”

“Really.”

“What
happened
yesterday, Lex?”

“What do you think happened?” I mumble.

“I have absolutely no idea,” he says. “You guys are acting so weird.”

I look at him, my eyes—and heart—heavy. “I told her how I felt and she shot me down.”

Matthew’s face falls. “Oh no.”

“Oh yes.”

“God, Lexi, I’m so sorry. I thought if you guys just had a chance to be alone together…”

“Yeah, well. Don’t worry about it. It wasn’t your fault.”

“It kinda was though—I’m the one who pushed you off the damn train.”

I look at him. “Yeah, what happened with Mr. Martin, anyway? He looked really mad.”

“He’s not thrilled, that’s for sure. I’m supposed to meet him in his office after breakfast. He’s probably gonna kick me out. Three strikes rule.” He actually looks worried.

“Well, that’s okay, right?” I say hesitantly. “I mean, you hate it here…”

He nods. “That’s true.” But his expression doesn’t change.

Why do I get the feeling I’m missing something?

“Matthew? Is everything okay?”

But then we’re at the dining cabin, and there’s no more time to talk.

After breakfast, Matthew heads off to the main cabin for his disciplinary meeting with Mr. Martin, and the rest of us go to the carpet cabin for more reparative therapy exercises.

Now that I know for sure that I have absolutely zero prospects for real love, I might as well stick with the pretend-to-be-straight-for-Mom plan. But it’s a lot harder today than it was two days ago to act like I care about this stuff. That stupid fantasy yesterday ruined everything. Allowing myself to imagine, even for just that one moment, that Carolyn and I could really be together has made the whole plan seem a lot less doable. Even though I was flat-out rejected, I can’t seem to let the
hope
go. Not hope that I’ll get to be with Carolyn—that’s clearly not going to happen—but more like the way I
felt
when I thought there was hope for us. I felt…optimistic. For the first time in a long time, I felt like there was at least one outcome, in a long list of possible paths, where everything might actually be okay.

It’s like there’s some part of me deep in my subconscious that’s saying,
Hey, remember how good it felt to think that you might actually get to live an honest, happy life? Yeah, we want more of that.

I really don’t have the energy for this de-gayifying stuff right now. I watch the exercise going on, but all I want is to be in bed with the covers pulled all the way up over my head.

It doesn’t help that in addition to being completely exhausted and dealing with a head full of thoughts that are more tangled than a ten-year-old ball of Christmas lights, I’m also feeling more alone than ever. Carolyn is acting like a stranger; Matthew is up at Mr. Martin’s, probably arranging his flight home at this very moment; and Daniel is still super gung-ho about the exercises after what happened on our date.

So when Brianna asks for a volunteer to bring Mr. Martin a note, I jump at the chance.

I take my time moseying through the woods. When I get to the part of the path that’s hidden from both the main cabin and the field, I sit on a big rock, take off my shoes, and dig my toes into the dirt path.

The rich soil threads between my toes and burrows under my nails. So much for Brianna’s pedicure. I dig down deeper into the earth with my heels. The soil underneath the top layer is cool and moist and soft. It reminds me of the sand on the beach back home.

I lean back against a tree trunk and gaze up at the intricate web of branches above me. I wish I could stay here forever.

But it’s only a matter of time before someone will come looking for me, so after a few more minutes, I brush the dirt off my feet, slip back into my shoes, and carry on with my errand.

Mr. Martin’s office door is closed when I get there, and I raise my hand to knock but freeze when I hear the voice through the door.

“Please,” Matthew is begging. “I can’t go home.”

Can’t go home? But I thought he couldn’t wait to get out of here?

Curious, I lower my hand and press my ear to the door.

“So you said,” Mr. Martin says. “But you have disobeyed me and disrespected my camp, Matthew. There are rules.”

“I know. I’m sorry,” Matthew says. “Please just give me one more chance. I’ll do anything.”

There’s a long stretch of silence…and then a few footsteps.

“Well,” Mr. Martin says, his voice low, “there is
one
thing you could do for me.”

“Wh-what are you doing?” Matthew stutters.

“Oh, don’t play dumb with me, Matthew. I’ve had my eye on you for a long time. I know what kind of boy you are.”

What kind of boy he is? What is going
on
in there?

“What the hell…what are you talking about?” Matthew says, his voice shaky now.

“You don’t believe in my teachings. You’ve been very clear about that.”

“So?”

“So…you like boys. You like to touch them, don’t you?”

“Uh…”

“I know you do. But, Matthew, have you ever been with a
man
?”

Oh my God.

“
Wha
t
?
” Matthew shrieks.

There’s another brief pause and then a chair skids across the floor followed by some sort of a scuffle. There’s a loud thump on the door, and I leap away and press my back against the wall next to the doorframe. The door doesn’t open, but when Mr. Martin speaks again, his voice is a lot closer. It sounds like he’s blocking the door from Matthew.

“Oh, don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it,” Mr. Martin says. “All those times you came to my office…”

“Are you
crazy
?” Matthew shouts. “I would
never
…I can’t believe this is happening. Let me out of here.”

“No.”

What do I do? There’s no one else around; everyone is down at the field cabins. I have to get Matthew out of there. I have to let my presence be known. Mr. Martin can’t do anything to Matthew if he knows I’m here.

But terror has me frozen in place. What would Mr. Martin do if he knew I overheard this? He’s clearly capable of some pretty crazy stuff…

“Let me out!” Matthew says again.

“You have two choices, Matthew. Do what I ask right now, or call your father and tell him you’ve been asked to leave the program.”

Another silence.

Just
call
your
father, Matthew!
I want to shout.
Don’t go anywhere near this monster!

“Well? What’s it going to be?” Mr. Martin says, sounding pretty confident that he’s about to get exactly what he wants.

If that happens, I tell myself, I’ll do something. I’ll stop it any way I can.

I stand there, flat against the wall, waiting.

“You know, I spoke with your father before you came here. I know what you’re facing if you go home early.” Mr. Martin’s voice is eerily gentle. “I had a father like that too. But mine was worse, so much worse.”

“I can’t call my father,” Matthew mumbles resignedly.

What? No!

“What do you want from me?” he asks miserably, his voice drawing closer to Mr. Martin.

“Take your shirt off.”

Matthew sighs. “Okay.” Another pause. “Now what?”

“Come here.”

Matthew’s footsteps come closer.

“Now kiss me,” Mr. Martin says.

That’s it. I’m going in.

I step in front of the door and raise my hand to pound on it.

But then something happens. Mr. Martin cries out in pain and there’s a large crash. The door flies open, and suddenly I’m looking into Matthew’s frightened eyes. He’s shirtless, his face ghost-white. We just stare at each other in shock for a never-ending second.

There’s another moan of pain from within the office, and I look down at Matthew’s hand to see that he’s gripping a large metal stapler.

Go!
I mouth silently.
Get
out
of
here!

He stares at me for a second longer, as though he’s still not quite sure what’s happening, and then takes off.

I know what I need to do. I wait outside the door for a few more moments and collect myself. Mr. Martin is groaning and muttering a garbled string of cuss words inside the office. That’s good. As long as I know he’s alive and conscious, I can take my time.

I wait until Matthew’s had plenty of time to get away, and then I take a deep breath and enter the office.

Mr. Martin is lying on the floor across a chair he must have broken when he fell. There’s a deep gash over his left eye, and blood is streaming down his face.

Matthew got him good.
Well
done, buddy
.

“Mr. Martin!” I exclaim, feigning alarm. I rush over to him. “Are you all right? What happened?”

“Lexi,” he groans. “Call for help.”

“Should I go get Barbara?”

“No! Call a doctor.”

“What doctor?”

“911.” He moans in pain again. “Call 911.”

“You need to apply pressure to your head,” I say, my first aid and CPR training from my job at Hard Rock kicking in. Matthew’s shirt is still lying on the floor. I wad it up and hand it to Mr. Martin. “Use this.” Then I grab the phone off his desk and call an ambulance.

Mr. Martin is losing a lot of blood. While we wait for the paramedics, he fades in and out of consciousness, and I have to keep shaking him and slapping him to wake him up. If he has a concussion, he can’t go to sleep. He might be the world’s worst kind of scum, but I still can’t let him die.

During a brief moment of clarity, he asks why I’m here.

I show him the note. “Brianna wanted to know if you were still planning on doing a Bible study session after lunch or if they should start setting up for something else.”

He mumbles something incoherent and drifts off again.

“Mr. Martin!” I shout in his face and pinch his arm, maybe a little harder than I need to. “No sleeping!”

Finally, the EMTs rush in.

“He was hit in the head,” I explain, “and then he fell. I’ve been trying to keep pressure on the gash and keep him from falling asleep.”

“Good work,” an EMT with big teeth says. “What happened?”

“Uh…I don’t know,” I lie. “I just found him like this.”

“Okay, we can take it from here.”

I start to leave but Mr. Martin’s voice stops me. “Brianna!”

“No, I’m Lexi.” God, he really is far gone.

“No. Get Brianna.”

“Oh. Okay,” I say and break into a sprint.

***

“I don’t understand,” Brianna says as we run back toward the main cabin together. “How did this happen?”

I stick with my lie. “I don’t know. I just got there and he was on the ground.”

“Bleeding from the head?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t understand,” she says again. Then she starts praying. Out loud. She’s really upset, even though I told her he was going to be fine.

The EMTs are wheeling Mr. Martin into the back of the ambulance when we get there.

“Jeremiah!” she cries and jumps into the ambulance too.

Jeremiah? Is that Mr. Martin’s first name?

Then the doors are closed, the siren is turned on, and within seconds, there’s nothing to show that the ambulance was even here except a thin cloud of dust floating over the gravel road.

I turn back to the main cabin and run up the front steps.

I need to find Matthew.

He’s in the boys’ dorm, curled up on his bed.

The boys’ dorm is pretty much exactly like the girls’, except there’s blue everywhere instead of pink, and instead of vanities, they have desks and a shelf filled with sports books.

“Hey.” I sit beside him.

“Hey.”

“He’s going to be fine. He’s on his way to the hospital right now.”

“Great.” He doesn’t seem happy about it though. He looks at me. “How much did you hear?”

“Enough.”

He buries his face under his pillow.

“I’m proud of you, Matthew,” I say gently.

“For what?” His voice is muffled.

“For fighting back. For not…you know, doing what he wanted you to do.”

He slides the pillow off his face and stares up at the ceiling. “I thought I was going to have to. I took my shirt off for him. And I kissed him.”

I gasp. “You kissed him?”

“It was the only way to get close enough to hit him without him seeing it coming.”

“Oh.” I think about what I would have done in a similar situation. I don’t know if I would have had the guts to do Matthew did. “Matthew, why didn’t you just call your father?”

“Not an option. He wouldn’t understand.”

“Whatever happened to, ‘Lexi, this is
your
life, not your mom’s. You have to do what makes you happy too.’ Sound familiar? I could say the same thing to you—just substitute the word
dad
for
mom
.”

“It’s different.”

“How?”

He looks at me with sad eyes. “Before I left to come here, my dad told me that if I didn’t stick with the program for the entire summer, I wouldn’t have a home to come back to.”

“You mean…he’ll kick you out?”

“Yeah. He was serious about it too.”

“But he can’t do that—you’re his kid. He’s responsible for you.”

He gives me a
can
you
really
be
that
naïve?
face. “It happens all the time, Lex. There are homeless shelters
just
for LGBTQ kids, for this exact reason.”

It’s pretty sobering to think that some kids might actually have it even worse than I do. No matter what my mom might be feeling about me being gay, and no matter how damaged our relationship might be because of it, I don’t think she’d ever actually throw me out on the street.

“Do you have other family you could stay with?” I ask. “What about Justin?”

“My dad’s parents would never take me, and my mom’s live in Canada. Justin lives in the dorms at UCSD. They don’t let you have guests for more than three nights in a row. I could probably stay with friends for a while, but how long can you really do that for? I’d be pretty much homeless.”

“What about your mom?” I ask. “Wouldn’t
she
let you come home?”

He lets out a little humorless laugh. “My mother doesn’t do anything my father doesn’t want her to.”

So the perfect family that Matthew painted during his Father Wound session isn’t so perfect after all.

I have a sudden flashback to the very first time I saw Matthew. “Did you know I saw you that first day, before we met at the carpet cabin?”

He shakes his head.

“You were coming down the stairs from the dorms. You must have checked in just before I did. You looked…” I trail off.

“Petrified?” Matthew supplies.

I give a little chuckle. “Well, yeah. Was that because of your dad?”

He nods. “He’d just dropped me off. And before he left, he made sure to reiterate his point: finish the program or else. So I thought I would get through the summer, go home, and go back to normal. My father never said anything about kicking me out if the program didn’t work; he just said I had to finish the full eight weeks.”

I’m not sure that makes much sense—if Matthew went home at the end of the program acting exactly the same way he used to before New Horizons, something tells me his dad wouldn’t be so thrilled about that either. But I guess we’ve all been leaning on a crutch of denial this summer.

“Matthew…not that I’m blaming you or anything, believe me, I love that you are who you are, but…if you knew all along what your dad was threatening you with, why didn’t you try a little harder? Why did you always have to challenge everything?”

He digs his palms into his eyes. “Honestly, Lexi, I never thought they would
actually
kick anyone out. Places like this thrive on their reputation. That’s all they have going for them, you know? They’re a total scam; they can’t actually deliver what they promise for most people. So the only way for them to stay in business is if people
think
they can. If they kick campers out before the summer is over, it would be admitting failure. And then the smokescreen comes down. I saw through it all from day one—or, at least, I thought I did. Clearly, I was wrong.”

There’s silence for a minute, then Matthew groans and says, “What the hell was I thinking, attacking Mr. Martin like that?”

“You were thinking you had to defend yourself.”

“Yeah, but I did it so I wouldn’t have to call my dad and tell him I got kicked out. But I’m definitely kicked out now. It was all for nothing.”

“You don’t know that…” I say. But he’s probably right. There’s no way Mr. Martin is going to let him stay now.

“I
knew
there was something off about that guy,” Matthew says.

“Yeah, but did you know it was
that
? I had no idea.”

“I knew from the moment I met him that all that talk about overcoming his SSA was bullshit. But it never occurred to me that he was screwing his campers.”

A little gasp escapes my throat. “Wait—you think this has happened to other people too?”

He gives me a wary look. “He knew exactly what he was doing in that office, Lexi. He’s no amateur.”

“Do you think he’s done it to other campers who are here
now
?” I immediately think of Daniel. Matthew might be able to defend himself, but Daniel? No way.

Matthew thinks for a second. “Nah, probably not. I’m the only one he ever calls to his office. And even with me he didn’t try anything until today.”

I exhale. “But other campers from other summers?”

“No doubt in my mind.”

Mr. Martin and Brianna return from the hospital a few hours later—I guess his injuries weren’t very serious after all. Matthew and I are still in the boys’ dorm when the taxi rolls up the gravel road. He didn’t want to go face the rest of the camp, and I didn’t want to leave him alone. Funny how with the two head counselors gone, no one came looking for us.

Brianna appears in the doorway, an ominous silhouette in the darkened room. “You two. Classroom cabin.
Now
.” She spins on her heels and marches down the stairs.

Matthew and I look at each other. Why are we going to the classroom cabin? Shouldn’t they be making arrangements to send Matthew home?

We follow Brianna in silence and get to the classroom cabin to find the whole camp already assembled there. Including Mr. Martin. A thick bandage over his eye is being held in place with a few yards of gauze wrapped around his head. But the scariest part is the look on his face—there’s fire in his eyes.

“Lexi, find a seat, please,” he says so calmly it’s almost menacing. “And Matthew, please join me up front.”

Matthew sits in the chair Mr. Martin has pulled out for him at the head of the classroom.

I automatically glance at Carolyn, forgetting in the moment that we’re not friends anymore. Her face is distressed. Yeah, whatever’s going on here, it’s not good.

Mr. Martin wastes no time getting to the point.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he says. “It’s no secret that over these past five weeks, Matthew has been lacking in his commitment to the work we do at New Horizons. Though he hasn’t taken to the reparative therapy process as quickly as we would have liked, we have nurtured his need to find his own way on this journey.”

That is such a lie! But the other counselors are nodding sympathetically.

“But his waywardness reached a new level today. Matthew has disgraced this camp, its teachings, and most of all, himself. We had hoped that, given enough time, Matthew would give himself over to the Lord Jesus Christ, but it’s now clear that the devil is more firmly rooted in him than we first thought.” He points to his bandage. “Matthew attacked me today.”

Gasps and cries of shock ripple through the room.

Mr. Martin looks sad. “I was just trying to give him some extra attention and help him get on track with the rest of you—who are all doing so wonderfully in your therapy, I might add—by giving him some one-on-one tutoring, when out of nowhere, he came at me with a weapon and sent me to the hospital.” He stops and looks Matthew in the eye. “Isn’t that right, Matthew?”

Matthew stares back at him, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows. I desperately want him to disagree, to stand up and tell everybody what
really
happened, but I know he won’t. He won’t for the exact same reason that I’m not jumping on top of my desk and shouting
Liar!
—we’re scared.

And for whatever reason, Mr. Martin hasn’t kicked Matthew out yet. We can’t risk doing anything that would change that.

“Isn’t that right?” Mr. Martin repeats.

Slowly, Matthew nods. “Yes,” he whispers.

A brief smile flickers across Mr. Martin’s face. It’s so quick that I doubt anyone else even notices it. But its meaning couldn’t be clearer: he knows he’s back in control.

“Yes, what?” he demands, sure of himself now.

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Martin turns back to the group. “Even though I was assaulted unprovoked,” he says, “and had to receive eleven stitches in my forehead, I have decided not to press charges against Matthew or send him home early. After all, it’s not his fault that the devil lives so loudly inside of him.”

There are more sympathetic nods, mostly from the counselors.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about what to do to help Matthew get rid of that darkness inside him, and after what happened today, I’ve come to a conclusion.” He pauses and looks down at Matthew. “We are going to have an exorcism.”