Borrowed Boy Read online

  Chapter Twenty-three

  BRENDAN LEFT right after we finished dinner.

  “Let me help with the cleanup,” he offered, starting to gather dirty plates from the dining room table.

  “Absolutely not,” Ma said more firmly than ever. “You’ve done more than enough for us today, Brendan.”

  “I don’t mind, Mrs. Copeland. Really.”

  “Thanks, but no.” Ma got up and gently took the plates from his hands. “You’ve had a very long, very busy day. You must be exhausted after all that.”

  Brendan shrugged. “I’m a little tired, yeah. But—”

  “No buts. The biggest favor you can do this family now is to get yourself some rest.”

  “Okay, if you say so. The chicken teriyaki was great. Thanks for dinner.”

  “And thank you.” Pa moved around the table, counting out twenty-dollar bills as he walked over to Brendan. Brendan raised both hands and started to protest, but Pa shut him down with a big shake of his head and an even bigger smile. “At least let us pay you back what the trip cost you,” he said, placing the money in Brendan’s hand.

  Brendan gave in reluctantly, nodding back at Pa as he stuffed the money into his pocket. “Well, good night, everybody.”

  BJ walked Brendan through the living room to the door. I watched them carefully. After he opened the door, BJ held up a fist. Brendan bumped knuckles with him, gave me a goodbye wave, and was gone.

  That was cool.

  I went back to the table and started to gather dirty dishes. As she’d done with Brendan, Ma took the dishes from my hands.

  “Let’s leave the dishes,” she said. “They can wait. I want everyone in the living room now. BJ, you wait right there.”

  Arms out, she ushered Pa and me into the living room where BJ had already staked out a spot on the sofa. When the rest of us were seated, Ma said, “We’ve each of us experienced a tremendous upheaval in our lives lately, but we’ve never taken the time to sit down and talk about it. Well, that ends now, tonight.”

  “Yes it does,” Pa said, taking over from Ma. “Your mother and I have been very worried about the two of you.”

  I nodded. “I know, and I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what, Dwayne?” Pa replied.

  “For leaving town the way I did, going back to Memphis.”

  “That was only one of our worries. We’d very much like to know why you felt you had to leave.”

  For a moment I was tongue-tied, unsure exactly what to say. I looked away from Pa, down at my lap. “There were… reasons, different reasons….”

  “Tell us,” Ma urged.

  There was a boiling mess of thoughts and emotions in me. I shrugged a shoulder.

  “Are you unhappy here?” Ma asked.

  “Sometimes. But not all the time. Just… sometimes.”

  Ma reached over, tucked a finger under my chin, and lifted my face so that we were looking into each other’s eyes. “I know how much you miss your adoptive parents, your friends in Memphis, and I’m sorry. But we don’t expect you to cut yourself completely off from them. We can arrange for you to visit—”

  “I know that, Ma.”

  “Okay. What else makes you unhappy?” Ma put a hand to her chest. “Is it your dad and me? Are you angry with us for bringing you here?”

  “No. No, I’m not.”

  Pa pulled in his lips doubtfully for a moment. “I think maybe, on some level, you are,” he said. “And that’s completely understandable.”

  Ma turned to my brother. “What about you, BJ?”

  BJ looked surprised. “What do you mean, what about me?”

  “You’ve been angry too. You were angry long before the FBI tracked Dwayne down, but you became outright hostile when we brought Dwayne home.”

  “You cut me off from my friends.”

  “Not completely,” Pa said, “and not permanently. And there’s more to it than that. As your mother said, this anger didn’t start just when Dwayne came home.”

  “Can you tell us what you’ve been feeling, BJ?” Ma asked.

  “You and Dad… whenever it came to anything about Dwayne, you completely ignored me. It’s like I didn’t matter. You stopped seeing me. You didn’t listen.”

  Ma and Pa looked shocked, their mouths dropping open.

  “Oh, BJ,” Ma gasped, reaching out to him, her hand quivering. “I didn’t… we didn’t realize….”

  “Son, we didn’t mean to make you feel that way,” said Pa. “But looking back now, I can see how we did.”

  “We’re so sorry, BJ,” Ma said. “We worried so about Dwayne… but you’re not an afterthought to us. You never were. It breaks my heart that we made you feel that way.”

  “But we’re listening to you now, son. I promise. We see you.”

  BJ nodded, He turned to me. “I hated that you were gone. I hated that you came back.”

  His words stoked a pain in my chest. “So you hate me.”

  “No!” BJ suddenly looked as hurt as I felt. “That’s not what I’m saying. I just… things were so screwed up without you here. They were screwed up after you came back.” He raised his hands and let them drop in his lap again, a helpless gesture. “You were right, Dwayne. I was an asshole, the way I treated you, and I’m sorry. I didn’t mean any of it. I don’t even know why I did it.”

  “I think I do,” said Ma. “You’re angry about the kidnapping. I blame myself, but you hate the person who took Dwayne. We still don’t know who the kidnapper is. We may never know. I think that, without a focus for your anger, you turned it on Dwayne.”

  BJ went quiet, his eyes taking on that faraway glaze that comes with inward looking. A few moments later, he sniffed and nodded; he knew Ma was right. He turned to me again. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “No, none of this is okay,” said Pa. “There’s a lot going on under the surface here, for all of us. I’ve also been angry and afraid all these years, angry at the police for not finding my missing son, afraid my little baby was dead.” He inhaled a shuddering breath and wiped a hand over his face. “I hid it so no one would see my pain, especially your mother and BJ. But it still eats at me even now.” In turn he looked each of us in the eye. “We can’t hold in our pain anymore. We have to start dealing with it.”

  “That’s why your dad and I have made an appointment,” Ma added. “Two days from now, we’re meeting with a therapist as a family. Each of us will also have individual sessions in addition to the family sessions. Anything you don’t feel comfortable discussing here at home or in a family session, you can bring up when you’re with the therapist one-on-one.”

  “So there’s no need to hold back,” Pa said, focusing on me. “Let’s bring everything into the open.”

  The way Pa looked directly at me when he said that made me think maybe he somehow knew and understood every part of me, even the part that sometimes confused and scared me. Maybe I could tell him about being gay. Maybe I could tell my whole family, and it would be no big deal.

  Or maybe it would. Who really knows about things like that? There were more urgent things to talk about.

  But I wasn’t going to hide who I was from the people in my life, not forever. If there was one thing I’d learned from all the craziness I’d been through, it was that you can’t really hide from yourself.

  We talked more that night. Not about the bad things haunting our hearts; we decided it was best to save that for our therapy sessions. We talked about taking a vacation together in August at the Grand Canyon, hiking, camping out, and visiting Native American reservations. And from there we’d take a trip to Las Vegas so I could meet my grandparents. We talked about how, after Ma and Pa returned to work and BJ and I started school again, we’d always make time together—movie night, game night, anything we wanted. We even started making plans for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Ma and Pa were going to invite my Memphis parents to Thanksgiving dinner, and they were going to let me spend my winter break, includin
g Christmas, in Memphis.

  As we talked, I kept looking from Ma to Pa to BJ. It was amazing because, for the first time, I actually liked that I saw and heard myself in them. BJ’s smile was my smile. Dad’s eyes were my eyes. Ma’s laugh was my laugh. I’d found new parts of my being and my history that I hadn’t even known were out there.

  I’d found myself, and I was never running from that again.

  My identity crisis wasn’t exactly settled, though. BJ’s unexpected change in attitude toward me was very welcome, but he also had one more surprise in the wings.

  “Hey, Mom, Dad,” he said, raising both hands to get their attention. “Here’s one more thing you ought to know. This guy—” He paused midsentence as he reached over to pat my shoulder. “—this guy doesn’t really want to be called Dwayne. He’d rather everybody call him Zay.”

  I think my eyes got as big as dinner plates. God, did he really just say that?

  Ma and Pa both looked at me. “Is that true, son?” Pa asked.

  If this situation had happened just a week ago, I probably wouldn’t have been able to answer because my tongue would have tied itself into a bow. Now I knew it was best to just put the truth out there. I swallowed hard and said, “Yes, Pa.”

  Ma looked totally surprised. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “The judge ruled that my legal name is Dwayne. My Memphis mom said I had to accept that.”

  “But you’ve been Zay all your life. That’s how you think of yourself, isn’t it?” Dad gave me this pained look. “I’m sorry. Your mother and I should have known that.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I reassured him. “I never said anything, so how could you have known? And it’s okay. I accept that Dwayne is my legal name now.”

  “But that doesn’t mean that you have to forget the life you’ve lived. We can change your name to Zavier Copeland,” Ma said. “It’s just a matter of filing a petition in court and updating your records again.”

  I thought about that for a minute, how I was named after her father, someone she respected and loved. That meant something to her, and now it meant something to me. “No. I don’t want to have my name changed in court or anything.”

  “Well, you can have a nickname,” said Ma. “If you want us to call you Zay, I think we can all do that.”

  “So is that what you want?” Pa asked.

  I nodded happily.

  Ma laughed. “Well, Zay it is, then.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  THE NEXT morning, I went down to Brendan’s place and rang the bell.

  “Hey, Dwayne.” He let me in as if nothing unusual had happened between us. “How’s it going?”

  I shrugged and took a seat on the sofa. “Okay, I guess. By the way, my family and I had this long talk after you left last night. We decided that Dwayne is gonna stay my legal name, but everybody’s gonna call me Zay.”

  He sort of shrugged, half lifting one shoulder. “Sounds good to me.”

  “I never apologized to you. You know, for the way I acted the other day.”

  “Forget it. It’s no big deal. You want some juice or something?”

  “No thanks. And I can’t forget it. I’m sorry for walking out on you the way I did. I was just confused about… everything.” I had wanted him to be a gay guy who’d make out with me. But that wasn’t him, and that would never be him. Still, he cared enough about me to drive hundreds of miles with my brother who, only hours before, considered him a freak of nature. That, I’d come to realize, is the mark of a real friend.

  “Don’t worry about that, Zay. I wouldn’t hold it against you.” He sat down next to me. “We can talk about being transgender if you want. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

  “BJ found some stuff on the internet. We both read it. I understand the transgender thing better now. I understand why you wouldn’t be attracted to me.”

  “Are you sure? Because I still want us to be friends. You can ask me anything.”

  “Well, I’ve been wondering… how does your family deal with you being transgender?”

  “Honestly, it’s been touch and go with my family,” Brendan said. “My dad’s been totally behind me from the day I first told him who I was. Even before that he was on my side, going right along when I hit third grade and refused to wear anything except boy clothes. He helped me make the decision to transition. He paid for my surgery when our insurance company refused to cover it. After the surgery, he got his lawyer to go to court and change all my legal documents to match my new identity.”

  Brendan smiled inwardly, his mind filled with obvious warm thoughts. I saw in that smile how much he loved his dad.

  “I couldn’t ask for a better dad,” he continued. “And through all the many times he went to bat for me, he only asked for one thing.” Brendan held up the two photographs of him before his operations. “I never liked taking pictures. I just don’t like seeing myself that way. I don’t think of the kid in these pictures as me anymore. As far as I’m concerned now, this kid was never me. But, aside from some baby pictures, these are the only photos my dad has of his kid, and he loves them. So when he told me he wanted to put them out where he could see them every day, I couldn’t say no.”

  “I’m glad you did that for your dad.” I picked up the third picture, the one of Brendan’s dad with his arm around the waist of the tan-skinned, beautiful laughing woman. I could now see that Brendan had this woman’s eyes and smile. “This is your mom, right?”

  Brendan practically sneered. “That’s the woman who gave birth to me. She wanted me to be this frilly girl she could dress up like a doll and paint fingernails with her and shit. It drove her crazy that I wasn’t that kid. She started losing points when she kept calling me Brenda after I realized my identity and told everyone I wanted to be called Brendan. Hell, I actually wanted to change my name to Liam, but I went with Brendan because it was close to the name she gave me and I figured that would make things easier for her. Not that it did, obviously. She lost the mom title completely when Dad and I told her I was going to transition and she packed her bags and left us. A couple of weeks later, Dad got divorce papers in the mail from her lawyer. He signed them and sent them back. That was almost a year ago. We haven’t heard from her since.”

  “Then why does your dad keep this photo of her around?”

  Brendan took the picture from me. He looked at the image of his mom and dad from some happier time. “I asked him that once. He said he doesn’t love her anymore, but he keeps the picture because he loves that she gave him me.”

  I smiled. I hadn’t met Brendan’s dad, but I already liked him.

  “What about you, Zay?” Brendan said. “Are you still worried your family will reject you for being gay?”

  “I don’t know. They probably won’t. After everything that’s happened, I see that my birth parents love me just as much as my adoptive parents do. I don’t even think BJ will hate me for it. Like I said, our parents had this long talk with us after you left last night. When BJ started explaining how angry he’d been since the FBI found me, our mom said it sounded like he was really angry at the person who kidnapped me. To this day the FBI doesn’t have a suspect for the kidnapping, and our mom thinks since BJ can’t direct his anger at the kidnapper, he directs it at me. I want my family to know I’m gay, but I think I’m gonna wait until tomorrow to tell them. The four of us have an appointment for family counseling, and I’m gonna tell them then.”

  “Smart move. If any of your family has an issue with it, you can start hashing it out right there.” He patted my knee. “How do you feel about being gay? You seemed thrown by it the other day.”

  “Gay is me. I’m okay with that. I just worry other people won’t be okay with it.”

  “But you can’t let that stop you from being true to who you are.”

  “I know. And I won’t.”

  Brendan smiled and nodded. “You’re gonna be okay, Zay.”

  I smiled back at him. “Can we play a video
game?”

  “You got it.”

  A COUPLE of hours later, Brendan had to begin the next shift on his job with the condo association. I took the elevator up to the roof.

  The pool area wasn’t crowded, just two guys and a girl maybe a year or two older than me. In swimwear, they were sitting at a table, shaded from the sun by an umbrella, each of them lost in a cell phone screen.

  I took a seat two tables over from them, pulled out my own phone, and started texting with Cole. It was slow going because he was in a tweet war with a couple of friends over who’d win in a battle between the Avengers and the Justice League.

  That left a lot of time for me to check out the three people at the other table. One of the guys was Latino. He had great-looking muscles. And a nice face. I liked his muscles and his face.

  I wanted very much to go over there and introduce myself. There was the whole country-boy accent thing, however. What would I do if the three of them laughed at me?

  On the other hand, I really liked that Latino guy.

  Surely someone with a face that nice wouldn’t make fun of a person who was a little different. There was no way to know for sure.

  But there was nothing wrong with being a little country, and I was willing to take that chance.

  I texted Cole that I’d get back to him later. Then I got up and walked over to the other table to say hi.

  More from Gene Gant

  At nineteen, college freshman Mace Danner works as an escort, hiring himself out to customers who want a submissive they can dominate. Having no carnal urges himself, the sexual side of his job leaves him cold, but he sees the pain inflicted on him by his clients as punishment for causing his brother’s death when he was in high school. Pain is not enough, however, to wash away his guilt, and Mace starts binge drinking in an effort to escape his remorse.

  The dorm’s resident advisor, Dex Hammel, sees Mace spiraling out of control and strives to help him. Despite the mutual attraction between them, Mace is disturbed that he still feels no sexual desire for anyone. Even with Dex’s support, Mace’s self-destructive behavior escalates, leading to a situation that endangers his life.