“I wasn’t thinking clearly,” I tell her.
“Other people have sense,” she says to the trees in front of her. She hasn’t glanced over this whole time. “Other people know what’s good for them. Even if you don’t.”
“This counts as icing it,” I tell her, moving my foot slightly so my ankle throbs less at least for a few seconds. She glances down at my foot, then up at me. I can’t see her freckles in the faint moonlight, diffused through the clouds, but I can see her eyes and her mouth and I know the look on her face.
It’s been twenty years, and I still know the look on her face.
“I owe you an apology,” I say, more bravely than I feel.
“It’s fine,” she says, voice flat and tired. “We’re both stressed and keyed up because of this whole mess.”
“Not about that,” I say, which isn’t quite right. “Well, for that. But also—”
Her gaze feels like a floodlight. I fight the urge to shade my eyes from her, hide while I say what needs to be said.
“For outing your dad and Rick,” I finish, and brace myself.
The woods go very, very quiet. It feels like the trees hold their breath and the breeze stops blowing. Andi’s gone perfectly still, eyes on me, colorlessly pale in the night. I can feel my heartbeat in my busted ankle and it’s six, eight, ten before she moves, looking forward, staring into the trees.
“You don’t owe me anything,” she finally says.
“Owed or not, I’m sorry,” I say. “I should have kept my mouth shut.”
I’ve thought a thousand times about how this conversation would go, and now’s the part I have to brace myself for: her righteous fury for fucking up her life. For tearing her family apart and turning a town against her. For making her move hundreds of miles away from the only place she’d ever lived and making her start over while she was in middle school, the worst time to start over.
I wait for it, and it doesn’t come. Andi doesn’t speak or move for so long that I start to wonder if I didn’t actually say anything, just thought about it. When she does, she stands from the log, walks to a pine tree, yanks a small branch off, then comes back and sits again. The air’s sharp with the scent of it and gets sharper as she pulls the needles off, one by one, dropping short dark lines into the snow.
There are a thousand more things I want to say—I didn’t mean to wreck your life, I thought I was helping, I was so scared for the three of you—but it’s not my turn right now.
“You were a kid,” she finally says. “It shouldn’t have been your secret to keep.”
“But it was,” I say. “I did for years.”
Her gloved hands stop moving, the pine branch going still again.
“Years?” Andi asks, her voice strange. Suddenly I’m electric with nerves, a twisting, tugging sensation like someone’s dragging a string though my veins and I pull my feet in, ankle protesting, and lean my elbows on my knees.
“Three, maybe four,” I say. I’ve got a lighter in one hand that I don’t remember taking out of my pocket, but it feels good to flip it between my fingers.
When I look over at Andi she’s staring at me, unblinking, pupils blown, eyes like twin lunar eclipses.
“You knew for years?” she asks, voice hushed.
“I came over once without calling first,” I say, the words spilling out of me. I’ve never told her this, never told anyone because when it happened I was horrified, and afterward I felt guilty for keeping the secret for so long, and then later, when I was grown, I felt guilty about how horrified I’d been. “It must have been morning. Rick was making coffee in the kitchen wearing pajamas, and your dad came in and gave him a kiss. I was eight, maybe nine. Old enough to know what it meant.”
I’d tried other solutions, of course: maybe they were brothers, or cousins, or… Andi’s dad was secretly a space alien with different customs or a prince from a far-off land, like Canada, where it was normal for rumpled-looking adult men to sleep at a good friend’s house and use the kitchen like it was their own and kiss each other on the mouth.
Back then, I believed in demons. I knew the devil walked among us. Looked like us. Acted like us. The devil was charming, charismatic and even kind, sometimes, but still the devil. The vigilant could recognize him anyway. The Godly would be brave enough to cast him out.
I thought it was a test. I thought it was a chance to prove that I was Godly enough.
“You knew for years,” Andi says, and she’s got a look on her face like she’s scratching out page after page in a notebook in her head, tearing them out, throwing them into the trash. Frantically rewriting. “You knew for that long and didn’t tell anyone? And then—”
She stops, mid-sentence, like her words have run dry and there’s a moment where I’m angry with her for blaming me, I’m angry with her dad and Rick for being so careless, I’m angry with everyone for making any of this matter at all.
“I put it out of mind for a while,” I say, which is more or less true. “I thought a lot less about kissing when I was nine than when I was twelve, but in that year before I finally told I felt like it was all I heard about. Who I could look at, who I could think about, what I wasn’t allowed to look at or think about. Keeping the secret felt worse every year.”
“And that reminded you,” she says. “Gideon, I didn’t—you never said anything.”
“I know,” I say. “I beat myself up for that all the time. There you were, sinning away, and I could’ve saved you but couldn’t work up the courage to tell you the good news about Jesus Christ even once.”
Andi snorts, and I finally look over at her: twirling the bare twig between her fingers.
“That would’ve gone over like a lead balloon,” she says.
“I didn’t usually think about Jesus much when I was with you,” I admit. “I thought way more about catching frogs and finding lost Confederate gold.”
“You ever find that?” she asks, and there’s laughter in her voice. I want to swim in it.
“Sure. Tons of it,” I deadpan. “Can’t you tell?”
“Is that how you’re funding this glamorous lifestyle?”
“I stopped looking after you left,” I say, flicking the lighter again. “Might still be out there somewhere.”
“You never know,” she says.
“I think my parents thought I might be gay because I was a weird kid who loved Dolly Parton, so they talked a lot about how evil it was so I… would change my mind, I guess?”
“Exactly how that works,” Andi says.
“Joke’s on them, they picked the wrong kid,” I say. “They ended up sending Elliott to a conversion camp when he was fifteen.”
Andi gasps, loud in the quiet, dark night, turns her floodlight gaze back on me. “Oh fuck,” she says. “Is he—okay, now?”
“Well, they could only afford the day camp where the abuse was emotional and psychological instead of physical,” I tell her, and I sound sarcastic and brittle, even to myself. “Apparently, the beatings are more expensive. And God knows our house didn’t have the space for a prayer closet, so, lucky him.”