Fic (Complete): The Muse (NC-17, Glee AU, Kurt/Blaine) 5/7
Previous
***
He knew it was bad when he spent a day with Quinn, and the next day with Tina, and couldn’t bring himself to tell either of them what he’d done. He spent the day after that wandering through the city by himself-whether as a result of being followed or for some other reason, Kurt was keeping close to home these days, and Blaine couldn’t stand being there, with the quiet, couldn’t stand not being able to talk to him, didn’t know how Kurt could live like that.
He’d gotten about a hundred messages, e-mails and texts from Sebastian. He dumped them all, and finally set up blocks on his phone.
Kurt was worried about him, obviously worried, and on the third day, as he wandered the path around Lands’ End, Blaine decided that the only thing to do was have it out-he realized it first with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, but then with something akin to hope: he would tell Kurt what he’d done, and why, and Kurt would be angry and hurt but then… then they could move on. And maybe they could finally talk about it, about everything, because secrets were clearly far more dangerous than any truth could ever be.
Blaine found his hands sweating when he pulled up in the driveway, his stomach rolling queasily. Part of him wanted to take a moment to collect himself, but the rest of him recognized that for the cowardly and futile self-serving instinct it was and pressed on, out of the car and into the house and up-right away. He was going to get this over with right away, sit Kurt down and tell him everything and beg him not to leave if he had to, he was going to-
Blaine stood in the doorway of Kurt’s room, and at first nothing sank in-something wrong, there was something very wrong, and his eyes were looking right at it but his stupid brain was refusing to tell him what it was… and that’s when it kicked in: not something wrong, everything wrong.
The room was empty, as bland and blank as any hotel room, only with the dresser and desk drawers yawning open and empty, the wardrobe and closet doors ajar, host to nothing more than a forest of hangers.
The room was empty, and Kurt was gone.
***
His feet almost skidded out from under him when he hit the bottom of the stairs, and Blaine pinwheeled a little before he made the turn and went for the front door, yanking it open.
Sebastian was standing there, and Blaine almost barreled right into him. “Sebastian, God-I don’t have time for you right now, okay? There’s-whoever’s been after Kurt got him, they took him, he’s gone and I don’t have time… wait, wait, no-you know, right? Who’s after him? I need to know, I need to know everything-”
“Nobody ‘got’ him, Blaine. He left on his own.”
His hand was on the doorknob, and everything in him was zooming along at a frantic, breakneck pace, circling panic and the urgent need to move. Outside, he was just standing there, trying to connect, trying to make his brain work-he needed it, now, needed it badly-trying to catch up. “He left?”
“This morning-in a cab. With a giant duffel bag that looked like it weighed a ton. I’ve been sitting in my car across the street all day; I saw him go.”
His heart felt crushed, pressure deep in his chest, numb and awful. “What… oh my God, Sebastian, what did you do?”
Sebastian scratched his chin with the back of his thumb. “He’s a blackmailer, Blaine. You were the next person on his list-if it’s any consolation to you, I don’t think he sought you out for it, I think you were just… an opportunity. And I tried to tell you, Blaine; I tried to tell you that you were being led around by the dick by a fucking sixteen-year-old criminal, but you-”
“What. Did. You. Do?”
“I slipped a letter through your mailslot this morning after you left, unsigned and anonymous, telling him that you knew all about it, that the authorities had been informed as well as the people in Ohio who want him, and that they were all on their way-”
“You told… the police… and-Ohio?”
“Oh, God no,” Sebastian said, looking horrified. “I would never expose you like that. The police aren’t even a possibility, given the circumstances-it was just the only thing I could say to him to make sure he’d go, fast, and never, ever look back-”
He didn’t consciously decide to punch Sebastian-one moment Sebastian was there, deepening Blaine’s horror with every word, and the next moment he was rolling on the stoop, holding his nose and screaming.
Blaine shut the front door. He stared at it, blinking, for a few seconds, then opened it again. Sebastian had managed to sit up. There was blood all over his face, his hands, his shirtfront.
“You’re fired,” Blaine said, and shut the door again.
***
He drove around the city. He drove home. Called Kurt. Number disconnected.
He sat down on Kurt’s bed, waiting to be calm. It kept not happening. It all felt unreal, nightmarish and impossible and unbelievable and unacceptable when it was only hours ago, just that morning, that he’d left the house he shared with Kurt, the life he shared with Kurt, the…
He hadn’t said goodbye. He’d been guilty and conflicted and ashamed of himself and eager to get away, just as he had been for the past three days-and he hadn’t even said goodbye.
No wonder Kurt believed a fucking anonymous letter. Blaine hadn’t even said goodbye to him.
Blaine curled up on his side on the bed, put his face in Kurt’s pillow, and broke down.
***
He cried a lot. He drank a lot. He had a vague memory of drunk-dialing Sebastian and calling him a bunch of really true and applicable names. He searched Kurt’s room, every inch of it-nothing. He took a picture of Kurt down to the library and found the reference librarian who’d helped him-who, in fact, thought he was just the nicest, sweetest young man on the planet and hoped he wasn’t in any trouble-but there was nothing useful; she wouldn’t even tell him what kind of books Kurt had asked for, other than she said she thought he must be pre-law.
He found the taxi service that had picked Kurt up, and for a small bribe was allowed the information that Kurt had left the taxi at the Church street Muni station. Dead end.
On the second, exhaustive search of Kurt’s room, he finally realized what a fucking idiot he was, because he hadn’t done anything with the computer other than pick it up to look underneath it.
There was nothing on the computer. No files, no internet history-it was as brand-new and empty as it was when the tech guy who delivered it had set it up and told him it was ready to go. The day Kurt moved in.
But-Kurt had used the computer. Constantly, when he first came. Not so much, later.
He had another tech guy there within the hour-yes, he understood he would need to pay the premium rate for a housecall after work hours, no problem, really-and half an hour after that, he had recovered data to go through.
Not much of it. Bookmarks: Muni and BART, The Castro Theatre, Broadway.com, Epicurious. And one file: For Blaine. It was a Word document. His throat went dry as soon as he clicked on it, and his eyes stung as soon as it opened, and he saw the first words:
For Blaine
The Whole Story
With Love
Blaine ground the heels of his hands into his eyes to clear them, then leaned forward in Kurt’s chair and started scrolling.
***
It’s really hard not talking to you. I started this for you once I realized how badly I’d hamstrung myself, but also as a way to lay it all out. Because I’ve been running for a long time, and there’s not a lot of chances to reflect on things under those circumstances. So really it was for me, too.
It’s so strange, going through this. It’s weird to think that as well as I know you, as well as you know me, and as close as we are now, there’s still so much you don’t know. So much I’ve never been able to tell you.
So I’ll tell you now, like this. Even though I don’t know if you’ll ever see it.
My name is Kurt Hummel and I’m from Lima, Ohio. I had a pretty normal life up until I was six years old, which is when my father died of congestive heart failure.
I remember him, and my mother, as being good parents, close and loving with each other, and wonderful with me (my particular flame burned very brightly, from a very young age). I remember my father joining me at tea parties I set up in the backyard (play-doh petit-fours, Blaine, you would have loved it), letting me show him the proper way to keep his pinky extended when he sipped. He was a solidly blue-collar car mechanic in a small Midwestern town, but I believe that he knew all about me, and loved me just the same. I’ve wondered a lot about how my life might have been different, if he hadn’t died.
My father’s death was terrible, of course, for both me and my mother, but she never was the same, after that. She went into what I now know was a very deep depression, to the point where my Grandma Hummel came and took me for a few weeks, while mom got ‘back on her feet’.
What got my mom back on her feet was the people who came to see her, who reached out to her after her terrible loss. Of course, I’m talking about church people. When my mom came to get me from Grandma Hummel’s, she asked me to say a prayer with her in the car, a prayer of gratitude and thanksgiving to Jesus that we were back together. She had never said anything like that before, but what the hell, she was my mom and I was so glad to see her, I prayed with her, no big deal.
My mother has never been officially diagnosed, and I am conspicuously lacking in a Psychology degree, but I lived with her through the next nine years, and I feel entirely confident in saying that she has bipolar disorder with associated religious mania. And because of the protection afforded religious people in our society, the question of whether or not she was sick (or fit to be a parent) was never seriously asked. Not by anyone who mattered, anyway.
From that point on, the only thing worthwhile in my life was school. Church took up everything else. I started doing my homework at the library, then started staying there as long as I was allowed to every single day, because it was the only place I could be away from relentless prayer and religious talk and praising Jesus every five seconds.
Still, I went to church with my mom and did everything she asked of me, and it really didn’t seem to matter much that I did all of it without ever believing in God. It was what my mother needed, in order to function. And I went along.
I was thirteen years old when Pastor Daniels gave a sermon on ‘The Demon of Homosexuality’. The upshot of this sermon was that gay people aren’t born that way, they’re possessed by demons; that at some point in their lives they turned away from God’s love, and gay demons snuck in. I know now that this is a pretty common belief among fundamentalist Christians, but at the time, it was all new to me. And I thought it was the stupidest fucking thing I had ever heard. I mean, I heard ridiculous, crazy things in church every damn week, but I thought of most of it as ‘harmless’ (or, I did then). But that wasn’t harmless. Not at all.
My mom spent most of the sermon looking at me, like really looking at me, and she was so calm, not fervent or crazy or rapturous, just calm, that I thought maybe the sermon had gotten through to her the way it got through to me. I thought about it on the way home, and she was quiet, and I knew she was thinking too.
When we got home, I did it. I told her I was gay. And she just nodded, and said that she knew, that she’d always known, since I was a little boy. And she was glad of the sermon, because now she finally knew what to do about it; that we were strong people, she and I, and with perfect faith in the power of God, with both of us calling on the blessing of Jesus’ love, I would be healed, and made whole.
That was the breaking point for me, the moment when I stopped ‘going along’. I told her I was done with praying, and done with church, that there was nothing wrong with me being the way that I was.
The next year was the worst I’d ever been through up to that point, even worse than the year my father died. My mom didn’t care much for her rebellious, gay-demon-infested, heretic son walking away from her every time she called on Jesus to heal my suffering. I was terrified and angry and so deeply hurt by turns, and because the only kids I was allowed to associate with were other church kids, I had no friends to turn to.
When I started high school, things got better for me, at least a little. I found other kids like me (not gay, but misfits, outcasts, which at the time was the biggest relief ever). Yes, I got bullied a lot, but compared to what I went through at home, I always felt like I could deal with it. I joined the school’s Glee club, and spent every possible moment I could with the kids I met there. Of course I couldn’t ever bring them home with me, and I wouldn’t have wanted to. Even my friend Mercedes would have been labeled an apostate, as she didn’t go to the ‘right’ church (mom’s church, of course).
But that whole year, my relationship with mom deteriorated terribly. I lived for my time away from home, and when I was with my friends I didn’t talk about my home life at all. They knew I had a very religious home life, they didn’t know that I had been forbidden to see or speak to my own grandmother because she was a Catholic, or that my mom regularly tried to exorcise the demons out of me, or that the thing that made me cry the hardest wasn’t being tossed in a dumpster or having a slushie thrown in my face, but the moments when I missed my mom, the woman who used to sing to me and play the piano with me and dance with me in the kitchen when we made lunch together for dad.
I spent the summer after my freshman year pining to go back to school. I stayed at the library as much as I could, learning as much as I could, reading as much as I could, but mom got more and more strict as the summer went on, and eventually she said the library was obviously a Godless place, and I wasn’t to go there any more. The last two weeks of vacation were like slow torture, waiting for school to start again. And then mom said we needed to go shopping for school clothes, and I hopped in the car like some stupid, trusting dog who doesn’t know he’s being driven to the pound, and mom drove me to Lost Lambs Home, and left me there.
The Home is ostensibly a ‘school’ for boys, but that’s not what it really is at all. The dean of the school is a man named George Todhunter Bryant, and his personal mission is to save the souls of all the poor lost lambs infested with gay demons. It’s a fundamentalist Christian reeducation camp, with some major fucked-up special twists that Dr. Bryant has added on his own.
I lasted three days there before I ran away. I went back to Lima first, and waited until mom left the house to go to church. Then I went in through the basement window and took all of my things that I couldn’t live without, and I also took the college fund money that mom refused to trust to a bank; the first and only time I was ever grateful for her paranoia.
I was fifteen, I didn’t have a real plan. I had no idea what I was doing, I just knew that I had to go. I suppose for my first run at it, I didn’t do too badly, although I made some major mistakes: namely, that I stayed close to home (just the next town over), and I let someone know where I was.
Honestly, I didn’t know what else to do. I was scared, and the thought of heading off somewhere with no plan and no experience and no idea where I was going was terrifying at that point. So I got in touch with Mr. Schuester, one of my high school teachers (I knew him best because he also taught Glee club), and told him what had happened.
He turned out not to be a good choice, but I don’t know that there were any better ones. He just kept insisting that of course my mom loved me, that all teenagers went through ‘rough patches’ at home, and he seemed stuck on the fact that because I’d answered his question about whether or not I’d been beaten with ‘no’, there must not be any ‘real’ problem.
Lima is a small town, and it’s almost impossible to keep a secret there. I don’t know who he told, but he must have told somebody, because word eventually got around to my mom that he knew where I was. She went to him, and she asked him, and he told her. And she told Dr. Bryant, and the next morning Dr. Bryant and two of his burlier ‘students’ showed up at the rattrap motel I was staying at, and took me back to the Home.
There’s a big piece missing here, Blaine, and it’s really hard to write about. What makes the Home different is Dr. Bryant’s combined techniques of God and Science in ridding children of their gay demons; he holds forth on it, pontificates on it in a grand, evangelical style, but he’s very careful never to come out and admit that what he uses is a combination of drugs that amount to chemical castration. Shots and pills, a combination of hormones and anti-anxiety, anti-psychotic and anti-depression medications, which were never meant to be taken together, all of which suppress the sex drive, as well as the personality and any capacity for rational thought.
I lost eight months. I remember routine, and calm, and looking at everything as if through a pane of thick ice. I remember praying when told to pray. I remember testifying that I was no longer troubled by demons. I remember my mother coming to visit me, crying and throwing her arms around Dr. Bryant, calling him a divine instrument of the Lord’s will. I remember her telling me she loved me for the first time in so, so long, and I remember watching her give Dr. Bryant a fat envelope, a ‘donation’.
It’s all fuzzy. It’s all blended and indistinct. The next really distinct thing I remember is Jeremiah.
He was older, nineteen or twenty, but his parents had placed him legally under conservatorship, and shipped him off to the Home because they couldn’t bear the thought of having a gay son. He didn’t adjust well. Dr. Bryant said he’d do fine once his medication ‘gave God some room to work with’, but two nights later Jeremiah took a metal kitchen knife and cut his own throat right in front of me while we were cleaning up from dinner.
They got to him in time, he didn’t manage to kill himself. But there was so much blood, and I was just standing there in the kitchen just staring down at it.
It was like being slapped. It broke the ice that glazed over everything, just for a second, and all of a sudden, just for a second, I could think. I was me.
I started ditching my pills the next day. I couldn’t do anything about the shots, as they were administered by Dr. Bryant himself, but I cheeked and flushed the pills from then on.
I was very careful. Probably the hardest acting job I’ve ever had or will ever have, remaining as zombielike as possible while slowly waking up to everything going on around me. First I was just waiting for my chance to get away, but soon that just wasn’t enough for me: I wanted proof. I wanted to stop him. I wanted to make it impossible for him to do what he did to me, and Jeremiah, and all of the others, to any other kid.
It was another four months before I ran. I gathered bits and pieces of information, I snooped carefully and unobtrusively, and slowly the whole thing started to come together.
Dr. Bryant gets a lot of money. From parents (a lot of the students are from wealthy families), but also from churches and nonprofits, and from the state. He has a medical license, and he’s really, really good at either paying or intimidating people who get a little too interested in his phenomenal ‘success rate’ with ‘curing’ gays. He keeps his fame strictly limited to those in the faith, which works perfectly because one of the primary beliefs in fundamentalist Christianity is that everyone else is an enemy, so of course you don’t talk to them. You especially don’t talk to them about your ‘miracles’.
The night I finally went, I broke into his office. I copied a ton of information from his computer (the only one in the place) onto a flash drive, scanned a bunch of papers from his files and took those too, and rifled his desk, scanning everything I could. And I found something I didn’t expect: a sticky note containing a bunch of numbers, including one that turned out to be the combination to the safe in his office. In the safe I found cash, almost ten thousand dollars, an open-ended plane ticket to Brunei (which, in case you didn’t know, has no extradition treaty with the U.S.), Dr. Bryant’s passport, and a ton of bearer bonds.
I took the cash. I didn’t even think twice about it. And then I ran.
Until the first time you kissed me, I don’t think anything felt better to me in my whole life than that first night out did. I was scared, yes, I was fucking terrified, but I was out, I was free, and I was absolutely determined to do everything right, do everything possible so that I would never, ever have to go back.
It was actually a coin toss, New York or San Francisco. San Francisco, with no intentional pun on my part, was tails. And tails won.
There’s a warrant out for my arrest in the state of Ohio: for burglary, attempted larceny, and attempted extortion-I guess that was all he could nail me with, for taking his money. There’s also a juvenile welfare court action assuming jurisdiction over me because I’m a minor ‘in danger of leading a lewd, idle, immoral and dissolute life’.
So I’m a criminal, Blaine. For a whole bunch of reasons. But mostly I’m a criminal because I refused to give up being who I am, and I refused to stay where they put me. I refused, and continue to refuse, to feel guilty for loving you, although I do feel guilty that, by loving you, I’ve made you a criminal too.
As you’ve probably surmised by now if you’ve read this far, the people who recognized me that morning on the Wharf were from Glee club. They were here for a competition, and I’m really happy and proud of them, but oh my God why there and then? When I saw Mr. Schuester all I could think was that he’d betrayed me last time, and he’d do it again, so I ran.
It just occurred to me, thinking about you reading this, that you might wonder why I just didn’t tell you everything. I couldn’t tell you, Blaine. At first it was just principles: not to tell anybody anything, because it’s the only way to stay safe. But after that, even when I knew you would be a safe person to tell, I knew you were the last person I could tell. You’re a problem-solver, you know, as I’ve told you before, and I know you love me very much. If I told you, I don’t think you’d be able to stay out of it, and with you in it there would be no real way to keep our relationship a secret-and that would be the end of your career, for sure.
And I couldn’t, I can’t do that. Someday you’re going to stop painting gorgeous, crazy pictures of me and go back to what you really do, which is make art and books and movies that remind people of what it meant to be a child. I’m not going to put all that at risk. I’m not going to put you at risk, any more than I already have. So I’m writing all this down for you, and maybe someday when you’re sixty-five and I’m forty-seven, if you still love me, I’ll sit myself down (carefully) on your lap and put these pages in your hand and say: I’m sorry you had to wait so long.
I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you, Blaine. And I’m sorry for so many other things. I know it can’t be easy for you, loving me, worrying about me and never knowing what’s wrong, or when I’m going to start screaming in my sleep.
In my nightmares, everything is beyond the ice. The needle is coming towards my arm, and his face is there. In my nightmares they find me ditching the pills and make me swallow them, over and over, and Jeremiah’s throat is my throat, and I look at you and I don’t recognize you, and I can’t love you, because I can’t feel anything at all.
Then you wake me up, and the ice breaks, and you’re you again, and I can, and do, love you with my whole heart. And that’s my version of what a miracle is.
***
Blaine didn’t cry. He needed to, he was aware that he kind of needed to cry for probably a couple hours in order to deal with all that, but for right now, he needed to think.
He read the file again, this time with his brain clicking and whirring (problem-solving, ha), clamping down on everything from murderous rage (oh, there was so much of that) to endless sadness, to something that was just a deep, desperate need for Kurt, the words so evocative of him, an ache so painful it felt like it could cripple him, if he let it.
He didn’t. He took his phone out of his pocket. Tina answered on the first ring. “Blaine, where have you been? Quinn and I were just talking about you, we’ve been trying to reach you for-”
“I need you,” he said, and only then realized what bad shape his voice was in-it was only a harsh croak. He cleared his throat and tried again. “You, and Quinn-I need your help. Can you… will you come over?”
“I… of course, Blaine. She’s here with me now, we’ll be right there.”
He hung up the phone, scrolled back to the top of the document, and started reading again.
***
He gave them the high (and low) points of what had happened, then handed copies of Kurt’s journal to each of them, and tried to steady his hands enough to make coffee while they sat at the kitchen table and read. Quinn uttered several variations on ‘oh my God’ as she went on, and then started sniffling a bit. Tina read slowly, her brows drawn together, saying nothing.
Blaine set out coffee. Quinn opened her compact and repaired her eye makeup. Tina finally finished reading, and looked up, looked right at him, her face calm except for two bright spots in her cheeks and a gleam in her eyes. “I want to help.”
Quinn sniffed again. “Me too.”
He’d kept it together so far, but he almost lost it right there.
***
“The problem isn’t making the film, Blaine. I can do that; it’ll take some time, of course, and a chunk of your money, but I can do it. The problem is that while I can put it up on Youtube and my website, there’s no way to make it go viral, no way to guarantee he’d ever see it.”
“I know. Which brings me to the second part of my idea.” He turned to Quinn. “Which is why I need your help.”
They were upstairs, in the loft. He’d brought them up there to show them the footage he had, and he’d braced himself for it, but it still hurt like he’d been stabbed in the chest when his screen filled up with Kurt sitting at the piano, working his way through a campy rendition of ‘Brand New Key’.
Quinn was still going through the video files, but she stopped when he spoke to her. “What can I do?”
“First, don’t strangle me when I tell you the second part of my idea.”
Her eyebrow arched. “Okay?”
“And second…” He sighed. “I’m going to need a new lawyer.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “A really good lawyer. Except… maybe someone who’s not a total dick?”
Quinn smiled resignedly. “I’m going to absolutely hate this idea, aren’t I?”
“Don’t strangle me.”
***
The three of them talked late into the night, going over everything, making changes to what went from ‘an idea’ to ‘the plan’ over the course of the conversation. Once they were gone he was wrung out, exhausted, and he crawled into Kurt’s bed without realizing what he was doing, then was too tired to move, when he did realize it.
He curled up around a pillow that smelled faintly sweet and boyish and made his heart twist in his chest, and went to sleep.
***
Santana Lopez arrived on a beautifully restored vintage Triumph, wearing five-inch stiletto Louboutins and a nicely tailored Armani suit. Blaine didn’t say anything out loud, but the inner-Kurt-that-lived-in-his-head kind of swooned over the whole package.
“Hi,” she said when he held the door open for her, sweeping by in a faint cloud of the same perfume Quinn wore whenever she had a date. “You’re the guy who shacked up with a sixteen-year-old kid, right?”
“Um. Yes?”
“And you’re making a video about how he’s running from some creepy religious nut who drugged him to make him less gay?”
“Yeah.”
“And doing a public art show of all the wanky pictures you painted of him?”
“That’s me.”
She smiled, and held out her hand. “Santana Lopez, your new counsel. I’m in.”
Blaine shook with her, and grinned. He couldn’t help it. “Really? I mean-good, Quinn says you’re amazing, I’m just… kind of surprised.”
She shrugged. “Look, short stack-first of all, you’re famous. That means media exposure, and lots of it. Add in sex scandal? Even more exposure. Underage-runaway-gay-sex scandal? Frenzy. And once you get to the part about religious kooks with gay drug cures-we are talking about a media shitstorm of epic proportions, and I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“Oh.” He paused. “I thought lawyers didn’t like publicity.”
She smiled again, this time with her teeth. All of them. “They do if they want to be famous lawyers who everyone remembers because they won.”
“Ah.”
She took a pair of half-glasses out of her pocket and slipped them on. “But don’t let that give you the idea that I won’t charge you a ridiculous amount of money to keep your ass out of jail, because I will.”
Blaine blinked. “Okay.”
***
“So, here’s the thing,” she told him later, sipping cranberry juice and peering at him over the top of her glasses while she took notes. “Just one thing, but very, very important-do not, under any circumstances, admit to having sex with him.”
Blaine’s mouth fell open. “But… I mean… the whole plan-”
She stopped him with one finger held up. “You can admit to knowing him. Living with him. Painting him. Marching with him at Pride wearing matching Britney Spears outfits-whatever turns you on. But when the question comes up-‘did you have a sexual relationship with him?’ I need you to say: ‘no comment’.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, oh. Because that’s basically the cornerstone of my whole plan, the one where you don’t get locked up.”
Blaine swallowed. “I… okay. As long as I don’t have to deny it.”
Santana squinted at him. “And don’t say stupid shit like that.”
***
“Are you comfortable, Blaine?”
Blaine shifted in his chair. “Uh, no. But I’m ready.”
Tina leaned forward and took his hand for a moment. Her skin was warm and soft. “You’ll be fine.”
Under the lights he felt nervous and self-conscious and very much like a bug under a microscope, but there was no way around this part of it. “Okay.”
Tina turned to her crew, got a thumbs-up, and turned back. “How did you meet Kurt?”
Blaine took a deep breath, and started talking. The lights bore down on him.
***
Afterwards, he felt drained, a dry husk, and when Tina hugged him, it was hard to let go.
“You did just fine. It’ll look great.”
The crew was finishing the last of the packing-up, heading down the loft stairs one by one. “I just… I hope this works, that’s all.”
“It’ll work.”
Blaine rubbed his face. “Do you want some coffee? I could-”
She shook her head. “I can’t, Blaine. I have to get home and pack. I’m flying to Ohio tonight.”
“You are?”
“Yes-you have to stop zoning out during strategy sessions.” She stopped packing her satchel, and sat down across from him again. “What we’re about to do, well, we’re going off of Kurt’s journal-but Kurt’s not here to back it up.”
“Not yet, but-”
“Exactly. Not yet. I have to go there before the circus starts. I have to get as much corroboration as I can before everything gets zipped up tight. Once this breaks, we’re going to have a lot less room to maneuver.”
“Right.” He really needed to stop zoning out during strategy sessions.
***
Blaine did grand gestures. Bold strokes. He was good at those. But the endless, detail-ridden, contingency-planning part of the whole process just made his stomach lurch at the stunning array of things that could potentially go wrong, so for the most part, he stayed out of it. With Tina in Ohio, Quinn and Santana commandeered his kitchen table and covered it with laptops, scribbled notes, law books, and newspapers. Blaine cooked for them, ran errands when needed, and spent the rest of his time up in the loft, staring at the still-unfinished Artist and Model III, and trying not to wonder where Kurt was. If he was okay. If he would understand, when it all came down.
Tina was back three days later. “I came straight here from the airport,” she said, letting Blaine take her heavy equipment case. “I need to start editing right away, but I thought you’d want to see.”
Blaine’s chest tightened painfully for a moment. “Did you get it?” Santana and Quinn looked up from the table expectantly.
Tina looked at him. She looked exhausted, dark circles under her eyes, but she was smiling faintly. “I got it.”
Blaine wrapped her up and held on. Santana and Quinn high-fived each other.
***
The day the video went up, Blaine stayed in the loft. He heard Quinn on the phone, then Santana, heard them both at the door, answering questions and giving short interviews-the PR machine ticking along like clockwork. Everything seemed slightly unreal, distinct and sharp but with a vague feeling that it all might just be a hallucination.
“Fox News is about to interview Bryant,” Santana told him from the top of the stairs. “You may want to see this.”
He went downstairs and made a fresh pot of coffee, then went over to the kitchen table where Tina and Quinn and Santana were all watching the freestanding flat-screen they’d set up on the wall.
“-a truly disturbing story involving beloved children’s author and creator of the hugely popular Fabulous Monsters series, Blaine Anderson-”
“I’ll come back later,” he said, wheeling around, but Santana said ‘shh!’ and Tina took his hand, so he sat down.
Through the newscaster’s voice over, there were clips from the interview, then clips of Kurt, playing the piano and singing, slicing mushrooms and sassing him with that raised, sardonic eyebrow and faint smile-his heart thumped painfully, and Tina squeezed his hand. He squeezed back.
They cut to the interview. Tina. “Did you know he was sixteen?”
“Yes.” Tina was right-she had made him look good. Or at least, harmless. “He told me he was, the first time I met him. But after a while, after getting to know him, I stopped thinking of him as a particular age. He’s just… a person. A smart, talented, wonderful person, and I love him very much.” It was strange, watching his own throat work on the screen, remembering how hard it had been in that moment not to completely lose it. “And I miss him. I miss him a lot, and I hope, wherever he is, that he’s okay.”
Back to the newscaster. “Representatives for Mr. Anderson have neither confirmed nor denied a sexual relationship between the artist and the young man. The documentary goes on to allege that Kurt Hummel fled to San Francisco from the Lost Lambs Home in Ohio, a Christian boarding school for boys, run by Dr. George Bryant. The documentary further alleges that the school is a cover for a ‘conversion therapy’ program intended to change the sexual orientation of gay teens, and that students were given dangerous drugs as part of their therapy. Dr. Bryant granted our request for an interview.”
Blaine didn’t realize he was shaking until Tina squeezed his hand again. He tried to stop, but he couldn’t.
Bryant was large, florid, balding, and wore half-glasses low on his nose. He appeared to be entirely composed. “Well, it’s all nonsense, of course. This is a boys’ school-we teach strong, Christian principles, we teach them to love learning and to love God, we teach them fellowship and Christian decency. Mr. Hummel was a remarkably troubled young man, absolutely bent on turning away from salvation. I personally took a great interest in his education and well-being, and I’m afraid he repaid my kindness with thefts and threats of extortion. He is wanted by the law, you know.”
“Blaine.” Blaine let Tina have her hand back. She shook it out, wincing. He turned back to Bryant.
“Be that as it may, the truth is that Kurt Hummel deserved compassion and understanding, he needed those things desperately in order to bring him to Jesus’ love. He did not deserve to be molested by a pedophile who made him pose for pornographic pictures, and who furthermore seems to be the last person to have seen him alive.”
Quinn uttered a soft squawk of surprise. Tina gasped. Santana said, “Oh hell no-”
Blaine said nothing. He just stared.
“There’s a war going on in this country: a war against Christians; a war against God. The secular humanists will stop at nothing to turn public feeling against us, to turn our good works into something as depraved as their own practices are.”
There was a bit more of the talking-head newscaster, and then a commercial. Santana turned off the television with the remote half-buried under a pile of papers. The sudden quiet seemed very loud.
“He’s trying to intimidate Kurt,” Blaine said, feeling his nails digging into his palms.
“That, and sell the idea that you killed him,” Santana drawled. “I think… he might know something we don’t.”
Blaine’s stomach folded in on itself. “What?”
“I don’t know-but I’m going to find out.” She got to her feet. “I need to go to my office and do some digging.”
“What about the Ohio interview?” Tina asked. “It’s ready to go. Do I put it up?”
“Not yet.”
Quinn nodded. “It’s… timing. Right now, we’ve got a pebble to throw. But by tomorrow’s news cycle, once Bryant’s saturated everything with his story-”
“Rock,” Tina said, nodding.
“Giant fucking boulder, I hope,” Santana said, shrugging into her leather jacket and zipping it up.
***
Tina had to go back to her office and Quinn said she had business to handle, so Blaine found himself sitting at his kitchen table, alone in his house for the first time in what seemed like forever. It was too quiet. He turned the TV back on.
War on Christians, war on God. It was everywhere. He flipped channels for hours, watching the same content over and over, watching things slowly spiral out of control, wondering if this was what it felt like to go crazy.
“I didn’t even know he was a homo,” said a mother of five, a woman-on-the-street interview on the local news. “My kids love them books. Brad Junior watches that first movie over and over, knows every line, it’s the only thing that keeps him quiet. But no more, it’s all going in the trash tonight-shut up, Bradley, or I’ll give you something to cry about-”
He was still at it, watching a public burning of his books in South Carolina, when Santana came back. “Turn that shit off,” she said curtly. “You’ll make yourself crazy, watching that.”
***
Quinn and Santana had been right about the timing issue; Tina uploaded her interview with a former Lost Lambs Home resident named David Karofsky the next day, just in time to hit the evening news cycle, and since in the interview he confirmed everything that had been alleged in the first video, it hit the network and cable news channels with all the force that even Santana could have wished for.
“Yeah, the drugs.” Just a dark silhouette; he’d requested anonymity. “Pills and shots, all the time. Those drugs, it’s like… like an elephant sitting on your chest or something. Everything’s just… gone. It’s horrible. And yeah, I didn’t feel like I was gay anymore-but that’s because I didn’t feel like I was anything. I didn’t know if I was alive or dead, and I didn’t really care.”
Bryant granted Fox News another interview. He still looked perfectly composed. “When you have a school where a percentage of the population is there due to major emotional and behavioral problems, you’re going to see this kind of attention-seeking behavior. As for the people who coerced that poor, disturbed child into saying those things, well-the homosexual agenda includes the suppression of all religion; they seek to put an end to the core principles our founding fathers fought and died for. The fact that they cloak it in ‘human rights’ language is an atrocity, a dog-whistle that the liberal elites respond to. The homosexuals are only another battalion in the war on God.”
Despite Bryant’s interview there was finally some traction, a few politicians and a bunch of talking heads from various gay-rights organizations calling for an investigation; the tone had shifted. Stephen Colbert did a segment on his show called War on God 2012: The Christpocalypse (brought to you by Cool Ranch Doritos) that made Tina laugh so hard she had tears in her eyes.
But still, no Kurt. Not a whisper or a word.
Nothing.
***
“Look,” Santana told Blaine across the kitchen table, leaning tiredly on her hand. “I know you hoped that once the shit hit the fan he’d come popping up like a weirdly-dressed prairie dog out of a bedazzled hole, but that’s… he’s being careful, that’s all. He’s being smart. Ohio still wants him, and even if they didn’t, his mother still has custody-and she’s probably got Bryant on speed-dial.”
Blaine nodded, and went to make more coffee. He was cleaning out the grinder when Quinn came in with her face all scrunched up and wrong-looking.
She shook her head when Blaine asked what was wrong, and then burst into tears when he put a hand on her shoulder. “I just got off the phone with Disney,” she told him between sobs. “They said you violated your morals clause. They’re stopping production of the next movie, and suing you for breach of contract.”
All he felt was a faint, exhausted echo of combined relief and contempt, but he didn’t tell her that. He held her until she stopped crying. “It’s okay, Quinn-”
“It’s not okay,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I’ve got a call with Viking this afternoon, and it’s going to be a bloodbath. You’re going to be-”
“I wanted out,” he said quietly, rubbing her back. “I’m sorry, but I did. I lost interest after the third book. Everything else has just been… going through the motions. Not what I really wanted to do.”
She sniffed and pulled back, her brows drawn low. “You… why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because… I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. Now I am-I’m an artist, Quinn, a painter. Not an illustrator. And I’ll thrive, or I’ll starve, on that.”
The look she gave him suggested that she had her suspicions about which possibility out of the two was most likely, but she just nodded, resigned, and asked if it was too early in the day to start drinking wine.
It wasn’t.
***
“I’m pretty sure someone in the juvenile justice system is a true believer.”
Blaine sat up and turned around when Santana came in, clicking the television off. “What? Who?”
“I don’t know yet,” Santana replied irritably, and sank down into one of the kitchen chairs with a heavy sigh. “But even before we started the shitstorm, I was hitting a wall in Ohio, trying to get him out from under-they want him, bad. And it didn’t make sense-the extortion complaint is sworn out in the vaguest language I’ve ever seen, the theft described as ‘petty cash’-”
“Ten thousand dollars is petty cash?”
She raised an exquisitely-arched eyebrow at him. “I don’t think Bryant wanted to admit that Kurt made off with his skedaddle money.”
“Oh.”
“But here’s the thing-the lockups for juvie offenders in Ohio are clogged-like they are everywhere. So there’s some latitude in where they send kids, depending on the offense. And it looks like they’ve sent a bunch of them-not sure how many, not yet-to the Home. Guess which kids?”
“The gay ones.”
“Right.”
“That’s how Bryant qualified the Home for state funds.”
“Right.”
He tilted his head. “I’m pretty sure that’s illegal-the part where you send gay offenders to a conversion camp, I mean.”
“Right. But only if we can prove it is one.” She shook her head. “It’s a beautiful setup. Relieve overcrowding in juvenile institutions, do ‘God’s work’, get state money-and the only people hurt by it are a handful of queer kids, and who’s gonna give a shit about that?”
He was shocked, absolutely shocked, when she started crying-not bawling or sobbing, just… tears, her eyes bright and overfull. “Santana?”
“I think about how scared I was, when I was that age, when I thought that telling my family I liked girls was going to mean getting kicked out of the house… and then I think about what it must be like for the kids who got sent to that fucking hellhole-it’s torture. And most of it is legal. And that fucking kills me.” She pushed away from the table abruptly and left the kitchen. He heard her heels clicking down the hall, heard the bathroom door close behind her.
Blaine closed his eyes and put his head in his hands, burning for Kurt on a cellular level, swallowing over and over with his throat perfectly dry, waiting for the pain to be bearable again.
He was still waiting when his cell buzzed. Tina. “Hey,” he said, then cleared his throat so he could do more than croak. “Sorry, I was just-”
“Blaine, listen-” She sounded winded, out of breath. “I was going through the backlog of e-mail coming into my website, and I found one-from a gmail address that’s just a string of numbers, but the word ‘Muse’ is in the middle of it; it came in the day after the first video went up. There’s nothing in it, nothing in the message at all-but there’s attachments. A ton of them, all relating to the Home. Blaine, I think… it’s got to be from Kurt.”
***
A reply message sent to the e-mail came back as ‘undeliverable’, and the ISP traced back to a computer in a public library in Los Angeles. But they had the documents.
Tina put them up the next day. The day after that, Bryant stopped granting interviews, and an official investigation into the Home was announced by the Ohio Attorney General’s office. The day after that, Bryant disappeared. That night he was caught in the international terminal at LAX using a passport that didn’t match his legal name, boarding a flight for Hong Kong with a connection to Brunei.
Bryant no longer looked composed. Several people with cellphones had caught his scuffle with Security, and there were blurry versions of it all over the news and the internet. Santana watched every single one of them she could find over and over and over, she spliced them together in a loop and watched it on her laptop, smiling fondly and occasionally giggling. She changed her laptop wallpaper to Bryant’s mugshot, his combover awry, his face drawn and shocked and haggard.
The investigation quickly expanded to include the Ohio Department of Youth Services. Santana yelled at the television in triumphant, rapid-fire Spanish for thirty seconds, then told everyone to shut up so she could hear what was going on.
***
Apparently it was Bryant’s arrest that prompted Elizabeth Hummel to finally grant an interview. She called Bryant a ‘brave and righteous soldier of God’, and mourned that such a good man and his good works should be scapegoated and vilified by the liberal media.
“But what about your son? Do you know where he is?”
“No, I don’t, but I pray for him every day. I pray that he finds his way home. I pray that Dr. Bryant will return soon to the work, and the children, that need him so desperately-including Kurt.” She shook her head. “I love my son. I love him with all my heart. I just hate the demon that has his precious soul in its grip.”
Blaine rubbed his arms. His skin was puckered, crawling, and he had to rub hard before they felt normal again. On the screen the interview was still going on, Katie Couric now leaning forward, pressing gently, her voice calm but insistent.
“But what if your son isn’t possessed by demons? What if he’s just… gay?”
The resulting slap was the last second of footage-the cameraman had been obliged to intervene.
***
“That’s what I’ve been waiting for,” Santana said, her eyes wide.
Blaine blinked at her. “You’ve been waiting for someone to slap Katie Couric?”
“Yes. No. Hold on.” She closed her eyes and took a long, slow breath. Then she faced him squarely. “I have an idea. It’s… kind of crazy.”
All the hair on his neck stood up. “Tell me.”
The strategy session that night went on until almost sunrise. After everyone was gone Blaine went up to the loft in the cool, grey light, sat and stared at the still-untouched Artist and Model III while the room slowly warmed and brightened. The crest of a wave, the hope in him, Kurt’s face and his own on the canvas, almost-touching, dark and light swirled together like feathery wings clasping.
Holding on.
***
Next
***
He knew it was bad when he spent a day with Quinn, and the next day with Tina, and couldn’t bring himself to tell either of them what he’d done. He spent the day after that wandering through the city by himself-whether as a result of being followed or for some other reason, Kurt was keeping close to home these days, and Blaine couldn’t stand being there, with the quiet, couldn’t stand not being able to talk to him, didn’t know how Kurt could live like that.
He’d gotten about a hundred messages, e-mails and texts from Sebastian. He dumped them all, and finally set up blocks on his phone.
Kurt was worried about him, obviously worried, and on the third day, as he wandered the path around Lands’ End, Blaine decided that the only thing to do was have it out-he realized it first with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, but then with something akin to hope: he would tell Kurt what he’d done, and why, and Kurt would be angry and hurt but then… then they could move on. And maybe they could finally talk about it, about everything, because secrets were clearly far more dangerous than any truth could ever be.
Blaine found his hands sweating when he pulled up in the driveway, his stomach rolling queasily. Part of him wanted to take a moment to collect himself, but the rest of him recognized that for the cowardly and futile self-serving instinct it was and pressed on, out of the car and into the house and up-right away. He was going to get this over with right away, sit Kurt down and tell him everything and beg him not to leave if he had to, he was going to-
Blaine stood in the doorway of Kurt’s room, and at first nothing sank in-something wrong, there was something very wrong, and his eyes were looking right at it but his stupid brain was refusing to tell him what it was… and that’s when it kicked in: not something wrong, everything wrong.
The room was empty, as bland and blank as any hotel room, only with the dresser and desk drawers yawning open and empty, the wardrobe and closet doors ajar, host to nothing more than a forest of hangers.
The room was empty, and Kurt was gone.
***
His feet almost skidded out from under him when he hit the bottom of the stairs, and Blaine pinwheeled a little before he made the turn and went for the front door, yanking it open.
Sebastian was standing there, and Blaine almost barreled right into him. “Sebastian, God-I don’t have time for you right now, okay? There’s-whoever’s been after Kurt got him, they took him, he’s gone and I don’t have time… wait, wait, no-you know, right? Who’s after him? I need to know, I need to know everything-”
“Nobody ‘got’ him, Blaine. He left on his own.”
His hand was on the doorknob, and everything in him was zooming along at a frantic, breakneck pace, circling panic and the urgent need to move. Outside, he was just standing there, trying to connect, trying to make his brain work-he needed it, now, needed it badly-trying to catch up. “He left?”
“This morning-in a cab. With a giant duffel bag that looked like it weighed a ton. I’ve been sitting in my car across the street all day; I saw him go.”
His heart felt crushed, pressure deep in his chest, numb and awful. “What… oh my God, Sebastian, what did you do?”
Sebastian scratched his chin with the back of his thumb. “He’s a blackmailer, Blaine. You were the next person on his list-if it’s any consolation to you, I don’t think he sought you out for it, I think you were just… an opportunity. And I tried to tell you, Blaine; I tried to tell you that you were being led around by the dick by a fucking sixteen-year-old criminal, but you-”
“What. Did. You. Do?”
“I slipped a letter through your mailslot this morning after you left, unsigned and anonymous, telling him that you knew all about it, that the authorities had been informed as well as the people in Ohio who want him, and that they were all on their way-”
“You told… the police… and-Ohio?”
“Oh, God no,” Sebastian said, looking horrified. “I would never expose you like that. The police aren’t even a possibility, given the circumstances-it was just the only thing I could say to him to make sure he’d go, fast, and never, ever look back-”
He didn’t consciously decide to punch Sebastian-one moment Sebastian was there, deepening Blaine’s horror with every word, and the next moment he was rolling on the stoop, holding his nose and screaming.
Blaine shut the front door. He stared at it, blinking, for a few seconds, then opened it again. Sebastian had managed to sit up. There was blood all over his face, his hands, his shirtfront.
“You’re fired,” Blaine said, and shut the door again.
***
He drove around the city. He drove home. Called Kurt. Number disconnected.
He sat down on Kurt’s bed, waiting to be calm. It kept not happening. It all felt unreal, nightmarish and impossible and unbelievable and unacceptable when it was only hours ago, just that morning, that he’d left the house he shared with Kurt, the life he shared with Kurt, the…
He hadn’t said goodbye. He’d been guilty and conflicted and ashamed of himself and eager to get away, just as he had been for the past three days-and he hadn’t even said goodbye.
No wonder Kurt believed a fucking anonymous letter. Blaine hadn’t even said goodbye to him.
Blaine curled up on his side on the bed, put his face in Kurt’s pillow, and broke down.
***
He cried a lot. He drank a lot. He had a vague memory of drunk-dialing Sebastian and calling him a bunch of really true and applicable names. He searched Kurt’s room, every inch of it-nothing. He took a picture of Kurt down to the library and found the reference librarian who’d helped him-who, in fact, thought he was just the nicest, sweetest young man on the planet and hoped he wasn’t in any trouble-but there was nothing useful; she wouldn’t even tell him what kind of books Kurt had asked for, other than she said she thought he must be pre-law.
He found the taxi service that had picked Kurt up, and for a small bribe was allowed the information that Kurt had left the taxi at the Church street Muni station. Dead end.
On the second, exhaustive search of Kurt’s room, he finally realized what a fucking idiot he was, because he hadn’t done anything with the computer other than pick it up to look underneath it.
There was nothing on the computer. No files, no internet history-it was as brand-new and empty as it was when the tech guy who delivered it had set it up and told him it was ready to go. The day Kurt moved in.
But-Kurt had used the computer. Constantly, when he first came. Not so much, later.
He had another tech guy there within the hour-yes, he understood he would need to pay the premium rate for a housecall after work hours, no problem, really-and half an hour after that, he had recovered data to go through.
Not much of it. Bookmarks: Muni and BART, The Castro Theatre, Broadway.com, Epicurious. And one file: For Blaine. It was a Word document. His throat went dry as soon as he clicked on it, and his eyes stung as soon as it opened, and he saw the first words:
For Blaine
The Whole Story
With Love
Blaine ground the heels of his hands into his eyes to clear them, then leaned forward in Kurt’s chair and started scrolling.
***
It’s really hard not talking to you. I started this for you once I realized how badly I’d hamstrung myself, but also as a way to lay it all out. Because I’ve been running for a long time, and there’s not a lot of chances to reflect on things under those circumstances. So really it was for me, too.
It’s so strange, going through this. It’s weird to think that as well as I know you, as well as you know me, and as close as we are now, there’s still so much you don’t know. So much I’ve never been able to tell you.
So I’ll tell you now, like this. Even though I don’t know if you’ll ever see it.
My name is Kurt Hummel and I’m from Lima, Ohio. I had a pretty normal life up until I was six years old, which is when my father died of congestive heart failure.
I remember him, and my mother, as being good parents, close and loving with each other, and wonderful with me (my particular flame burned very brightly, from a very young age). I remember my father joining me at tea parties I set up in the backyard (play-doh petit-fours, Blaine, you would have loved it), letting me show him the proper way to keep his pinky extended when he sipped. He was a solidly blue-collar car mechanic in a small Midwestern town, but I believe that he knew all about me, and loved me just the same. I’ve wondered a lot about how my life might have been different, if he hadn’t died.
My father’s death was terrible, of course, for both me and my mother, but she never was the same, after that. She went into what I now know was a very deep depression, to the point where my Grandma Hummel came and took me for a few weeks, while mom got ‘back on her feet’.
What got my mom back on her feet was the people who came to see her, who reached out to her after her terrible loss. Of course, I’m talking about church people. When my mom came to get me from Grandma Hummel’s, she asked me to say a prayer with her in the car, a prayer of gratitude and thanksgiving to Jesus that we were back together. She had never said anything like that before, but what the hell, she was my mom and I was so glad to see her, I prayed with her, no big deal.
My mother has never been officially diagnosed, and I am conspicuously lacking in a Psychology degree, but I lived with her through the next nine years, and I feel entirely confident in saying that she has bipolar disorder with associated religious mania. And because of the protection afforded religious people in our society, the question of whether or not she was sick (or fit to be a parent) was never seriously asked. Not by anyone who mattered, anyway.
From that point on, the only thing worthwhile in my life was school. Church took up everything else. I started doing my homework at the library, then started staying there as long as I was allowed to every single day, because it was the only place I could be away from relentless prayer and religious talk and praising Jesus every five seconds.
Still, I went to church with my mom and did everything she asked of me, and it really didn’t seem to matter much that I did all of it without ever believing in God. It was what my mother needed, in order to function. And I went along.
I was thirteen years old when Pastor Daniels gave a sermon on ‘The Demon of Homosexuality’. The upshot of this sermon was that gay people aren’t born that way, they’re possessed by demons; that at some point in their lives they turned away from God’s love, and gay demons snuck in. I know now that this is a pretty common belief among fundamentalist Christians, but at the time, it was all new to me. And I thought it was the stupidest fucking thing I had ever heard. I mean, I heard ridiculous, crazy things in church every damn week, but I thought of most of it as ‘harmless’ (or, I did then). But that wasn’t harmless. Not at all.
My mom spent most of the sermon looking at me, like really looking at me, and she was so calm, not fervent or crazy or rapturous, just calm, that I thought maybe the sermon had gotten through to her the way it got through to me. I thought about it on the way home, and she was quiet, and I knew she was thinking too.
When we got home, I did it. I told her I was gay. And she just nodded, and said that she knew, that she’d always known, since I was a little boy. And she was glad of the sermon, because now she finally knew what to do about it; that we were strong people, she and I, and with perfect faith in the power of God, with both of us calling on the blessing of Jesus’ love, I would be healed, and made whole.
That was the breaking point for me, the moment when I stopped ‘going along’. I told her I was done with praying, and done with church, that there was nothing wrong with me being the way that I was.
The next year was the worst I’d ever been through up to that point, even worse than the year my father died. My mom didn’t care much for her rebellious, gay-demon-infested, heretic son walking away from her every time she called on Jesus to heal my suffering. I was terrified and angry and so deeply hurt by turns, and because the only kids I was allowed to associate with were other church kids, I had no friends to turn to.
When I started high school, things got better for me, at least a little. I found other kids like me (not gay, but misfits, outcasts, which at the time was the biggest relief ever). Yes, I got bullied a lot, but compared to what I went through at home, I always felt like I could deal with it. I joined the school’s Glee club, and spent every possible moment I could with the kids I met there. Of course I couldn’t ever bring them home with me, and I wouldn’t have wanted to. Even my friend Mercedes would have been labeled an apostate, as she didn’t go to the ‘right’ church (mom’s church, of course).
But that whole year, my relationship with mom deteriorated terribly. I lived for my time away from home, and when I was with my friends I didn’t talk about my home life at all. They knew I had a very religious home life, they didn’t know that I had been forbidden to see or speak to my own grandmother because she was a Catholic, or that my mom regularly tried to exorcise the demons out of me, or that the thing that made me cry the hardest wasn’t being tossed in a dumpster or having a slushie thrown in my face, but the moments when I missed my mom, the woman who used to sing to me and play the piano with me and dance with me in the kitchen when we made lunch together for dad.
I spent the summer after my freshman year pining to go back to school. I stayed at the library as much as I could, learning as much as I could, reading as much as I could, but mom got more and more strict as the summer went on, and eventually she said the library was obviously a Godless place, and I wasn’t to go there any more. The last two weeks of vacation were like slow torture, waiting for school to start again. And then mom said we needed to go shopping for school clothes, and I hopped in the car like some stupid, trusting dog who doesn’t know he’s being driven to the pound, and mom drove me to Lost Lambs Home, and left me there.
The Home is ostensibly a ‘school’ for boys, but that’s not what it really is at all. The dean of the school is a man named George Todhunter Bryant, and his personal mission is to save the souls of all the poor lost lambs infested with gay demons. It’s a fundamentalist Christian reeducation camp, with some major fucked-up special twists that Dr. Bryant has added on his own.
I lasted three days there before I ran away. I went back to Lima first, and waited until mom left the house to go to church. Then I went in through the basement window and took all of my things that I couldn’t live without, and I also took the college fund money that mom refused to trust to a bank; the first and only time I was ever grateful for her paranoia.
I was fifteen, I didn’t have a real plan. I had no idea what I was doing, I just knew that I had to go. I suppose for my first run at it, I didn’t do too badly, although I made some major mistakes: namely, that I stayed close to home (just the next town over), and I let someone know where I was.
Honestly, I didn’t know what else to do. I was scared, and the thought of heading off somewhere with no plan and no experience and no idea where I was going was terrifying at that point. So I got in touch with Mr. Schuester, one of my high school teachers (I knew him best because he also taught Glee club), and told him what had happened.
He turned out not to be a good choice, but I don’t know that there were any better ones. He just kept insisting that of course my mom loved me, that all teenagers went through ‘rough patches’ at home, and he seemed stuck on the fact that because I’d answered his question about whether or not I’d been beaten with ‘no’, there must not be any ‘real’ problem.
Lima is a small town, and it’s almost impossible to keep a secret there. I don’t know who he told, but he must have told somebody, because word eventually got around to my mom that he knew where I was. She went to him, and she asked him, and he told her. And she told Dr. Bryant, and the next morning Dr. Bryant and two of his burlier ‘students’ showed up at the rattrap motel I was staying at, and took me back to the Home.
There’s a big piece missing here, Blaine, and it’s really hard to write about. What makes the Home different is Dr. Bryant’s combined techniques of God and Science in ridding children of their gay demons; he holds forth on it, pontificates on it in a grand, evangelical style, but he’s very careful never to come out and admit that what he uses is a combination of drugs that amount to chemical castration. Shots and pills, a combination of hormones and anti-anxiety, anti-psychotic and anti-depression medications, which were never meant to be taken together, all of which suppress the sex drive, as well as the personality and any capacity for rational thought.
I lost eight months. I remember routine, and calm, and looking at everything as if through a pane of thick ice. I remember praying when told to pray. I remember testifying that I was no longer troubled by demons. I remember my mother coming to visit me, crying and throwing her arms around Dr. Bryant, calling him a divine instrument of the Lord’s will. I remember her telling me she loved me for the first time in so, so long, and I remember watching her give Dr. Bryant a fat envelope, a ‘donation’.
It’s all fuzzy. It’s all blended and indistinct. The next really distinct thing I remember is Jeremiah.
He was older, nineteen or twenty, but his parents had placed him legally under conservatorship, and shipped him off to the Home because they couldn’t bear the thought of having a gay son. He didn’t adjust well. Dr. Bryant said he’d do fine once his medication ‘gave God some room to work with’, but two nights later Jeremiah took a metal kitchen knife and cut his own throat right in front of me while we were cleaning up from dinner.
They got to him in time, he didn’t manage to kill himself. But there was so much blood, and I was just standing there in the kitchen just staring down at it.
It was like being slapped. It broke the ice that glazed over everything, just for a second, and all of a sudden, just for a second, I could think. I was me.
I started ditching my pills the next day. I couldn’t do anything about the shots, as they were administered by Dr. Bryant himself, but I cheeked and flushed the pills from then on.
I was very careful. Probably the hardest acting job I’ve ever had or will ever have, remaining as zombielike as possible while slowly waking up to everything going on around me. First I was just waiting for my chance to get away, but soon that just wasn’t enough for me: I wanted proof. I wanted to stop him. I wanted to make it impossible for him to do what he did to me, and Jeremiah, and all of the others, to any other kid.
It was another four months before I ran. I gathered bits and pieces of information, I snooped carefully and unobtrusively, and slowly the whole thing started to come together.
Dr. Bryant gets a lot of money. From parents (a lot of the students are from wealthy families), but also from churches and nonprofits, and from the state. He has a medical license, and he’s really, really good at either paying or intimidating people who get a little too interested in his phenomenal ‘success rate’ with ‘curing’ gays. He keeps his fame strictly limited to those in the faith, which works perfectly because one of the primary beliefs in fundamentalist Christianity is that everyone else is an enemy, so of course you don’t talk to them. You especially don’t talk to them about your ‘miracles’.
The night I finally went, I broke into his office. I copied a ton of information from his computer (the only one in the place) onto a flash drive, scanned a bunch of papers from his files and took those too, and rifled his desk, scanning everything I could. And I found something I didn’t expect: a sticky note containing a bunch of numbers, including one that turned out to be the combination to the safe in his office. In the safe I found cash, almost ten thousand dollars, an open-ended plane ticket to Brunei (which, in case you didn’t know, has no extradition treaty with the U.S.), Dr. Bryant’s passport, and a ton of bearer bonds.
I took the cash. I didn’t even think twice about it. And then I ran.
Until the first time you kissed me, I don’t think anything felt better to me in my whole life than that first night out did. I was scared, yes, I was fucking terrified, but I was out, I was free, and I was absolutely determined to do everything right, do everything possible so that I would never, ever have to go back.
It was actually a coin toss, New York or San Francisco. San Francisco, with no intentional pun on my part, was tails. And tails won.
There’s a warrant out for my arrest in the state of Ohio: for burglary, attempted larceny, and attempted extortion-I guess that was all he could nail me with, for taking his money. There’s also a juvenile welfare court action assuming jurisdiction over me because I’m a minor ‘in danger of leading a lewd, idle, immoral and dissolute life’.
So I’m a criminal, Blaine. For a whole bunch of reasons. But mostly I’m a criminal because I refused to give up being who I am, and I refused to stay where they put me. I refused, and continue to refuse, to feel guilty for loving you, although I do feel guilty that, by loving you, I’ve made you a criminal too.
As you’ve probably surmised by now if you’ve read this far, the people who recognized me that morning on the Wharf were from Glee club. They were here for a competition, and I’m really happy and proud of them, but oh my God why there and then? When I saw Mr. Schuester all I could think was that he’d betrayed me last time, and he’d do it again, so I ran.
It just occurred to me, thinking about you reading this, that you might wonder why I just didn’t tell you everything. I couldn’t tell you, Blaine. At first it was just principles: not to tell anybody anything, because it’s the only way to stay safe. But after that, even when I knew you would be a safe person to tell, I knew you were the last person I could tell. You’re a problem-solver, you know, as I’ve told you before, and I know you love me very much. If I told you, I don’t think you’d be able to stay out of it, and with you in it there would be no real way to keep our relationship a secret-and that would be the end of your career, for sure.
And I couldn’t, I can’t do that. Someday you’re going to stop painting gorgeous, crazy pictures of me and go back to what you really do, which is make art and books and movies that remind people of what it meant to be a child. I’m not going to put all that at risk. I’m not going to put you at risk, any more than I already have. So I’m writing all this down for you, and maybe someday when you’re sixty-five and I’m forty-seven, if you still love me, I’ll sit myself down (carefully) on your lap and put these pages in your hand and say: I’m sorry you had to wait so long.
I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you, Blaine. And I’m sorry for so many other things. I know it can’t be easy for you, loving me, worrying about me and never knowing what’s wrong, or when I’m going to start screaming in my sleep.
In my nightmares, everything is beyond the ice. The needle is coming towards my arm, and his face is there. In my nightmares they find me ditching the pills and make me swallow them, over and over, and Jeremiah’s throat is my throat, and I look at you and I don’t recognize you, and I can’t love you, because I can’t feel anything at all.
Then you wake me up, and the ice breaks, and you’re you again, and I can, and do, love you with my whole heart. And that’s my version of what a miracle is.
***
Blaine didn’t cry. He needed to, he was aware that he kind of needed to cry for probably a couple hours in order to deal with all that, but for right now, he needed to think.
He read the file again, this time with his brain clicking and whirring (problem-solving, ha), clamping down on everything from murderous rage (oh, there was so much of that) to endless sadness, to something that was just a deep, desperate need for Kurt, the words so evocative of him, an ache so painful it felt like it could cripple him, if he let it.
He didn’t. He took his phone out of his pocket. Tina answered on the first ring. “Blaine, where have you been? Quinn and I were just talking about you, we’ve been trying to reach you for-”
“I need you,” he said, and only then realized what bad shape his voice was in-it was only a harsh croak. He cleared his throat and tried again. “You, and Quinn-I need your help. Can you… will you come over?”
“I… of course, Blaine. She’s here with me now, we’ll be right there.”
He hung up the phone, scrolled back to the top of the document, and started reading again.
***
He gave them the high (and low) points of what had happened, then handed copies of Kurt’s journal to each of them, and tried to steady his hands enough to make coffee while they sat at the kitchen table and read. Quinn uttered several variations on ‘oh my God’ as she went on, and then started sniffling a bit. Tina read slowly, her brows drawn together, saying nothing.
Blaine set out coffee. Quinn opened her compact and repaired her eye makeup. Tina finally finished reading, and looked up, looked right at him, her face calm except for two bright spots in her cheeks and a gleam in her eyes. “I want to help.”
Quinn sniffed again. “Me too.”
He’d kept it together so far, but he almost lost it right there.
***
“The problem isn’t making the film, Blaine. I can do that; it’ll take some time, of course, and a chunk of your money, but I can do it. The problem is that while I can put it up on Youtube and my website, there’s no way to make it go viral, no way to guarantee he’d ever see it.”
“I know. Which brings me to the second part of my idea.” He turned to Quinn. “Which is why I need your help.”
They were upstairs, in the loft. He’d brought them up there to show them the footage he had, and he’d braced himself for it, but it still hurt like he’d been stabbed in the chest when his screen filled up with Kurt sitting at the piano, working his way through a campy rendition of ‘Brand New Key’.
Quinn was still going through the video files, but she stopped when he spoke to her. “What can I do?”
“First, don’t strangle me when I tell you the second part of my idea.”
Her eyebrow arched. “Okay?”
“And second…” He sighed. “I’m going to need a new lawyer.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “A really good lawyer. Except… maybe someone who’s not a total dick?”
Quinn smiled resignedly. “I’m going to absolutely hate this idea, aren’t I?”
“Don’t strangle me.”
***
The three of them talked late into the night, going over everything, making changes to what went from ‘an idea’ to ‘the plan’ over the course of the conversation. Once they were gone he was wrung out, exhausted, and he crawled into Kurt’s bed without realizing what he was doing, then was too tired to move, when he did realize it.
He curled up around a pillow that smelled faintly sweet and boyish and made his heart twist in his chest, and went to sleep.
***
Santana Lopez arrived on a beautifully restored vintage Triumph, wearing five-inch stiletto Louboutins and a nicely tailored Armani suit. Blaine didn’t say anything out loud, but the inner-Kurt-that-lived-in-his-head kind of swooned over the whole package.
“Hi,” she said when he held the door open for her, sweeping by in a faint cloud of the same perfume Quinn wore whenever she had a date. “You’re the guy who shacked up with a sixteen-year-old kid, right?”
“Um. Yes?”
“And you’re making a video about how he’s running from some creepy religious nut who drugged him to make him less gay?”
“Yeah.”
“And doing a public art show of all the wanky pictures you painted of him?”
“That’s me.”
She smiled, and held out her hand. “Santana Lopez, your new counsel. I’m in.”
Blaine shook with her, and grinned. He couldn’t help it. “Really? I mean-good, Quinn says you’re amazing, I’m just… kind of surprised.”
She shrugged. “Look, short stack-first of all, you’re famous. That means media exposure, and lots of it. Add in sex scandal? Even more exposure. Underage-runaway-gay-sex scandal? Frenzy. And once you get to the part about religious kooks with gay drug cures-we are talking about a media shitstorm of epic proportions, and I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“Oh.” He paused. “I thought lawyers didn’t like publicity.”
She smiled again, this time with her teeth. All of them. “They do if they want to be famous lawyers who everyone remembers because they won.”
“Ah.”
She took a pair of half-glasses out of her pocket and slipped them on. “But don’t let that give you the idea that I won’t charge you a ridiculous amount of money to keep your ass out of jail, because I will.”
Blaine blinked. “Okay.”
***
“So, here’s the thing,” she told him later, sipping cranberry juice and peering at him over the top of her glasses while she took notes. “Just one thing, but very, very important-do not, under any circumstances, admit to having sex with him.”
Blaine’s mouth fell open. “But… I mean… the whole plan-”
She stopped him with one finger held up. “You can admit to knowing him. Living with him. Painting him. Marching with him at Pride wearing matching Britney Spears outfits-whatever turns you on. But when the question comes up-‘did you have a sexual relationship with him?’ I need you to say: ‘no comment’.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, oh. Because that’s basically the cornerstone of my whole plan, the one where you don’t get locked up.”
Blaine swallowed. “I… okay. As long as I don’t have to deny it.”
Santana squinted at him. “And don’t say stupid shit like that.”
***
“Are you comfortable, Blaine?”
Blaine shifted in his chair. “Uh, no. But I’m ready.”
Tina leaned forward and took his hand for a moment. Her skin was warm and soft. “You’ll be fine.”
Under the lights he felt nervous and self-conscious and very much like a bug under a microscope, but there was no way around this part of it. “Okay.”
Tina turned to her crew, got a thumbs-up, and turned back. “How did you meet Kurt?”
Blaine took a deep breath, and started talking. The lights bore down on him.
***
Afterwards, he felt drained, a dry husk, and when Tina hugged him, it was hard to let go.
“You did just fine. It’ll look great.”
The crew was finishing the last of the packing-up, heading down the loft stairs one by one. “I just… I hope this works, that’s all.”
“It’ll work.”
Blaine rubbed his face. “Do you want some coffee? I could-”
She shook her head. “I can’t, Blaine. I have to get home and pack. I’m flying to Ohio tonight.”
“You are?”
“Yes-you have to stop zoning out during strategy sessions.” She stopped packing her satchel, and sat down across from him again. “What we’re about to do, well, we’re going off of Kurt’s journal-but Kurt’s not here to back it up.”
“Not yet, but-”
“Exactly. Not yet. I have to go there before the circus starts. I have to get as much corroboration as I can before everything gets zipped up tight. Once this breaks, we’re going to have a lot less room to maneuver.”
“Right.” He really needed to stop zoning out during strategy sessions.
***
Blaine did grand gestures. Bold strokes. He was good at those. But the endless, detail-ridden, contingency-planning part of the whole process just made his stomach lurch at the stunning array of things that could potentially go wrong, so for the most part, he stayed out of it. With Tina in Ohio, Quinn and Santana commandeered his kitchen table and covered it with laptops, scribbled notes, law books, and newspapers. Blaine cooked for them, ran errands when needed, and spent the rest of his time up in the loft, staring at the still-unfinished Artist and Model III, and trying not to wonder where Kurt was. If he was okay. If he would understand, when it all came down.
Tina was back three days later. “I came straight here from the airport,” she said, letting Blaine take her heavy equipment case. “I need to start editing right away, but I thought you’d want to see.”
Blaine’s chest tightened painfully for a moment. “Did you get it?” Santana and Quinn looked up from the table expectantly.
Tina looked at him. She looked exhausted, dark circles under her eyes, but she was smiling faintly. “I got it.”
Blaine wrapped her up and held on. Santana and Quinn high-fived each other.
***
The day the video went up, Blaine stayed in the loft. He heard Quinn on the phone, then Santana, heard them both at the door, answering questions and giving short interviews-the PR machine ticking along like clockwork. Everything seemed slightly unreal, distinct and sharp but with a vague feeling that it all might just be a hallucination.
“Fox News is about to interview Bryant,” Santana told him from the top of the stairs. “You may want to see this.”
He went downstairs and made a fresh pot of coffee, then went over to the kitchen table where Tina and Quinn and Santana were all watching the freestanding flat-screen they’d set up on the wall.
“-a truly disturbing story involving beloved children’s author and creator of the hugely popular Fabulous Monsters series, Blaine Anderson-”
“I’ll come back later,” he said, wheeling around, but Santana said ‘shh!’ and Tina took his hand, so he sat down.
Through the newscaster’s voice over, there were clips from the interview, then clips of Kurt, playing the piano and singing, slicing mushrooms and sassing him with that raised, sardonic eyebrow and faint smile-his heart thumped painfully, and Tina squeezed his hand. He squeezed back.
They cut to the interview. Tina. “Did you know he was sixteen?”
“Yes.” Tina was right-she had made him look good. Or at least, harmless. “He told me he was, the first time I met him. But after a while, after getting to know him, I stopped thinking of him as a particular age. He’s just… a person. A smart, talented, wonderful person, and I love him very much.” It was strange, watching his own throat work on the screen, remembering how hard it had been in that moment not to completely lose it. “And I miss him. I miss him a lot, and I hope, wherever he is, that he’s okay.”
Back to the newscaster. “Representatives for Mr. Anderson have neither confirmed nor denied a sexual relationship between the artist and the young man. The documentary goes on to allege that Kurt Hummel fled to San Francisco from the Lost Lambs Home in Ohio, a Christian boarding school for boys, run by Dr. George Bryant. The documentary further alleges that the school is a cover for a ‘conversion therapy’ program intended to change the sexual orientation of gay teens, and that students were given dangerous drugs as part of their therapy. Dr. Bryant granted our request for an interview.”
Blaine didn’t realize he was shaking until Tina squeezed his hand again. He tried to stop, but he couldn’t.
Bryant was large, florid, balding, and wore half-glasses low on his nose. He appeared to be entirely composed. “Well, it’s all nonsense, of course. This is a boys’ school-we teach strong, Christian principles, we teach them to love learning and to love God, we teach them fellowship and Christian decency. Mr. Hummel was a remarkably troubled young man, absolutely bent on turning away from salvation. I personally took a great interest in his education and well-being, and I’m afraid he repaid my kindness with thefts and threats of extortion. He is wanted by the law, you know.”
“Blaine.” Blaine let Tina have her hand back. She shook it out, wincing. He turned back to Bryant.
“Be that as it may, the truth is that Kurt Hummel deserved compassion and understanding, he needed those things desperately in order to bring him to Jesus’ love. He did not deserve to be molested by a pedophile who made him pose for pornographic pictures, and who furthermore seems to be the last person to have seen him alive.”
Quinn uttered a soft squawk of surprise. Tina gasped. Santana said, “Oh hell no-”
Blaine said nothing. He just stared.
“There’s a war going on in this country: a war against Christians; a war against God. The secular humanists will stop at nothing to turn public feeling against us, to turn our good works into something as depraved as their own practices are.”
There was a bit more of the talking-head newscaster, and then a commercial. Santana turned off the television with the remote half-buried under a pile of papers. The sudden quiet seemed very loud.
“He’s trying to intimidate Kurt,” Blaine said, feeling his nails digging into his palms.
“That, and sell the idea that you killed him,” Santana drawled. “I think… he might know something we don’t.”
Blaine’s stomach folded in on itself. “What?”
“I don’t know-but I’m going to find out.” She got to her feet. “I need to go to my office and do some digging.”
“What about the Ohio interview?” Tina asked. “It’s ready to go. Do I put it up?”
“Not yet.”
Quinn nodded. “It’s… timing. Right now, we’ve got a pebble to throw. But by tomorrow’s news cycle, once Bryant’s saturated everything with his story-”
“Rock,” Tina said, nodding.
“Giant fucking boulder, I hope,” Santana said, shrugging into her leather jacket and zipping it up.
***
Tina had to go back to her office and Quinn said she had business to handle, so Blaine found himself sitting at his kitchen table, alone in his house for the first time in what seemed like forever. It was too quiet. He turned the TV back on.
War on Christians, war on God. It was everywhere. He flipped channels for hours, watching the same content over and over, watching things slowly spiral out of control, wondering if this was what it felt like to go crazy.
“I didn’t even know he was a homo,” said a mother of five, a woman-on-the-street interview on the local news. “My kids love them books. Brad Junior watches that first movie over and over, knows every line, it’s the only thing that keeps him quiet. But no more, it’s all going in the trash tonight-shut up, Bradley, or I’ll give you something to cry about-”
He was still at it, watching a public burning of his books in South Carolina, when Santana came back. “Turn that shit off,” she said curtly. “You’ll make yourself crazy, watching that.”
***
Quinn and Santana had been right about the timing issue; Tina uploaded her interview with a former Lost Lambs Home resident named David Karofsky the next day, just in time to hit the evening news cycle, and since in the interview he confirmed everything that had been alleged in the first video, it hit the network and cable news channels with all the force that even Santana could have wished for.
“Yeah, the drugs.” Just a dark silhouette; he’d requested anonymity. “Pills and shots, all the time. Those drugs, it’s like… like an elephant sitting on your chest or something. Everything’s just… gone. It’s horrible. And yeah, I didn’t feel like I was gay anymore-but that’s because I didn’t feel like I was anything. I didn’t know if I was alive or dead, and I didn’t really care.”
Bryant granted Fox News another interview. He still looked perfectly composed. “When you have a school where a percentage of the population is there due to major emotional and behavioral problems, you’re going to see this kind of attention-seeking behavior. As for the people who coerced that poor, disturbed child into saying those things, well-the homosexual agenda includes the suppression of all religion; they seek to put an end to the core principles our founding fathers fought and died for. The fact that they cloak it in ‘human rights’ language is an atrocity, a dog-whistle that the liberal elites respond to. The homosexuals are only another battalion in the war on God.”
Despite Bryant’s interview there was finally some traction, a few politicians and a bunch of talking heads from various gay-rights organizations calling for an investigation; the tone had shifted. Stephen Colbert did a segment on his show called War on God 2012: The Christpocalypse (brought to you by Cool Ranch Doritos) that made Tina laugh so hard she had tears in her eyes.
But still, no Kurt. Not a whisper or a word.
Nothing.
***
“Look,” Santana told Blaine across the kitchen table, leaning tiredly on her hand. “I know you hoped that once the shit hit the fan he’d come popping up like a weirdly-dressed prairie dog out of a bedazzled hole, but that’s… he’s being careful, that’s all. He’s being smart. Ohio still wants him, and even if they didn’t, his mother still has custody-and she’s probably got Bryant on speed-dial.”
Blaine nodded, and went to make more coffee. He was cleaning out the grinder when Quinn came in with her face all scrunched up and wrong-looking.
She shook her head when Blaine asked what was wrong, and then burst into tears when he put a hand on her shoulder. “I just got off the phone with Disney,” she told him between sobs. “They said you violated your morals clause. They’re stopping production of the next movie, and suing you for breach of contract.”
All he felt was a faint, exhausted echo of combined relief and contempt, but he didn’t tell her that. He held her until she stopped crying. “It’s okay, Quinn-”
“It’s not okay,” she said, wiping her eyes. “I’ve got a call with Viking this afternoon, and it’s going to be a bloodbath. You’re going to be-”
“I wanted out,” he said quietly, rubbing her back. “I’m sorry, but I did. I lost interest after the third book. Everything else has just been… going through the motions. Not what I really wanted to do.”
She sniffed and pulled back, her brows drawn low. “You… why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because… I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. Now I am-I’m an artist, Quinn, a painter. Not an illustrator. And I’ll thrive, or I’ll starve, on that.”
The look she gave him suggested that she had her suspicions about which possibility out of the two was most likely, but she just nodded, resigned, and asked if it was too early in the day to start drinking wine.
It wasn’t.
***
“I’m pretty sure someone in the juvenile justice system is a true believer.”
Blaine sat up and turned around when Santana came in, clicking the television off. “What? Who?”
“I don’t know yet,” Santana replied irritably, and sank down into one of the kitchen chairs with a heavy sigh. “But even before we started the shitstorm, I was hitting a wall in Ohio, trying to get him out from under-they want him, bad. And it didn’t make sense-the extortion complaint is sworn out in the vaguest language I’ve ever seen, the theft described as ‘petty cash’-”
“Ten thousand dollars is petty cash?”
She raised an exquisitely-arched eyebrow at him. “I don’t think Bryant wanted to admit that Kurt made off with his skedaddle money.”
“Oh.”
“But here’s the thing-the lockups for juvie offenders in Ohio are clogged-like they are everywhere. So there’s some latitude in where they send kids, depending on the offense. And it looks like they’ve sent a bunch of them-not sure how many, not yet-to the Home. Guess which kids?”
“The gay ones.”
“Right.”
“That’s how Bryant qualified the Home for state funds.”
“Right.”
He tilted his head. “I’m pretty sure that’s illegal-the part where you send gay offenders to a conversion camp, I mean.”
“Right. But only if we can prove it is one.” She shook her head. “It’s a beautiful setup. Relieve overcrowding in juvenile institutions, do ‘God’s work’, get state money-and the only people hurt by it are a handful of queer kids, and who’s gonna give a shit about that?”
He was shocked, absolutely shocked, when she started crying-not bawling or sobbing, just… tears, her eyes bright and overfull. “Santana?”
“I think about how scared I was, when I was that age, when I thought that telling my family I liked girls was going to mean getting kicked out of the house… and then I think about what it must be like for the kids who got sent to that fucking hellhole-it’s torture. And most of it is legal. And that fucking kills me.” She pushed away from the table abruptly and left the kitchen. He heard her heels clicking down the hall, heard the bathroom door close behind her.
Blaine closed his eyes and put his head in his hands, burning for Kurt on a cellular level, swallowing over and over with his throat perfectly dry, waiting for the pain to be bearable again.
He was still waiting when his cell buzzed. Tina. “Hey,” he said, then cleared his throat so he could do more than croak. “Sorry, I was just-”
“Blaine, listen-” She sounded winded, out of breath. “I was going through the backlog of e-mail coming into my website, and I found one-from a gmail address that’s just a string of numbers, but the word ‘Muse’ is in the middle of it; it came in the day after the first video went up. There’s nothing in it, nothing in the message at all-but there’s attachments. A ton of them, all relating to the Home. Blaine, I think… it’s got to be from Kurt.”
***
A reply message sent to the e-mail came back as ‘undeliverable’, and the ISP traced back to a computer in a public library in Los Angeles. But they had the documents.
Tina put them up the next day. The day after that, Bryant stopped granting interviews, and an official investigation into the Home was announced by the Ohio Attorney General’s office. The day after that, Bryant disappeared. That night he was caught in the international terminal at LAX using a passport that didn’t match his legal name, boarding a flight for Hong Kong with a connection to Brunei.
Bryant no longer looked composed. Several people with cellphones had caught his scuffle with Security, and there were blurry versions of it all over the news and the internet. Santana watched every single one of them she could find over and over and over, she spliced them together in a loop and watched it on her laptop, smiling fondly and occasionally giggling. She changed her laptop wallpaper to Bryant’s mugshot, his combover awry, his face drawn and shocked and haggard.
The investigation quickly expanded to include the Ohio Department of Youth Services. Santana yelled at the television in triumphant, rapid-fire Spanish for thirty seconds, then told everyone to shut up so she could hear what was going on.
***
Apparently it was Bryant’s arrest that prompted Elizabeth Hummel to finally grant an interview. She called Bryant a ‘brave and righteous soldier of God’, and mourned that such a good man and his good works should be scapegoated and vilified by the liberal media.
“But what about your son? Do you know where he is?”
“No, I don’t, but I pray for him every day. I pray that he finds his way home. I pray that Dr. Bryant will return soon to the work, and the children, that need him so desperately-including Kurt.” She shook her head. “I love my son. I love him with all my heart. I just hate the demon that has his precious soul in its grip.”
Blaine rubbed his arms. His skin was puckered, crawling, and he had to rub hard before they felt normal again. On the screen the interview was still going on, Katie Couric now leaning forward, pressing gently, her voice calm but insistent.
“But what if your son isn’t possessed by demons? What if he’s just… gay?”
The resulting slap was the last second of footage-the cameraman had been obliged to intervene.
***
“That’s what I’ve been waiting for,” Santana said, her eyes wide.
Blaine blinked at her. “You’ve been waiting for someone to slap Katie Couric?”
“Yes. No. Hold on.” She closed her eyes and took a long, slow breath. Then she faced him squarely. “I have an idea. It’s… kind of crazy.”
All the hair on his neck stood up. “Tell me.”
The strategy session that night went on until almost sunrise. After everyone was gone Blaine went up to the loft in the cool, grey light, sat and stared at the still-untouched Artist and Model III while the room slowly warmed and brightened. The crest of a wave, the hope in him, Kurt’s face and his own on the canvas, almost-touching, dark and light swirled together like feathery wings clasping.
Holding on.
***
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