Page 14 of Haunted

“There are some very touching stories of bravery, such as seventeen-year-old Lance Broussard, who braved the fires to save his boyfriend, seventeen-year-old Parker Bishop. Both boys have made it out of the fires safely.”

And then there’s a photograph of us. The two of us on a cot in the gym at the exact moment Lance kissed my forehead. Our faces are dirty from smoke and there are tear tracks on my cheeks. I look broken and scared, huddling into his arms. The man with the camera. I remember the laminated card swinging from his neck while he worked the room. I saw it. I looked right at it and it didn’t mean anything to me.

My jaw drops. Lance’s parents look over at me. I can’t stop looking at my own face on the screen, my terror displayed for the whole country like it belongs to them now.

“Can you give us some sense of the devastation here?”

She’s saying something about the Holy Light Baptist Church. The camera pans across what used to be forest and is now a field of black stumps. Across the street, where this morning there were houses, there is nothing at all. She says the fires are still too hot to go any deeper down Hemingway Road. Then she asks the cameraman to zoom in on something further along.

The camera zooms in on a blackened car. It had driven into a ditch in front of the church and I swallow hard. It’s barely recognizable. It could be Mom’s car, or not. It’s the right shape, yes, but I can’t tell anything else, not even what color it would have been. It could be any of a hundred cars.

Everything else she says is lost to my ears. When the anchor switches to lottery mania in New York, someone turns off the TV, and I still can’t peel my eyes from it.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Mrs. Broussard says.

“That was the national news. How did they get that picture? Where did they get that story from?” I ask.

Lance tightens his grip on my shoulder and hands me his phone. He looks grim.

It’s open to the website of the Fairhaven Excelsior. I read the words LIKE HELL ON EARTH: Governor declares state of emergency as over 50 still missing. And we’re the picture. The caption reads Lance Broussard, 17, comforts boyfriend Parker Bishop, 17, as they wait for word of the Bishop family.

I hand the phone back to him. “They outed me,” I say. I want to shout it, but my voice breaks and won’t let me. “I wasn’t ready for that.”

“They outed me, too,” Lance says. “We’ll deal with it. Together, okay?”

I want to tell him that he’s strong and handsome and people won’t be terrible to him, but it gets stuck in my throat.

“My mom is going to see this,” I say.

“Parker, do you think that you’ll be in trouble for this?” Mrs. Broussard asks. “Does she say bad things about gay people?”

“No! No. She loves gay people. She thinks they’re great and funny. It’s just—she has this idea of what they’re supposed to be. Like, florists and bakers and dress designers. She’d trust a gay hairdresser with her life, but she wouldn’t trust a gay surgeon unless he was a plastic surgeon.”

Lance bristles next to me. I look up at him, but his mouth is set into a grim line.

“She wouldn’t think bad things about Lance,” I hasten to add. “She doesn’t hate gay people. She just doesn’t think they’re serious.”

“Jesus Christ,” Mr. Broussard says. I’m clearly making this worse.

The doorbell rings and we all freeze. I can’t move. Mr. Broussard has to do it.

There’s a woman standing at the front door clutching a casserole dish. She has a helmet of set gray curls, and her eyes sweep the room before settling on me.

“Why, Ellie!” Mrs. Broussard says, standing up. “What brings you over here?”

“I was making a green bean casserole for those survivors, and then I heard the most upsetting thing on the news and I thought you would be in need of some moral support.”

“What do you mean?” Mr. Broussard asks.

“Well, that terrible misunderstanding on the news. New York media. They just get everything wrong. Can I come in?”

“Of course. And thank you so much for this lovely casserole,” Mrs. Broussard says, accepting it. She turns her back on Ellie and I see her face crinkle in disgust.

“It was just such a crying shame. Did you hear what they’re saying about your son? A young man and a hero with his whole life in front of him, who risks his life for his friend and…” She shakes her head. “I think that those media types will stop at nothing to get higher ratings.” She turns to face me. “You must be that Bishop boy. I’ve been on my knees all day just a-praying up a storm for the Lord to come and deliver you people. Why don’t we pray for your family together?”

I look out the window at the starless sky and think that God must not have been at home today. “Okay,” I say, because it couldn’t hurt. I feel uncomfortable. Mom doesn’t like church people very much. And now, I’d only be praying that she hasn’t seen that picture.

“Perhaps we should introduce you formally,” Mr. Broussard says. “Parker, this is our neighbor, Ellie Hopkins. Ellie, this is Parker Bishop.”