NIGHTLIGHT, Ricky’s Playbill message repeated.
NIGHTLIGHT. HELP CONNOR.
It was a warning. Mr. Hannigan knew these men were coming.
My fog is gone. I blink my eyes clear and bellow, “MOLLY, GET OFF THE BOAT! GET OFF THE BOAT RIGHT NOW!” She spins on the deck, her hair and dress flapping like a flag in the wind. “Get back!” I shriek at Briggs, shoving the muscular statue with the last drops of power in my terrier-sized body. He doesn’t budge. “MOLLY, THEY’RE NOT WHO THEY SAY THEY ARE!” Molly sprints back along the deck, but two of the men snatch her. She screams. Behind me, Briggs stands deathly still on the dock—a dock conveniently empty of all human beings except us—and his smiling eyes lock onto mine. “Who are you really?” I ask, close to hyperventilating.
Briggs digs into his pocket and removes the all-black Pez dispenser—his good luck charm—and touches it gently to my chest. I’m too curious to move. A smarter person would’ve moved. A crack of violet electricity punches my heart backward. As the force launches me off my feet, I slam against the dock, and once again, air vanishes from my lungs. Molly screams as I struggle to brush the dusting of stars from my vision.
Stay awake, Connor…Keep conscious…
Ben Briggs—my mother’s hired goon—kneels beside me and whispers, “All aboard.”
CHAPTER THREE
HELP CONNOR
TWO MONTHS AGO
Ario texts me at the worst possible times, I swear.
Mom and I are grabbing an early dinner at Sue’s Diner before her night shift, and the hour before she goes to work is stressful enough without all these buzzing notifications. When I sneak a quick peek, they’re exactly what I expect from my boyfriend: support. It’s actually something closer to aggressive, hostile support, but it’s hard to blame him. He’s just trying to help me come out. The sooner I come out to my mom, the better. This “before moment” is like edging, but for anxiety attacks.
Let me know as soon as you do it! he texts, followed by emojis of crossed fingers. I know it’s hard, he continues in rapid fire, but omg you’ll feel great on the other side! Here for you!
I’m amazed I’m even able to hold my phone with this cold sweat pumping through my hands. He’s right, I know I need to do this. Everybody who’s gay does it. Nothing can happen in my life until I do it. I just, obviously, can’t do it ten minutes before my mom has to go to work to nurse preemie babies for twelve hours. It’s not fair to her, and it won’t look good on me. Next week is finals, and I don’t want this hanging over my head if it goes wrong. The week after that is my birthday, and I don’t want that getting ruined either. So, it has to happen sometime after my birthday, and honestly, I never promised Ario I was having The Conversation today, so I don’t know what these texts are supposed to be—a nudge? A mind game?
Realizing that I don’t need to have this talk for at least another three weeks sends a cool prickling sensation up and down my arms, as if a strangler suddenly released his grip from my throat. I plop my phone onto the leather booth and return to my milkshake with a renewed zest for life.
Sue’s Diner hasn’t had a fresh coat of paint since the moon landing, but Ambrose doesn’t care if things are old and busted, as long as they stay the same. These menus were printed eons before my birth, and there’d be riots if they changed a single item. The only menu modifications have been updated pricing stickers, which lay plastered and crooked over the yellowing laminate. Still, Sue herself has proudly never missed a day of work in sixty years. Well into her late eighties, she sports a Pepto Bismol-pink wig and totes around an oxygen tank as she observes her twenty-year-old busboy at work. He kneels on the countertop by the refrigerator-sized milkshake machine and fiddles behind it delicately with a wrench.
“You gotta slap the motor,” Sue badgers him, huffing like she’s frustrated that she can’t hop up there and take care of the damn thing herself.
Sweating and fidgeting, the busboy says, “I’m gonna break it. It’s fragile.”
“That machine is gonna outlive you, Gabe. It’ll bury us all. Slap it!”
Gabe winces and does as he’s told. The moment his palm makes contact, the motor belches once and then shimmies to life with a satisfying thrum. The corners of Sue’s lips upturn and she gives her iron monstrosity a grim, respectful nod. No one in Ambrose is happier than Sue at the cultural resurgence of old-timey nostalgia, or else someone would surely complain about this ancient beast. It probably spits flecks of lead paint into each milkshake. Nevertheless, Sue’s shakes are famously brick thick and arctic cold, and I’ll drink them until I die. I don’t know how she does it, but her strawberry shakes taste like someone froze Fruity Pebbles in milk.
I shouldn’t be freaking out so much about coming out. My sexual orientation isn’t gay—it’s milkshake.
I ignore Ario’s next nudging text and scrape the final remains of my shake out of the galvanized tin sidecar. “You got your badge?” I ask my mom, and she jerks away from her Vanilla Pepsi to hunt through her purse. After a tense moment of searching, she pulls out her multitiered nursing badge: Marcia Major, BSN, RN, St. Josephine’s Medical Center, and clips it to her scrub top. She forgot it last week and had to turn around and go all the way home to get it. Day shift nurses couldn’t leave until she came back, people complained—it was a whole nightmare. Mom can’t afford another write-up.
“Oh, thank you,” she says on a relieved breath.
“Got your phone charger?”
“Yes.”
“Wallet?”
“Yep.”
“You got enough on Starbucks for a venti?”
“Who’s the mom here? You or me?”
“Me, duh.” I grin and chomp another fry as she giggles into her Pepsi. A surge of warmth surrounds me like a protective shield—almost visible, shimmering as gold and ultraviolet as sunrays. I will do anything to preserve the ecosystem between my mother and me. If it means she goes on thinking I’m straight while I meet up with Ario during her night shifts, then that sounds like a pretty good life to me. “Do you got enough?”
Mom scrolls through her Starbucks app until she finds our card’s amount. “Eh, maybe just a tall,” she groans.
“Use the free drink reward.”
“Oh, no—”
“You’re gonna go through a whole shift with just that little wiener-sized tall coffee?”
“Connor!” Mom shrieks quietly, scandalized but delighted at my G-rated swearing. “I’ll just use the Keurig in the break room.”
“You said it’s broke and they’re in no rush fixing it, now come on, just take it, it’s free.”