Saints & Sinners

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Nineteen:

"Well, for starters, I should probably just explain it to you from the very beginning, I guess," she began, nodding her head. "It was a good two years ago, he told me he was around thirteen. Anyway, as you can imagine, he was wild and young and free, but he isn't like that anymore. When he was younger, he had no rules, he was just who he was, and he thought the world would accept him for that. Do you know why he was sent to our school to begin with?"

"No," I told her honestly. He refused to elaborate on much of his past, to me especially.

"His father was a rich man, a lawyer, or something like that. And he divorced Tristan's mother for another man, so obviously, the religious old slag thought she best stop her son being tainted. She was given full custody of him, and shipped him straight here because god forbid her son, the son of a homosexual, becomes like his dad. You know the saying 'Like father, like son?' Well that was probably why he was sent to St. Seppo's.

"Anyway, as you can guess, the school doesn't necessarily teach you to be a saint, nothing can do that, so his mother took more radical methods two years ago to make sure he didn't turn out like his dad. She sent him to an anti-gay church camp over the summer. When he came back, he was... gone. He just wasn't himself, he just faded away. He wasn't even gay, so there was no point sending him someplace on the off chance that maybe, just maybe, he turned out like his dad. The meagre, one-in-ten chance that he was a homo. If you ask me, his mother was just looking for someone to blame for being a beard for twenty years, Tristan probably just reminded her of his dad everytime she looked at his face. She hit him a lot, like serious damage. She was cruel."

"So, is that it?" I asked, slightly expecting that there would be a lot more to the story than 'he went to an anti-gay church camp.' Somehow, I could sense that she hadn't finished.

"No, you idiot! No church camp could change a great guy like Tristan, it was what happened while he was there that changed him," she announced, her tone becoming darker as she finished the sentence, her voice ominous and disturbingly, sickeningly sweet.

"Well, what happened?"

"I'm about to tell you, so just be quiet, okay?" She let out a long, sick, tired breath and continued with her story. "This is what he told me what happened, when I confronted him about why he was avoiding me, why he'd changed so much over the course of a single summer."

She retrieved a bright red notepad from her bag and handed it me, titled, TO REMEMBER, BY YOLANDA YAMSA.

"What is this?"

"Well, I obviously wrote about it. I write about everything, but all the good stuff, I put in there. It's kind of like a book."

"I didn't know you wrote professionally, is this published?"

"No. It's unfinished. Read Chapter Fifteen, that's my short-story about Tristan."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: THE SORDED SUMMER AFFAIR

TRISTAN'S life had been good - great, even - until his mum decided, on the slight chance that her son might become a homosexual, to send him to a church camp. Now, Tristan knew plainly that he wasn't a homosexual - oh no, does uttering it contaminate me? - so he figured going to this pray-the-gay-away camp wouldn't do him much harm.

In the simplest of terms, Tristan was wrong. He was wrong about many things.

He'd met a guy on the first day, Jaspar Johannsen, he seemed cool. So Tristan decided he'd hang out with him, and when they were assigned the same dorm-room, they ended up becoming pretty close friends. Tristan liked him, he seemed like a really nice guy. He liked most of the same stuff as Tristan, and they had lots in common, so why not, right?