1 Chapter 1

I had to trade names with seven different people to get the name I wanted: Tory, a senior like myself. Utopia was a small college, and most everyone knew one another. It was church-based. I didn’t want to out myself as gay to anyone, really, but Tory had captured my heart. I felt I owed it to myself to at least find out Tory’s orientation.

We both dated female students. The administration seemed to encourage it because they wanted their male students to become nicely married ministers and the girls to become teachers. The monthly school-run paper always had updates on prior students who now had a church of their own or were teaching. This was so expected.

I wasn’t interested in that kind of life for myself. I had been brought up in a different religion, which I had semi-dropped, lately. I had come here because I’d been given a scholarship and couldn’t afford to go anywhere else.

Now, with one more semester to go, I was almost twenty-two years old and wanted, even though it was stupid, being gay and all, to join the Navy. At least, I thought I did. Maybe it would please my father.

But first, the Christmas party, then two weeks at home, and then the last semester.

* * * *

It was time. Time for me to hop on the bus to Ann Arbor, and then another bus, if there was one, to the campus of Utopia College, where I was going, because Dad couldn’t afford to send me to the university like he had my older brother. I didn’t have any kind of sport to help me get accepted anywhere, but at old Utopia, it didn’t matter. It was enough that I was a Protestant of some sort. Not their sort exactly, but it didn’t matter. They accepted me because I wrote a nice paper on how good a minister I’d make (lying through my teeth) and because my graduation picture showed me with a fresh haircut and a clean white shirt and tie. Do I sound bitter? Well, yes, and grateful, too, because after I earned a BA of some sort, I could do whatever I wanted.

If I wanted to please the school, I’d become a minister or a teacher or counselor. If I wanted to please my father, I’d come home and do the accounting and business end of his hardware store for the rest of my life. If I wanted to please myself, I’d probably have to go way off campus to find myself a boyfriend. And for all four college years, I’d have to hide the fact that I was gay, just as I’d been doing for the last four years, ever since I figured out why I didn’t want to date any of the girls in our high school except Milly. Only as a junior did I find out Milly was a lesbian, trying as hard to hide it as I was.

My father had been kind enough to take a few hours off work to drive me to the bus depot. I had been pleased and thought it was a very kind and loving gesture on his part, because he was nothing if not all about his work. He lifted my two bags out of the trunk for me and waited as I got my tickets. The bus was already hissing to a stop when he put his hand on my shoulder, smiled briefly, and then placed an envelope in my hand.

“It’s time to give you this and wish you a good experience.” He patted me awkwardly, turned, got back in the car, and drove off.

I stood there with my mouth hanging open and a sinking feeling in my chest. Still, I thought it was probably a nice fat check or a glowing accolade of praise. He wasn’t much good in the face to face emotion things, unless it was anger and criticism, but then, he’d been brought up with no father at all.

I took a final look around my home town. I’d lived here for seven years, and they’d been difficult, but it was almost all I had. I wasn’t counting those happy days of being a kid, five, ten, eleven years old, still with that harsh and critical father but with siblings who also suffered his coldness, and a warm and loving mother. It had been not great, but good, very good, I guess, compared to many. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt as I headed off, feeling like an adult for the first time in my life.

Besides being all I could afford, this college would also please my mother. That may be the only thing I could give her.

I knew I wasn’t ugly. I had fine dark hair, curly but not annoying, barely needed to shave yet (I think I had Indian blood), and was built as nice as I’d want in someone else. Even though I was not very athletic in the supposedly important team sports way my father worshipped, I could swim and run well enough to have made both teams in school.

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