Signs (2 page)

By lunchtime all he wanted was a fucking nap. Jay had already gone, unsurprisingly, but he had been considerate enough to send Luc a text to let him know.

There were a few goth kids he could sit with to eat his lunch. He wasn’t really into the goth scene, not in the same way they were, but he fit in with them a lot better than he did with most of the other kids at school.

He nodded to Ellery as he sat down with a sandwich and an energy drink.

“Tired?” she asked.

“Mhmm.”

Ellery knew everything; their parents moved in the same social circles. She’d always been nice to him, even before, and now she seemed to take it as a personal responsibility to keep her eye on Luc and make sure he was okay in school. She noticed when he was tired. Which was nearly always.

Luc had always thought that, were he straight, Ellery would be the sort of girl he’d want to date. She was a little on the plump side and had awesome boobs. Even as a gay guy he could appreciate them. They liked the same bands, sometimes went to gigs together. And she helped dye his hair black, as long as he returned the favor with whatever color she was sporting that month. Most recently they’d experimented with the “dip dye” look from London—black on top, purple at the ends. For a first attempt it had turned out pretty good.

He ate his sandwich in silence, vaguely tuning in to the conversations around him. It seemed like someone was planning to get tickets for a band passing through on tour. Luc didn’t speak up. Because of his friendship with Ellery there would always be an offer to go along to things like that, and he would normally decide last minute if he would be there or not. His presence didn’t make any difference to these people. Not to say they didn’t care—they were his friends—but whether or not he turned up didn’t change the fact that they would go and have a good time without him.

Luc just about managed to pay attention during his math class, mostly staring at Cameron Barker’s cute butt instead of concentrating on Pythagoras, but PE was a total write-off. He’d turned up, though, so he was relatively safe from his sister’s wrath.

The house was usually empty when he got home. His mother was rarely there when he got in from school, even though he wasn’t really sure where she went every day. She was the sort of woman who didn’t welcome prying questions, even if they did come from a place of concern. Frances Le Bautillier was old money in New York and spent most of her time drinking dry martinis at the bar at the Four Seasons. It was probably for the best that he didn’t know the details.

Luc wandered through to the kitchen and made himself a snack—peanuts, cheese, and apple slices. He didn’t stay slim by working out, after all. He took the snack up to his room and fired up his laptop. There were a few messages waiting for him on his Tumblr account, and he opened the mailbox, hoping he wouldn’t have to deal with faceless online abuse today. Being gay and looking the way he did made Luc a target for people who could hide behind a mask of anonymity. He really wasn’t in the mood for it.

Luc was immediately drawn to a note from Caleb-the-photographer.

I feel the need to thank you for re-blogging my picture. It suddenly gained hundreds of notes
.

Luc smiled and typed a reply.

No problem. Although it already had a lot when I saw it first. You really are very talented
.

He sat back and reached for a cube of cheese, feeling strangely lighter. And hungry.

2. CREATE

C
ALEB
WANTED
to shrug off the compliment from Luc, and with it the attention it drew to him. Since there was no one around it seemed pointless to do so. Instead he just thanked the Internet stranger and clicked away from the site so he couldn’t obsessively check for another response.

Posting his photography online had been a suggestion from his mother, and he had checked a few different sites before finding one he was comfortable with. Granted, Tumblr had an awful lot of pornography and cat images (sometimes even together), but since he had no objections to either porn or cats, he had signed up.

Taking pictures was one thing. Caleb could spend hours with his camera around his neck, snapping one image after another. Honing them down was more difficult. He had to pick the single best image from a day’s work, just the one, to post online. Caleb had quickly learned people were rarely interested in seeing more than one picture from a collection. It flew in the face of nearly everything he’d learned about exhibiting his work in a gallery, where continuity and collections were valued. On the Internet, the consumer looked, appreciated, then wanted to be entertained with something new.

It had been a steep learning curve, and a valuable one.

Caleb finished off a homework assignment and saved the file to a USB drive, ready to take into school the next morning. Then, because he couldn’t help himself, he switched back to his blog.

There was a notification he was now being followed by “Luc-le-Beau.” He had yet to explore the other person’s blog. It seemed like an excellent time to do so. Caleb quickly scrolled through the pages. Most of them were photos of bands or music clips, although there were some text posts too. For a moment he hesitated over reading those, feeling like it was an invasion of privacy.

The cursor lingered over the “read more” button as Caleb deliberated clicking on it, wondering if he had permission to know personal things about “Luc-le-Beau.” Then the light above his desk flashed. It was his parents’ way of knocking on his door. On the doorframe was a standard doorbell that was hooked up to the light. He quickly glanced at his clock—it was nearly eleven, his lights-out time.

Caleb minimized the window and went to open the door to his mother, who was already in her pajamas.

“
Came to say good night
,” she signed.

He smiled and nodded and leaned in to let her kiss him on the cheek.

“
Good night
.”

Since he had to be up for school in the morning, Caleb turned the computer off and quickly changed for bed, knowing if he sat back down at the desk, he’d quickly get caught up in the blog.

As he lay in bed, Caleb wondered what Luc-le-Beau looked like. It was a train of thought that took him all the way to sleep.

T
HE
HARDEST
part about school was when Caleb’s teacher gave half his lecture while facing the board, writing things down as he went. Actually, it wasn’t just Mr. Graff that did it. Quite a few of his teachers didn’t listen when he asked them to face the front so he could lip-read. Which was ironic, really.

His grades never slipped, though. His parents would never let that happen. Most nights when he got home from school, Caleb sat down at the kitchen table and went over everything from his classes that day to make sure he understood, before he even got started on homework. While other kids his age watched TV or played video games or went online, he was stuck in front of a pile of books, relearning what his teachers were too ignorant to teach in a way that meant he could learn like everyone else.

It was for that reason that Caleb’s parents had enrolled him in five different schools before he finally settled in a regular, mainstream high school. A couple of those had been schools specifically for deaf kids, but he’d never felt like he fit in at those. Nearly all the kids at deaf schools excelled in an environment that catered to their needs. Not Caleb.

Feathered neatly with his deafness were layers of social anxiety Caleb had spent most of his teenage years battling. In twelve years he hadn’t attempted any kind of speech. The beautiful range of body and facial expressions that characterized ASL didn’t come naturally to him, and his reluctance to show his emotions on his face, as well as with his hands, eventually alienated him from his deaf friends. He just wanted to be like everyone else, not in some school where his signing, lacking in expression and emotion, was more difficult for his peers to understand. Plus there were always therapists at “special” schools: language therapists, emotional well-being therapists, speech therapists.

Awkward was redefined when he sat in a room with a speech therapist for an hour a week and didn’t open his mouth once the whole time he was there. That lasted a year. When he left that school, his parents finally relented and sent him to the local high school. It was overcrowded, slightly run down, full of cliques and teams and special little groups he wasn’t part of. It was what he’d always wanted—to be
normal
.

There were some teachers who were awesome. There was an option to take a photography course as an extracurricular activity, and Caleb had signed up as soon as he was able. In fact, he was currently on his third rotation, when students were only supposed to get one place per year. But Mr. Andrews was really nice. He had learned some sign language so he could better get to know Caleb as a person, not just as the deaf kid in school. After Caleb’s second rotation, he’d created an assistant position so Caleb could stay in the photography project for as long as he wanted, on the condition that he helped clean up the developing chemicals and take down the prints from the drying room after class.

Mr. Andrews was young, for a teacher. Caleb guessed he wasn’t thirty yet, probably midtwenties. During the week he was one of the art teachers, and he was a working artist too. After a quick search on the Internet, Caleb had found Mr. Andrews’s website, with pictures of his pieces in different mediums: sculptures, oil paintings, sketches, illustrations, photography.

On the nights he was in the photography studio—Tuesdays and Wednesdays—Caleb’s mom came to collect him so he didn’t have to take the late bus on his own. There had only been one time he’d ever had trouble, but that was enough as far as his mom was concerned. It wasn’t even anything terrible, just some guys flicking things at the back of his head from the other side of the bus. Caleb had guessed they were calling him names too. He’d shrugged it off, determined this was just another thing normal kids went through, so he wasn’t going to make a big deal of it. Then the next day he had been called to the principal’s office, and his parents were there, and his dad had translated Caleb’s version of events to the principal. Apparently the bus driver had seen—and heard—it all and reported back to the school. And since then his mom wouldn’t let him get the bus on his own.

It was stupid, but she was overprotective of him at the best of times, and he knew letting him go to a mainstream school was a big thing for her.

He wasn’t quite finished working on the digital photo, but there wasn’t time to complete what he’d hoped to achieve that afternoon. With a small sigh, Caleb saved his work and turned off the computer, grabbed his bag, then went down to Mr. Andrews’s office to say good night.

“Is your mom picking you up?”

Caleb could lip-read well. Extraordinarily well, in fact.

“
Yes
,” he signed, knowing Mr. Andrews could understand.

“
Okay. Good night
.”

“
Thanks. Good night
.”

As expected, Caleb’s mom was waiting for him in her bashed-up old Volvo. He was running just a few minutes late, and as he approached, Caleb noticed her head was tilted back on the headrest, her eyes closed. She hadn’t even changed out of her mint-green scrubs.

His mom’s job as a midwifery nurse meant she worked long shifts and odd hours. He could remember her saying it wasn’t the sort of job she could just do for the heck of it. It was a calling in life, to bring new life into the world. She was also pretty convinced her job wasn’t about babies, it was about women.

He’d been to Boston Medical Center a few times before to see one doctor or another regarding his hearing—or lack thereof. In the past year, since he’d been driving himself around, he liked to drop in to the ward to see his mom, just to say hello.

However, the labor and delivery wards scared him. Caleb’s excuse was that he was a teenage boy, and babies and women in labor were fucking scary. His mom was different when she was at work too. Once he’d gone in with a bag of M&M’s for her because she was working a twelve-hour shift, and he thought it would be nice.

The girl on the desk recognized him and signed hello, then put a call through for Nurse Stone.

Caleb took after his mother in many of his features. He got her slim body and blond hair, although he’d inherited the curls from his dad. His mom kept her hair long so she could easily tie it back at work, which had always made her look younger.

When she strode through the ward to the front desk, he thought she looked terrifying with power. For all of the peace and calm she usually brought to those around her, especially at home, in the right circumstances she could, apparently, be a warrior.

Caleb had silently handed her the packet of candy, and that had broken through the armor and forced her face to split into a smile. She’d thanked him, pulled him down into a hug (and placed a little kiss on his cheek), then asked him to come with her.

He’d followed blindly. He always would, where his mom was concerned. She took him through to the nursery and pointed out her miracle of the day. The baby’s face was red and white, with pouting, shiny pink lips and a shock of dark hair peeking out from under a pink cap.

“
It was supposed to be a boy
,” his mom had told him. “
The mother has three sons already. They called her Trinity, so she’s named after her brothers
.”

She always remembered her miracle babies.

Caleb approached the car and watched her snoozing for a moment, then knocked lightly on the window to get her attention. His mom startled awake, then noticed him and rubbed her eyes with one hand as she pressed the button to unlock the door.

“
How was your day
?” she asked, shifting in the seat to face him.

“
You look tired
,” he signed back.

Carrie-Anne shook her head. “
It was a long shift
.”