Scott Sherman - Third You Die

“Hmm,” Freddy observed. “The old ‘I have to stop seeing you so I can keep seeing you’ line. I may have used that once or a hundred times when I wanted to dump someone.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Well, maybe not that much. I mean, you know me. It’s not like I ever did the ‘dating thing.’ More of a ‘one night stand’ kind of guy. Or, ‘one nooner.’ Or, ‘that morning in a crowded subway car when the lights went out and-’ ”

“I get it, I get it,” I said. We could have been there all night.

“Fine,” Freddy said testily. “I’ll skip over the hot-air balloon, the opening-night line for the last Twilight movie, and the various Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormon missionaries who showed up at my door thinking they’d convert me.”

I circled my hand in the universal gesture for Get on with it.

“My point,” Freddy said, well, pointedly, “is just because I knew I wasn’t interested in anything serious didn’t mean they knew that. So, one learns to be diplomatic, darling.”

“Maybe you’re right and Brent was trying to let Lucas down easy. But Lucas didn’t think so. He thought Brent would choose him.”

“Ah,” Freddy said wistfully, “they always do, the dear things.”

“He was beginning to lose faith, though. Before the ‘time-out, ’ they were constantly in touch. Texting, on the phone. Brent’s director, Kristen, told me he’d seen Brent on the set making private phone calls-turns out he was right. Kristen thought the calls were to another production company, though, not another lover.

“When Brent said he needed some space, Lucas assumed it’d be a week or three. As it stretched into months, he became increasingly worried. Not that anything had happened to Brent, mind you. More that maybe Brent hadn’t chosen him after all.”

“Why didn’t Lucas just call him?”

“He promised not to. He’d already made the mistake of pursuing Brent too aggressively the first time around. He even thought Brent’s not calling might be some kind of test.”

“Lucas could have made the whole thing up,” Freddy offered, raising his hand to call over the cute waiter. The dark-haired, dark-eyed Latino was taking an order at an adjacent table. The waiter held up his index finger. One moment.

“Maybe he never did get back together with Brent. It could have been another of his fantasies.”

“No, I don’t think so. Besides, Lucas knew something about Brent that I’d asked everyone and nobody could answer. Not even Charlie.”

“What was that?”

“His real last name. Richie’s last name. Dawson. He even had the phone number and address of Richie’s parents in Queens. Look.”

I took out from my backpack a picture of Brent’s that Lucas had given to me. It showed Brent, a girl a few years older than him, and his parents at Disney World, the four of them smiling like every other family smiles when you point a camera at them in Disney World. Brent looked like he was nine or ten at the time.

On the back, Brent had written his parents’ names and all their contact information. He also wrote a note:

Dear Mom and Dad,

If you ever get this, know that I forgive you. I will always love you.

Your son,

Richie

“Why would Brent have given this to Lucas? Why not just send it to them himself?”

“That part’s weird…” I began.

“Yeah,” Freddy said. “Thank god the story’s finally getting weird. Because the whole porn-star-hooked-on-drugs-and-sleeping-with-a-guy-wh o-just-happens-to-look-like-his-brother part was so wholesome I was getting bored.” He glared at the waiter, who gave an apologetic shrug and repeated his earlier gesture.

“I’m about to give him a finger, too,” Fred growled. “But a different one. Sorry, darling. You were saying…”

“Lucas said that for a few weeks before Brent’s disappearance, Brent seemed distracted. Moody. A little worried. At one point, he told Lucas he had the feeling something-or someone-was after him.”

The waiter came over. I got my first good look at him, and I suspected Freddy’s motivation for beckoning him over may have gone beyond just wanting to place an order. The server really was kind of spectacular. He had the smoldering looks of an Argentinian soccer player you’ve never heard of who then winds up modeling for a Versace campaign and dating Miley Cyrus.

“I am sorry to have been detained,” he said in a velvety Spanish accent. “How may I be of assistance?” His eye contact with Freddy promised a main course of polite attentiveness with a side order of flirty innuendo.

Little did he know subtlety wasn’t on Freddy’s menu.

“I hate to bother you,” Freddy said. “But my friend thinks this is disgusting. What’s your opinion?”

Freddy picked up his bowl and gave it another long, sensuous lick. It was a mortifyingly vulgar display that only he could pull off, and just barely at that. He finished with a final wipe around the rim with his finger, which he sucked into his mouth with the subtly of a voice mail from Mel Gibson.

“I think,” the waiter said thoughtfully, taking out his order pad, “you should have this.” He wrote ten digits followed by his name.

Freddy tucked the paper into his front pocket. “Bring me another bowl of this and I might call,” he said.

“Right away, sir.” He scurried off, with a more obvious wiggle to his butt than before.

“Another?” I asked incredulously.

“Waiter or dessert?” Freddy asked. “I’m not sure which indulgence you’re objecting to.”

“I’m talking about what you’re going to eat.”

“That doesn’t narrow it down, honey.”

I rolled my eyes and snorted.

“Lovely,” Freddy observed. He reached into his pocket and handed me the waiter’s number. “Here. Just in case you ever need to piss off Tony.”

“You’re not going to use it?”

“I have Cody,” he said nonchalantly.

Wow. This from the guy who didn’t do the “dating thing.” I decided to let it pass. This might be a stage in Freddy’s evolution that went better unrecognized. At least by him.

“So,” Freddy said, “Brent had a bad feeling, huh? He wanted to give Lucas his parents’ number in case something happened to him?”

“No,” I said. “That’s just it. Brent was almost completely estranged from his family. His father wasn’t just antigay, he was rabidly homophobic. He kicked Brent out of the house when Brent was still a teen. They had no contact at all.

“A few weeks before he went missing, though, Brent got something in the mail that worried him. Someone sent him an article in the mail. Anonymously. It was clipped from a fundamentalist magazine Brent knew his parents subscribed to at home. It was about an extreme form of reparative therapy.”

“Like, for a shoulder injury? ’Cause, if so, I’d like to see it. I was doing flies at the gym the other day and-”

“No, not that kind of therapy. This was for repairing homosexuality.”

“Like, making it even better? ”

“No, you nut, like making it go away.”

“Oh,” Freddy said. “Like that scam Harrington’s son was running.”

Freddy and I had come across a similar program when my friend was murdered.

“Kind of,” I answered. “But that one, at least, was voluntary. Unethical, sure, but no one was forced into it. It was also kind of New Agey and based in psychology.

“The one sent to Brent was worse. It regarded homosexuality not as some kind of undesirable lifestyle but as a cult. It was a deprogramming program. The ‘patients’ are kidnapped. They’re subjected to confinement, mind control, and mental abuse until they conform.”

After Lucas told me about the letter Brent had gotten, he showed me some papers from Web sites he’d printed out about these kinds of programs. Deprogramming forces people to abandon their participation in a religious, political, or social group. Since the believer is unlikely to volunteer for this kind of change, deprogramming involves kidnapping and arm-twisting.