not sure whts going on, Sam. jg is very sad and lonely. need to do something. Marsh wont c it.
u sound worried, JT. r u ok? let's talk when we get there. love you, S.
Sam said nothing to his parents about the message.
This was the last in the series of texts from Sam's Seattle cousin, JT, before their annual family gathering in Goldendale, Washington, a small town in south-central Washington.
Sam thought JT was the sweetest and goofiest of his cousins; though not seemingly as brilliant or charismatic as his cousin Marshall was, JT's understanding of people bordered on genius.
#
Sam was looking forward to warm summer afternoons and evenings in Goldendale with his cousins, sitting in a hayloft in one of the barns away from parents and grandparents.
#
The "cousins", as they thought of themselves, had been coming to Goldendale in late summer for as long as they could remember. They weren't cousins by blood, but their fathers were as close as brothers could be, and their offspring became cousins. To the cousins, Goldendale was composed of three dwellings with outbuildings that they could use interchangeably no matter which family's name was on the deeds.
Grandma Violet, a native American and known as Vi, owned one of the farmhouses where her son, Jason, had been raised and where his husband, Jonathan, and their adopted son, JT, stayed — unless JT was elsewhere. Jason and Jonathan were physicians at University Medical Center in Seattle.
Jim Underhill — Just Grandpa, or JG — owned a house that he and his husband, the writer, Tom Jansen, had bought two decades earlier and where they had raised two adopted sons, North Underhill and Lucas Jansen.
While in Goldendale — a two-hour drive from their Portland home — North and his wife, Annie, stayed at JG's place as did, unless temporarily elsewhere, their children, Marshall and Ann-Violet — Vee — who was a precocious 11-year old and three years younger than her brother and the other cousins. North and Annie taught social work at Portland State University.
Sam's fathers, Lucas Jansen and Jerry Robinson (or Other Dad and Dad) stayed at the third dwelling along with their adopted son, Sam — unless he, too, decided it was more fun to be at one of the other Goldendale places. Lucas and Jerry had built a retreat to escape from Southern California in late summer and at other times of the year when the pressures of working at Caltech and creating for the Los Angeles art world needed some relief. They called their place Turing House.
They had called their place Turing House after Alan Turing, the father of modern computing and artificial intelligence and a formidable code breaker. In 1952 Turing had been convicted of gross indecency for homosexual acts and was sentenced to chemical castration. Two years later he committed suicide using cyanide.
#
"Let's rescue your father at the lab."
Sam looked at the grimy T-shirt and the clay-spattered shorts his father was wearing, and he smelled the loamy aroma of the modeling clay, the same clay Sam loved to squish through his fingers. Though he loved the earthy smell that he would always associate with days spent in his father's studio, he didn't want to appear in public with his dad unless he had changed and cleaned up.
Jerry Robinson was small, with an open face often bespotted with clay — so small and young looking that he could have been mistaken for the boy's older brother.
"If you change clothes — and maybe take a shower."
Jerry looked down at himself. "Oh, that's probably a good idea. You want to call Markie and see if she wants to come?"
"Where are we going?"
"I thought Celestino. A little fancy, maybe?"
"How about 140 South? I know Markie will come if we go there," the boy said with a bright smile.
"You call. I'll get presentable." Jerry dashed down the hall to the bedroom he shared with his husband. They had been married in Washington State, where Lucas's family lived when he and Jerry had met at an underage dance club in Portland; but now, in California, they were Domestic Partners.
Jerry was looking forward to spending a few weeks at the end of summer with his husband, Lucas, and the extended family in Goldendale beginning next week. Though he had become a regional artist of some notice and his work sold well in Southern California, the respite in Goldendale seemed to boost his creative energy.
While his father showered, the thirteen-year-old Samuel Martin Jansen called his best friend in Pasadena. "Hey, we're going to grab OD and eat lunch at 140 South. Want to go?" He smiled at his friend's voice, deeper and huskier than expected from a girl, and got the answer he wanted. He always felt happy when he heard her voice.
"Okay, we'll pick you up in twenty minutes."
When Jerry had dressed and presented himself to the soon-to-be-fourteen-year-old boy for inspection, Sam was satisfied if not thrilled. His father's fashion sense was dismal, especially for a gay man, but unlike Other Dad, at least this one paid a little attention to his image. Other Dad had so little regard for the clothes he hung on his spare body that among Sam's friends he had gone past uncool directly to some state of awesome idiosyncrasy.
"Thanks for cleaning up," the boy said, looking at the faded black jeans and gray T-shirt his father sported.
"Despite what you may think, my mission in life doesn't focus on embarrassing you."
"Well, being an artist cuts you a little slack, but I have a hard time convincing some of my friends that you're gay. Haven't they taken back your membership card?"
All Sam's friends knew about his fathers, and the boy didn't seem to have suffered because his parents were both male. This was a university town and a California one at that. "We were never more than probationary members. We never got the sensibility merit badges."
Sam sighed and moved to the door.
Markie was waiting outside her house when they pulled up, and Sam moved to the backseat to keep her company. Jerry knew that he and Lucas had raised a polite and compassionate boy, but now, as he looked at the backseat in the rearview mirror, he thought he saw something more, something in his son's face when he looked at Markie. Jerry remembered that his first great loves came around Sam's age. Welcome to the great mystery, son.
From years of friendship with Markie, Sam knew that her single mother worked long days and sometimes into the night. If her mother had lunches, they were hurried interruptions from work or were fast food in her office. From friends, he knew that most people's lives ran on that kind of schedule.
Parking was likely to be terrible at the Caltech lab, so they would park where they could, probably a few blocks from Other Dad's office, and then walk over to the lab, pick up the man and go to lunch.
#
Somewhere near Geneva, Switzerland, at the CERN research facility, protons were screaming along magnetically contained paths, bunched into groups of billions of protons, some of which circulated in opposite directions in parallel circular tracks until they collided with each other in one of several detectors. The collisions very briefly produced energies not occurring in nature since just after the Big Bang. One point of this exercise was the production and detection of the Higgs boson, a predicted particle with an associated field that imparted mass to all other matter and energy passing through it.
The data produced by the collisions in the Large Hadron Collider would be measured in petabytes per year of operation. A petabyte is roughly a quadrillion bytes. How to search for evidence of the Higgs in this haystack was a problem. Lucas Jansen looked at the printout of the latest version of an algorithm he had helped design to do just that.
Lucas had been the Goldendale, Washington, boy who loved to work with horses and spend time alone, but within him was an extraordinary mathematical aptitude that had been recognized at an early age by physicist Lita Koresh at Stanford, a friend of his mentor, the poet Samuel Marshall. She had extended an offer to a then fourteen-year-old boy to work with her if he was serious about studying mathematics. She had offered to become his academic mentor.
Lucas had emailed Koresh one day soon after his early high-school graduation with the message, "I'm ready." She had been mildly surprised because she hadn't been sure Lucas really wanted an academic career.
Koresh, as promised, had made a place for him at Stanford where she supervised his doctoral work in number theory as he simultaneously completed his bachelor's degree. Sam had lived up to the early promise she had seen.
He and his life-mate Jerry had moved to Palo Alto after Jerry had graduated from his Portland high school, and Jerry had worked on his Bachelor's and Master's Degrees in Fine Arts there. Lucas and Jerry had met on a club dance floor and over a few years created a similar bond to what Lucas had seen in his fathers' relationship. Their differences as much as a few similarities made their relationship rich, and Lucas was deeply grateful that Jerry had taken in stride his HIV-positive status — a residue of the awful life he had been forced into before he had been adopted. Their long relationship was founded on trust and shared responsibility.
Eventually, Lucas had moved from Stanford to Caltech, not because of his computational work on the Higgs signature, but because of his work on number theory and quantum computing. He had won a prestigious Millennium Prize from the Clay Mathematics Institute for his work.
What Lucas really loved, though, was mucking out stalls and combing, grooming, and above all else, riding horses on an open range. He relished the smell of horseshit, the lather of horse sweat, and the feeling of horsehair under his fingers, though his disease forced him to wear gloves and a respirator when handling the beasts.
His colleagues at the Lauritsen Laboratory viewed him as odd, even among the collection of odd men there, though they viewed his sexuality as just a fairly common variant. He was quiet but didn't suffer fools and didn't like self-righteousness, scientific or otherwise, and he would never be even politely dishonest with anyone about anything. He sifted through the undergrads and graduate students for those who interested him and treated those few as equals in his work.
#
As he looked at the whiteboard in his office on the fourth floor of the lab building, Lucas Jansen's concentration was shaken by the sound of a boy's voice from the hallway. Lucas smiled and, remembering the lunch date, waited patiently for his son.
Sam had a special relationship with the laboratory and its inhabitants. When he was old enough to realize that his father worked in a lab, Sam had been bitterly disappointed that it wasn't a place of beakers, burners, and the sizzle of Jacob's ladders, nor was it populated by men in white lab coats creating monsters. The building was just a bunch of offices, and the laboratories lived in the minds of the residents.
As Sam rushed ahead of Markie and Jerry, his father nearly called him back, but stopped himself as a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist, moving distractedly along the hall toward the stairway, said hello to Sam as he passed. Everyone here knew Sam.
#
Sam's eyes passed over the contents of Other Dad's office. Unlike some of the other offices on the fourth floor, this one was spare, with only one bookcase, two file cabinets, a huge whiteboard, and a desk with most of its surface clear. Sam thought the desk unusual because it had only a writing surface with two drawers above and nothing below to interfere with the user's legs. On the walls were a movie poster from the film, Secretariat, two photographs, one of Other Dad with Peter Higgs and one a group photo including Lucas at the last Solvay Conference, as well as plaque certifying the Millennium Prize along with a framed copy of Lita Koresh's remarks at the award ceremony for Lucas:
It is my great honor to offer a few remarks on the winner of this Clay Mathematics Millennium Prize, a young man I have known since he was in middle school. A fourteen-year-old boy with no formal training astonished me with his grasp of higher mathematics. Eventually, he studied the mathematics and underpinnings of String Theory, and then he tackled the problem of analyzing the CERN data trying to detect the Higgs boson.
When he joined me at Stanford, Lucas began to explore, at first on his own, a problem of how a distributed computing network would detect a pattern from millions of particle collisions, a pattern that if seen some thousands of times might signal the appearance of the Higgs. He realized the other products of any one collision would overwhelm the signal, and only by overlaying and comparing data from millions of collisions would the occasional signature appear clearly.
He did this work while delving into number theory and quantum computing. This Millennium Prize, a result of this work, is awarded for his proof of the conjecture that the lowest excitations of a pure Yang-Mills theory have a finite mass-gap with regard to the vacuum state, leading to the solution of another open problem connected with this conjecture — a proof of the confinement property in the presence of additional Fermion particles.
What the plaque didn't say was that Lucas's work on the Higgs data problem had earned him the undying gratitude of the experimental-physics community because he had simplified the computer program to more quickly sift the data for the tiny signature.
Other Dad was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt. The two fathers by dress would be almost twins, and Other Dad looked even younger than Jerry, especially with his shoulder-length dark hair. "You ready, OD?"
Lucas looked at his son, trying to feign irritation, but could only manage a smile. He rose and hugged the boy who was already approaching his height. "Where's your dad?"
Before Sam could answer, Jerry and Markie walked through the office door. The room was tight for four people. Jerry and Lucas hugged and gave each other a perfunctory kiss on the lips at which both Markie and Sam rolled their eyes and then smiled at each other. "How's your afternoon looking?" Jerry asked his husband.
"Good. No meetings, so we can relax over lunch. Where'd you decide to go?"
Sam replied, "140 South."
"Let's go, then."
Taking the stairs, the four were out of the lab. Caltech's footprint was small, only about a city block. Once they were out of the lab they were off-campus almost immediately, walking north to the restaurant.
Trailing behind the youngsters, Jerry and Lucas saw Sam and Markie talking together as if they were alone. The fathers slowed their pace a little to give the kids some space. Jerry observed the way his son looked directly at Markie when he was speaking and saw that when Markie replied, the boy looked quickly away as if he might reveal too much if he held her gaze. He remembered his first conversation with Lucas and the ones during the following few weeks. He had been in love at fourteen, and he thought that thirteen-year-olds might find themselves in some form of love. Many adults had described his and Lucas's relationship as infatuation then, but if it was, it turned into something else, something much deeper. Just when that change had occurred, he had no idea. Would you describe a tree as fundamentally different than a sapling?
Jerry nodded ahead toward their son with a look that said, He's in love.
Lucas grinned and muttered, "Please, no."
They were at the restaurant in thirty minutes, the kids arriving ahead of the adults, and the host reacted to the two thirteen-year-olds with more deference than usual toward young people. "Ah, Sam. Just you and the young lady?"
"No, sir. The dads will be here soon, so four, please."
Even at thirteen, Sam knew why he was treated this way — money. His fathers had a bucket full. He knew that they had money before they married and that his father's mathematics prize came with a million bucks. His fathers never directly mentioned the money or how they came by it, but the internet told him everything he wanted to know. All he had to do was Google the name Lucas Jansen. The whole world that had produced Other Dad was revealed there, if sometimes inaccurately, but including Other Dad's friendship with his adopted son's namegiver, the poet Samuel Marshall, and with the grandfather who had died before he was adopted, the author Tom Jansen, whose books were still on best-sellers lists from time to time. He also saw photographs of his Other Dad and his grandfather taken at a book signing in Seattle when he was only a little older than Sam was now. OD didn't look all that much different today.
#
As a four-year-old wearied by the foster-care system, Sam had landed in a different world, a world full of all sorts of differences, from sexual orientations to money to jobs and on and on. The boy knew little about his own infancy; he had been given up for adoption by an unwed teen-age mother and had been adopted by his fathers in Washington State just after he reached his fourth birthday. He had found that the ache of foster care came from an overbearing sense of rootlessness and difference, something he felt, not to mention a judgment from many friends from normal families.
After he came to Lucas and Jerry, different seemed normal, and he now had roots that stretched into a definite past. He thought of his cousin Marshall, and though a gay couple had raised Marshall's father, Marshall's family resembled a conventional one, or maybe not, since Marshall's parents, Uncle North and Aunt Annie, were still married to each other. Of course, so were his parents.
After a year of living in his new home, Sam had begun to feel safe with the men, a feeling that his fathers reinforced as the boy grew up. Other Dad could be reclusive. Sam knew that he and Lucas shared the same kind of family history minus the abuse and minus the HIV.
As Sam grew older, he was struck by how normal his fathers were despite their fame as a mathematician and a renowned sculptor. They set aside their careers when necessary to take a strong interest in a very bright, adopted son.
His fathers had attended more than one parent-teacher conference resulting from their son's tendency to answer his teachers' questions truthfully, especially in his science classes – answers that usually went: "No one really knows." He wasn't being contrarian or a smart ass. His teachers were always chagrined when the professor, his father, told them, "He's right, you know. He values truth. Don't mistake collective wisdom for science. Don't mistake consensus for proof. Other Dad frustrated a lot of teachers, but Sam was smart enough to know what answers he should give on tests.
#
Seated with their menus, they gave their drink orders to the host. When the waiter appeared, the men both ordered salads, as did Markie. Sam started to order a Ranch Burger loaded with smoked bacon and jack cheese along with fries but stopped at a horrified look from Markie. He frowned and instead ordered a Veggie Burger with a side salad. Lucas thought, Oh, you poor little man.
Sam and his fathers had discussed asking Markie to join them on the upcoming trip to Goldendale. Sam seemed to have forgotten until Jerry kicked him gently under the table and nodded toward the girl.
"Oh. Um, Markie, do you think you'd like to go to Goldendale with us next week?"
He had tried to be so casual about asking the question, but his voice betrayed how much the answer would mean to him. Markie decided to prolong his anxiety a bit. "How long would we stay?"
"We usually spend a month, but you don't have to spend the whole time if you don't want to."
"Will Marshall and Vee be there?"
Now Sam was irritated and didn't understand why; nor did he conceal his irritation very well. He stared at her a moment, twisting the cloth napkin in his hands before answering. Markie had never been concerned with Marshall before, although she had met him. He thought of his blond, handsome cousin. "Yes, and so will JT."
His fathers noted Markie's delight at having irritated Sam. Finally, the girl said, "I'd really like to, but I'll have to check with my mom, and she'll want to talk with your dads."
Any darkness the girl had precipitated by her mention of Marshall dissipated in Sam's happiness that she hadn't said no. The rest of the lunch disappeared along the arrow of time. They talked about their lives, and the adults listened attentively, but Sam saw in Other Dad the kind of distraction he saw almost all the time. While he could attract his dad's full attention when needed, he felt that a part of his Other Dad's attention wanted to gravitate to some hidden interior compartment holding a physics problem or to a desire to retreat into solitude. Sam didn't begrudge Lucas privacy, but he longed to know him as clearly as he knew Jerry, who was an open book to him.
The restaurant was busy, yet none of the staff hurried them. Lucas smiled inwardly when, despite a look from Markie, Sam ordered a slice of "Killer" carrot cake.
#
"I don't know. A month's a long time, and you won't have much time to shop for school when you get back."
Markie looked about the living room of their perfectly maintained home. Her workaholic mother used the fruit of her efforts and her father's child support to create a large and somewhat ostentatious home decorated with a lot of white. Only wealthy people who paid dearly for maintenance decorated in shades of white. She couldn't remember a day without the new-house smell. "I don't need much time, and I really want to go."
Markie's mother decided, without consulting her ex-husband. He was traveling this summer. After all, she and her ex both liked Lucas and Jerry even if they were unconventional, and she had absolutely no compunction about the fitness of two gay men to look after her only child on a vacation. Unlike Sam's parents, she had no clue about the little tension developing between Sam and Markie, a tension born of the just-beginning hormone storm.
"Okay. I'll talk with Luke and Jerry about the details, and I'll send some money with you."
That was typical of her parents — money instead of time. "You know they won't take it, but I'm sure I can find a use for it, although I don't think Goldendale is a shopping mecca. Can I let Sam know?"
"Sure. He can tell his parents that we'll talk."
#
"You up for seventeen hours in the car?" Lucas was at the dining-room table with Sam. Sam looked at the map spread before them. He didn't much need to review the map because the route hadn't varied in all the times he'd made the trip. They'd head up I-5 to Weed and then cut over to follow US-97 all the way to Goldendale.
His Seattle and Portland cousins would already be there when they arrived. He was looking forward to seeing them in a couple of days. One thing he had learned from both his fathers was the value of family.
Sam wondered if his father was still up to the long days of driving. He hadn't detected any change in Lucas's energy level, but, despite his fathers' efforts to assure him, he always waited for the disaster he was sure would come. From the first days he had come to live with his parents, he had learned that OD took pills and that they were very important for his energy level. The first responsibility toward OD that he had taken upon himself was to check on the medication every morning.
"Stopping in Klamath Falls?"
"That's the plan. You all packed?"
"Pretty much. Thanks for taking me shopping. Maybe my old clothes shrunk."
"Oh, no doubt — all of them at the same time. You're getting to be a real moose. I wonder how much your cousins have grown since Christmas."
"We all have Facebook pages, OD. For a geek, you're pretty backward."
"Once again I remind you that Geeks are carnival performers who bite the heads off chickens. If anything, I'm a nerd."
Sam sighed because he should have seen OD's reaction coming; he'd heard the complaint often enough. "Sorry. For a nerd, you're pretty backward."
"Keeping a little privacy is important. Besides, I love the surprise of seeing people after a time. And by the way, I can find anything you put out on the net, so don't post or email anything you don't want your parents to see."
"I know. I know. It'd be a lot more fun if you weren't a computer genius."
"I'm sure. Why don't you try to get a little sleep? We leave early, and …," he looked wistfully at his son, "… we have to pick Markie up before we get on the road."
Sam smiled, unable to hide his happiness at the thought of spending a month away from their homes with his friend, before he walked slowly to his room. The room, like its resident, was in transition. The walls were hung mostly with posters of fantasy/sci-fi characters, some based on his grandfather's books and the movies and games made from them. There were also a couple of signed lithographs, one bought with his allowance and the other a gift from his dads, an embossed print by the Vietnamese artist Lebadang titled "Leader of the Herd." Its deep-green background flowered into a large, irregular, central printed cartouche with a herd of small reddish horses and a larger gold stallion in the front. Small, embossed cartouches of horses surrounded the center. He hadn't liked it very much when he first received the gift, but over two years the print had seduced him, often filling his dreams. He thought it whispered to him about Other Dad and the horses he loved so much.
He had to pass his eleventh birthday before his fathers let him get a cell phone and a laptop of his own. The iPhone was a gift because his fathers regarded it as a safety tool. The MacBook had come only after he came up with half its cost.
Because of the size of the files his other dad used, the house was connected to the university's OC-3 fiber-optic backbone. His family paid only for the pricey local loop. If Other Dad showed any ostentation, this very expensive connection was its evidence. The computers in the house were connected by wire through a very high-speed switch, although a much slower Wi-Fi network was also available. His friends were stunned at how fast the connection was, because, to them, bandwidth was everything as they did battle in fantastic lands in the ether. The downside was that everywhere else he went, the data world was painfully slow.
He set an iPhone alarm and launched a playlist of arias sung by Montserrat Caballé. His fathers had used opera to help him sleep when he first came to them, and unlike most of his friends, he loved the melodies, especially her Casta Diva.
At 5:30 in the morning, the lyrics of The Gaslight Anthem's Once Upon a Time woke him.
I remember Marvin Gaye, singin'
"What's Goin' On"
Don't play with my love oh
I remember Otis Redding
Sittin' at the Dock of the Bay
But then he went away
And I remember Sam Cooke ya'll
So Bring It On Home To Me
From your love I can't be free
I remember Elvis Presley
And them Blue Suede Shoes
Lord they gave me the blues
He listened to the song end, imagining picking the high guitar melodic line, the music moving his fingers in sympathy as he listened. His fathers had turned him on to Sam Cooke, Otis Reading, and Marvin Gaye, whose recordings they'd inherited from his grandfathers, and he knew all those songs. Of the group in the song, Presley was the only one that left him cold.
Among his earliest recollections were trips out of the city to lie in a field looking at the myriad stars and listening to the lyrical lessons from Other Dad about the relationship of time and space. Somehow, even then an image of songs and lives connected and smeared out through space and time formed and comforted him. Caballé and the others were long dead, but their fossilized voices reached out to him, and their connection to his acquired ancestors sweetened their music.
Hearing his fathers up and about, he silenced the phone and went to his bathroom to shower. Dropping his shorts and T-shirt on the floor, he looked in the mirror to see the burgeoning collections of hair where little had been a year ago, and then there was the erection that was now present more often than not when he woke.
Many of his friends had told him that talking about sex with their parents was like getting a cut sewn up without anesthesia. For him, the discussions with his fathers were anxiety-free and matter-of-fact. Jerry had even managed to turn occasional embarrassment into gentle humor. Jerking off, they had told him, was an obvious solution to the problem of erections, but he had pointed out that if he relieved himself that way every time he had one, that's all he would be doing. His fathers had recommended a certain amount of temperance, but that temperance didn't extend to mornings in his bathroom. He thought his plumbing was pretty cool.
After he showered, he gathered his toiletries, picked up his sleep clothes, and wandered naked back to his bedroom to finish packing before breakfast. After dressing and zipping up his duffle, he lugged the bag and one of his cased guitars to the living room and then went to the kitchen for breakfast.
Jerry loved to cook, but today, cold cereal with the last of the fruit was the only item on the menu. Other Dad's relentlessness when traveling — no unnecessary stopping — was restrained only by Jerry's exceptional curiosity about landscapes. His artist dad was among the few who could cajole his mathematician Other Dad into varying from the most direct route. Now, the relentlessness was in full flower, and they packed the car deliberately. While Other Dad arranged the bags and some small gifts for the family, Jerry took out the last of the household garbage and recycling. Sam quickly checked his mental list because he knew that once underway, they weren't turning back.
Sam also knew that Other Dad's real office was wherever his brain was, but he knew that the office would shut down for a while when they arrived at the stables in Goldendale.
Markie was waiting for them in front of her house, alone because her mother was already at work. Lucas helped stow her bags, and she buckled up next to Sam in the back of the Prius. As he looked at her, Sam could feel her excitement. He had always thought she was pretty, but lately his gaze was drawn from her face to her curves. She had heard so many stories of his trips to Washington and the people who gathered or already lived there. She had even met his cousins, uncles, aunt, and grandfather when they made short visits to California, but now she'd have the Goldendale experience.
Jerry started out driving, taking them out Pasadena Avenue and I-210 to I-5 north. Lucas seemed lost in thought until they were on I-5. Smiling at Jerry, he barked softly, "Five miles over the speed limit, Jer. We're not going to a funeral."
The two children saw the warmth of Jerry's smile as he replied, "Sure thing, Doc." Seeing the quizzical looks on Markie's face in the rearview mirror, Jerry said, "He's thinking about his first time driving when he was just a little older than you and getting back-seat instructions from Samuel Marshall, strapped in a wheel chair in the back of his van."
Markie had flown everywhere she had traveled, and her nose was almost pressed against the window as the miles enveloped them and then passed. Sam and Markie shared a game of Scrabble on an iPad as they passed through central California, occasionally also sharing confidences about school or opinions about a performer. Quite suddenly Sam felt he should remind Markie that more than family would be staying at the farm.
"You remember that some other kids will be visiting while we're there, right?"
"Yeah. From a center for gay kids in Portland, right?"
"Basically, but there might be lesbian, bi, or trans kids as well. Sometimes straight foster kids come out as well."
"Is there room for everyone at the farm?"
"The kids and their families or foster parents stay at a Quality Inn across the highway from the farm."
"That can't be cheap."
Sam decided just to tell her. "My dads foot the bill. Most of the kids and their families couldn't afford it. And, then some of the kids are homeless, so counselors who work at the center come with them. They get a chance to get out of the city and play a little bit. We go to the observatory and to the museum, but mostly we relax at the farm or go up on Mt. Adams or down to Smith Rock."
Markie smiled as Sam began to say we instead of they. Though many of her girlfriends couldn't see why, she liked Sam in a way she liked no other friend. She didn't even mind when they teased her about Sam being her boyfriend.
"Why did you ask about my cousin Marshall?"
"I was just curious. He seems like a nice guy."
Sam had to be honest. "He is."
The kids retreated into the audio feeds from their phones as they passed alongside Mt. Shasta before the crossing into Oregon and into Klamath Falls eleven hours later. The long leg of their trip was over; tomorrow, the drive would be six hours.