Page 49 of Deliver Me

Michael glanced at Gabriel and then back at Amy. “I was sixteen,” he said quickly. “So, it would have been more than a decade ago.”

“You were sixteen,” Amy said with an encouraging nod. “And how old was Gabriel at that time?”

“He was fifteen when I first met him.”

Amy nodded. “And how did you two meet?”

Michael hesitated, his face draining of what little color it had started with. “I lived with his uncle, Richard Miller. Gabriel was sent to live there, too.”

Amy began to pace slowly across the floor in front of the judge, nodding along with his answers and looking back at him when it was time to ask another question. “This was at Richard Miller’s house?” she asked.

“No, ma’am. He ran a …” Michael’s brow furrowed as he searched for the right word before giving up. “I don’t know what it was exactly, but he called it a school. We—all the kids, I mean—lived at the school.”

“This was a boarding school?” Amy asked, then continued to the next question without waiting for an answer. “Richard Miller was a pretty famous evangelical preacher, so I assume it was a religious school?”

“It wasn’t a school,” Michael said bluntly. “He called it one, but it wasn’t. We didn’t go there to learn—we went because our parents wanted him to fix us.”

“Fix you?” Amy shook her head, giving a small, puzzled shrug that Mia knew was theatrical. “What was wrong with you Mr. Lansing?”

Michael took a deep breath, the kind that shuddered a person’s whole body and left them hollow on the inside. “I’m gay,” he said simply. “My parents didn’t believe in that sort of thing.”

“They didn’t believe you were gay?”

“They didn’t want me to be,” he clarified. “They wanted Richard to fix it and make me straight. He preached fire and brimstone at them and anyone else who would listen, damnation in every breath. They were terrified that I was going to hell, and they would’ve done just about anything to stop it.”

“I see,” Amy said quietly. “Were all the kids there gay?”

Michael shook his head. “No, some of them were there for that kind of thing but most were just doing drugs or sneaking out or even just failing their classes. Richard took in pretty much any kid whose parents thought they were a problem, as long as they bought into his version of God and had the funds to pay for what he called discipline.”

Amy smiled tightly. “And were you there the entire time that Gabriel was?”

Michael nodded, shifting restlessly in his seat. Mia knew that Amy had practiced the questions with him before today and she suspected that he knew the more difficult questions were coming. “I was there for two years, and Gabriel was my roommate for just over a year. He ran away a few months before my parents finally came and picked me up.”

“So, you were there with him and saw the conditions that he was living in while he was with Richard?”

“Yes, ma’am. We pretty much all lived the same way while we were there.”

Mia flicked a glance at Gabriel, at the tense line of his shoulders as he stared straight ahead at Michael. His face, the eyes that were usually so expressive, were like stone as he listened.

“Can you describe what it was like? Living with Richard?” Amy continued.

Michael’s mouth moved to form a single word. He breathed it so quietly that the judge had to ask him to repeat himself.

“Yes,” he said again, more firmly this time. “It was hell.”

“It was hell in what way, Mr. Lansing? Can you be more specific?”

“It was hell in every way,” he said, glancing at Brittany and then away again quickly. “Different for each of us but hell, just the same.”

“Mr. Lansing …” Amy began, but he cut her off before she could finish.

“I was abused for two years,” he said bitterly. “Most of the time we didn’t have decent blankets in the winter, and we never had air conditioning. There was no hot water and there wasn’t a single day that I wasn’t hungry.”

The words settled over them all, stealing some of the air from the room. Mia breathed, slowly and intentionally, as Brittany gripped hard onto her hand. Her father tapped his fingers on the bench beside his thighs and when she looked up at him his mouth was set in a grim line.

Michael continued speaking.

“If we were lucky, we got one meal a day, and that was only if they decided we had been good. If we hadn’t been, they just skipped our meal altogether. Sometimes we were locked in our rooms for days at a time and we had to piss in a bucket in the corner.”

---