Page 52 of Gay for Pray
“But my father will be furious,” he adds.
“I won’t ask you to lose your family for me, Theo. I’d never ask that.”
“Am I really losing anything if they don’t love me as I am? If they really care about me, I won’t lose them. And if they don’t…there was nothing to lose.”
He says it like it’s so simple, but I know it’s not. His family pays for him to go to this school. They have high expectations.And now he’s saying he’s going to do the one thing they’d disapprove of most. The enormity of his bravery stoppers my throat.
“You don’t have to do this,” I say. I was angry before, but faced with this…I can’t possibly ask him to go through with it.
But Theo says, “I do. Otherwise my whole life will be a lie, and I don’t think that’s God’s plan for me.”
I pull him in against me, simply holding him for a few moments. His hands wrap around my back, and he clings to my shirt. When he shudders, I squeeze him tighter, trying to say with my whole body that no matter what happens, I won’t leave his side.
When he pulls away, fresh tears dance in those gold-flecked eyes of his.
“What first?” I say.
The future has never been so uncertain…or so thrilling.
Theo cracks a genuine smile. “First we finish our philosophy project.”
“Professor Demsky will tell your Dad.”
“Yeah,” he says. “She will.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Theodore
“NEXT, THEODORE, PLEASE,” PROFESSOR Demsky says.
I rise from my seat near the front of the classroom, but I don’t head up to give my presentation. Instead, I pause, casting a look over my shoulder.
Jude meets my eyes, and I wait. A question lingers in his gaze, and he mouths the words, “Are you sure?”
I nod. I’m sure. I’m absolutely sure, not a single trickle of doubt anywhere in my body. That doesn’t prevent my stomach from fluttering when he rises and heads to the front of the classroom. I join him, and we face the class. That one guy who laughed when Jude and I became partners, the bouncer from the party, sneers instead of smirking when he sees us standing at the head of the class together. He looks like he might protest, the way he protested when I entered that disastrous party. Seriously, what is his problem with me? The rest of our classmates have no idea what’s going on, but Professor Demsky does, and her gaze contains even more questions than Jude’s did. I give her the same nod I offered Jude, a gesture of absolute surety.
I’ve made my choice.
We pull up our presentation to project it on the board. All of the information is there. Our research is thorough, our arguments well articulated. We didn’t phone in a second of this. We both knew that if we were going to do this, we were going to do it so right that Professor Demsky had no choice but to give ustop marks for our presentation on predestination.
“In Christianity,” I say, “predestination proposes that God has predetermined who to save, and therefore salvation rests within God’s eternal decree. It proposes the existence of a divine plan that is absolutely immutable.
“But both religious and secular philosophers have pushed back against this doctrine, arguing that God intentionally gave us free will and let us choose our own paths. Many argue against the idea that God would have chosen who to save and who to damn before He even created the earth. If he gave us free will, they say, then He must have wanted us to exercise that free will.”
And I will. I’ll choose my own path, no matter what my father believes my destiny is. Taking that leap nearly broke me, but the moment I stepped off the cliff, I felt like I was flying instead of falling. I’ve never felt so free in my life, and while it’s partially terrifying, that sensation comes from the huge, wide open future suddenly stretching before me, a future I get to choose for myself instead of having someone else decide it for me.
Jude takes over explaining the secular arguments in favor of free will. He did all of that research himself, and I watch him present it in awe. He’s confident and easy, totally relaxed even standing up in front of a room full of people. If anything, he glows, lighting up as all the attention turns on him. I wonder again why someone like this would persist so long with someone like me, someone so different from him, someone who pushed him away again and again. The second he found me in the pews the other day and offered me a chance at redemption, however, there was only one possible choice.
By the time we finish our presentation, I can’t feel my legs. Adrenaline courses through my body because what I just did wasn’t simply an assignment for a class. It was a statement to my father.
Other pairs go up and present, but I don’t hear them. I’m toobusy replaying what Jude and I just did, and what it could mean. I’m sure I’ll know the moment my father finds out about this. He’ll be sure to call and tell me what an awful, damning choice I made. He doesn’t even know the half of it. I didn’t simply choose to do a project with my assigned partner; I chose Jude himself, and fear of my father won’t change that.
When class ends, Professor Demsky calls me to her desk. I motion for Jude to come with me. The professor glances between us, but doesn’t object.
“So, Theodore,” she starts.
I spare her from having to explain my own father to me. “I know, Professor Demsky.”
