16: Like Sheep

“What happened?” I asked, once we were in the parking lot, where his parents were waiting by their car.
“We need to go to your house, I need to talk to your Dad.”
“He won’t be there, they will still be at church.“
“I, I need to tell my parents,” he said. “I know your Dad didn’t want me to…”
“It’s OK,” I said, “He trusts you. Else he wouldn’t have given me to you.”
Caleb lit up, and we got in the car.
“Caleb?” His mother said, “What is going on? First the police come and take that poor young man. And then you practically drag us out of church before the potluck supper and all. And I left my dishes there and everything.”
“We can go back in a minute, Mom. I just need to talk to you and Dad. Dad, pull over at the park, will you? That will be a good place to talk, if there is anywhere safe.”
“Very well.”
“Caleb,” I said, “I am going to take a walk while you tell them.”
“OK.” He said, and I could see the confusion in his eyes.
“It… I’m scared Caleb,” I said.
“I know,” he said, patting my arm as he led his parents away to a picnic table. But he didn’t know. It wasn’t the police I was scared of right now, but a middle aged couple with a son I loved. A son who was going to tell his parents that he was engaged to a girl who thought she had been a boy, and who was a wanted fugitive. I cried, freely, as I walked. It took a long time, I had time for three laps around the park and two visits to the restroom to wash my face before I saw them getting up, and Caleb jogging over toward me.
“I’m so glad I told them,” he said. “They are going to be so helpful. It would have been incredibly awkward, but now we can do things at my house too, like voice training, and we won’t have to watch what we say. Have you been crying?” He asked, the imbecile.
“How… what do they think about me?” I asked.
“About you?” He said. “Why they love… oh, you mean… oh, good grief. I told them all about that what you said at dinner, about how you were a girl now, and committed to it. They know it will be hard for you but… they love you. Mom cried about Roberta, of course, but they love you, and will love you more each day.”
I cried again. And had to go to the bathroom again, but I felt much better. My circle of support was getting wider, and a relationship I had prized back in my world was established here as well.
“But Caleb,” I said, outside the bathroom, you never told me what happened back at the church.“
“Three men in suits showed up, looking for this boy, a boyfriend of one of our girls. And they just took him. The pastor and one of the men of the church, a lawyer, tried to get them to say where he was being taken and why, but they just said, ”National Security,’ flashed their badges, and left. The girl had hysterics… well, you saw that… and the men were very upset, including the pastor. I have never seen him angry like that.“
We arrived back at the church in time for the end of the lunch line, and I tried my best to be interested in the food, but I was still picking at it, when the pastor stood up and said, “The other elders and I have discussed it, and we would like to hold an emergency men’s meeting now. If all of the men would come to the junior high room, please.”
I was a little startled when Caleb got up, but even more startled when boys as young as thirteen went with them. “It’s our tradition, dear,” a woman I vaguely knew sitting accross from me said, “When boys turn thirteen they can go to the men’s meetings, and most do.”
We women at in silence for a while, and then got up and cleared things away. It seemed a long time before the men came trooping back.
“The men have met,” the pastor said, “and we are all agreed. As a church we are instructing our members not to participate with the Federal Government during this investigation. What happened this morning was inexcusable. We have found out by a call to a freind of the family of the young man, that he is the brother of a girl who was at the college where the investigation is being held. They seized the rest of the family, except for one boy who happened to be with a neighbor at the time, and is now in hiding. We are called on to obey the government in all of it’s lawful activities, but this government is out of control, these activities are not lawful. So far we have heard of two hundred people being taken into custody, two hundred innocent civilians whose only ‘crime’ is having their child or sibling foolishly participate in some college experiment.”
It was a quiet and sober group that filed out of the assembly hall, even the children catching the vibes from their parents.
But it was a noisy one that met in my living room. “I am not sending her back there!” Caleb said, “It is too dangerous!”
“You have to!” Father said, pacing back and forth, “It is too dangerous not to. They must know that they haven’t gotten all of the subjects. People are panicking over this, and that is what they will be looking for… students not coming back. Today was a good thing. Horrible for that family, dont’ get me wrong, but a good thing for Bobbi. We now have help all over the town. It makes my job much easier. I was afraid I was going to have to break some laws… but one of our doctors goes to your church, and an X-ray tech, and we will get the whole thing set up.”
“What whole thing?”
“Bobbi is going to have an accident. She is going to fall out of her treehouse onto her arm. We will rush her… you will rush her to our emergency room, where the doctor will have an X-ray made, and I will splint the arm, and the doctor will give her some heavy drugs.”
We all stared at him for a minute, and then Caleb’s father began to chuckle. “I don’t get it,” Jenny said.
“Think about it,” his father said, “She has just gotten engaged, has broken her arm, and is on narcotics. Of course she is not acting herself! Everybody will be so busy expressing congratulations and sympathy and signing her cast, that they won’t have a chance to see how differently she is behaving. And besides, think about it. Bev and I didn’t notice… or rather, we did when Caleb was acting all strangely, but we put it down to lots of other things… that Bobbi had told him that she been a boy before was not even one of the possibilities we discussed. And then when Caleb announced they were engaged, well, that just ‘explained’ everything; all of his awkwardness and blushings were suddenly ‘explained’.”
“This will help on the internet, too,” Caleb said, “It was a popular subject before, but now it will go viral. And since I have a boy who was taken from my own church, I can express all the interest I want without it seeming weird. Bobbi and Jenny can too.”
“I don’t want to,” I said, “I just want to go and hide in a corner.”
Mother came over and hugged me, and Father said, “Caleb?”
“I still dont’ like it, but I guess we don’t have a choice. It is that or have all of you go on the run. I hadn’t really thought about you all much before, but I was just thinking that, even if Bobbi and I could go hide somewhere, they would still come after you.”
“What do they want from us anyway?” Jenny asked.
“Well, that’s easy enough,” Caleb said, “the same things we have in our notebook. They want to find out exactly what happened, so they can work on being able to do it themselves.”
“But why? What good does it do except make it hard on everybody? I mean, I love Bobbi, but she would probably rather be Robert anyway, and Roberta is gone…” Now Jenny was crying too, and Mrs Jones had to hold her.
“Well, that part is simple, I’m afraid,” Caleb said. “Just look at what happened with Bobbi. Imagine they could do that to anyone. She has a knowledge of carpentry that our Bobbi never had. Imagine they could take a soldier and give them the knowldge of weapons, or of being a doctor, or they could just create a nuculear physicists. Let alone stuff like spies.”
“Bobbi knows carpentry now?” Mrs Jones asked.
“Better than me, Mom,” Caleb said, which I thought a bit of an exageration.
“Oh, dear. I didn’t know that.”
“No one said anything after that, and the Jones’s got up to leave. I went over to Caleb, ”I’m going to go take my shower now, you want to come watch?“ I asked.
‘No, thanks tho,” he said, his voice flat, and I fled up the stairs.