Unnatural by Michael Griffo

again, this time without feeling awkward, without worrying if the gesture would be reciprocated. And it was. Michael hugged him back and held his father tightly. He pushed away the memories that had latched on to his mind. Vaughan forgetting to send him a birthday card or Michael overhearing his mother arguing with his father because he canceled—at the last minute—a trip he and Michael were supposed to take. Those were petty and they were in the past. His father held him now with the promise of a future. And then his father left, explaining that he needed to catch an early flight back to Europe and, in a quieter voice, that he didn’t feel Grace would want him at her funeral. No one disagreed with him. Even still, before escaping into the early morning darkness, he informed them that he would pay for all of the funeral expenses and would arrange for Michael to fly to London in a few days. No one should worry about a thing. Michael for one didn’t. He was saved.
       Watching the casket lowered into the ground, Michael hoped that his mother was now saved too. Saved from more decades of unhappiness and dread, saved from the knowledge that she was ridiculed by her neighbors, from any more pain that she could inflict upon herself. And saved even though she committed what the church considered a mortal sin.
    Michael had sat through endless sermons and homiliesin his life; he had listened to priests speak passionately about heaven, berate their parishioners for not leading lives worthy of entering heaven, and yet he still wasn’t convinced such a place existed. Now watching his mother’s body encased in an expensive, elaborately designed coffin that Vaughan had picked out and paid for, he wondered what was to become of her. Was she to be swallowed up by the earth and remain in this place for all eternity? Or had her soul already left her to travel the world silently, invisibly, to all the places she had never journeyed to when she was alive? What a waste if that was true, he thought. How could she have wasted her life—and his—by staying locked in this stupid town and refusing to venture anywhere else? He wasn’t going to make the same mistake his mother did. He was determined to live.
    But at the same time, he was quite unexpectedly bothered by his grandparents’ willingness to let him leave Weeping Water. He didn’t really get along with either of them. His grandpa was caustic, his grandma voiceless, but they were, for better or worse, his world. And yet when Vaughan announced that he was taking Michael to London immediately since the school year had only just begun, neither grandparent had put up a fight. It was as if they were both relieved not to be duty bound to their daughter’s offspring.
    He knew it was complicated and he didn’t blame them entirely; he wanted to leave this place more so than anyone. It just would have made him feel better if they had protested the tiniest bit. But when Vaughan finished hispitch by saying, “And you know as well as I do that Michael doesn’t belong here,” they both nodded their heads in agreement. So his fate was sealed without hesitation or hindrance. Michael tried to rally the anger to condemn his grandparents, but he couldn’t.
It just confirms what I’ve always believed,
he told himself.
    A few days later Michael went to Two W for the last time, to clean out his locker and return all his school-books to the principal. His father had already made the necessary preparations for Michael to enroll in his new school; in fact, he would be flying to London later that night. He looked at the few mementos he had stuck to the back of the locker door and left them alone; there wasn’t anything he wanted to take with him. In a few hours this school and this town would be part of his past and he knew that if he ever returned, it would not be willingly.
    “So, gaytard! Heard you’re going to an all-boys school in England.” Mauro had come to bid him farewell. “You must