I jerked awake at 5:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, blinking stickiness out of my eyes. Why was it so dark? Why was glossy paper plastered all over my walls?
Because they’re not my walls. It flooded back—the drinks. The performance. The kiss, the gravity that had kept me clinging to Victoria, the way she’d tasted, the roughness of her lips beneath the gloss. What I’d said to Isaac.
I jerked up in bed, whispering a stream of detailed and elaborate curses that would’ve made your typical Kensington mother clutch her pearls. Isaac lay on a mattress pad on the ground, breathing deeply in his sleep. His roommate snored in the other bed, invisible under the covers. As Isaac’s covers fell from me, I realized I wasn’t wearing my blazer. Why? What possible reason? Had I lost all sense of self-preservation?
As I looked in the window, the reflection offered a glimpse of my left eyebrow, a glaringly obvious brown-black smear pointing toward my cheekbone. The moment in the elevator came back to me, then. The way Isaac had frowned, scanning my face, and gone completely blank.
Horror paralyzed me. My hands went still on Isaac’s dark sheets. I couldn’t do anything but let the alarm bells in my head ring on, on, and on.
Isaac had figured it out, because regular eyebrows did not migrate down people’s faces, and Isaac wasn’t an idiot. He’d tell the others, and they’d shun me and tell the rest of the school, and I would be humiliated beyond belief.
That had been the biggest flaw in my plan, hadn’t it? Of course I had no backup plan for failure, because at the start, I hadn’t cared about failing. I’d had nothing to lose. Nothing at all.
Now I had something, fields at night and songs in the dark and wind in the afternoons and the eight of us together and home. The idea of losing it felt catastrophic.
I slid out of bed. Isaac shifted in his sleep, but I moved faster, grabbing my blazer from the end of the bed and dashing for the door, head splitting. Go. Go. Go—
By the time I burst out of Wingate into the freezing early morning, I was in a full spiral of panic.
Evening approached. I felt pinned and helpless.
None of the guys had texted me all day. The group text had been unnaturally quiet, too—and Isaac hadn’t said a word.
They must have started another group text, just the seven of them, to talk about it. Maybe they were meeting in person to figure out what to do. Even with the Sharps’ eighty-year history, I somehow doubted they’d had this particular issue come up.
It was a weird day if figuring out you were bisexual made up the least of your mental turmoil. I considered calling Jenna, but I felt too sick with nerves to talk about it. Instead, I buried myself in memorizing lines for The Greek Monologue all afternoon. I had to deliver a monologue from Antigone on Tuesday. “Last of all shall I pass thither, and far most miserably of all, before the term of my life is spent!” The anguish of it all didn’t help.
Sitting in my room as eight o’clock approached, I figured there was nothing for it. I slid my wig off and brushed my bangs into place. Black jeans belted, gray shirt buttoned, winter jacket on, I stepped into the skin of a perfectly average boy, and with it came the sting of self-assurance, still a little fresh every single day. I braced myself and slipped out the window one last time.
At the top of the stone steps to the Nest, I hesitated. I ran a hand over the red-painted door and took a deep breath, breathing in the dust and oldness of the stairwell. The faint tang of fresh paint still hung in the air from when Nihal and I had put a new coat on the door.
I blinked hard, looking up at the ceiling. Breathe. It’ll be over soon.
My watch read 7:59 p.m., closer than I’d ever cut it with rehearsal. No more delaying.
I walked in. Isaac, who stood by the piano with Nihal, looked over to me and stopped talking. Nihal wouldn’t meet my eyes. The rest of the conversations went quiet, too.
My face and neck flooded with heat. The last, tiniest hope I’d been harboring—that somehow Isaac hadn’t noticed, or if he’d noticed, hadn’t said anything—died.
The door shut behind me. The black Sharps flag fluttered a bit, brushing me as if in comfort.
“Julian,” Trav said slowly. “Hi.”
I swallowed. “Yeah.”
“Listen,” he said. “Sit down.”
I sat down. The armchair squeaked beneath me. I slipped my hands under my thighs and gripped the leather cushion hard. Seven pairs of eyes fixed unwaveringly on me.
“So, um,” Isaac said. “We . . . this . . .”
“Spit it out,” I murmured.
Mama leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. His eyes were warm. “Look, it’s fine,” he said. “Okay? It doesn’t have to be weird.”
I stared at him for a full ten seconds before I could muster up a sound.
“Wh-what?” I said. My heart hammered. They didn’t care?
“Yeah,” Isaac said. “Um, look, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything, but I didn’t know if . . . anyway, I’m sorry.”
I opened my mouth, then shut it again.
Jon Cox shrugged. “I mean, if we had a problem with gay guys, this would be the actual worst place in America to go to high school, you know?”
Oh my God.
After a strangled second, I released a shout of laughter that was way too much for the joke. Laughs rippled around the room in the wake of the sound. The others looked relieved, but those looks were barely a shadow of what I felt.
They thought I was a gay boy. Isaac must not have noticed anything when I took off my blazer. Of course, it had been dark. The makeup smear must have happened in my sleep, and I’d left this morning before he’d seen it. Even the dance—Jon and Mama had seen me run away from Victoria like her kiss had burned me.
“We should start rehearsal,” Trav said, “but we wanted you to know that you don’t have to expect anything different here. I hate to make a presentation out of it, but since maybe you had reasons for not saying anything, and since finding out en masse like this is a little . . . um, unorthodox, I thought it might be best to make sure you . . . are all right.” He looked around for backup. Marcus was nodding so hard I thought he might give himself a minor concussion. Even Erik gave me a single thumbs-up, although red tinged his cheeks, like the idea of gay Julian was scandalous.
“I . . . thanks, guys,” I said helplessly. Part of me wanted to break into hysterical laughter. But mostly, as I looked around the Nest, at the scored floorboards and the out-of-key upright, I wanted to melt into a puddle of relief. This was still mine. The circles of night sky through the windows and the guys around me, with their dumbass jokes and their silences and their complexes. The sight of the Sharps flag on the back of the door made something shaky and warm start glowing in my chest. Verbis defectis musica incipit. Words were failing me.
I still belonged.
At the end of rehearsal, Nihal and I set off together, as usual. Rehearsal hadn’t been different, just like Trav had promised. Of course, Trav was the only one talking, and the guy was as unchanging as a faulty chameleon, so that wasn’t saying much.
Nihal wrapped a thick woolen scarf around his neck as we set up the shallow hill toward August Drive. For a few minutes, we were quiet. As we crested the hill, he said, “Julian, I’m sorry everyone found out at once like that. As usual, Isaac couldn’t keep his mouth shut.”
I shrugged, but my throat went tight, the same twinge I’d felt when I’d come across the trans resource website. I’d slipped beneath another mantle that wasn’t mine—as if I could understand what being a gay guy was like. All I understood about sexuality was its uncertainty, discovering your way through yourself day by day, stepping tentatively, hitting on some term that seemed to fit and hoping it stuck.
We hit the sidewalk and headed toward East Campus. Thick white clouds had settled over Kensington earlier this afternoon, and they had turned cannonball dark in the night. Our school’s towers and buildings reached toward the belly of the sky, outlined in orangey streetlight.
“It was good to see the guys like that, though,” Nihal said. “I mean, because . . . you know. You never know who comes from what sort of mindset. So it’s comforting.”
I glanced at him, not sure where he was going with this. I nodded.
“Comforting,” he continued, and from the strain in his voice—strain I’d never heard before—I realized what he was going to say before he said it. “Because I am, too, actually. Gay, I mean.”
I looked at Nihal, then, with his prominent nose pointing down at the pavement and his hazel eyes more guarded than I’d ever seen them. He said it like a shield. He said it like he’d never in his life said it out loud.
“Hey,” I said, stopping in my tracks. And for a second I considered telling him absolutely everything. Spilling the truth out in a rush, coming clean.
It caught in my throat. No, be smart. Be smart about this. I’d just gotten my freedom from the truth—it had happened like a miracle. Plunging myself back into that uncertainty, cold and thick and neck-deep . . . I couldn’t do that.
Nihal might tell. He’d told before.
Instead, I reached for his shoulder and let my hand rest there a second. He was a couple inches shorter than me, I realized. I’d always thought of Nihal as tall. Tree-tall, tree-solid, tree-serene. Right now, he was just a scared-looking boy a year and a half younger than me.
“None of the guys know?” I said quietly, lowering my hand.
“No.” We started walking again, approaching the crossroads where our paths usually split. “But being here is good,” he said. “There’s so many people who are, it feels normal. I started getting a grip on it at the end of last spring, and I was going to get back after summer and tell the Sharps, but now I can’t.”
“Why not?”
We slowed, then stopped at the crossroads. “It’s . . .” Nihal sighed, searching for words.
“Is it because—?” I glanced at his turban. Maybe I couldn’t say this without being insensitive.
Nihal must have caught the look, because he said, “No, not really.” He half-smiled. “It’s actually funny. There’s nothing about gayness in the Guru Granth Sahib. That’s our, you know. Holy book. Scripturally, it’s just not mentioned.”
“That’s . . . good?”
“Yeah, you’d think. But the Guru Granth Sahib maps out the course for our lives, and since the only thing that is mentioned is straight marriages, that’s all that’s technically allowed. So gurdwaras won’t allow for gay marriage ceremonies.”
I studied his expression, which was uncharacteristically closed.
“That’s frustrating,” I said carefully.
“Yeah.” He grimaced. “Very. Some people think that since it isn’t mentioned, being queer lines up fine with Sikhism. I guess that’s what I think. I mean, I have to believe that, otherwise what am I doing, you know?” He sighed, looking up at the spools of nighttime cloud. “Honestly, it doesn’t make sense otherwise. I mean, being a Sikh is—it’s love, acceptance, equality, oneness. For every person. It should be simple.” A hint of bitterness touched his voice. “But I still can’t make the pieces fit right in my head.”
“Have you—maybe it would help to talk to your parents about it?” I suggested.
He puffed out a sigh. “I haven’t told them. I don’t really have plans to. I have this lesbian cousin who lives in Ludhiana, and when she started being open about it, about half my extended family stopped talking to her, or even about her, because in India a lot of people still think it’s this purely sexual thing. I mean, not that people here are so much better about understanding that that’s not true.” He rubbed his forehead. “But it is tougher over there for a lot of reasons. Maybe it’d be different for me, but I don’t want to take the risk.”
A bundled-up figure headed up the sidewalk on the other side of the road. I lowered my voice. “You could talk to the Sharps about it. I mean, look how they acted tonight. It’d be fine.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Because—” He glanced at the figure until it turned the corner and bobbed away. “I’m kind of involved with someone. His family doesn’t know, either, so he doesn’t want the whole school knowing.”
“Oh.” After a second, I said, “But that’s great. That you’re seeing someone.”
A shadow of a smile touched his mouth and faded. “Dating is kind of a murky thing too. My mom says I shouldn’t see anyone until I’m ready to get married, because that’s the point, that’s what I should be thinking toward. But I . . . this isn’t really dating. We kissed one time, but I told him I couldn’t do the physical stuff, so since then we’ve just spent a lot of time together. Just talking.”
“What’s he like?”
Nihal’s lips quivered in suppressed laughter.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just. You know him.”
I frowned. “Is he a Sharp?”
“No. Definitely not.”
“What do you mean, definitely n—wait.” I mouthed uselessly for a moment before getting ahold of myself. “Is it a Minuet? Is—is it Caskey?”
Nihal winced. “Okay, so, hear me out.”
“Oh my God. It is.”
He lifted his hands. “Let’s all just breathe.”
“Isn’t he dating Anabel?”
“No, they were only talking for a couple of weeks.”
“Okay, but—I—you’re so much of a better person than him!”
“He’s not actually like he pretends he is.” Nihal struggled for a second. “I mean, Connor’s very smart, and he’s an exceptional painter, and he has a great voice. We actually have everything in common, when he’s not being inflammatory, and that’s only because he wants his dad to think he’s, I don’t know, manly.”
“What? His dad’s a high school music teacher. Not exactly hypermasculine.”
“See, that’s what I said.” He grimaced. “But it’s Kensington, so it’s apparently different in a way that has not yet become clear to me. Anyway, his family has this mansion outside Boston, and they’ve all been Kensington alumni since the late nineteenth century. So they aren’t go-hunting-and-be-a-lumberjack masculine, they’re, like, sip-old-fashioneds-and-adjust-your-six-hundred-dollar-tie-while-disdaining-the-bourgeoisie masculine.”
I tried to undo my face of disgust.
“Yeah,” he said. “Same. Trust me, though. Connor isn’t his dad.”
“But he is the guy who burned our archives.”
“Yes. We had words about that. Don’t worry; I can hold my own.” He raised one eyebrow at me. “Although I’m very flattered by your concern.”
I sighed, my knee-jerk revulsion finally simmering down. “No, I just—I thought you hated him.”
“Well, obviously. Connor’s infuriating, all the time.” Light humor colored his voice again. “The worst.”
My phone buzzed with low battery. I checked it and startled. Nine thirty had crept up while we’d been standing here. If I was going to make it back through my window by the time Anabel knocked on my door, I had to run.
“We should go,” I said. “Check-in.”
“Right.”
I paused, meeting his eyes. “But I won’t tell anyone, trust me.”
“I do,” Nihal said. “That’s why I told you.”
The words hit a little too hard. As he left down the street toward Wingate, guilt fastened over my body, a mass of pinching claws. It was the most basic trust, expecting someone to be himself.