Burns had never been so grateful for the darkness. Moonlight picked out the corners of Karl’s eyes, but if he looked away, he could pretend Karl wasn’t watching at all.

“I have an origin story too,” he said, after a long, long pause. “Except mine doesn’t come with any super-powers, and nobody gets saved, least of all me.”

Karl shifted in the shadows. “I’m listening.”

“The thing is…you have to swear not to tell anybody. Not a soul. Not your friends, not your parents, nobody.”

“What exactly am I swearing not to tell? Because if this story involves shallow graves or something, I’m gonna be a little uncomfortable.”

“I need you to be serious about this, man. I’m not joking around.”

A rustle that might have been Karl nodding. “I see that. Sorry. Your secret is safe with me.”

“Are you sure?”

“If you keep asking me, I’m going to wind up cracking another joke, and you’ll get mad. Just tell me.”

Burns turned his back to Karl. Why was this so hard? In a perfect world, it wouldn’t have been difficult at all. Hell, it shouldn’t have been difficult now. It sounded like half the people Karl knew were…were…you know.

Damn, I can’t even say the word in my own head.

Then don’t say it. There’s no rule that says you have to blurt it out. Tell it like a story. Ease into it.

His voice shook as he said, “So once upon a time, I was fat.”

Karl’s silence was extraordinary. He wasn’t even breathing. Which meant that he was trying to keep himself from laughing. If Burns hadn’t been in a sleeping bag, he would’ve kicked him.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Burns continued. “Just hear me out, okay?”

In the darkness, Karl exhaled.

“Anyway. I was fat, I was uncoordinated, and I hated school. It seemed like we had a PE class every five minutes, and I’d stand there waiting to get hit by a dodgeball, or wait for a fly ball to pass over me in softball, or get a somber look from the coach if, god forbid, we had to run track. Track was the worst. They wouldn’t let you stop. You’d huff and puff and feel like you were going to die. I mean, I had asthma, I’m surprised I didn’t drop dead right there in the heat.”

“I can’t even picture that,” said Karl. “You’re so…not fat these days.”

Thank you for noticing.

“You know how it is with schoolboys, though. You’re either good at sports, or you’re a girl. They don’t see any middle ground. So they would make fun of me mercilessly. What’s worse, it would make me cry, and you know that tears are like blood to kids like that, it drives them wild, they feel like they have to go further.

“So we’re playing kickball one day, and I am telling myself you can do this, just don’t screw up, standing at home plate, ready for that ball to come towards me. I’ve been watching the other kids, seeing how they take a step or two, building up speed before the kick, and I’m going to do that. I’m a pace behind the plate. Here comes the ball.

“I’m ready. One step, two steps, I get my leg back… But it’s the wrong leg. I come down on the ball, and it rolls my foot out from under me. I hit the ground hard. Whoof, all my air knocked out. It sucks to say at least I didn’t cry, but, well, at least I couldn’t catch my breath long enough to cry.

“They were on me instantly, big circle of kids. Taunts, laughing, pointing, the funniest thing they’d ever seen. Beached whale, beached whale. Give him a pinkbelly goes one of the kids, and that got them really worked up. They yanked up my shirt…

“I was a fat kid. I had tits. I knew it, I was ashamed of it, and the last thing I wanted was everyone in my PE class seeing it, but they all saw.

“From there on out, they called me Mommy Tommy. It was the worst I’d ever felt in my entire fucking life. Or so I thought.”

He paused then, listening to Karl breathe. Come on, you better not have fallen asleep. At least he wasn’t laughing.

How had they been friends this long, and yet he’d never told Karl this story?

Maybe you’re a bad friend, he told himself.

The silence stretched out, his fear of Karl being asleep growing, until finally Karl said, “Wait, was that the end? You kind of had a cliffhanger there.”

“Nah, I was pausing. For emphasis.” And also I don’t want to tell this next part.

“Consider yourself emphasized,” said Karl. “I’m not laughing, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“No, no, no. No. That’s just the beginning, really. Because once Mommy Tommy was out there, things started getting really tough for me. Remember how I said the thing about how you’re either good at sports or you’re a girl? It went further than that. They decided I was gay. There was nothing I could say. I could sit there and say No I’m not, but that’s not much of an argument when you’re little. I look back on it and wonder why I didn’t throw any punches or something.”

Karl wasn’t making a sound. The air in the tent was absolutely still. Outside, something splashed into the water.

“I know why I didn’t throw punches. I couldn’t have said it to myself then…I still can’t say it to myself. It’s too hard to even think about it. But…they weren’t wrong.”

A long, long silence. Finally, the softest sound from Karl: “Oh.”

“I didn’t understand any of that back then. I didn’t have a name for what I felt. It was all so vague, you know? I’d see guys in music videos and picture them in my head later, but I wasn’t sure why they were there, and I wasn’t sure what to do with their images in my memory, so they just hung there like portraits, surrounded by this sense of the most awful, the most inexplicable importance.

“Sometimes rumors take a life of their own. Even though I would never admit it to anybody, even though I didn’t really even understand that there was something to admit, word got around. Mommy Tommy was gay. This was a really religious school, too. The teachers started looking at me differently. They used to be friendly, sometimes sympathetic, if a little impatient with my clumsiness. But now there was something else. A look of…I don’t want to say horror, exactly. But I felt like I didn’t belong at all. Nobody talked to me about it. But they must have told my mom.”

“Jesus Christ, Burns! They told your mom?”

“All I can figure is, they were doing what they thought was best, heading off all this gay stuff at the pass, because they didn’t know any better.”

“That’s an awfully charitable way of describing homophobia, dude.”

“I didn’t understand any of that back then, you know? Naturally, my mom didn’t talk to me about it. Of course not. Instead, Reverend Ron pulled me aside one Sunday morning.”

“Oh shit.”

“He was really friendly. He asked if I wanted to go to a special camp he was hosting. A Bible camp. I didn’t understand what he was getting at first, but all the camps I’d been to so far had been miserable, nothing but sports and prayers, prayers and sports, and I told him that. He laughed and said no, this was different, this was for boys like me. And I was so stupid, Karl, I thought he meant fat kids.

“So I went. And there were a few fat kids there, a few skinny ones…they were all kids I’d never seen before. Most were from out of the area. All of them looked nervous. No: They looked hunted. Like no one was sure where the next punch would come from.

“The crazy thing to me was, there were no punches. None of the usual bullies were there. Nobody called names. We just all sat around awkwardly in a circle talking about God and stuff, and it all seemed innocent, but pretty boring, but at the same time…kind of a relief?”

The moon was stronger now, or maybe his eyes had just adjusted; he saw Karl drew his legs up, until his friend was in a ball on the floor of the tent.

“Then, the second day, Reverend Ron came to me privately.”

“Oh god, Burns.”

“Wait, no!” Burns said. “Don’t get the wrong idea. This isn’t…I mean, he didn’t lay a hand on me, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Karl sighed. “Whew. Damn. It was starting to get creepy.”

“It was bad enough without that. He told me he knew what I was. Not I understand, not I know what’s going on, but I know what you are. Like my secret identity had been found out. Like I was an alien, hiding in plain sight in my borrowed boy-skin.

“He told me that he’d met lots of boys with my problem, that it was easy to get confused by things at my age. That Satan was setting a lot of snares for young men who are maturing.

“I felt exposed, ashamed, astounded…but also relieved, more relieved than I had felt in a long time. I think it must be the way a murderer feels when the police finally slip the cuffs on. What comes next might be awful, but it’s nothing compared to the burden of guilt, nothing like the weight that just crushes you every day.

“I started to cry, and I confessed my crime. I’m a gay, I said, still not understanding quite what I meant by it, just that it was bad, and I was bad, and I needed help making it go away.

“We knelt together in the little chapel in the campground, and we prayed. He put his hand on my head and called out to God to deliver me from sin and temptation, to put me on the righteous path.

“It was the best I had ever felt, as a kid. Like chains had fallen off me. Like I was free. We kept praying for the next four days. And Reverend Ron said that physical activity would be good for me, that it’d keep the thoughts away, and so I started running, exercising, anything I could do to keep myself occupied.

“When I got home, I kept it up. I ran and ran until I could do it without huffing. I made my dad install a basketball goal over the garage, and I made shot after shot, until I could hit the basket every time.

“Kids are fickle. When I came back to school the next fall, it was obvious there was something different about me. A few kids tried to do the taunts, but I ignored them. They weren’t important. They didn’t understand.

“So my life really began then. I got more into sports, into hiking, showed up every Sunday to church, then for Wednesday services, went to every Bible camp. I hit a growth spurt, and suddenly I was a head taller than anybody else. The other kids started respecting me. It should have been awesome.”

“But…it wasn’t?” asked Karl.

“It didn’t take,” Burns said. “I prayed and I prayed, but as time went on, and puberty was in full swing, I felt like I was on some kind of drug, like Viagra for the mind. Every time I closed my eyes, I’d see these big sweaty guys, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted them to do, but I knew I wanted them to do it to me. I’d jack off, and then I’d lie in bed crying, asking God to forgive me, asking him to find me a girlfriend or something to take this temptation away.

“Nobody knew. To them, I was an astonishing success. If my mother had actually worried about me before, all that was forgotten. I was a new man, in more ways than one.”

“Then why…oh shit, right. Delia is Reverend Ron’s daughter.”

Burns sighed, like all the oxygen had left him. His tongue felt funny with all this talking. He was a little dizzy. It wasn’t completely unlike the other night after the whiskey. “Delia is his daughter, yes. And all I can think is…is this a test? Is this a way to see if the conversion really took?”

“That fucking sucks, man. All that conversion therapy is bullshit. You know that, right? I mean, it’s evil.”

“I know. Trust me, I get that. I’ve made my peace with…with my spirit. I believe what I believe, and I don’t see myself like that anymore, don’t see myself as a pathetic sinner in God’s eyes. I figure He’s probably more broad-minded than some of his followers. But also, I didn’t have it nearly as bad as a lot of guys. I’ve read about the stuff some of those groups do. Maybe if my pastor had been anybody else, it would’ve been much worse. But…it still sucked.”

“So, you’re gay.”

“Am I, though?” he asked. “See, I feel like I can’t say it, even now. You don’t hate me, do you?”

Karl sat up. “Look, Burns. I didn’t want to mention this, because I worried that it would wreck our friendship…and also because I hate labels, and think the whole orientation thing is a scam to empower the—”

“Dude.”

“Sorry. What I mean to say is, I like guys too.”

If it had been any other conversation, with any other person, he felt like he would know what to say right away. Like there would be an instant answer in mind. It’s all right, I don’t judge or anything, something like that. Something shallow. A lie, not because he was judging, but because he was hiding.

But Karl’s admission was like a candy he wanted to savor on his tongue; the temptation was to bite down, to swallow, to take it all in one gulp and move on with the conversation, with the millions of questions he had.

But his soul was sore after telling his story, and he wanted to hold on to this moment of their confessions. To the infinite possibilities it suggested. Because there was a second part to the confession, wasn’t there? A part that he had been hiding from himself for a long time, but one that couldn’t stay hidden, not after this.

“I’m not sure what it feels like, to like a real person,” Burns said finally. “I know what an impossible crush feels like. I know what a hopeless longing feels like.”

He couldn’t say another word. Not right now. This was as close as he could get. Hopeless longing.