I was surprised that business should take place at what must be past ten o’clock at night, but more surprised when he picked up the phone and began speaking in what I could only guess was Mandarin. He spoke a few phrases of greeting and then spoke in English again, all in a happy, reassuring, genial tone even as his face remained frighteningly blank and intense. The result was like bad dubbing in a movie.

“Very soon, yes. So grateful for your business. As always. Yes, old friends. Hahaha, yes. No, I sent them to your office. Cassie sent them. I’ll double-check, but I’m certain she sent them. All right.” He followed this with a few more phrases in Mandarin, then hung up, and without looking at me dialed again.

“Cassie, did you send Mr. Phong the blueprint files? Uh-huh. Did the wire transfer go through? Yeah, go ahead and send them, he’s waiting on them. Sorry to wake you up. All right. Catch you later, doll.”

And then he hung up and looked at me and giggled like a teenager. “I cannot possibly begin to tell you, Michael, how deeply fucked I am.”

“Is that right?” I asked, so nervous that when I crossed my legs, I sloshed some of the wine onto the Oriental carpet. “Oh shit, I’m sorry,” I said, leaping up, the red wine dripping down my hand and along my arm to the elbow.

“It’s all right, it’s all right, I spill wine on it all the time,” Ray said, but he looked tired suddenly, and I knew that the night was over. I brought him a roll of paper towels, and I tried to help him sop up the mess, but he shooed me away, and I left him there, crouched in the dim office on his hands and knees, scrubbing at the rug.

Really, it was a confusing summer. I was working full-time at the Rite Aid, or as close to full-time as Terrence could manage for me. Bunny was always gone at her volleyball intensive. I began hunting flies in my aunt’s house. The screens were torn, but we would have baked without the windows open since there was no air-conditioning. My aunt said daily that she needed to go by the hardware store and order new screens, and the problem was always framed as a scarcity of time and wherewithal, but I knew it was a scarcity of money. I was unwilling to spend my own hard-earned cash to have new screens fitted, but I was willing to spend two dollars on a flyswatter and spend hours a day hunting flies. To narrow the scope of my mental activities to the tracking of a single aerial point in three-dimensional space was deeply soothing to me. I drove Jason half-insane. “You need to stop,” he would say, “you’ve been killing flies for like an hour.”

But I couldn’t stop because I was profoundly anxious, not because of Bunny’s weird Ecstasy date, for which she apologized the next day, assuring me that nothing terrible had come of it except that she’d had to feign flu and miss a day of volleyball. She was excited, thinking that now this boy Ryan would be her boyfriend, but the relationship did not materialize. Ryan returned her texts with one-word answers and then not at all, creating a sticky wound that eventually crusted over with bitter acceptance and shame. I could hardly bring myself to pay attention to this, so consumed was I by what was transpiring in my own life.

By the time I was sixteen and I got my first phone, I switched from Craigslist to Grindr, lying about my birthday and claiming to be eighteen. But as I aged, so did my Grindr profile, and now that I was seventeen, my digital representation was almost twenty. I tended to steer clear of younger men, afraid they would ask me questions about college, or notice cultural points of reference I did not share with them. A young man can tell the difference between a seventeen-year-old and a twenty-year-old in a second. But to a man in his forties, all the young are awash in a golden haze.

On Craigslist, the ads tended to spell out what the encounter would entail: “You come to my clean apartment and fuck my hairy ass. We watch porn and j/o with some edging, no kissing.” The ads were insanely specific, age, height, weight, dick length, cut or uncut; these statistics were displaced from sentences and laid out cold, separated only by the tiny knives of commas. They were clear about what they wanted in return: “You can have a small dick if you have a bubble butt, but if you have no butt, you must have monster cock. You must be 18–23 ONLY!!!” People advertised that they were “neg” and “on prep.” If they were offering massage, they were prostitutes. If they said they just wanted a friend, they were ugly. It became easy to navigate, and an ad that I was willing to respond to was practically a unicorn. I did not have a computer of my own, nor did I have a phone back then, so I was mostly browsing on my aunt’s computer after everyone went to bed. In short, Craigslist was like a massive yard sale, a flea market of sexual opportunities, most of which you definitely didn’t want, but you always knew what they were. Do you want this fat hairy man to fill you with cum? Do you want to stroke it with this insanely buff Nigerian dude at precisely 2:15 in his garage?

But then I got a phone, and the very first week I owned it, I got on Grindr, where there was less to go on. Almost all profile pictures were headless torsos, almost all profile descriptions were half a sentence of acronyms. Creating my own profile was terrifying. I had never had to for Craigslist, had always been an anonymous stroller through the bazaar. Realizing I would have to become one of these headless torsos, I took the bus to the mall, where I camped out in the dressing room of a Zara with a men’s section for forty minutes trying to find a good angle in the full-length mirror. With a little editing and cropping, I turned myself into a flesh violin like all the others and placed myself on the marketplace, uncertain how to say the things I needed to say: I can’t host, I have no car, I have no money, I have little experience and what experience I do have is weird and scary, I am a ball of nerves, I am terrified, no one knows who I really am, I think about killing myself daily, I like to read books, please don’t murder me.

Honestly, I was afraid of most of them, these floating photographs of dicks and hard-bodied torsos. Hey cutie, hey sexy, you ready to bend over? It was not a place where I expected to find love. Indeed, I was not allowed to have a boyfriend, even if I had somehow managed to find one. My aunt had once stopped me in the hallway and said, haltingly, “I don’t think I need to say this, but I’m saying it: No boys. No boys in the house.”

At bottom, I thought she was right. It wasn’t even because I was gay that my love, my body, my touches, needed to be contained. It was because I had been born of a woman who could stab a man in the chest with a fruit knife at three in the morning because she had run out of other ideas for how to make it stop. Maybe there were some truly clean people in the town. There seemed to be. But I suspected most were like me, were like Ray Lampert, were like my aunt even, chasing after a middle-class dream that would have spit her out like a seed. To live in North Shore was to be committed to pretense. Committed to this beautiful, fake, wholesome dream, because even though it was a dream, it was so much better than anything else.

There was a certain category of man on Grindr, in his forties or fifties, who was looking for the validation of youth, no strings attached, but was not an official daddy, would not expect to buy me or control me. Men who wanted a golden hour with a young man so that they could remember something about themselves. So that they could feel a way they used to feel. And who couldn’t understand that? Far from being the kind of person who requires his conquests to be physical perfection, I was instantly reassured by their sagging bellies, their imperfect mouths and receding hairlines. I preferred to be the beautiful one in these fragmentary encounters.