And so it came to be that I missed my stop, still staring at the picture of my mother and Gabby (“Cat got your tongue?” Jesus!), and rode on the bus all the way down to Manhattan Beach and then had to wait for another bus to take me back to North Shore, and by the time I got home to Aunt Deedee’s house, I was exhausted and disoriented and so sad it felt like my very being was saturated with it and had begun leaking, causing dark stains on the air around me. Aunt Deedee and Jason were in the living room, and when I opened the door they looked up in unison. There was a plastic tray of Oreos on the coffee table. The TV was on, some kind of sports game show with an obstacle course, but it didn’t seem they’d been watching it. I thought Aunt Deedee was going to be mad at me for being out so late, but instead she looked sad and worried. Oh, I thought. It’s going to be bad.

“Hey, homo,” Jason said.

“Jason!” Aunt Deedee said. He was not going about it in the way she had thought they would. She needed, in order to be able to do this to me, for it to be clean, dressed up as decent.

“What?” Jason said, standing up and then sitting down again. “He’s the one living some secret life!” He took off his hat and began curling the bill in his hands, squeezing and squeezing it, like it was a cow’s udder.

“Come here and sit down,” my aunt said, tucking the escaped wisps of her ponytail behind her ears. She looked very tired and her ponytail was sad and straggly. She was wearing a peach-colored sweatshirt with a large white bleach stain on the shoulder in the shape of a kidney. I had not really thought she would kick me out. It felt like the molecules of my body were dissolving like sugar in a glass of water, nothing was stable, everything was melting. I just had not thought she would really, really do it. But I looked in her face, and I thought: She’s going to do it. She’s already reassured Jason that she will do it, and now she has to carry through, and she’s realizing it is going to be harder than she thought, but she’ll do it. I sat down on the ottoman of the chair by her, trying to take up as little space as possible, trying even to float slightly above the ottoman.

“Michael,” my aunt said, and she said my name with so much love and kindness that I couldn’t stand it. “Jason has heard some really disturbing things from some of the boys on his water polo team, and we were hoping to talk to you.”

I looked at the pink carpet. Pink as the inside of a conch shell. I had always been so embarrassed of the carpet in our house, but what was embarrassing about it? Why shouldn’t carpet be pink?

“You’re moving out,” Jason said.

“Jason!” Aunt Deedee snapped at him.

“What? He is. Better to just put it out there. I’m not fucking sharing a room with him!”

“And I respect that choice,” Aunt Deedee said, “but—”

“How much time do I have?” I asked.

“Back up—hold on, both of you, this is not what I wanted. Just back up, we need to back up a few paces, and start over.”

“Mom,” Jason said, furious now, “I’m sorry, I just don’t want to see two guys kissing in my bedroom. Okay?”

Aunt Deedee got angrier at this than I had ever seen her, and the words seemed to leap right out of her throat. “Oh, Jason, grow a pair! He’s not kissing people in your bedroom, and even if he were, Michael’s had to watch straight couples kiss in every movie ever made, so I think you could probably handle seeing two men kiss each other without the hysterics.” She smoothed the light denim of her jeans on the tops of her thighs, as though that were that, and she appeared to be thinking about something.

“Part of what concerns me about what Ann Marie said, and god, I hope she’s okay, is that she had seen you in a sexual position with a man who was much, much older than you, and—”

“A sexual position?” I said.

“She said they were kissing, Mom,” Jason said, irritated. He was in no way on my side, but even he thought calling kissing a “sexual position” was a little unfair.

“All right, kissing. Can I just ask, how did you meet this man?”

I was not sure what the right answer was. If I said in real life, wouldn’t that insinuate an even more advanced and evolved secret life? What if she thought I was part of secret societies where we had orgies with antlers strapped to our heads and made burnt offerings to the moon? And yet, I dreaded even uttering the word “Grindr”; it seemed so cheap and childishly obscene. “Online,” I said.

“Meeting people on the internet, Michael—it’s just not safe! And you don’t know—older men, they will expect things from you, and they might take advantage of you, and—”

“I’m not a virgin,” I said. “If that’s what you’re talking about.”

“Oh,” Aunt Deedee said, and she seemed suddenly wildly sad, almost despondent. “I feel I’ve done such a really terrible job as your guardian,” she said. “I should have talked to you about all this so much earlier—I just never thought—”

“I’m not fucking living with him,” Jason said.

“That’s fine,” I said. “I’ll figure out a place to live.”

“Where?” Aunt Deedee said. “Where would you go? You can’t go live with your mother, even aside from the fact that she doesn’t have room, I won’t have it. I won’t have you living there. Are you talking about living with— your man friend?”

“No,” I said, “I was thinking I would look into staying at a shelter until I could save enough money to rent an apartment.”

“Oh, Michael,” Aunt Deedee said, her hand raised to her cheek like I had slapped her.

“Well, where did you think I would go?” I shouted.

“I don’t fucking care where he goes,” Jason said.

“Calm down, Mountain Dew,” I said, but Aunt Deedee was already shouting him down.

“What the good goddamn is wrong with you, Jason Clark? I mean, for heaven’s sakes! He’s your own cousin. And you don’t care where he goes? You want him to live in a shelter? Shame on you. I can’t believe I raised you. I should have taken you to church more because you don’t know the first thing about how to be a decent human being.”

“Yeah, they teach that a lot in church, how to love faggots,” Jason said.

“Go to your room,” Aunt Deedee said, pointing at the ceiling.

“You’re being ridiculous,” he told her.

“Go.”

He went. She sat back in her chair with a great sigh and idly smoothed her pants again.