The way he said the word “friend” hurt me, and I knew already the kind of story it would be.

“And he loved me. And we kissed each other, touched each other, all of it was a secret. It was so secret it was almost a secret from ourselves. We didn’t know what we were doing because we couldn’t afford to know. It was so dangerous just to be ourselves that it seemed dangerous to see, to feel, to be. It was like a dream where one thing morphs into another, and what maybe started out as a fear that we were not like other boys, that we were attracted to men, became a fear that our deepest selves in every particular were blasphemous, and that if we ever truly communicated with anyone the world would end. It was another time, there’s no way you can understand what it was like.”

“I understand,” I said, and I thought I did.

“My mom, she didn’t grow up watching Will & Grace. It was—I’m sure you have some stereotype in your mind about what the world was like before Prop 8 was struck down, but you will never understand what it meant for it to be that way, the kind of—the kind of deformity of consciousness that takes place. The way you can pretend you aren’t thinking certain things, refuse to notice that you notice what you notice. Anyway, I will never know exactly what happened or why, but word got out at school. I don’t know how someone found out. But the bullying was…was so tremendous that I had to leave the school.”

“My friend,” I said, my voice nervous on the word because it meant so much and it meant so little. Bunny was my only friend, but she was not my friend in the way that Anthony had used the word. She was not my lover, and yet, in some way I knew I loved her more than I had ever loved anyone before, more even than I loved Anthony. “Not a boyfriend, just a friend, beat up another girl because that girl saw us making out. In your car. And she was telling. And now the girl is in the hospital in a coma and she might not wake up. And my friend might go to jail, or else maybe nothing will happen. Her dad is really rich, so.”

“You weren’t out,” he said, a guess instead of a question.

“I mean—I wasn’t not out. I wore makeup and I had my little piercing and my sass. I’m sure people knew. But no, I was not out out.”

“Sometimes I wish I could have grown up in your generation. Just the freedom. Gay, bi, poly, queer—you could—I know it feels like the world is ending now, but coming out won’t end your world. You’ll see—it will be—”

And then I was so angry that the words ripped out of me just like the string on a FedEx envelope shreds the cardboard, unzipping myself, exploding with thoughts I didn’t even know I had inside me until I spit them into the close air of his car. “You tell me, ‘Oh, you don’t know what it was like, you could never understand the past, it was so hard’—well, you can’t fucking understand the present. You don’t know what it is to grow up in a country that has only ever been at war. To do active shooter drills in fucking kindergarten. To grow up knowing you’ll never make a living wage. You’ll never own a house. That the whole game is rigged, and you’ll work your whole life and have nothing to show for it.

“Sometimes I look at all these houses. These mansions. Sometimes I walk through this town and wonder: Who needs a house like this? Who needs a three-car garage? Who needs a master bedroom big enough for a couch by a fireplace? Who needs fucking LaCantina doors that slide so the whole front of your house is open? And the answer is: Everyone. Everyone wants their own personal fucking mansion, and everyone is willing to do whatever it takes to get one. We’re like rats at the feeding machine, pushing the lever, confused when all we get are shocks. And sometimes I walk around this neighborhood and I wish that everyone in it would die and all the houses would turn to ash and fall down in piles of clean black powder like sand, and everything that has ever been done could be undone.”

“God, I love you,” Anthony said, looking at me with his wet brown eyes, pure and beautiful as the eyes of a deer. I felt I could see him as he had been at every point in his life: as a hopeful little boy, as an arrogant teenager, as an earnest college student, as a tired father, as a man, a brave man, a man who chases after his own vitality and refuses to give up on what is right even when it’s wrong.

Reader, I fucked him in his car.

* * *

—

Part of the fallout of my conversation with Aunt Deedee was that I had been relocated to the tiny room that had been a walk-in closet on the first floor, and so I no longer had a window into Bunny’s bedroom. I no longer had a window at all. Jason had our old bedroom to himself, which delighted him. Whenever we encountered each other in the house, he would address me as “faggot.” “Good morning, faggot!” he would say. “Would you like some cereal, faggot? There’s milk left.”

I think Aunt Deedee had hoped that the small victory of kicking me out of his room and forcing me into a literal closet (!) would pacify him, and he did seem happy about it, but he did not seem satisfied. A fire does not stop after consuming a single log. I knew he would keep trying to get me out, but all I had to do was get through senior year. I could outlast him. For me, the situation was also a kind of improvement, since I had a new solitude in my tiny room, where I was free to watch porn or makeup tutorials without censure.

In retrospect, it seems clear that I should have had more of a reaction to being treated so uncivilly in my own home, a space where I was supposed to be, at least in theory, safe. But I had never been safe in my own home. Not even as a child. In fact, I had been much more alarmed when my own father commented that he thought one of the bag boys at the Albertsons might be a “poof.” I had no idea what being a poof meant, but I knew it was dangerous. I didn’t immediately associate it with sexuality, at that age, around six or seven, I associated the word with a makeup poof, something soft and pink. Jason calling me a faggot and thinking it was funny or rebellious or interesting to do so was disgusting, yes, but also pathetic and childish. A bit of the moron doth protest too much, methinks. So I would answer him: “Hey, dudebro, why don’t you go drink some ranch and swim with your shirt on?”

“Go suck a cock, homo,” he would say when he saw me getting home from school.

“Your pussy is way too dry to be riding my dick like this,” I would say as I shouldered past him into my room.

And I think my rage felt as good to me as his rage felt to him.

The only place it was tolerable to exist in my house was in my tiny, windowless room, which was fine for studying or sleeping, especially at first, but as the weeks wore on, I found myself spending more and more time at Bunny Lampert’s house, even though I was still finding Bunny extremely hard to take. For one thing, she had begun wearing her mother’s (very large) sapphire engagement ring on her right hand. This, together with her ridiculous new office wear, made her feel elegant, causing her to use her arms and arch her torso in new, oddly artificial ways. Maybe she wouldn’t even finish high school, she said, languorously stretching. Maybe she would get her GED and go to work for her father. Maybe she would marry Coach Eric, who was still coaching her three times a week. It would be nice, she admitted, to play volleyball for the sheer joy of it. She had gotten so narrow in her thinking, focused on the wrong things. “I mean,” she said, leaning in conspiratorially, “it’s just a game!”