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.