“That’s frustrating,” I said carefully.
“Yeah.” He grimaced. “Very. Some people think that since it isn’t mentioned, being queer lines up fine with Sikhism. I guess that’s what I think. I mean, I have to believe that, otherwise what am I doing, you know?” He sighed, looking up at the spools of nighttime cloud. “Honestly, it doesn’t make sense otherwise. I mean, being a Sikh is—it’s love, acceptance, equality, oneness. For every person. It should be simple.” A hint of bitterness touched his voice. “But I still can’t make the pieces fit right in my head.”
“Have you—maybe it would help to talk to your parents about it?” I suggested.
He puffed out a sigh. “I haven’t told them. I don’t really have plans to. I have this lesbian cousin who lives in Ludhiana, and when she started being open about it, about half my extended family stopped talking to her, or even about her, because in India a lot of people still think it’s this purely sexual thing. I mean, not that people here are so much better about understanding that that’s not true.” He rubbed his forehead. “But it is tougher over there for a lot of reasons. Maybe it’d be different for me, but I don’t want to take the risk.”
A bundled-up figure headed up the sidewalk on the other side of the road. I lowered my voice. “You could talk to the Sharps about it. I mean, look how they acted tonight. It’d be fine.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Because—” He glanced at the figure until it turned the corner and bobbed away. “I’m kind of involved with someone. His family doesn’t know, either, so he doesn’t want the whole school knowing.”
“Oh.” After a second, I said, “But that’s great. That you’re seeing someone.”
A shadow of a smile touched his mouth and faded. “Dating is kind of a murky thing too. My mom says I shouldn’t see anyone until I’m ready to get married, because that’s the point, that’s what I should be thinking toward. But I . . . this isn’t really dating. We kissed one time, but I told him I couldn’t do the physical stuff, so since then we’ve just spent a lot of time together. Just talking.”
“What’s he like?”
Nihal’s lips quivered in suppressed laughter.
“What?”
“Nothing. Just. You know him.”
I frowned. “Is he a Sharp?”
“No. Definitely not.”
“What do you mean, definitely n—wait.” I mouthed uselessly for a moment before getting ahold of myself. “Is it a Minuet? Is—is it Caskey?”
Nihal winced. “Okay, so, hear me out.”
“Oh my God. It is.”
He lifted his hands. “Let’s all just breathe.”
“Isn’t he dating Anabel?”
“No, they were only talking for a couple of weeks.”
“Okay, but—I—you’re so much of a better person than him!”
“He’s not actually like he pretends he is.” Nihal struggled for a second. “I mean, Connor’s very smart, and he’s an exceptional painter, and he has a great voice. We actually have everything in common, when he’s not being inflammatory, and that’s only because he wants his dad to think he’s, I don’t know, manly.”
“What? His dad’s a high school music teacher. Not exactly hypermasculine.”
“See, that’s what I said.” He grimaced. “But it’s Kensington, so it’s apparently different in a way that has not yet become clear to me. Anyway, his family has this mansion outside Boston, and they’ve all been Kensington alumni since the late nineteenth century. So they aren’t go-hunting-and-be-a-lumberjack masculine, they’re, like, sip-old-fashioneds-and-adjust-your-six-hundred-dollar-tie-while-disdaining-the-bourgeoisie masculine.”
I tried to undo my face of disgust.
“Yeah,” he said. “Same. Trust me, though. Connor isn’t his dad.”
“But he is the guy who burned our archives.”
“Yes. We had words about that. Don’t worry; I can hold my own.” He raised one eyebrow at me. “Although I’m very flattered by your concern.”
I sighed, my knee-jerk revulsion finally simmering down. “No, I just—I thought you hated him.”
“Well, obviously. Connor’s infuriating, all the time.” Light humor colored his voice again. “The worst.”
My phone buzzed with low battery. I checked it and startled. Nine thirty had crept up while we’d been standing here. If I was going to make it back through my window by the time Anabel knocked on my door, I had to run.
“We should go,” I said. “Check-in.”
“Right.”
I paused, meeting his eyes. “But I won’t tell anyone, trust me.”
“I do,” Nihal said. “That’s why I told you.”
The words hit a little too hard. As he left down the street toward Wingate, guilt fastened over my body, a mass of pinching claws. It was the most basic trust, expecting someone to be himself.
As Winter Storm Saul loomed in the distance, the season snuck up on us. The cold unsheathed its claws, releasing the sort of chill that had you hiding your frozen lips between your teeth for safekeeping. The year’s first snow came that Monday, showering down from wet skies, plastering Kensington in layers of thick white. By the next day, it had been tramped, sledded, and salted down to mud and slush. From winter wonderland to miserable hellscape in under twenty-four hours.
The midterm election happened that day. Marcus blamed the outcome on the weather, as well as voter apathy, and the poor alignment of the stars, and also there being no God. He couldn’t stop talking about how Anderson Grimsley was going to be the worst senator in US history. He threatened to move overseas a few times. “Ah, of course,” Nihal said. “Our largest emigrant population always has been politically disgruntled fourteen-year-olds.” Marcus turned fire-hydrant red and emitted a sound of protest that sounded like a balloon deflating.
The week after my fake coming-out was filled with questions and adjustments. I meant to ask Erik to say something to Victoria, to follow what had happened at the dance, but I couldn’t settle on the right words. An apology for fleeing, sure, but then what? “I only think of you as a friend”? “I think we should see other people”? “It’s not you, it’s the fact that I’m secretly a girl who sacrificed a foot and a half of perfectly good hair to the dark gods of a cappella”?