“But so, so good.”
I ate. I loved eating, and I loved watching Tariq eat. He bit down on three fries so they protruded from his mouth, then leaned across the cab of his truck to stick them in my face.
“You’re gross,” I said, then bit down on the offered fry stubs. Our teeth clinked together. We chewed, swallowed, laughed, kissed. I touched his face and his stubble tingled, electrified my fingers. He reached out his arm, draped it over my shoulders, pulled me in tighter. By the time he sat up straight and put his hands back on the wheel, I was grateful for the paper sack hiding the significant tenting of my lap.
“So how is this going to work?” he asked, shifting the truck back into drive.
“How is what going to work?” I asked—even though from his hard, distant tone I knew where he was taking this.
“Us. You and me.”
“What do you mean?”
Tariq looked at his greasy fingertips. “We can’t let anyone know about it. If my dad finds out he’ll throw me out of the house so fast and hard . . .” He pulled out of the parking lot, sped up into the gathering dark.
“Of course,” I said, because hadn’t I known already that it could never be like it was in my fantasy? That the world wasn’t ready for us to hold hands in the halls of Hudson High? That Tariq had a lot more to lose than me? “Although if he did throw you out, you could come stay with us.”
“I’d be staying in the hospital, actually,” he said, and I heard his voice crack. “Because he’ll beat me within an inch of my life.”
“If anyone tries to hurt you, I’ll break them into a million pieces.”
Tariq laughed, but I wasn’t joking. And I wasn’t exaggerating. Tariq had no idea what I was capable of. How I felt—who I was—who he was.
“I know I can’t make you understand,” he said. “You’re different from me. Plus your mom, your sister, they love you for who you are. And fuck everybody else. But I’m not like that.”
“Okay,” I said, and felt my immense happiness shrink just a little. I’d imagined, stupidly, that being Tariq’s boyfriend would validate me in the eyes of my peers. That being with him would help me step out of the shadows of shame. But that was a childish fantasy. “I’ll be your deep, dark secret. Your friends will never suspect.”
He nodded. “I’m sorry. I’m just not ready to . . . ” He shivered, and I knew that shiver, that fear I’d lived with for so many years, the terror of admitting, even to yourself, that you’re gay. How did he know—how had I known—that as soon as you say it, a door closes, and you step into a whole other life that looks nothing like the one you’ve spent every day up until then expecting?
Tariq headed toward my house. Mom hadn’t been home when I came in the night before. According to her schedule for the week, penciled in on the kitchen calendar, her shift should have been over two hours before then. Maybe she’d gone grocery shopping, I’d thought, or maybe she’d gotten assigned an extra shift. But she always texted me when those things happened, so I wouldn’t worry.
And it was only here, now, remembering this, wondering What if she went to a bar, that I realized: I hadn’t thought about Maya once all day.
“Wait. Drive us to the river,” I said. “There’s something I have to ask you.”
RULE #29
God, your mom, me, Muhammad, Cosmopolitan magazine—nobody’s rulebook is right for you. No one will have all the answers. Sooner or later you’re going to come up against something they can’t answer.
When you’re a kid, you follow the rules you’re given, but growing up means figuring things out on your own.
DAY: 22, CONTINUED . . .
Hudson has beautiful sunsets. Clouds crossing the Catskills, wind sweeping up the river and pollutants in the air all add up to some glorious spectacles in the sky around twilight. By the time we got to the Hudson boat launch, the place looked like a nineteenth-century landscape painting, except for the seagulls fighting over roadkill and the dudes on cheap boats drinking even cheaper beer.
“So what’s up?” Tariq asked.
Fear kept the question bottled up tight behind my lips. Fear that once I asked it, the bubble of this impossible, undeserved happiness would burst.
What happened the night my sister got hurt?
But the words would not come out. I wanted him to say them, wanted him to bring them up. Wanted him to explain why he’d spent so long sitting on a missing piece of the puzzle. I shut my eyes and tilted my face toward his. I thought the words as hard as I could. But he didn’t say a word.
A bottle broke on board one of the boats.
“I know my sister went to meet you,” I said, quick as I could before doubt could smother the words back into my mouth. “The night she ran away.”
Tariq flinched, turned away.
“I’m sorry, Matt. I should have told you.”
I didn’t say anything. Just waited.
“She asked me to pick her up, near your house.”
“Why you?”
“We were friends, and she needed a ride, and I had a vehicle. No big deal, she said. A concert your mom wouldn’t let her go to. So I said yes.”
“She had a crush on you. We both did.”
He laughed, abashed. “Yeah, well. As I was taking her where she wanted to go, she asked me out. And I don’t know why, but I said I couldn’t. Because I was in love with someone else. And she asked who. And even though I never breathed a word of this to anyone before, I told her it was you.”
I said nothing. I shut my eyes, listened to the tiniest of fluctuations in his voice, the slightest of shifts in his smell. But McDonald’s was making a mess of me. My abilities had evaporated.
My voice was barely audible. “What’d she say to that?”
He paused. “Actually, she kind of surprised me. I thought she’d be cool with it—it’s why I told her—but she actually kinda got mad. Or, maybe not mad, but . . .”
“Silent?”
“Yeah! Exactly.”
“Silence is how Maya handles pretty much any negative emotion. It’s her defense mechanism. But I don’t know why she would have been upset by what you said. She’s not homophobic. She helped me come out, basically.”
Unless her crush on Tariq was more serious than I thought. Unless she was really, truly, deeply in love with him.
Which would explain his response to my text to him from Maya’s number—I’m going to tell.
The secret Maya knew, the thing she could reveal to the world that would ruin his life, wasn’t some horrible harm he had caused her. The secret was that he was gay.
But it still didn’t add up. Rejection from a crush is not enough to make someone run away from home. Something was still missing from the story.