The kid in the cafeteria, sixteen and scrawny, trying to fold himself into a smaller shape so nobody noticed him, that kid had been so lonely the loneliness had its own weight. I could still find that weight if I went looking. Most days I didn’t go looking.
I thought about how far I’d come. The body, the confidence, the whole life. The trick had been not stopping long enough to look at it.
There was the other thing, too. The thing about waking up alone, no matter who’d been in the bed the night before. It always showed up at the back end of these brunches, the way a guest you didn’t invite shows up after the food’s already cold, and I let it sit for the count I’d trained myself to. One. Two. Then I was past it, swerving around it on muscle memory.
“We found each other. That’s how we got here.”
“True.” Sierra was quiet a beat. “I don’t know what I would’ve done without you guys.”
“Probably something boring and heteronormative.” Calliope waved her fork. “We saved you from a life of minivans and PTA meetings.”
We laughed, and the moment passed. But later, walking home through the Sunday quiet, I couldn’t quite let it go.
How did we get here?
It started in junior year. Back when I was a different person in a different body, before I’d figured out how to armor myself in muscle and charm.
It started with three girls who saw me when I was still learning how to be seen.
Chapter two
Eight Years Earlier
The cafeteria smelled like industrial mac and cheese.
I sat at the corner table by the windows. Nobody wanted it because the sun hit you straight in the face after eleven and you couldn’t see your own food. I’d taken it on purpose. Being lit up in the corner felt safer than sitting in the middle where people could come at you from any angle, and where the angles included the back of your head.
Ma had packed me arroz con pollo. Again. I loved it. She made it on Sundays with extra sofrito, the way her mother had made it before her. But the smell announced me to a room of people whose lunches did not announce them. The white kids ate sad turkey sandwiches on Wonder Bread and looked at my Tupperware like it was a specimen from the back of someone’s basement.
Sixteen. Gay. Wrists that looked breakable if I held my backpack wrong. Alone.
Well. Mostly.
Near the vending machines stood a girl with twilight-blue eyes and acamera around her neck. Sierra Turner. She was photographing the lunch ladies’ hands while they scooped mashed potatoes. The mechanical patience of people who had given up on joy years earlier.
Sierra Turner stayed on my radar. Hard not to. She saw things nobody else looked at. The kid picking at the peeling paint on the wall. The janitor dancing when he thought he was alone. Once, in October, she had spent a whole lunch period photographing the back of someone’s neck, and the photo turned up in the school’s literary magazine three months later and was probably the best thing in the issue.
She was also queer. The way she held herself, the way her eyes lingered on the softball captain a beat too long. It took one to know one, and I knew one.
“Is this seat taken, or are you hoarding it for your imaginary friends?”
A girl stood over me. Sharp eyeliner. Black boots that had been through something. The expression on a person daring me to fumble a single word. She didn’t wait for an answer. She just dropped into the chair across from me like she’d already decided the table was hers.
“I’m Raven.” She pulled out a Tupperware container of something black. Was that rice? “Before you ask, yes, it’s squid ink. No, I’m not in a cult. Maybe.”
I blinked. “Uh, Jett.”
“I know who you are.” She stabbed her fork into the rice. “You’re the guy who got shoved into a locker last week by Brad Dickhead and his merry band of assholes.”
The heat in my neck was the kind that goes all the way to the ears. Brad Mitchell and his friends had cornered me after gym class on a Wednesday. He’d made some comment about me checking out guys in the locker room. I hadn’t been, but also, so what if I had? He decided a locker was where I should go to think about it. I had barely fit. My too-thin frame folded like paper, the way it folded into anywhere people wanted to put it, while they laughed.
It wasn’t the first time. It wouldn’t be the last either, probably. Small made me an easy target, and gay made me an obvious one.
“His name’s Brad Mitchell,” I muttered.
“I know what I said.” Raven’s eyes flicked to my lunch. “Your mom make that?”
“Yeah.”
