“Okay…” I said. “But there’s no message.”
“There is!” Cam was really getting excited now. He grabbed a pencil and started writing something on a piece of scrap paper. No, he wasn’t writing. He was drawing. He made the four pigpen grids exactly as they’re supposed to be drawn and filled them with all the correct letters. Then he turned again to the grids in the book and the strange numbers placed inside them.
Cam touched a corner of the page softly, his fingertip balanced on the edge. I remember seeing it, his finger pressing into the paper, and feeling the strangest touch on my lower back. Like my skin was suddenly the book, and he was reading it. I turned away and stared at the wall.
He cleared his throat. “One and four,” he said, lassoing myattention back to the cipher. “They’re both in the place whereAgoes in the pigpen grid.” He looked at me. “What do you want to bet thatAis the first and fourth letter in the message?”
I didn’t say anything. Didn’t bet anything against it. Which turned out to be pretty wise, since a few minutes later, Cam’s idea gave way to an entire decoded sentence:
A Giant Btwn Streets
As I look at the corner with the pigpen cipher now, the solution seems glaringly obvious. But isn’t that the way it always goes with riddles and codes? Hindsight’s twenty-twenty, and foresight is double cataracts with melted sunscreen running into your eyes.
Not for Cam, I think miserably. Cam understood the puzzle right away. So why wouldn’t he understand the rest of this too?
With the weight of Gabriel, Sunny, and Julia’s presence sitting heavy on my shoulders, I’m suddenly overcome with an intense wave of imposter syndrome. I didn’t even help solve the one cipher we managed to crack from the book. Cam’s going to unlock this entire thing while we hang out in a basement, fiddling around on web archives.
“You haven’t taken a breath in, like, two minutes,” Sunny murmurs.
I make a “Pah!” sound, mostly to annoy Sunny, and blink the pages back into focus.
The pigpen cipher seems easy now, but not just because Cam solved it. It was the only grid of its kind in the entire book. None of the other numbers in this chapter are in pigpen grids. Out of six pages, the other five contain three-dimensional-looking Rubik’s Cubes, each filled with random numbers. The last Rubik’s Cube is partially covered, but that’s the only clue we get about what they could mean. They don’t have any blanks. None of the numbers are doubles. There are no dots, orX’s, or anything like that. It looks like a bunch of sudoku games completed by someone who has no idea how to actually play sudoku.
I feel like I’m on a Slip ’n Slide covered with baby oil as my brain scrambles to make sense of all this. I try flattening the information into math terms. Six pages in the chapter. Five Rubik’s Cubes, plus a pigpen cipher. Three sides are visible on four of the cubes. Then just a side and a half are visible on the fifth. Nine numbers per side. So nine…times three…times four…plus nine and six equals…
Shit.
Everything I’m saying is complete nonsense. I literally have no idea what any of these numbers mean.
I shove my head into my arms. “What if I’m not gay enough for this?” I groan.
“Excuse me, what now?” Gabriel prods my elbow.
I look up. “There was this weird conversation online. It’s how I found the website in the first place. Basically, one person asked if another person was gay—or, no, if they were a ‘friend of Dorothy,’ but that’s basically the same thing—and when the other person hinted that, yes, they were gay, the first person said, ‘Right answer,’ and sent them the link.”
The others only stare at me, bewildered.
“So?” Sunny asks after a moment.
“So,” I say, “maybe you have to be super gay to figure this whole stupid thing out!”
“Aren’t you supposed to be, like, the gayest person at this school?” Sunny asks.
Yes, I want to snap.Obviously.But a weird knot catches in my stomach. I’m the co-chair of GSA. I came out by myself as a sophomore. If Benjamin Gates was the ideal headstrong American, then I should absolutely be the ideal nerdy gay teen. I’m basically the Benjamin Gates of gaying!
Except…sometimes it feels like I’m not really the gay queen everyone at school thinks I am. When I first came out as a sophomore, it was as a lesbian. I made a whole poster board presentation on why the acronym LGBTQ+ starts with the letterL. I love the specific history of lesbians in the gay rights movement. How, as a group, they’ve stood up for all identities under the queer umbrella. How Anne Kronenberg, Harvey Milk’s campaign manager, was a lesbian. Lesbians are socompletely badass. They use their privilege the way it’s meant to be used to help and protect others. They’ve been fearless when they’ve had so much to lose. Being a part of that group, considering myself in line with heroic lesbian trailblazers, felt so validating and powerful during my sophomore year.
Cam’s face suddenly blooms in my memory. The way he looked when he came into school junior year with his short hair. The way he grinned as he told everyone he was trans. My stomach flops. I feel so completely lost about everything.
“Well, I’m sort of gay too, if that counts,” Gabriel says. “So we can add up my gay to your gay.”
We all turn to him.
“Is this some kind of gay superhero team-up?” I ask. God, maybe we reallyareGreta Gerwig’s version of the Avengers.
Gabriel splays his hands. “You’re the one who said that maybe you weren’t gay enough! I don’t know!” He pauses, looking at each of us in our silence.
“I haven’t done anything,” he adds quietly. “With anyone. I just feel like Icouldbe swayed by a really hot guy. Like if Nico Hiraga ever slid into my DMs…”
