“It’s fine,” I said after a long silence. “I don’t really fit in anywhere.”
Jackson smiled—and I cheated at our contest. I snuck a glance at him. Something in him knew. He had found himself another outsider. We fit like gloves, Jackson Preacher and me. We fit like pasta and wine, football and Bud Light.
I was the pasta and wine. He was the football and Bud Light.
That first semester, Jackson and I existed in completely different worlds. As much as we crossed paths, we never really talked. He flew in the stratosphere of athletes and popular kids; I flew under the radar. I just didn’t see the point in going through the social acrobatics of making friends when I was only going to be at that school for eight months.
Still, we kept playing our un-staring contest in the halls whenever we passed each other. There was something lingering from that tour, and it was going to take a seismic shift to get it out.
That seismic shift happened right before Thanksgiving, when our football team lost the last game of the season. I was driving home after the game and stopped by 7-Eleven to pick up some salt-and-vinegar chips when I found Jackson sulking in the parking lot. I thought about just walking inside like I didn’t see him. But he had dirt marks all over his face. A dried-up river of tears running down his cheeks. He was vulnerable. So I said, “Need a hand?”
He looked up and saw it was me, and he laughed. “I’m supposed to be giving you a hand,” Jackson said, wiping a tear from his face.
“Screw the script,” I said.
He looked at me differently after those words slid out of my mouth. I don’t know what invisible hand gave me the push I needed that night to respond so smoothly, but it will forever go down as the best and worst decision I made in high school.
I comforted Jackson that night, in the grassy corner of the parking lot. I remember his hair was dark and sweaty. I don’t know how long we were talking, only that I got to see Jackson in all his multitudes. I saw him, blond and brown-haired, stoic and sensitive, a guy who plays football but who maybe, just maybe, plays for the other team, too.
When I walked him over to his car, he put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed tight. “Remember that thing you were telling me when we met,” he said softly, “about not really fitting in anywhere?” My eyes grew wide. I stared right at him, his green eyes, and he was staring back at me. “I feel that way, too.”
And right there, the world shifted.
I wish I could just slip back into that little crack in the universe, that guilt-free space where I wanted Jackson Preacher’s touch and nothing else. A week later, I was sitting in the passenger seat of his car, fumbling with my sweaty fingers. I was quiet. Jackson was quiet. The radio was humming softly, something poppy. He later told me he kept expecting me to make a move, since, in a way, I had made the first one, but I didn’t have any more moves left in me. When he finally put a hand on my shaking leg and leaned in to kiss me, I pulled back. That really scared the shit out of Jackson. He looked like he wanted to die right there. But I needed that second, that frozen moment in time, to say goodbye to my old life. The way you might take one last look at your house after the moving boxes are all packed up. That’s all I needed. A second. When I finally pressed my lips against his, I swear, I could feel us both exhaling. Jackson taught me how to breathe. A special method of breathing that involved drowning, because, boy, was he a slobbery kisser.
I was so happy between Thanksgiving and the middle of March, when I had Jackson and not much else. I should have known Ben and Jake would smell my happiness like a shark smells blood.
Ben and Jake had singled me out from day one at my new school. Much like those “random” security checks at the airport, they picked on me without any probable cause. I was brown, and I was there.
One morning, they deviated from their routine cafeteria traffic stop and caught up with me at my locker. Ben flashed a phone in front of my face.
“We know what you’re up to, Jihadi,” Jake said, gesturing at the picture on the phone. I took a closer look, and when I made out what it was, I tried to steal the phone from his hand. Jake grabbed my wrist.
It was a picture of Jackson and me kissing in his car.
Ben leaned in closer and went, “You wouldn’t want us to smear your faggy little secret across town, would you, Amir Bin Laden? Wouldn’t look so great for your people.”
Their words stung so hard that I didn’t even register that they had followed Jackson and me into the empty parking lot where we hooked up when both our parents were home. I didn’t even get a good look at the photo. It’s hard looking at a photo like that, at the face of the first boy you’ve ever kissed, without imagining the creepy stare of the two boys who would blackmail you with the most intimate detail of your life.
“One thousand dollars of your Wiki fortune, and we won’t show this shit to your parents,” Jake said. He nudged Ben, who nodded. Looking at them, it hit me that they were dead serious: they really did believe I was a “Wiki millionaire.”
The thing is, I’m actually very legit in the Wikipedia world, to the point where I actually do receive offers to make and edit pages for money. It started in tenth grade, when a friend’s mom wanted to hire a Wikipedia editor to make a page for her lingerie start-up. My friend commented on the Facebook post, “Amir!!” and the rest was history. I didn’t take the offer, or any of the offers that followed. Paid articles are strictly forbidden in the Wikipedia terms of use. But when Ben and Jake once caught me editing the Real Housewives of New Jersey page in homeroom, I didn’t think it would hurt to pretend I got paid. It’s a lot cooler to say “I do this for money” than “I do this because I find the power of crowdsourcing and the democratization of information really sexy.”
I didn’t have the kind of money they wanted. I begged Ben and Jake to believe me, but they refused. Especially Jake. He was weirdly insistent about the whole thing. It was like he was desperately clinging to this fantasy notion that I was actually a Wikipedia millionaire.
It was less of an explosion, and more of a steady crumbling inside of me, when I realized what had just happened.
All the meticulous planning I had put into how I would come out to my parents, the years I spent closeted but knowing I had to come out the right way: poof. It was dust in the wind. Ben and Jake were very clear: if I didn’t get them the money in one month, I was fucked.
There was one more condition: “Don’t go telling your gay lover about our deal,” Ben added. “If anyone finds out about this, this shit’s going straight to your parents.”
Ben and Jake bulldozed right through the fortress I’d spent years building around my secret.
When you’re gay, you grow up doing a lot of mental math. Your brain is basically a big rainbow scoreboard, logging every little thing your parents say—their offhand remarks, the way they react to two men holding hands at the mall or the latest Nike commercial with a queer couple in it. You assign each event a point value. Plus or minus. When the time comes, you tally up all the points—and believe me, you don’t forget a single one—and based on the final score, you decide what your coming out is going to look like.