THE PUNGENT SMELL OF BOILING kale and tofu had overtaken the kitchen, where my mom was preparing dinner from a cookbook called The Psycho-Spiritual Diet and Lifestyle.

“But that’s the thing about lyrical dance, Marley—if we can’t debate it, then why does it exist at all?” she asked, not pausing for me to answer before launching into an exhausting lecture on the importance of freethinking and pirouettes. After a solid ten minutes, she finally paused, tossing a pinch of Himalayan pink salt crystals and rosemary grown in our backyard into the kale, then asked me about my first day of school.

I shrugged. “It was fine.”

“Marley, you know how Sharon and I feel about empty words like fine,” my father said, appearing in the doorway and scratching his long gray beard like a cartoon version of the novelist he actually was. My parents had strict disdain for words like fine or nice or okay. They also asked to be addressed by their first names.

In a nutshell, they were nuts.

“In that case, my day was overwhelming in its uneventful demeanor. Better?” I replied, to their delight. My parents could be a bit much when it came to their freethinking “intellectual” routine, but they meant well and loved me almost as much as they loved a well-rounded vocabulary.

“Your problem, Marley, is that you don’t have a force that drives you,” my mother said, launching into yet another dissection of my outlook on life. This was a common pastime of both my parents. “Sculpture, mixed media, advanced Pilates, anything. Every day, you need something to contribute to the world and be excited to wake up for.”

I didn’t have the heart or energy to explain to my mother that neither sculpture nor mixed media were high school activities (nor Pilates, for that matter), but I understood her point all too well. For my entire life I’d been the kid in class with no label. There was the football jock, the pretty cheerleader, the science weirdo, the cross-country star, the funny one, the bully, the smelly girl, the smelly boy, the band geek, the drama geek, the general all-around geek, and so on. In order to solidify your place in the community that is any form of school, you needed a label, and despite my best efforts, I’d never found one. Sure, there was the gay thing, but at this point being gay was like being a Pisces. By which I mean: common, and oftentimes emotionally unstable.

Why can’t sarcasm and global resentment be a passion? I asked myself inside my head.

I cut the conversation with my parents short and beelined for my bedroom … where I immediately googled Reverend Jim son. I don’t know what I was hoping to discover about this kid I had so quickly become obsessed with. It took a while before Google served any help, since the first few hundred results were from bloggers in rebel flag T-shirts celebrating Reverend Jim as the son of God.

Finally, I found a biography of Reverend Jim’s family, complete with a heavily staged family portrait in front of an enormous cross that had been painted red, white, and blue. Reverend Jim had a botoxed and chemically orange-colored face with a toupee so big it could’ve been considered its own species. His wife, Angela, had the biggest and fakest smile to ever be seen on a human being outside of paid amusement park performers.

Their only son, however, appeared normal.

And he had a name.

Christopher.

Even though he was stuck in a photo with the words Jesus Junkies written in calligraphy above his head, he looked just as cute as he had at school that morning. Unlike his parents’, his smile seemed genuine and kind.

I clicked on a clip of Reverend Jim speaking to thousands of rabid fans at one of his many conventions. In between plugging his countless books and DVDs, he tore into America’s “road to ruin paved in sin.” The camera panned around to the audience of devotees frothing at every judgmental word.

The entire time Christopher sat onstage with his mother, behind his dad. He didn’t respond to any of the theatrics, even though his mom kept jumping out of her chair and waving her arms around like she was afraid the air was attacking her.

I paused the clip at a moment where Christopher was close up in the frame, and stared into his eyes. He was a bit younger in the clip but he looked pretty much the same. I didn’t know what I was hoping to find, but I was definitely searching for something, as if staring hard enough would tell me whether or not he liked boys. Or, more accurately, if it was possible that I could convince him to like me. I don’t know what it was, but I could tell he wasn’t like his parents. And not just because I thought he was cute … although maybe that played a large part of it. But, regardless, I could feel it in my gut.

He was different. And I was determined to find out how.