When I got back to my apartment, Thomas was waiting in my living room. Charlie was sitting like a gremlin on his lap while my mom was asking him probing mom questions.
“And what does your mom do?”
“She’s a lawyer.”
“Ooh. Nice.”
“She’s a corporate attorney, actually.”
“That’s amazing.”
Luke churned into the room, noticed Thomas, and stuck out his meat-paw to test Thomas’s grip strength. (Thomas failed.) “What’s up?” asked Luke.
“Hello, sir,” said Thomas. I grimaced inwardly. Despite my growing acceptance of Luke, I still felt like no one should call him sir.
“What’s going on, Thomas?” I asked.
“Ooh,” said Luke. “Talking. Yes.”
Mom slapped at his shoulder with her hand. “He’s gay.”
“Niiice,” said Luke. “What? I love gay people. They’re awesome. High five.”
It took only two high fives before we made it to my room.
“First of all,” I said, “what kind of monster drops over to someone’s house without texting first?”
“Sorry.” He surveyed the state of my room and gingerly brushed off the corner of my bed before sitting on it. “I didn’t want you to say no. Or have a chance to clean up, apparently.”
“Just so you know, I wouldn’t have cleaned up, anyway.”
“I really appreciate that honesty.”
“Me too.”
He took off his glasses and wiped them against his sweater. “Sydney? What the hell.”
“Go on,” I said, knocking the dirty clothes off the only chair I had in the room.
“This isn’t like you.”
“You’ve known me for like two months.”
“And I respect you. And I think you’re a wonderful person. And I’m your friend. And I think too much of you to let you do this without a fight.”
“Nope. This is me now. I’ve joined the Dark Side. I’m a stormtrooper for Sauron now.”
His mind broke a little. “You can’t—That’s not—Sauron is an entirely different universe from Star Wars—”
“They could be the same. What if one of the planets in the Federation was Middle Earth?”
He grunted as a shelf of his brain collapsed like an Antarctic glacier. “The Federation isn’t… Look. I’m not going to let you destroy yourself.”
“How am I destroying myself?”
“Please. You’re taking advice from Sparks now? You’re friends with the other varsity members of the speech team all of a sudden? It’s painful to watch. And I have been watching you all week. You’ve let the thing you’re pretending to be take over who you really are.
“And dear God Jesus, Elijah is killing me. You know what he did this week? He just sighs. LOUDLY. All the time. It’s so annoying. It’s like he’s staring at the floor. ‘Sydney walked on floors once. We walked on floors together. I thought we were gonna walk on floors together forever.’ I can’t even with that boy.”
“I’m still walking on floors,” I protested.
“Not with him, apparently. Or not enough. Or not in the magical way you did before, I don’t know. But it’s annoying and it’s got to stop.”
I laughed a little in spite of myself. Thomas was right, of course. Everything he was saying was true. Not just the stuff about Elijah, but the things about me. I thought about my dad, about how I had finally managed to tell him the truth.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said finally. “I feel like I’m letting everybody down, but I also feel like I need to do this. Everybody wants something from me, and I don’t… I don’t really know who I am anymore.”
He nodded quietly. “Can I tell you a story? I… hid for a long time. A long time. So… when I was younger, my dad was more famous. People still recognize him sometimes, but it was constant when I was in elementary school. And I like worshipped him. I didn’t worship him because he was famous, but it just sort of reinforced my idea of who he was.
“I mean, we would be at restaurants and people would come up to him, take pictures. Strangers, right? Can you imagine being at like Red Lobster, and every time somebody recognizes your dad they come up to get a picture with him? I became hyper-aware of it—all the signs. You see somebody stare for too long and then whisper to the person next to them. And then the whole table starts staring. And somebody probably takes out a phone and tries to zoom in on him. It was crazy. But I loved him so much. And I was so scared he’d find out who I really was.
“Because I had an idea—I thought I knew what he was going to do. Obviously he was gonna disown me and throw me out of the house and at the age of twelve I’d be living on the street reciting poetry for money. I had weird ideas of what street performers did in those days, I promise you. I mean, I had already written the poems. ‘These are my living-on-the-street poems.’ Like, specifically calibrated to get people to throw down quarters. Then I figured, okay, I’ll just wait until he’s like eighty years old and then tell him when he’s about to die or whisper it at his funeral, that makes total sense.
“But it’s like—every day you’re inside this shell, this gigantic robotic shell, and the real me is so deep inside this thing, hiding, running the controls, terrified that someone’s gonna see in through the eyeholes and catch a glimpse of the tiny little person inside. And it is so heavy in that shell, it is so fucking exhausting hiding every second of every day—and you look around and you think, ‘Is that what’s going on inside everyone’s head? Are we all like this? Or is it just me?’
“And I was finally like, ‘Am I gonna do this the rest of my life?’ There was a time, when I was little, when the shell didn’t exist, you know? But I built it bit by bit, every time somebody teased me, every time a relative corrected how I was standing, or sitting, or looking, every day I built that shell. But finally—no more. We were at a barbecue, and my parents are there—this is the summer before my freshman year and I wanted to apply to Eaganville—and I finally said, ‘I may not be entirely straight.’ I was planning on saying, ‘I’m gay,’ but it came out like that. Maybe I was just hoping to confuse them a bit? And then I just had a bite of potato salad and I said, ‘This is really good, by the way.’”
He stopped there.
“Well, and then what happened?!”
“Then my dad said, ‘Your uncle Damion made the potato salad and that’s why it’s good.’” Thomas laughed. “No, um… it was so good, Sydney. It was so good. Not the potato salad but the coming out. I mean the potato salad was good, too, but—” He smiled. “I was afraid of something, for years, that was not as scary as I thought. And it took a little bit of adjustment but my mom said she loved me and my dad said he loved me and holy shit I felt a hundred pounds lighter.”
“You shoulda had that in the play,” I said.
“I did!”
“It was probably good, then.”
“Maybe not as artfully. But what I’m saying is I know you. And whatever you think you can get from listening to Sparks, you’re sacrificing too much to get it.”
I nodded.
“It’s so much better to be walking around without a shell. That means you get hurt a little more, but God, it’s so much lighter.”
He looked up at me, his dark eyes shining.
I knew what I had to do.