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“No, you aren’t.”

“Nope, I’m really not.”

“Good boy. Always be honest.” I bumped his shoulder. “I tried dressing differently too. Talking differently. Sitting differently. I stopped moving my hands so much when I spoke. Copied my dad mostly.”

I demonstrated, pinning both hands beneath my thighs and feeling the jitters even with that small gesture.

Trevor stared. “That looks painful.”

“It was spiritually devastating.” I sighed. “I even practiced making my voice deeper.”

“No!”

“Oh, yes.” I swallowed and kept the air deep in my throat. “Hello. I’m Alvin. I enjoy lawn equipment and suppressing my emotions.”

Trevor nearly choked. “Stop.”

“Do you want to hear my teenage heterosexual joke?”

“No.”

“Why’d the chicken cross the road?”

“Jesus… I don’t want to know.” Trevor shook his head.

I cleared my throat and peered into his soul as I said, “To get away from the cock.”

Trevor stared at me as I coupled the joke with my absolutely straight laughter.

“Exactly. The locker room didn’t like it either.”

“So what happened?”

That question didn’t have a funny answer.

I stared at the trees lining the lake. “I got tired. I spent years monitoring myself,” I explained. “Every word. Every movement. Every person I looked at too long. Every song I liked. Every friend I had. You start thinking everybody can see something you’re trying to hide, and it was exhausting to even breathe after a while.”

Trevor picked at the sleeve of his hoodie. “And eventually?”

“Eventually, I realized everyone was happy… except me.”

His eyebrow lifted and I shrugged.

“Meh. I was apparently very bad at heterosexuality anyway.”

That earned me half a smile.

“But mostly…” I glanced at Trevor again. “I realized I was killing myself. I looked in the mirror and didn’t see… me anymore. It was like more pieces of my soul flaked off. Little by little, I was being rewritten yet I still felt the way I did, and I started to wonder what the fuck the point of anything was. I was going to do it for real one night. End it all, but…”

Trevor swallowed, and something about his face made my chest tighten. He had been there before too.

I knew better than to ask him about it. I especially knew better than to name any memory for him. Everybody deserved to experience those dark moments themselves. Even if the rest of us could see that those scars existed from ten miles away, fuck anyone who pointed them out.

Darius’s smiling face and that damn text flashed in my mind.

DeeDee:

Hey, Alvy. You coming over soon? I miss you.