“Thank you, sir.”

  He hesitates. “I love you.”

  Now, my dad never says those words. I’ve never heard them come out of his mouth, not once. Never to my mom. Never to my brother. Never to me.

  With my mom, before everything changed, she’d say it when she hugged me or told me good night, the sort of I love you that almost sounds like the beginning of a song or a long poem, with that smile of hers—a real one, not the fake smile she likes to give all the time now—so I’d know that, yes, my mom loves me, and always will love me, no matter what.

  With Khalid, he used to say it quick, almost like a joke we shared, just between us. Love you, bro! He didn’t say it all the time, but he did before the soccer championship when he had to go to Mississippi for a weekend, and when he had to go to Washington, DC, for his debate team. He’d stick his hand in my hair and ruffle up the already-tangled curls with a laugh. Love you!

  But my dad? I’ve never once heard those words come from his mouth. I freeze solid when I hear him say it. I have no clue what to do.

  My dad lets go of me and looks away without another word, his truck still rumbling. I slide out of my seat and onto the ground and slam the door shut behind me. My dad’s truck rolls away, and I stand there like I plan on growing roots from the bottoms of my feet. Should I have said it back? It’d feel weird, telling my dad something like that. It’s not like it isn’t true. Of course I love my dad. But that’s just the sort of thing you don’t say. At least, it isn’t the sort of thing we say to each other.

  Out of nowhere, someone jumps on my back and almost pitches me forward into the dirt.

  I spin around. “Darrell!”

  He cackles, bending over to heave a laugh. Darrell’s always laughing. Hearing his laugh used to make me want to laugh right along with him, but these days, I just want to ask him why he thinks everything’s so funny all the time.

  Anthony is also there, backpack slung over his shoulder. “Why’re you just standing here?” he asks, and we start walking, past the basketball court and over the brown-green field of grass to the bench where everyone sits before class. Well, not everyone. Camille decided that this bench was only for the people she likes, and whenever anyone else tries to sit down, Camille snaps at them to get on up and leave. I know it isn’t very nice, but I don’t want to get into a fight with her about it, so I just shut my mouth and sit down with the rest of them.

  Okay, so here’s the rundown: There’s Darrell, who’s shorter than everyone around but will beat anyone at basketball (and then laugh in their face when he’s won). There’s Anthony, who is white and probably the most mature, on account of the fact he’s fourteen and was held back because he wasn’t doing his homework (he says he’s too busy helping out his dad with the crawfishing), but he’s also the kind of person who’ll listen and won’t judge or be mean for any reason. There’s Breanna, who’s taller than all of us, but I don’t know much else about her, except that she’s Camille’s best friend. There’s Camille, who says she’s the prettiest girl in our class because she’s light-skinned and has eyes that aren’t brown … but I secretly think Jasmine is even prettier. Jasmine has skin and eyes as dark as Lupita Nyong’o and thick hair that fans out like a halo. Her eyes turn up at the corners and are lined by thick eyelashes. She doesn’t try too hard to stand out. That’s what I like most about her.

  She sits on top of the bench, her Converses on the seat. I sit down beside her.

  “How’re you?” she asks, and I also like how she asks this question, because she doesn’t mean it in an are you okay now that your brother’s dead? way. She means it in a you can tell me anything you want to when you’re ready way.

  I tell her I’m okay, and we start talking about our favorite anime shows, and Darrell interrupts by making kissing sounds.

  “Stop that, Darrell, you’re so annoying!” Camille says.

  “I’m not annoying,” he yells. “You’re annoying!”

  She puts her hands on her hips. “Good job, Darrell. Great comeback.”

  Darrell’s face turns purple, and it’s obvious that he’s trying to come up with a better response. Camille smirks. “Don’t hurt yourself, now!”

  Jasmine rolls her eyes, but I can feel embarrassment radiating from her, because it’s radiating from me, too. Can’t a guy and a girl just be friends without everyone thinking they’re boyfriend and girlfriend? Jasmine looks at me like she’s thinking the same exact thing.

  But then I wonder: Does Jasmine want to go out with me? I’ve never had a girlfriend before. I don’t think Jasmine’s ever had a boyfriend before. If we like each other, is that what we’re supposed to do? What’s the difference between liking Jasmine as a friend and liking Jasmine as a girlfriend? And if we do start going out—what would that mean? That we’d have to kiss and hold hands and slow dance at the winter formal? Maybe I can ask Khalid on our walk back home from school—the girls always like him, always flock around him and ask him out on dates and—

  And then I remember, and an invisible hand reaches right into my chest and clutches my heart so hard it stops.

  The pain must be all across my face, because Jasmine whispers, “Are you okay, King?”

  “Yes,” I say, praying she doesn’t say another word—I don’t want any attention on me, not right now, not when I can feel my eyes starting to sting from the salt. My prayers are answered, because Jasmine nods and leaves it alone. I don’t have much to worry about anyway—the others are too busy having their fun.

  “Leave them alone, Darrell,” Camille says, smacking his arm. “You’re just jealous.”

  He puts a hand to his chest in mock offense. “Me? Jealous?”

  “Yes!”

  He’s actually offended this time. “Of what?”

  “You’re jealous because no one likes you.” Camille puts her hands on her hips with a smirk. “Well, except Breanna.”

  Breanna blinks rapid-fire. “What? No. I don’t—I mean, I don’t like—”

  There’s a good, long silence. Breanna snatches up her backpack and rushes away. Darrell raises an eyebrow. “Wait, Breanna likes me? We’d look horrible together! She’s way too tall!”

  “No,” Camille says, “you’re way too short.”

  That really gets Darrell going. “There are plenty of short men, you know. Bruno Mars, Kevin Hart—”

  Jasmine shakes her head, standing up from the bench. “That wasn’t nice, Camille.”

  “—Aziz Ansari, and then there’s that guy from all the Harry Potter movies—”

  Camille shrugs. “What? Nothing’s going to happen if she just keeps her crush to herself.”

  “But it wasn’t your secret to tell,” Jasmine says.

  Camille narrows her eyes. She doesn’t like it very much when people argue with her. But Jasmine only shakes her head again and says she’s going to find Breanna. She runs off, backpack slapping her back. Darrell slides up onto the bench beside me, taking her place.

  “There’s no way Breanna likes me,” he says. “Isn’t she too tall, King?”

  “I don’t know.” I can still feel tears built up in my throat. I swallow them down, playing with the zipper on my backpack. “Why should something like that matter?”

  He frowns. “Because it does. Of course it matters. The guy is supposed to be taller than the girl.”

  I don’t like arguments. I don’t like to say anything unless someone asks me to. So I don’t know why the next words shoot out of my mouth the way they do. “Says who?”

  Darrell squints his eyes at me. “What’s with you today?”

  I don’t answer him. I catch Anthony watching me, but he looks away, saying he should get to the library before class. He leaves, so it’s just me, Darrell, and Camille.

  “Of course it matters,” Darrell says.

  “Hey,” Camille tells us, sitting down on the seat. “Hey, look. It’s that Sanders kid.”

  I keep playing with my backpack’s zipper, and I don’t look up. This is one of Camille’s favorite games—making fun of Mikey Sanders’s little brother, Sandy Sanders. I never like hearing the sorts of things Camille has to say about him.

  “God, he’s so weird,” she says with a grin. “And so skinny and pale. He doesn’t even have to wear a KKK sheet. He can just go to a rally like that, and he’ll fit right in.”

  Darrell cracks up at that one, even though she’s said it before.

  “And guess what?” she says, looking up at us. “I heard from Nina who heard from Zach that Sandy went to the library yesterday.”

  “So?” Darrell says.

  “So,” she says, all drawn-out and slow, “guess what section they saw him in?”

  “I don’t know,” Darrell says, impatient. “Just say it.”

  “He was looking at books for gay people,” she whispers, grin just about to burst.

  Darrell leans forward so fast I think he’s about to fall from his seat. “No, wait, really?”

  “Yes, really! He was looking at a book with gay boys in it.”

  “I heard that he might be gay,” Darrell says. “I heard that from Lonnie last year. Like, the kid outright said it or something.”

  “Nuh-uh,” Camille says. “I would’ve heard about that.”

  I don’t know why I say it. I don’t know what takes over me. “Yeah,” I say, “he’s gay.”

  Camille and Darrell look at me.

  I can hear Jasmine’s words—it’s not my secret to tell—but I look at my backpack again, pulling the zipper back and forth. “He told me himself once.”

  Camille’s voice shrieks in my ear. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you say anything about it?”

  I really wish I’d kept my mouth shut, the way I usually do. “It didn’t seem like a big deal.”

  “It’s a big deal if you’re a—” and here, Darrell says a word that I’d never say, never in a million years, no matter how I feel about gay people.

  “And it’s not fair if you don’t tell anyone,” Camille says. “People deserve to know something like that.”

  I should just be quiet, I know that I should. “Why would that be anyone’s business?”

  The bell rings. Darrell jumps down from the bench. “You’re acting so weird today.”

  Camille stands up, too, and they begin walking, but I just stay sitting where I am. Am I any weirder now than I was yesterday or the day before that?

  “Come on, King!” Camille yells after me.

  I stand up and sling my backpack over my shoulder. As I’m walking, I see Sandy Sanders staring my way from across the field—but when I catch him looking, he practically runs off to class.

  Sandy isn’t even his real name. It’s Charles. “Charlie” should probably be what everyone calls him, same way everyone calls his brother, Michael, “Mikey.” But somehow, the name Sandy stuck, and that’s what everyone knows him by. He hates his name—not Sandy, but Sanders—and everything that name means in this town.

  That’s the first thing we’d spoken about months ago—really spoken about, not just about favorite shows and stuff, but about something important. There was that, and the fact that we both loved anime, same as me and Jasmine, and there was also the fact that Sandy didn’t particularly hate this town, same way as me, even though everyone else is eager to get out of here and leave for New Orleans or Atlanta or Miami. There were other things we’d talk about on our walks home from school. The sorts of people we wanted to be. The sorts of things we wanted to do. Neither of us were sure, so we’d tell each other our ideas, spitting them out as soon as they came to our heads.

  “Bakery chef.”

  “Marine biologist.”

  “Technician—I’d code apps and stuff.”

  “Beekeeper.”

  I laughed. “Is that a real job?”

  He shrugged, and we’d keep going like that for hours sometimes.

  But the last conversation I had with Sandy Sanders was when I told him I couldn’t be his friend anymore.

  It’s the conversation I think about every time I see him now.

  I wonder what it’d be like if I hadn’t told him we needed to stop speaking to each other. Wonder if I should go to him and apologize so we could keep talking on our walks back from school like we used to.

  But I know I can’t be his friend, because that’s what my brother told me.

  Khalid actually hadn’t minded that much, even knowing Sandy is Mikey’s little brother. It was when he overheard what Sandy had to say one evening when we were sitting in my tent in the backyard that my brother told me that same night, long after we’d turned out the lights, that I should stay away from Sandy Sanders.

  “You don’t want anyone to think you’re gay, too, do you?”

  That’s what he said. That’s what sent me straight to Sandy Sanders the next day. What made me tell him I didn’t want to be his friend anymore. Why I still can’t talk to him. I can’t be Sandy’s friend, knowing that my brother wouldn’t have wanted me to be.

  I wrote down the conversations my brother and I had when he was asleep late at night. I kept everything we said in a notebook that I’d been using for science class. The first half is full of facts about evolution. The second half is stuff my brother and I told each other. I keep the journal under the mattress, where no one will go looking for it. I pick it up and read through some of the entries at night, when I want to pretend I can still hear my brother’s voice.

  “The sun rises up over the horizon like a mountain, but it doesn’t burn. You can swim. The sunlight is like the sea. You can float on top of the sunrise. Stars are stepping-stones. Jump from one to the next.”

  I ask him if I might fall.

  “No, don’t fall.” He said this so loud I thought he’d wake himself up. “I’ll catch you.”

  I ask him if he knows who he’s speaking to.

  He mumbles, turns over in his sleep. “The sky is beneath you, King.”

  That’s all he says for the rest of the night.

  Darrell always sleeps in the back of the classroom, since he says he’ll be going pro and so doesn’t need to know math, and Camille and Breanna sit in the corner by the window so they can gossip about the people passing down below, but I sit up front with Jasmine, because I know I need good grades if I want to go to college, and because I actually like to learn most of the time.

  The teacher gives the class an assignment, and Jasmine and I finish before everyone else. We write notes to each other so we won’t get in trouble for talking, and so the teacher won’t take our phones away if she catches us texting.

  I write, One Piece is way better than Naruto and Bleach.

  She writes, NO IT’S NOT!

  The older stuff is better anyway. Cowboy Bebop is cool. And so is Samurai Champloo.

  Your mom and dad let you watch those? Mine found out there’s violence and said I couldn’t watch them.

  They don’t know I watch them. I stream online. My brother was the one who taught me that trick. He showed me the older series in the first place. But I don’t tell Jasmine that.

  She takes back the piece of paper and sits holding it for so long that I think she got bored, so I pull out a book from English to get started on the homework assignment early—when she slips the paper onto my desk again.

  Can I ask you something?

  Jasmine has the prettiest cursive handwriting, even though I don’t know if I’m allowed to think something like that, since I’m a boy, and my dad always told me and my brother that boys don’t like things that are pretty, like flowers and dresses and cursive writing. Jasmine wrote this question out slowly, carefully, so it’s even curlier than usual.

  I write back to her: Yeah.

  She pauses for a long time, staring down at the paper we’ve been passing back and forth, before she scribbles out something and gives the note back to me.

  Why don’t you talk to Sandy anymore?

  It’s my turn to stare at the piece of paper. We used to be the best of friends, the three of us. Sandy saw me sketching Naruto during free period one day, and he told me my drawing was good, and even though I knew he was the little brother of Mikey Sanders, I told him thank you. We kept talking—about Naruto and Bleach and all the anime we’d seen. I’d already been sitting with Jasmine at Camille’s bench since the start of the school year, but I had no idea she liked anime until she overheard and asked if she could sit with us. It became a habit for six whole months, the three of us sitting together during our free period, talking about anime and manga. We even tried to make a manga together, but it wasn’t very good.

  Our conversations eventually branched out, until it was the three of us talking about anything and everything for forty-five minutes at ten o’clock every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning. Sandy and I started walking home together in the afternoons, Sandy sometimes coming over so we could keep talking in the tent I keep in the backyard.

  But that was all before. Before Khalid told me to stay away from Sandy, before Khalid left his body behind like a second skin. Now Khalid is gone, and Sandy hasn’t come back to our free period ever again.

  Jasmine’s never asked me why I stopped talking to Sandy, not once. She could tell something was wrong, I knew she could, but she doesn’t like to be rude and stick her nose where it doesn’t belong. I’ve seen her talking to Sandy sometimes, eating together at lunch when she isn’t eating with me and Camille and all the others. But it’s never me, Sandy, and Jasmine anymore.

  The teacher says time’s up for the assignment, so I pass the paper back to Jasmine with a shrug, happy for the excuse not to tell her a thing. What will Jasmine think if I tell her I can’t be Sandy’s friend anymore because he’s gay? Jasmine would say that’s ignorant of me. What’s worse is that I know full well that she’d be exactly right.

  When the bell rings, we stuff our notebooks and pencils into our backpacks and file out of the classroom door. The hallways are lined with rusting lockers and sticky yellow tiles and lights that glare down from the ceiling, almost as bright as the sun itself. I can tell Jasmine’s thinking hard, her face all scrunched up and her balled fists clutching her backpack straps tight. I don’t want to talk about me and Sandy at all, no, not one single bit, so I almost manage to make up some reason I have to run ahead to our next class, but Jasmine’s always been quick to catch on to me and my plans. She speaks before I can say a word.

 

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