I Have Lost My Way(24)

“I take it you’re not out to your family?” he asked.

“I’m not out to anyone.”

“’Cept me.”

The revelation stunned me, but in a good way, like I’d been a can of soda on a shelf, all quiet and dusty until someone had come along and shaken me. For the first time in my life, someone else knew who I was. The realization left me giddy, light-headed, drunk (or what I imagined drunk to be like).

“Except you,” I told James.

James smiled and licked his lips. “Seeing as you told me a secret, I guess I owe you one back.”

“You already told me about that singer you’re obsessed with.”

“Freya.” He shook his head. “Nah. Not her.” He cast his eyes downward, a little creep of red at his sideburns. He was embarrassed. I was a goner. “You didn’t drop that dollar bill.” He paused. “I did.”

“You did? Why?”

His eyes were slow and sleepy, coming up to greet mine like a morning sunrise. “To meet you.”

And with that, the can was shaken even harder, and the fizzy sensation grew more powerful than it had been that night with Aladdin, more powerful than it had been with all the crushes on boys real and make-believe whom I’d fantasized about over the years but never really allowed myself to imagine being with.

“Got another secret for you,” James said. He leaned across the table and beckoned me closer. His mouth was near my ear, his finger was on the tab. If he opened that can, there would be no going back.

“What?” I asked. Entire body liquid.

“I’m gonna kiss you now,” he whispered.



* * *



— — —

“I thought March was supposed to be in like a lion, out like a lamb,” James muttered that frigid day a year and a half later. “And it’s almost April. Ain’t supposed to be this cold.”

James wasn’t living in Jersey anymore, not going to school anymore, which was why we’d taken to meeting Thursdays in the city. He complained that one day a week wasn’t enough, and I didn’t like it either, but some days we were together ten hours and I justified that, amortized over a week, it wasn’t that bad.

James hated the cold in general, but particularly on our Thursdays, when it was a stinging reminder that we had no place to go. He’d been kicked out of his father’s place before I met him and had been bouncing from friend to relative ever since, first in the Heights, later on the Grand Concourse, and now in Inwood with a sympathetic aunt who mostly worked nights. “Come spend a night,” he wheedled. I wanted to. But I couldn’t.

“You could if you told your family,” James said.

“And how did that work out for you?”

It was a low blow—I’d since learned that the reason James didn’t live with his father anymore was that his father kicked him out after James told him he was gay—but it illustrated my point. And for this reason, it usually shut James up.

When it was cold outside, we’d meet and go to a café, station ourselves there for hours, and dream about being somewhere else. “One day, we’ll go to Brazil. Or to Fiji,” James would say. He’d seen pictures of tree houses in the Amazon, Fijian bungalows perched right over water as blue as a swimming pool. He’d pull up the images on his phone and show me. “You’ll be a pilot and fly us everywhere we want to go,” he said, even though James knew I’d long since put away my dreams of being a pilot, long since stopped plane-watching.

Sometimes I tried to picture us hiking through the rain forests, diving into that impossibly blue water, but it was like trying to read a book in a dream: I could never quite see it.

That cold spring day, Fiji seemed farther away than ever. I steered James toward the nearest Starbucks, knowing a hot chocolate and a warm corner were the best we could do.

But he didn’t want to go there. He didn’t want to go anywhere. “I’m tired of this,” he muttered.

Tired of this was a fist to the gut. Tired of this really meant tired of me.

“Is it because I’m black?” James asked. “Christian? Can’t do nothing about black, but I could convert. I had an uncle who was Nation of Islam for a while.”

It took me a moment to understand what he was saying. That he thought his not being a Muslim was the deal breaker with my family.

“That wouldn’t help.”

“At least I’m willing to try,” he said.

“You think they’d invite you for dinner? Be happy for us to have sleepovers?” I shook my head, angry. “My mother didn’t speak to my brother for six months after he married a white woman.”

“So you just gonna keep doing like this? Keep lying to them, and to yourself, because you’re too chickenshit to be true?”

“How am I lying to myself?”

“Everything you do is to keep playing the good, dutiful son, and it’s all bullshit.” He stopped and looked at me with a withering disgust. “Did you ever even tell your parents you wanted to be a pilot?”

“What does that have to do with anything? All little kids have things they want to be when they grow up. Abdullah wanted to be Bob the Builder! Halima wanted to be a Disney princess. It doesn’t mean that’s what you’re going to do. And anyway, it’s not like any American carrier would be eager to hire a pilot named Harun Siddiqui.”