Chapter 1
“My dad’s such an asshole,” Daniel said.
The boy—the young man—was sitting in a cluster of teens: a girl with her head shaved, a different girl with her hair dyed green, a boy with a T-shirt that said GAY THE PRAY AWAY, and a long-limbed boy with doe eyes.
Daniel was leaning against this last boy’s shoulder in a way that might have been friendly or might have been more than friendly; it was impossible to tell.
Tean, observing from the hall, suspected that might be the point.
In response to Daniel’s announcement the other kids stirred up in excitement.
“My dad’s so toxic,” the boy in the T-shirt said.
The girl with the shaved head said, “My mom wants me to take sewing lessons. Seriously—lessons!”
The girl with her hair dyed green and the doe-eyed boy both began to speak at the same time, and the conversation picked up steam the teens vented what sounded—to Tean, anyway—their versions of typical teenage complaints: my parents don’t understand me, my parents are so dumb, my parents are so mean.
On the other hand, at Rainbow House—a support center for queer teens—those complaints tended to have more substance behind them.
“Maybe I should take sewing lessons,” Jem said as he joined Tean at the doorway.
“Maybe you should,” Tean said. He chose not to bring up the, quote, matching pajamas Jem had tried to make for him and Scipio.
“We got that free sewing machine.”
“We don’t know that it was free.”
“Babe.” Jem’s groan was mostly exasperation. “It was sitting on the curb. It’s not like I broke into an old lady’s house and mugged her.”
“I’m just saying, we don’t know. We’ll never know.
Maybe whoever owned it sold it for—for soup money, and it was one of those Facebook Marketplace things, and she got her grandson to carry it down to the curb, and then you took it, and the deal fell through, and she didn’t get any soup money, and she called her grandson for help, but he couldn’t do anything because he hurt his back carrying it down to the curb, and she was too proud to ask anyone else for help, so she probably starved to death. ”
Jem slurped from a McDonald’s cup for a few moments, his blond eyebrows knitted together. And then, holding up a finger, he said, “What if it was a man?”
“What?”
“What if it was a man who owned the sewing machine and put it down by the curb?”
Tean stared at him.
“Ah ha!” Jem shouted. When the teens turned to look at him, Jem announced, “Tean’s making sexist assumptions!”
Five sets of judgmental eyes settled on Tean.
“I didn’t—” He made himself stop because he was an adult.
But it felt like a long time before the girl with the shaved head made a sound of disgust and said, “Are you eavesdropping on us?”
“Uh, no,” Tean said. “Just, you know, waiting for the show to—”
“Because this place isn’t for adults.”
“No problem,” Jem said, and he caught Tean’s arm and tugged him away from the room.
“I wasn’t making sexist assumptions,” Tean whispered furiously, wrenching his arm free. “You were the one talking about breaking into an old lady’s house and—”
Too late, Tean saw the drag queen.
She was enormous—with the heels, well over six and a half feet tall, and built like a ranch hand. She wore a magenta wig and a velveteen suit, and she looked like if one of those ladies from Sex in the City had undergone plastic surgery with catastrophic results.
She must have caught the part of what Tean was saying because she slowed and gave them a once-over.
Face heating, Tean mumbled, “That was out of context—”
“The context,” Jem said brightly, “is that we didn’t rob an old lady.”
And because this was Jem, the drag queen laughed. She ran her index finger over Jem’s coat and said, “Aren’t you a snack?” Then, to Tean, she added in a cold voice, “Show starts in ten minutes. If I were you, I’d sit in the back.”
Tean couldn’t help himself; as soon as the drag queen was gone, he blurted, “That’s so unfair.”
“Why?” Jem was inspecting his coat as though seeing it for the first time. “I am a snack. I mean, I am, right? You’d tell me if I wasn’t?”
“If I’d said we didn’t rob an old lady, she would have—I don’t know, snapped me in half and used me like a toothpick.”
“People like me,” Jem said with a shrug. He turned a big smile on Tean. “Don’t worry, babe. People like you too.”
“No, people don’t like me. People dislike me.”
“That’s crazy,” Jem said. “People are obsessed with you.”
“No, they’re not. People are unobsessed with me.”
“I’m obsessed with you.” Jem ticked the list off his fingers. “Scipio’s obsessed with you. Daniel’s obsessed with you.”
“Daniel just looked at me like I was the human equivalent of a dirty gym sock!”
“But that’s only because you were being sexist. He still loves you.”
“I wasn’t being sexist!”
“That’s what every straight, White, cis man says,” the girl with the shaved head said as she led the other teens into the hallway.
“But I’m not straight or White—” Tean began. But Jem cleared his throat, and Tean cut himself off.
The teenagers stalked past them with more dirty looks for Tean.
Daniel slowed as he passed, then stopped.
The doe-eyed boy glanced over his shoulder and reached back, twiddling his fingers low—as though somehow that might make the gesture invisible to everyone else.
A hint of pink bloomed in Daniel’s cheeks, but he only shook his head, and the doe-eyed boy frowned and went on.
In the last four months, a lot had changed about the boy standing in front of them.
He was continuing to grow, of course—his shoulders broadening, his face taking on definition and structure as baby fat melted away, his voice cracking at unexpected moments.
But it was more than that. He wore glitter on his cheeks—which, Tean hadn’t failed to observe, he had applied after his dad had dropped him off at their house.
And although Daniel had arrived in a gray zip-up hoodie, he’d immediately shed the jacket to reveal a cropped white T-shirt that left close to six inches of his stomach bare in spite of the February cold.
Maybe those were good things, Tean tried to tell himself.
Maybe it was good that Daniel felt no qualms about producing a glitter stick from his back pocket as soon as his dad drove away and using the living room mirror to put it on.
Maybe it was good that Daniel didn’t care if they saw what he was really planning on wearing to Rainbow House.
My dad’s such an asshole.
Daniel stood there, hugging himself. And then he said, “My pronouns are he/him or they/them.”
“Okay,” Tean said.
“You can’t tell my dad.”
Tean didn’t say anything to that.
Fortunately, Jem was there to step into the mix. “My pronouns are he/him. What are your pronouns, Tean?”
“Uh, he/him.”
“Nice.” And then, so fast Tean could barely process what was happening, Jem slapped Daniel.
That was what it looked like, anyway—Jem’s hand a blur of movement as it snapped toward Daniel’s face.
But Daniel wasn’t there anymore. He leaned back, and the blow whiffed through the air.
And because Tean would never understand anything, Daniel was grinning. And so was Jem.
“Almost,” Jem said.
“Nah,” Daniel said, but the grin got bigger. “Too slow.” Then he jogged after his friends, calling, “Justin, wait up!”
Jem must have seen something on Tean’s face because he said, “What?”
Tean opened his mouth to ask what that had been, or what had just happened, or some version of that question. But he was fairly sure he wouldn’t understand the answer, so he said, “Please don’t tell my dad?”
“Come on. If you had a dad like Ammon, would you talk to him about your pronouns?”
Tean hesitated. And then he said, “I guess we should get our seats.”
Rainbow House was exactly what the name implied: an old house.
It was a big house, for sure—a sprawling pseudo-Victorian, chopped up inside into a lot of rooms. Tean and Jem had been here plenty of times before, either bringing Daniel or picking him up or coming to an event like the one tonight.
Although, Tean had never been to an all-ages drag show before, and he wasn’t entirely sure what to expect.
He also wasn’t entirely sure how he’d gotten into the strange situation of having what occasionally felt like partial custody of a child who, until a few months before, had been more like a distant nephew than anything else.
But whether he understood it or not, partial custody was exactly what it felt like.
Are we picking up Daniel tonight, or are Ammon and Lucy?
What time is Daniel getting dropped off for dinner?
Who’s getting the snacks for Rainbow House this week?
Does Daniel have piano lessons before or after his therapist this week?
Not that Tean was directly involved in hammering out the logistics.
He’d worked hard to carve Ammon out of his life, and he wasn’t going to let him back in that easily.
When Daniel had first started reaching out, calling Tean, wanting someone to talk to who wasn’t his dad and who might understand, a little, what it was like to be gay and Mormon and, even if he never said the word, frightened, Tean had resisted.
Daniel had seemed like one stepping stone away from Ammon.
Maybe, in the end, it had been a lapse of judgment that had made Tean lower his defenses.
Maybe it had been emotional turbulence—around Christmas, Tean and Jem had found themselves snowed in at a ski lodge with a pack of killers.
Maybe it had simply been the fact that, whether Tean liked it or not, he understood what Daniel was going through, and he wanted to help, even if he wasn’t sure most days how much he was helping.