Chapter Eleven
“I’ve got more page scans!” Gabriel calls.
Julia, Sunny, and I migrate from my station to Gabriel’s. He’s pasted the images from the website over into Adobe Photoshop and is already fiddling with the contrast and brightness features.
“Is this the right chapter?” Gabriel asks me. He stands to one side and offers me his chair.
I sit down and squint at the pages crammed with the familiar hurried, slanted writing.
Maybe Dyslexic Stoner was onto something about there being a picture hidden within the words.
But no matter how much I try to blur my vision, nothing really comes together.
This isn’t a Magic Eye kids’ book, I remind myself.
It’s supposed to be a remembrance of gay history.
That’s why it pointed to Harvey’s birthday flyer as a clue.
Solving this thing means uncovering something important, something real.
For whatever reason, this only makes tackling the next piece of the puzzle seem a million times harder. I sigh and turn my attention over to the one feature in the book Cam and I fixated on when we started the hunt: the endless tiny grids filled with numbers.
“There,” I say, my finger tapping the last page. “This is definitely Harvey’s chapter.”
I’m pointing to a tiny tic-tac-toe grid and an X grid set into the bottom right corner of the third and final page spread. There are several numbers jumbled inside the grids, with two or more numbers sharing the same spot. Other spots, notably, are blank.
Actually, it was Cam who first noticed the blank areas when we pored through the book years ago.
“What’s that about?” he had asked.
I was still trying to figure out the words themselves—if there was a larger riddle within them. I lost my place in one sentence. “What’s what about?”
“The blanks here,” he said. He opened a drawer in his desk and dug around, random items clanking like cartoon sound effects until—“Aha!”—he pulled out a chipped magnifying glass and hovered it over the grids.
“There’s something to this.”
I rolled my eyes. “There’s something to everything, Cam. That’s the entire point.”
“No, I mean these numbers are different from the rest. The way they’re stacked in some places and missing in others. And look here…there’s a dot next to two of the numbers.”
He cut the air in half with a tiny gasp. “It’s a pigpen cipher.”
I didn’t have to ask what that was. We had been making a master list of ciphers ever since we’d watched National Treasure. Book ciphers, Playfair ciphers, Caesar ciphers—we knew them all.
A pigpen cipher splits up all the letters of the alphabet into four grids: two tic-tac-toe grids and two X grids, one of each type with dots in the spaces.
A letter goes into every space, and you figure out that letter’s symbol from where it sits in the grid and if it has a dot or not. Meaning most messages coded in pigpen look like a sort of alien language.
for “gay.”
for “treasure.”
You’re supposed to read the symbol and then find the corresponding place in the grid where the correct letter goes.
Simple enough. But the grids in Gay Treasures, the ones Cam was indicating, seemed anything but simple.
One tic-tac-toe grid and one X grid, with only numbers inside.
No letters. No alien symbols. And no encrypted pigpen message anywhere else in the book.
“How is it a pigpen cipher?” I asked incredulously.
“Well, look.” Cam pointed at the numbers with dots underneath them. “BGR combined the four grids into two.”
“Okay…” I said. “But there’s no message.”
“There is!” Cam was really getting excited now.
He grabbed a pencil and started writing something on a piece of scrap paper.
No, he wasn’t writing. He was drawing. He made the four pigpen grids exactly as they’re supposed to be drawn and filled them with all the correct letters.
Then he turned again to the grids in the book and the strange numbers placed inside them.
Cam touched a corner of the page softly, his fingertip balanced on the edge. I remember seeing it, his finger pressing into the paper, and feeling the strangest touch on my lower back. Like my skin was suddenly the book, and he was reading it. I turned away and stared at the wall.
He cleared his throat. “One and four,” he said, lassoing my attention back to the cipher. “They’re both in the place where A goes in the pigpen grid.” He looked at me. “What do you want to bet that A is the first and fourth letter in the message?”
I didn’t say anything. Didn’t bet anything against it. Which turned out to be pretty wise, since a few minutes later, Cam’s idea gave way to an entire decoded sentence:
A Giant Btwn Streets
As I look at the corner with the pigpen cipher now, the solution seems glaringly obvious. But isn’t that the way it always goes with riddles and codes? Hindsight’s twenty-twenty, and foresight is double cataracts with melted sunscreen running into your eyes.
Not for Cam, I think miserably. Cam understood the puzzle right away. So why wouldn’t he understand the rest of this too?
With the weight of Gabriel, Sunny, and Julia’s presence sitting heavy on my shoulders, I’m suddenly overcome with an intense wave of imposter syndrome.
I didn’t even help solve the one cipher we managed to crack from the book.
Cam’s going to unlock this entire thing while we hang out in a basement, fiddling around on web archives.
“You haven’t taken a breath in, like, two minutes,” Sunny murmurs.
I make a “Pah!” sound, mostly to annoy Sunny, and blink the pages back into focus.
The pigpen cipher seems easy now, but not just because Cam solved it.
It was the only grid of its kind in the entire book.
None of the other numbers in this chapter are in pigpen grids.
Out of six pages, the other five contain three-dimensional-looking Rubik’s Cubes, each filled with random numbers.
The last Rubik’s Cube is partially covered, but that’s the only clue we get about what they could mean.
They don’t have any blanks. None of the numbers are doubles.
There are no dots, or X’s, or anything like that.
It looks like a bunch of sudoku games completed by someone who has no idea how to actually play sudoku.
I feel like I’m on a Slip ’n Slide covered with baby oil as my brain scrambles to make sense of all this.
I try flattening the information into math terms. Six pages in the chapter.
Five Rubik’s Cubes, plus a pigpen cipher.
Three sides are visible on four of the cubes.
Then just a side and a half are visible on the fifth.
Nine numbers per side. So nine…times three… times four…plus nine and six equals…
Shit.
Everything I’m saying is complete nonsense. I literally have no idea what any of these numbers mean.
I shove my head into my arms. “What if I’m not gay enough for this?” I groan.
“Excuse me, what now?” Gabriel prods my elbow.
I look up. “There was this weird conversation online. It’s how I found the website in the first place.
Basically, one person asked if another person was gay—or, no, if they were a ‘friend of Dorothy,’ but that’s basically the same thing—and when the other person hinted that, yes, they were gay, the first person said, ‘Right answer,’ and sent them the link. ”
The others only stare at me, bewildered.
“So?” Sunny asks after a moment.
“So,” I say, “maybe you have to be super gay to figure this whole stupid thing out!”
“Aren’t you supposed to be, like, the gayest person at this school?” Sunny asks.
Yes, I want to snap. Obviously. But a weird knot catches in my stomach. I’m the co-chair of GSA. I came out by myself as a sophomore. If Benjamin Gates was the ideal headstrong American, then I should absolutely be the ideal nerdy gay teen. I’m basically the Benjamin Gates of gaying!
Except…sometimes it feels like I’m not really the gay queen everyone at school thinks I am.
When I first came out as a sophomore, it was as a lesbian.
I made a whole poster board presentation on why the acronym LGBTQ+ starts with the letter L.
I love the specific history of lesbians in the gay rights movement.
How, as a group, they’ve stood up for all identities under the queer umbrella.
How Anne Kronenberg, Harvey Milk’s campaign manager, was a lesbian.
Lesbians are so completely badass. They use their privilege the way it’s meant to be used to help and protect others.
They’ve been fearless when they’ve had so much to lose.
Being a part of that group, considering myself in line with heroic lesbian trailblazers, felt so validating and powerful during my sophomore year.
Cam’s face suddenly blooms in my memory. The way he looked when he came into school junior year with his short hair. The way he grinned as he told everyone he was trans. My stomach flops. I feel so completely lost about everything.
“Well, I’m sort of gay too, if that counts,” Gabriel says. “So we can add up my gay to your gay.”
We all turn to him.
“Is this some kind of gay superhero team-up?” I ask. God, maybe we really are Greta Gerwig’s version of the Avengers.
Gabriel splays his hands. “You’re the one who said that maybe you weren’t gay enough! I don’t know!” He pauses, looking at each of us in our silence.
“I haven’t done anything,” he adds quietly. “With anyone. I just feel like I could be swayed by a really hot guy. Like if Nico Hiraga ever slid into my DMs…”
“Anyone with a brain would hook up with Nico Hiraga if he slid into their DMs,” Sunny says.
She clamps a hand on Gabriel’s shoulder and gives it a tight squeeze.
“You don’t have to have done anything with anyone to justify your sexuality,” she states firmly.
Sunny sniffs and turns her nose up at the group.
“And I don’t feel a need to comment on my sexuality one way or another. ”
“Wait. That’s not what this is.” I offer my hands in surrender.
I didn’t mean to pressure anyone to come out. Unlike what Gabriel might think, I highly doubt we get to combine our gayness for ultimate treasure-finding power.
“I have my own reasons, though,” Sunny adds after a moment, “for doing the hunt.”
“That’s great,” I say quickly. “We don’t have to talk about about—”
“The thing is, I’m tired of seeing Harvey Milk’s name thrown literally everywhere in San Francisco but with almost no real context,” Sunny explains.
“He has an airport wing named after him, and a bunch of gift shops and streets, and yet…none of us knew about the White Night riots. We didn’t know about the first birthday party after Harvey’s murder.
And that’s messed up! History should be something deep enough that we can actually explore it.
It shouldn’t be oversimplified to a street sign or a single line in a book. ”
I’m stunned into silence.
I turn and check the number cubes again. Threes. All the numbers come in threes…
Julia picks up her notebook and starts scribbling. She mumbles as she writes. “History shouldn’t be oversimplified to a street sign or a single line in a book.” Julia reads it over to herself and grins. “That’s great, Sunny. We should put this in the yearbook. Can I quote you?”
Sunny shrugs. “Sure. Whatever.”
I lean so close to Gabriel’s computer that my nose is nearly touching the screen. The cubes are so tiny. But the numbers have to be here for a reason. Sunny’s words keep echoing in my head.
A line in a book.
A line.
In a book.
“There’s no message,” I had told Cam about the pigpen cipher. But I was wrong. Gilbert Baker had hidden a message in those grids through the numbers.
And he hid one in these grids too.