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She turns and I follow her out the exit, down another hallway and into a stairwell.

WAH! WAH! WAH!

An alarm goes off. Except, I know it’s not a fire but me they’re looking for. I am the emergency. I was so close. I want to go back, have a moment with john. I really needed a private moment, to take a dump.

“
C’mon,
” she says, calm, like she rescues runaways on a daily basis. Like a movie, everything shifts to—

Slo-mo—

Death—

He’s farther back, as I—

Pull out in front. I might just win this race. We scramble down three flights, our footsteps echoing in the empty well. On the ground floor, we burst out the building, onto an alleyway. A blue beater van is parked by the curb.

We climb inside; the van drives away. Past the patrol car that pulls up and the cops who jump out, guns drawn. You’d think it was a bank robbery. I can’t figure out what was stolen.

Except, maybe—

Me?

T
he VW beater van pulls up to a curb. The engine sputters, dies. We’re in a forest. Or, a park. Overhead, the street lamp’s dim light filters through a canopy of leaves. I sit in the backseat, next to Marci. The boy driver sits up front. He ignores me.

There’s something fishy about this setup. Panic! Adrenaline surge. Get out! Before I become a sex slave. Marci runs a brothel stocked with runaway teenage queer boys. We’re locked inside and forced to service men. Yes, I need to jump out and—

“Did anyone see you?”

Sure, I almost say, lots of people
saw
me. A knife-wielding serial killer, for instance.

“No.”

“How’d you get my number?”

“Serenity Ridge.” I hand over the wrinkled paper. “A boy gave it to me the night before I left. He told me, ‘Call this.’”

She examines the paper under the dim light. Everybody’s paranoid. Full moon? I never thought
she
might be nervous about meeting
me.
I could be a baby-faced cop posing as a runaway queer teen who’s been sent to
bust
the teen boi brothel. She holds up a lighter, flame to paper and drops it out the window.

“That’s out of service. How’d you find me?”

“I called the phone company, cross-checked the correct name and address against the bill and—”

A car drives toward us. Lights strobe across our startled faces. A warning? A trap? Marci grabs my head and pulls me down to the floor. We don’t move.

“We’re good,” the boy says.

My face is close to Marci’s. She exhales. Pizza breath.

We sit up. I glimpse the boy’s face in the side mirror. He’s really cute.

“We need your statement,” Marci says, facing forward. “It will be transcribed and sent to an attorney via certified mail.”

“Why?”

“Why?” she says. She sounds surprised I (dare) question her.

“I don’t want a record of my dirty deeds.”

“It’s so, in case we—you—need to go to court.”

“Or, what, coz you really don’t believe me?”

“No.” The Cute Driver Boy speaks. His deep voice doesn’t match his baby face. “Kids change their story. Maybe they tried to kill themselves. Or, they ran away from home. Or,
whatever.
”

On
whatever,
his dark eyes meet mine in the rearview mirror. I thought all I had to do was run away from Serenity Ridge, get myself to San Francisco and the van people would take care of the rest. I want to request, “Some disinterest, please. Some of Ms. Wanna-be Rasta’s don’t-bug-me-I’m-looking-for-a-new-apartment attitude.”

Marci holds up a tiny tape recorder. The red light’s on. Cue tape, people, we’re live in five, four, three, two, one—Ahmed / Ben’s life story. Problem is, I need a nap.

Luckily, I wrote down what happened in the notebook. That’s it. I’ll
read
my story. I reach under my shirt. An alarmed look crosses Marci’s face. She
definitely
thinks I’m undercover—the cop who hides his handcuffs under a tee shirt. She sees the blue notebook and exhales a big gust of Domino’s. Extra large relief, hold the anchovies.

“Can I read what I wrote?”

“Sure.”

“It’s kind of dark.” I open the notebook. Light. Driver Boy
holds a flashlight overhead. The pages are covered with scrawl. Doesn’t matter, my handwriting or somebody else’s, I can barely keep my eyes open. I stare at the page and try to focus. On the words. But I can’t. My eyes can’t—

“What!” My body jerks. “Epileptic. I caught it in the hospital.”

“No,” she says. “You dozed off. You were about to read?”

“My story?” Again, I wonder, which one? Supermodel dykes? Large Marge? Downtown Vegas? Blue-Eyed Bathroom Rapist?

“Why’d they put you in Serenity Ridge?”

Oh, that’s easy.

“I wrote, ‘I might be queer,’ for a class assignment.”

Marci nods. I can’t see her face now. She sits with her back turned, away from the window.

“And how’d they find that out?”

“My stepmother read it.” If this is how the interview goes, we’ll be done in five minutes. “And she
really
overreacted.”

“Right. What happened to you in Serenity Ridge?”

“They gave me a shot. Thorazine or something.” I yawn. “I w-w-ant to—”

“Coffee.” She holds out a styrofoam cup. “It’ll help you stay awake. We can’t take you back with us unless we know your story.”

I tilt the cup and taste cold, bitter coffee. Neat. Caffeinated cough syrup. Marci’s thought of everything. How to keep me up, how to suck out my story. I look at the blank page, where the words—my words—should be. If I’d had more time in the bathroom to write, I would have the luxury of reading it aloud.

I do the next best thing: close my eyes, open my mouth, and let the words tumble out. Out my weary head, down my dry throat and through my heavy, heavy lips.

“M
rs. McIngle walked through English class, dropping those blue test notebooks on our desks. ‘These are your new journals. What you write is between
you, your notebook
and
me.
If you don’t want me to read something, staple the pages.’

“The class groaned. Not me. I was excited. I had a
lot
to say and no one to say it to. ‘Perfect,’ I thought. ‘I can write anything in there and … they’ll never know. Because the parental unit’s obsessed with my
computer.
They’ll never look in a notebook. Everyone ‘knows’ the Internet is the ‘danger’ spot.’ Online porn, woo-hoo! Hah. Not for me. I was careful. I always emptied the cache and cleared the history.

“I left class and walked to my locker. I opened it. A dildo fell out. People laughed in the background. Stuff like dildos, all that crap, started in fifth grade. I looked at the dildo. I nudged it with my big toe. It was shaped like a sausage and rolled away.

“Next. The walk of shame. My face felt hot. I knew it was red. ‘Later, haters,’ I said. I wrote off the dildo. It meant nothing except … it was a worse-than-usual ‘one of those days.’

“School was a daily dose: same sex harassment run riot. Same as yesterday, same as the day before, same as tomorrow, school sucked. I knew this, so I never fantasized it would ever
get
better
. I just never thought it would get
worse,
but it did when people got older. Dildos, Brie-filled condoms—”

“Brie?”

“It melts and looks—kinda smells like, too—sperm. Stuff like this happened—”

“You never complained?”

“To who? A counselor? Sure, I tried. Once. He rolled his eyes and told me to go back to class. What happened was, during the day, my body was there but my head was elsewhere.

“So I get to the end of the hall. I’m thinking. Why a dildo? Why today? Then I think—no, I
know
—'Oh, it’s my outfit!’ I wore a pink polo shirt with turned-up collar and snug, stovepipe jeans. The kicks didn’t fool anyone. Basketball players—
they
could wear pink. Their pants could hang half off their asses. Not me. I was The Fag. Least, that’s what people said. Others were The Slut. Or, The Gigolo. The Methhead, The Pot-head, The Loser, The Dropout, The Brain. I’d cornered the market on The Gay.

“I’d worked it out. Maybe that’s why it didn’t bug me so much. Kids want to look different for adults but the
same
with each other. You want to fit in there but stand out here. I was the frommage who stood alone.”

“You mean,” she interrupts, “you had
no
friends? No one? What about the gay–straight club?”

“Right, there was a gay–straight club. But the only people who went were future fag hags and computer geeks padding their activities for college apps. I wouldn’t be caught dead there.”

“There weren’t any other gay kids?” Marci asks.

I’m starting to wonder how many gay teenagers she’s met. Have I not spelled out the State of the Teenage Gay?

“There was another one—a gay—and people just ‘knew’ about him, same as me. We stayed away from one another. I always thought, maybe he’s jealous. I got all the attention. Dildos, condoms—oh, and one day, shit smeared on my locker. The janitor pointed out the alfalfa sprouts in the feces. Maybe it was
coz I dressed the part. If I was gonna be The Fag, I’d own it. Fuck ’em, y’know?”

“People said stuff?” Marci says. Is she deaf?

“Uh, yeah.”

“A lot? Or, just sometimes.”

“
All
the time.”

“How’d they know?”

I give her my “You’ve got to be kidding” look.

“I don’t know. People, they just
knew.
And I knew they
knew
coz when they called me ‘faggot’ everyday, they weren’t kidding.”

“Yeah, but how’d they know? Did you …”

“Did I what? Open my mouth? Yeah, and when I did, people knew. Most of the time I was quiet. You know how people are. Like on cop shows. The special light they shine on murder scenes.”

“Yeah.” She nods. “It lets them see blood.”

“Right.” I gesture. There I go, “talking” with my hands. I’d point out, another giveaway, but decide to skip it. “With the special light and glasses. These days, all the kids have that special light and glasses. They can just
tell.
Fag. It started and I didn’t know what it meant. I was like, ‘Fag? What’s that?’ It’s, it’s—”

Her face remains blank. I’m frustrated.

“You’ve never heard this? How kids label you? Like that movie,
The Breakfast Club.
Except, now it’s the nerd, the joke, the sosh, the freak and the …
fag.
”

Her silence asks, How
did
they know? I realize, she wants me to repeat it. Say it twice. Prove I’m not lying.

“Okay, gay people, it’s not like they’re all secret. They’re everywhere. On TV. I guess, I filled the slot. Yeah. I was the school’s designated faggot.”

“After the dildo …”

“The dildo. Yeah, so it fell out, I ran from the hallway to my bike. I jumped on it and left. Cranked my music, hit the road and rode to this cafe. In the gay neighborhood. Gayborhood. Hah. That’s a stretch. One block and half a street corner.

“The cafe was empty. I sat down at the end of the bar and coached myself. ‘Don’t let them see what you’re feeling.
Ever.
’ Told myself, I’m developing inner strength. I imagined high school was my baby mama moment. If I could get through—”

“What?” she asks.

“
High school.
Anyway, I looked up and right. At the old cigarette machine. A naked lady was painted on the side. She was something, too. Wore a see-through nightie.
Pink.
You couldn’t miss the pink. She winked, and held a pinkie finger to her bow-tie-shaped mouth. Naughty. She dared me. ‘Write it.’ What did I have to lose except … everything? I remembered the blue notebook. I pulled it out my backpack and wrote, ‘I might be queer.’

“She dared you?”

“Yeah, I knew, I
knew—
the way you know—when I wrote those words, I was daring my parents. Which is kinda why, I think, I wrote them down. I knew there’d be hell to pay if they read those words. I wanted to get caught
and
I wanted to tell them.”

“They were really that ignorant?” says Little Miss Contrarian. Or, the Straight Devil’s Advocate. “I’m sure they watch TV. On TV, practically the
whole
world’s gay.”

“Plus, gay porn,” I joke. “Gay porn drove my father crazy. Gay people are fine so long as they’re not your son. And you don’t know what they do. Gay porn made it way worse. It was always popping up on his computer. All that gay, what do you call it? Visibility? It’s great. But if you’re a teenager, the TV and Internet can’t save you from your parents if they’re homophobic. You know, most people are. It’s a straight world. I didn’t have anyone watching my back. And I knew all
that
because I
knew
my U.S. history.”

“Wait.” Marci touches my arm. I flinch. It’s gonna take a while to get used to her touching me. “What does U.S. history have to do with you coming out?”

“Us—kids—anyone under eighteen? Basically, we have the rights of slaves. As in, no rights. Parents can do whatever they want with us. You parents’ rights rule.”

“Dependency relationships,” she says. “Go on.”

I don’t know dependency relationships from Depend diapers, but I continue, “I felt this urge—to leave. I waved good-bye to Miss Pinkie. I stood up, walked to the cash register, pulled out my wallet and … oh, wow! The guy at the cash register was
so
cute. How’d I miss him? His name tag read ‘Stuart.’ Stuart smiled—at me! And he got even cuter!

“I handed him the money but I couldn’t look him in the eye. He held out my change. I took it and turned to leave. ‘Hey there,’ he said. ‘Wait up a sec.’ I felt it! The beat that my heart skipped. Stuart said, ‘I see you in here all the time and …’ He flashed me this friendly-flirty smile. I was sure he was about to ask me to be his boyfriend. I would have said, ‘Sure,’ because I never say ‘yes,’ only, ‘sure.’ I said, ‘What are you smiling at?’ He looked at me and said, ‘Are you queer?’

“I was so embarrassed. I didn’t know what to say. People didn’t
ask.
Ever since fifth grade …” My voice trails off. I’m getting tired of proving I’m not pink enemy number one.