Page 41 of The Rebel's Guide to Pride

12:09AM

zekechapman

does that make me a bad person?

7:43AM

bedmas_22

I don’t think it makes you a bad person at all. I’m sure she’d understand if you’d just talk to her?

bedmas_22

Also, good morning.

zekechapman

good morning

zekechapman

it’s too complicated and she’d just try to fix everything instead of letting me figure it out myself but I’m glad we’re talking

He was typing a response. I could picture him in his bed, his dark hair haloing him on his pillow. The image made me smile as I took a sip of coffee and waited. The stillness of a new day was disrupted by caffeine-fueled heartbeats and the sounds of Mom getting ready in the other room. I listened as she shuffled around, watching my screen intently until a new message popped up.

bedmas_22

Glad we are tooand I’m glad you’re doing this for yourself. You can talk to me about anything, even those things about your dad. I will try to understand if you’ll let me

Mason had called me brave, and I was starting to feel even more so as I reread his message. Without doubting myself, I started typing. Listing out everything the JACass had done, why I had been kept from coming out before, how I was trying to be the right kind of gay. All of it poured out of me like a dam had ruptured.

I hit send, then dropped my phone on the bed like it was on fire and stood up. The screen remained dark for a minute, then two. There was no going back now. I really hoped he’d meant what he said about being able to talk to him. That he wouldn’t be disappointed by the real me and Z-step like I’d done countless times and then—

A sudden, sharp knock on my bedroom door scared me. I jumped, spilling coffee down my Wildcats Baseball shirt. For a second, I thought Mason had appeared in the hallway to tell me how much of a fuck-up I was.

“Y-yeah?” I stammered, voice thick.

“Are you awake?” Mom asked. “I need to talk to you.”

“Yeah. Um. Give me a minute.” I rushed to change my shirt, nearly knocking over a stack of empty moving boxes.

“Take all the time you need,” she called, “and if you’re doing boy stuff—”

“Ohmygodno.”

My face scorched worse than my chest as I opened the door. Mom stood there in her green Roaring Mechanics shirt. One of her delicate eyebrows rose as she noted the wadded-up shirt in my hand and the laptop on my bed.

“Hun,” she said. “No reason to be embarrassed. It’s perfectly natural—”

“We are absolutely not doing this.”

I sat back on the edge of my bed. My mental capacity was limited to one difficult conversation at a time. I couldn’t handle anything else after confessing all my deepest, darkest thoughts to Mason.

“What, uh, did you want to talk about?” I asked.

She gave me a tight-lipped smile and stepped into my room. “Your father texted about your upcoming birthday.”

“What about it?”

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