So we kept texting. Some days more and some days less, but all in all I finally felt like I was getting my money’s worth with the unlimited texts phone plan I was on. I had unlimited national calls as well, but fuck that. My aim was still to use zero of those.

Jethro had lots of friends and he told me about things his friends did so much that it almost felt like having more than one friend, but, like, in the saddest way.

I didn’t tell him I didn’t have any school friends, but at some point it had to be implied, right? The closest I came to mentioning anything resembling a friend was the Wednesday boardgame gang. They were always nice, but we never so much as spoke outside of that one hour of Uno and Mouse Trap. After the semester was over we’d all select a new cop out activity for Wednesday afternoons to avoid doing sports and probably never speak again.

Most of my lunch breaks were spent in the library reading. Not, like, books. I was reading slash fan fiction on my phone.

But maybe that wasn’t so bad. Jethro usually just went to hang out at his mum’s work and use their microwave, and that was fine, right?

Strangely, I missed Jethro. Now, okay, I guess that doesn’t sound strange, but I didn’t really miss people. Not normally. I just didn’t get attached to them.

It wasn’t like I’d never had friends. I did, in primary school. And then we’d gone to different high schools and I’d never talked to them again because I just didn’t care. But I did care about Jethro.

So I was pretty excited when the second Friday of April finally rolled around. But before we got to the actual good part of my day, I had to deal with my psychiatrist’s appointment.

Dr Booker was a relatively young man who liked to pretend to be hip, but I suspected he’d been a bit of a nerd when he was my age. But that was okay. Preferable, even. He had glasses and always wore a tie, but, like, in a cool way. Coolish? He was doing his own thing and I respected that.

And, of course, the first thing he said when he saw me was, “You got a haircut.”

I was almost glad I knew so few people so I could minimise the number of times I had to go through this conversation.

“Yup,” I said.

“His friend did it,” my dad said. He still sounded proud when he said that. Was I that lame that having a friend was this much of an achievement? I guess so.

“Oh, a friend?” Dr Booker asked.

“Yup,” I said again. “I have one of those now.”

“The son of a coworker of mine,” my dad explained.

“Another boy?” Dr Booker asked, and I could see exactly where this line of questioning was going. I hoped my crush wasn’t as blindingly obvious to Jethro as it seemed to be to everyone else.

“He’s refused to say whether he’s cute or not, but I’ve considered the question for myself and I think the answer is yes, he is,” my dad said.

“Do you want that sort of relationship with this boy, Casper?”

“Can we not?” I asked. “He’s straight.”

“What?” my dad practically shouted. “No he isn’t.”

“What do you know? Did you ask him?”

“Well… did you?”

No I hadn’t, but I’d made a baseless assumption and that was basically the same, right? 

What the fuck. He couldn’t not be straight. Other guys just… generally were straight. Assuming they were had always just made things easier in the past.

But he could not be, right? It wasn’t impossible. I wasn’t the only guy who was attracted to guys. There were even others who went to my school, I’d just never talked to them because I never talked to anybody. But if Jethro liked guys…

“Casper?” Dr Booker asked gently.

I shook my head and folded my arms. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

So we talked about other things. Or mostly didn’t, because I was pretty uncooperative at the best of times and this was not the best of times in terms of focus. Because maybe Jethro liked dudes. Probably still not me even if he did, but it wasn’t literally impossible so that was something.

And I was going to go over to his house again this afternoon and he was going to touch me while he tidied up my hair. If my fantasies weren’t literally impossible, I had to find out. But that was going to be really difficult without actually dealing with the awkward situation of asking him directly.

When he arrived for his lunchtime visit, all that was on my mind was trying to figure out his sexuality. My dad seemed to think just looking at him was enough, but, well, bullshit. My own personal grooming was atrocious but I was still into dick, so I didn’t see why the fact that Jethro did take care of himself should mean anything.

But there wasn’t much to go on. He didn’t talk about dating or anything, and it was much too late to start broaching that topic now. And also, like, that would probably lead to me having to come out and I didn’t really want to do that. Not because I was embarrassed about being gay or because I thought he’d react badly to it or anything like that, though. I just knew that the moment he found out I was gay would also be the moment he realised I had a crush on him.

I was kinda sad when he had to go back to school and I realised I’d wasted some of the little time we had together being distracted and probably not much fun to be around. But he was coming back later and then we’d go to his house and that would be great. And maybe there’d be, like, a poster of a shirtless dude on his wall that I hadn’t noticed last time and all my questions would be answered.

A few hours later and no, there were no sexy posters on his walls, but there was this huge fucking flag that I’d stared at last time I was here before getting distracted by some other dumb shit. I’d sort of realised it wasn’t, like, a country’s flag, but what it really was hadn’t struck me. A pride flag.

Problem was, I didn’t know what it was the pride flag for. It was pink, yellow, and blue, and I had no idea what that meant. I wasn’t even sure it was a sexuality thing. Was that the trans flag, maybe? Fuck if I knew. Heck, for all I knew it was the heterosexual pride flag. The blue and pink represented men and women and the yellow represented the very vanilla sex they planned on having within the confines of marriage.

But probably not.

I turned around to face Jethro. “I need to go to the toilet.”

He gave me a weird look and, okay, fair enough. I’d just stared at his flag in complete silence for much too long and then abruptly announced my toileting needs.

“Okay, well, you know where it is,” Jethro told me.

I headed into the bathroom before I could embarrass myself any further, sat down on the toilet, and searched Google images for pride flags.

And then there it was, in the very first set of flags. The pansexual pride flag. Maybe I hadn’t known what their flag looked like, but I knew what the word meant.

Of course, just because Jethro wasn’t straight didn’t mean I had any chance with him. If he was into people of all genders, he was just as likely to be interested in anyone else around him as he was in me. More likely, really, because, well… it was me.

I flushed the toilet, washed my hands, and then realised I actually did kind of need to pee. Oh well. I’d have to just hold it now so that he didn’t think I had some kind of weird bladder issue.

When I came out of the bathroom, Jethro had already gathered up the chair and the sheet. “Ready for your trim?”

“Yup,” I said in a way I hoped really concealed how much I’d been looking forward to this for the last month. I am just the most neutral, so super indifferent to this. Your touch means nothing to me, I swear.

He sat me down in the bathroom and he wrapped me up in the sheet and then got to work. I wished this were a real barbershop where you could ask them to wash your hair and give you a head massage for a little extra. Not that I ever wanted to do that in real barbershops and extend that awkward experience, but from Jethro… yes please.

“Okay, looks good,” Jethro said when he was done, fluffing up the long part of my hair. “Do you want to take a shower again?”

“Yeah.”

Again, I did not jerk off in his shower.