Our shared territory—the one sovereign nation where we were equals—was wrestling. It was the rope I clung to.

I remember sitting with him on the bus once, the sticky vinyl of the seat connecting our legs. He was talking about a match he’d seen, describing some simple dropkick.

My brain lit up like a switchboard.

Okay, I thought, a frantic monologue spooling out in my head. He’s talking about a basic dropkick, but what he doesn’t understand is that in the R.A. Wrestling canon, the “Meteor Dropkick” is a protected finishing move only used by the Season 3 champion, “The Comet,” whose nine-volume backstory involves a tragic betrayal and a quest for a mythical championship belt. If I can just articulate this entire saga with sufficient detail, he’ll surely see me as his intellectual and emotional equal, solidifying our bond for all eternity.

I opened my mouth, the entire epic ready to pour out.

“Yeah,” I said.

The universe collapsed back inside my head.

That night, buzzing from the simple validation of his nod, I opened my laptop in the dark. I typed the words into the search bar, my fingers trembling slightly: Can boys like boys?

The results were a chaotic mess—clinical definitions I couldn’t decipher and angry, hateful blog posts I understood all too well. I slammed the laptop shut.

A week later, Aiden was gone. No goodbye, no explanation. Just a void where my sun used to be.

That’s when Hallie happened—a chaotic whirlwind of energy, a walking, talking newsfeed of everyone’s business. You weren’t supposed to trust Hallie with secrets, but I was lonely, and her energy was infectious. She became my necessary, risky best friend.

“Come on, Ryan, who is it?” she’d prod during lunch, trying to crack the code of my crush life.

I’d deploy my main defense: the Innocence Gambit.

A blank stare.

A head tilt.

“Huh? What’s a crush?”

She’d groan, and for a moment, I was safe.

The incident that changed everything happened on a rainy Tuesday. She was at my house. I left for two minutes, and when I came back, she was sitting on my bed, holding my most sacred object—my songwriting notebook.

“What are you doing?” The words came out cold and sharp.

She spun around, caught.

“This is what you’ve been hiding?” she demanded. “I’m your best friend! You couldn’t tell me this? That you’re… gay?”

The word hung in the air, terrifying and real.

We fought. I yelled about privacy; she yelled about trust. It ended with her storming out and me collapsing on my bed, the full, crushing weight of exposure settling over me.

That night, I had a moment of pure, self-aware teenage angst. I’m supposed to be sad about this in a cool way, I thought. I should be a sad girl at 3 a.m., listening to Billie Eilish and writing tragic, tear-stained poetry about the state of my soul.

I looked down at my notebook.

It wasn’t filled with poetry—it was filled with lyrics about fictional superheroes and a drawing of a championship belt.

I can’t even be sad right, I thought. My angst is just… nerdy.

The next day, I went to school like a soldier walking into a minefield.

First period—nothing.

Lunch—nothing.

By the final bell, silence.

Hallie had seen my deepest secret, and she had kept it.

Two weeks later, she was gone too. Manhattan. Quick goodbye. Another ghost.

Aiden was gone. Hallie was gone. Honesty was dangerous, loyalty was real, and loneliness was louder than both.

Should I even try to find them?

“Hey, it’s me. That dumb boy you both loved to tease. Remember me, right?”

Oh, wait. I have their numbers.

I just couldn’t bring myself to use them.

I just closed the notebook.

It was safer to be a question without an answer.

For now.