He thought about fairy tales, those foolish things he had read, hiding in his closet and escaping his father’s attention, his father’s anger. He wanted to hide again, to live the stories, to rise far above the clouds until there was nothing left of his life here but the faint line on his lip and the relief of leaving it all behind.

“Where do you wanna go?” Tom leaned forward, hoping, maybe, for inspiration. For Theo to give him the answers the way he had in algebra and Latin and chemistry classes.

Theo felt the myths of his childhood pull at him. Standing stones, fertile green fields, poetry and song. But he couldn’t quite say it, not yet. It felt foolish, too much like a dream. In a quiet corner of his mind, he calculated the pitiful money he had left. Enough for a plane ticket, maybe. Enough for the fantasy his father had denied him. Enough to get the fuck away.

And enough to forget Jack Gardner.

“Anywhere.” The needle dug in, and he yielded to it. “Anywhere but here.”

Chapter Seven

Jack stood at the red door with white framing, the lintel an abstract arrangement of glass mosaic, and wiped his sweating hands on his jeans.

God, he was still so nervous.

Meg’s closest friend from middle school was Darius Smith, and Jack might have been jealous, at first, because she wouldn’t stop talking about him. And they had dated for a few weeks, that summer before freshman year, but as soon as he met Darius at Gwynns and Dare opened his mouth and began describing in exquisite detail the paintings he was working on in his advanced art classes, Jack couldn’t help but love him, too. He loved him at his senior art show, and he loved him at his first gallery opening, and he loved him—even as a part of him was terrified, like a bug under a magnifying glass, tortured by an exposing light—when they went to his first drag show.

And he was proud, so proud, when Dare got married to Quinn as soon as it was legal. He’d cried when they exchanged vows on the steps of the courthouse—Meg handed him a tissue, rolled her eyes, grinned at him—and he tried not to think about the fact that he was so fucking sad.

Quinn—always studious, never without a big word or three, absolutely crazy about ethical philosophy—stumbled over his vows, and everyone laughed a little at how unusual that was, and Jack knew, God, how he knew, what it felt like to not be able to speak.

Quinn, his roommate for four years, had done so much for him, taking him in when he left his mother’s apartment for good, and Jack couldn’t imagine what his life would have been like without him, and without Dare’s kind smile, his eyes older than the rest of him.