I roll my eyes. Do I really need to hear this? Try to be supportive, Chase.

Jack notices my discomfort, though, and looks away. “One day, I was sitting on the bleachers by the track field, writing, watching his football practice. I was a sophomore, and he was a senior. A legion of football players came up behind me and dumped an entire cooler of lime-green Gatorade on me. They grabbed my wet notebook and started tearing out soggy pages. One of the roided-out dudes read it out loud, ‘JR hearts CT. Who’s CT—Callum Taggart?! Oh shit!’ And that’s how the rumors started. I told them it meant Courtney Thomas because I had clearly thought about who CT could be if I had to in a pinch, which should’ve been a sign, you know? But I didn’t want to confront my feelings.

“But that wasn’t the first time. In middle school, I spent a lot of time at Cal’s house. We were watching old sci-fi alien movies, the kind where cockroach-shaped creatures burst out of humans’ stomachs, and we accidentally stumbled upon some unblocked porn channels. The girls looked so plastic, and the guy was more into himself than her. I spent most of the time staring at the wall behind the TV, tracing the streaks in the paint.

“But Cal had his hand down his pants, and I went to the bathroom to splash cool water on my burning face. Once Cal got off, we went outside and played a game called Gladiator, where we’d balance on this stone ledge on the side of his house and battle each other; the first one to push the other off won. He always won, but not that day.

“When Cal bowed to me, impressed, and stared at me with his big blue eyes, I don’t know why, but I told him I loved him. He called me a fag and slammed me to the ground against the ledge. Searing pain shot through my shoulder, and burgundy blood oozed like a chemical spill on my chest. I passed out. Woke up in the hospital to my dad telling me that I had twenty stitches and asking me, ‘What the hell happened?’ He told me that crying and carrying on wouldn’t fix anything, not for me, not ever. He told me to never cry.