The thing is, Paul would often joke like this—in such an offhand way that nobody but me would ever give it a second thought. He liked to see me squirm—but only because he knew I kinda liked squirming a little. Yet as tempted as I was by that dangerous edge, I didn’t do well looking over it.

I looked around one more time. No one there. I could hear his father on the phone somewhere else in the house. Paul hadn’t come out to his parents, but he was pretty sure they knew. Did that mean they knew about me, too? Indirectly, like the way Katie knew? And if they did, and were okay with it, shouldn’t I be okay with them being okay? Still, just thinking about it made me tense.

“It’s like you’re always on the field, toeing the line, waiting for the snap,” Paul once told me. Then he had hooked his finger on my shorts and snapped the waistband. Right in the school hallway. And I squirmed and got mad and kind of liked it.

Man, these memories! I caught myself grinning, then cringing, then grinning again, as I sat in the living room waiting for Paul to come back down. I was letting in more and more bits and pieces of this world, allowing them to ricochet around my brain. Not just stuff with Paul, but of my whole life here. How it was mostly the same, and yet entirely different. I could remember the same life events, the same parties, but recalled other things about them. All those things that struck me enough to lodge in my long-term memory. A conversation. A look. And I understood how, through everything, I kept myself so protected. That core of who I was. I held it close like a quarterback, terrified I’d fumble. Like fragile china in layers of bubble wrap. No one got to see it, so no one could break it. And Paul? He was the mischievous hand popping those layers one bubble at a time. I wondered what would happen when they were all gone.

This is how the old me and the even older me came to know the new me. While the Edwards kept dividing and separating, I had to do the opposite, and try to blend multiple selves into a singular “I.” There were parts that had to be subdued. Quelled. I’m talking about the parts that dealt drugs and treated people like shit. But this part—this queer part—I didn’t want to silence at all. I mean, I didn’t want to go skipping on rainbows with it either, but getting to know it—getting to know him—wasn’t a bad thing. I was learning to be okay in my own skin. That’s more than I could say about the original me.