All the platitudes I’d been ready to say to him fly out of my head and I take the other empty seat, ignoring the drink and dropping my bag like a stone. “Did she get into another fight?”

“Did who what?” He knits his thick brows. “Oh, Jack? No, no—just the usual stone silence today. This isn’t about Jack. Or, I guess maybe it is.”

“You’re starting to seriously stress me out, Santiago.”

His eyes dart around the coffee shop and he exhales deeply before saying, “I want to take Malcolm to homecoming.”

“Huh.” That was the last thing I expected him to say. “Okay. And you want me to ask Jack to bring him as her date? I don’t think she was planning on going at all, but—”

“No.” He wraps his hands even tighter around his drink, until his knuckles go white. “I … I want to bring him as my date.”

Okay, that was the last thing I expected him to say. Lowering my voice to a whisper seems silly, given that we’re literally talking about him being out in the open, but judging by the way he glanced furtively around the room a moment ago, he’s still not totally comfortable. Besides, it’s too ingrained a habit for us both at this point. “You want to come out at homecoming, of all places?”

He sighs. “It’s not that I want to come out at the dance. Honestly, that sounds like a fucking nightmare. But I don’t wanna keep missing out on shit. Nothing about this year has been normal. If I’m being real, nothing’s felt normal since Robbie first started blackmailing me.”

“Yeah, and he was able to blackmail you because you wanted to keep your sexuality a secret,” I say carefully, “so what changed?”

He sets the drink down and puts his foot up, then drops it back down, like he’s still trying to figure out just how comfortable he can get. “I guess I’m just finding it harder and harder to give a shit what the guys think. I see them around Jack, and the way they talk about Saint Robbie, and it feels like I’m watching some surreal-as-shit movie. They’re deranged. They don’t feel like my friends. And I’m a little tired of trying to hide from them. What’s the worst that could happen? They’ll want me off the team? Honestly, being on it kind of sucks this year anyway.”

“Even though you’re finally winning?”

“Especially because we’re finally winning,” he says with a snort. “Like, if we can stop sucking and there’s still no joy in it—even less than before, really—then what the fuck am I doing? My mom would kill for me to spend that time on something else. I could get a job, save up for college, actually spend time with Malcolm.…”