Twenty-Four Days Ago

I HAD BEEN staring at the text on my phone for a full minute. I know you’re gay.

It was seven thirty a.m. This couldn’t be real.

I looked around at Jahan’s living room. Everything looked so peaceful under the soft morning light. The couch I had woken up on. The stack of books at the foot of the couch. The pasta machine on the kitchen counter, the dishes Jahan and I had been too lazy to wash, the Joni Mitchell album he’d played for me.

All those things were real. Not this text from my sister, the words I had been dreading my entire life.

You know I don’t care, right? read her next text. You know I love you.

The smell of espresso rose up through the window from the café below. Slowly, I started breathing again. I wrote back: Do mom and dad know?

I waited for a response. Finally, Soraya’s WhatsApp status changed to “Online.” She typed, then deleted. Then typed again.

No. Of course not. Next text: Why don’t you tell them?

You know I can’t tell them. I was pounding the letters on my phone’s keyboard. That’s a stupid question, Soraya. Come on.

You know Dad spent the last two days looking for you in New York, Soraya wrote back. He literally went looking for you there.

I took a deep breath. I felt sick to my stomach. To my dad, I was still the old Amir. I wasn’t the person watching drag queens on TV with Jahan and talking about open relationships with Neil. I wasn’t a stranger who had been living in his house. Not yet.

Remember the scoreboard, I thought to myself. The numbers aren’t in your favor.

How did you find out? I asked Soraya.

I talked to Jackson. Fuck. What did Jackson tell her? Before I could ask, Soraya texted again. It doesn’t matter. Come home, Amir.

I can’t come home.

My sister and I usually texted with memes and emojis. We’d never texted with this many full sentences before, this many periods. It was just that kind of conversation.

If I come home, I wrote, I’ll have to tell them.

Or you could make up another excuse, she texted.

That didn’t sit well with me. Lying, again. I’d done it my whole life, but after these days in Rome, I just couldn’t see myself pretending the reason I ran away was because I didn’t feel like crossing the graduation stage or some other bullshit like that. I didn’t reply. Soraya texted again: Where are you now?

As much as my home life had gone to shit, I couldn’t stop thinking about the other night with Jahan and his friends, dancing on the rooftop into the early morning . . . I wanted more of that. I was hungry for more of that. Life. Authentic, unapologetic life. I wanted to sink my teeth into that kind of living, the kind I’d never thought I would have.