“We know what you’re up to, Jihadi,” Jake said, gesturing at the picture on the phone. I took a closer look, and when I made out what it was, I tried to steal the phone from his hand. Jake grabbed my wrist.

It was a picture of Jackson and me kissing in his car.

Ben leaned in closer and went, “You wouldn’t want us to smear your faggy little secret across town, would you, Amir Bin Laden? Wouldn’t look so great for your people.”

Their words stung so hard that I didn’t even register that they had followed Jackson and me into the empty parking lot where we hooked up when both our parents were home. I didn’t even get a good look at the photo. It’s hard looking at a photo like that, at the face of the first boy you’ve ever kissed, without imagining the creepy stare of the two boys who would blackmail you with the most intimate detail of your life.

“One thousand dollars of your Wiki fortune, and we won’t show this shit to your parents,” Jake said. He nudged Ben, who nodded. Looking at them, it hit me that they were dead serious: they really did believe I was a “Wiki millionaire.”

The thing is, I’m actually very legit in the Wikipedia world, to the point where I actually do receive offers to make and edit pages for money. It started in tenth grade, when a friend’s mom wanted to hire a Wikipedia editor to make a page for her lingerie start-up. My friend commented on the Facebook post, “Amir!!” and the rest was history. I didn’t take the offer, or any of the offers that followed. Paid articles are strictly forbidden in the Wikipedia terms of use. But when Ben and Jake once caught me editing the Real Housewives of New Jersey page in homeroom, I didn’t think it would hurt to pretend I got paid. It’s a lot cooler to say “I do this for money” than “I do this because I find the power of crowdsourcing and the democratization of information really sexy.”

I didn’t have the kind of money they wanted. I begged Ben and Jake to believe me, but they refused. Especially Jake. He was weirdly insistent about the whole thing. It was like he was desperately clinging to this fantasy notion that I was actually a Wikipedia millionaire.

It was less of an explosion, and more of a steady crumbling inside of me, when I realized what had just happened.

All the meticulous planning I had put into how I would come out to my parents, the years I spent closeted but knowing I had to come out the right way: poof. It was dust in the wind. Ben and Jake were very clear: if I didn’t get them the money in one month, I was fucked.

There was one more condition: “Don’t go telling your gay lover about our deal,” Ben added. “If anyone finds out about this, this shit’s going straight to your parents.”