I shrug. “I don’t know if ‘fun’ is the right word for it, but it wasn’t too terrible.”

He laughs. “When I first started working at the camp, it was pretty stressful, but it gets better. You kinda realize that they’re kids, which means as rambunctious and uncontrollable as they can be, they’ll also give you way more wiggle room than any adult.”

He’s probably right about that, even if he had to use some weird SAT word to explain it. I can’t say I did anything particularly well today, but the kids seemed to like me well enough. One little girl even brought me a drawing of a heart and said, “I love you, Mr. Noah,” which was really fucking cute.

“How long have you worked at the camp?” I ask.

“This is my second year,” Devin says. “I haven’t lived in Denver that long, but if I had, I probably would’ve been here longer.”

It’s kind of nauseating how in love he is with the camp and the kids and all that jazz, but I’m trying to give him a pass. I still can’t quite say Devin’s my cup of tea—between the weird whistling and head bobbing while he cleans and the overbearing smiling, he’s just way to peppy for my taste—but something about him coming out to me made me like him a little bit more. Like maybe we aren’t total opposites, and I could stand to be a little nicer to him.

I swipe my mop across the floor. “Where’d you move from?”

“Florida—Satan’s ball sack.”

I laugh because we used to call it that too. It’s the little phallus hanging off the edge of the US. “I’m from Florida too,” I say. “Which county?”

“Dade, you?”

I freeze, my mop stopping mid-swipe. “Same.”

He smiles. “Small world.”

He’s definitely right about that. “Why’d you leave?”

The room falls quiet after that, the sound of Troye Sivan muffled in the background, and I wonder if I overstepped. Really, it doesn’t matter that much. I’m mostly just making small talk, but it kind of feels like I asked him about his dead grandmother or something.

Finally, he says, “I came out at school, and people didn’t take it very well.”

I freeze, my hands gripping the handle of the mop until I’m almost positive I’ll get splinters. “Because you came out as nonbinary?”

He laughs, but it sounds hollow. “Actually, I thought I was a trans girl. They weren’t really cool about that.”

And suddenly something clicks in me and the mop falls from my hands, the wood colliding with the floor in a hollow crack.

Devin stares at me, eyebrows raised. “Are you okay?”

“You went to St. Francis?” I ask, my voice soft.

And Devin’s eyes widen. “How did you know that?”