I thought about television. There was that character on Dynasty, and another one on Soap. There were those two men on Barney Miller who wore scarves and blousy shirts and swished around the police station with their hands dangling from their wrists. That was four characters out of what, a million? And as for actual people, the only one I’d ever known whom I even suspected of being gay was a boy named Jeremy in my American Lit class who wore eye shadow to school one day (and had it washed off for him in a toilet that afternoon) and who had since moved to Vermont. The odds of Wes Markham and me being at the same point on the map, at the same moment in time, seemed beyond remote and infinitely lucky.

Karen had stopped clucking and both she and my mother had turned back toward the program. Frankie was swaying between me and the television screen.

I said, “Hey, Twiki, you make a better door than a window.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Frankie said. “This is my transparency wrap.”

I heard his guitar plucking but didn’t look at him at all during chorus the next day. He didn’t call my name from the practice room after class. But when I stepped into it, he was there. He was sitting back on the same folding chair, with his legs spread apart and a cigarette pinched sideways above his upper lip like a mustache. A hard-on pushed against the front of his jeans. I said, “I wasn’t sure if, you know—”

The cigarette dropped into one of his wide palms. “Shut the fuck up and close the door.”

I did what he said. He palmed the light switch without getting up, the room went completely dark, and I got down on my knees. On the previous day, he hadn’t touched any part of me other than my head, but this time he dropped one of his hands and closed it over my crotch. I was soft. He squeezed a couple of times as if trying to identify what he was touching, then grunted and took hold of my head again. Seconds after he came, he stood abruptly and left the practice room without another word passing between us.