Karen was walking forward, poking another Oreo into her mouth. My mother was folding and unfolding her arms, shifting around in her chair as if deciding whether or not to storm out of the room. The top of Frankie’s wavy head of hair rocked over the cereal boxes. There was room for all of this in our family, I thought; there was even room for me: one of everything in a ragtag fleet drifting through space. Then Karen stepped up behind Frankie, looked down at his drawing, and said, “You ought to fix her hair, twerp. That looks like two guys.”

“It is two guys,” Frankie said, without looking up. “It’s me and Luke Skywalker.”

“You and Luke Skywalker? So that makes you, what, Princess Leia?”

“I’m me,” Frankie said. “We’re rescuing each other.”

“Great,” Karen snorted. “Gay astronaut lovers.”

“Yes,” Frankie said, as if bored with such petty inquiries.

My mother reached out and took away one of the cereal boxes. “What is that? What are you drawing?”

With his felt-tipped pen still moving, his head bent down in concentration, Frankie said, “Me. Luke. The chasm.”

She pulled the other box away, and all four of us stared down at the drawing of a chasm shrinking in one-point perspective into the center of the page, and in the foreground, holding on to some sort of cable-shooting pistol, Luke Skywalker was in mid-swing, his other arm wrapped around a young man with dark, curly hair who looked an awful lot like Frankie. Frankie’s arms were wrapped around Skywalker’s torso. His eyes were gazing into Skywalker’s, and his lips appeared to be touching the blond man’s cheek.

“Queers in space!” Karen said gleefully.

“Yes,” Frankie said. He reached for the cereal boxes. “May I have my shields back?”

“Karen, stop it,” my mother said. “That’s not what he means.”

“It is what I mean,” Frankie said.

“No, it’s not. You don’t mean that the two of you—in that picture—are … that way.”

“In the picture, yes, I mean that exactly. It’s a fantasy, Mom.”

Karen snorted again and said, “Fag Wars!”

“Karen, shut up!” my mother said.

Frankie glanced at the two of them calmly. “She doesn’t bug me, Mom. None of you do.”

I had never given a thought to actually telling them I might be gay. Suddenly, I saw that it was possible, and that I wanted to—and at the same moment, I realized I never could. In his calm, innocent way, Frankie had seized that moon in the galaxy of crazy and had raised his flag.

Karen was laughing around a cookie. My mother was staring aghast at her youngest son, who had returned to his drawing and was shading in his own curly hair. I wanted to shrink to a pinpoint and vanish from the room.