Um, personally, I better keep mum on that score, but Frohmeyer isn’t waiting to hear from me anyway. “Wilson, I think you know better than that. You know what flies at First Secondary, and I’m not asking about sex.”

Chaz shrugs as if he has no more to add. Frohmeyer eyes me. “You may be new, Silverthorn, but I’m guessing you know boys don’t go around kissing other boys here.”

I find my voice. “I know I don’t.” I don’t “go around” kissing multiple people anywhere.

He lays both hands flat on his desk and raises his shoulders, then takes a breath and blows it out.

“You’re saying you weren’t making out on the bleachers.”

I’m not leaving this to Chaz. “Seriously? Of course not.” Honestly, you cannot call one kiss—with no magic—“making out.”

“Why would they say you did?”

“They’ve been picking on Chaz since I got here. Ask them why!”

“I did. And they said it’s because he—both of you—are gay. They admitted to chasing you through the woods—”

“Uh, the woods didn’t throw rocks at us.” I touch my face to make the point, and the wound throbs.

“I told you they admitted to it. I’m not splitting hairs. They went home, and that’s that. But they owned up to what they did. That’s why they get to graduate. Now I’m asking you to own up to what you did.”

Because an attack and a kiss are equal crimes.

Chaz’s eyes are narrow, trained on Frohmeyer. “If we say we’re gay, we’ll be suspended too, won’t we?”

“Suspension is the least of your problems, Wilson. You have a family and God to deal with.”

I cut in. “What if we don’t say anything?”

“You clowns really think four boys gave up the rest of their school year by telling the truth, and I’m going to let you pretend they did what they did for no reason?”

“I’m not making assumptions about anything’’—I have the good sense here not to call him sis—“I’m asking a concrete question.”

His face is turning red. “Then it’s four on two, four witnesses with nothing left to hide, saying you did, and two of you saying nothing at all? Letting them take the fall, a big one when you had a chance to tell the truth. You do the math. No way I’m letting two kids fool around on a Christian campus while I just look the other way.”

“So, to be clear: we say yes, and you suspend us?”

“Count yourselves lucky.”

“We say nothing and you expel us.”

“That’s correct.”

I am a half-second away from telling Frohmeyer what he can do with his patriarchal, homophobic, blame-the-victim bull, when Chaz speaks.

“There’s one thing you haven’t told us.”

Frohmeyer is surprised. “Yeah? What’s that?”