“Um, no, I did not. I’m like her favorite kid—I’m everyone’s favorite kid. If they won’t change for me, they’ll never change.”

She retreats into the bathroom, the door still open, pretending to fix her hair in the mirror. (Um, she wears it in a pony—she can do it without looking.) She doesn’t face me as she defends Mrs. Somboon-Fox.

“Life is full of tradeoffs. This is a good school, a small one where they know you and like you. You’re getting a great education and a safe one. You don’t have the drug problem of Schuylerhook to worry about, and the word ‘academy’ will look good on your transcript.” She’s got her own bag of tricks, “count your blessings” being her favorite. “Just be grateful you’re a legacy, so we get enough of a deal to afford it.” I don’t say a word, not one, so she switches to another classic tactic: shame. “Losing out on a dance isn’t the biggest sacrifice ever.”

“It’s not ‘a dance.’ It’s prom. Which matters to me, even if you didn’t care about yours.”

I catch her reflection in the mirror and see her wincing.

“I didn’t make it to prom. But I never said I didn’t care.”

I am not taking that bait. “What matters is that I do—a lot. It’s not your school now and not your prom we’re talking about. This is my senior year, and it’s insane for them to erase me from my prom.”

“Mrs. Somboon-Fox’s not trying to erase you—”

“MOM!” For real?

This stops her mid-sentence, but she recovers. She turns to look at me, eyes full. “She’s protecting you.”

“Do. Not. Go there.”

But she does. “You know what happened to Chaz Wilson.”

Chaz Wilson is my ghost of gayness past. I mean, not literally—no skinny Black boy with violet eyes appears in my mirror or emerges from the shadows when no one else is looking. But he haunts my life like nobody’s business, even so.

When I first came out, I got “I love you as you are …” and she meant it, but within minutes she was reminding me about Chaz Wilson. When I wanted to have the teeny tiniest rainbow flag tattooed on my bicep? “Sorry, honey—remember Chaz Wilson.” When ASA turned down my proposal for an Allies Club (I mean, it didn’t even have the word “gay” in the name!), instead of sympathy, what did I get? “Think about Chaz Wilson.” It’s like that kid died a thousand times instead of just once.