“I’m not abnormal!” I screamed, collapsing on the bed and clenching my fists around my mother’s duvet. Shame throbbed behind those words, a snake brushing past, underneath a blanket of leaves. Late some nights, when the growing unwanted desire stopped me from sleeping, I would yield to its current. I would let the hidden fantasies sweep me away, listen to their murmur, of the boys and their bodies, the hard forms of their whiteness, the smell of sweat and musk and skin. Moments from PE would flicker: thighs in shorts and armpits in sleeveless tops; Henryk, the strongest boy in the class, on the leather-wrapped gymnastic rings, hanging above us all in the gymnasium, his biceps flexing, the dark hair of his armpits contrasting with his skin, precocious veins running all along his arms, the bulge in his short white shorts . . . images from the changing rooms, the showers we took afterward—water trickling down backs, along the cross of chests and into belly buttons, down to the strongholds of their cocks, which I would only dare glimpse at for a moment and imprint onto my mind despite myself.

When I was done and my body had given its release, I would push these thoughts away, deep down into the recesses of my mind. And yet I’d wake with the same images stuck in my head, like flies caught on a strip of glue. Years of yearning compressed like a muscle, pulsating mercilessly. I felt like a gas flame left burning on the stove for no reason.

One day after school, right before my final exams, when I could no longer take it, I didn’t go straight home but walked through the city by myself, feeling the world far away from me. I walked without knowing where I was going, taking in the shreds of conversations of couples dressed for their dates in suits and ties and skirts and blouses, with their hair done, the man carrying the woman’s coat and making a joke, looking her over in approval; past groups of girls coming out of school in their uniforms, long blue skirts and white socks drawn to their knees, walking in pairs with their plaited hair dangling behind them like tails; past groups of silent smoking men with red faces sitting on benches drinking from unlabeled bottles. The city was dirty and broken, layers of soot and age on the facades, nothing clean and nothing clear, a murky secondhand world. It felt like I would never get away, not from myself, not from this. I walked and walked, and my legs and feet hurt, and this was the only thing that stilled me a little.