He shakes his head. “No way, not with my stage fright. Besides, I’ve had to spend the last few years unpacking whether I wanted to be Niall singing to all those girls or if I wanted to be one of those girls Niall was singing to.”

I stare at him, taken aback by the shift in conversation.

“Sorry,” he says when he notices my expression. “That probably doesn’t really make sense.”

“It makes perfect sense,” I say to him. “Can I ask you something?”

“You just did.”

I glare at him, so he knows that he isn’t funny.

Wyatt grins, taking another bite of his food and talking through a piece of baked potato. “Go for it.”

“What do you identify with?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like … sexuality wise, I guess?” God, I couldn’t have asked that in a weirder way. “Like your labels.”

“You know, I haven’t really thought about it a lot.”

“Really?”

“No, I think about it all the time.” Wyatt sets down his fork and covers his forehead with his hands, and then he leans back and lets out a huff of air. “Sometimes I think about just not identifying with anything at all, just being myself.”

“You can do that.”

“Yeah, I know. But I’d still like to have something, you know? Even if it’s just for myself.”

“Who are you attracted to?”

“I don’t know; I don’t think it really matters,” he says. “Like I’ve had crushes before. Girls, boys, people whose pronouns I didn’t know, plenty of out nonbinary people.”

“It sounds like you’re pansexual.”

“Maybe.” He picks up his fork and starts playing with his food again. “And don’t even get me started on the whole gender thing.”

“What about gender?”

He smiles. “Didn’t you hear what I said?”

“Oh, right. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize.” Wyatt looks away at a different table. “I just … I don’t think I’m quite ready to have those conversations. Even with myself.”

“Well …” I sigh, wishing I could do a bit more to comfort him. “I’m here if you ever want to talk. I’ve got experience in the gender department.”

He finally looks at me again, another smile on his lips. “Thanks, Neil.”

“Okay, okay, let’s move away from the gender talk.”

“Thank you.”

“If your stage fright is so bad, why do you want to be a singer?”

Wyatt puts his napkin down after wiping his mouth, and he stares at the lit candle, flickering in the middle of the table in a glass jar. “To be honest with you, I don’t even know if I want to be a singer.”

I mean, I guess that was just sort of an assumption I made when I offered the audition. “Then what do you want to do?”

“I want to be in music—don’t get me wrong. And a record deal could do so much for me and my family. But then I look at how pop stars are treated, how their fans act, how everything they do is under this microscope … it seems scary.”