At fourteen, when I realized I was gay, I picked up a magazine with a transgender woman on the cover on my way out of the gas station after school. It was Loretta Moore, the star of a comedy I’d gotten around to watching.

I’d seen Dad go through my things and burn what he didn’t like. There was to be no witchcraft or wizardry. No ghouls, demons, or wendigos. Only Jesus Christ.

Darcy Carter, Arnold Chase, Koba Kaseem—all my favorite he-roes went up in flames when he found out I’d been reading them.

He found the magazine just as fast.

“JAKE!” he bellowed, his volume shaking the house.

I found him in the living room, holding up the magazine. “WHAT IS THIS?”

The cover was ripped down the middle, across Loretta’s face.

My voice didn’t work. His voice left no room for it. I was shaking. He didn’t need his fists to hurt me. The volume and the look sent sheer terror through my being. Still, his fists hit my face, neck, and stomach like blocks of hail. I left the house bloody faced, stomach upside down. He never said I’d have to go, but I couldn’t stay. Now he knew for sure. I am gay.

I ran to the park. I swung on the swing, dragging my feet through the dirt, and I texted Grandma. She came to pick me up, gave me leftover dinner, let me rest on the couch.

Grandma’s house is where I learned to fall on hard times. It’s where I learned about art and cooking and culture. In her living room hangs a painting of six-year-old Ruby Bridges being escorted to school by four men in suits, the word nigger scrawled on the concrete wall behind her.

“That’s how I want you to walk into that school every day,” Grandma told me after I got into St. Clair, in the summer after ninth grade. “Head high,” she said. “No matter what they say to you, you walk in there with pride and you get your education. Because nobody can take that away from you.”

I open the fence and walk into the playground, my feet falling silently on the wood chips and mud. The fog in the thicket beyond the fence is parasitic. A shadow of trees hangs over me, like a jungle canopy, clawing at the darkness, hissing in the wind.

The carousel platform is a pie of fading blue, yellow, and red. The bars perch from a post in the center, like spiders’ legs.

The wheel starts to spin when I sit on the flimsy wood.

“It’s okay,” I whisper.

No, it isn’t. I want to curl up and die.