I arch my brows incredulously.

“Who am I fooling? Of course you’d ask that.”

I can tell from the stillness between us that the question is uncomfortable, prickly, even. It’s jagged and cold, but it also burns hot at the same time.

“My parents aren’t happy with me right now,” he finally says. “They kicked me out. I’m working at that newspaper for room and board.”

“They kicked you out because you’re gay? Or because you want to be a musician?”

He shrugs. That’s not an answer, but I don’t think I’m going to get anything else out of him. Not yet, anyway.

We cross the street in silence. It’s on me to say something; Michael’s done pouring his heart out. But I don’t know what to say. I’ve never dealt with something like that. When I came out, my parents were accepting. They love me for me, and my friends do too. I’m lucky—and rare. I know that. So stories about dealing with homophobia from parents? That’s foreign to me.

But I can understand standing up for what you believe in and fighting for your own future, not the idea of a future someone else has for you. While we walk in silence, I try to play out what might happen if I told my parents that I’m not sure I want to go into medicine. They wouldn’t kick me out, of course not, but they’d be disappointed. They’d question every choice I made and try to poke holes in my logic.

They’d be dismissive.

“You know you can’t choose, right?” I finally say. “Being gay. It’s not a choice.”

“Is that what you boys in the future say? Science would beg to differ.”

“Gayness being a disease isn’t a scientific law, it’s a theory,” I remind him. “And theories can be proven wrong. I promise you, it gets better.”

“Oh, I know it gets better. Just not here.” He gestures around him. “Somewhere else… Somewhere like…”

“San Francisco?”

He laughs. “You think I’d want to go there? Why? Because I’m gay?”

“Is that such a bad reason? To go someplace where you’d be accepted?”

The history of society’s treatment of gay people isn’t something obscure. It sucked—that’s how it can be summarized. My time, the twenty-first century, is the best time to be gay so far. But Michael doesn’t know that because what he’s living is all he knows.

A pang of guilt ripples through me. Is suggesting that he move breaking a rule? Am I using personal knowledge, knowledge that I’ve learned thanks to the hindsight of historians in my time period, in a way that violates one of the time travelers’ creeds?

But, on the flip side, I’m doing it to help someone. That has to factor in, right?