Michael Thomas Ford

She shrugged. “How do you really know if anyone loves you?”
When I didn’t answer, she looked at me. “Really, how do you know?”
I thought about it for a minute. “I guess you just assume they do until they tell you they don’t,” I said.
Sadie shook her head. “You need a better system than that.”
“Maybe you ask,” I suggested.
“If you have to ask, the answer is probably no. Do you think your parents love you?”
I nodded. “Yeah,” I answered. “I do. They may be a little whacked, but they love me.”
“Do they tell you they do?”
“Sometimes,” I said. “My mom more than my dad, but I think that’s usually how it goes.”
Sadie looked at me for a long time. “You’re lucky,” she said finally.

I watched them, the more I thought that that’s exactly how most people are. They move their mouths, but nothing important comes out. They just talk and talk and talk.
That’s what Cat Poop wants me to do: talk. But like I keep telling him, there’s nothing to say.

too deep inside for the truth. The poison comes out, and you die, even though you have beautiful glowing pieces of blue truth in your fingers.

“People always say they want to hear the truth, but they really don’t,” I said. “Like how many parents really want to know that their kids are having sex or smoking? Even if they ask, they just want you to say that everything’s fine. Then they can believe that it is.”

ee what I mean about watching a lot of weird fish? Sometimes they look normal, but then one day they go and do something that totally surprises you—and it gets them landed in a place like this. I don’t think anyone who knows me would ever have thought I’d do what I did.
But I did.

“Sometimes we don’t know why we like certain things,” Cat Poop said. “Or at least we can’t put into words why we like them. We just know that we do. Being gay or straight—or something in between—is often like that. We just like one thing or another because of how it makes us feel.”

o now I’m thinking about it. I’m imagining sitting down with my parents and actually saying, “I’m gay.” And you know what? It makes me a little mad. I mean, straight guys don’t have to sit their parents down and tell them they like girls. Everyone just assumes

that they do. But if you’re gay, everybody makes this ginormous deal out of it. You practically have to hold a news conference and take out an ad in the newspaper. Why? Just because it’s not what most people do? That doesn’t seem fair.

If you ever manage to become perfect, you have to die instantly before you ruin things for everyone else.

You may think you’re fine, but you’re not. If you don’t want to talk about it right now, that’s your decision.