mother.” I stopped in front of a store and said, “We’re here.”
Dre looked confused at first until his eyes caught the sign in the window. “You brought me to a comic book shop?!”
“I thought you might like it.”
The smile that bloomed on Dre’s face was toothy and brilliant and brightened my whole day. It was the best smile I’d ever seen and was worth the pain and frustration it had taken to get there.
Dre
DEAN WASN’T WHO I thought he was, and maybe the problem was that I’d already decided who I thought he was before I’d given him the chance to tell me. So, pretty much, maybe the problem was me. I would’ve given the finger to anyone who’d tried to tell me they knew who I was, especially since I was still working it out for myself. I felt like an asshole, and I kind of deserved it. I had never been worried what my parents would think when I came out. It was such a non-event for me that it barely registered as anything more than another day. But Dean was marinating in that fear, even if he didn’t want to admit it. He wanted to believe his mom was a good person, but he was also scared she wouldn’t accept him. That kind of doubt could tear a person apart.
Despite his buttoned-up and polished exterior, Dean was kind of a mess. It made me think back to all the things I’d said to him about being uptight or emotionally closed off or whatever, and I felt like a jerk. I’d had no idea what he’d been going through because I hadn’t taken the time to ask.
And it might seem shallow compared to the other stuff we talked about, but Dean had also blown my mind with his revelation that he’s had crushes on guys. On guys like me. In the span of an hour, the possibility Dean could be into me the way I was into him had gone from dim and distant to a pretty solid maybe, and I had no clue how to react. The part of me that Mel was worried about wanted to spill my feelings right on the floor of Newbury Comics and rub Dean’s face in them, but I didn’t because everything was still so raw. He’d built a bridge by bringing me to the closest thing to a church for me, and I was pretty sure shoving my feelings in his face would’ve caused his head to swell and explode in a cloud of confetti.
But the problem that was really messing me up was wondering if we’d even be good together. I know, I know, I was getting way ahead of myself, but it’s like in tenth grade when I was totally in love with Wesley Anders. I wrote a million awful poems about him and forced Mel to read every single one. Finally, she was like, “What would you even do if he liked you back? You’re a flamboyant extrovert, he’s a bully. You practically have a different outfit for every hour of the day, he’s been wearing the same pair of corduroy pants since school started. You like comic books, he likes beating up people who like comic books.”
I’d fallen hard for Wesley because we’d had English together and he’d been nice to me once, probably because he wanted to copy my homework, but it never would’ve worked. Dean could be another Wesley situation. It might not matter how Dean felt about me if all we did was fight.
But he’d brought me to a comic book store, and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to shop. I grabbed Monstress for me because Mel had been bugging me to read it, and I forced Dean to buy the first volume of Saga, though I warned him his mom probably wouldn’t be cool if she found it. I was in heaven. After, I let Dean drag me to the USS Constitution because I could tell he wanted to go even though he was playing like it was no big deal if we didn’t. Then we grabbed a late lunch at a deli and walked the Freedom Trail. We’d sort of silently agreed not to bring up our parents or the election or any of the shit we’d talked about before for a while, and it was the most fun I’d had in a long time.
“How many witches do you think are buried here?” I asked.
It was getting close to the