By Jay-Daniel Baghbanan

Edited by Amy Li and Alloe Mak

With our backs turned to the teacher, we talk in the loudest whispers we can manage. It’s clear our conversations have changed since the second grade, and they’re all the more painful now. Our clothes, our money, our family, our self-worth; none of this mattered when we were kids. We’d play Pokemon, and shoot silly films– drawing characters of our own creations and never thinking twice about all the things that made us different. If anything, we were too similar, even if my deep-in-the-closet mentality was nothing like yours. All we cared about was eating snow and rolling up the hills (as opposed to down). I’d let you copy my homework, and you’d lend me your crayons. Our minds fused and I never had to think about how different our worlds really were. 

But it’s our last year in the same city, with you going to America to study. I’m glad you have the money to do so, and I’m glad you have the parents to do so. I’m as proud as I can get. More so, I’m glad there are people who could like me enough to keep me around. There’s a constant dread of knowing where I don’t belong– my home, and yours too. Most parents would rather not keep me around, morphing itself into a phobia of your family’s perceptions of me. I’m the obvious queer, between my small shoulders, my mullet, and my oversized sweaters, I’m not the traditional kid I was supposed to be. 

“Yeah, I had to convince my parents you were a boy.”

“My dad doesn’t want you over anymore because he doesn’t believe you’re a dude.”

“It was so funny, my mom couldn’t tell you were a boy.”

“My parents support it ‘cause it’s not their kid.”

How many different ways can people tell me the same sentence? And how many times does it need to be said until I’m no longer the punchline? Your parents sigh in relief that I’m not theirs—contrary to my own parents, who cry and yell. I’d apologize a million times if it could fix anything. I’d beat the devil out of myself if it brought my maman a smile. Being queer meant that no matter my grades, no matter the model child, no matter the public speaking, the AP tests, the scholarships, the “perfect kid” and the “good role model”—I’d always be this vampire, uninvited into most homes. 

At least my parents are safe. They’d complain about me to their friends, join the FaceBook groups of “parents of troubled youths,” and make sure the world knew they had no ties to my “deplorable behaviour.” So I turn to you and let you know, in my most adult voice possible, that my family is alright with yours, and my parents are respectable. 

“Oh, my parents don’t even want to talk to yours.”

Why is that?

“Because they think you’re middle-class, and my mom doesn’t associate with the poor!”

. . .

“She still wants to offer you a job though.”

Some things are really really best left unsaid.