“Ugh, I’m starved,” Bunny said. I, who by fifteen was already a neurotic counter of calories, almost gasped at this statement, having witnessed the 700-calorie Pop-Tart sandwich.

“And you’ll join us, obviously,” Ray Lampert said, turning to me. He was substantially fatter than in his picture, and while there were dark puffy bags under his eyes, the rest of his skin tone was so peculiarly even that I could have sworn he was wearing makeup. His blue dress shirt was unbuttoned a scandalous three buttons, and he was wearing a ratty red baseball cap. It occurred to me that I had probably seen him dozens of times and had just never realized that it was the same man as in the photograph.

“This is Michael,” she said. “Were you thinking Bamboo Forest?”

“No, I want good, really good, egg drop soup. Bamboo Forest is so watery.” He turned to me. “Don’t you think it’s watery?”

What I thought was that I didn’t know anyone was such a connoisseur of egg drop soup. To me it just came, like napkins and forks. “I should probably get home,” I said.

“You don’t really have to go, do you?” Bunny said with sudden, cloying desperation. “Say you’ll come with us!”

Ray reached out and squeezed my shoulder. “He’s got nothing better to do, right, son? Don’t tell me you’re one of these overscheduled kids that’s got back-to-back tutoring and chess club right before you off yourself because you didn’t get into Harvard.”

He had found me unattended in his daughter’s bedroom; I stank of cigarettes and was wearing a Nirvana T-shirt and eyeliner, and I had a septum piercing. My hair was loose and went halfway down my back. It was unclear to me if his remarks were meant ironically or if he was actually blind. “Let’s make it a party!” he said, slapped me on the back, and headed downstairs, shouting that he would meet us at the car.

Bunny turned to me and said in a low voice, “My dad’s kind of weird, but I promise it will be fun.”

And I thought: If Ray Lampert was one of the men I met on Craigslist, I would be too scared to ever get in his car, because he was the kind who would lock you in a closet or put a gun in your mouth and then cry about his ex-wife. Bunny took my hand and twined her fingers through my own. And she looked at me with eyes so hopeful that I nodded.

Honestly, I probably would have let her take me anywhere.

I did not often leave the narrow cove of North Shore, as my aunt Deedee possessed neither the material means nor the disposition to take us out to dinner anywhere, and since my mother had been released from prison and my little sister had returned to living with her, my continued presence at my aunt’s house depended almost entirely on my being around as seldom as possible. My aunt was a difficult woman to know because her personality was almost entirely eclipsed by exhaustion. She worked at the Starbucks inside the Target and at the animal shelter, and between those two jobs she was still barely able to pay our ever-increasing rent. For her, the mansions that encroached daily were a constant reminder that her life was untenable, and that, as she rapidly approached fifty, she had nothing to show for her labors and would soon be forced to move to a less nice (read: less white) part of the city. She was holding on as long as possible, determined to get her son through high school in the good, rich town before collapsing.

I shared a bedroom with her son, Jason, an effortlessly masculine and unreflective sort, who was neither bad nor particularly good, and who often farted in answer to questions addressed to him. How he always had a fart ready to go was a mystery to me, but I knew that if I became annoying enough to him, he would complain to his mother so persistently that it would leave her little choice but to evict me.

When my mother had been released from prison for good behavior after serving only two years of her sentence, my sister moved back in with her while I had remained with Aunt Deedee under the pretext that my mother could not “handle” both of us, though whether on a financial or an emotional level was always vague. It was easy for her and my sister to share a queen-size futon in her tiny studio apartment, but where would they put me, with my adolescent male body? It was as if they were afraid that when they opened a cupboard my secret erections would all come tumbling out.

There was a further bizarre line of reasoning that because I was the same age as Jason, but slightly smaller of build, I could wear his hand-me-downs, thus making my upkeep “practically free.” It “just made sense.” It was “easier for everyone.” While I did nurse this rejection by my mother and sister as a core psychic wound upon which my entire personality was founded, I also breathed a sigh of relief. As much as I wanted my mother to want me to live with her, I didn’t want to actually live in that tiny, airless studio apartment, and I think I even told Aunt Deedee as much.

Really, I suspected there was another reason I remained with my aunt, and it was because almost immediately upon her release my mother had taken up with a new boyfriend who was so exactly like our father it was comical, and Aunt Deedee and I both knew without having to ask or look for clues (the first time I met him he was wearing a shirt that said CONQUER YOUR INNER BITCH; who needed to know more?) that he was probably homophobic. While I had never come out to my aunt, one day in ninth grade, when I had been struggling in the bathroom, she came in and said, “If you are going to wear eyeliner, let me at least teach you how to put it on so you don’t look like a sad clown.” And she had taken the cheap black pencil I had purchased at Rite Aid, explained to me that it was useless, and opened her own makeup bag to me, showing me all of its wonders: tiny arched brushes and tubes and palettes of colors and primers and luminizing sticks and other products I had never heard of. “Go to a MAC store,” she told me. “They’ll love you in there, sweetie.”

Her sympathy did not extend to my septum piercing, which she said made me look like a cow. “A bull,” I pointed out. “At least it’s a boy cow!” But she tolerated it and me, though I did not want to test this tolerance, which I intuitively felt was jerry-rigged from moment to moment, a rope tossed casually to me as she rushed from one shift to another, yelling over her shoulder, “I think there might be tater tots, make something.”

But whenever I went over to see my mother and Gabby, Aunt Deedee would examine me, inspect me. She would make me turn in a circle. Sometimes she would suggest I change my shirt. If I had dared to wear eyeliner, she would tell me to take it off. She requested that I put my hair back in a gross ponytail that made me look like I bred iguanas. But it made me look less gay. And that’s what she was doing. De-gaying me before I went over there. We never talked about it, she never said those words. But that’s what she was doing, and I suspected it was part of why she let me stay. She was protecting me, shielding me in North Shore. When my mother and Gabby moved into a two-bedroom with her new boyfriend, no one even asked if I wanted to go with them. By that time I was in high school, and it was such a good high school, it would have been a shame not to let me finish. Or that was what was said out loud, anyway.