Summary

In May 1998, Saeed is twelve years old and living in Lewisville, Texas with his mother Carol. He reads Another Country by James Baldwin and is titillated by its contents. In the book, he finds a Polaroid picture of a man he does not know with an odd smile on his face. He asks his mother about the picture and she tells him that the man was a friend of hers from school who got sick with AIDS and killed himself. Though he can't imagine his mother saying the word "gay," the absence of it vibrates in the air between them. Saeed thinks about being gay all the time. He goes to the library and reads books about homosexuality. All the books he finds about being gay are "also about AIDS" (10) and he feels like he has "made the mistake of asking a fortune-teller...