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      In honour of the fifteenth anniversary of

      Matthew Shepard’s death

      For Matthew Shepard and Tyler Clementi and young people

      everywhere who are just trying to be who they are

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      THANKS TO MY AMAZING EDITOR, NATASHYA WILSON, and the MIRA Ink editorial team, T. S. Ferguson and Annie Stone. Thanks for the awesome karaoke, you guys! (Oh, yeah, and all the support, too!)

      Thanks also to my wonderful agent, Emmanuelle Morgen, without whom I would not sleep at night.

      And a very special thanks to my parents, my brother and Lester, who keeps me honest.

      homophobic (noun): scared of homosexuality (see also: the Swim Thugs, and half of Union High)

      1

      “JUMP, FAGGOT! JUMP!”

      And just like that, summer is over.

      Symbolically, anyway.

      I’ve been at this party for sixty seconds and already the tyranny of the swim thugs is so suffocating, it’s like I never even had summer break to detox from freshman year.

      Not that summer can really be considered a break when you spend the whole thing either folding clothes at the Gap or in therapy. With your mother. Talking about how you had every right to go behind her back and build a memorial website for your dad.

      Who’s dead.

      Obviously. Hence, memorial.

      “Come on, homo! Let’s go!”

      Mike Darren’s backyard is packed with students from every level of Union High’s caste system, but it’s obvious that this is a swim-team-initiation party. As Mike struts around checking the beer level of the bottomless red plastic cups that were given only to the prettiest freshman girls when they skittered through the tiki-torch gauntlet, Matt Hallis and the rest of the swim thugs are lined up on the edge of the pool like a firing squad. A freshman swimmer dressed in a red polo shirt, rolled-up white jeans and loafers with no socks stands on the diving board, backing away from them, inching closer and closer to the end while looking down at the water every other second. Matt ceremoniously raises his arm in the air and then shows off those leadership qualities that got him elected swim captain even though he’s just a sophomore: he fires the first shot, hurling his cup of beer at the freshman.

      Thanks to the fact that Matt is an annoyingly talented athlete whose parents paid for him to spend the whole summer in a weight room, it’s a perfect throw with a ridiculous amount of force behind it. The beer splatters on the freshman’s blond head, the impact nearly knocking him backward as liquid pours down his cheeks, nose and neck, drenching his perfectly pressed shirt. His legs shake a little with the force of the blow and he jostles the diving board. For a second I think he’s going to fall—loafers and all—into the kidney-shaped pool with blue floodlights shimmering just beneath the waterline. He throws his arms out to the sides and steadies himself, and I can tell by the relieved expression on his face that he thinks he survived, that the hazing wasn’t so bad after all.

      He slowly lowers his arms and takes a defiant step toward the firing squad. The relief on his face disappears as Matt’s underlings lift their cups in the air to follow their leader’s example.

      “Jump or die, fag!” yells Matt, his drunken slurring making his speech sound even less intelligent than usual, which is hard to do. The cups nail the freshman like a spray of bullets, and he staggers backward, arms pinwheeling as he tries to cope with the beer in his eyes and mouth. He missteps and falls into the water on his back. The thugs cheer as loafers pop up and float on the pool’s surface.

      Ironically, “Take it Off” by Ke$ha starts playing.

      “What are we doing here?” Tracy asks next to me as she watches her ex-boyfriend parade around collecting high fives. It occurs to me that this is exactly the kind of party that Matt spent time at last summer, before freshman year, which is probably what turned him from the nice guy he was in eighth grade to the total jerk he is now.

      I look at my best friend. A year ago, all she could talk about was how she couldn’t wait to be at parties like this in her cheerleading uniform with her swimmer boyfriend. Now, she’s dressed like a normal person—well, a very fashionable normal person—and she can’t remember why she wanted to be here in the first place.

      I’m so proud of her.

      “‘We are putting in an appearance at the biggest party of the summer so we can start sophomore year on Tuesday with our heads held high,’” I say, quoting her.

      “What a dumb idea,” she replies.

      The freshman hauls himself out of the pool with no help from anyone. He is shivering a little in his soaked clothes, probably trying to figure out whether he should fight back, leave or grab some beer and pretend everything is cool. There’s a radius around him of about 10 feet, as if being the swim thugs’ target of choice is a communicable disease. He takes a towel off a wicker stand and tries to dry his shirt.

      “He picked the wrong team—in more ways than one,” Tracy says. “Not that being gay is a choice,” she quickly adds, repeating what our health teacher from last year, Ms. Maso, drilled into us, even though she probably could have gotten fired for stating as fact what some people think is just a belief about homosexuality. As far as we can tell, Ms. Maso’s the only teacher at Union High who is actually interested in giving kids useful—aka truthful—information.

      Matt stumbles over to kiss Lena, the new captain of the cheerleading team who he had sex with a lot last year while claiming he was a virgin in order to get Tracy—his girlfriend at the time—to sleep with him.

      Which, eventually, she did.

      I glance at Tracy to see if she cares that Matt and Lena are making out in front of half of Union, but she’s not looking at them. She’s watching the freshman as he leans over the water with one of those long-handled nets for cleaning the pool. He nabs his shoes and lifts them, dripping, out of the water. “The chlorine is going to totally trash that leather. God, those look like Gucci, don’t they?”

      I’m about to remind my fashionista friend that I wouldn’t know a Gucci loafer from a loaf of bread when suddenly Kristin is standing right in front of us. In her uniform. With her pom-poms.

      “Tracy! You

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