Chapter 2

Wyatt dressed—jeans and a T-shirt today—and then looked for a hairband to tie his hair back. Some days he liked to leave it loose. Some days he even played around with a blow dryer and product to make it fall in loose curls, or give it waves, but today he just pulled it back into a messy bun. Today was definitely what Wyatt was coming to think of as a boy day.

His stomach clenched as he popped the elastic around his hair.

Not that…

Not that his other days were girldays. They were just softer days. Or something. They were days when he added some eyeliner, or some lip gloss, or wore a shirt that maybe looked like it came off a rack from the other side of the store or something. He was softening his look, he wasn’t being a girl. He was…he was just being Wyatt

The family didn’t care. One bonus of being raised by two gay guys? It hadn’t been an issue when Wyatt, thirteen years old, had told them he was gay too. So they thought that sometimes he was experimenting with his look with the clothes and the eyeliner and the lip gloss, except Wyatt knew that’s not what it was. He was…he was maybe not exactly a guy at all on those softer days. Not a girl, but maybe not exactly a guy.

It was confusing.

He was Wyatt, and that should have been enough, right? His family would tell him that was enough, but Wyatt felt it somehow wasn’t. Not when he was still figuring out who Wyatt was.

Wyatt stared into his dark eyes in the reflection of his bedroom mirror and wondered if he’d always feel a little like there was a stranger staring back.

* * * *

Wyatt was downstairs with one of Dad’s old YouTube episodes on in the background when Lettie burst into the house surrounded by her pack of dogs.

“Don’t let them in the kitchen!” he called to her.

“I won’t!” She sailed through the house with the dogs barreling along with her.

Lettie was a sophomore in high school, and she was in perpetual danger of failing a bunch of classes. It wasn’t that she wasn’t smart. She was on the spectrum though, and she tended only to be interested in things that, well, interested her. And schoolwork was not one of those things. Dad and Justin had tried to tell her that if she wanted to start her own business training dogs when she was finished with school that she’d at least need to know how to do her own books, but Lettie didn’t seem bothered. Wasn’t that what accountants were for?

Wyatt paused the video. Dad wanted help planning the next series, which meant Wyatt was writing his ideas down. Listening to Dad’s voice in the background helped, for some reason. When he was little, and Dad had spent a few nights away here and there with work, Justin used to let Wyatt go to sleep watching Dad’s videos. Though looking back, Wyatt suspected it had been an excuse for Justin to watch them too.

Wyatt didn’t remember much about before they came to live in California. He had vague memories of going to visit Del, now Dad, and of Dad being one of the first adults he really felt safe around, but everything else was hazy. He didn’t remember his mother, not really, and sometimes felt a jolt of panic when he tried to remember her. He didn’t know how much of that was his actual memories, or if it was just a reaction from what he’d learned much later had happened: when she’d overdosed, Wyatt had been sitting on the couch with her. Nobody knew how long it was until Harper had got home from school to find them there.

Wyatt had been to a lot of therapy since. Was he an introvert now because of her? Was he so quiet because once upon a time he’d screamed for hours and nobody had come? Or maybe he’d just thought she was sleeping and hadn’t been bothered at all. He didn’t know. Nobody knew.

Lettie appeared in the doorway. “Have you seen Justin?”

“No.”

“He said there was some guy coming for an interview.” She shrugged. “I forget what time.”

“Okay, thanks.” Wyatt closed his laptop and gathered up his papers. Justin usually used the living room for interviews, and Wyatt didn’t want to get in the way.

He headed upstairs to his bedroom.

He worked on ideas for Dad’s channel for a little while longer, putting on his headphones and listening to music. He was sitting at his desk by the window when he saw the guy getting out of a car and moving closer to the house. Justin must’ve been on the porch below Wyatt’s window.