For Indigo V.

---

THE DAY I STOPPED CRYING, my ex-wife, Kate, made a particularly cruel remark, immediately putting my resolve to the test. “Are you going to start crying?” she’d hissed when I’d told her about Dani’s name change. “You’re probably happy now anyway.”

Dani was already in the truck, wedged between the twin babies in their car seats. I hoped he hadn’t heard.

And I hoped neither Kate nor her husband Shawn saw my face collapse as I turned without replying and hustled back to my car. Not only was I smarting from Kate’s pure meanness, but I was outraged she would stoop so low. To taunt someone about crying: is there a more surefire way to provoke tears?

Not to mention that of course Kate knows that having a gay son would further the scrutiny of my own masculinity. And I wouldn’t have been ashamed to be gay, and I am aware that I am a mild, gentle man; nevertheless, I remain a heterosexual male nerd. Put another way: I’m not Drogo, but I’m no Prince Joffrey either. I’d like to believe I’m a bit of a Jon Snow. But maybe that’s what all heterosexual male nerds tell themselves.

Regardless, my son being gay wasn’t making me “happy.” Probably like most parents, I didn’t want my son’s life to be harder than it had to be; I didn’t want him to have to struggle with things that were easy for other people, like becoming a parent or getting a wedding cake. Yet Kate had implied that I was reveling in it, like some sort of next-level, male-Munchausen-by-proxy bullshit. Like I wanted the attention that came with having a gay son, like it would be a new arrow in my quiver of liberal self-righteousness.

It was so mean because Kate and I used to laugh together – in an indulgent, affectionate way – about Dani’s clear interest in all things girl-coded, his high-pitched giggle, his obvious crush on Dalton, a little boy in his class at West. Dani had talked about Dalton constantly, lit up whenever Dalton came into a room. Once, when they were in third grade, I sat between Kate and Dalton’s mother at an assembly. Chit-chatting, Dalton’s mother said, “Dalton’s gotten interested in girls. Is Daniel obsessed with girls too?” I wanted to say, “No, Daniel’s obsessed with Dalton.” I didn’t, though, because even though Kate says everyone in our Milwaukee suburb is so confoundingly “woke,” I think I might be the most liberal person I know, and I voted for Scott Walker. Twice.

But maybe joking about it back then was, for both of us, a way to sort of keep it from happening. Like how I used to make jokes about Kate running off with some redneck Republican who’d say that he loved Daniel, but who would insist that he and Kate should have kids of their “own.” I could tease Kate about that because I didn’t actually think it would happen. But then she left me for a guy named Shawn Bergkamp who works for the National Parks Service and has an unironic “TAXATION IS THEFT” bumper sticker on his oversized pickup, and now they have IVF twins, who are, fine, very cute, but who are also, like, some version of manifesting gone very wrong, at least for me.

Honestly, I don’t even know how I survived it in the beginning. Dani was being bullied – naturally, fucking Dalton was the ringleader – and Kate was acting like our marriage was a dinner date gone bad, and she was frantically flagging someone – anyone – for the cheque. One day, in the middle of all this, I woke up crying, and I couldn’t stop. Each morning, I would shuffle downstairs, hiccup a greeting to my family, and weep into my coffee. I would whimper on the way to work. Once, someone gave me the finger on the Interstate and I had to pull over because I was sobbing so hard. I mostly did not cry when I was teaching, although there were moments: I might get set off by a stirring piece of rhetoric or a video I was showing as an example of pathos, like a clip from the documentary Blackfish. One day, a student expressed displeasure over a timed writing assignment and I had to flee the room. The poor kid, a recent refugee who had been suckered into taking out loans to attend the for-profit technical college where I teach communications, had come to see me in my cubicle the next day, on the verge of tears himself, asking if I thought it might be best for him to leave school altogether. I started crying again and told him that he was definitely college-material, but that he should probably leave Diploma Mill University and enroll at the community college. When he left, Olga from the math department popped her head around our shared cubicle wall. “Woah,” she said. “That was a lot. You okay?”

Of course, this made me cry harder.

“You need to go on anti-depressants,” my friend Harris told me when I relayed the story.

“I know,” I said, and I began to cry. “But I can’t get fat. Not at this point. Kate already thinks . . .” I couldn’t finish.

“I get it,” Harris said. “But this nervous breakdown? It isn’t, like, a great look either.”

I couldn’t collect myself enough to explain again to Harris that I believed that my uncontrollable crying was a reasonable response not only because I’d been cheated on and dumped by a person I was beginning to believe was a demi-narcissist, but also because I was acutely aware that this drama was hurting my child, maybe even more than the fact that he was an effeminate boy in a horrible, homophobic world. I cried all the time, in part, because I knew that Dani couldn’t, because the poor kid had to put on a brave face and go to school every day where the other kids teased him and pushed him around and made sure to let him know that everything about him was wrong, not-okay, disgusting. They shoved Dani against the walls, shouting, “Smear the queer!”

“Smear the queer,” I said to Kate at the time. “This is the 21^st century. I thought that kids didn’t do things like that anymore.”

Kate claimed to be distraught, but she was no help. She was too involved with sneaking around, and then initiating the dissolution of our union, and then embarking on a new marriage, and then the pregnancy and the babies. Sitting around a too-small elementary school table with the social worker and the teacher and some other mysterious specialist, Kate maintained an air of concerned confusion, like she couldn’t believe this continued to happen, and as though she couldn’t properly understand why people kept associating her with me.

“It seems to me like you should be doing more to protect him,” I would say. “It seems to me like maybe you aren’t doing enough.” The only male in the room, I’d be leaking and squeaking, my eyes filling with tears the moment I entered the school, a Pavlovian misfire. Kate didn’t look at me at all during those meetings, treating me as though I were a cop driving alongside her on the highway, only to be nervously glanced at in the side mirror.

And honestly, at the time, I didn’t understand why everyone else wasn’t crying. Who were these people? They seemed to think my crying was the problem, or that Dani was the problem, not the kids who played “Smear the Queer,” whose parents probably laughed when their kids did impressions of my son, who probably thought my son deserved it.

Daniel, now Dani. I’d been reporting on the name change when Kate suggested I was “happy” about Dani’s new identity.

Before that Sunday hand-off at Culver’s, Dani wasn’t “out” yet, though that would have been news to his peers. Earlier, Dani and I had streamed the Elton John biopic. I wanted him to see a movie about a successful gay person. Plus, Dani’s a pianist too.

When we were packing him up to go, I asked him if he’d liked the movie.

“Yeah,” he’d said. He peered into his backpack before zipping it up. “But it wasn’t very realistic. Not enough bullying.”

I felt as though I’d been punched in the throat. I was able to squeak out that I needed to use the bathroom, and I darted away.

“You okay?” he asked, when I rejoined him, ready to go, at the backdoor.

“Too much soda,” I said.

He was quiet in the car. I put the radio on, but then, from the backseat he said, “I want to be called Dani. Not Daniel. Or Deeeh-knee, the way you say it with your accent.”

“I don’t even have an accent anymore.”

“It’s more like D-o-n. Donny. But Dani. With an i.”

“All right,” I said.

“I’m gay,” he said.

“Oh yeah?” I said, forcing a smile even though he couldn’t see my face. “Cool.”

And that was when I stopped crying. It wasn’t even really a decision; it was just a new reality, like the way I stopped sneaking cigarettes the day Kate told me she was pregnant. Though maybe it wasn’t even as hard as that. Because you know what, Kate? To hear that Dani was gay was easier than hearing he couldn’t believe a movie in which a queer kid grows up in a small town and isn’t persecuted. It was easier to hear than, “It’s fine, dad; Dalton’s my friend,” after I saw that little fucker knee my son in the balls on the playground. No, I wasn’t happy he was gay. I wasn’t happy, but I fucking pretended to be, because that’s our fucking job.

---

TO HER CREDIT, it was Kate who pushed for the transfer to St. Francis when the bullying became intolerable.

“Catholics are officially homophobic,” I’d sneered when she first proposed it. “It’s our actual brand.”

“The Waldorf school is twenty grand a year,” she said. “Or did you want to move?”

So there I was, meeting Kate and Shawn in front of the squat yellow brick school, Shawn, be-mulleted and hearty as usual, and Kate, in her work make-up and a long coat that hid her postpartum body, looking lovely. Objectively, she probably didn’t look so great. But Kate always looked good to me. So that sucked.

Inside, as we shoved our hats in our coat pockets and looked around, my newfound ability to not-cry was immediately put to the test, as, though I no longer identified as Catholic, the plaster crèche in the lobby combined with the sweet and comfortable smell, like damp wool sweaters on old-fashioned radiators, transported me back to my own parochial school days and childhood on Long Island.

Luckily, I was saved by Shawn’s inanity.

“So, there’s a lot of this Jesus stuff?” he said, gesturing to a bulletin board with cut-out letters joyfully declaring, “CHRIST OUR SAVIOR IS BORN!” I cut a glance to Kate, who stared steadily ahead, as if this was a reasonable question.

Principal Ericsson, solid and unsmiling, replied, dryly, “This is, in fact, a Catholic school.”

If we’d still been married, Kate and I would have smirked at each other. That day, though, I cringed as she pursed her lips and nodded, so arrogant, as though she and Shawn had cannily caught Principal Ericsson out, as though they’d seen right through the sales pitch.

As if Principal Ericsson cared about recruitment! She was the inverse of the attentive young administrators we’d dealt with at Dani’s middle school, women with elaborate manicures who seemed to care very much as they chirped with concern and took notes on iPads, but then did nothing, did nothing but make excuses, arrange for small-group lunches, deploy jargon to disguise inaction. In contrast, Ericsson’s demeanour suggested that our opinion of her school was immaterial, that St. Francis was not yet another under-enrolled private school on the verge of collapse. Instead, I had the sense that we were the ones with something to prove, as we jogged along, trying to keep up with her long strides. “Robotics lab,” she barked, gesturing to a classroom, and pausing almost imperceptibly. “Updated last year.”

In her office later, Ericsson looked downright bored when, with tears behind my eyeballs like clouds on a day that could go, really, either way, I explained that Dani was “having problems at West.” Kate didn’t jump in, so I continued: “He’s being bullied.”

Ericsson frowned. “Bullying isn’t tolerated at St. Francis,” she said flatly.

I nodded. “Good,” I said. “That’s what we want. A safe environment for him.” I cleared my throat and continued. “He’s not, you know, the most –”

Principal Ericsson cut me off, as though to save me from proposing something absurd and offensive, like putting Taylor Swift’s figure on the crucifixes. “All students are treated with dignity here.”

I wanted to jump into her lap.

Dani was able to transfer a few weeks later – the middle of eighth grade – and move right into the upper school for his freshman year. St. Francis doesn’t have a great music program like West, but it also doesn’t have Dalton Lewis. I know that there are kids like Dalton at every school, but only St. Francis has Principal Felicia Ericsson.

---

THESE DAYS, Dani doesn’t come home with fat lips or scraped hands anymore. And he’s apparently made friends, with whom he games almost constantly when not at school or practicing piano, and who, at least as far as I can tell from my snooping, communicate entirely through texted memes.

Still, there are so many things I don’t know, as Dani’s become secretive, cagey in a way common to teens. I’m dying to ask: Are there any other gay people at St. Francis? Are you out at school? Do you have a boyfriend? Did we make the right choice? Are you okay? Did we fuck you up so completely that nothing we do matters anyway?

I can’t bring myself to make these inquiries though, because when I ask even the most innocuous questions, like “What did you do at your mom’s this weekend?” or “Did you get a good night’s sleep?” he looks up from his phone, blinking, as though I’ve interrupted him just as he was finishing the equation that was going to win him a Nobel Prize. If I’m lucky, he’ll answer “I don’t remember” or “I’ll get back to you” before returning to his phone. If I’m not lucky, he will roll his eyes, or sigh, or say, “Why do you ask?” which is really, perhaps, the best response to any question, and one I wish I’d known when I was a teenager, or even four years ago when Kate wondered if I thought our marriage was “working.”

That’s his response the day I come in the back door and catch a few notes of a heart-breaking melody. I freeze, aware a sudden movement might startle this rare creature, send it leaping away.

But he must sense my presence. The music stops abruptly.

“What was that?” I call. I shut the door and drop my backpack.

Silence. And then, “Why do you ask?”

By the time I get to the dining room, where we keep the squat upright, he is playing something else, something classical and show-off-y. “It sounded great,” I say. “And familiar.”

He shrugs, stops playing. “I have homework,” he says, scooting out from under the piano and unfolding himself. He’s getting so tall; unbelievably, in the past few months, he’s passed me in height. And he’s looking more and more like his mother. Other than the thin Irish lips he gets from my ancestors, he’s all Kate: Scandinavian, with eyes so light it hurts to look at them.

My phone rings. It’s “Alyssa, Lola’s mom.” I have a little hit of dopamine: she is a smoky-voiced, dark-haired, commanding woman, which in another life, might have been my type. It’s been a pleasant surprise that, apparently, a divorced dad who is not yet obese or bald is a pretty hot commodity. But I haven’t been interested in dating. I’m not over Kate. It’s so pathetic, and I’m working on it, but it’s true.

When I listen to the voicemail I discover that, no, Alyssa, Lola’s mom is not calling to flirt with me. She says she’d like to speak to me about “the showcase” when I have a chance. Could I call her back, she asks.

I do not want to call Alyssa, Lola’s mom. For months, a year even, our lives have been mostly untroubled, with no one bullying or cheating on or divorcing anyone else. I’ve even mostly made my peace with Shawn, that loser. His attendance at the St. Francis tour helped; it confirmed, I suppose, his investment in my son, though honestly, he’s one of those guys that wants to defund the schools anyway, so maybe he did have an ulterior motive. But Dani says that he’s nice, that he makes Dani feel included and “part of the family.” I can’t really ask for much more than that, other than for him to do something to make Kate realize her terrible mistake in leaving me, or maybe have a catastrophic, debilitating stroke which would force Kate into the role of reluctant caregiver. Failing that, I guess I’ll take him being “nice” to my kid.

Alyssa, Lola’s mom’s tone doesn’t suggest she’s getting in touch to congratulate me on my hard-earned peace. She’s a kid with a stick, stirring up last year’s muddy puddle. Still, I return the call.

“How are you,” she breathes into the phone. It’s not really a question. “So, like I said . . . the showcase.”

Rather than reveal that my son does not share with me any significant information about his social or creative life, I say, “Sure.” I smile into the phone to let her know I am friendly.

“Well, we’re so proud of the kids for making it in, and I know Dani’s upset, but we just don’t feel comfortable with him accompanying Lola anymore.”

“Okay,” I say.

“Yeah, it was pretty inappropriate,” she says. I am freaking out a little. Inappropriate? I put the phone on speaker and mute it when she’s talking so I can practice some box breathing.

When I don’t say anything, she continues. “I’m sure it will be fine for Dani to just play the piano without a singer. I mean, maybe you’ll encourage him to tone down the writhing?” She makes a noise of disbelief. She pauses and, again, I refuse to rush in. “Obviously it’s not about anyone’s ‘sexuality’ or anything. But I also don’t think it needs to be flaunted. This is the Wisconsin Student Music Festival, not the Greenwich Village Rainbow Pride Parade!” She laughs. “I mean, you agree with me, right?”

I suspect that anyone who calls it the “Greenwich Village Rainbow Pride Parade” does in fact, fundamentally, have a problem with my son’s “sexuality,” so I unmute and, channelling Dani say, “Do I agree? Why do you ask?”

She makes a spluttering noise that suggests she is short-circuiting. “Why do I . . .? I mean, whatever,” she says. “I thought we might be on the same page here. I don’t believe we should sexualize children. Or encourage them to sexualize themselves. But you’re obviously . . . whatever.” She huffs and disconnects the call.

I blink, try to collect myself. I am roiling, and yet what an accomplishment to so disconcert Alyssa, Lola’s mom! I regret that she hung up before I had a chance to get in a dig about how rich it is to hear someone who’d name their daughter “Lola” take a self-righteous stance against sexualizing children. But perhaps that’s for the best. What, exactly has Dani done? And what, exactly, should I do now?

I’d like to call Kate, but she doesn’t want to talk to me, and I don’t want her to know that I have no idea what is going on. I drink my coffee and google “Wisconsin music state festival showcase,” until I have a vague idea of what it is that Dani’s involved in, and it’s exactly what my search terms suggest.

I knock on his bedroom door. I can hear the soft click of the keys on the digital piano and I peek in to confirm that he is practicing with his headphones on.

I open the door and call his name.

He puts the headphones around his neck and looks at me, already bored.

I enter and sit on his bed. “Alyssa, Lola’s mom called me. You’ve been selected for a showcase?”

He nods, noncommittal. He rifles through the sheet music.

“That’s exciting,” I say. “Lola’s mom seems like a real asshole, though. She said Lola can’t sing with you. You’ll be performing alone?”

Dani sighs and rolls his eyes. “Yeah, I know,” he says.

“So that doesn’t bother you?”

His lips draw into a line, something close to a wry smile. “Not really,” he says.

“Alyssa, Lola’s mom, said the ‘showcase’ is this weekend. I’d like to come,” I say.

He puts the headphones back on his ears. “Fine,” he says.

My anxiety is shot through with a brief jolt of joy, like a vein of gold in an ugly, grey stone.

“Great,” I say. “What are you playing?”

“You probably don’t know it,” he says. He puts his fingers on the keyboard.

“I might,” I say. “Or I could look it up.”

He removes one headphone and gives me the side-eye. “It’s old,” he says.

“I’m old,” I say.

He doesn’t disagree.

“I might know it,” I insist. “I listen to lots of different stuff.”

“No, you don’t,” he says. “You only listen to Radiohead and The National.”

It’s difficult to be so finely observed. “I’m going through something,” I say. “But what are you playing?”

“It’s just, like, Tori Amos,” he says.

“I love Tori Amos,” I say, trying to sound enthusiastic. “She’s great.”

“Ummmm, okay,” he says snootily. His tone is borrowed from the gay or gay-adjacent YouTubers that he watches. I don’t like it, but I also think it will come out wrong if I try to tell him I don’t like it.

“She’s my generation,” I insist. “You didn’t invent Tori Amos.”

“Okay,” he says again, impatient, and unconvinced.

“Which song?”

He shrugs. “I haven’t decided.”

“But it’s ‘inappropriate’? Is it the same one Lola’s mom objected to?”

“Lola’s mom is, like, a Mom for Liberty,” he says, dismissively.

“Is she really?” I ask, leaning forward.

But he is finished with this conversation. “Maybe not literally,” he says, replacing the headphone and turning back to his keyboard. “But she’s super uptight. And you don’t have to worry. It’ll be fine. Plus, Lola’s not that good.” His fingers fly as he plays scales. Where did this ability come from? Not me, or Kate.

I stand and gingerly pull the headphone away from his ear. “Should we invite mom and Kid Rock?”

He doesn’t stop playing, but allows the headphone to remain askew.

“The whole thing is going to be, like, 30 seconds long.”

“I bet Harris would love to come too.”

“Harris needs to get a life.”

“Don’t be mean. Harris is your biggest fan.” I pause. “But you’re not wrong. He doesn’t have a lot going on.” Harris’s wife lives in Dublin. They only spend about three months a year together. Kate and I used to sneer. But look who’s still married.

Downstairs, I text Harris, which predictably results in a much longer exchange than I’m looking for, but which I never know how to end. He’d love to come to the recital, he says, but then wants to tell me about his father’s dementia, and complain about the Brewers, and try to firm up our plans for an upcoming trip to Chicago. Me getting divorced has been a real boon to Harris’s social life.

I text back absently, thinking about the showcase. I wasn’t telling the truth: I never liked Tori Amos. All that Lilith-Fair feminism was a bit too earnest for me. It seems sweet that young people have re-discovered her, though. Maybe they got to know her through those horrible ASPCA commercials she used to do. God, it was impossible not to cry watching those. I’m glad I haven’t seen one in a long time.

---

ON THE SATURDAY of the showcase, Dani is nervous, though he is pretending he is not, and I am pretending not to notice. Thankfully, he has to be at the college auditorium early, so I drop him off and then go pick up Harris.

We are milling around the lobby when Harris asks, “Are we sitting with the QAnon Shaman?” He nods toward where Kate stands with Shawn. I laugh.

“He’s not looking so robust anymore,” I say. “Maybe the government teat is running dry.” I’d say he looks so haggard because of the stress of new parenthood, but naturally the twins are nowhere in sight; I know, from Dani, that my traitorous ex-mother-in-law is basically co-parenting with Kate, that she often leaves prepared casseroles in the fridge and takes the twins for weekends at a time. God, I miss those days.

“Yikes, there’s Dani’s principal,” I say, spotting the hulking Ericsson on the far side of the lobby. “I didn’t know she was going to be here.” I turn back to Harris, hoping she doesn’t notice me. “Did I tell you that Dani’s doing a Tori Amos song? Blast from the past, huh? Haven’t heard anything from her in years.”

“She actually put out a new album recently,” Harris informs me. “Maybe he’s doing one of those songs.”

I shrug. “Or that ASPCA song,” I say. “What was it, ‘Arms of an Angel’?”

“That’s Sarah McLachlan,” Harris says. “Tori Amos did ‘Cornflake Girl.’ And ‘Crucify.’ She was the one who used to hump the piano bench.”

It is as though Harris has injected ice directly into my heart. “Crucify?” I choke out. How could I have made such a stupid mistake? Of course I know who Tori Amos is. In a flash, I see her at the piano, and I suspect I understand more acutely what Alyssa, Lola’s mom, had been concerned about.

My eyes dart around the room, involuntarily seeking out Principal Ericsson, which of course has the effect of attracting her attention; I have sounded the foghorn to call home that graceful barge. “Shit. The principal’s coming over here.”

“She’s gay?” Harris asks.

“No,” I say. “She’s a Catholic school principal.” I look again. “Maybe, though.”

She arrives, followed by another woman. The two of them wear cross-body bags, comfortable clogs, and floral blouses. They look very much like Madison-area lesbians, like women who snowshoe, who put mushrooms and squash in lasagna, who buy actual vegetables, and not just apple cider donuts, at the farmer’s market.

I introduce Harris and meet Principal Ericsson’s “friend” Eva, but it’s hard to focus, as I am fizzing with anxiety and overwhelmed with new information. There’s this Tori Amos stuff, but also the idea that Principal Ericsson is a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, which is akin to seeing a picture of a flower and then zooming out to see that it was really an image of a microscopic organism that lives on human eyelashes: it is marvellous, and strange, and it changes everything, or maybe it doesn’t.

Then, fast on the heels of Principal Ericsson are Kate and Shawn, and I can’t help but notice how nice Kate looks. She smiles at me, which is new, and which I plan to unpack later.

There are more introductions, and a frosty greeting between Kate and Harris, and then there is the business of asking after the twins, and wondering aloud what it is that Dani will perform.

“Looks like he’s the very last one to go,” Shawn says, pointing to a line on the program. “‘Precious Things.’ I don’t think I know that song.”

I’m not quite sure I know it either, but I suspect it is intense, like all Tori Amos songs. However, even if Principal Ericsson is a lesbian, I am relieved it is not “Crucify.”

The doors to the auditorium finally open and we file in, relieved to have something to do besides stand around feigning interest in each other. We take a row: Kate and then Shawn and then Harris and then me and then Principal Ericsson and then Eva.

“This is quite an accomplishment,” Ericsson announces as I pretend to read my program.

“It’s very cool of you to come to support Dani,” I say, although I am wishing, desperately, that she had not come, or that I could be confident that there would be no “writhing.”

“Of course I came,” Ericsson says snappishly. “Dani is representing St. Francis.” I am about to interject that no, really, Dani is acting one-hundred-percent as a private citizen, when she adds: “And he invited me. I wouldn’t miss it.” She casts a sideways glance at me, her eyebrows slightly raised, as though expecting an objection.

What is this? Who on earth invites their principal to an extracurricular musical competition? His own parents had to negotiate for permission to attend. Yet another mystery for my overheating brain.

I suffer through a dozen mercifully short performances. I’m aware that some of these kids are excellent, but the only one I watch with interest is Lola, who sings a tepid acapella version of “Let it Go.” Take that, Alyssa, Lola’s mom, I think, as I golf-clap.

And then Dani takes the stage. He walks with great dignity to the piano. My sweet, talented, adorable, goofy son. I have sat through many, many recitals, but none quite like this one. Looking at that profile – the nose too big for the face, though I think he’ll grow into it, like Kate did – that dear chin, that awful haircut, I am overwhelmed with love and terror; and I must physically resist the urge to run down the aisle and leap onto the stage, sweep him up in my arms and flee out the emergency exit. If this is bad or if he is in any way injured, I think I might die.

He sets up the music and places his hands on the keys but does not play. He continues to sit at the piano, staring straight ahead. The audience shifts, looks at their programs. Why has he not begun? Perhaps he will not begin. Perhaps he will decide that today was not the day to do a Tori Amos song at the All-State Wisconsin Student Musical Festival to which he invited the almost comically austere principal of his Catholic school. It’s all right, I think. I’ll homeschool him. Or we’ll move to Madison, or even back East somehow, to a neighbourhood lousy with “Love is Love” lawn signs. Or we’ll come up, together, with some other idea, something I can’t imagine at this moment because I am practically hyperventilating as I watch him now adjust the microphone on top of the piano because, I realize, he is planning to sing as well as play. My mind skitters through any Tori Amos information that might be stored in a forgotten corner, and I wish I could take out my phone and just look it up. What is “Precious Things” about? Is there anything too sexual, too “inappropriate”? I cannot remember. I sit up tall and practice my breathing.

Dani begins to play. I recognize those first, haunting notes. Suddenly, despite my distress, I am moved. And I sense the attention of the audience snapping into place, a collective gasp in the presence of true talent.

He begins to sing, and he sounds better than I would have expected, but not “good”; he’s never been interested in singing before, as far as I know. Still, there is something spellbinding about the contrast between his croaking, almost raspy voice, and the complex elegance of the piano. “Holy shit,” Harris hisses. I do not respond. I can’t take my eyes from the stage.

Still, I cringe when I catch a line about “Christian boys,” something sexual, and then a reference to Jesus, and I remember to be worried about the solid mass of Ericsson beside me. Harris should have been a better friend and taken this seat. Then I would not have to so studiously avoid registering her in my peripheral vision as my son begins, as Alyssa, Lola’s mom, might say, to writhe and moan, his legs splayed, one foot pounding the piano pedal.

I barely recognize him, this young man having some sort of cathartic, sexual experience at the piano.

I barely recognize him, but my soul recognizes the essence of being fourteen, of being big-nosed, and strange, and desperately lonely, but also feverishly curious, and full of love and yearning. Sublime and defiantly unselfconscious, he has captured and distilled this fugacious state, and I am with him – I am him – as he croons and rages, furious and heartbroken.

The song ends and I leap to my feet. The applause is wild, and there is whooping – it is me, I am doing the whooping – and my son bows and smiles at me – and bows again, and retreats.

Seats creak and snap up as the audience rises. The showcase is concluded. I am blinking and breathless, unable to focus or respond to what Harris is saying. I overhear a woman in the row in front of us say something about “saving the best for last” and I want to tap her, to revel in the revelation that yes, that creative genius who just totally killed up there is my son! But instead I am again forced to shuffle along back toward the doors, my eyes on my feet, though I listen as all around me people sniffle and murmur, and I am agitated that they seem to have moved on already. I have not; I cannot. And then, in the lobby at last, I am forced to stand in a circle with pairs of people who in almost every circumstance would likely dis-request each other’s company. I remember to be afraid of Ericsson, and I am about to ramble on about art, or interpretation, or to apologize, or make an excuse, when I realize that she is flushed with colour, and that though she stands stoically, her eyes fixed on a patch of ceiling, she is clutching her program to her chest, and there is an ecstatic tremble in her pursed lips.

“Jesus Christ,” Kate says to no one in particular. “That was incredible.”

Yes, Kate, I think. And I love her again, not in the mournful, bitter way I usually do, but rather with a sort of awe and even gratitude for the parts of her that I see in our son.

I am about to declare this – to take Kate in my arms and thank her – when the side door swings open and the performers emerge, and there is Dani, our boy, and we throw our hands in the air and holler, and we move as one to gather around and embrace him. I am crushed between Principal Ericsson and Kate as I try to touch my son, to pat and pinch him, to tell him how talented and brave and beautiful he is. He is such a surprise to us, except that he isn’t, we always knew, all along, didn’t we, how wonderful he was? And it isn’t just me for once; we each and every one of us is crying, even Eva and Shawn, and Harris and Principal Ericsson, and even Dani, and even Kate, because we are so in love with what Dani has done, and we are so glad that in this strange and terrifying world, we are his, and he is ours, this precious boy.

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