PROLOGUE

Chattanooga in 1985 wasn’t a place built for reinvention.

It was hemmed in by mountains and memories, a city stitched together by highways and hunches, church signs, and drive-ins. The air smelled like river mud and wet grass, and in the summer, the kudzu grew so fast that it could swallow fences and utility poles whole.

If you were different there, people noticed. Gil had always been different.

In high school, he wasn’t popular. Not even close. He was the boy who walked too softly, the boy who flinched when called on, the one who never made eye contact in the locker room. He didn’t know why he was different, not then. He just knew that people sensed something in him they didn’t like, and they pulled it out of him like a loose thread, every day. Some of the teachers looked at him with pity, while others didn’t look at him at all.

There was no letterman jacket. He wasn’t strong or loud or full of boyish certainty. He was about five-seven, thin, with shaggy black hair and unusually clear skin that never seemed to sweat. He wasn’t an athlete; he was a reader. But under the stress of school, of surviving each day in his own skin, his grades never reflected what he actually understood. People assumed he was quiet because he was simple. In truth, he was quiet because it was safer that way.

He was raised in the church, and his extended family was small and close-knit. All of them could be counted on to offer a casserole and a judgment in the same breath. His only friend group was the youth choir and Wednesday night Bible study, kids who accepted him in the way people accept a cousin they don’t quite get but are too polite to abandon.

Chattanooga didn’t offer much in the way of refuge. There were no bookstores with queer shelves, no rainbow flag stickers on the windows. Just the downtown library with its newish carpet and air conditioning that worked only in some corners. He’d wander the aisles, pretending to look for Civil War histories while hoping something else would fall off the shelves, something that might explain to him who he was. It never did.

The mall wasn’t new, but it was dependable. It had a Merry- Go-Round, a Chess King, a Gateway Books, and anchor stores like Sears and JCPenney. Sometimes Gil would walk the length of it on Saturday afternoons, headphones on, pretending he was just a guy passing through. He didn’t know what life outside Chattanooga looked like only that it had to be different from this.

After he graduated, something changed. For the first time in his life, Gil felt seen.

But it was in being seen that things began to slide into worshipful adulation, into violence, into reinvention. What he found wasn't freedom. It was the start of a story that would unravel everything he thought he understood about desire, safety, and who he was allowed to become.