Back in 2024, I was maybe a third of the way through giving a talk about my first novel, Darius the Great Is Not Okay, to an auditorium full of high schoolers, most of whom had read all or part of the book, when it happened. Someone (later, I found out it was a 9th grade boy who wasn't actually supposed to be in the auditorium in the first place, as his class wasn't one of those who'd studied Darius) interrupted me, shouting, at the top of their lungs, "Faggot!"
(I don't use that word in my daily life, and typing it out still feels weird. But stick with me. It’s important to grapple with both the ugliness of that word, and how some of the queer community has begun to reclaim it. I’m still deciding where I land.)
I didn’t let it disrupt my presentation; I pretended I heard the word “bacon,” talked about my love of breakfast food, and carried on, while the student was bodied out of the auditorium by a group of teachers. I moved on.
But the students in that auditorium didn’t. So many of them came up after to apologize to me, as if it was their responsibility, what someone else had said. Others admired how I handled it, asked for advice on how to do the same, because they were queer too and knew they’d need that skill in their lives too.
Teachers and administrators later told me about the discipline planned for the student shouted. But none of it really stuck with me.
I was visiting. I got to go home. I’m a grown man. The ignorant words of a fourteen-year-old, even a hateful one like the slur he used, didn’t hold much weight.
Instead I found myself thinking of his peers, who have to walk the halls with him, sit in class with him, who will remember this moment for the rest of their school days and maybe the rest of their lives. Who’s apologizing to them? Who’s making sure they feel safe and respected? How are they healing from this?
And I found myself thinking, too, of the boy who shouted the slur. Why did he do it? Was he a homophobe? Was he parroting what he heard at home? In the hallways of the school? Was he put up to it by a classmate? Does he have impulse control issues? Had he eaten breakfast that day? I’ll never know.
The older I get, the less I care about punishment, and the more I care about justice. How can an individual or a community make amends; and how can an individual or a community heal and move on? What does it mean to forgive? What does it mean to remember?
Will that boy ever be given a chance to reflect on his mistakes, learn and grow, apologize for the hurt he’s caused and allowed to heal it? Will his classmates ever get to feel safe and welcome in their school again?
I wrote about this experience after it happened, and my wise agent emailed me: You know...there’s a story in here, if you want to explore it.
And I responded: Hmmm, maybe so! Maybe even two stories, or two stories in one...
So here we are. Two stories—two stories in one—about mistakes, and about fear, and about apologies, and about justice, and about healing.
I don’t know if any of the students who inspired this story will ever read it. But I hope they found their own healing, whatever that may be.
And if you would like to read that story, now you can.
Check out One Word, Six Letters - <p><b>Two teen boys grapple with identity and accountability and set off a ripple effect within their comm
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