Kyle wasn't gay.
And he had never planned on telling anyone.
But Stan had been giving him meaningful looks, and Cartman always seemed to have something up his sleeve, and Kenny had walked in on him jerking off to a video of men engaged in sexual activities, which, frankly, didn't lend much credence to his insistence that he was straight.
But damn it all to hell, Kyle wasn't gay.
He knew that it seemed liked it. But he wasn't.
He was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, tracing the bumps with his eyes. He was expelled for a week for "bullying."
Bullying Cartman for being fat. Oh, Jesus.
Cartman being fat was one of the last reasons he disliked him. In fact, Kyle didn't really mind that much at all. He wasn't a weight-ist. He was sure there were many perfectly pleasant obese people out there. Fatass just didn't happen to be one of them.
And Kyle felt the same way about gay people. This is America, and just as people are free to stuff their faces with hot dogs, they're free to stuff their hot dogs in other people. He just wished that he could explain to people that he wasn't gay, that there was just something going on inside of him that was a little off… But he couldn't. He couldn't tell anyone, because how could he explain anything when he didn't even know himself?
He really wished that he could smoke. But his stash and Stan were far away – in the school parking lot, to be exact, and one of the perks of being expelled was that he didn't have to see that shithole that they call a school.
He didn't want to go to school, but he didn't want to stay in his room.
After sneaking out the window, he walked around town, hands stuffed into his pockets, and he thought about life, and he thought about how unfair everything was, and he thought about David, whose profile he'd stalked, and who was, apparently, engaged to be married to a Christian woman, and he'd undergone some conversion or something. Kyle wondered about how his mother would react if he underwent a conversion. To something interesting. Maybe Satanism. She'd die. He chuckled at the thought.
He wondered how she would react once she'd realized he'd snuck out of the house. She'd be mad. She'd ground him. She'd probably even consider sending him to a military camp or something. But she wouldn't do it. Kyle felt like she hadn't yet hit her breaking point.
He wondered what her breaking point was. Was it telling her he was gay?
"But gay people are supposed to know, right?" Kyle sat down on the curb and felt the snow melt into his jeans. "Like, if I were fag, I'd know, right? It'd be pretty obvious."
Kyle didn't know if he was supposed to know. He didn't know anything. He didn't know if all gay guys had similar existential crises, or if all straight guys wondered about this kind of stuff, and Jesus, this is when he really wished he was brave enough to talk to Stan.
And that's when he saw the hooker, standing on the corner of the street, smoking a cigarette, wearing a bikini top that barely held in her tits.