In school that day, my classmates treated me with deference, like I had lost a person who was important to me. And wasn’t he? I wept for an hour watching Brokeback Mountain, and listened to the soundtrack during long car rides (“The Wings” is a perfect song). Ten Things I Hate About You taught me that long hair is a weakness of mine. The first boy's hand I ever held was in a movie theatre during The Dark Knight. Essentially, Heath Ledger’s movies were flags in the sands of my formation. My shirt was an display of grief to the other seventh graders whose taste for pop culture, perhaps, burned less ardently. But at least I had taste, I told myself. At least it constituted so much of me that I’d express it through arts and crafts (and later, through essays).