The summer of 1993 was the kind that smelled like chlorine, sunscreen, and the occasional burnt burger on a backyard grill. It was also the summer that changed everything for me.
I was just a kid who loved video games and amusement parks, the kind of kid who never outgrew his fascination with roller coasters or late-night marathons of Street Fighter. And then there was him—Michael. He wasn’t just the King of Pop to me; he was the guy who let me beat him at Mortal Kombat and dared me to eat three ice cream sundaes in a row.
We had the kind of friendship that made no sense to the outside world but was perfectly natural to us. Sleepovers at his place weren’t weird; they were fun. His room was bigger than my entire house—two floors, three bathrooms, and a closet the size of a department store. People imagined something sinister in the fact that we shared a space, but they didn’t understand. They never did.
It wasn’t until the media got involved that everything started to unravel. They took our sleepovers, our late-night gaming sessions, our innocent laughter, and turned them into something ugly. They plastered our faces on tabloids, whispered rumors in headlines, and made accusations that felt like wounds.
I remember sitting on my porch one evening, the smell of my dad’s overcooked burgers filling the air, and watching the news spin our friendship into something it never was. It felt like my childhood was going up in flames, like those burnt patties charring against the grill.
“He never did anything to me,” I told anyone who would listen. “We just played video games or went to the park.”
But the world had already decided.
The truth was simple, but people preferred the scandal. And so, my summer of roller coasters and video games turned into a trial I never signed up for. The burgers kept burning, and so did the truth, lost in the smoke of speculation and lies.
