Mr. Patrick points because he’s heard. “Andrew. You see me after class.”
I blush scarlet. I wish Em were here. God, I am so stupid.
I understand him, I wrote. He loves me, I wrote.
I can’t believe I was so stupid.
I can’t believe I spent two years of my life loving a guy who is gay.
“I’m done whining,” I announce to Emily as I stir my Postum.
The stupid red coffee stirrer keeps bending. It’s not tough enough to slosh around the thicker stuff, the Postum stuff, the hearty stuff.
Emily raises her eyebrows. She sips her Coke.
“I mean it. I’m officially done whining,” I repeat. I pull out the stirrer and suck the end.
“Uh-huh,” she says.
“You don’t believe me?”
“You’re allowed to whine a little,” she says. She twists the pop top on her Coke. Twisting. Twisting. She yanks it off. She takes a picture of the Coke can, pop topless.
“I’m done whining,” I tell her.
My head spins. She flicks the little metal pop top at me. It skitters across the table. I slap it down with my hand, keep it from sliding off the table top and into the abyss of the cafeteria floor.
“I mean it,” I say again. “I’m done.”
All during lunch people come up and ask me if I’m okay. Callie Clark gives me a supportive hug. Amiee Ciciotte tells me that I’m better off without Dylan. Shawn comes over 800 times and asks Emily and me if we need anything. She makes googly eyes at him.
My eyes keep glancing over at Tom’s table. His eyes glance over at mine and when our eyes meet, lock, and hold it’s like electric shocks bounce up and down my skin. It’s crazy, uncontrolled electricity and it makes me scared a bit and my breath hitches and I turn away. And there’s this other thing stuck in there too, this thing that gnaws at me. His dad told him to look after me. That’s it. That’s all. Why does this matter? I have no idea.
When Emily’s Coke is gone and my Postum has sunk to the bottom of my stomach, she says, “You know, I’m not sure if liking other guys yet is a good idea.”
I lift up my eyebrows at her.
She fiddles with the buttons on her camera. Her unoccupied hands flits through the air with her rapid-pace words. “I mean, it’s good in the way that it means you’re moving on, right? You’re moving past this, which is healthy, but maybe it’s not, because it’s like a rebound thing, you know? It’s like maybe you aren’t giving yourself enough time to recover from the trauma of your relationship.”
“The trauma of my relationship?”
“Yeah,” she nods, sighs, and puts the lens cap on. “You know. It’s a big deal, what’s happening to you and Dylan and everything. That’s hard to adjust to. You loved him for, like, forever and then—boom—that love’s gone.”
I stare into Emily’s blue eyes. She stares back with sympathy. I say as undramatically as possible, “It was a lie, Em. It was just a fairy tale. You don’t have to recover from a fairy tale.”
She exhales, plucks off the lens cap again, and twirls it between her fingers. “Yes, you do.”
Emily and I head off to science. Just outside the cafeteria door, Shawn stands in front of me, totally blocking the way. His too-big eyes are sad, sad, sad and he stares down at me so intently that I’m worried that there’s dandruff on the top of my head or something.
“Belle,” he says.
I wait.
He doesn’t say anything. Emily fluffs her hair and flutters her eyelashes, totally subconsciously. She’s had the hots for Shawn forever.
He stares at me.
I wait.
He clears his throat. “I’m sorry about Dylan.”
“Oh,” I say and suddenly find my shoes incredibly interesting. They are canvas Snoopy sneakers with clouds on them, arty but cool. Snoopy holds the balloons floating up above his red doghouse, heading up, up, up into a blue sky.
Shawn clears his throat again. “It sucks that he’s gay.”
I nod because what else am I supposed to do?
Emily coughs and shifts her weight in her bright yellow clogs. Shawn’s sneaker taps the floor. Footwear is very interesting these days.
“I didn’t know,” he says.
“Yeah,” I shrug. “Me either.”
“Really? You couldn’t tell?”
People push by us. Rachel, Mimi, Anna. Mimi glares at me. It’s getting late.
“Nobody could tell,” Emily says. “I mean, how can you tell if someone’s gay or not?”
Shawn shrugs. “I heard they smell different.”
Emily rolls her eyes. She grabs his arm and steers him down the hall. I follow them, watching their feet and how they move forward one step at a time. Em snaps a picture of Shawn. He starts walking in such a happy way that it’s almost like skipping. They are too cute.
Behind me someone hisses, “Fag hag.”
I whirl around, but it’s just blank faces, none of them stick in my head, they are all unfocused, except for their eyes. Their eyes stare.
But the truth is, I know all these eyes. There’s Andrew. There’s Mimi again. There’s Aimee Ciciotte and Anna.
“Did you say something?” I ask Mimi. She shakes her head, but her mouth makes a tiny little smirk.
I do not give her the finger the way I want to, because I have class, damn it. Instead, I whirl back around and head into science.
“We are going to the dance Friday,” Emily announces as we examine our fetal pig’s urinary system.
The pig’s bladder looks suddenly, impossibly full. Oh, maybe that’s my own.
“What?” I sit back in my chair, pull off my latex glove. My hand smells like a condom. I contemplate telling Emily about what someone, possibly Mimi, called me in the hall, but she looks so focused, it’s not worth it.
“The dance. We’re going,” she says, not even looking at me, poking through the pig’s innards.
I shake my head. “No way.”
“Yep.”
Emily invades the pig, works her way around like a pro, now that we’ve found its spleen. “This baby is ours,” she said when we sat down. She took a picture of it. “No more girlie queasy crap. This baby is ours.”
She pokes and prods. She careens through its insides. She explores and takes notes. I follow her lead, but wrongness fills my bones. We are invaders. We are defilers, slicing through muscles, moving protective sheaths to see what we will see.
“You have to get back out there,” she says.
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do,” she slices something. “Damn. Hold this up.”
Using this thin metal stick thing, I hold up a piece of abdominal muscle. She takes a picture of me and then goes back to work.
“Didn’t you just say it was too soon for me to like somebody else?”
She slices deeper. “I changed my mind.”
“I don’t want to go,” I tell her.
“You sound like a baby. ‘I don’t want to go.’” She peers into the pig’s pelvic area. “No choice. Shawn and I will kidnap you.”
“You’re going with Shawn?”
She flashes smile glorious. “Mm-hhm.”
“That’s great!” I say and think, third wheel, third wheel.
Emily, the telepath, hears me somehow. “Like I’ve never been the third wheel.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You were thinking it,” she sighs. “Do you think this is the ureter or the vagina?”
She giggles.
I shrug.
“We don’t know the difference between a ureter and a vagina.” She’s dying now, laughing hysterically. She raises her hand and calls out, “Oh, Mr. Zeki! We can’t tell the difference between the u
reter and the vagina!”
Mr. Zeki struts over, hands on the hips of his too-tight chinos. “What are you? Junior girls or sophomore boys?”
Everybody cracks up. I drop the muscle. Emily snorts out her nose.
Mr. Zeki moves the muscle, uses the pointer, aims it at a tiny tube. “That, girls, is the ureter.”
He winks. “You’ll have to find your vagina on your own.”
Red flames both our faces, but it’s funny too. I hide my face in my hands and laugh and laugh until there is nothing left, until tears break through the surface of my eyes, until everything inside of me is gone, a dehydrated fetal pig without a soul.
Emily and I have never had a hard time getting guys, not since we passed that awkward stage in seventh grade where pudge made its home throughout my body and Emily resembled a mutated granola bar with braces and stringy hair.
She’s a chocolate torte now. She’s yummy with her super-model chestnut hair and her flirt eyes.
When you read “chick lit” you always find a hottie friend and a not hottie friend. One friend is always the ooh-la-la girl who everyone gravitates toward. The other is looked over, ignored, fading in the background while the other gallivants through French kissing hordes and muscle-man hands.
That’s not how it ever was with us.
We always knew what guy would like which one of us. We’d split it up. Emily got artists, runners, metal heads, red-haired men, football players, Greek men. I’d get musicians, writers, Arab men, African-American men, soccer players. And gay men. Did I forget gay men? I did, didn’t I?
Those lists are not all-inclusive of course. Shawn is a soccer player. One of my boyfriends freshman year was a runner. So, we mixed it up a bit.
“Everybody’s got a type,” Emily said once, after an Arab guy at the Bangor Mall ran after me, proposing.
I turned him down, blushing.
“They just like you ’cause you blush,” she said. “It’s so cute.”
She made smooching noises at me. I socked her in the arm and we went and bought shoes. She took pictures of our feet in every pair.
Now, I’m wondering, what if I don’t have a type anymore? What if I go to this stupid dance thing and Shawn and Emily rip it up and I stand on the wall, staring at everyone else in couples, two by two going into the sex ark and I’m alone, alone, alone.
Or worse, what if my type is gay men trying not to be gay? What if the only guys who like me, like me as a last resort, the final shot at heterosexuality? What if I really am a beard? I’m obviously not a fag hag, but maybe I’m just someone people use for a disguise?
This is what I’m thinking when we pass Dylan in the hall. He’s wearing a giant pink triangle on his black t-shirt, the universal symbol of gayness.
My breath whooshes out of me. My hand grabs Emily’s arm.
Dylan waves at us and I walk up to him thinking, Breathe. Breathe.
“Dylan?”
He smiles at me and shrugs. “I figured it was time to just come out.”
“You think that’s a good idea?” Emily says. “Somebody’s going to slam you.”
“Dylan?” I say and in his name is all my worry and fear, rushing out of me like a broken guitar chord, like a sad, sad, song.
“I can handle myself.” He just shrugs again. His green eyes burn into me. “People already know, anyway. How about you, Belle? You okay?”
“Yeah,” I whisper.
He reaches out and touches my cheek, then drops his hand. “I know this is hard for you.”
“No—it’s . . .” My words flee. People walk by us. They turn their heads to stare.
“We’re still friends, Belle,” he says. “I still love you.”
Emily throws up her hands. “Oh, Jesus! Give me a break.”
She yanks me away, tearing me down the hall. “What is this, some kind of Danielle Steele novel?”
Behind us, someone calls Dylan a fag.
I can’t tell who it was. Maybe it was everyone.
No, no, from the way he’s glaring and the jutting of his chin, I think it was my neighbor, Eddie Caron. Or maybe, it was Colin Troust, that sophomore boy who lives up on Alton Ave. I don’t know for sure. I don’t know.
I glare at them both. They both glare back. Really. Eddie glares back. I shake my head. I do not know who anyone is anymore. And that’s the problem. You spend all your life growing up in this hick place thinking you’ve got everyone all figured out. Anna is a jock and she’ll be a real estate agent some day. Eddie is a neighbor boy, stupid but harmless, still hurting over what happened with Hannah. Dylan is my one true love, a hot, straight guy with golden hair and a bright smile.
Yep.
And what about me? What does Mr. Allen who runs the blueberry plant think about me? Or my mom’s boss at the hospital, Mr. Jones? Or even my mom? Do they think, “There’s Belle, she’s got seizures but she’s a damn good singer and she plays a fine guitar. Smart girl. She’s got it together.”
Is everyone as wrong about me as I am about them?
Dylan? I think Eddie called you a fag, which is derived from the word faggot. Do you know what a faggot is? It’s the bundle of wood they used to burn gay men with during medieval times. They’d burn people like you, Dylan. They said people like you were demons. Some people still say that. They’re wrong, obviously. You’re no demon.
They used to burn people with seizures too, said the demon got to them. They said that people with seizures were witches. Some people just call us freaks.
Go figure.
Maybe we were an appropriate couple after all. Five hundred years ago we’d have both died, not from the looks of people in the halls, but from the hands of people in our lives.
Burnt.
Before Emily and I part ways, me to German, her to PE, I grab her arm.
“I don’t want him to get hurt,” I tell her, my eyes watering.
She hugs me, my sister twin, my second body. She hugs me and murmurs, “I know.”
I’m almost in the door to my German class when I hear someone mutter it.
“Fag hag.”
I whip my head around, scan the kids moving speed-walker style past the tall, grey lockers. They’ve got books in their hands, not torches. Nobody’s looking at me. They’re all staring straight ahead, feet walking, mouths talking, eyes moving, hair in place. Good little soldiers, all.
Fag hag.
“Shut up,” I say to all of them. “Shut up.”
Nobody answers. They just goose-march ahead. One after the other after the other.
Then Anna says, “Did someone actually just call you fag hag?”
I scan the sophomores around me and whisper, “I think so.”
Anna puts her hands on her soccer-goalie waist and says, “Whoever the hell just said that better shut the hell up.”
I gasp. I’ve never heard Anna swear, not even when we lost Eastern Maines with a corner kick in the final three seconds her junior year.
She grabs me around the shoulders and says, “Freakin’ idiot.”
Then she kicks me in the shin and nods. “Stay tough, girl.”
I nod. I’ll stay tough.
What a weird day! But it isn’t really. Because every day is crazy weird if you think of it. Every day some new person is born, some old person dies. Every day someone is loved for the first time and someone else is murdered for the only time.
I settle into my desk in German trying not to be pissed off about the fag hag comment. I mean, once is bad enough, but twice? I mean, what, I’m suddenly labeled? I’m not hurt-feelinged, I’m more sad. Plus, it was cool that Anna stood up for me like that.
Outside the window, the sky glows ski-parka blue and the trees sway in some frigid wind that I can’t hear or feel. I should be out there with my arms out
stretched. I should be out there rolling in the leaves, only I don’t have anyone to roll with.
If sighing were acceptable I’d sigh right here but sighing, unfortunately, is a cliché.
Bob tiptoes in, without a pink triangle taped to his flannel shirt. He squints his eyes and looks at me through the corner of them. I wave. No hard feelings, I am trying to think. No hard feelings. Okay. A little hard feelings. He sits in his seat, looks around, starts scribbling a note to somebody. I bet it’s Dylan.
Tom has seen them kiss. I will not imagine that.
In some weird, selfish way, I wish Dylan had cheated on me with a girl. That would make things easier. I could hate her. Emily and I could rant about what a tart she is, how she’s bulimic or anorexic or should be (yes, that’s awful). I could be mad, mad, mad and hate could be a tiger pushing me through the days. Plus, nobody would be muttering fag hag at me in the halls.
But, no. Gaydom soars through Dylan’s Irish/Norwegian genes and his Gap jeans, probably. And I can’t be mad, mad, mad because . . . well, he’s oppressed. He’s oppressed. He is no longer a dominant Aryan boy with his blonde hair and white skin and good parents and cute house. Now, he’s a gay man. Now, he can be a victim.
I can’t be angry about someone being gay, can I?
Poor Dylan. Poor Bob. Poor me.
That’s the only time I’m going to say that. Okay. One more time. Poor me.
That’s actually fun to say. I am such a Mallory.
“How you doing, Commie?” Tom says when he sits down.
I don’t even look at him. “You don’t have to be nice to me.”
“What?”
I yank a notebook out of my backpack even though we never take notes in here. “I said, ‘You don’t have to be nice to me just because your dad told you to.’”
His breath blows out his mouth and hits hot against my neck. I pull at my ponytail and try to fix it but I do not turn around.
“Is that what you think?” His voice comes out as scorching as his breath.