The State of Us

by Shaun David Hutchinson

  Cora cut us off. “Splendid. Find Kenny in house three-oh-three down the road, and he’ll get you set up with paint and brushes and whatever else you need.” Without waiting for us to respond, Cora walked away, muttering to herself, “This is not worth the extra-credit points.”

  As soon as Cora was out of earshot, I turned to Dre. “Too much coffee this morning?”

  “Not enough sleep. Did I take it too far?”

  “You were joking?”

  Dre’s eyes went a little wide. “Weren’t you?”

  Words spilled out, and I stumbled over them. “You were so mean, and I didn’t know what to think.”

  “I was just playing for the cameras.” He hiked his thumb over his shoulder. “And I was scared.”

  “What were you scared of?”

  Dre shrugged. “That things wouldn’t be like they were on Promethean.”

  I was relieved but also confused. I didn’t know whether I believed Dre was kidding. I wanted it to be true, but even with our conversations on Promethean, I still didn’t know him that well. “We should find Kenny.” I took off in the direction Cora had pointed.

  The worksite was a street of houses; ten in all. The ones farthest from us were mostly built, with the ones nearest little more than a frame. Volunteers scurried over the houses doing the work they were assigned, and the sun was already beating down on me, making me sweat.

  Dre walked behind me, and I wished I could think of something to say. This wasn’t going the way I had planned, and I wanted the day to be over even though it had hardly begun. My phone vibrated in my pocket. It was a message from Dre.

  DreOfTheDead: im sorry

  DreOfTheDead: i guess i got carried away

  DreOfTheDead: im really glad im here

  I stared at the messages for a second and then put my phone away. “I’m glad you’re here too,” I said loudly enough for him to hear.

  Dre caught up to me, and he was beaming when I glanced at him. “I can’t believe you pulled this off. I never would’ve thought of doing something like this. My plan would’ve involved a large box, packing peanuts, and a lot of stamps.”

  The thought of Dre shipping himself across the country made me laugh. “That definitely seems like something you would do.”

  “Right?”

  “Did you have any trouble with your parents?” I asked.

  Dre shook his head. “They loved the idea of me volunteering but kept asking me if I was sure I could handle spending the whole day with you. I think they were afraid you’d strangle me.”

  “My parents were also worried I’d strangle you.”

  “That’s fair.”

  The longer we walked, the more we fell into the rhythm we’d established on Promethean, proving that our conversations could translate into the real world. At least for a short while. But there was one thing I still needed to know.

  “Do you really think I’m dressed badly or was that part of your plan to throw off the reporters?” I heard myself ask, and hated how pathetic I sounded. Dre didn’t need anyone’s approval, so why did I?

  Dre pulled me to a stop alongside him. He eyed me up and down like he was scrutinizing everything about me. Finally, he said, “You know you’re good-looking, but—”

  “But?”

  “What you wear says a lot about who you are.”

  “What do my clothes say?”

  “My client is not guilty, Your Honor.”

  “I object!”

  “All I’m saying is that it looks like you bought your outfits right off the mannequins at the Gap.” Dre made a grab for the bottom of my shirt, but I stopped him. “What are you doing?”

  “Relax.”

  I wasn’t worried about him—I was concerned about a reporter snapping a picture at the wrong moment and taking it out of context—but I didn’t see anyone around, so I let Dre do what he wanted. He pulled the bottom of my shirt out until it was completely untucked. He stood back to look at what he’d done, then reached up and ruffled my hair, appraising it with one eye until he was satisfied.

  “Better?”

  “You don’t look like your mom dressed you anymore.”

  “My mom didn’t dress me,” I said. “I dressed myself.”

  Dre let out a laugh. “That’s even worse.”

  “I guess,” I said. “But if I hadn’t, you wouldn’t have had anything to fix.”

  The laughter on Dre’s face vanished like it had never been there in the first place. A crease formed between his eyes. “Shit, Dean. I didn’t . . . You don’t need to be fixed.”

  I couldn’t stop smiling, and I didn’t even care.

  Dre

  MY SHOULDERS WERE sore by the end of the first hour, but there was no way I was complaining where Dean could hear, especially since he had the lean muscles of someone who spent his free time lifting weights. He could probably paint all day—and then go run a marathon.

  We didn’t talk much while we painted, mostly because every time I tried to crack a joke, I screwed something up, and I didn’t want to half-ass the paint job in a house someone was gonna be living in. Especially when it was going to be someone who’d lost their house to a hurricane. Those people had been through enough, and they deserved for me to take the job I was doing seriously.

  Earlier in the morning, a couple of volunteers popped by to check on our progress, so they said, but ended up asking if they could take selfies with us. Thankfully, that didn’t last long, and other than that, they treated us like we were nothing more than a couple of high school kids working for community service hours. Reporters were allowed into the house at one point so they could take pictures of me and Dean working, and we gave them a couple of good poses, including one of me standing behind Dean with a bucket of paint like I was about to dump it on his head. Eventually, they got bored and left to chase more interesting stories.

  The other cool part was just hanging with Dean. Within five minutes of walking into 303, he knew everyone’s names and a little something about them, and he was laughing with them like they’d been best friends forever. He drew people to him without even trying. During my first five minutes in the house, I’d leaned against two freshly painted doors and stepped in a pan of paint, leaving a single paint shoeprint trailing through the house. Luckily, the floors had been covered with plastic to protect them from fools like me. I might’ve joked about Dean being uptight, but I admired how natural he was talking to other people. And it didn’t seem like an act to me. I think he genuinely enjoyed meeting and talking to everyone. He was also really patient when he was teaching me the best way to paint, and he never got upset when he had to repeat something. It made me wonder if there was anything he wasn’t good at.

  When lunch rolled around, Dean and I grabbed sandwiches and wandered off to a park that was still within view of the worksite, and found a bench to sit on.

  “Hold up,” I said. “Gotta go back. I forgot a drink.”

  Dean reached into his backpack and handed me a metal water bottle with “Arnault/Portman 2020” and their slogan “For Tomorrow” emblazoned on the side. “I brought this for you. So that you stay hydrated.”

  “You can’t expect me to drink out of that,” I said.

  “Why not?” he asked. “It’s not plastic, so it’s good for the environment, right?”

  I raised my eyebrows at the bottle. “Jose would kill me if anyone caught me drinking out of a bottle with your mom’s slogan on it.” I set the bottle to the side, close enough so that I could reach it in case I started choking to death and it was the only option, but far enough away that no one would think it was mine.

  Dean’s shoulders curved inward and slumped down a little. “I just thought you’d be thirsty,” he said. “How do you like volunteering so far?”

  I couldn’t tell if Dean was upset that I didn’t want to drink out of the water bottle he’d brought me. It was sweet, yeah, but Jose really would’ve considered it a disaster if a picture of me drinking out of it showed up, and he prob
ably never would’ve let me out on my own again.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “Not as much fun as when I put together a Drag Queens Read event at the library where my mom works.”

  “Did you dress up?”

  I smiled as I unwrapped my sandwich—turkey and Swiss with mayo, boring but not terrible—remembering the event. “Yeah. I made up a queen named Betty Don’t.”

  Dean spread a napkin over his lap before pulling his egg salad out of the wrapper. “Aren’t drag queen names supposed to be funny?”

  “They don’t have to be,” I said. “But mine was.” I waited a beat for him to get it, but he kept watching me all blank-faced. “Betty Don’t?” Still nothing, so I said it slower, sounding out each word. “Bet he don’t?”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Anyway. The queens were the real stars. They just let me play in their world for a minute, and it was fun as hell. The way the kids lit up when they saw us, and how they couldn’t take their eyes off us while we were reading to them. It was magical.”

  Dean ate his sandwich with polite little bites, dabbing at his mouth with his napkin after each. “Please don’t think badly of me, but I don’t understand the point of drag queens. Are they making fun of women? Do they want to be women?”

  “Shit no,” I said. “First, don’t confuse being trans with being a drag queen. They’re definitely not the same. Trans women are women, and trans men are men.”

  “I thought so,” Dean said. “But, so then, explain drag.”

  This was a bigger conversation than I was expecting over lunch. I figured we’d have a laugh about him getting caught howling at his reflection during the homecoming dance or us both spending that evening hiding in toilet stalls, but I hadn’t expected to be giving him a lesson on the meaning of drag. Hell, I wasn’t sure I was even the right person to be doing it. I knew some queens, and I’d dressed up once, but that didn’t make me an expert.

  “You’ve never met a single drag queen?”

  Dean shook his head. “They’re not the kind of people who usually vote for my mother.”

  “I wonder why.”

  “Forget it,” Dean said. “We don’t have to—”

  “No wait.” I was fortunate that my parents were the kind of people who’d encouraged me to meet drag queens and organize a read-along with them, but Dean hadn’t grown up with my parents. If he was genuinely interested in learning, and his curiosity did seem sincere, then maybe I could give it a try.

  “Look, I can’t speak for all drag queens, but I view drag as performance art. Queens create a character that’s totally separate from who they are when they’re not in drag. Some use it to live out their fantasy of wearing beautiful gowns and jewels, some use it as a way to escape the toxic masculinity that’s been forced on them all their lives, and others use it as a way to blur the lines between the masculine and feminine.

  “When I was Betty Don’t, inspired by my mom and by Olivia Newton-John’s leather transformation at the end of Grease, I felt powerful in a way that I never felt as Dre Rosario. It’s the kind of experience that’s tough to explain without cinching your waist and shoving you into a pair of six-inch heels.”

  Instead of laughing, Dean was watching me with the same rapt attention the kids at the library had been watching me with while I’d read to them from my favorite book, The Girl Who Drank the Moon.

  “I always thought it was nothing more than a bunch of men in dresses.”

  “No,” I said. “And that’s kinda the problem with being so sheltered. It’s not even enough for me to explain it to you. What you need is to meet some real queens and get to know them.” I snapped my fingers. “You should do an event with me. We can use my mom’s library, you can dress up and—”

  Dean grimaced. “I doubt that would go over well.”

  “Because of your mom?”

  Dean froze, his shoulders tensed, and he looked away from me, focused intently on his sandwich. “She doesn’t hate gay people,” he said. “We went on Ellen.”

  I considered dropping it. I’d already put Dean on the defensive, and we’d been having such a fun day that I didn’t want to ruin it. But I also heard Mel’s voice telling me to stand for something or I was just wasting everyone’s time, and anyone who knows Mel will agree that she’s damned difficult to ignore. “Going on Ellen isn’t the same as believing queer people deserve the same rights as everyone else. Didn’t your mom support amending the state constitution to keep same-sex couples from marrying?”

  “Yes, but I’m not my mother.”

  “Then what do you believe, Dean?”

  Dean seemed to have forgotten his sandwich as he stared across the street at a bunch of empty lots overgrown with weeds. I was sure, after this, he was never gonna want to see me again. But I had to know, and better that I found out now.

  “What about conversion therapy?” I asked, pressing Dean harder. “Or abortion rights or gun control?”

  “Do you support everything your dad believes?” Dean snapped.

  “No, but I don’t pretend I do either. He’s fine letting people keep guns, but I think we should stick all the guns into a rocket and launch them into the sun, and I’m not afraid to say so, no matter who’s listening.”

  I kept waiting for Dean to go off on me. I’d heard about his vaunted debate skills, but he didn’t seem to me like he could argue his way out of detention.

  “Look,” Dean said, spreading his hands. “I don’t believe in all of my mother’s political views, but I believe in her.”

  “Bullshit!” I said.

  “How so?”

  My cheeks were getting hot as I worked myself up. “Do you think same-sex couples deserve the right to get married?”

  “Why does it matter?” he asked, his voice rising. “The courts already decided the issue.”

  “Answer the question, Dean.”

  “Fine!” Dean threw up his hands. “Yes, I do.”

  “Then how can you support your mom, knowing she doesn’t? How can you let her trot you out onstage, knowing folks assume you believe the same things she does, and never say anything?”

  Instead of answering, Dean stood, gathered his trash, and walked toward the swings. He sat in one, not swinging. I grabbed my own garbage and tossed it in the can before sitting in the swing beside him.

  “I wish this wasn’t personal for me,” I said. “But it is. Like, how can I be friends with someone who supports someone who thinks I’m not a person?”

  “My mother doesn’t think you’re not a person.”

  “Just not deserving of the same rights as her.”

  Dean gripped the cords holding up the swing and sat with his head bowed, not looking at me. Maybe there was no way for me and Dean to be friends. Maybe we were just way too dissimilar.

  “It’s different for me than it is for you,” Dean said. “From the beginning of the campaign, before your father secured the nomination, you were already out there being you. The first time I saw you on TV, you were with your father at a rally, and you were wearing shorts and pink Converse high-tops, and I remember thinking that Nora would have had a stroke if I’d shown up to a rally in an outfit like that.”

  Laughter burst out of me, and I nearly fell backward out of the swing.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Everything you just said,” I told him. “You think it’s easy being the out gay Mexican American son of a presidential candidate?”

  “I didn’t say it was easy—”

  “People say you’re a clone of your mom,” I said. “But they call me a faggot. Think of an object, any object, and someone on 4chan’s made a meme of me being penetrated by it. They tell me to go back where I came from, and they don’t mean Nevada. I could’ve thrown on a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt and faded into the background, but that’s not who I am. Being me all the time, especially with the shit people say, is hard, Dean, and don’t think for a second it isn’t.”

  I expected Dean to a
pologize, but he snorted derisively. “I didn’t mean to imply being you was easy, but you’ve been living under this microscope for a few months. I’ve been doing it for years. And, no, I don’t like all my mom’s views, but I’m not supporting Janice Arnault, Republican candidate for president of the United States; I’m supporting my mom.”

  “You can support your mom and still be yourself.”

  “How?”

  “The campaign can spin anything. They’ll just say it shows how tolerant your mom is that she can still love you even though you disagree.” I kicked at Dean until he looked at me. “Do you think my dad’s campaign wanted me to be so outspoken? Hell no. But Jose figured if I was gonna do it anyway, they might as well use me to appeal to younger voters.”

  “They’re still using you,” Dean said.

  I nodded. “But it’s on my terms.”

  “She’s a good person, you know.” When I didn’t respond, he added, “My mom. She’s a good person and she has a good heart.”

  “Good people make bad decisions all the time.”

  “Do you think I’m a good person?”

  The question caught me off guard, and I fumbled for a moment before saying, “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

  “I think you’re a good person.” Dean smiled, but it wasn’t the smile he used with everyone else, the one that said, “I’m Dean Arnault, and I’ve got a deal for you!” It was softer, subtler. It was in his lips and his cheeks, and it reached all the way to his eyes, where it simply said, “Hey.”

  And when I looked down, Dean’s hand was resting on mine.

  Dean

  I FOCUSED MY attention on painting. On rolling the paint onto the walls evenly, on not dripping any onto the floor, on rolling right up to the corner without touching the ceiling. My fingers were sore and stiff from holding the pole, but I didn’t relent because I knew that Dre was on the other side of the room hoping I would turn around and talk to him, and I just wasn’t confident I could open my mouth and say words that wouldn’t make an uncomfortable situation worse.