Love Rules

by Marilyn Reynolds

  “Close your eyes for a moment and envision all of the supportive people in your lives.” Another pause.

  “Love is stronger than hate.”

  “I hope so,” Frankie says, “but we still need strategies.”

  We decide to meet again, after school.

  Conan is waiting for me as I leave the library.

  “Why so glum?” he says, falling in step beside me.

  “Sorry.”

  I’m on the verge of telling him about everything that went up on the board, but the confidentiality thing stops me.

  “I wish you’d been there.” I tell him.

  He smiles, shaking his head. “I get enough hassle from the team as it is, just for eating lunch with you at the same table as Kit and Frankie and some of your other friends.”

  “They’re your friends, too,” I remind him.

  “I guess. Kit is, anyway.”

  “What about Frankie? You guys talk. Can’t you say he’s your friend?”

  Pause.

  “C’mon. Lighten up, Lynnie.”

  I try to. I really do. But I keep thinking about how hard it must be, to be insulted and pushed around because you’re somehow different than what people think you should be. I can’t get it off my mind.

  At the door to the choir room, Conan kisses my forehead.

  “See you after school. No practice today,” he says.

  “I’m going back to the library after school,” I tell him.

  “Why?”

  “To finish the GSA meeting.”

  “Lynnie. Sweets,” he says with that smile. “This is my only non-­practice day for a week. I thought you’d want to spend it with me.”

  “I do. But . . .”

  “No buts,” Conan says.

  “Come with me. It won’t last too long.”

  Conan gets that stiff look on his face.

  “I don’t know why you’re so caught up in this thing anyway. It’s not like it’s a club for people like you!”

  “Gay Straight Alliance,” I remind him. “Not everyone in there is gay, or lesbian, or whatever.”

  “Practically.” he says.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “It doesn’t take a genius . . .”

  “There are plenty of straight people in the group,” I say.

  “Name them.”

  “No! What’s said in the group stays in the group! Besides, most people don’t even divulge whether they’re gay, or straight, or whatever.”

  “Then how do you know there are plenty of straight people there?”

  “I just do! This is a stupid conversation.” I say.

  I turn away and walk into the classroom. Then I get all scared and go running back out after Conan.

  “I’m sorry. I’m just upset,” I tell him.

  “Meet me in the parking lot after school,” he says.

  Why shouldn’t I? I ask myself, what’s my top priority here? The answer is Conan.

  “Okay,” I say.

  In the choir room, Frankie has the boys lined up in the back, practicing a basic step they’ll be using in the silly Christmas songs section of our winter concert—“Rudolph the Red Nosed Rein­deer,” “All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth,”—you get the idea. The girls are standing around the piano, working with Mr. Michaels on a few rough spots in “Dona Nobis Pacim.” Caitlin has a short solo. She’s been singing it perfectly for weeks, but today she starts off all wrong. She tries again, then stops. She wipes her eyes and shakes her head sadly.

  Mr. Michaels motions for the rest of us to take a short break, and moves closer to Caitlin.

  “What is it?” he asks softly.

  She shakes her head. Nora comes over to them and says some­thing to Mr. Michaels, who nods. Nora and Caitlin gather up their things and leave the classroom, Nora opening the door for Caitlin as if she were incapable of doing it for herself.

  “What’s wrong with Caitlin?” I ask Kit.

  “I guess that whole business about Frankie and the hangman thing really got to her.”

  “Are they really good friends?”

  Kit gives me one of those looks of disgust that she saves for

  special occasions.

  “We all care about each other in GSA.”

  “Well, yeah. I mean that stuff’s upsetting to all of us. But Caitlin . . .”

  “Star said she’d heard some rumor that Caitlin’s older brother was gay and that he had some kind of tragic death.”

  “Where’d she hear that?”

  “Gigi—this woman who hangs out at the coffee bar. But Star says you can only believe about half of what Gigi says.”

  Mr. Michaels calls the group back together.

  “We’ll start with the medley of carols,” he says.

  He waits a moment for us to find the music in our folders, then takes his little round pitch pipe from his jacket pocket, gives the pitch, and for the rest of the period we turn our total attention to singing. About half way through class our alto section becomes stronger and brighter, and I know that Caitlin’s come back.

  CHAPTER

  23

  It’s after ten o’clock when the phone rings.

  “Where were you?’’ Kit demands, not even saying hello.

  “What do you mean?’’

  “The meeting this afternoon?”

  “I went with Conan instead. No football practice today.”

  Silence.

  “How was the meeting?”

  “You should have been there to see for yourself,” Kit says.

  “Hey. I have a life, too. You go to GSA meetings, you get to sit with Star, all up close and personal. I go to meetings and miss being with the one I love. So don’t start.”

  More silence. Wilma is stretched out across my feet, her eyes half closed. I scratch behind her ears. She turns on her back, exposing her soft underside, wanting a belly rub.

  “C’mon Kit. How’d it go?”

  “Confidentiality,” Kit says.

  “I’m not asking for gossipy details. I’m wondering what strate­gies you came up with?”

  Another silence. Then, finally, “We didn’t do well with strate­gies. It was like, should we bake cookies and be more involved with other campus clubs, try to broaden our social base, or should we just bomb the boys’ gym and get it over with.”

  “Let me guess whose suggestion that was.”

  Kit laughs. “I thought you didn’t want gossipy details.”

  “Dawn better not be saying that stuff. She’ll get the SWAT team on her butt.”

  “Right,” Kit says, all sarcastic. “It’s nothing for Frankie’s life to be threatened, but stay away from the jocks.”

  “So anyway . . . the meeting.”

  “So anyway, it was frustrating. But Emmy told us about a national gay rights organization. We’re arranging for a speaker to come talk to us.”

  “Sounds good,” I say.

  “Yeah. I can only hope it will be at a time when Conan has football practice,” Kit says.

  “Get over it! . . . ”

  Kit sighs. More silence.

  “SO ANYWAY . . .”

  Wilma stirs, opens one eye and looks up at me, as if asking me to quiet down.

  “Yeah. Okay. I looked that organization up on the Internet.”

  “And . . .”

  “There’s this stuff about what’s going on all over the country,” she says, finally loosening up with me.

  “Check out the website. It’s awesome!”

  In the middle of telling me how to find the website, though, Kit gets a call waiting beep. She flashes off, then comes back to let me know it is Star.

  “Gotta go. See you in the morning,” she says.

  Kit has priorities, too.

  After her shower. Mom comes to my room to say goodnight. She’s in her old terrycloth robe, with a towel wrapped around her sopping hair.

  “How’d the rest of your day go, after our conference?” she asks.

 
; I tell her about the broken display case, and Frankie’s poster.

  “Do you think things are getting worse?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe I never noticed how bad they were before.”

  She gives me a long, thoughtful look. “It’s good that you’re standing up for Kit,” she says.

  “I guess. But sometimes I want all this stuff to go away, and for things to be like they were before she started letting it be known that she was a lesbian.”

  “Really?”

  I consider her question.

  “Really, I guess not,” I say. “People should be able to be themselves without taking a lot of . . .” I can’t quite say the word.

  “Shit?” Mom asks.

  “Yeah. People shouldn’t have to take shit just for being themselves.”

  Another thoughtful look from my pajama clad Mom, only now she looks sad.

  “I’ve been thinking about how I grew up, and how I’m afraid I’ve fallen down on the job with you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know how Gramma and Grampa were, always trying to make things better for other people. Or fighting what they thought was wrong.”

  “Civil rights marches?”

  “And anti-Vietnam war marches. They were even on some FBI list of suspected communists.”

  “Gramma and Grampa?” I say, looking at their sweet, gentle faces smiling at me from the collage over my desk.

  “They took a stand. They thought the war was unjust, a terrible mistake—so much death and destruction. They refused to pay their telephone taxes, because that money went directly to finance the war.”

  “Did they get in trouble?”

  Mom laughs. “No. I think they just made it onto a list of very good people.”

  She walks over to the collage and looks closely at their picture.

  When she turns back to me there are tears in her eyes.

  “Remember when we saw them on the six o’clock news? They were at a demonstration at the Federal Building. Remember that?’’ I nod.

  “That was only six months before Gramma died,” Mom says, again looking at their picture.

  “I remember seeing them on TV, but I don’t remember what the demonstration was about.”

  “They wanted amnesty for illegal immigrants. ‘Those people grow our food, tend our gardens, clean our houses! They have inalienable rights, too!’ Gramma told me.”

  “What happened?” I ask. “Did it work?”

  “Well . . . things got better, then the other side fought harder . . . it’s that pendulum thing. But Grampa always said that even if the road to justice is two steps forward, one step back, there is still forward movement. I like to believe he was right.”

  Mom looks at the other pictures in my collage, like she’s seeing them fresh.

  “I’m proud of you,” she says.

  Then she unwraps the towel from around her head and uses it to vigorously rub small sections of hair from the ends to the scalp, working her way from side to back to side. She is so intent upon her task, that I’m afraid she will forget to tell me why she is proud of me.

  When no hair is left untouched, she takes her brush from the pocket of her robe and brushes her hair—about eighty strokes short of the recommended one hundred. Like mine, Mom’s hair is wiry—a nondescript brown. I try not to hold it against her, that she passed her hair on to me. But why couldn’t she have hair like Jessie Dandridge’s? THAT would have been an inheritance. You can be sure I wouldn’t have wasted it, like Kit did. I’d let it grow down to the middle of my back. It would glimmer in the sunlight. Conan would run his fingers through it slowly, lifting it, letting it fall, caught by the beauty . . .

  “. . . thinking about how they showed me it was important to stand up for what’s right . . .”

  Oops. Unruly thoughts.

  “ . . . but I get so caught up in my work, and keeping things going around here, I forget to look beyond us, at the broader world . . . Gramma used to have a sign on her refrigerator that said, ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.’ Something like that, anyway . . . I wonder what ever happened to that sign?”

  Mom’s getting a faraway look in her eye. I’m pretty sure I got my tendency for unruly thoughts from her.

  Right now, I’m worried that Mom’s already past the part where she’s proud of me, and I missed it during my hair thoughts. And now her thoughts are all wandering, and I may never know what she first came to tell me. I’ll have to ask straight out.

  “Why are you proud of me?”

  She does this mom kind of thing—intent eye contact.

  “Because you have the courage to stand up for what’s right, even if I haven’t been a very good example for you.”

  I feel a twinge of guilt, knowing how I just blew off the afternoon’s GSA meeting. On the other hand, I know what Mom’s saying is at least partly true.

  She gives me a long hug. “You’re a good person, and I’m glad you’re my daughter,” she says. Then she’s off to bed.

  All the while I’m doing homework, I have this thing in the back of my mind that says my mom’s proud of me. I like it.

  In the morning, Conan gets to my house earlier than usual. We sit in the car, talking, waiting for Kit. After a few minutes, she comes rushing through the gate, her backpack thrown over one shoulder, a bunch of papers in her hand. She’s talking before she even closes the car door behind her.

  “You won’t believe what I found on the Internet last night! It is so vicious! Are people born cruel, or what? And half of these . . .”

  “What are you talking about?” Conan says, glancing at Kit in the rearview mirror as he pauses at the end of our driveway.

  “This!” Kit says, waving around several sheets of paper. “This is from a website I found last night. It lists crimes, thousands of them, against people who are homosexual, or trans, or whatever—it’s sick! But here’s the really awful part. Listen to this!”

  Kit reads from what I now see is a printout from a website.

  Vincent Ratchford, twenty-four, Chico, California. Found dead in his off-campus apartment. Apparent cause of death, blunt force trauma to the head. Unsolved.

  “Ratchford, like in Caitlin Ratchford?” I ask.

  “Yeah, so then I clicked on his name and found more information. It’s got to be her brother.”

  “Are you sure?” Conan asks.

  “Listen,” she says, and reads more details from the printout. “Born in Los Angeles. Grew up in Running Springs, California. Survivors include grandparents, parents, younger sister. That’s got to be Caitlin. It’s not exactly like their last name is Smith.”

  “But Running Springs . . .”

  “Right. I did the math. This thing happened six years ago. I bet they moved here shortly after.”

  “God,” Conan says. “No wonder she’s the way she is.”

  “One of the news reports said DEATH TO PERVERTS was written in big letters all across the wall—in lavender paint.”

  The rest of the way to school, we ride in heavy silence, then sit, immobilized, in the parking lot. Finally, Conan says, “Homo Sapiens. Freakin’ Homo Sapiens.”

  Kit looks at him, puzzled. He turns to me, kisses me, gets his stuff out of the car and walks slowly toward the gym. Kit and I head off in the opposite direction toward the main building.

  “What’d he mean by that?” Kit asks.

  I tell her about Conan’s response to the “homophobia” assign­ment we had in Woodsy’s class. How he wrote about people fearing people, and how that’s the cause of a lot of messed up stuff. Kit’s quiet. Thinking, I suppose.

  “Conan’s smarter than he seems,” Kit says.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just . . . you know, that stupid jock thing . . . and he’s so big, and sort of sweet, like that big dumb guy in Of Mice and Men . . .”

  “And black!” I say. “That’s what you really mean, isn’t it?”

  I know
a bright red is creeping from my neck upward. So what? I’m angry, and I don’t care who sees it.

  “No! Oh. my gosh! You know I didn’t mean it like that!”

  We’re both stopped in the middle of the hall, facing one another, with a stream of students hurrying around us.

  “I’d never dis Conan. I totally respect him.’’

  I stand looking at her, projecting my bright red color in her direction.

  “Look! I’m half Cherokee! I know better than to believe any of that racist trash.”

  I sigh. Why did I jump to the conclusion that my liberty-and- justice-for-all friend would suddenly turn racist? It doesn’t even make sense.

  “Sorry,” I say. “It’s just . . .”

  “You’ve only got one nerve left, and I just stepped on it,” she says, quoting from a poster of a harried woman that hangs over Woodsy’s desk.

  I laugh.

  “Spirit sisters?”

  We grasp hands for a moment, long enough to remember our spirits come from the same source. Then we go to our separate first period classes.

  During physiology we go over terms and functions of the alimentary canal. Just thinking about the gunk that’s hanging out in my gastronomic tract is enough to make me want to reverse peristalsis and barf my breakfast. I’ve got to get tougher or change career plans.

  Conan is waiting for me at the end of first period, so we can walk together to PC.

  “Do you think Kit’s right, and it was really Caitlin’s brother who was killed?”

  “Sure sounds like it,” Conan says.

  “That’s just so sad. I feel awful about it. Poor Caitlin.”

  “Even if it’s not Caitlin’s brother, it’s someone’s brother,”

  Conan says.

  The first thing I notice when I enter Woodsy’s class is a bright, multicolored, rainbow sign over the chalkboard. It’s about four feet long and a foot high. Printed across the colorful background, in silver letters, is “NO ROOM FOR HOMOPHOBIA.”

  “What happened to ‘Make Lemonade’?” Eric asks.

  “It was time for a change,” Woodsy says.

  “I like the lemonade poster better,” Eric says.