Jay's Gay Agenda

by Jason June

  “As your Gay Guide, I’m getting your name out there,” Max whispered. “Now everyone will know about the cute, mysterious new boy at school.” He turned to the class. “We’re running on a Knudson and um, whatever Jay’s last name is, ticket!”

  My cheeks burned with a thousand tiny furnaces. “It’s C-Collier.”

  Ms. Okeke wrote our names on the board. “Excellent. Nice to meet you, Jay. I’m glad to see a newcomer jump right in. Everyone say hi to Jay.”

  “Hi, Jay!” the group echoed.

  Ms. Okeke motioned for me to stand up. “Tell us a bit about yourself.”

  At Riverton, just saying I was “the gay kid” made me automatically interesting since I was the one and only. I had spent so much time hearing that label that I’d taken it on as my number-one reason for being, hence, the creation of the Gay Agenda. But here, among all kinds of queer students who had real identities other than their sexual one, there was no way just saying I was gay would be enough. This was why crossing items off the Gay Agenda was so important: not only so I could get all the relationship firsts I’d been lagging behind on, but so I could stop obsessing so much over the lack of boy lips on mine, and get to focusing on what makes me me. I’d actually get to develop what makes me worthy of spending time with people other than being the token gay.

  Ms. Okeke and the rest of the club kept staring at me, ready for my fascinating explanation of who I was that would completely blow them away.

  “M-me?” I stuttered. “I’m new. Happy to be here.”

  Great. I was just replacing the label of “the gay kid” with “the new kid.” I didn’t give them any worthwhile information about myself other than demonstrating how I was not good at speaking under pressure. I sat back down as fast as I could.

  Max looked at me like I’d said the most brilliant thing in the world. “See? He gets right to the point. We need somebody as organized as Jay is as we head into planning the biggest dance of the year. I’ve seen his list-making skills firsthand.” Max winked at me and a whole new list started forming in my mind.

  GAY GUIDE GUIDELINES

  1.Absolutely no veiled references to the Gay Agenda in mixed company.

  “Way to bring it back to the issue at hand, Max,” Ms. Okeke said. “Would anyone like to challenge Max and Jay?” She looked around the room, but nobody said anything.

  “Oh, no,” a girl finally cooed from the back of the class. “We all think that Max needs this. After what happened with—”

  “I do not need the pity votes, Lisbeth,” Max interrupted. “Not in these hallowed grounds of the QSA. I want to win this election fair and square.”

  Nobody moved. What could Max be getting pity over? Just eight minutes with him and he was already the most self-assured person I’d ever met.

  “Ms. Okeke, make somebody else volunteer for president,” Max commanded.

  “I don’t think you understand what volunteer means, Max,” Ms. Okeke said. “I can’t make anybody do anything.” She faced the room once more. “Anybody want to reconsider running?”

  After another silent pause filled with condoling looks at Max, Ms. Okeke called the easiest election I’d ever heard of in my life. “That settles it,” she said. “Take it away, you two.”

  “Fine.” Max’s tone was sharp. Not at all the mood I was expecting after winning an election. He stood and pulled me up with him. I glanced at Albert, then immediately looked away when he flashed me that perfect smile.

  “I am honored to serve as your party planner in chief,” Max said, although the begrudging look that still lingered didn’t make his statement seem so true. “In the spirit of our great country, I want you to know this is a dance-ocracy. I will take all suggestions to heart and put them to a group vote. And with Mr. Collier by my side”—he raised my hand high—“we won’t let you down.”

  With that, Max got down to business. He actually reached into his tote bag and pulled out a gavel. Whether we got a fair election or not, he’d clearly planned on winning, but apparently not with pity votes, whatever that was about.

  I didn’t have time to think about it because Max started naming off committees and enlisted me to write down people’s names as they volunteered for different duties. Max smashed his gavel on Ms. Okeke’s desk along the way if people got too rowdy. There was decorating committee, drinks committee, ticket sales. Albert signed up for that last one, so I did, too. Maybe we’d fall in love while working the cash box together. Take that, Mom and Dad! Dance-ticket-selling romance definitely overrules made-up mechanical mishaps on the cuteness scale.

  “I’ve saved the best for last,” Max announced after everyone’s name was listed under their respective duties. I had to admit, Albert & Jay looked really good together on the whiteboard. “It’s time to come up with a theme for the dance and costume contest. As we all know, this is the most important decision, people. Whichever couple gets the most votes for best costume wins homecoming royalty.”

  I was starting to think Mom was right about stars aligning because in that moment, everything seemed to click. It was like the universe wanted me to cross off all kinds of items on the Gay Agenda. First, I was at a school with boys who liked boys who might want to make out with me on the dance floor. Second, I was a three-time costume-contest award winner. I could put those skills to use and make the most epic homecoming outfit so that everyone voted for me for best costume. Then I’d be homecoming royalty and could erase the “new kid” label for good. People would realize I’m fun and have interesting skills, and I’d never have to list WAMbledon champion under Jay Collier Qualities again. People would be clamoring to become a part of the Jay Gay Framily.

  Now I had a game plan for item number nine.

  JAY’S GAY AGENDA

  1.Meet another gay kid. Somewhere, anywhere . . . please! in Seattle in, like, days!

  1.5.Get checked out by a very VSB!

  2.Go on a date with a boy at the Space Needle and hold hands within the first ninety minutes.

  3.Go to a dDance with a boy and have my first kiss slow dancing to Shawn Mendes while getting caught in a surprise Seattle downpour.

  4.Have a boyfriend, one who likes to wrap me up in his arms and let me be little spoon, and maybe smells like coffee from all the cafés he goes to.

  5.Fall in love with a boy, but wait for him to say it first so I don’t seem too desperate, and maybe he says it for the first time at Pike Place Market or in the first Starbucks.

  6.Make out with Albert, with tongue, and hard enough that I’d get a little burn from his stubble. run my fingers along that perfect jawline.

  7.See another penis besides my own, IRL, and do fun things with it!

  8.Lose. My. Virginity!

  9.Become part of a super-queer, super-tight framily by impressing everybody with my epic costumier skills, erasing the “new kid” label, and becoming homecoming royalty.

  I knew just what theme was going to turn this goal into a reality.

  “I’ve got an idea,” I said. “For the dance.”

  All eyes in the room turned to me. My insides squirmed. This was my shot.

  I’d had this idea saved up for the past three years since the chumps of the hoedown costume committee never used it, despite all the times I brought it up. Maybe it stemmed from just how suppressed I was as the only gay kid in Riverton, but I couldn’t help but see so many bromances that really should have just been straight-up romances in hindsight.

  GET TOGETHER ALREADY

  1.SpongeBob and Patrick (I mean, come on, they can’t go a single day without seeing each other?)

  2.Hulk and Thor (I know I’m not the only one who’s wondered what’s under the Hulk’s jean shorts, and we all know what Thor’s hammer really is)

  3.R2-D2 and C-3P0 (they literally finish each other’s sentences, even when R2 speaks in beeps and boops)

  All that time thinking about bro-couples that should be homo-couples led to my perfect theme. It was all about letting duos that should have been tog
ether finally have their chance.

  “It’s centered around that old cliché ‘hindsight is 20/20’,” I said, grabbing my notebook to flip to the costume ideas I’d listed. “It could be all about the couples that we wish had stayed together or would finally see what everyone else does and become a thing already. You could make it gay, like shipping War Machine and Iron Man, or full of hope, like Romeo and Juliet without killing themselves. Or you could rewrite history and put our favorite couples back together, like Vanessa Hudgens and Zac Efron.”

  “They were so cute together,” someone shouted.

  “Wait.” A girl angrily shot up from her desk. Her long hair was the same color as a fire hydrant. “I thought we agreed last year we would do an under-the-sea theme. I already dyed my hair for it!”

  “I appreciate how strongly you commit to your name, Ariel, so we’ll put it to a vote,” Max said. “All in favor of Under the Sea?” Max looked around the room three times, doing his due diligence even though Ariel’s hand was the only one raised. “All in favor of Homecoming in Hindsight?”

  Hands rose throughout the classroom.

  “It’s decided!” Max slammed his gavel. “Start spreading the word now, folks, so people have time to really up their costume game. We’ll meet every Monday and Tuesday, with a Wednesday gathering this week since Monday was a holiday. All committees should arrive tomorrow prepared to make a game plan for the dance. I declareth this session O-V-E-R!” He rapped his gavel with each letter for dramatic effect.

  The space filled with talk about hindsight costume ideas as everyone filed out of the classroom. Even Ariel took part. She mentioned something about how she totally shipped Flotsam and Jetsam, and that the rest of us poor unfortunate souls wouldn’t stand a chance against her outfit. At least I didn’t make an enemy on day one at Capitol Hill High.

  “Hey, great idea for the dance, by the way.” I turned and Albert was looking right at my mouth with those perfect dark eyes. That sexy smile had totally worked.

  “Thanks.” He was standing so close. I had to say something, fast, or I was positive my lips would lunge forward with a mind of their own. “Where’s your friend?”

  Albert cocked his head to the side like a confused puppy. How can a person be outrageously adorable and smolderingly sexy at the same time? He was so fracking cute I thought my heart was going to explode. “Friend? What do you mean?”

  “Your robot thingy from this morning.”

  “Oh, that!” Albert laughed loudly, making me melt all over again. His laugh was the most carefree sound I’d ever heard, like he had every right to enjoy life as loudly and as much as he wanted. “Ms. Rochester, the robotics teacher, hates that her office is so far from the staff printer. She said anyone who could fix the situation with a robot over the summer would get extra credit this year. So I made a remote-controlled, battery-powered, wireless printer on wheels.”

  Albert could make robots, adding yet another item to the list of Albert Adjectives.

  ALBERT ADJECTIVES

  1.Sexy (I mean, he is a V, V, V VSB.)

  2.Sweet (Who else would help pick up all my crap even though I had gum on my face and my hand was soaked in blood?)

  3.Adorable (I’m talking puppy-dog-eyes adorable.)

  4.Smart (Where do you even get started on building a robot?)

  In short, he was totally swoon-worthy.

  “Ever since I learned that you’re four to six times more likely to get killed by a vending machine than a shark, I’ve steered clear of machinery of any kind,” I said. Hopefully Albert would think I was funny and not too much of a stats geek. I wanted to hear that laugh again. “But the googly eyes you added were a nice touch.”

  It worked. Albert let out a guffaw, and my heart reached the ceiling.

  “Thanks,” he said, “but I’m not sure it was enough to make PrinterBot stand out. I was one of five remote-controlled printers. Ms. Rochester had no idea what she was bargaining for when she set that challenge.”

  I steepled my hands like a devious evil genius. “Or maybe she did. Her army of PrinterBots is finally complete! Mwahahaha!”

  Albert’s real laugh joined my evil one. It made his eyes shine beneath his glasses, and he had a dimple on his right cheek that accented his angular jaw. Ohmigawd, get ahold of yourself, Jay. You can’t fall for this guy after knowing him for only seven hours.

  But they were seven glorious hours.

  “Anyway,” Albert said, snapping me out of my internal love fest, “see you tomorrow.”

  “Sounds great.” I waved. “See ya.” The wave immediately turned into yet another face-palm. See ya? I sounded like a sixth grader who’s never kissed anybody. Sure, the second half of that was true, but I didn’t need to make it so obvious.

  Max slammed his gavel, and I practically jumped out of my skin. “What the frack?!”

  “I declareth that you and Albert should just go as yourselves to homecoming,” Max said. “The two of you need to get it over with and get together already.”

  My breath caught in my throat. “Wait. Do you think Albert likes me?”

  “Uh, yeah.” Max put his gavel in his Dolly tote and hoisted the bag over his shoulder. “I’m not so sure you’re going to need my advice, after all. I haven’t seen Albert flirt with anybody since he and Kyler broke up last winter. He just walked right up to you like you had some sort of gravitational pull. What could that possibly mean?” Max winked. We both totally knew what that meant, and I could not wait to tell Lu. Maybe finding a date to the hoedown really wasn’t going to be so hard.

  Max handed me a piece of paper, then headed toward the door. “Okay, gotta run. That’s my number. If ever you need me, your Gay Guide is only a text away. Later, Veep.”

  I stood there, utterly in shock about how well the whole day had gone. It seemed impossible that I could have met more than twenty queer kids in one day, having gone my whole life without meeting a single one. Then to click so well with Max and have the beginnings of my new framily underway? Not to mention that Albert could possibly like me? That he’d stare at my mouth like he wanted to devour it as much as I wanted to devour his?

  Statistics would call this day an outlier. The majority of days would just be normal, emotionless days. Others—the outliers—go completely horribly (like, Jack-doesn’t-get-to-climb-on-that-floating-door-with-Rose-after-the-Titanic-sank-despite-the-fact-that-he-totally-could-have-fit, kind of horrible), or they go perfectly, like my first day at Capitol Hill High. But I couldn’t get used to the perfection. As outliers, those epic days are only supposed to happen very rarely.

  Or maybe the Gay Gods wanted to throw a bone/boner my way, and my life was about to have a much more VSB-filled trend.

  7.

  Have a Hoedown Heart Attack

  I itched to Skype Lu the whole way home, but my walk back to our new place was only eight blocks from school. I had no idea yet who else lived nearby, or whether any of the teens I saw on the street went to Capitol Hill. I was not going to risk anybody overhearing all the giggling and squealing that was definitely about to go down.

  The Seattle gloom had finally burned off, and I got to thinking how I’d love to explore the city with a boy in the very near future. I pictured going to the Space Needle, but the landmark’s giant phallic shape shifted my thoughts to knocking items seven and eight off the Gay Agenda. Why did the city’s most notable attraction have to be so boner-y?

  I burst through our apartment door and collapsed on the full-sized living room couch. I unlocked my phone and Skyped Lu, making sure my bangs were perfectly in place while I waited for her to pick up.

  “Headline news: Chip and I had a fight.” Lu always skipped hellos and got right to the point. She said it came from her journalism background, to always start with the most important information first.

  But this information slapped everything I was going to say right out of my mouth with a perfectly manicured hand. How could I tell Lu about Max and the QSA and getting checked out by a ver
y VSB when she was having her first fight with Chip?

  “Jay?” She banged her phone against her coffee table. “Screw this old piece of shit!”

  With each bang of the phone I pictured punching Chip in his stupid face. Now was when he decided to open the trunk to their metaphorical relationship car and let out the Spare Tire? I was hundreds of miles away and should be focused on making a whole romance vehicle of my own, not picking up the pieces of the wreck he left behind.

  Lu’s face reappeared, and the anger washed right out of me. She looked completely beaten down. Her hair was frizzy, she had on a perma-scowl, and I swear one of her neon-green nails was chipped. She never let that happen.

  “I’m so sorry, Lu,” I said. “What happened?”

  “He says I’m becoming such a . . .” The sound of her nervous nail clicking filled the void. If I was with her it would be so much easier to take her hand and tell her everything would be okay, that Chip was the douchiest of douches. But digital comforting was going to have to be our new normal now, and it was seriously lacking.

  “He says I’m becoming a burden, Jay,” Lu continued. “I’m not kidding when I say we have no. Extra. Money. We see each other half as much as before because practically all my free time is spent working at the diner. When I do get to see Chip, he has to come out here because I can’t drive to Spokane without a car. I can’t pay for my own dinner when we go on dates. He has to pay for everything. To top it all off, I’m that girl who always smells like burger grease. He just called to say he feels like he never sees me anymore, and when we do see each other, he thinks I’m different than when we started dating. Yeah, I’m different, because my life is blowing up around me. So I blew up at him.” She took a deep breath and tried to smooth away some of her frizz. “Gawd, I look awful. My life is such a miserable shit show, and now it’s ruining my relationship too.”

  She said it in such a matter-of-fact way, which was never a good sign. The more emotionless Lu got, the worse she was feeling on the inside. Since she was describing the fight like she was reading a grocery list, I knew she was completely torn up about it.