by Alex Gino
After everyone had eaten their fill and then some, and everyone but Rick and Diane had fallen asleep on the patio, the siblings went inside to watch a couple of episodes of Extreme Calligraphers’ Challenge.
“I told the people in my dorm not to tell me what happened,” said Diane as she arranged pillows around her on the couch.
“Does anyone else at college watch ECC?”
“Turns out, nobody had ever heard of it.” Diane shrugged.
The contestants were designing birthday cards. The host, Bastian, would choose his favorite and give it to his boyfriend at the end of the episode.
Rick saw his opening as the commercials started and dipped a toe into the pool of conversation. “So, um, do you have a boyfriend?”
Diane chuckled.
“Or, um, a girlfriend?”
Diane kept laughing.
“What?”
“You’re adorable when you ask about dating.” Diane rustled Rick’s hair.
Rick batted Diane’s hand away. “Don’t call me adorable!”
“Whatever. Do you want to know or not?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’m kinda hanging out with this one guy, Carlo. He’s okay.”
“How did you know you liked him?”
“Oh, you know, you get those special feelings: Your skin gets electric, and you both get a little shock when you touch. You’ll know when it happens.”
Rick felt like he was treading water. “What if I don’t like anyone?”
“Not even me?” Diane batted her eyelashes.
“Diane! I mean the special feelings you’re talking about. I don’t feel like that about anyone.”
“Of course you don’t!” laughed Diane. “You’re too young for dating.”
Rick pressed further. “But what if I don’t ever get those special feelings?”
“Then, whoever it is, you don’t like her.” Diane shrugged.
“No, I mean more like, what if I don’t get them for girls at all.”
“Do you get them for boys?” Diane asked.
“Do you think I’m gay?” asked Rick. Rick didn’t think he was gay.
“I have no idea. You haven’t told me. Are there any boys you like that way?”
“No.”
“Well, then. I guess neither of us knows yet. I wouldn’t worry about it. You’re just a kid, and besides, boys mature slower than girls.”
There was nothing to do but plunge in. “Have you ever heard of someone being asexual?”
“Sure. There’s an ace girl on my dorm floor, but you can’t be ace.”
“Why not?”
“You’re too young. Don’t worry about it. I’m sure it’ll all work out for you soon enough. Enjoy being a kid while you can.”
“You sound like a grown-up.”
“Whatever. You love me. Now hush so we can see whose birthday cards will get them an RSVP into the final round.”
And there they were, back on the surface. Breathing came easily, but the potential of drowning hadn’t yet faded from Rick’s consciousness. And Diane had thrown a dud of a life preserver.
She went back to school the next afternoon, and their hug was nothing like their parting hug three weeks ago. Both of them squeezed, but not for very long, and not at the same time.
Rick took his seat behind Melissa in homeroom on Monday. Once morning announcements were done, Ms. Medina let the class talk quietly, as long as they remained in their seats.
“Hey, Melissa?” Rick could barely even hear his own words, so he repeated himself, louder and leaning forward.
Melissa turned back. “Hey.”
“Could I ask you a question?”
“I guess.”
“How did you know that you were a girl?”
Melissa paused, then recited the line she had rehearsed over the summer. “It’s not my job to justify myself to you.”
“Oh! I didn’t mean … I’m sorry … I didn’t mean to …” Rick’s tongue tripped over itself.
“People don’t usually mean to. But I’m a girl because I’m a girl. That’s why.” Melissa didn’t look angry, but she didn’t smile either.
“I meant, how did you stick with it, even though everyone kept telling you that you were too young to know?”
Maybe it was the look in Rick’s eyes. Or maybe it was the year that Melissa had spent with a therapist, convincing her mother that she wasn’t too young to know who she was. Either way, Melissa didn’t turn back around.
“Never mind,” Rick said to her. “I don’t want to be rude. I just think you’re really brave.”
“No, it’s that”—Melissa scratched at her elbow—“that’s not what most people mean when they ask. And really, I don’t know. I don’t think I’m that brave. It’s just who I am, and it was really hard to try to be someone else.”
“Oh,” said Rick. Sometimes it was really hard to be Rick. Maybe that was because the Rick he was trying to be was someone else.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“It’s your turn.”
“Why did you come to Spectrum last week?”
Rick froze.
“I mean, whoever you are, that’s your business, and that’s cool and all. I just thought that you were … Well, Kelly thinks you’re a homophobe.”
“Oh.” Her words landed like a stone in Rick’s stomach. A homophobe was someone who didn’t believe in rights for LGBTQIAP+ people. Diane had called Thomas that when he used the word gay as an insult.
Melissa continued. “Mainly she thinks that Jeff is a homophobe and anyone who’s willing to hang out with a homophobe is a homophobe too.”
“What do you think?” asked Rick.
“I don’t know.” The bell rang before Melissa said anything else.
“Hey, can I come over after school?” Jeff asked the next day as he tossed the remains of his lunch into the trash and dropped the orange tray onto a stack.
“Yeah,” said Rick. “Oh, wait. No.”
Tuesday was Rainbow Spectrum day.
“Uh … I … uh … er …” Rick’s mouth contorted with each nonsense syllable.
“Or are you going to that origami group again?”
Of course. Rick had forgotten about last week’s excuse. He heard his mom’s voice saying that you need a great memory to tell a good lie.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” said Rick, recovering. “It’s just that it’s called paper folding. We use a bunch of different techniques.”
“You sure you don’t want me to come over instead? I got the new Wheels at Warp Speed last night, and it’s awesome.” Jeff pulled the corner of a video game box out of his backpack, revealing the back end of a black car with flames pouring out of the exhaust.
“Maybe tomorrow.”
“Sure, maybe.” Jeff shrugged.
Meanwhile, Rick felt like he was folding himself into some sort of paper puzzle. Kelly thinking he might be a homophobe was enough to convince him to attend the second Rainbow Spectrum meeting, but Jeff finding out that he was going was enough to make him lie about it.
This time, Rick entered the classroom on the first try. Kelly, Melissa, and Leila were there, as were Green and some kids Rick didn’t know. Green waved at Rick. Rick responded with a small, nervous smile, but inwardly he beamed that Green remembered him. Rick took a seat next to a kid with short hair and pale freckles who hadn’t been there last week. Other kids filed in after him, including the three tall theater kids: Xavier, Yaya, and Zoe. Ronnie was one of the last to slip into the room.
“Okay, then,” said Mr. Sydney, who was wearing a black-and-gray knit vest over a bright pink collared shirt. “Welcome to the Rainbow Spectrum. I’m excited to see so many returning faces, plus some new ones.”
He clapped his hands together and held them tight as he spoke. “I’ve been doing a lot of research, and I want to apologize for my ignorance last week. The singular they has a rich history in English, and as I learned on one blog, it is more important to be
respectful than to be right. I was caught up in the rules of grammar instead of the function of language. Thank you for educating me, and I hope that you’ll keep letting me know when I need to catch up to speed. And I’m going to do my best so that you won’t have to.”
Rick couldn’t remember ever having heard a teacher apologize about not knowing something before. From the looks of pleasant surprise around the room, neither had anyone else.
“To start today, I’d like to switch up one thing about our introductions, based on something I read. This time, let’s make stating your pronouns optional, no matter what they are—he, she, they, ze, or something else.”
Green looked relieved.
“You are welcome and encouraged to share, especially because that can make it easier for others to open up, and your answer can change, but I don’t want anyone to feel they have to give an answer every week if they’re thinking it over. So let’s do our go-round. And for an icebreaker this week, tell us a word you love.”
Mr. Sydney wrote down people’s words on the board as they went around the room:
LOVE
FRIENDSHIP
JELLY BEANS
FABULOUS
HABERDASHERY
MARIPOSA
PANSEXUAL
PALIMPSEST
POTATO
MINUET
FIERCE
OOZE
ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISM
TRUST
SUNDAY
VIOLET
FREEDOM
MAYBE
DAFFODIL
NAPTIME
Rick’s word was Sunday. Until last month, he would have said Saturday, since sometimes he played video games with Jeff and he never had school the next day, but now that Sundays were Grandpa Ray days, it had won out.
Mr. Sydney was the last to introduce himself. “My pronoun is he, and my favorite word is a new one for me this week.” Next to the list of words, he wrote in giant capital letters: QUILTBAG.
“Well, it starts with a Q, like queer, so I like it,” said Green.
“Good eye!” said Mr. Sydney as he wrote the word queer running down vertically, starting with the Q from QUILTBAG. “I came out at a time when we mostly talked about our community as gay or gay and lesbian.” He wrote the words using the starting G and L on the board. “And I genuinely appreciate the inclusivity of LGBTQIAP+, but it was a little unwieldy on my tongue. So I did some sleuthing and found this gem that a feminist artist named Sadie Lee came up with. Any ideas what the other letters stand for?”
“Bisexual!”
“Transgender!”
“Intersex!”
The words flew at Mr. Sydney, and he wrote them down as fast as he could.
“Asexual!”
Rick didn’t call it out loud, but in his mind, he added and aromantic.
“That just leaves the U,” said Kelly, “and I’m unsure what that means.” Kelly chuckled at her own joke, but Mr. Sydney wrote it in.
“You are exactly right, Kelly,” he said. “Many, many people, especially your age, are unsure, and that’s valid.”
“Ohhhhhh,” said Kelly, mirroring Rick’s thought. “That’s good.”
“QUILTBAG,” said Yaya. “I like it. It’s super sayable.”
“Way easier than LGBTQIAP+,” Xavier agreed.
“It’s not that much easier,” said Zoe.
“One of my moms makes quilts,” said Ronnie, “and I really like that word, because quilts are made up of all these different little bits. And each one of them is just a weird thing on their own—”
“Who are you calling a weird thing?” said Green.
“No, I mean—” Ronnie shook his head.
“Just kidding,” said Green. “I’m pretty weird. But you’re right. Each of the pieces of the quilt is unique, but it’s when they come together that things get really good.”
“But what about P, for pansexual?” said Leila, an eyebrow raised.
“Oh, right!” said Yaya.
“We can keep using the plus sign to say we know that we can’t ever cover it all,” said Ellie. She wore the same cupcake hat from last week, but now the tips of her hair were dyed blue. “Does that help?”
Mr. Sydney added a big plus sign to the end of the word.
“I guess,” said Leila. “But I still like LGBTQIAP+ better.”
“Me too,” said Zoe. “No offense, but QUILTBAG sounds kind of funny to me.”
“Fair points,” said Mr. Sydney. “I didn’t mean to say you need to use this acronym. I was just offering an alternative.”
“Well, I’m going to use it! I’m a total QUILTBAG+!” said Green. They did a little dance in their chair, complete with jazz hands.
“I like it too,” said Yaya, “but I don’t want to make anyone feel bad. Is there anyone who doesn’t like it so much that no one here should use it?”
The room was quiet.
“Leila?” Mr. Sydney prompted.
“I’m okay, as long as people use the plus sign and I don’t have to use it if I don’t want to.”
“That,” said Mr. Sydney, “sounds like a community-based compromise if I’ve ever heard one.” He added LGBTQIAP+ to the board.
“So, what are we doing today, Mr. Sydney?” Green asked.
“I was thinking that we could spend the meeting talking a bit about what we want to do this year as an organization.”
Zoe’s hand was up immediately. “I think we need to have better books in the library. I mean, look at us, we’re the Rainbow Spectrum and we’re still learning a lot of this stuff.”
“Yeah,” said Xavier. “And some kids might not have friends they can talk to about being QUILTBAG+, so if they could find some good books in the library, it could really help them.”
“That’s very thoughtful of you,” said Mr. Sydney. “But books cost money.”
“We could have a fundraiser,” said Ellie.
“We were saying at the end of last year that we wanted to get more involved in educating the whole school on queer issues,” said Yaya.
“So let’s get educating!” said Zoe. “All in favor of raising money to get new books with queer content into the school library, raise your hand.” So many kids raised their hands that they didn’t even bother counting them. Rick kept his hand down. He thought that having better books in the library was a great idea, but that a fundraiser sounded like more posters, and that sounded like more comments from Jeff.
“That settles it,” said Zoe. “We’re having a fundraiser. Or should I say, a fun-draiser. Now we just need to think of something fun to help us draise money for some books!”
People threw out ideas, and Ellie wrote them on the whiteboard.
“A bake sale!”
“A car wash!”
“A fundraiser night at Pizza Pete’s.”
“C’mon, people,” said Ronnie. “Groups do stuff like that all the time. We’re the Rainbow Spectrum. We’ve got to do something exciting, something that makes people think it’s cool to be LGBTQIAP+.”
“A play!” shouted Xavier.
“A musical!” added Zoe.
“Broadway style!” Yaya stretched his hands out at his sides and shook them with flair. “There’s a rich history of queers in theater.”
“Do you have any idea how much costumes and sets cost?” asked Kelly. “It would eat up whatever money we make.”
“Besides,” said Ellie, “the arts department already does a school musical in the spring. Ronnie’s right. We gotta be original.”
“I’ve got it!” yelled Green. “Let’s do a talent show. It’s onstage—”
Xavier, Yaya, and Zoe cheered.
“—but there are no sets,” Green finished.
“And no scripts to memorize!” added Leila.
“We can all just do the thing that’s right for us,” said Green.
“We can call it a cabaret!” said Yaya.
“Anyone here got a talent?” asked Ellie.
More than half
the kids raised their hands.
“Awesome!” said Kelly. “I’ll pass around a sheet. If you want to be in the cabaret, put down your name and what you want to do onstage!”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here,” said Mr. Sydney. “We have to make sure the auditorium is available …”
“I’m sure there’s a time that’ll work,” Kelly said as she ripped a page out of her notebook and wrote RAINBOW SPECTRUM CABARET across the top. “The longest journey begins with a single step.”
“What?” asked Leila.
“Oh,” said Melissa. “That’s just Kelly turning into her dad. He says stuff like that all the time.”
The conversation turned to ridiculous parents and the indignities suffered by their children while Mr. Sydney tried to steer the conversation back to fundraisers. The talent show sign-up sheet made its way around the room.
“What if we’re not sure what we want to do yet?” asked Chris when the sign-up sheet reached him.
“That’s okay,” said Kelly. “Just put down your name and we’ll worry about it later.”
“What about kids who aren’t here?” asked Green.
“We can add more names next week,” said Ellie.
When the list reached Rick, there were already a dozen names on it. Singing was the most common option, and a few kids were going to play musical instruments. The theater kids were going to do some theater thing together, and Devon was going to dance. But there was also Dini with a magic act and Green juggling and Chris writing in that he would probably read a poem or something.
Rick wondered whether spinning quarters counted as a talent. He thought about what it would be like to be onstage, showing off. The thought was light and airy for a moment … but then it dropped with a thud.
Jeff. Not that Jeff would be there. But Jung Middle School wasn’t that big, and word traveled fast when sixth-grade reputations were on the line. Rick passed the paper along without signing up. When the meeting ended, he bolted out the door and to the bus stop.
He reached the corner just as the bus did. He took a seat and checked down the block before the bus pulled away. Sure enough, half a dozen kids were meandering toward the bus stop, and worse, one of them was Ronnie. Rick lowered himself in his seat until only his hair was visible through the window. He didn’t breathe until the bus pulled away.