Drag Queen Beauty Pageant

by Malachite Splinters

  Then I crawled onto the bed and lay face down. Machyl’s arch tones were ringing through my head.

  Bone China… I think La Tata may need some help with her tuck

  I pulled a pillow over my head, trying to shut out reality. But Machyl’s behavior in the dressing room the other night was suddenly taking on a different meaning.

  La Tata doesn’t have a boyfriend either

  Machyl was always teasing. Always mocking. Always picking at me. But in the past I had always dismissed it as, well, Machyl. That was just what Machyl did.

  But now… I felt a shiver of fear run down my spine. What did it mean?

  I saw Marcus’ earnest face, his eyes gazing at me.

  Machyl mentioned to me a while back… he thought you liked me, you know.

  I couldn’t believe Machyl had said that. I couldn’t believe he had lied to Marcus about me.

  I didn’t like Marcus.

  I would never like Marcus.

  Ever!

  So that night in the dressing room, Machyl was ribbing the two of us, laughing inside at the little game he was playing.

  Had Marcus told Machyl he liked me, and then Machyl decided to respond by telling him I liked him back?

  Or was it the other way around?

  Had Marcus only become interested in me once Machyl told him I liked him?

  I forced myself to sit up, gather up my clothes and carry them to the closet.

  It didn’t matter what had happened.

  I had been afraid that Marcus had told already. Well, that didn’t matter any more.

  All that mattered was that now I knew they were playing with me. So it didn’t matter if Marcus had told or not—eventually, he would.

  There was no point in playing the game if you couldn’t have any fun. And keeping our hook up secret was as boring as an empty room full of dust.

  I knew you shouldn’t have trusted Marcus, the little voice in the back of my head whispered. You’re an idiot.

  I hadn’t trusted Marcus. I left last night as soon as he kissed me and today, I only went on the date with the intention of finding out if he had told or not.

  You fucking liar! the voice laughed at me. Why did you call Sue Ellen this morning?

  I set my jaw and tried to ignore the voice.

  Besides… the voice purred. Your dick swelling kept getting in the way of your plans, didn’t it?

  I scowled, shoving the clothes back on the hangers with little attempt at neatness.

  Well, that was over. It was a stupid, stupid idea to try to go out with Marcus. I should never have let Sue Ellen talk me into it.

  And I hated myself for the way I reacted to Marcus’ touch. To Marcus’ sweet talk. To Marcus’ attention.

  I want to put something sweet in your mouth.

  I felt a twinge in my groin.

  “No!” I said aloud, clenching my fists. I was only wearing underwear, and suddenly I realized this was a dangerous condition to be in.

  I was not going to give in to the desire to touch myself and I was not going to do that while thinking about Marcus.

  I refused to do that again.

  I point blank refused.

  I dug around in the clothes on the floor in the walk in wardrobe, looking for the loungewear I’d had on yesterday, but I couldn’t find what I was looking for.

  I kicked everything on the floor into a pile and dug in the drawers until I found a pair of yoga pants and a spandex racerback tank top and put that on instead.

  I went over to the nightstand purposefully, opened the drawer and pulled out my phone.

  I wanted to ask Damaris if she knew anything about this. I wanted to ask her if Machyl had said anything to her, or Marcus.

  Yesterday, in her bedroom…

  Are you dating anyone? Holy shit, Anthony, do you like Marcus?

  She had never asked me about the topic of dating so directly before. That was one of the reasons why it had come as a shock.

  Why would she ask me if I liked Marcus unless she already knew about Machyl’s lie?

  Damaris and Machyl were friends. They were close. Of course she would know.

  I stood there with my finger hovering over the power button of the phone, and slowly my hand dropped and I let the phone fall back into the drawer of the nightstand.

  I felt as if the solid ground beneath my feet had turned to quicksand.

  They all knew.

  They must.

  I put my hand over my mouth. I felt nauseous. Why did it come as a surprise, that the others were conspiring against me behind my back?

  It shouldn’t come as a surprise. I knew they didn’t like me. I was the failed drag queen, after all.

  And ever since it became clear what a useless piece of crap I was, I had felt guilty about it for Damaris’ sake.

  Because she was the one who took me backstage. Because she was the one who put me in front of DT, one night when he wasn’t tending bar but had stayed backstage working on a Cleopatra braided wig.

  She was the one who had stood next to me while DT’s eyes traveled over the features of my face, over my slight frame, my small limbs.

  I had always felt as if I had disappointed her.

  But now I was faced with the horrible idea that she had— that she was part of Machyl’s lie.

  My shoulders slumped.

  Are we even friends?

  I wandered into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked very different from the first time I walked into the House of Ellegrandé. I looked very different from the night, about a week later, when Damaris had shown me to Duane Tyrone.

  I remembered that buttoned-up Catholic boy half the size of every other boy his age and so shy he couldn’t even open his mouth to speak to the teacher in class. I remembered that kid with horror, with almost the same disgust I had for myself leaning forward and kissing Marcus.

  I remembered how he looked at himself in the mirror each morning, with his pressed school uniform, shiny shoes, painfully neat, and the way his slender fingers and their carefully filed nails did up the top buttons of his white shirt. I remembered his hair, worn natural in an embarrassing old man style.

  His big doe eyes in the mirror didn’t look like anything anyone would ever want to look at. His full lips, half the time pursed in embarrassed silence, didn’t signal sensuality. They just looked too big, unseemly, and out of place.

  I remembered how Abuela praised his light skin, stroking his downy-soft cheek with the back of her finger. She saw a little boy. I saw a failure.

  I smoothed down my hair, probed the scalp with my fingers and felt the reassuring braided rows where my weave was sewn in.

  My eyes wandered down to take in my body. I had come a long way from that little boy, but some things would never change.

  He’s petite, Sue Ellen had said to Damaris. I had grown a little more, but it didn’t look like I would ever reach five foot seven.

  And I was still as thin as a willow branch, and when I pulled up my tank top to look at my chest and stomach, I was reminded how faint the traces of muscle under my skin were. I pulled the tank top down again.

  My gaze wandered down to the right-hand drawer underneath the sink, where I kept my sex toys.

  No.

  I walked myself sternly back out of the bathroom.

  Think about something else.

  I looked at the open drawer of the nightstand again, where I could just see a gleam of light reflecting off the screen of my phone.

  I wanted to look at the pictures of the time we went to Coney Island to watch the Mermaid Parade last summer.

  No. Do not think about the Mermaid Parade.

  Damaris had worn a shell, silver and pearl headdress Brooklyn had made for her, and a 70s-to-the-max purple crochet halter neck bralet over this silver-gold lamé drapey maxi skirt with a high slit up the thigh, and she had worn her hair long and curly. I helped her do this silver fish scale make up she had found a tutorial for because it was hard to get symmetrical
doing it yourself.

  She made me wear disco hot pants in pastel mint green and she painted fish scales on my stomach. She wanted me to wear the matching piece to the headdress, which was the plastic carapace from a set of football shoulder pads which had been encrusted with shells, diamantés and strings of pearls.

  Brooklyn had actually designed them to go together, but Damaris refused to wear the shoulder pads.

  The construction left most of my stomach and back exposed, which I wasn’t really happy with, but I agreed to it in the end, to please her.

  Actually, Machyl was supposed to come with us but he ended up being too hungover from the night before, when a few of them had gone partying at House of Revêtte, although not Damaris, because she didn’t go out.

  Well, actually it was Machyl and Damaris who had planned to go together and Damaris eventually asked me to join. I knew this was because Angel would be there with Machyl and Damaris didn't want to be the third wheel.

  Machyl was supposed to wear the shoulder pads and match with Damaris. I hadn’t planned to dress up in a costume.

  Angel wouldn’t be wearing one, of course. The mere thought of Angel in a costume was enough to make me laugh. He wouldn’t even wear a Halloween costume.

  Last year he had shown up in normal clothes and Machyl made a big deal of telling everyone his costume was Off-Duty Gay Serviceman, like that was even funny or clever.

  Anyway, Machyl wasn’t going, and Angel wasn’t going, so that meant it was just Damaris and me. So I was more or less ready to do anything for her when I found out we would be going alone, together.

  She wanted me to wear roller skates to finish off the outfit along with some yellow-lensed late 90s ski-goggle-style sunglasses with a thick elastic strap that she thought would look good worn on the head.

  But I’d never been able to roller skate, and besides, they belonged to Machyl so they were several sizes too big.

  She settled for me wearing my wedge heel sneakers which we customized with some yellow spray paint to match the goggles. I hesitated but then figured I’d had them a couple of years and it was an excuse to go shopping for replacements.

  I remembered the thrill of stepping out the door of Ellegrandé’s arm in arm with her, we both looked fantastic and any nervousness I had about prancing around the city like this was alleviated by the excuse that we had a reason to get dressed up.

  By the time we got to the parade, most everyone was at least as dressed up as we were. And some were a lot less dressed in general. I hadn’t realized nudity was such a big part of the mermaid identity.

  We stood in the hot sun looking at the men. Damaris got these really lethally strong and sweet snow cone margaritas and we shared them since I didn’t have a fake ID. We found one of those photo booths that printed real photo strips. And then we had more of the margaritas, and spent about half an hour taking pictures of each other.

  Those were the ones I wanted to look at. Only a few were online because Damaris didn’t like how she looked in them. I liked how she looked in them.

  Then we had sat on a bench and watched the guys go past and she had commented on each one, speculating on their life story, history.

  Then it was my turn. I didn’t know. I couldn’t just look at a person and know things about them. It seemed pointless to speculate.

  They were just normal, boring people. Most of the men going past had unathletic physiques or just plain no sense of style. They were a world away from the sexy and glamorous world of New York drag.

  I wasn’t interested in them. I was interested in her.

  “Come on,” she had said. “There’s got to be one you like.”

  I had thought of one. There had been a merman, a white boy in a Rapunzel-like blonde wig, perched on a glittering blue rock on a float, who threw tissue paper flowers to the crowd.

  His slender torso had been adorned with starfish and he had spotted me in the crowd and given me a look, and blown a flower toward me on a kiss.

  I mentioned him.

  Damaris wrinkled her nose. “He looked like a girl,” she said distastefully.

  My heart sank. I liked boys who looked like girls. And not only that, I was well aware that I looked like a girl, especially now I was wearing long weaves.

  Damaris poked me in the arm. She was looking off down the pier, at a group of young men walking along.

  I felt like shrinking away into the gray weatherworn boards underneath the picnic bench at the sight of them. They were just oozing machismo, and I suddenly thought that if they had been drinking….

  My danger signals were going off. Men like that got a certain look in their eyes when they caught sight of me, like a hunting dog scenting prey.

  “Let’s go over there,” I pointed to a busy bar where a large crowd were standing around high tables. There were a number of parade performers were still in costume among them and we would blend in better there.

  I was about to stand up when Damaris jabbed my bicep harder to stay sitting down. She was still looking at them.

  They were all young, athletic build—two or three, distinctly built, with bulging arms and thick necks under their basketball singlets. Two of them were Latinx.

  “Damaris, no…” I whispered.

  She elbowed me, hard. “Do you think I’m a fucking retard?” She hissed, but she didn’t look away.

  The group passed by and I saw which one she was looking at.

  Damaris was leaning against the picnic table, elbows back, one leg crossed over the other, and she remained that way, staring at him as he passed. I noticed she was breathing fast, her chest rising and falling.

  He was the tallest of the group, he looked to be six four or five. His eyes lingered on Damaris, taking her in. He had a very dark skin tone, the type that was almost blue in some lights. He was wearing spotless white leather high tops, and it looked like a rare type to me, based on my limited knowledge of cult sneakers, and a white short-sleeved shirt done up all the way to the neck.

  I looked between the two of them, unable to stop myself, until he turned away and the group sauntered away.

  It was a perfect day up until that point. I had felt like I was in heaven, there with her. I still wasn’t really used to drinking at that point and getting drunk felt like going giddy and rising up into the stars.

  I had managed to get Damaris over to the crowded bar and we stood there at a table with a fresh round of drinks, which was probably not a good idea in retrospect.

  Damaris seemed distracted and she kept looking out over the horizon, up and down the pier. I could tell she was looking for him.

  I don’t know what we were talking about. Something stupid. Hair extensions, I think. Damaris wanted to get them and I kept telling her she didn’t need them, and besides, I had never seen extensions that would properly match her curls.

  She said she would get her hair relaxed first and I told her that was a stupid idea since she had such beautiful curls, why would she want to kill them with relaxer?

  And she snorted at me and tugged on the bangs of my weave a little and asked me if she was supposed to believe I was such a big supporter of natural hair.

  I felt hurt by that and didn’t say anything more, because I did not have good hair, and didn’t I have the right to try to look nice?

  And then she said she didn’t have thousands of dollars for hair anyway and stuck her straw in her mouth and looked out across the pier again.

  I wanted to protest that my weave didn’t cost thousands, but that wasn’t entirely true, and besides I felt even more hurt now, so I decided to just shut my mouth completely since obviously I couldn’t say anything worth listening to.

  And then I saw him. I saw him before she did, because she was looking at her phone on the table. He was walking directly toward us with two buddies flanking him.

  Shit.

  I could smell the brine in the air in my nostrils and I was acutely aware of a gull wheeling and screeching overhead as the three men walked toward us.
I felt Damaris tense next to me.

  I was about to grab her hand in warning, and hiss, “Run!”

  But then the two guys he was with, who had been flanking him like bodyguards, turned to the left and disappeared into the crowd. Now it was just him coming toward us.

  I could see why she liked him. Damaris was almost six feet tall, and he towered over her. Then he was at our table, which was crowded with people jostling each other trying to set their drinks down.

  “Hey,” he said to Damaris.

  “Hey,” she said.

  I politely turned myself slightly away and tried not to listen to their conversation.

  They didn't talk for long. They both had their phones out, and then he was gone. I watched his broad back receding into the distance with a sense of relief, and then glanced at Damaris, who was staring after him.

  She was holding her phone in both hands. “He had to go to work,” she said, as if in explanation.

  “Oh,” I said, feeling embarrassed for her for some reason. “I’m sure—he wanted to stay. He seemed like he wanted to.”

  “Yeah,” she muttered, looking down at her phone again. It pinged and with lightning speed she navigated to the app and was tapping out a reply, which she deleted, then re-typed.

  She straightened up, took a deep breath, glanced at me, raised her eyebrows, smiled, let the breath out, and then looked out in the direction he had gone again.

  “What did he say?” I asked thoughtlessly, then immediately regretted it. She probably didn’t want to tell me.

  She shrugged. “Just…small talk,” she said, and went back to the phone.

  I stood there, stirring the plastic stick around in my drink, which was sitting in an ever-spreading pool of condensation on the tabletop.

  A long pointy spiral seashell in the shoulder of my costume kept stabbing me in the neck if I held my head in the wrong position. I wasn’t paying attention and when it stabbed me again, and I had a strong urge to rip it off and stamp on the damn thing.

  I stood there while Damaris texted and looked at the other people at the open-air bar, people walking along the promenade.