“And I heard you; now please hear me. I’m done with everyone thinking that me being alive is an open invitation to bigots and weirdos who want to do awful things. I am way past over the lectures. It sucks, okay? I just want to live in peace.” Jamie tears a hunk off the pretzel and chomps down with an angry bite. “Don’t worry. I can take care of myself.”
Her teeth roil and grind the doughy thing into soup. She’s so pissed, but I can’t help it.
Dad…Even if she’s mad and can’t stand me right now, give me a sign to reach out and hold her hand. Send the okay; send the all clear. Like someone dumping their tray in the trash in the next three seconds.
I wait.
Okay, five seconds.
Still nothing. Crap.
I glance over at Jamie and in spite of my best efforts, I smile.
“What?” she says.
A daub of yellow spots her cheek. “You got some mustard here.” I point to mine, locationwise.
Her tongue flares out but misses. “Did I get it?”
“Nope.” I reach out with my thumb and wipe it away. The napkin is a wreck, so I lick it off instead. She smirks and looks to her lap. Now I have to ask. “What?”
“Nothing,” she says. “I think it’s adorable that you still want your prince fantasy.”
“My what?”
“Your bodyguard thing—how you want to be my prince in shining armor. It’s sweet.”
I laugh so loud, everyone at the food court twists to see. “I would make a real shitty prince.” Let’s just stick to the Beast, thanks. Much easier. “Besides, I don’t think it’s some massive gesture to warn you about stupid people. That’s just normal friend stuff.”
“Maybe I watch too many stupid movies where the guy comes in and sweeps the girl off her feet. Carries her away and they kiss in the rain. You know the ones I’m talking about?” She waits for me but I shrug. “Anyway”—she ducks her eyes low and blushes—“I don’t know. I love those movies. Have you ever wished you were in a movie like that?”
A slab of pretzel gets stuck deep in my molar because of course I have. With her.
“You think I’m being a cheesy dork, I can tell,” she says.
“Nah. You’re a romantic.”
“I am.” She sighs. “What about you?”
The mall is packed. I try to make eye contact with a stranger. A lady over there waiting in line for a Venti peppermint pumpkin mocha white squall. The lady looks up, catches my eye, and shudders. She grabs her drink and runs.
“I’m a realist,” I say in a dull voice as that lady flees.
Even if I got the sign of all signs to pick Jamie up and sweep her off her feet (Dad, how about someone tripping on that spilled strawberry shake right now? No? Dammit), I don’t know if I could be the type of boyfriend Jamie wants. I just don’t look the part. She’s into all those romance movie guys and their swoony gazing. I’m way more suited to standing in front of her and smashing the oncoming world to bits. Besides, I’ve already tried to be a movie-star guy with her, back in the rose garden, and she shot me down hard.
So I guess it’s good to officially know Jamie will never go for me. I can stop worrying about us and me and her and all the rest of it and just be. Maybe we can be friends.
“Yeah, I suppose I’m a realist too. Everyone kinda has to be at least a little bit,” she says in a similar monotone. “Since you loved group therapy, with your whopping one session and all…”
“Two!” I laugh. “I showed up for the second one, I just didn’t go, remember?”
“Semantics. Anyway, here it comes, ready? Pop psychology. You’re a leading man in a movie, like action or horror or thriller. Which one are you and why?”
“A lead? What does that mean?”
“Like an actor. How about classic Hollywood? If I’m doing me, I’d kill to be Sophia Loren because oh my god, but since it’s obvious I’m more of a Katharine Hepburn, that’s not a bad deal either. You get to pick between James Dean, Paul Newman, and Marlon Brando. Spoiler alert, I’m bringing home Brando from A Streetcar Named Desire. Oooh, Stanley.”
“Jimmy Stewart,” I say. I’m the guy saving the town and coming home to my family on Christmas, my wife and four kids smothering me with hugs and kisses. Ill-fated suicide attempt and all.
“Oooh…I like it. The Everyman. Oh, hey! Rear Window! He has a broken leg in Rear Window! That’s perfect.”
“I guess so.” He’s also super paranoid and sacrifices his girlfriend to go head to head with a murderer, so there’s that.
“Grace Kelly was so pretty in that movie. Her makeup was flawless.” She peers across the food court. “Can we stop in Sephora?”
“Out of pineapple lip gloss?”
“You remembered.”
Some things you can’t forget. She gets up, I do too. We chuck the sad remains of our pretzel in the trash and there’s nothing I can do but follow her into a store that smells like Play-Doh doused in rotting Sharpie markers. “We have to go to Sephora, huh?”
“You’re my BFF. You of all people should understand.” I am despising the descriptive term “BFF” because it has one too many Fs. “Help me pick out some colors. I need a new nude palette,” she says.
“A what?”
“Eye shadow. Don’t worry, we’ll get you up to speed by the time Pride rolls around.”
“Why do I have to go to Pride now?”
“Well, I usually go. We make it a party—to me it’s like a birthday almost. My day, I love it. But if you’re not into it, that’s okay.”
“It’s in June, right?” Maybe I’ll be ready by then.
“Uh-huh, June.” Jamie takes my hand and gives it a squeeze. Feels like she’s made of fireflies and it lights me up. “I keep forgetting this is new for you, sorry.” She drops my hand and picks up a box with some girl’s slick and shiny cheek on it. “Only if you want to. Pride’s not going anywhere. What do you think of this moisturizer?”
“I don’t,” I say. I drift into the aisle and glance at the wonderland. I don’t even know what half this shit is. Lipstick? Okay, that’s easily identified. But lip gloss, lip balm, lip tar, and lip stain? You only have two lips. How many boiled dinosaur bones do two lips need? I grip my disgusting crutches, the rubber all split and cracked with wear and tear. When I look up, I have a heart attack. It’s my mom. Staring at her phone and ambling into Sephora. I duck down and almost crush Jamie. “Hide!” I tell her in a whisper.
“What?”
“My mom’s at the mall, she’s in the store, hide!”
Jamie jumps and turns and stops, waiting for me. “Aren’t you coming?”
All I can do is shake my head. “I’m too big.” Hiding, like crouching into a ball or something, is stupid. The only thing I can do is stand next to a wall and hope my mom doesn’t see me.
Mom is still staring, staring, staring at her phone. Please keep reading all those emails.
Jamie gives me a sad look and resigns me to my fate as she darts off behind a row of colors wedged in plastic containers. I lean against a post next to a bunch of tubes and tubs and wait, peeking from behind the brim of my hat. Mom comes in, finishes up a text, and looks around. Be small, I command my entire body, and it just goes, ha ha ha, sucker….
Mom sees me and gasps so loud everyone’s head in Sephora snaps along for the ride. “Dylan Walter Ingvarsson, what are you doing here?”
“Hi, Mom.” I look across the store. Jamie is invisible. It’s for the best.
“I want answers. Now.”
“I was…” I don’t know crap-all about any of this. I grab the nearest thing. “Shopping. For Mother’s Day. Here’s some lip…stuff.”
She peers at the black plastic tube of goo. “It’s November.”
“Christmas, then. But now you spoiled the surprise.” I put it back.
“Not buying it. Why aren’t you in school?”
Struggling to come up with something, I’ve got nothing. I shut my mouth.
“That’s what I th
ought.” She tugs at one of my crutches to get me moving. “You’re going back right this second, mister.”
“Wait a minute. Why are you here?”
Her mouth pops open. “I…had a feeling this is where I needed to go.”
Dad! Dammit, how does he keep doing this for her? I don’t get it. Why won’t he talk to me?
“And I have a coworker who’s retiring and I wanted to pick up her favorite perfume.” She reaches behind me and snares a box. It’s all pink and loopy with little white birds on it. “So now I have it, let’s pay and go.”
Mom marches me toward the cashier behind a counter and alternates between watching where she’s going and shooting me the look, just so I know I’m still in a very large amount of trouble. Got it. “That lip gloss wasn’t even my color, Dylan. I have more of a peach complexion.”
“Um, okay.” I sneak my head around. Jamie’s still hiding better than a baby deer.
“It was a good choice for you, though. You’ve got your dad’s pink cheeks. Wait.” She stops us both. “Were you shopping for yourself? Or Jamie?”
Now the look has shifted to oh no, what does this REALLY mean?
“Honestly, I saw you coming and ducked into the nearest store.”
Relief smooths her edges round. “Thank god. For a second I thought we had our own Jamie situation on our hands. Not that this negates all the trouble you’re in, mister.” She gets moving again and plunks the perfume on the counter. “Ma’am, do you have children?” she asks the woman behind the counter.
“I do,” she says brightly. “Two girls and a boy.”
“And what’s your strictest punishment for a kid who skips school, like my son here?”
The woman behind the counter looks up and up at me. “That’s your son?”
“Yup.”
“You poor woman,” she laughs. “You must’ve cracked open from the pressure.”
Mom smiles along. “Ten pounds, eight ounces, I demanded a C-section.”
They get their full jollies on and I stand there while they laugh at me. “Good lord, he’s a beast,” the woman says. “When he came in with that girl, I was like—”
“What girl?” Mom demands.
I eye-yell at the woman behind the counter to say no more, but she’s Team Mom. “She’s young, tall, and pretty. Think she had a camera?” the woman says, and I’m instantly screwed.
Mom tears away from the counter and storms through the aisles one by one. I catch a glimpse of Jamie trying to make a break for it, but Mom spies her first. “Jamie!” she yells. “Young lady, you and I need to have a talk.”
“Mom,” I interrupt, throwing myself between the two of them. “It’s not what you think! Don’t take it out on her, take it out on me.” If there was any way to bargain, to plead, to steer her another way, I’d do it all, but once she saw Jamie, it was over.
Jamie holds on to a display and grips her heart. “I didn’t mean—”
My mom bucks around me and gets too tight with Jamie. “I don’t know what kind of agenda you have for my son, but you will leave him alone from now on,” she says in a low tone. “Understand me?”
“Mom, it was my idea, not Jamie’s. She’s innocent.”
“You.” She switches her sights to me. “We’re leaving. Go.”
I look over my shoulder and see Jamie holding it in. “I’ll call you,” I mouth.
Jamie nods and lays her head against her clinging hands holding on to the shelf, and that’s the last I see of her as Mom drags me by the arm through the mall, like I’m some belligerent five-year-old. I don’t want her to touch me and I yank my arm away.
“Ow!” she cries, and rubs her wrist.
My gut sinks. I’ve done this before, hurt her by accident. I’ll move too fast or turn a corner too sharp and completely take her out. “I’m so sorry, Mom.”
She pushes back the sleeve of her coat, and underneath her whole forearm is red from where I wrenched her off me. “You’ve got to be more careful,” she mutters.
We find the car in the garage and get in. Our doors slam shut, and I wait for Mom to start in on me. Start tearing me a new one about ditching school and how bad I’m punished. To go off on Jamie, the whole nine yards. But she doesn’t. It’s as quiet as a coffin. The streets slip away and it starts to rain. Blocks tick by and the car wends its way up to the front entrance of the school. The wipers swish back and forth, and we both sit in the car.
“Just…hop out.” A thin layer of tears sits heavy in her eyes. “I’ll see you at home.”
“Mom.”
“You wrecked the basement, you threw your best friend out of the house, and now you’re skipping school to go to the mall with Jamie, and I’m supposed to sit here and take it? What’s next? Drugs?”
“We’re not on drugs.”
“I don’t know what to do.” Her gaze follows the windshield wipers. “I met with my boss this morning. They want to send me to Pittsburgh for a meeting. I’ve been killing myself to get a promotion and if I do well, this could be it. We need the money. College is coming. This is my moment, but I don’t know if I can leave you for two days.”
“I’ll be fine. I can take care of myself.”
“Not if that girl’s in the picture.”
“She’s a friend. You said there’s nothing wrong with having friends.”
“I don’t think Jamie is a healthy influence.”
“She is.” I’m doing my best to protect her from JP, and if that means having my mom mad at me forever, so be it. “You just don’t like her because she’s trans, is that it?”
“Don’t start with that. Her being trans has nothing to do with it. I’m lying awake at night because you are going through a really hard time right now, and the last thing you need is some confused individual with a complicated history to throw a wrench in the works.”
“You make it sound like I’m a cotton gin.”
She grits her teeth. “You fell off a roof, Dylan. You said it was all an accident and a misunderstanding and you were fine. I’m starting to doubt myself in letting you tell me what you needed.”
“But that’s got nothing to do with Jamie!”
“I’m not fond of Jamie because you, of all people, are skipping school to see her.”
I can’t tell Mom why. She’ll never believe that her precious JP, who said grace with her at every dinner, has turned into a full-blown asshole.
“I’m going to tell work I can’t go,” she says.
“Don’t. You work really hard. Get your promotion.”
“A promotion’s not worth it if my kid is falling apart.”
“Look at me,” I say. She does. “Do I look like I’m falling apart?” Strong like bull, sturdy like ox, ain’t nothing bothering me, nope. Everything is HUNKY-DORY. I add a smile because I’m the only one who can sell it.
Mom looks like a gigantic balloon five days after a Thanksgiving Day parade. Everything about her has gone poof.
I already feel like lukewarm crap; it’s best if I leave. I crack open the door and try to get my crutches on the sidewalk without getting my cast wet. I don’t worry about my head or jacket getting soaked. No one uses umbrellas in Portland unless an ark is floating by. “You’ve left me for business trips before,” I say. “It’ll be same as ever. I’ll eat, I’ll do my homework, I’ll wake up, and I’ll go to school. No big deal.”
I’m out of the car and up onto the brick steps leading up to St. Lawrence before my mom can pull out into traffic. My brain is supposed to be gearing up for physics, but it feels more like scrambled eggs. I hang back in the lobby until the bell rings, hoping I can slide into the day like nothing happened. It’s still early. If anyone asks, I’ll tell them I had an appointment with my orthopedic surgeon.
Which is almost true. I’m meeting with him next week because I grew another inch, oh my god, someone please rip out my pituitary gland with their teeth, I’m begging you. The blood test can’t come fast enough.
Ten minutes tick by. The bell shr
ieks and I ease back into the current. There’s three things I want out of this day to make it substantial, decent, and tolerable. No JP, no JP, and no JP. That’s it. I head toward my locker and something is off. No, it’s worse than before. Everyone is staring at me. I can feel all their eyes burrowing into me like festering ticks.
My stomach sinks.
They all got the go-ahead to hate me, say the terrible things, reduce me to anecdotes that make them feel like they have the right to do whatever idiots do. JP gave them his blessing. I know it. And the son of a bitch confirms. From the far end of the hallway, where he just left English, he sees me. A smile lights up his face. He points at me and starts to walk over. One of his minions laughs along with him. The one laugh attracts more guys and the group grows larger. They all look at me and laugh.
JP makes like he’s merely passing me in the hall, as if it’ll ever be that simple again. “Bad news, Dylan,” he says my way. “I don’t take payment plans.”
If I could, I would run.
TWENTY-TWO
This past week has been hell. The only thing getting me through is nightly phone marathons with Jamie telling me to turn the other cheek, to forgive, to be patient…all the things she tries to muster up every day and all the things I am currently failing at.
Thanks, JP. Now I’m everything I never wanted to be again. I’m the kid not picked for dodgeball or volleyball or to represent Mrs. Martin’s class in the first-grade spelling bee, even though I can spell the second and third grades under the table. Heads turn away from me. Like I have leprosy, Ebola, and plague all in one. It used to be I couldn’t go anywhere without a robust “BEAST!” thrown my way as I went by. Now the sea in the hallway parts with a trail of snickers made under their breath.
And really, for what? Because some sniveling little jerk told them to? Because they think it’s weird I kissed a trans girl on the cheek? So what, big deal. Lots of stuff is weird. I’m no fan of ketchup, but Jason Harrington practically drinks it with a straw. I might not hold hands with a dude but I didn’t give him shit when he brought a guy from his traveling basketball team to the dance last year. No, I was cool about it. I was like, oh wow, good for him for getting some palm-on-palm action because I—the sweaty, heaving ox over here in the corner—will never find someone to hold my hand. Hoof. Paw, whatever. So I’m not too keen on Jason following JP’s orders by throwing me a bunch of ketchup-swigging judgmental smirks these days.
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