by Annie Harper
“That’s right. So, in service of that goal—which is what, Maddie?”
“Not sucking.”
“Right—I’m going to sit over here with the nice ‘man’ the Parker campaign has sent over to help us along.” Cody hears the implied quotation marks and tries not to scowl into his papers. “We’re going to work out the minutiae for the day—”
“The what?” A boy’s thin, white hand shoots up from the middle of the pack and the speaker sighs.
“The bullshit, Andrew. For fuck’s sake, I keep telling you that books open.”
“Fuck you, André.”
“Not in this lifetime,” he snaps and shifts his focus back to the rest of the group. “So while I’m hashing out boring parking permits with this guy, we’re gonna need people figuring out the really important questions. Obviously,” he smiles, “I’m talking about what we’re going to wear.”
“Yes,” a tiny girl in the front whispers reverently. “Yes!”
André stoops to pick up a clipboard covered in color swatches from the floor and hands it to the boy sitting on the table. “Terrence, Maddie, Juliet—you’re on point. We need something coherent, but not too flamboyant for the St. Claire masses. Unless we’re being given campaign T-shirts?” He looks back at Cody and raises an eyebrow at his blank stare. “Let’s assume we aren’t getting T-shirts. Remember, don’t listen to anything Andrew says, and don’t let me down.”
Cody feels as if he’s stepped into some kind of creation ritual without a rulebook. The speech drips sarcasm, and yet no one else seems to notice, or care. Instead, they rush into action as though this André is the second coming of Tim Gunn and they are damn well going to “make it work.”
“We have to match!” Maddie squeals to the tall girl who threw the pencil.
“But not exactly, right?” she replies, her dark eyebrows furrowed. “If we all wear the same thing, half of us are going to look like shit.”
Terrence is already hunched over a three-ring binder, drawing angular shapes as the rest of the group huddles to contribute opinions.
For a second, André watches, arms still wrapped around his body, mouth pulled into a tight, close-lipped smile. Then he turns, and his smile slips into a line of disdain. “There we go,” he says, voice drained, and drops into a chair across the table from Cody. “That should keep them busy for a while. Now, I need to figure out what to do with you.” He lifts a pencil in two fingers and lets it dangle like a cigarette in a long, elegant holder. Cody is fairly sure that André, if he had his druthers, would be blowing smoke rings between Cody’s eyes.
“I—um—” Cody feels his brain stutter and shut off. “I guess we should—” André suddenly focuses his considerable attention on him; his nose is wrinkled as though Cody resembles a particularly unusual insect. “I—I’m Cody and—um—should I call you Andreas?”
“André is fine,” he says in a tone that suggests absolutely nothing is fine.
“Okay.” Cody stares down at his papers and watches the words swim in front of his eyes. “The campaign has provided guidelines in here about how to—um—to register for the parade and there’s something about what we can put on the signs—”
“Are you even old enough to go to this school?” Cody looks up to find André leaning across the table, peering into his face. “Did they send us a middle-schooler?”
“I’m a senior.”
“Seriously? I’m a senior. How are you a senior?” André looks genuinely shocked, as if Cody has just told him that he moonlights with the Harlem Globetrotters.
“Seriously. I don’t know if you have strong feelings about your posters, but I—I have markers and I think the campaign could provide poster board if you—um—I mean if you don’t already have some.” Even with the stammer, Cody knows he can play the part of a competent volunteer if this guy will let him. Still, André won’t budge. If anything, his eyes keep getting wider. “I could meet with your group tomorrow to make the posters if—if you’d like. What did you do last year?”
“Absolutely fuck all.”
Cody feels his expression sour, and André shrugs, continuing: “No, I mean it. We jumped in two days before the event and when we showed up, hardly anyone was there. The entire parade was us, the organizing committee and the drag queens from the Starlight Lounge.” André delivers the line like a joke, but he’s no longer looking Cody in the eye. “The kids were pissed, but it’s not like parades do anything, right? Has any homophobe ever wandered into a shitty little pride parade and suddenly realized the error of his ways? ‘Oh shit, I’ve been wrong all along, these little fairies know how to throw a party.’” André lays his hand over his heart in mock contrition; Cody can’t bring himself to laugh. “Anyway, it didn’t do a lot for team morale. Thanks for asking.”
Cody blanches and looks down at the papers in his hands. “I didn’t mean to—”
“But if you’re a senior, does that mean you’re actually seventeen? You must be one of those wunderkinds who graduate from high school before they hit puberty. Do you already have a contract with NASA?” André asks this last in a low whisper and, when Cody looks up, he gives a smirk that’s at once patronizing and utterly bored. Across the table, André carefully crosses one leg over the other and purses his lips as if to say, Well, dumb-ass? You gonna answer the question?
“Really?” Cody’s mouth drops open and he dumps the papers onto the desk before he can think about what he’s doing. “I’m trying to help you, and you—” He sounds petulant, but he can’t seem to stop. “I didn’t even want to be here, but I got the job and I don’t get why you’re riding me so hard, you—you— ”
Cody glares down at his scattered papers. It takes one whole breath before he realizes what he’s just said. He just—oh my God. He looks up in horror to find André leaning back with a wide, self-satisfied grin. “Oh, honey, really? I never ride anyone until after the first date.”
“You know I wasn’t talking about… that,” Cody mutters.
“About what?” André asks, all innocence, and rolls his eyes toward the ceiling. “Oh, don’t worry. I won’t make you say it. But you should know that it isn’t catching. You can’t go homo just by acknowledging the pink elephant in the room,” he says with a bite. Cody flinches back into his chair. “Now,” André says, with a wicked grin, “if you want to go full-on gay, there might be some riding involved, but I’m not sure I’m your guy. If you want, I could ask Andrew. I can’t promise anything, but he’s pretty desperate. Isn’t that right, Andy?” He calls over his shoulder toward the huddle of students still chattering over T-shirt designs, and something in Cody snaps.
“No,” he whispers, leaning over the table and poking André in the arm until he turns around. “I really don’t get it.” André’s eyes narrow, but Cody keeps pushing. “I’m here. I’m talking with you about posters and parking, while they’re all talking about what? Costumes? I don’t get it. I know you don’t know me from Adam, but I’m here talking about the ‘bullshit,’ as you so kindly put it, so what did I do to get on your shit list?”
Cody jerks his head toward the other students and watches as the humor drains from André’s face one muscle at a time. He was grinning just a second ago, eyes flashing with humor, but now, under Cody’s gaze, André turns to stone. He leans over, elbows pressed into the laminate table, eyes as hard as glass.
“Shit list?” André says in disbelief. “You aren’t on my shit list, because I save my shit list for people that matter.” He points over his shoulder toward the group, his hand shaking in suppressed rage. “Do you see Kaiylee and Terrence? They both got kicked out of their houses last year, shortly before I got kicked out of mine. She’s been sleeping on a blow-up mattress with a friend for the last eight months, and he’s been on more couches than he can count. Do you see Maddie? She will never get kicked out of her house, but she’ll also never be able to leave. Her mom wants her to take over the family store, which means that she gets to go to college, but s
he probably won’t be able to have an open relationship with another woman until all of her relatives are dead. Some of those kids are depressed, some of them have tried to kill themselves, and even the ones with perfectly wonderful little families are a little fucked up, because it’s almost impossible not to be.”
André takes a deep, shaky breath and Cody leans back, mouth agape.
“Of course they’re talking about clothes and stupid costumes,” André continues with bitter emphasis, “because what the hell else should they be talking about? No really, tell me, because this is the place they come to not talk about all that other shit. This is where they get to be idiots, like every other teenager on the planet, so they talk about clothes and movies, and I don’t get in their way.” He sighs and stares down at his own hand as it taps on the edge of the table. “You are not on any of my lists, because—right now—you are standing in their way. I’m sure that you are a perfectly decent sort of person in any other context, but right now—” He breaks off with a swallow and, when he looks up, his eyes shine under the fluorescent lights. “Do you have any idea how much—I spent three months calling your office. That meant three months listening to that woman’s voicemail in the stupid hope that someone might notice. I get it. I do. Poor kids don’t vote, and the ones without parents might as well be road kill, but fuck it, what else was I supposed to do?”
André pushes himself to his feet, eyes raw, and as much as Cody might want to, he can’t look away.
“Cody, I’m riding you because right now you’re all we’ve got. I spent three months hoping for some real sign that this campaign gave half a shit about queer kids, and instead I got you.”
His words fall like grenades, and Cody sits, helpless to stop them.
André scoops up his backpack from a chair and turns toward the door, his face once again official and distant. “We usually get ready at Warner Park, by the staging area. Be there at five with the poster supplies and I’ll make sure they all show up in time for the parade.” He nods in a sharp jerk and turns without waiting for Cody’s assent.
* * *
Three days later, Cody tromps across the Warner fields in a haze of fog and sweat. He hasn’t been sleeping well, not before the meeting at the school and certainly not after. He keeps wandering into the same memories, reliving them one after another, like a film that won’t move past the penultimate scene. It wouldn’t be so frustrating if the memories weren’t so boring. In every one, he’s on the playground by Foster Creek Elementary, across the street from his house. He practically lived on that sand and cement before he started middle school; he could see the swings from his bedroom window. Now, his brain won’t stop going back to recess and the crowd of little boys playing smear-the-queer on the open field.
He didn’t know what it meant at the time. None of them did. It was just the name for the kid who had to take the ball and run until everyone tackled him and took him down. “The queer” could run anywhere near the school; it was all fair game. But he was always eventually caught, and he always hit the ground coughing and yelling at all the other guys to get off so someone else could take a turn.
Cody was too fast to be the queer. The whole point of the game was the tackle; it wasn’t fun if the queer got away, so the other kids never asked and he never offered. Instead, he chased and felt the ground move under his feet. Most of the boys were bigger, so he had to run at full speed into their sides, head down, to bear the impact.
That’s what he remembers now: barreling into faceless bodies and watching them crash in a cloud of dust. He can’t remember what happened after that. They might have come up laughing. Some might have cried, but he doesn’t know. He can’t get his mind to move past the rush and sudden crash, jarring his bones as if that nine-year-old is still hidden somewhere inside his seventeen-year-old frame.
He runs. He hits. He falls. And then he’s running again, over and over again for days; until last night, when he doused himself with sleeping pills to get a decent night’s sleep. This morning, his mom had to shake him and then shake him again to get him out of bed.
As he walks, a black speck emerges in the distance and grows into André, perched on the top of a picnic table, leaning back on his hands, his brown eyes scraping Cody’s skin.
André Furneaux might be the first person to make Cody genuinely want to pick a fight, to say something dickish and throw a punch. Whenever he’s been able to stop reliving the playground, he’s thought about André’s eyes, and what he might have to do to make them go dark in irritation. The answer is probably nothing. He just needs to exist to piss André off.
“You made it,” André calls, as Cody gets close enough for heckling, “and here it is: only five thirty.” He holds up his phone, as though Cody could read it from ten feet away and clucks like a mother hen. “Did you get lost? You didn’t actually just move here from an air force base in Russia or anything, right?”
“I walked.” Cody dumps his bags on the dry dirt at André’s feet and looks up; the figurine pokes his hip in the pocket of his jeans. “The Saturday bus schedule is weird and I didn’t factor in the—”
“Oh, stop. I know. I just got here five minutes ago.” André snorts and pushes himself off the top of the table, revealing a paper bag filled with streamers and yardsticks. “Are you usually immune to sarcasm?”
“Usually?” Cody asks, mostly to himself. Nothing about this is usual. “Usually, I don’t feel quite so necessary. After all, you’ve only got me.” He digs into the nearest bag for the black Sharpie and feels André stiffen. He hadn’t meant to throw André’s line about being the “only one” back in his face, but now he doesn’t want to take it back. He waits for André to tell him to fuck off, but the words never come.
“Huh.” Cody peeks up to see André biting his lip and smiling ruefully at the sky. “You know,” he says, “I may have overstated that point… for emphasis. I remember saying something about lists.” He shrugs, and Cody has the distinct sense that this is the closest André will come to an apology.
“Emphasis,” Cody echoes in disbelief.
“Let’s go with that. Like you said, you’re here,” André says, and the corner of his lips twitch as he crouches to reach into his own bag. “Plus, you’re not all they have, thank God. There’s me, there’s Terrence, and Maddie’s pretty intense when she wants to be.”
“I noticed.” Cody risks a tight smile, and something tense between them starts to crackle, like frost breaking under the sun. He searches for a peace offering and jumps on the first stupid thing that comes to mind. “Just so you know,” he starts, slowly, “it wasn’t just you. Judy—the woman you called— she’s awful to everyone. I still remember listening to her answering machine message a million times when I was trying to volunteer. I don’t think she ever called back either way. I just showed up at the office and they never made me leave.”
“Well, that’s just beautiful.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Truly, democracy in action. I can see the posters now. Come volunteer for democracy… if you absolutely insist.” André flexes into an imaginary camera like a disgruntled Rosie the Riveter and looks Cody in the eye. Cody feels his stomach give an almost audible flip. He coughs out a laugh, looks down, and dives into a paper bag in search of supplies.
He holds up a Sharpie without looking back; André takes it and retreats to the picnic table with a piece of poster board and a stencil of the letter G. He sits cross-legged on top of the table while Cody spreads the poster board out onto the pavement and eyes the sign-making materials like a pop quiz.
After a long minute sizing up his poster board, Cody senses eyes on his back and turns to find André watching him. He raises an eyebrow, but André waves, unfazed. “Don’t mind me, I’ve just never seen anyone commune with paper. Is it talking back?”
Cody rolls his eyes and goes back to the poster board. “Not yet.”
“You sure? Because I can handle crazy. Some might even call me an expert.”
“Oh, sassy.” André sounds almost proud. He also sounds closer; his voice hovers just above Cody’s shoulder, and his breath skims the back of Cody’s neck. “Not bad for a straight boy.” Cody flinches, but André barrels on. “You should try that line on Kaiylee. At last year’s parade she said she could commune with trees.”
“Was she one of the ones pissed about last year?” Cody’s voice sounds steady, as if he isn’t pushing down on a rising wave of bile. The word “straight” has never felt so overwhelmingly wrong, like putting on a parka for the Fourth of July.
Above his head, André stares thoughtfully toward the parade staging area at the end of the park. “No,” he answers slowly. “To be totally honest, I was the only one who got my panties in a twist, but if you tell any of them that I just used the word ‘panties’ in a sentence, I will end you.”
“Understood.”
“I guess I was just expecting more,” André continues, his voice dropping to little more than a murmur. “I don’t know why. Most of the folks who live here couldn’t spell homosexual with a dictionary in both hands.” He gestures toward the four bars and one lonely Lutheran church visible from the park. Walk a few blocks in any direction, and the view wouldn’t change. They stare down the street as a man in hunter orange props open the door of the Falcon Bar and starts sweeping out the entrance.
André shakes his head down at the table. “I’ve been watching too much Logo. Some piece of my brain wanted a movie parade and thought a horde of spectators would materialize out of the woodwork.” He laughs up at the sky and as he smiles, he lights up like the sun. All of the sharp angles that seemed ready to cut in the classroom are instantly delicate, ringed in a halo of light. Cody has to look away; he can’t imagine that André would want a stranger to see him so vulnerable.
By the time André stops laughing, Cody’s back to his poster board, back turned and eyes carefully trained down.