by Annie Harper
“Well then,” André says, peeking over Cody’s shoulder at the still-blank canvas, “if this is still a standoff in ten minutes, I’m calling for backup.” He waits for a response, but Cody can’t find one. The emptiness of the poster board feels insurmountable. All the slogans he can think to write on the poster involve labels he can’t attach to himself, and he cannot imagine carrying any of them down the middle of the street.
“Hey,” André pokes him in the shoulder with the covered end of his Sharpie. “You’re thinking too hard. No one’s even going to look at our posters, because we’ve already established that no one is going to be there. Cody—oh, for fuck’s sake. It’s like you’ve never seen a marker in the wild.” In a blink, André climbs down onto the ground, turns the poster board ninety degrees and starts scrawling in broad, red strokes. Cody watches as words emerge, the marker seeping through the fibers like blood in the sand.
“There.” André sits back to study his work and then turns the poster for Cody’s approval. “I got it started for you. It’s inelegant, but nobody gives a shit, and I promise that just looking at the word won’t make you like boys.” He rolls his eyes as he stands and walks back toward the paper bags, and Cody can only stare at the poster.
There it is: G-A-Y in rude red chicken scratch.
It’s just a word, but he thinks he might shake out of his skin. “You don’t get it,” he whispers, before he can stop his mouth. “I already like boys. I’ve always liked boys and—” He sucks in a breath. “And that’s not the problem.”
The words rush out in a wave, and when they hit, André finally turns, squinting, confused. Cody knows the minute they sink in: André’s face goes lax in shock.
He’s never said it out loud. Not in his room, not in the shower, not anywhere outside of his head. It sounds bitter and pathetic. He shouldn’t have said it here—not in a pile of dirt, not in front of this tall, beautiful boy who doesn’t understand. André inches forward, one hand out in front of his body, but Cody’s already gone. As quickly as his mind shut down, it rushes back to life, and he runs.
Cody runs for what seems like hours, feet pushing off of the pavement, then the dirt and finally the long grass beyond the park fields. He used to love it here—not the park, but this hazy space where he runs too fast and breathes too hard to make sentences. It’s what he does: When his dad’s gone quiet or when he can’t figure out a color scheme for his models, he runs. The wind picks up the edges of his shirt, and as he falls into a steady rhythm the world melts under his feet.
When he sits for too long, he can almost hear the mental gears grinding in his skull, but when he runs, he can’t feel himself think. When the gears in the back of his mind threaten to turn, he runs harder, until his lungs burn and his eyes fill with tears. Maybe if he keeps going, the heat in his lungs will expand and he’ll burn away, leaving a smoldering patch on the asphalt to mark his departure. He could just disappear.
He’s never wanted anything more in his entire life.
Finally, he runs out of air. His hands drop to his knees and he hunches over the road, coughing into dirt so dry that his breath kicks it up in puffs. He has to go back. He wants to run until he forgets his own name, and all the names that anyone else might want to lay on his back; maybe then he could wake up on foreign soil and create himself anew. But right now he has to go back.
He stands and stares back over his shoulder at the speck in the distance that was André. André, who’s been planning. André, who’s bringing the whole club to carry signs that Cody couldn’t make. André, who’s already spent one year wondering what happened to his perfect day. André, who probably popped out of the womb knowing who he was and where he was supposed to be. Before this week, Cody can’t remember when he last saw André from any less than a full hallway’s distance away. That’s when he’d catch a yell or a bleat of laugher from the clump of bodies up ahead, and find another way to class. For years, Juliet, Terrence, Maddie and the rest were just that group he didn’t name, like a species too foreign for safe identification But still, even from a hundred feet away, André reeked of confidence. Cody might not have known his name or been able to pick out his face in a lineup, but it was obvious that that boy, with his crowd of loud, bizarre friends, was at home in his own skin.
Cody sucks in a ragged breath and starts running back toward the picnic table and all the art supplies he couldn’t bring himself to use. It’s too late for the posters, at least for the ones that didn’t come from the campaign, but he’ll ‘fess up and apologize to everyone until he runs out of ways to say that this year’s mess was all his fault. I’m sorry I was too weak. I’m sorry I had a meltdown over poster board. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. André won’t make it easy on him. Whatever uneasy truce they formed back there will be gone, but Cody can’t say that he deserves anything less.
As soon as he can see the picnic table, Cody knows that he’s been running too long. The empty clearing now holds at least ten teenagers, all dressed in the campaign’s white and blue. Terrence hands out rainbow handkerchiefs from a white trash bag, while André’s sparring partner, Andrew, shoves new arrivals in André’s direction. At the picnic table, Maddie and Juliet, the girls who’d been arguing about Adam Pascal back in the classroom, have mended fences; at least he thinks they have. But he doesn’t remember Juliet, the tall black girl, being quite so bald. Maddie, the little raging one, sits on the picnic table bench, while Juliet sits on the table itself, leaning over and doing something serious with her friend’s hair. They haven’t seen him yet. He could still turn around and disappear into the park. For a second, he entertains the thought of just leaving all of them to celebrate the parade in peace, but then the huddle shifts and Cody finds himself looking directly into André’s upturned gaze.
He can’t make out André’s expression, but it can’t be good. There he is; André Furneaux, self-appointed champion of gay misfits, and Cody can’t even deal with markers. As he gets within shouting distance, André starts walking toward him; when he gets within a few feet he holds up one hand. Cody stops in his tracks and feels his stomach jump into his throat. No. André doesn’t even want him to come back. He’d been prepared for anger, but the rejection aches like an open wound. He turns to walk back into the park, his hand twisting the figurine in his pocket, when he hears André quietly say his name.
“Cody? Are you—?” André squints, eyebrows furrowed, and Cody’s jaw drops in shock. André wants to know if he’s okay. He’s worried about whether or not the wimp who ran out on him is okay. Cody almost laughs. He’d never considered that André might care.
“I—” He starts and then realizes that he has no idea how he’s doing. Still, he nods and André slowly lowers his hand to twitch at his side.
“Well,” André says slowly, “I didn’t think you were coming back.”
“Yeah, neither did I.” Cody shrugs and stares down at André’s feet. “Surprise?” he tries, waving his splayed hands near his waist.
André doesn’t smile. If anything, his face falls. His eyes drop to the ground. “You know,” he says, “I’ve got plenty of idiots here to wave signs and be publicly stupid if you want to sit it out. I know you didn’t really choose all of this.” He waves back toward the students getting ready for the parade and finally catches Cody’s eye. “You don’t have to—”
“No.” Cody replies, louder and more quickly than either of them expected. He shoves his hands in his pockets, but doesn’t look away. “I mean, I’m—I want to be here. Besides,” he raises an eyebrow and tries to smile, “if I go, you guys are probably gonna walk the wrong way on the parade route.”
For a second, André just stares, squinting into Cody’s face as if unsure whether to laugh. He cocks his head and Cody does his best to look certain. Something in his face must pass muster, because André breaks into a smile tinged with pride and beckons Cody to follow him into the crowd.
As he turns toward the group, André mutters Cody’s line under his breath
in disbelief. “The wrong way on the parade route… Jesus, I wouldn’t let that happen, and if I did you wouldn’t be the one to stop it,” he calls over his shoulder.
“Who then?” Cody scoffs, right behind him. “Terrence?”
“Please. It would be Maddie, if anyone.” André turns to face Cody and walks backward toward the tables. “Terrence and Andrew would walk us all into Lake Superior if someone didn’t tell them to turn at the shore. We’d be knee-deep in water and—”
“Hi, Terrence.” Cody raises a hand at the blue-haired boy physically blocking their path, and André turns with a guilty smirk.
“Glad to see you could join the party,” Terrence deadpans, pressing a rainbow bandana into André’s hand. André grabs a second bandana out of the bag, stuffs one in each of his back pockets and then goes in for a third.
“Cody was checking out the parade route,” André replies, in a smooth lie. “It turns out we’re still walking six blocks through absolutely nothing and then calling it a day.” Terrence laughs, and, as he turns away, André presses a handkerchief into Cody’s hand. “Use it wisely,” he whispers into Cody’s ear. “You’re one of us now.”
One of us. He’s never been part of an “us.” Cody stares down at the lines on the handkerchief and then at the two patches of color on the back of André’s jeans as he walks toward the arriving cars.
Cody expects panic, but it doesn’t come. Maybe he isn’t ready to be Gay with a capital G, but if “us” can mean being one of these idiots, then maybe he’s ready to have people of his own. As he watches the sharp sway of André’s hips, the heat rising up his neck doesn’t feel like fear. It feels like… clarity, as though the run put everything in perspective, and now he can’t stop seeing André in crisp, dazzling color.
Someone presses a sign into his hand and guides him toward the parade staging area with the rest of the crew. Once again, he can’t hear himself think over the din, but it’s different now. At the meeting, and for years before that in the hallways, he felt like an invader locked out by a wall of sound, and now he’s somehow wandered inside.
In their parade spot, next to a sad little flag stuck in the ground, parade-master Maddie tries yelling for quiet. She jumps up and down, waving her arms, but the noise grows, magnified by the echo between the pavement and the brick of the bar walls. She stamps her foot and Terrence takes it as a sign and stoops to let the tiny girl clamber onto his back. By the time she manages to get her head above the crowd, they’re all watching.
“Thank you, Terrence,” she calls. “I’ve never felt so dignified.” The group giggles, and she glares from her dizzying height. “To the rest of you idiots, I want to see enthusiasm out there. Smile your asses off. Chant like you’ve never chanted before, because there might only be three people, but we are gonna give them a show! There’s always the news crews, and we make a fabulous report!” A cheer rises from the little group, and Maddie’s jaw twitches as she tries not to smile.
“Unfurl the banner!” she bellows, and out it comes, a plastic screen-printed monstrosity, long enough to require four carriers. “Banner holders to the front, everyone else to your stations. Signs in hand!” They hustle into place, and she smiles like a general at a military tattoo. “At the moment, you don’t make me want to throw up. Well done. Let’s move out!”
“Sir, yes sir!” Juliet calls back, and they’re on the move, a crowd of weirdos putting one foot in front of the other.
They might be one of ten groups in a parade for almost no one, but from Cody’s spot in the middle of the chaos, it’s hard to care. For one thing, people, actual people, dot the sidewalks and smile as the parade walks by. When he tosses Tootsie Rolls into the street, children race out to scoop them up before dashing back to their parents on the curb. They look giddy, less because of the candy, Cody guesses, and more because they get to run into the road without looking both ways. No cars, no stop signs, just candy. One boy darts out and hurries back as though the magic that’s turned the world upside down might dissipate at any second, and Cody knows how he feels. He’s standing in the middle of the street, screaming at the top of his lungs, and so far no one’s telling him to stop. In fact, Maddie keeps telling him to use his diaphragm.
She marches backward in front of the banner, calling out chants at will. Juliet laughs after every chant, and for the first time Cody recognizes the call and response that once sent him scrambling for another path to class. Heeeey, he’d hear from down the hall, We’re lookin’ too good for Calc II. Am I right? Of course I’m right. Then Juliet would laugh, and he’d run the other way. Out here, it’s just Maddie and Juliet doing what they do, and Cody finds himself laughing along.
“I say sexy, you say bitches. Sexy!”
“Bitches!”
“SEXY!”
“BITCHES!”
Mostly, they all shout to themselves until the second block, when drag performers in sequins and peach lipstick fill the sidewalk outside the Starlight Lounge and start chanting back.
Cody’s head spins in the heat, and sweat trickles down the back of his shirt under the late afternoon sun. He can’t wrap his mind around everything—not the sound, not the jostling bodies, and definitely not the hand at his elbow when he almost falls over his own feet. It’s too much at once, and so he marches along in choppy patches of sensation and light.
Terrence spins Andrew East Coast Swing-style as they turn the corner onto Quentin Avenue, whirling to the beat of the band two blocks away.
They trail behind an all-female motorcycle gang, and one of the ladies invites Maddie to jump on the back of her bike; Maddie spends the rest of the parade grinning, dangling from the back of a 1997 Honda Valkyrie.
When they run out of children to feed, they unwrap the candy and throw it at each other. What doesn’t drop gets eaten, and they ride the sugar high like toddlers.
The sun reflects from the stop signs like fragments of broken glass—
And then there’s André.
He’s everywhere: signaling to Terrence, passing instructions up the line, ordering Maddie to get her ass off the motorcycle. He’s constantly at the edge of Cody’s vision, but never looks him in the eye until the parade ends and Juliet pulls lipstick out of her bag. In the reflection of a car window, she writes “Parker for Senate” on her forehead and suddenly they’re all writing on each other’s faces in “Impatient Pink” and “Burgundy Wine.” Cody turns from watching Andrew’s steady hand to find André leaning against the hood of the car, one eyebrow raised and a lipstick tube in the palm of his hand.
“I don’t know if it’s your color. Would you like to find out?” he smiles.
Cody nods, but he doesn’t consider how close someone must be to paint words on his skin. André’s face hovers inches from his cheek; his eyes are focused in concentration, and when his breath skims Cody’s ear, goose bumps roll down Cody’s neck in waves. He tries to stare at the ground and stay calm, but then André carefully places his thumb and forefinger on Cody’s cheek to hold him in place, and he forgets how to breathe until André steps back to examine his work.
“You’re passable,” he shrugs, tossing the lipstick on to Kaiylee, “and I resisted drawing a penis.”
Cody frowns as the lipstick disappears into the crowd. “Don’t you want a turn?” It’s not that he wants a chance to steady André’s face; it only seems fair.
“Absolutely not.” André taps his shoulder and points toward a cluster of microphones and blazers down the street. “See those cameras? They’re headed this way, and I’d be willing to bet that at some point they are going to want a statement from the leader of these hooligans. While you look super enthusiastic, I don’t want to go on local television wearing lipstick that isn’t on my lips.”
“Lips are still an option,” Cody shoots back, and stops himself before he can think about rubbing a smear of color into André’s bottom lip.
“Of course they are,” André snorts, crossing his arms over his chest. “And so is streaking
through the parade route, but my pants are staying on.”
“The lipstick might play better on the local news.” Cody shrugs and holds onto the car for dear life. Now the André in his mind isn’t wearing pants. He is, however, still wearing lipstick and a smirk that looks suspiciously like the one creeping across André’s face in real life.
“Now that you mention it, maybe my interview could use a little spice.” André glances down at his own body, and Cody feels himself flush a vibrant red. “I might be a stick with legs, but I’d like to think I’d be memorable.”
“Right up until you got arrested for indecent exposure.” Cody swallows.
“It might be worth it.” André squints up at the sky and his smirk bursts into a grin. “We didn’t get campaign press for the parade, so a little nudity might do the trick. I can see tomorrow’s headline: ‘Local Boy Bares All for Queer-Loving Candidate.’” He trails his splayed hands through the air in a high arc, as if he could make the words appear in lights. “See? Memorable.”
He glances over at Cody, and that’s his cue, but Cody can’t think of his line. He can only think about the hint of collarbone visible over the dip of André’s shirt collar and how both lines must continue under the fabric, so he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he kicks the gravel at his feet and tries not to imagine the soft skin at André’s waist or how the sharp points of his hips might feel under the tips of Cody’s fingers.
André would be horrified if he knew what was going through Cody’s mind. He’d either be sick or die of laughter, but Cody thinks either one might be better than the sudden silence. He looks up, when he trusts himself, just in time to watch André’s face fall.
“Huh. I just killed that dead.” He’s still smiling, but the light doesn’t touch his eyes. “My apologies for making you uncomfortable.” In the heavy quiet, the last hints of his smile fade into a hard, brittle line. “Maybe we should schedule a trip to an art museum so that you can see an ass in a controlled environment, hmm? Is that what you need to keep your brain from exploding at the very suggestion of naked men? Or maybe it’s just me.” He takes a deep breath as his eyes turn to glass. “Maybe you’d be fine talking about someone else’s ass, but the thought that I have a body under here somewhere gives you hives.” He wraps his arms tighter around himself and breathes a humorless laugh. “It’s okay, you wouldn’t be the first. Is the idea of me streaking making you throw up in your mouth?”