My Fairy Godmother is a Drag Queen

by David Clawson

  Unfortunately, before I could ask that, or any of the other thousands of questions I’d wanted to put to J.J. since Sunday, Duane and Kimberly returned to the table.

  “Hey J.J.,” Kimberly said as she squeezed into the side of the booth she was sharing with him, “remember those drag queens that performed at the ball last weekend?”

  “Oh, yeah, they were great,” J.J. said. Then, with a glance at Duane, he added, “I mean, for a bunch of fags.”

  I almost dropped the glass from which I was taking a sip. No sooner had I thought I’d bought myself a few minutes of relative calm, then this happened.

  Kimberly looked surprised, but Duane looked ready to throw down. Then J.J. let out a laugh. “I’m just messing with you, dude. Chris said you think I’m a homophobe, and that’s so not my message. Love is love.”

  Duane squinted his eyes at J.J., trying to decide if he was still being played with, when I tugged down on his arm and told him to sit down. He did so slowly, still looking at J.J. suspiciously, then finally lifted a hand to wag a finger at him. “You are not funny.”

  Still smiling, J.J. turned to Kimberly and asked, “What were you saying about those drag queens?”

  Kimberly pointed at Duane proudly. “He’s one of them.”

  J.J. looked dubiously at Duane, not sure who was fooling who now. “Shut up.”

  “No, you shut up, bitch,” Duane said, as he snapped a napkin over his lap. “Coco hasn’t decided whether or not to forgive you yet.”

  “You’re Coco Chanel Jones?!” J.J. asked, genuine surprise clear in his voice and on his face.

  Suddenly with his own share of disbelief and wonder, Duane sat forward. “You know who Coco Chanel Jones is?”

  The night had finally taken a very positive turn.

  I would have sworn we had been there less than an hour, sharing each other’s desserts, talking, laughing, just, hanging out, but when I looked at my watch, I was shocked to find out it was after ten o’clock! I had to get up for school in the morning, and I still hadn’t finished all my homework. Regretfully I announced this to the group, and J.J. immediately signaled to the waitress for the check. But when she came over with the bill folder and J.J. reached out for it, waving away our attempts to figure out our shares, a slightly annoyed look came over his face as he opened it.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  He hesitated, then apologetically looked at Kimberly before saying, “Sorry, this happens sometimes.”

  “What?” she asked, trying to see what was in his hands.

  “Someone has picked up the bill,” J.J. explained to us.

  “And the problem with that is?” Duane asked dryly.

  J.J. turned to show us what the folder contained. On a blank page from an order pad in a woman’s flowing cursive was written, Please allow me. Suzanne. 917-555-9878.

  We all slowly turned to look around the cafe and saw a very attractive redhead in her mid-twenties wave with a smile.

  “Redheads are such sluts,” Kimberly said.

  “Kimberly,” J.J. said, “it’s never a good idea to jump to conclusions. She could be in politics, or a reporter, or just a fan.”

  “Or a slut,” Duane said.

  “I hope you won’t think this is rude, but I really should go over and say thank you. In fact, maybe we all could? Safety in numbers and all that.”

  “Are you serious?” Kimberly asked.

  “You know I’m going into politics someday, right? She could be a future constituent.”

  “Is that the euphemism they use on Capitol Hill?” Duane asked.

  J.J. laughed. Before he could say more, I tried to help him out by telling him he should go say thank you and we would wait where we were. He waited for Kimberly’s acquiescence, which she finally gave with a shrug of her shoulders. All of our eyes followed him, and not a word was said at our table until he returned, which was in less than a minute.

  As we stood, Kimberly shot another dirty look over at the redhead, who held up the slip of paper with her number on it to show that J.J. had returned it. This made Kimberly very happy.

  But as he was opening the door for us, J.J. said, “Shit.”

  “What’s wrong?” Kimberly asked.

  He nodded to a spot across the street where a number of paparazzi were waiting. “Someone tipped them off.” He closed the door, and turned to face us.

  “Does this happen all the time?” I asked.

  “Pretty much,” he said.

  “Damn, I have been living my life all wrong,” Duane said.

  “Do you guys mind if I call a cab? My treat, of course.”

  “The subway’s not that far,” I said.

  “They’ll follow us. They might even follow us in a cab, but less likely.”

  “Of course, do what you need to do,” Kimberly said.

  He stepped away to make the call, and Kimberly looked peevishly across the street. “It’s just rude, really,” she said. “So invasive.”

  Duane gave her a slow burn up-and-down as he said, “Well, you better get used to it, Miss Thang, because you’re dating him.”

  Kimberly then turned surprising shy. “I am?”

  “Girl, you should see the way he looks at you when you turn away from him. It’s all just so deep and … complicated.”

  That word again. If he only knew.

  Once the cab arrived, we darted out of the restaurant and into the waiting car, having been cautioned by J.J. to look as casual as possible. Don’t make eye contact with them, don’t smile, don’t cover your face or head, just look as boring as you know how. Evidently that kind of picture brought the lowest price, and would likely never see print. Duane had asked, “What if I wanted it to see print?” but J.J.’s look reprimanded him into his best behavior.

  Once the car drove off with only one of the photographers running a few steps beside us to get a few more shots, J.J. apologized again for the inconvenience. Duane turned around from the front passenger seat and said, “The only thing you need to apologize to me for is not letting me show them how fabulous I truly am.”

  J.J. laughed. “Well, maybe we’ll have to think of a bigger media setting, so that Coco really has the chance to shine?”

  Duane looked at Kimberly as he pointed to J.J. “This is a really, really good man. I approve.”

  Kimberly, who sat in the middle between J.J. and me, beamed as she leaned against J.J., putting her head on his shoulder.

  As she did, J.J. looked over her head at me, and said, “It’s not easy dating me. There’s constant attention, and you have to be very careful, and very secretive. Our security people do electronic sweeps all the time, but even a text, or a phone call, or an email might be intercepted and made public, so everything has to be very innocuous. We might even want to make up codes, so that only we know what we’re trying to say to one another.”

  “I don’t mind,” Kimberly said.

  After a long moment of J.J. and me holding each other’s eyes over the top of Kimberly’s head, I gave him the smallest of nods. As we continued uptown, I at first felt an almost overwhelming weight of fear and guilt and self-doubt. But then as I replayed in my head what he’d said about the difficulties of dating him, I finally stopped and focused on one word: dating. I was officially (if secretly) dating J.J. Kennerly.

  CHAPTER 8

  A LITTLE LESS CONVERSATION

  I doubt anyone who has been in love would argue that the process of falling is pretty ridiculous. You’re exhausted because you can’t sleep from thinking about the person, and then the second you see them it’s like you just drank thirty Red Bulls in one gulp.

  After that first date, which had been a Thursday, I hardly slept at all. Since I had school, and I figured he was always busy, I didn’t really expect to see J.J. until the weekend. But when he didn’t show up on Saturday, obviously, the world was over. He’d realized he wasn’t gay, that I was heinously ugly and awful, and he was never coming near the Fontaine brownstone again in anything less tha
n a hazmat suit, if even then.

  I didn’t feel quite that desperate and dark in the morning, but by noon I was decidedly on edge. And Kimberly just slept, and slept, and slept. Since I didn’t have J.J.’s phone number, and knew I couldn’t text him anyway, she was my only source of information. I couldn’t concentrate on my homework for the life of me, so I made myself busy rearranging the kitchen pantry. And because I was in it, I managed to miss Kimberly leaving the house. It was dinnertime before she returned from shopping, my mood was full blown fatalism, and when she blithely answered my question about J.J.’s whereabouts with, “Oh, he had a family thing,” I wanted to both strangle her—why couldn’t she have told me that earlier?—and hug her.

  After not sleeping well Thursday or Friday nights, Saturday night was even worse. By seven o’clock Sunday morning, I gave up even trying and decided the kitchen shelves needed fresh lining. Around ten-thirty, I was in the later stages of the task when the door swung open and J.J. entered in a rush and grabbed me up in a kiss. It probably lasted somewhere between thirty seconds and a minute, but it somehow felt both instantaneous and eternal. Then, as quickly as he’d entered, he ran out calling to Kimberly that of course he was ready.

  I, naturally, now entered one of those thirty-Red-Bull highs. I completed the shelves while dancing around and making up lyrics to an absurd secret little ditty with the refrain, “Mr. Man just kissed me, oh, yeahyeahyeah, Mr. Man just kissed me.”

  The next month or so was for me a period of exquisitely torturous highs and lows. I mean, I was falling in love for the first time with, arguably, the most sought-after man on the planet—that would be the high part—but it was all in secret and while my sister and the world thought he was falling in love with her. That would be the low part.

  Now, while I can’t exactly defend lying to Kimberly, in my … well, defense … I really didn’t think she would mind that much. As the paparazzi presence outside the house increased and the papers and magazines and blogs made her a daily fixture, and friends she hadn’t heard from, or girls who had barely paid her any attention started getting in touch, and charities started asking her to attend as their guest, and fashion designers offered her exclusive showings, sometimes even sending things right over to the house—all of that and more—well, it was pretty clear to me that she was having a great time. And to be honest, J.J. wasn’t with her for a lot of that, so I eased my guilt with the comfort she was getting what she most wanted from dating J.J., even if he and I were the ones who were actually falling in love. And, truly, it was quite a love fest between Kimberly and the media. She adored them and they adored her.

  While we did go on a few more “double dates”—only Kimberly thought of them that way—almost all our time together was spent in our living room with Kimberly, or since she went to a lot to society things that J.J. begged out of, with Buck and/or Iris right there with us or close by, and it was all actually pretty Victorian and chaperoned. Not that they had any idea they were acting as such.

  The advantage of this was that J.J. and I got to know each other very well in a quite old- fashioned way. We talked about what was going on in the news, politics, literature, what we were learning in our classes, our beliefs on what determined morality, kindness, spirituality, all sort of things. I probably don’t need to mention that Iris and Buck added little to these discussions, but she seemed happy enough with a glass of wine in her hand, and he happy enough with his Xbox controller. When Kimberly was around, she would sometimes try to participate, but usually a text or a picture of herself in a newspaper or magazine would distract her soon enough.

  But being that we were also two teenage boys, even as we were discussing the merits of the latest Nobel Prize recipients, we were also always trying to figure out a way to steal a few moments alone together, so that we could honor the wishes of Elvis Presley and have a little less conversation. It didn’t take long before that included more than just kissing. J.J. was quite fond of grabbing my ass. After the first couple times of pretending it was an accident, neither of us needed the pretense.We both knew we wanted it.But we still hadn’t managed to find a long enough moment of privacy to get further. Which is why I came up with a plan.

  J.J. usually spent about two nights a week over at our place, not including the nights he actually accompanied Kimberly to events and social commitments. It didn’t take me long to notice that on the nights Kimberly went out without him, Iris and/or Buck would always hang out with J.J. until just before Kimberly walked in the door, then they would suddenly need something upstairs and would hightail it out of there, pushing me along with them. Since neither of them had ever struck me as having particularly keen hearing, I had a feeling it wasn’t just the jingle of keys that tipped them off as to when to dash out of their starting blocks.

  A little further observation and I noticed that about fifteen minutes before she arrived, one of them would always get a text. Part of me was hurt that I hadn’t been included in the plan, and another part of me worried that was because maybe Iris suspected what was up between J.J. and me. Because now part of Iris’s breakfast ritual was to read Kimberly tips on how to make your man happy in bed. Kimberly would seethe. So far J.J. had been a perfect gentleman, and she didn’t appreciate the extra pressure being put on her. One morning, before Iris could even start to read, Kimberly pulled out a purple fedora with a long feather tucked into the band and tossed it on top of Iris’s plate. I’m not sure if the glare Kimberly received was because of the hat implication or because it had almost knocked over the waiting mimosa.

  If I’m being completely honest, I’m not exactly sure what I thought we were going to get accomplished in fifteen minutes. I knew that was enough time to take care of things on my own, but the stolen seconds and minutes—two at a time at most, so far—I’d shared with J.J. were the sum total of physical intimacy I’d ever experienced. All I knew was those moments were amazing, and fifteen minutes were exponentially longer, so I would take what I could get.

  On the day I’d picked, knowing Iris and Buck charged their phones while they slept, I’d little by little been burning through their battery power when they weren’t looking. Then, when J.J. arrived and he was helping me make popcorn and drinks (and grabbing my butt, because that’s what he did when we were alone), I mentioned I was annoyed about how much Iris and Buck were on their phones and how I hoped it wouldn’t distract from our enjoyment of the movie we were about to watch. I think J.J. caught on that I was up to something, because his right eyebrow raised ever so slightly. But that didn’t stop him from walking into the living room and telling Buck and Iris about a dinner he’d been to the night before where everyone had to put their phones in a stack on the table, and the first person to check their phone had to pay the bill.

  “Chris got the movie from the library, and the popcorn and sodas are paid for,” Buck said, his tone suggesting that J.J. needed to step up his mental game.

  Iris, however, was having none of that. In the Fontaine household, J.J. would get what J.J. wanted. Obviously, she hoped that would mean Kimberly sooner than later, but in the meantime, phones would have to set the precedent. God love Iris’s ambitious, manipulatable heart. She was playing into my plan just as I’m hoped. I volunteered to collect everyone’s phone, and then once the movie had started, I discreetly burned through the rest of the power on both of their phones.

  As the movie ended, I reached under the pillow I’d put over the phones and then acted surprised to have received a text from Kimberly. (A total lie, of course.) “Huh, odd, Kimberly texted me that she’s on her way home. Oh, and she sent it almost fifteen minutes ago.”

  Well, Iris and Buck lunged for their phones, then both looked exasperated to find them out of power.

  “That must be why she texted Chris,” Buck said.

  Iris badly faked a yawn. “Oh, I’m so tired. You’ll forgive me, J.J., if I head up to bed, won’t you? Kimberly will be home any second.” She headed for the door as she spoke, pulling Buck and me e
ach by an arm. Buck went along willingly, but I twisted free, blaming it on my need to take the dishes into the kitchen. “Okay,” she said, “but then it’s right to bed for you.”

  “Of course,” I said, putting on my most respectful voice.

  I hadn’t been in the kitchen for half a minute before J.J. was pushing through the swinging door. “What was that all about?” he asked as he pulled me into him and kissed me, his lips still tasting of lingering butter and salt.

  “We might have more than fifteen minutes,” I said. “Or less. I really don’t know. But hopefully more.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  I’d been super antsy during the movie, filled with as much nervousness as excitement at the thought of what we were about to do if my plan worked out, and so far, it was working perfectly. While my heart had started racing once I got to the kitchen, knowing that J.J. would follow me as soon as Iris and Buck were safely upstairs, once he held me and kissed me, it was all I could do not to rip his clothes off. My nerves were gone, and my hands were wandering all over him.

  “Whoa, what’s going on?” he asked.

  “I figured out how to get rid of them early enough so that we could finally have sex.”

  “What?”

  I began to unbutton his shirt, but he took each of my hands in his, stopping me.

  “Don’t you want to?” I asked, immediately feeling the flash of heat that comes from soul crushing embarrassment.

  “Of course I want to.”

  “So, let’s—”

  “Kimberly could be home any minute.”

  “So, we’ll hurry.” I tried to free my hands, but he held on firmly.

  “I don’t want our first time to be rushed.”

  “You don’t? Why not? Who knows how long it could be before we’ll get another chance?”