by Jeffery Self
Nana’s cancer got real bad right around my eleventh birthday, and it became clearer and clearer to all of us, including to her, that she was going to die. We went over to her house one day and she had a birthday present wrapped up for me. My parents said something about how she shouldn’t be buying me presents when she was so sick, and she told them to screw off. Inside the package was a Levi’s denim jacket she must have ordered from a catalog. It was nice, and I was thankful, but it was nothing out of the ordinary. It wasn’t until we were leaving that Nana whispered to me to look under the tissue paper inside the box. In the backseat of my parents’ car, I looked—and there, underneath the tissue paper, was the wig and a note from Nana that said, For when you’re feeling blue.
I kept the wig in that same box underneath my bed from that day on, and whenever I felt blue or nervous or mad or just needed a moment to smile, I’d pull out the box, put on the wig, look at myself in the mirror, and for the first time all day, I’d feel capable of anything. This was probably why I understood why the characters in To Wong Foo were doing what they were doing, because any time I put on that wig I felt like a star.
Maybe it was just something in my blood. Maybe it was Nana’s spirit looking down on me and telling me I was going to be okay. Or maybe it was a combination. Either way, that afternoon, as I waited to tell my parents about spring break, I put it on. I looked at myself in the mirror and reminded myself that I had nothing to be afraid of. I’d always have Nana on my side. I could feel her cheering me on to take the first step toward my dreams.
“And I’m sure you both understand that spring break is a rite of passage for somebody my age, and you don’t have to worry about it costing you money because Seth’s offered to take care of it,” I said, halfway through my plea to get the week off from the gas station.
My parents hadn’t looked up from the TV once, except to tell me to move because I was blocking Mariska Hargitay.
“So … may I?”
“I don’t care—ask your father,” my mother said, focusing on the TV and not actually looking at my father, who was sitting directly next to her.
When the show went to a commercial, my father stood up and walked to the kitchen to get another beer. Then he cracked open the can as he walked back to his seat, as if he liked to leave me hanging.
Finally, he said, “If I say yes, you gotta work double time all next month.”
My voice cracked with excitement as I promised that I’d work triple time if that’s what it would take. They didn’t put up too much of an argument—not because they cared but because the show was starting back and they wanted me to shut up. I ran back to my room, thanking the spirit of Nana. Then I lay down on my bed and texted Seth:
New York, here we come.
WITH THE ISSUE OF MY parents behind me and the first day of spring break being four nights away, I sent in my application for the pageant, which made the whole thing feel real, official, and utterly intimidating. The application itself was pretty minimal and standard; they wouldn’t expect me to really explain myself until I was standing in front of hundreds of strangers onstage. The minute I sent it off and got the email confirmation that I was officially a contestant, I broke into a panic-fueled sweat. In the confirmation, they repeated the segment requirements: talent, interview, evening gown, and that incredibly intimidating speech about what drag means to you.
Public speaking aside (I’d passed out during my fifth-grade spelling bee on the word altogether, for goodness’ sake!), the biggest problem with this speech would be the fact that I wasn’t sure why I should be crowned the Drag Teen over anyone else. Sure, I needed the money—but that didn’t mean I deserved it. Convincing a panel of judges you’re worthy of first place is tough when you yourself think you’re a loser.
I didn’t tell Seth and Heather any of this. After agreeing to go, I tried to keep all my fears to myself. They were giving up their spring break to go on this adventure with me. All they should be getting back from me was gratitude, not angst.
Because he didn’t have to worry about my mental health, Seth focused on other, more mundane road-trip matters.
“We’ll definitely need a playlist,” he said to me and Heather at lunch on the Friday before we were leaving. As he did, he marked the word playlist into the notebook where he was creating a list of things to bring with us on the road. “I should probably handle that since you both have bad taste in music.”
“How dare you!” Heather said, slamming her miniature carton of fat-free milk onto her lunch tray and spilling a little white puddle onto her Salisbury steak. “I have great taste in music. I pride myself on having no understanding of Katy Perry whatsoever!”
“How about you both make playlists?” I interrupted. “We’re driving from Florida to New York. Something tells me we’ll have time for both.”
“Now. I did the math and we’re going to need roughly four hundred dollars in gas. I’ve got that covered—”
“No!” I protested. “That makes me feel bad. The only reason we’re doing this is because of me. You shouldn’t have to spend your own money to get me to New York to be in some dumb pageant.”
Seth threw his hand in the air. “First of all, the pageant isn’t dumb, and you really need to stop saying that or you’re going to create that as the narrative in your head and not try hard enough.” (Seth read WAY too much O magazine.) “Second of all, it’s my parents’ money. They have a lot of it, too much of it, and it’s from cutting into people’s faces in an attempt to make them look younger but ultimately just turning them into people who look like forgotten Muppets that got thrown out for being too strange-looking. So, if I’m not spending it on getting my boyfriend to a drag pageant and his future, then I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.”
Seth’s adorable grin could have convinced me to do anything. But accepting his money was still hard, even if it was his parents’ money. It was like he was Robin Hood, Heather was Maid Marian, and I was one of the beggar children they robbed the rich for.
But you can’t expect Robin Hood to understand that even good deeds lead to a feeling of indebtedness. He continued to grin, saying, “So. We’re doing this? Like, for real? This Sunday, we’re going to drive to New York City?”
He looked across the table at me. I looked at Heather. Heather looked back to Seth. As if on cue, slowly, we all nodded yes.
Two days later, Seth’s car was packed to the brim with luggage. We carefully avoided his mom’s curiosity about why we’d need so much stuff in Daytona Beach by blaming Heather’s indecisiveness about what to wear. Seth’s mom had every right to raise an eyebrow, but the bottom line was that because of all her plastic surgery, she literally couldn’t.
We’d all way overpacked, but that was the thing about drag—it wasn’t about to allow us to travel lightly. I had two suitcases of clothes I’d borrowed from Heather, the wig from Nana, every pair of heels I could squeeze my feet into from the local thrift shop, and a major suitcase for my makeup. I had packed so much stuff for drag that I’d barely had enough room for my civilian clothes.
I called shotgun and Heather took the backseat. The agreement was that we’d drive in shifts—or rather that Seth and I would drive in shifts, while Heather would rest in the backseat. Heather was fine if she was just driving around Florida, but interstate freeways were a different matter altogether. Heather had failed her driver’s test four times and the only reason she’d passed it the fifth time was because the lady at the DMV was tired of having to talk to her.
We were breaking up the trip over the course of three days because that’s what we’d seen people do on road trips in movies. We’d drive until we got too tired, we’d stay at a motel near the interstate, then we’d get up the next morning to do it again. Our goal for the first day was to get to South Carolina before dark.
We hit the road, Seth’s mix of pop music as our soundtrack as we pulled onto the interstate, leaving Clearwater behind us. I could barely believe it was really happening.
We passed the time with car trip games; we played Résumé, which was a game I claimed to have made up but that I’m sure I didn’t. You named an actress and every time it was your turn you had to name one of that actress’s movies. The game lasted until no one could name another movie. I was essentially unstoppable at this game because I had seen pretty much every movie any famous actress had ever made. It didn’t occur to me until I had beaten everyone through Sandra Bullock, Reese Witherspoon, Meryl Streep, and Jennifer Lawrence that none of us had ever, ever considered playing the game with a man’s name.
“Why would we do that?” Heather scoffed at my question, and she had a valid point. One of the uniting bonds between Heather and me was that we refused to see movies without a strong female lead. Heather argued it was our feminism, but in reality I think it was just that Nana had instilled me with good taste when it came to movies.
It was beginning to get dark out, the sun setting behind a McDonald’s golden arches. We’d been driving for a while, maybe seven hours, long enough that we’d listened to “Firework” thirty-three times and Heather had told us the story about the time her parents left her at the grocery store, twice. A sign advertised forty-dollar rooms three miles ahead, and we decided we’d gotten far enough for one day. Plus, forty dollars was our exact budget for a room that night, so we pulled off onto the exit and into the parking lot for the Bel Air Inn.
Seth checked us in while Heather and I waited in the car. We figured a group of three teenagers paying for one room in cash might look a bit suspect. Our plan was that Seth would break down crying and tell them he was in town for a funeral if they asked why a seventeen-year-old was traveling alone. They didn’t, though—the Bel Air Inn didn’t seem like the kind of place where people paid a lot of attention to who was coming or going. The two-floor building looked like something out of a horror movie, surrounding a pool that was a color I’d never seen before—not blue, not green, not yellow, but something in between all three. There was nothing else within eyeshot except for a diner and a gas station; only a few cars and Mack trucks were parked in the motel parking lot, and the snack machine outside our first-floor room was out of everything but gum that looked like it had been in there since before I was born.
Our room was even rougher than the rest of the place. The two double beds advertised ended up being one double bed and the headboard of a second one. Which left us to speculate where the other mattress and bed frame had gone and why anyone would have wanted them.
“Bedbug farmer?” Heather guessed.
“Maybe they put it into the Smithsonian as part of an exhibit on crime scenes,” Seth theorized.
“Maybe it just went for a walk,” I reasoned. “I mean, if you were a bed, would you want to stay here?”
“Well, until it comes back, we have a problem. We can’t all fit in a double bed,” Heather complained. “Call the front desk and ask for a rollaway or something.”
Seth shook his head. “We can’t. I told them it was just me, remember? They’ll probably charge more if I ask.” Riskily, he plopped his suitcase onto the filthy carpet.
“Just to play devil’s advocate,” I argued, “I don’t think this is the kind of place that will ask that many questions. It feels like the kind of place you could kill someone and housekeeping would simply vacuum around the body. Or incorporate it into the decor. That lamp looks like a salesman after his third coronary, no?”
“Do you want to be the one to talk to the guy behind the front desk?” Seth challenged. “I think his name was Snarly Deathbringer. Any takers?”
Heather and I decided it was best to just suck it up and share the bed with one another both out of fear but mainly because of general teenage laziness. It would be a tight squeeze, but it was just the one night. Besides, something told me we didn’t want to see what was rolled away inside a rollaway bed at this place.
“What are we going to do with our night?” Heather dug a sweater out of her suitcase, since the AC in the room was on some kind of arctic setting and the on/off switch must have joined the missing bed on its moonlit stroll.
“Um. Sleep, right?” I asked. “Isn’t that the point?”
“No, Heather’s right. We should do something! This is the first night of our adventure. Let’s explore!” Seth was way too energetic for someone who had just spent seven hours in a car. They both were, actually. Then again, I wasn’t exactly in a hurry to squeeze into the double bed with the two of them either.
“Where exactly do you plan to explore?” I pointed out the window at the barren fields and interstate outside. “That diner? Or the gas station? How can you choose between such scintillating options?”
Heather and Seth, ready for adventure, ignored my sarcasm. Heather tossed the car keys to Seth.
“You’re right. We ought to eat first.”
The diner across the street was almost as disgusting as our motel room, but only almost. It was set up like your typical diner, with a long counter going through the center of the room and a few tables in the corner. Someone must have put in at least twenty dollars’ worth of quarters before we got there because the jukebox never stopped playing Christian rock music. We sat down at a table near the front, my hands sticking to the table the minute I touched it.
“You guys, why do I feel like everybody is staring at us?” Heather asked, surveying the room. I turned and saw that her feeling was correct: Every single eye in the place was focused on us.
“I suppose they’ve never seen a guy on the verge of being crowned Miss Drag Teen before,” Seth said, waving his hand in dismissal and peeling the menu off the linoleum tabletop. “Now. Do you think this place has any vegan options?”
We were all so far from vegan that we’d had KFC for lunch earlier, but we always liked to joke about snobby city-people things like that. One time we’d dared Heather to ask Mrs. Irene, our school lunch lady, for something gluten-free, and Mrs. Irene had almost thrown a chicken-fried steak at her. Joking about things like that was our way of feeling a little bit closer to life in a big city where people would get us.
“Ready?” a very old waitress with a name tag specifying her as Sheila asked. She didn’t betray even a trace of a smile.
We were caught off guard and all ordered burgers just because it would get her away from our table quicker.
“She seems fun.” Heather rolled her eyes.
“Okay, so, JT,” Seth said, ripping a page from his ever-present notebook. “I think you should write out a to-do list of what needs to be done before the pageant. We need to be prepared by the time we get to New York.”
“That’s a great idea.” Heather drummed her hands on the table excitedly. “I love lists.”
“What kind of list?” I asked.
“Well, for one, the four key words from John Denton. That’s ultimately what this whole competition is about, right?” Seth pulled the pageant website up on his phone.
“And what are they again?”
Seth cleared his throat. “Glamour. Talent. Heart. And soul.”
When I didn’t make a move for the pen, he wrote down the four intimidating words on a napkin.
“What does that even mean?” I asked. “How do you find soul—I mean, besides listening to Mary J. Blige circa twenty years ago?”
“They mean it in a more general, emotional sense,” Seth clarified. “What makes up your soul?”
Sheila, the waitress, sat our drinks down on the table and shot Seth a strange look as she heard the tail end of his statement.
“I have absolutely no idea what that means,” I said.
Heather was busily staring across the room. “Um. The guy in the corner totally just waved at me. Don’t look.” As if on cue, both Seth and I turned around and looked. “You guys!”
The guy in the window was pretty cute. Hipster cute, no less. Tattoos, shaggy hair, most likely a little smelly on purpose. He was exactly Heather’s type.
“How old is he, you think?” she asked.
Seth lo
oked over. “Probably our age, or one of those people with that disease that makes you age really slowly and he’s, like, fifty-four. Go say hello.”
Heather nearly spat her water. “What the hell is your problem? Why do you keep trying to get me to talk to people any time we go out to eat?”
She had a point. I remembered last time all too well.
“Come on, Seth,” I said. “This is a diner. People don’t go over and say hello in diners.”
“Why not? Look. We’re on an adventure. You are going to do drag again, JT. We’re all seeing New York for the first time ever while lying to our families. Clearly we all owe it to ourselves to make this adventure special. No, people don’t walk over and say hello in diners, but they do in adventures, and like I told you the other day … you two need a dose of confidence and I refuse to hear any more about it. Go.”
Seth spoke with such purpose that Heather, instead of arguing, got up and walked over to the guy’s table.
“I can’t believe you got her to do that again,” I whispered as we pretended not to watch. From the animation of the guy’s body language and the smile on Heather’s face, it looked as though it was going well this time.
“Hey. I have a question,” I asked with some trepidation. “The other night, you know how you said you might go to Ithaca or whatever?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, Heather said nobody ever ends up with—”
Heather rushed back over with a big grin.
“Well?!” Seth whispered really loudly as she sat back down.
“Well. Get this. He’s straight.”
“That’s a good first step,” Seth quipped.
“And the friend he’s with is gay—”
Both Seth and I flipped our heads back around to get a better look at the alleged gay friend. He was a few years older than the straight guy, maybe early twenties.