by Jeffery Self
We were both quiet suddenly. The room was too, as it went from one song to another in the bar outside. The short gap of silence felt like forever. Within it, Bambi placed a bright green, curled, cropped-at-the-shoulders wig on my head.
“Look,” she said, with the flourish of a magician completing a trick.
I saw myself in the mirror and gasped. I looked like a real, honest to God, legit drag queen. Not just some boy in a dress.
“I look …” But I couldn’t finish the sentence, not in that moment. Words failed me.
“Stunning, darling.”
“Can I take a selfie with you?”
Bambi rolled her eyes as she began to put her makeup tools back where they came from. “You kids reach for a camera the minute anything feels even the slightest bit okay, don’t you?” she said as leaned in beside me and immediately struck the kind of pose that told me she was no stranger to taking a selfie.
“Perfect,” I said.
I dug into my pocket and felt the list of John Denton To-Dos. Seth had handed it over to me when we left. There at the top of the list was glamour. I picked up a makeup pencil.
“What’s that you’re doing?” Bambi asked.
“It’s silly, but for this pageant they say the four keys are glamour, talent, heart, and soul.”
“Well, if that face of yours isn’t glamour, then I don’t know what else is. However, if you’re thinking of using one of my makeup pencils to write, you better think again.” She yanked the pencil out of my hand and replaced it with a pen. I crossed off the word glamour. “Now, go out there and show that boy just how beautiful you look. You don’t owe me twenty bucks—just be sure to thank me when you win that prize.”
I got up and walked over to the curtain. But before I walked out, I turned back to Bambi. She was putting away her makeup brushes and pencils.
“Hey, Bambi?”
She looked over her shoulder. With her enormous wig and bright makeup, she looked like a drag queen chief, a respected elder of some long-lost tribe. And I guess in a lot of ways that’s exactly what she was.
“Thanks,” I said.
I walked back out through the little curtain, reentering the bar. I was so excited for Seth to see me, to see how great I looked, to see that despite all my whining, I really could do this after all. I could be a real drag queen. That’s when I saw him dancing, slowly, to some crappy pop song, with Alex. I thought I might puke.
He immediately spotted me and stepped away from Alex, pointing at my makeover with a giant smile. I still felt humiliated, standing there in full drag from the neck up only. I didn’t know what to do, so I ripped off the wig, threw it on the stage, and ran out the front door.
SETH WAS RIGHT BEHIND ME.
“JT! Wait!”
The parking lot was dark and mostly empty, the old sign written in a rainbow of neon colors, lighting our faces in reds and greens and blues as I snapped around to face him.
“What?” I asked. “What do you want?!”
I had already started crying, the tears mixing into the eyelash glue, creating a thick, tar-like sludge under my eyes.
“Listen to me. That wasn’t what it looked like. We were all dancing to a fast song, but then it turned slow and Alex grabbed me and tried to dance, but I was pulling away right when you came out.”
Seth reached for my hand but I wouldn’t let him have it. I could now feel mascara running down my cheeks, but I was too upset to care enough to wipe it off.
He went on. “I know. He was being very flirty, but I told him I was with you and then we went to dance with Heather and Mark, but then Heather ran off—”
“She ran off? What do you mean?”
“Out of nowhere, she just insisted on taking a cab back to the motel,” Seth said with a shrug.
“And you let her go off all by herself in the middle of some town we’ve never been to in our lives? Are you an idiot?”
Seth was clearly taken aback. “Hey, now, wait. I—”
“Why would you let her do something like that? So you could flirt with that guy in privacy while I was off with the drag queen? Is that it?” I fished Seth’s keys out of my sweatshirt pocket. “Come on, we need to go right now and make sure she’s okay.”
“She’s fine, JT. I wouldn’t have put her in danger, you know that. She’s not a baby, she—”
I wasn’t listening. With two fake eyelashes slowly dripping down my cheek, I stomped my way across the gravel to our car.
“You can either come with me or stay here,” I told him.
I got in the car and Seth rushed over to join me. As we started back to the motel, he attempted to further explain what had happened with Alex. I cut him off. I wasn’t in the mood to hear it.
When we got back to the motel room, Heather was already fast asleep—snoring, in fact. All I wanted was to go to sleep and for the night to be over. I went into the bathroom and washed the rest of the makeup off my face—at this point, the once-glamorous face Bambi had created on me looked more like a piece of modern art someone would pay way too much money for, just to have the privilege of pretending to understand it.
Seth tapped on the door.
“Come in,” I said.
He walked in behind me, already changed into his pajamas. I attempted to avoid eye contact.
“JT, I want you to let me explain what happened—”
“Not right now, okay? Not tonight.”
Seth sighed and said fine. Then he brushed his teeth beside me, in silence.
“He was really, really handsome,” I said, softly, as if saying it too loud would hurt more.
“And so are you, JT.”
“Yeah, but not like him. Not like you. Not like some of those other guys at the bar. It made me feel like it’s only a matter of time before you realize how much better you could do than me. Then you’ll be gone and with someone as perfect as you.”
Seth spat out his toothpaste and took my hands, his breath so minty.
“I am not perfect,” he tried to assure me.
“But you are! You’re in amazing shape, you’re pretty, you’re funny, you’re smart, you’re—”
“Stop it. I try so hard to make you realize how special you are, but it’s like there’s no point because you’re never going to believe me.”
“Do you think everything is temporary?” I asked. “Like, even the stuff that makes you happy?”
I could feel that tremble in the back of my throat that you get when you say something that scares you.
“Um, that’s a pretty deep conversation for this late … but sure, yeah. Of course I do. Why?”
“So, this? Us? You think of this as just some temporary moment in our lives that’s bound to end?”
“Babe, I was literally just dancing with him. I told you, we were all dancing to a fast song and it had just happened to switch to something slow when you walked out. It really meant nothing. You know that I love you.”
I squeezed his hand and pulled him slightly closer. “No, but do you think of us as just some temporary thing? I mean, we’re seventeen, right? Sometimes I wish I liked you less, or that I’d met you when I was older, or—”
“JT. I think of us and smile, I think of us and get so happy that I get to know what love feels like at our age.”
“But do you think it’s just temporary?”
“I think that everything is, yes.”
“But doesn’t that scare you? I mean, doesn’t that make you feel like, what’s the point?”
“No. It doesn’t. It makes me less afraid. It makes me not worry. It makes me excited to live in the moment.”
I wanted to feel that kind of excitement, that kind of freedom from inhibition. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever genuinely felt “in the moment” in my life. If I were able to live in the moment, I probably would see exactly what he meant, that he really did love me. I would actually be able to hear the sweet words coming out of his mouth. (He was driving me across the country to a drag pageant, for God’s sake.) I
would probably see that Bambi was right about not overthinking so much. I leaned forward and kissed him, trying not to think of the future, of what I wanted our lives to someday be, of all my stupid plans, of every second-guessing thought I had happening in my head at every second of every day.
“JT, you’re going to find what it is that puts you here, that makes you present, and you’ll know when it happens, because you’ll look around and realize that everything is okay. I promise.”
I nodded, but inside my head, I wondered if I ever would.
WE GOT UP LATE THE next day and hit the road. I was thinking a lot about what Seth had said about finding my anchor into the moment. How do I find that? I wondered. Or do I just wake up one day and have it? Like a zit?
“Should we sing?” Seth’s voice pierced the conversational silence of the car.
Heather didn’t answer. In fact, she’d been quiet the entire morning, a very rare occurrence for her. I could see her in the rearview mirror sitting in the backseat, arms crossed. Despite her sunglasses covering her eyes, I could tell they were rolling. Seth and I hadn’t asked her about what happened last night—we figured she’d tell us when she was ready.
“Or play one of those road-trip car games,” Seth pressed on. “Do you guys know any?”
Heather remained silent.
“I’m not really awake enough for games,” I said, staring out the window as an enormous billboard for a place that advertised HOT BABES AND WINGS went by. I couldn’t imagine eating wings in front of anyone, let alone strippers.
“Okay, well, we need gas. I’m going to pull off.”
Seth took the next exit, which was a barren wasteland somewhere in North Carolina, with only a gas station and a pizza place connected to a store called Baby Jesus’s Books and Gifts in sight. At the station, Seth pumped the gas while Heather and I went inside for sodas. It was always weird for me to be in a gas station that wasn’t the one I grew up in; a small part of me worried that the person behind the cash register would spot me, take off, and leave me to run the place the way my parents always had.
Quickly, I grabbed two Cokes for Seth and me.
“Want one?” I asked Heather.
She turned from a rack of healthy-looking snacks: dried fruit, nuts, and other stuff she never ate.
“Make mine diet,” she said.
I grabbed a Diet Coke and gave her a look she would understand, a look that asked, Since when do you eat or drink anything diet, you crazy person?
“What?” she said defensively. “Those regular ones have a crazy number of calories. And the sugar? It’s like drinking a cake.”
I raised my eyebrows. I didn’t think Heather had ever said the word calorie before in her life. That was one of the things I loved about her, that she was just as reckless with food as I was. A great night for Heather and me usually consisted of watching bad reality shows and eating as many snacks as we could until we fell asleep or ran out. She was like my sister in carbohydrates.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
“Yes. Why wouldn’t everything be okay? Why can’t I just be in a bad mood sometimes and not have something be wrong? Sometimes people just don’t feel great, JT. There is nothing wrong with that.”
She took the Diet Coke and huffed and puffed her way to the counter, picking up a bag of unsalted almonds on the way. Then, before reaching the counter, frustrated, she tossed the almonds onto a shelf and went for a bag of M&M’S instead. I hadn’t seen Heather this upset since the third time KFC discontinued popcorn chicken.
Once we stepped outside, I squeezed her hand. The time had clearly come to talk about the previous night.
“Hey. You ran away from the bar last night. You’ve been weird and quiet all morning. Clearly something is wrong, and we might as well stop pretending it isn’t, because we’re way too close for that. So, what’s up?”
She tried to yank away but I tightened my grip. She sighed, her eyes staring at a crack in the pavement.
“I’m fat, JT.”
This wasn’t news to me and it wasn’t news to her.
“Hey, you’re just—”
“No. Don’t. You know I’m fat. I know I’m fat. And that cute guy who flirted with me last night? He knew I was fat too.”
Her cheeks were getting flushed, like she might cry.
“What are you talking about?”
“That guy? Mark? The one I danced with at the bar? At the end of one of the slow dances, he kissed me. I told him he was handsome and you know what he told me?”
“What?”
“He said that I’d caught his attention because he’d never been with a fat girl before and he wanted to try something crazy.”
Now tears were forming in her eyes. People coming in and out of the gas station stared as they passed us.
“It wasn’t like he was even being mean about it. He was just being honest. He was just explaining to me that he’d only been with ‘normal’ girls. Like I’m some sort of freak. It’s Seth’s fault for making me talk to him. I need to stop listening to him. Having confidence is a load of BS. All it does is give you enough courage to go out and humiliate yourself.”
I didn’t know what to say that could comfort her because I didn’t know if I actually disagreed with what she was saying. Seth didn’t have to work to be confident because there was no reason he wouldn’t be confident already. People like Heather and me, we didn’t blend the way someone like Seth did, and I guess that was the whole secret to being confident: the ability to blend.
“Heather, you’re beautiful.” I attempted to sound assured. “You know that you’re beautiful.”
“How am I supposed to believe that? Coming from you? Look at how you see yourself, JT. You hate what you look like just as much as I hate what I look like. Maybe even more.”
I couldn’t deny it. I hadn’t taken my shirt off in public since fifth grade, and even then it was because I’d stepped in an ant bed.
“That’s different,” I said. “That’s—”
“No. It’s not different. Maybe you’re right, JT. Maybe you are fat. And I’m fat too. And we should just go off and live in a town for fat people where nobody can make us feel worse about ourselves than we already do.”
I wanted to remind her that we did live in a town for fat people, by which I meant the state of Florida, but she had already stormed off to the car. I felt guilty that I’d allowed my lack of confidence in myself to make Heather question my confidence in her. Her logic made sense. If I was so down on my own body, how could I not be down on hers, which was at least twice my size?
“You ready?” Seth called from the gas pump with his bright smile and perfect gay guy body that could make any shirt look as good as it did on the mannequin in the store.
“Yeah. Coming,” I said.
Neither Heather nor I said a word about any of this to him. It was our own little fat, self-loathing secret.
As we crossed into Virginia, it began to get dark. Having never left Florida before, I found it weird to see just how much the rest of the country looked like the rest of itself. When you’re on an interstate, you’re basically seeing the same empty fields and billboards for guns over and over and over. And off the interstate, it’s the same chain stores and strip mall setup. America the beautiful.
Just as it became dark enough for Seth to turn on the headlights, there was loud sort of boom, rip, then the sound of our screeching tires as Seth pounded the brakes.
“What the hell?” Seth shouted as he jumped out of the car. Heather and I watched as he said, “Oh crap. This is bad. This is really bad.”
Seth was running his hands through his hair. Lit by the red of the car’s flashers, he looked like a pop star in a music video. I got out to join him. One of our back tires was flat. In fact, it was worse than flat—it was a pile of rubber.
Seth, it seemed, had also deflated to a pile of rubber. “My dad’s going to kill me. Literally. Will you speak at my funeral, JT? Heather? Will you sing?”
I bent down to assess the damage. It was bad.
“Do you have a spare?”
Seth shook his head. “No. I think that was the spare.”
He kicked a rock, which skidded across the completely empty highway. It echoed into the darkness, creating a spooky sensation of just how far away from home we really were. We were on one of those old back highways because our GPS was taking us on a shortcut. A GPS can really solve all your problems—except, of course, for a flat tire.
“Should we call 911?” Heather asked as she got out of the car.
“What? No. That’s not what people do about flat tires.”
Heather shrugged. “We could get it towed into town and fixed in the morning, but that’s going to cost a lot of money. How much money do we have left?”
Seth kicked one of the not-flat tires in frustration. It was rare for me to see Seth lose his cool.
“Not enough,” he muttered. “Crap. This was a terrible idea, wasn’t it?”
“What was?” I asked.
“This. Lying to our families and driving all the way to New York for …”
“For me?”
Seth stopped. He knew he’d said the wrong thing.
“No. That’s not what I mean at all. I’m sorry. That came out wrong.”
“No—you’re right. We wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t for me needing a stupid scholarship.”
Seth grabbed my hands. “But I want to help you do that. That’s why I—”
I yanked away.
“Why? Why do you want to help with that, Seth? I mean, if everything is temporary, why do you care about helping me? Sooner or later, I’m just going to be some memory from high school—a chubby, not-so-bright, stuck-in-Florida memory, who can’t ever, as you say, live in the moment, while you go off and experience some awesome, perfect life far away.”
“Hey. Don’t say that.”
“You don’t get it! You’re perfect; you never have to worry about stuff that upsets you.”
“STOP SAYING THAT. I am not perfect. That’s so not fair! There is plenty that’s upsetting me RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE. And I never said we were temporary. I just said—”