by Ami Polonsky
Dad and I exchanged a glance. Mom “hopping on a call” with Essie’s dad usually translated to Mom counseling Walter on his marriage issues. “Half an hour?”
“Are you going to go all couple’s-counselor on him, Mom?” I asked.
She wiggled her eyebrows at me. Maybe she had finally realized that I’d outgrown spilling everything about everything and accepted the fact that she’d have to get her “therapist fix” elsewhere. All good. Walter obviously needed a friend.
DAY 45
I dropped my backpack on the kitchen floor and leaned over Mom’s shoulder. “Hey, Maxi Pad!” I said, waving at the phone, which was propped up against her half-empty coffee cup.
“What’s up, Ol?” Max asked from his dorm room in Chicago. “Mom was just telling me all about your idea for the rally in December. Sounds awesome!”
“Yeah, that was actually Mom’s idea, but thanks.”
“Ah. Anyway, so I was telling Mom that Joey still works at Campus Press. I just texted him and asked him to help you publicize. He texted back immediately and said yes. Obviously.”
Don’t be annoyed, Ollie. You’re so lucky; your family is seriously fantastic. Mom was beaming. Man, I loved her for this. For everything. Max, too.
“Great, tell him thanks,” I said. And I meant it. But I also felt like changing the subject. “What’s new with you?”
“Not much. It’s pretty here now. Look.” He pointed his phone out the window. Red and orange trees dotted the campus below him.
“Nice!”
“How are classes going?” Mom asked, which was my cue to leave, since things were about to get boring, so I poked my head in front of hers.
“I’m out. Bye, Maxi.”
“Later, Ol.”
“And tell Joey thanks,” I repeated, despite the nagging knowledge that I could definitely handle things myself.
DAY 47
I looked around the lunch table that Friday at our weekly GLOW meeting. Including me, we had fourteen members. Mom had gotten a text from Max the night before and had knocked on my bedroom door to tell me the good news just as Joey had messaged me: Great news, O!
It turned out that, thanks to a connection Joey had, in addition to Campus Press covering the pride event, ABC News would be there. “You’ll definitely increase membership once you announce this school-wide,” Mom had told me. “People will want to be on the news.”
“But do we want members who are participating just because they want to be on TV?” I’d wondered aloud.
“Ol, it doesn’t matter how you get them on board, as long as they’re on board.”
I felt like, with all this involvement from Mom and Max and Joey, and now ABC News, I was playing a smaller and smaller role in this project. But maybe Mom was right. And the more publicity the better.
So I tried to channel her energy as I made my announcement. “I have excellent news!” I said, looking out over the other thirteen members, trying not to stare at Essie. Lucy gave me an encouraging nod. “My brother’s best friend from high school is Joey Chen, and he works for Campus Press, which is covering the Thankful for Pride march. Joey wanted to help us out, so he submitted our info to ABC News. Now ABC wants to do a thing on us, too!”
Everyone cheered. Essie smiled at me, her eyes locked on mine, like she believed in me. Like she had no doubt that I could do anything in the world. And maybe I could. But with all this help from all these amazing people in my life, how would I ever know?
DAY 51
After school, Lucy, Savannah, Essie, and I met at my locker, where I took out the massive stack of brightly colored flyers that Dad had photocopied for me at his office the night before and the packages of blue sticky tack that Ms. Rose had absolutely insisted we use to hang them. For the next hour, we plastered the hallways, doorways, and lockers with information about the Thankful for Pride march and ABC News coverage. Then, exhausted and starving, we began to make our way back toward the seventh-grade hall, only to realize that blue sticky tack doesn’t stick.
“No!” Lucy said, picking up a poster, smudges of sticky tack on each of its four corners. “Just, no,” she said again, pretending to cry as she looked up and down the hallway at all the fallen and dangling posters.
Savannah lay down on the floor and closed her eyes. “I can’t,” she announced. “Wake me up when you’re done rehanging them. Or if anyone finds a pizza.”
“I’m new here. I can still get away with anything,” Essie joked. Then she disappeared into a classroom and emerged with four rolls of masking tape. “If anyone asks about the tape, blame it on me.”
I smiled at her boldness. At her.
For the next hour, we rehung the flyers. Essie and I worked together: She rolled tape loops, and I stuck them onto the papers. It felt like she wanted to be with me. Like, right next to me. “You know how amazing all of this is, how amazing you are,” she told me, “right?”
DAY 53
Thursday’s GLOW meeting was packed.
I reminded myself of Mom’s words: “It doesn’t matter how you get them on board, as long as they’re on board.” The benches around the lunch table were crowded with sixth, seventh, and eighth graders talking, laughing, eating their lunches, and waiting for me to start the meeting.
Essie got up on her knees so she could see everyone and counted the number of people. She caught my eye, held up three fingers on each hand, and mouthed, Thirty-three! Then she gave me two thumbs-up. Lucy, who was sitting behind her, looked from the back of her head to me and gave me two thumbs-up, too.
Nineteen new GLOW members. All because of Max’s connection to Joey and Joey’s connection to ABC.
And before that, because of Mom’s idea for the rally.
It had been Mom’s idea, too, for me to start GLOW when I’d entered sixth grade. Which made me think of fifth grade. And fourth grade. Rumble Peak. Addison Miller.
I tried to clear my head. So you’ve got amazing support from family and friends. Deal with it, Ollie, I told myself. And I went to work, calling the meeting to order, describing the December 4 rally, assigning jobs. And Essie—the way she looked at me throughout it all—she was impressed. I could feel it.
Intensely.
DAY 54
DAY 57
After lunch, Essie and I walked together toward our lockers. The night before, when we’d met at the library, the feeling of electricity between us had been so strong that I could have picked up a mound of magnetized air and actually held it in my hands.
At the same time, when we’d been making plans, she’d shot me down when I’d asked her about doing homework at her house. (Come to think of it, she pretty much shot me down every time the idea of going to her house came up.)
Up ahead, a crowd had gathered around the Activities Board. The next session of clubs had been posted. “Let’s look,” Essie said, dragging me over. We inched our way toward the sign-up sheets.
“Do you want to join something?” I asked her.
“Not really,” she said. “I’m just curious.”
Back in fourth grade, I’d developed an aversion to activities, in general. Girls’ soccer. Boys’ baseball. Daddy-daughter sport night. Everything about these gendered teams and clubs was so … dumb. Once I’d realized that my label was “nonbinary,” Mom, Dad, Max, and Annabella started to pound the idea into my head until I’d understood that the world—the binary—was wrong. I was awesome just the way I was.
I read through the sheets anyway; at Lab it was just the sports that were gendered. Cool Coders. Snooze. Chess Masters. Oh my God, boring, though I’d never say so to Lucy, who could run that club. Wait—Stage Combat? That was new. I pointed it out to Essie and read the description to myself. Learn the art of stage fighting and stage weaponry with Ms. Wigg, complete with stage makeup and costumes, and a performance in the spring! “Whoa,” I told Essie. “That sounds amazing.”
“Why can I totally see you doing that? Sign up!”
“I don’t think I have time,” I t
old her, thinking of my twice-a-week, after-school GLOW meetings, the weekly lunch meetings, and planning for the march.
“Ollie,” she said, turning to me, her long hair falling over my arm, “you’re like Superma—Superperson. If you want to do it, I’m sure you can make time.”
I laughed. “You think?” I asked.
“I do.”
So I put my name on the list.
DAY 58
“Okay,” I said to Damien when he opened the door for me after dinner. “I have an idea. I know what my next project is going to be.”
“Hello to you, too.”
“So my art teacher showed us these optical illusions and they’re awesome. I want to carve something that can look like two hands, with the thumbs pressed together or like a butterfly.” I held up my hands to show him.
“Cool!” he said, leaning against the doorframe, thinking.
“Yeah, so can I come in or what?”
“Sorry, just trying to decide how we—I mean you—should approach that.” He stepped to the side and ushered me into the kitchen. “Come to the basement. If Annabella gets home and the dirty dishes are still in the sink, I’m blaming it on you.”
“Deal.”
Downstairs, Damien told me all about the different kinds of woods, and how butternut was a good beginner’s wood when it came to carving. He pulled out the carving gloves and made me promise to always wear them because he liked all ten of my fingers. Then he lined up the gouges and chisels and gave me a lesson on each. Finally, before heading back up to do the dishes, he allowed me to get my (gloved) hands on a hunk of wood.
Carving was cool because, in a way, it was the opposite of drawing. It was creating something by taking away, not adding to. By the time Dad came by to tell me to come home (homework and another revision on the GLOW mission statement awaited), I’d made a decent dent in one side of the wooden block.
I thanked Damien as we left. “That was awesome,” I told him. “Can I come back tomorrow?”
“My house is your house, Ollie,” he told me. “See you then.”
DAY 59
At the first Stage Combat meeting, after a PowerPoint introducing us to the rules and fake weapons and fake bodily fluids that we could produce using the fake weapons, Ms. Wigg pulled out the props and helped me wrap a “blood-soaked” bandage around my hand. I held it up, admiring it. Man, this was amazing.
Then I hopped onto the stage with the rest of the crew. “My name is Zoey,” a hyper-in-a-good-way sixth grader yelled, approaching me, wooden sword in hand. “You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
“The Princess Bride! Sweet!” I said as she plunged her sword into my stomach and I fell. “I love that movie!”
“Me too!” She helped me up just in time for me to punch her in the cheek, sending her rolling backward.
“Remember, it’s all about tricking the audience!” Ms. Wigg yelled as Zoey got up and clocked me in the face. I chomped down on a blood capsule and died, sweet red liquid dripping down my chin.
As I lay on the stage, I thought of how Max had responded when I’d first texted him about Essie. Don’t overwhelm her with too much Ollie! he’d warned. Stage combat was all about being too much. I hopped up, grabbed a rapier, and wiped the blood off my face with the back of my hand. “En garde!” I yelled. Zoey tried (and failed) to keep a straight face as I stabbed her in the gut.
After activities, Lucy came over to my house. We sat at the kitchen table eating raisins dipped in peanut butter and (not) doing homework. “So everyone doing stage combat seems cool?” she asked nonchalantly after telling me what was going on with Peter (which was that he had said hi to her when she had walked into Chess Club).
“They’re the coolest people in the school,” I joked.
“You know what I mean.”
I did. She meant gender-cool. As in, is anyone messing with you? And I loved her for it, even though she was reminding me of Mom.
“Everyone’s cool,” I confirmed, though. “I don’t think there are any more Addison Millers in my future.”
Lucy looked startled. I hadn’t brought up the Addison situation in forever. She had moved away during the summer before fifth grade, which definitely helped when it came to ignoring what had happened. “Do you still think of her?” Lucy asked.
“Not much,” I told her. “Well, until recently.”
DAY 60
“What made you think of Addison again?” Lucy asked carefully as we waited in social studies for the three o’clock bell to ring.
Part of me wanted to tell her everything: How Essie had come, and the way she looked at me—like I was Superperson—had opened an inner doorway (a magical doorway!) that led to so many paths. And how one path led to new things like woodworking and stage combat, and another path led to all the other awesome things that probably existed out there in the world, and on and on. But also, how one of the paths led backward, to fourth grade. To Rumble Peak and Addison. And I still hadn’t figured out why.
But there was no way to say that to Lucy without sounding like a freak. So I just shrugged. “I’m not sure,” I lied. Well, partly lied.
The bell rang, and Savannah and Essie joined us at my locker. “I think we’re set for Halloween on Saturday,” Savannah announced.
“I promised my dad I’d go out for dinner with him first,” Essie told us. “Apparently we’re still trying to eat as much Indian food as possible.”
“So, Luciana and Ollie, come at six. We’ll have pizza and wait for Essie to be released from her daddy-daughter-dinner-date.”
“Perfect,” Lucy and I told her. But actually, I was feeling like a terrible person. For years, Annabella and I had spent Halloween together trick-or-treating. We alternated each year between superheroes and Star Wars costumes. It was supposed to be a Star Wars year, and I hadn’t told them yet that I’d be ditching them to hang out with Lucy and Savannah. And Essie.
DAY 61
“So…,” I said nervously to Annabella when they came down to the basement for a work break and to check out my blob of wood, which was slowly becoming sort of a butterfly-hands-ish blob, “how much would you hate me if I ditched you for Halloween this year?”
Annabella stumbled and turned to Damien. “Dame? Help me pull this knife from my heart?”
I smiled. “You should take a stage combat class,” I told them. “That wasn’t bad.”
“Thanks,” they said, straightening up and smiling. “So you’re doing something else this year, huh?”
I shrugged. “Maybe?”
They sighed. “Fine. I guess I’ll have to act like a regular adult and hand out candy with this joker,” they said, nudging Damien, who was sanding down the fruit bowl he’d been working on forever.
“Sounds torturous,” he teased.
I knew Annabella was joking around about being upset, but I still felt bad. Halloween had always been our thing. I thought back to my costumes from each year since we’d begun our Halloween tradition. I’d started out as Spider-Man because, back then, I’d been less creative. The next year, we had dressed as Star Wars characters so, obviously, I was Luke. Then Peter Quill. Then young-Anakin, before he became evil. Obviously. Then Groot. Chewbacca. This year I’d been planning to recycle Groot but then Essie had arrived.
There was something about Halloween that Annabella got. Being anonymous leveled the playing field. Like, it partially removed gender from the equation. Not that I had any insecurity about my gender, but on Halloween anyone could be anyone, so everyone’s gender mattered just a little bit less.
DAY 62
I had to admit to myself that not celebrating Halloween with Annabella and, instead, hanging out with Lucy and Savannah (and Essie, if she’d ever finish dinner with her dad and actually get to Savannah’s), was a million times better than blending in with hundreds of other costume-clad humans lurking around outside in the dark.
“How is it possible that things between you and Essie could still be weird?” Savannah asked me as she a
nd Lucy and I sat together on Savannah’s kitchen island, the tray of peanut butter chip rice crispy treats that we’d just finished making at our side. The doorbell rang. Again. It was most likely trick-or-treaters, not Essie, so none of us protested when Lindsay, Savannah’s little sister, ran to answer it.
“Trick-or-treat!” shouted a mass of high school–age kids who were definitely too old to be begging for candy, which made me think of myself and Annabella, who was definitely, definitely too old to be begging for candy.
“I have no idea how things are still weird,” I told Savannah and Lucy truthfully.
“And what I have no idea about is why it’s so difficult to ask her what’s going on,” Lucy said in that totally logical way of hers.
“Yeah, that makes too much sense,” I joked.
She rolled her eyes and nudged me as the doorbell rang again and Savannah hopped down this time to get it. “She’ll be leaving soon,” Lucy reminded me. “If there’s some easy way around this weirdness that you’re too much of a wimp to find, you’ll never forgive yourself.”
I nodded noncommittally, so she nudged me again. “I wouldn’t be saying this if it weren’t totally obvious that she loves you, too.”
DAY 64
She loves you, too.
I mean, Lucy and Savannah were pretty much always right about things, and it was true that it seemed like Essie still liked me. Like, really liked me.
She and I had been sitting on Savannah’s kitchen island together, arms touching, when Savannah and Lucy had hopped down for a photo shoot with Lindsay and Savannah’s dad. The energy where our arms met was like two lightsabers connecting, but obviously not in battle—in the opposite of battle. Essie’s long hair had been hanging down the side of my arm, and all of it had brought me right back to Annabella’s hammock in September: the moon, the twinkling feeling where our arms had touched, her head resting against mine.