Drag Teen (3 page)

Needless to say, I shut up.

We dropped Seth at his house and I kissed him good-night. It felt like one of those distracted kisses where both of you are in completely different headspaces but kissing because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re boyfriends saying good-bye to each other. He knew I wanted to talk more about his future and mine; he knew how insecure I was about him going off to college and our attempting to have some sort of long-distance relationship. I was giving myself a migraine.

Heather drove me across town to my neighborhood. A far cry from the picturesque cul-de-sac Seth called home. As she pulled up to the apartment building, we were both quiet. I could see the sadness in her eyes and she could see the worry in mine.

“Will you please just tell me whether or not you’re okay?” I asked, finally.

It was dark inside the car, but I could tell she wasn’t smiling.

“I’m fine.”

Normally, I would have stopped here. But maybe Seth was right. Maybe I needed to be a better friend, and part of that meant pushing a little harder. So instead of letting it go, I said, “You sure? You don’t look any definition of fine that I’m familiar with.”

Heather sighed. “That guy I grew up with? Patrick from the hot dog stand? Yeah, he wasn’t trying to flirt with me. When I got over there, he and his friends told me they should’ve asked me to order for them, because I looked like the place’s best customer.”

“WHAT?! Those assholes. You know that you’re—”

“Stop.”

Heather was flustered and attempting to hide how truly upset she was. She sighed again, and this time the sigh seemed to contain the entire state of Florida.

“We’re gonna get out of here someday, right? And get somewhere where we fit in? Right?”

I fell silent because I really wasn’t sure and I didn’t want to lie to her. Maybe I wouldn’t pass that scholarship test; maybe I wouldn’t get my ticket to my otherwise; maybe I’d be stuck in Florida, without Seth, without Heather.

“Seth’s definitely going somewhere out of state,” I said.

“Are you sure?” From the look on her face, I could tell she wasn’t fronting—he hadn’t told her, either.

“Yeah. He told me so, at Hal’s.”

Heather squeezed my shoulder. “You will too—”

“But what if he goes somewhere for smart, fancy people? What then?”

Heather shrugged. “Then you’ll go somewhere for interesting, messy people.” She cracked a smile, then added, “Without Seth.”

I didn’t want to hear this. “Stop. Sorry I brought this up at all.”

She grabbed my knee. “Remember, he’s your first boyfriend, JT. We’re both seventeen.”

“So?”

“So … does anybody actually end up with their first boyfriend?”

I had never thought about this before and I suddenly felt scared. Pit-of-the-stomach scared.

Heather saw what she’d done and tried to backpedal. “Hey, sorry. Don’t let that upset you. I was just trying to put things in perspective. Forget I said anything. Okay?”

I nodded, though I knew how my brain worked. If there was something to worry about, I would worry about it until I was physically incapable of worrying anymore. The best I could do right now was attempt to change the subject. Instead of thinking about Seth, I’d focus on me and Heather.

“Let’s make a pact,” I said. “You and me. No matter what happens, we’ll get out of here someday. Go far away from Florida. We’ll find a place where we aren’t the freaks, but just the people.”

I imagined this as I said it. I imagined us in some big city where everybody was just as weird as us, if not weirder.

“Someday soon.”

“Yes,” I promised, as much to myself as to her. “Someday soon.”

“AND WITHOUT FURTHER ADO …”

Principal Kelly’s voice sounded like Darth Vader through the school’s crappy intercom system.

“The three scholarship winners are …”

My heart was pounding so hard I worried it might pound right out of my chest and onto the floor of the science lab.

“Reese Firstman.”

Okay, that wasn’t a surprise. Reese was one of those people who only had bad grades because she was too smart to actually care about high school. She probably hadn’t even studied for the scholarship exam.

“James Hansen.”

Okay, one left.

Please say my name. Please say my name.

“And …”

My throat tightened.

“Mary Soria.”

The pounding suddenly stopped. I began to feel that salty weight that says,
You’re gonna cry and you can either do it where you are, in this case a high school science lab, or get to the bathroom as fast as you freaking can, bitch
. I didn’t even raise my hand. I just slipped out the back and bounded my way to the boys’ room. As soon as the door swung shut behind me, tears poured out. So did the heavy breathing I get when I’m overwhelmed with how bad I feel.

No scholarships, no college.
The story was over.

I was officially stuck in Clearwater.

The bathroom door burst open and Heather barreled in.

“I came as fast as I could!” She pulled me into her soft chest. What Heather lacked in confidence she made up for in boob size.

“You can’t be in here, Heather.” My voice was muffled so far into her cleavage it almost echoed.

“Look at me.” She pulled me away and stared into my eyes. “Screw them. Screw that scholarship.”

“That’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one who just had his last shot taken away.”

“It can’t possibly be your last shot. There are billions of scholarships out there.”

“I’ve tried, Heather. I’ve Googled into the depths of the Internet. I can’t afford any more application fees. I have no skills.”

Heather smacked me on the cheek.

“Don’t you ever say that again. You’re a wonderful person! A wonderful singer! A wonderful writer. A gorgeously talented writer. You just happen to have insanely bad grades.”

“Thanks.”

“Like really bad. Like how did they get so bad to begin with? How do you let yourself go like that—”

“Okay. I get it.”

Heather began pacing, the wheels of her brain spinning, as Seth rushed in.

“Sorry it took me so long,” he said. “My teacher wouldn’t let me leave until he finished telling us why the world will probably be destroyed by the time we’re fifty. How are you?”

“It didn’t take fifty years for my world to be destroyed—only seventeen.”

Instead of trying to persuade me otherwise—it wouldn’t have worked—Seth pulled me in and kissed my lips. He was wearing Dr Pepper ChapStick. It helped me smile.

“What are you doing in the guys’ bathroom?” Seth asked Heather.

She snorted. “Please. Save it. I’m more of a man than most of the guys at this school.”

Seth nodded understandingly. She had a point.

“Okay,” she said with some urgency. “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to spend tonight researching scholarships.”

“But I told you, I’ve already—”

Heather cut me off, relentless. “What about scholarships that play the gay card? Can’t you just write to that guy who played Spock in the new Star Trek movies, and see if he’ll pay for you to go to college? Or Ellen? She’s always giving gay people money on her show.”

Something twinkled in Seth’s eyes. “Well. I found
something …
but JT won’t even consider it
.
” As he said this, he casually played with a strand of his perfect hair. Irresistible jerk.

“Does he have to pretend to be Chinese? I already looked into that one, and he is NOT conversant in the Mandarin language.”

“No,” I said, “his idea is completely absurd and complicated.”

“It’s a drag pageant!” Seth exclaimed. “It basically works like a beauty pageant for teenage drag queens and the winner gets a full scholarship!” Seth was doing his best sales pitch and Heather was hanging on his every word.

“What? JT!” she exclaimed. “That sounds perfect! You love drag queens!”

“That doesn’t mean I can be one myself. I love old Jessica Lange movies too but that doesn’t mean I have any right to be in one!”

Heather ignored me and plowed on. “Is this about what happened last time? That was a dumb school talent show. Of course they didn’t get you—”

Now it was my turn to interrupt with a reality check. “They didn’t just
not
get me. They booed and laughed at me!”

“Okay, fine. You were a teenage boy performing at his high school in drag—what did you expect? This is different. This is where we aren’t the freaks. Where is it located?”

“New York!” Seth squealed with excitement. “We’ve GOT to go!”

They were drinking the Kool-Aid of this idea way too fast—and it wasn’t kool, and it didn’t particularly aid me. “You guys, come on!” I protested. “We can’t just up and run off to New York for some pageant. Who do you think we are?”

Heather passionately pulled me toward her so we were face-to-face.

“Fine,” she said. “It’s the last thing you want to do again … but who cares? You need a scholarship and they have one to give. You can’t give up on something you were so excited about just because it went poorly the first time.”

It
went poorly
. That was one way of putting it. Another way would have been:
Everyone watching literally LAUGHED AT ME, BOOED, SHOUTED INSULTS. They were all so mean, so vicious, so cruel.
It was like the final scene in
Carrie
but without pig’s blood and with way more eyeliner.

I couldn’t put myself through that again.

“You guys. I don’t think—”

Seth placed his soft hand on my shoulder. “It’s a full scholarship. All four years. A full ride, JT.”

Seth’s eyes weren’t just sparkling now; they were drilling into me. Did he see something I didn’t? Was he right? If I tried again, could there be even a tiny chance I could actually do it? Did he actually think I could—

The door flew open and Mr. Garcia bounded in.

“Young lady, you have no business in here. All of you, back to class. Right now. GO!”

As we parted ways outside the bathroom door, Seth looked over his shoulder at me and smiled. Heather grabbed my hand, and as she squeezed it, she whispered, “Think about it, JT. I believe in you.”

ONCE IT WAS IN THERE, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head.

Was I actually considering doing it again? After my one drag experience, I’d vowed I’d never do it again, but could I muster up the audacity to change my own mind? Could I ignore the horrible memories? If my life were a musical, this particular moment would’ve made a really good character-driven ballad about hope and fear that would come back as a reprise in the second act to mean something entirely different. The kind of show tune people would sing, most frequently off-key, in auditions.

Also there was the matter of originality and pride. I was far from original, and the last time I’d actually felt proud was when I first saw myself fully in drag. Before the competition, before the humiliation; I felt wonderful, but not for long. And the last time I remembered feeling proud before that was when I went to a sleepover in fourth grade and
didn’t
wet the bed.

My curiosity was getting the better of me, so later that night I Googled more about the pageant. The information online made it clear that while it was a “beauty pageant,” it wasn’t meant in the traditional Miss America sense. The whole idea of beauty not being what we look like but who we are was definitely a comforting thing to remember.

There was no swimsuit competition, thank God. But there was an opening number where each contestant would be introduced, a talent portion, an interview portion, and then the essay performance.

I had no talent. Sure, I enjoyed singing, alone in my room, but that didn’t make it a
talent
. Nowadays you had to sing while ice-skating through a ring of burning cars or be famous for zero reason on Vine in order to be called talented.

And then there was the whole
competition taking place in New York
thing. I was in Florida, which meant it wasn’t exactly a bus ride across town. I had a hundred and ten dollars saved up in a sock in my dresser, but that was all I had to my name. That wouldn’t even get me a one-way plane ticket. Asking my parents was out of the question, especially because they believed that anything you needed in life could be found at Walmart, and if Walmart didn’t have it, then you could probably live without it.

Who was this John Denton of the John Denton Memorial Foundation, anyway? According to the information online, he had been a big playwright in New York during the seventies and eighties. He was some kind of cult icon who had no family and had chosen to leave his entire estate to this foundation in hopes of, as he put it, “helping to empower and strengthen the minds and confidence of queer youth in the way it took me an entire life to do for myself.”

I wondered what it was that had finally strengthened the confidence of this John Denton character, what finally made him feel comfortable in his own skin, and if it was even possible for me to find that in myself at all.

The competition was scheduled for the first week of April, which was our school’s spring break. A trip to New York for spring break would be like a dream come true. But as with all of my dreams, I inevitably had to wake up and smell the coffee—or, in my case, the gasoline.

There was absolutely no way it could happen.

My phone rang—it was Seth. Like he had spies in my mind to tip him off that I was thinking about his idea.

“Hello?” I answered.

“Hi. Are you still mad at me?”

“I was never mad at you.”

He chuckled his dumb little chuckle that only he could make cute.

“I know. I’m just calling to say hey.”

“I was just on the website for the scholarship, actually. Did you know John Denton was some obscure playwright who left his money to this foundation to help gay kids?”

“I see
someone’s
been doing his research.”

“Isn’t it crazy to think about how when somebody like John Denton was a kid, the very word
gay
was considered so taboo he couldn’t have even said it?” I asked. I had never lived in a world where
gay
wasn’t at the very least the description of a wacky next-door neighbor on a TV show. Sure, it wasn’t always easy to be gay in Clearwater, Florida, but it wasn’t anything like someone like John Denton would have experienced. Gay people were everywhere now and some of them were getting married and having kids, to a degree that John Denton probably wouldn’t have been able to wrap his head around. Sure, I was insecure about almost everything, but at least I had the freedom to be proud of being a gay person, even if I wasn’t wild about the person part.

“Yeah,” Seth said. “Crazy, huh? And to think after his struggles he still left this amazing legacy for someone like you and you don’t even want to try to take it.”

“Seth,” I said, flat and edgy, the way I always did when I was over a particular subject.

“I just want you to let go of what you felt before. We all have to do that once in a while; we all just have to move on from something that made us feel bad about ourselves sometimes. You can’t hold on to it.”

“Oh yeah. When was the last time
you
had to let go of something that made you feel bad?”

Seth was uncharacteristically quiet on the other end, as if I’d upset him.

“You still there?”

He brushed off the whole conversation with a laugh and said he had to run, but before he hung up he told me he loved me no matter what and would always be there to believe in me. I wondered why, even in modern times, even with all that had changed since somebody like John Denton was around, even with a gorgeous boy telling me he loved me … I still couldn’t face an opportunity that, sure, scared me, but also excited me in a way I was just too scared to admit to myself or anyone else. I wondered what John Denton would say.

Later that night, I ate dinner in front of the TV, which was tuned in to the Home Shopping Network because Mom was in control of the remote. A woman was selling sixty-dollar snow boots people could pay for in five installments. With a sleeping Li’l Biscuit in her lap, Mom was on the phone, reading her credit card number to the operator on the other end of the line. Dad came in, tired as always, dirty as always, and with a beer in his hand as always.

“Four-five-five-four … seven-nine-two …” Mom squinted at her Visa.

“What’s she doing?” Dad asked, plopping into the ratty old recliner only he was allowed to sit in.

“Ordering boots, I think.” I bit down on the frozen burrito Mom had “cooked” for dinner, the center still ice-cold.

“What the— Debby! Hang up that phone right now!”

Mom waved her hand at him and moved on to the expiration date.

Dad continued to huff and puff but Mom just talked over him. Finally he grabbed the phone and hung it up before she could get to the security code.

“Hey! Those snow boots are on sale!”

“What the hell do you need snow boots for?” Dad tossed the phone onto the couch beside me. “We live in Florida!”

Mom groaned as she lit a cigarette and took a deep, long drag, which was followed by a deep, long cough.

“We need to save some money. JT is graduating this year and we gotta think about the future,” Dad said, taking off his shoe. The odor of his foot filled the room—an odor that could have peeled paint off of a car.

I perked up. It was the first time Dad had ever used
JT
and
future
in the same sentence. I was actually surprised he remembered it was my senior year.

“Right, son? It’s about time we start thinking about your education.”

I couldn’t believe it. Dad had
never
talked about my education, except the one time he got mad at me for reading too often.

“I picked this up for you today.” Dad slapped a brochure onto the coffee table, a cloud of dust billowing in its wake. I looked down.

Clearwater Technical School Auto Repair Department.

“I figure you ought to start taking classes this summer, get a jump start on the training, and maybe we can open a little shop for ya in that old garage behind the gas station. Buddy of mine says the mechanical industry is really booming.”

I had thought, for a moment, that my father was approaching an understanding of what I wanted.

Now, not so much.

I was sure that auto repair classes at the technical college would have been awesome for some other teenager, someone whose passion lay under the hood. I knew those guys existed. My dad had been one of them. But this wasn’t exactly what I imagined for my own education. I hated cars almost as much as I hated living in Clearwater.

“Dad, I don’t think I’m—”

He cut me off. “I know what you’re gonna say, but you can learn. Apparently it ain’t that hard. You know Pooter down at the Reichen Auto Body Shop? He’s dumb as a brick. But give that guy a screwed-up engine, and he’ll have it fixed quicker than you could drive to Pizza Hut and back.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My father was comparing my future to that of a man named Pooter.

“I’m not going to auto repair school. I’m just not. Save your money. Let Mom buy those snow boots. I want to go to college.”

Dad’s face flushed, the way it always did when he got mad or ate red meat.

“I think he’s right,” Mom said, reaching for the phone. “I
should
order those boots.”

Dad grabbed the phone away from her.

“Look, there’s nothing wrong with technical college or auto repair or whatever,” I told him, “but that’s just not what I want, okay? I want to do something different. I want to live in different places. I want to see the world and be somebody.” I was on the verge of tears, but I fought them back.

“You ungrateful little son of a—”

Dad stopped himself, lit a cigarette from the box on the coffee table, inhaled, then exhaled like he was meditating. “All right. Have it your way. Your mother and I are trying to give you a future. You don’t want it? Fine. Be ungrateful. Be a little prick.”

He couldn’t process the
otherwise
I was searching for. I wanted to shake him, tell him that I loved him but that I wanted more than his life, and if he truly loved me, he would understand. I wasn’t asking for a handout, just support. I wanted them to hear me, actually hear me. That would have meant the world.

I cleared my throat and stood up from the couch. The woman on the TV was still going totally nuts over those boots. Which were hideous.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really am. I don’t know why or how, but I want something other than this. I don’t want to live in this town. I don’t want to work in an auto shop or at a gas station. And I’m not saying those are bad things. They’re just not for me. And I know it’s hard for you to understand that. But I wish, for my sake, you could at least try to. Because one day, not that long from now, I’m going to be gone. Maybe even far away. And I’d like to believe that, even if my parents don’t understand me, they can at least be happy for me.”

Mom and Dad were silent for a while. The clouds of their cigarette smoke formed a weird fog around them, thick as the fog in their minds. I stood there for what felt like forever, hoping in my heart for an
I love you
or even just an
okay
.

Instead, Dad tossed the phone to Mom.

“Order the damn boots.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray on the table. “Move out of the way, JT, you’re blocking the TV.”

I didn’t say another word. I just went to my room and slammed the door. I looked down at my computer and it was still opened to John Denton’s bio. His face, with generations of hard work for kids like me, staring at me. I thought of Seth, beautiful Seth, and how much he believed in me. In that moment, I knew that no idea was too crazy. I had nothing to lose. Whatever it would take, I was getting out of Clearwater. As soon as possible. Once and for all. Give me a wig, I was going to win it—the scholarship, the title, everything. I was going to be THE Miss Drag Teen, and not just for Seth, not just for Heather or John Denton, but for me.