Drag Teen (9 page)

“Hey.” Seth pinched my leg. “Thanks for saying that. I’m sorry too.”

I smiled as I pulled the car back onto the interstate, and with my new wigs and costumes in the trunk and my two best friends at my side, we were off.

Seth was singing along to the radio as we passed a sign welcoming us into the state of Maryland. Suddenly he stopped singing and became quiet for a while.

“Has anyone called home since we left?” he asked, seemingly lost in some other thought.

None of us had. Heather had texted her mom sometime the day before, but otherwise we were completely cut off from the lives we knew. It was a neat feeling, with no one but the three of us knowing where we were. Arguably dangerous, but still a neat feeling. However, we decided we probably ought to call and at least pretend to update them.

The three of us paced back and forth around the car, each fabricating our own story about how spring break was going. Seth’s dad was asking all sorts of details, telling him to have a blast. The good thing about having parents like mine is that you can lie to them at any time and they won’t question you for a second, not because they think you’re trustworthy but because they just don’t care.

“Hello?!” My mom answered the phone in her usual sound of panic. For as long as I could remember, my mom had always answered the phone as if the house had just caught on fire.

“Hi. It’s JT.”

Li’l Biscuit yapped loudly over the sound of QVC in the background.

“Oh, hey. You still in Daytona? Don’t tell me you got arrested or something!”

This was my mom’s way of saying “How are you?”

“Nope. Not arrested. Daytona’s fun. Just great. Really cool,” I lied.

“Okay, so do you want something? Suzanne Somers is selling her three-way poncho right now and she’s about to tell us the third thing it can do.”

It was no surprise to hear my mom’s lack of interest, but it was still a disappointment. Seth’s and Heather’s families had both gone on and on about how much they missed them, and the most my mom could say was that she needed to get back to some old TV actress selling a poncho that could be worn three different ways. (That said, I wanted to know more about this poncho myself.) I told Mom good-bye, she hung up without saying “I love you,” and I rejoined the others by the snack machine.

“How’d it go?” Seth asked, pulling a bag of Lay’s out of the machine.

“Fine.”

“Did they quiz you like mine did?”

I gave Seth my
what the hell do you think?
look and he smiled.

“Well, consider yourself lucky that you didn’t have to come up with a fake story about going to an all-you-can-eat fried shrimp buffet!” Heather shouted from the picnic table she was sitting on.

“Why would you make that up?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “It was the first thing that popped in my head when they asked what I’d been up to. Speaking of which, is anyone else craving shrimp?”

Seth looked up from his phone. “Actually, since we’re making pretty decent time, how would you guys feel about a detour?”

“To where?”

Seth was already mapping out directions. He seemed more tense than usual.

“It’s a ways out of the way, but Ocean City, Maryland. Where we used to live before my dad moved us to Florida. I haven’t been back in, what? I guess four years or something. Wow.” Seth stopped and took in the passage of time. I could see how much he really wanted to go; it was sweet to see him trying not to sound too eager in case Heather and I protested.

“Why not?” I elbowed Seth in the hip. “It’s important to live in the moment, you know?”

“Yeah,” he said. “But I should warn you—the moment we’re about to live in definitely belongs to the past.”

And away we went.

IT WAS CLOUDY BY THE time we got to Ocean City. The town was located on the water but was nothing like a Florida town. It was a cold, quiet little place with small houses built around a large boardwalk that followed along the water’s edge. We parked on the street and made our way over to the water and wandered down past the kind of places with T-shirts that read
I’M WITH STUPID
and an arrow pointing directly up. The whole place smelled more like a giant funnel cake than an ocean.

I knew this was where Seth had grown up—but I didn’t know much more than that. The past was something he didn’t talk about much—sometimes when there was a story from when he was a kid, but very little from his recent history. I didn’t think about it much—my own sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade years weren’t particularly compelling material either. I just assumed that Golden Boy Seth had been golden somewhere else, and then had left this place to come into my life.

“My dad and I used to come down here on Saturdays after Little League ball games and get either ice cream or pizza, or ice cream
and
pizza if my team had won,” he said to me now. “Those were the best days.”

A seagull flew overhead, pooping on the boardwalk, so close that the disgusting blob almost landed in my hair. I jumped, and both Heather and Seth burst into laughter.

“Shut up or I’m throwing one of you over the edge,” I warned them.

A strong breeze blowing off the water had left the whole boardwalk uncrowded. Heather spotted a booth selling purses made out of recycled license plates—the kind that no one has carried since 2001—and she reacted like someone currently living in 2001. She walked over to check them out while Seth and I wandered toward the railing overlooking the water.

“Is it like you remember?” I asked.

“Sure. Sorta. There used to be more arcades and stuff, I think, but maybe it just seemed like there were a bunch because I was little.”

“It’s a pretty town.”

Seth nodded, distracted by something.

“Everything okay?”

“Uh-huh.” He paused with a slight frown. “Well, actually … you sorta hurt my feelings the other day.”

“What? Really? I apologized for freaking out about that guy. I really believe that you weren’t flirting with him and have fully let it go.”

“No, not that. It was when you said everything was perfect for me. That I’ve never had anything to worry about or whatever.” He was avoiding eye contact, focusing on a boat or barge way out in the foggy distance.

“Seth, you know I didn’t mean that to upset you. I just meant you have your stuff together. You’re not a constant ball of nerves like me. People like you fit in. Everybody likes you.”

He snapped his focus toward me. “Just because I fit in doesn’t mean I have my stuff together, JT. I know you think you know me, but you only know the part of me I show, okay?”

His eyes were weighted with hurt. They didn’t twinkle the way they usually did—they were muted, gray, like mine. This was not the Seth I knew.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have said that. Forgive me?”

“Everyone has stuff they can’t seem to shake no matter how hard they try. Everybody has stuff they’re afraid of. Everybody has stuff that breaks their hearts.”

His voice was so thin and strained. And I couldn’t tell: Did he want me to ask what he meant … or was he saying that there was a private part of him that I didn’t have access to yet, and that I’d just have to take his word for the pain that was kept inside? Also, I was wrestling with the knee-jerk reaction to be pissed off at him that he had the audacity to withhold anything he was afraid of.

“I really didn’t mean to upset you like this,” I told him. Then, delicately, I asked, “Do you want to talk about it?” This was the door I was opening for him. But hopefully my tone told him I wouldn’t be hurt if he decided he didn’t want to walk through it right now.

In response, he took my hand and pulled me behind him down the boardwalk.

“Follow me,” he said.

The school Seth had grown up going to was situated across the street from the pier, which felt like really strange planning on the school’s part. Looking up at Seth’s old school’s windows overlooking the ocean, I couldn’t help but imagine the countless hours its students must have spent not listening to a thing their teachers said.

It was late afternoon during spring break, so the school was mostly empty and strangely still, spooky in the way schools can be when they aren’t full of kids attempting to learn and blend in. Seth let us into the school’s main hallway through the front door. A long glass case lined the entire expanse of the walls, filled with trophies, heavily posed group photos, and the kind of pointless high school knickknacks people hold on to under the notion that they’ll matter to them after they’re adults. I mean, really, who has ever said, “Wow. Thank God I held on to this plastic button that says Homecoming Planning Committee 2003!”

“So you went here for elementary school?” I asked, faking interest, the way one has to when being shown photos of something that seem to matter to the person who’s showing the photos.

“And middle school. It’s the only school I went to until we moved.” Seth’s attention was fixed on a photo of three nerdy-looking kids crowded around a chessboard; they looked thirteen or so, all three in the most awkward and most sudden of pubescent growth spurts. I leaned down to get a closer look, and saw the caption:
CHESS CLUB
. The photo might as well have been a photo ad for an organization called Dorks United. The three kids’ names were printed under the caption: Carolyn Hedden, Ed Robson, and Steve Coulson.

Coulson. Like Seth Coulson. As I started at the photo longer, the pimply kid in the middle of the photo looked like he could be related to Seth somehow. That’s when Seth spoke up.

“Recognize me?” He arched his eyebrows, nervously.

“What do you mean? That’s not you. It says Steve Coulson. Wait … you have a brother?”

Seth shook his head and sighed.

“My name is Steve, not Seth. Or … it was a long time ago. And by a long time ago, I mean middle school.”

It was my turn to arch my own eyebrows—not nervously, but in confusion. Seth went on.

“JT, I’ve never told anyone this before in my life … but when I was growing up here, I was like the biggest loser in school. My idea of a good time was playing chess and second-guessing every single aspect of my personality until I’d get a headache and go back to playing chess to distract myself.”

“Wait,” I interrupted. “Are you saying you changed your name because you were ashamed of playing chess? I mean, yeah, as far as board games go, it’s boring as shit, but I don’t think that warrants a name change.”

Seth stared down at the peeling linoleum of the hallway. “Once my dad got his job in Florida and I was sure we were moving, I made the decision to start over. All my life I’d been the loser kid who didn’t fit in. I didn’t know how to dress, how to talk to people without sounding like a borderline psychopath. I just didn’t know how to blend into the groove of things.” He shrugged. “Then we had to move during my eighth-grade year and most people probably would’ve been so upset, but I was so excited. I knew it was my chance to start over. To hit refresh like I used to do on the computer games I’d spend my nights playing as a way to distract myself from having zero friends. Wow, did that sound as depressing as I think it did?”

This whole “coming out” monologue was coming out of left field in every possible way. So much so that I thought he was pulling my leg.

However, from the anxious look on Seth’s face, I could tell this was no joke.

“I’m confused. You changed your name?”

“Do I seem like a Steven to you? With a
V
, no less.”

I couldn’t imagine Seth named anything but Seth. Especially not
Steven
.

“My parents were a little weird about it at first, Steven being a family name, but they knew how hard a time I’d had over the years and they finally gave in. I legally changed it and everything. It was really freeing. Plus, I didn’t want the people who’d spent all of middle and elementary school making fun of me to be able to find me on Facebook. I basically counter-catfished myself.”

This was a lot of information to take in. Seth was Seth, not Steven into Seth. My immediate reaction was to be angry with him for never telling me until this moment. However, there was something in Seth’s eyes that I couldn’t help but understand. Something that could sometimes feel like it only lived in me.

He went on. “I’ve never told anyone. Ever. Because I vowed that I’d leave Steven in my past and that Seth would always fit in and be liked. And you know what? He has.” He spoke these words so honestly that one could ignore what might have normally seemed incredibly egocentric. “You find the person inside of you that makes you feel like yourself, or makes you feel whole, and that’s who you have to take into the world.”

I glanced back at the photo of Steven Coulson. Within his shy, sad eyes I saw the beginnings of Seth. The beginnings of the most special boy I’d ever met. And I wanted to ask a million questions, but all I could do was grab him, hold him as tight as possible, push my lips against his nervously sweaty forehead, and whisper:

“I love you, Seth or Steven or whoever the hell you want to be next. You’re you, you’ve always been you, and I’m so lucky to love you.”

He kissed me back.

“This is so weird. You. Here,” he said. “Do you mind if I look around a little?”

“Not at all.” I sensed this was something he had to do alone. “I’ll go find Heather.”

Perhaps he was hoping to heal whatever wounds were left behind by Steven, by experiencing the place as Seth this time around, or maybe he just wanted to binge out on his old chess set. I left him to do his thing and went back out to the pier. I found Heather attempting to avoid a conversation with a crazy man who had an actual cat on his head and was begging people to pay him for a photo. Heather was carrying a large shopping bag full of recent purchases: the license plate purse, a T-shirt, a stupid-looking hat, and a bunch of other crap she didn’t need.

“Hey! Where’s Seth?”

“In there.” I pointed toward the school.

“He’s inside a school on his spring break? What’s he trying to prove?”

I explained the whole story to Heather as she stood there captivated. I couldn’t believe it myself, even upon hearing it all a second time from my own mouth. I also couldn’t shake the increasingly selfish feeling of being hurt because Seth had kept me out of his full life and truth. I wondered how different things would have been if I’d known Seth had been just as much of an outsider as me, once upon a time.

“So, literally nobody is perfect, huh?” Heather asked, with an air of surprise and slight trace of disappointment. “Y’know, it actually makes me feel a little bit better knowing that even Seth—gorgeous, smart, beloved Seth—has had something to cry about. Is that horrible?”

“Naw,” I said. “At the end of the day, we’re all just a bunch of freaks trying to pass for normal. And I reckon, it turns out, there is no such thing.”

“I can’t believe he’s never told you. I mean, after all this time together,” she said, slightly throwing the statement away, as if she hadn’t wanted to point out the place where she knew my mind had already set up camp and was roasting marshmallows.

Seth walked out, his head held high, and joined us. We walked away from the school, all three of us holding hands and silent for a while.

“Are you okay?” I said. His hand was a trace sweatier than usual.

“Yeah. I am. I walked around, and just sorta pretended the last few years had never happened. I imagined that I’d never moved away or changed my name or whatever. I just came to terms with the fact that you can run, you can reinvent yourself, but you’ll always be you. You know? And while that’s a little scary, I guess it’s also a little comforting too.”

We embraced before walking for a ways, back toward the car, but before we left the boardwalk, I stopped.

“How would you feel about going to get pizza
and
ice cream?” I asked.

Heather and Seth ran along ahead, toward the pizza place with a crooked neon sign that appeared to have been broken since long before I was born. I watched them for a moment. Seth had flipped like a switch, immediately his confident and upbeat self again, filling Heather in on what had just happened. Heather did a good job of pretending to hear this story for the first time. I wanted to feel happy for him, for his facing his issue head-on, and allowing himself to come up for air immediately after. However, I couldn’t help but wonder why he’d kept it all to himself while I poured out every insecurity and issue I’d ever felt in the past four years, why he was able to (in the words of Taylor Swift) “shake it off” so easily and why I’d never been able to shake anything off in my entire life. Perhaps I should take this as a lesson for my own self, to allow myself to be okay with my mistakes and the voices in my head who had nothing but cruel things to say about me. I’d always thought of Seth as strong, but to find the ability to shut up those voices? Well, that deserved some kind of medal. Or at least a giant hug, which for now would have to do.