Under the Rainbow

by Celia Laskey

  I swallow another gulp of champagne and take my phone out of my pocket. Underneath Jake’s initial text, there’s the ellipsis that means he’s typing. I hold my phone in my hand for what must be a full minute, watching the dots, until his next text finally appears. It’d be really cool to see u.

  The champagne has pulled at my principles, loosening them like a sloppily tied knot. Images flash by: his warm mouth on mine, his hands raking my hair and then sliding down my neck, my chest, landing on my breasts, a thumb snaking into the cup of my bra, rubbing back and forth slowly across my nipple. Pick me up on the corner of Walnut and Pine, I text back. I chug the rest of my champagne, then grab an unopened bottle before sneaking out the back door.

  I’m outside before I realize I forgot to grab a jacket. I button up my thin cardigan and cut through the neighbor’s backyard, the silver springs of a trampoline gleaming in the moonlight. The black spindly tips of pine trees reach into the sky like the claws of a Maurice Sendak monster. I shiver and pick up my pace, sprinting through the next few yards until I reach the corner.

  Jake pulls up in his old Honda Accord. I get in and pull the bottle of champagne out from under my cardigan.

  “First you tell me to pick you up on the corner, then you have champagne?” he says. “I think you really are in the CIA.” He takes the bottle and puts it in the back seat, unbuckling his seat belt and leaning his body into mine to reach. “I think I’ll have to check you for a wire,” he says, his face so close I can smell the Big Red gum he’s chewing.

  I let out a nervous laugh and pull away, pressing my back against the door. I have nothing witty to say in return. My stomach gurgles and I hope he doesn’t hear it. I’ve imagined kissing him so many times, I never thought about how nervous I’d be if it ever actually happened.

  Jake hesitates. I force myself to make eye contact, giving him a look that says yes. He places a hand on my thigh, leans in, and kisses me once, softly. He pulls away and smiles. “You’ve already had some champagne.”

  I nod and grab the back of his neck, pulling him in. This time he kisses me more forcefully, his tongue eddying against mine in a telepathic rhythm.

  He stops again. “You’re not drunk, are you?”

  I shake my head. My insides feel warm and viscous, like melted candle wax.

  “Good,” he says. “I wouldn’t want that to be the reason this is happening.” As he leans back in, his phone vibrates. “Oh, shit, I think we’re late.”

  “For what?” I ask, surprised and disappointed that there are plans involving other people.

  He grins. “You know that lesbian who was on the news the other night? Billy followed her home from work the other day. We’ve got about twenty cartons of eggs with her name on ’em.”

  And just as suddenly, the candle wax inside me stiffens, forming a hard shell around my lungs and my heart. When Jake leans in again to kiss me as he starts the car, his mouth feels like nothing.

  We meet a group of about twenty people in the high school parking lot, mostly clustered on the hoods of cars, smoking cigarettes and sipping from bottles of Mad Dog. The girls wear the boys’ Carhartt jackets, the zippers low enough to show the dark valley of their cleavage, and the boys stick their T-shirted chests out, pretending not to be cold. Hip-hop blasts from Billy’s truck, and there’s an air of excitement, like before a football game.

  Jake puts his arm around me, and I really do feel like a double agent. Billy walks around passing out Styrofoam cartons of Sunny Farms eggs. He hands me one and I accept it, the fat cartoon sun on the package smiling at me menacingly.

  “Okay, people,” Billy says, and kills what’s left of a bottle of Mad Dog. “Let’s do this.” He lobs the bottle over everyone’s heads and a few seconds later it shatters on the pavement. They all whoop and get in their cars, revving their motors. Competing bass lines bump against each other as radios turn on. I slide into the passenger seat of Jake’s Honda, the carton of eggs on my lap. He drums the steering wheel as we follow the line of vehicles out the long school driveway, everyone unrolling their windows to flip off the 15 MPH speed limit sign as we race by.

  “You’re quiet. Is everything okay?” Jake asks, reaching over to put a hand on my thigh.

  “Yeah, everything’s fine,” I say, then remember Zach’s joke from Billy’s party about having a fine time. Based on the vibe I got from Zach, it figures he’s not participating in the egging. I wouldn’t have thought Jake would be down, either, but here we are. As much as I want to leave, it feels like some kind of outside force is keeping me pinned to the passenger seat.

  As Jake drives, he spreads his fingers across the width of my thigh, drags them back in, then spreads them again, like he’s picking something up and dropping it over and over. My chest tightens as we drive past the Acceptance Across America billboard that just went up on top of Barb’s Boutique, a store that unabashedly has a sign in the window that says WE SERVE ADAM & EVE, NOT ADAM & STEVE. Karen told me she overheard some women in the Pancake House talking about how the boutique hadn’t been doing well, so Barb sold the ad space to a media company who, unbeknownst to her, promptly rented it to AAA. And now there’s nothing Barb can do about it. Karma, man. The kicker? The billboard features two femme, fashionable women holding hands underneath cursive type that reads Equality has a bright future in Big Burr, Kansas.

  Jake laughs, then pulls his hand across his mouth in an attempt to smother it.

  “What’s funny?”

  “You know Keith? He took a picture of those lesbians and jerks off to it.”

  “Typical,” I mutter under my breath.

  “What do you mean, typical?”

  I sigh and look out the window so I won’t have to look at Jake. “Men thinking lesbians exist for them.”

  “Huh.” He shakes his head good-naturedly. “You’re a funny one, Miss Los Angeles.”

  I cross my arms. “It wasn’t meant to be funny.”

  He presses his lips together and widens his eyes. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  Before I can decide how to reply, we turn onto Pine Street and he says, “Hey, this is near where I picked you up. You live around here?”

  “I was at a friend’s,” I say. As we get closer to my house, my throat spasms with the urge to vomit. Part of me wants to blame Karen for my current predicament—who did she expect me to hang out with, bringing me to this town? Or was I supposed to be a social pariah, just like she was? But another, larger part of me knows I’m only blaming her because I don’t want to blame myself. In L.A. I would never be stuck in a situation like this—at least half my friends there are queer, and if anything I was always slightly less cool because I’m straight and cis. My life there seems unthinkable now, like some alternate universe. I know I should just make some excuse to Jake about why I can’t go with them. But I stay silent, thinking about Newton’s law of inertia as we speed down the street: an object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an external force. In science class, our teacher showed us a video of a car crash to illustrate the point. I find myself hoping for one right now—that someone will accelerate through a red light or merge blindly into our lane, sending us careening in the opposite direction.

  Billy pulls over a few houses before mine, the others following suit. Everyone slams their car doors and runs down the sidewalk. The guys whoop and punch each other in the arm, the girls following behind them, smiling uneasily. I pray they’ll get the number wrong and end up egging one of our neighbors. But then Billy stops in front of my house and nods. The party still appears to be going strong: the high soprano of Kylie Minogue and the screech of laughter make their way through the closed windows.

  “Perfect, a homo party,” says Billy. He opens his carton of eggs and balances one in his palm. Then he flicks his wrist and whips the egg at the beige siding of my house. It hits with a hollow, sloshy crack. Anothe
r one hits, then another. Jake hands me an egg, then joins the firing squad. Arms move in steady circles as eggs fly through the air and explode against the house. The glossy whites drip and shine in the streetlights, the shells collecting on top of the yew bushes. Karen and the others must not be able to hear the noise over the music inside. Then an egg whaps into one of the living room windows. The music turns off and the front door opens, Cory’s face appearing behind the glass of the storm door.

  “Come on out, faggot!” Billy yells to Cory, who pushes the storm door open and walks slowly down the sidewalk, his mouth set in a hard line. I know I should duck behind a car before he sees me, but my feet stick to the ground.

  Karen rushes into the doorway. “Cory! Get back inside right now.” Cory ignores her and keeps walking, his eyes fixed on Billy. “I’ve called the cops,” Karen yells.

  Billy scoffs.

  Cory walks right up to Billy and, without hesitating, reels his arm back and punches Billy square in the face. Billy blinks, his eyes wide and disoriented. He looks like someone who’s just woken up in a hotel room in a strange city and has no idea where he is. A bright red spot of blood appears below his left nostril, tracing a thick line to his mouth. He touches the spot and holds his hand in front of his face. Then his rage kicks in and he snarls, lunging at Cory. They both fall to the ground.

  Karen runs out from the house, but not in time to stop Billy from returning a punch that lands directly on Cory’s right eye. Cory yowls and writhes. “Please,” Karen says, trying to pull them apart. She looks at the group of teenagers standing on the sidewalk. “Won’t someone help me?” Her eyes scan the group until they come to rest on me, standing at the edge of the lawn, an egg in my hand. “Avery?” She blinks and pulls back her face like someone’s thrown sand in it.

  Billy turns to look at me, everyone else’s eyes following. “You know her?”

  Karen waits for me to answer, her lips pressed together. I look down at the grass.

  Billy’s eyes dart from Karen to me to Cory, then back to me. “They’re your family, aren’t they?” He shakes his head, his eyebrows pulling together. “That’s fucked up. Why would you egg your own house?” He releases Cory from his grasp and Cory stumbles to stand up, touching a finger to his eye and grimacing. I look at Cory and expect him to be seething, but he makes a face like he feels bad for me, like I’m the one who’s hurt.

  “Good question,” says Karen, crossing her arms and staring at me.

  Everyone waits for an answer. I look up to the sky, hoping a simple explanation will appear there. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that the moon is an actual astronomical object, with rocks and craters and sweeping lunar plains formed by ancient volcanic eruptions. From the ground it just looks like a translucent projection, which would be a good description for how I feel most of the time—letting people see what they want to see on my blank surface. My eyes drift down and land on Jake, who won’t look at me. Karen follows my glance, and her eyes widen in understanding.

  Just then a cop pulls up to the curb and gets out of his car unhurriedly. He has a face like a toddler’s, with ample cheeks, a short, upturned nose, and a grin as if he’s just covered a wall in Sharpie. He strolls up to a guy I recognize from Billy’s party and claps him on the shoulder, saying, “Nice touchdown last week. Think you can do it again this Friday?” Then he turns to a girl from my science class and says, “Tell your mom thanks for that apple cake. It put my wife’s to shame, but let’s keep that between us, huh?”

  “Excuse me,” Karen says to the cop, her voice raised. “These kids just egged my house.”

  “Yup, that’s what you said when you called.”

  “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

  The cop gives her a look like she’s about to step over an imaginary line. “Seems like a harmless prank to me.”

  “Really?” says Karen. “Because it seems like a hate crime to me.”

  He smirks and puts a hand on his hip, right above his gun in its holster. “I’m sure these kids didn’t know whose house they were egging,” he says, his eyes on Karen. “Right, kids?”

  They all nod eagerly.

  “And I’m sure they won’t do it again, right, kids?”

  Their heads keep bobbing.

  “Problem solved,” he says. “You all can go home now.” Everyone races to their cars like they’re being timed, Jake included. I hope he’ll turn back and look at me, but he doesn’t. The cop saunters to his own car.

  Karen follows him. “Your department will be hearing from me.”

  “I’m sure they will,” he says, before closing his door.

  The cars roar to life one after the other, like thunder rolling across the air. They all leave the same way, disappearing in an orderly line around the bend, the hum of their engines fading. The neighborhood feels eerily quiet: the calm after the storm. I look down at the egg still cradled in my palm.

  “You might as well throw it,” Karen says.

  “I don’t want to,” I say.

  “Throw it.”

  I rock the egg back and forth in my hand. It feels light as a feather, heavy as a rock.

  “Throw it!” she shouts.

  I gasp, startled by her anger, and wind my arm back. The smooth shell glides past my fingers, the white orb arcing through the dark air. When the egg cracks against the house, something in my chest cracks, too, like a wishbone snapping apart at the forked bone.

  Christine

  It’s appalling,” says my best friend Pammy at our kids’ weekly playdate. We’re sitting in her living room on chairs we’ve pulled up right in front of the AC window unit. It huffs like it’s running up a hill, struggling to cut through the ninety-eight-degree humidity of an October heat wave. Pammy’s talking about that new billboard, the one you can’t miss on the roof of Barb’s Boutique.

  “It’s more than appalling, it’s horrifying,” I say. If I stand on a chair and look out the top left corner of my bedroom window, I can see the back of it, casting a long, dark shadow down the street. And it’s impossible to avoid—I have to drive by it every single time I leave the house. The photo on the billboard shows two women holding hands, standing in front of the old wooden gazebo in the park on Walnut Avenue. The women are looking at each other and smiling, like they’re just so content with their life choices. Like God and everyone around them approves.

  “I bet they’re not even real lesbians,” I say. The one on the left is tall and thin, with long, dark brown wavy hair, defined cheekbones, and an extended, upturned nose. There’s a sharp severity to her face, like she might be from Russia or one of those Eastern European countries. She’s wearing a flowy black blouse over jeans so snug her thighs don’t even touch. The other one is a few inches shorter and curvier. She has a platinum-blond pixie cut with side-swept bangs that fall over wide blue eyes. Her full lips jut out from her profiled face even as she smiles. She’s wearing a gray T-shirt dress with a black belt cinching the waist. On the bottom of the photo, in folksy cursive, it says Equality has a bright future in Big Burr, Kansas. In a much smaller font below that, it says Brought to you by Acceptance Across America.

  From what I’ve gathered, Acceptance Across America is a gay nonprofit all about shaming the rest of us, like we’re somehow to blame for being straight. They decided that out of the tens of thousands of towns in the United States, Big Burr was the “most homophobic” of them all. And how did they make that decision? By nitpicking our laws, hacking our social media to look for “hate speech,” and barraging our homes with phone calls asking inappropriate questions, all of which I later realized was a precursor to them sending people here to investigate us in person, like the gay Gestapo. The way the media outside of Big Burr reported the investigation’s findings twisted everything around. They said a teacher at the high school was fired for being gay, but I heard he resigned completely of his own accord. They said a lesbian-own
ed bed-and-breakfast was purposefully burned down, but the fire department said it was actually due to faulty wiring. And the one that really takes the cake: they said members of my church almost strangled a young boy to death in an attempt to “banish his homosexual demons,” but the boy refused to press charges, which seems awfully convenient. Now a task force is here on all these false premises, invading our workplaces with “inclusivity trainings,” ruining our social events, and erecting gay billboards.

  Pammy shakes her head. “Katie kept asking me, ‘Mommy, why are those two ladies holding hands?’ So I told her, Those ladies are best friends. Do you know what she does now? She makes all her dolls hold hands and says, ‘Look, Mommy, they’re best friends!’”

  “Claire and Carson haven’t asked me about it, thank God,” I say, lifting my hair up and leaning closer to the AC, trying to feel the barely cool breeze on my damp neck. “I got some of those mesh window shades for the back seats of the minivan, and I always make sure to have a movie playing when we drive by, so I don’t think they’ve noticed it yet.”

  Katie screams out. Over in the play area, she points at Claire and says, “She took my frying pan!”

  Claire stands at a Fisher-Price kitchen play set, placing perfectly round fried eggs and wavy pink-and-white strips of bacon in a pan.

  “Claire, give Katie back her frying pan,” I say.

  Claire tightens her grip around the pan’s handle, her tiny arms shaking with stubborn resistance. “I have to cook my husband his breakfast.”

  “Why don’t you bake some muffins?” Pammy says to Katie.

  Katie eyes the frying pan sulkily, then picks up a bowl and pretends to add various ingredients from the cupboard.

  “POed in the kitchen,” Pammy says. “The apples don’t fall far from the tree, do they?” She laughs, then pulls her mouth into a scowl. “Do you ever cook vegetarian meals?”