by Jason June
“What the hell?” I blurted.
“What’s up?” Mom asked, while Dad said, “Language.”
“Oh, it’s uh, nothing.” And that was the problem. There was a Gaming Club, for frack’s sake, but no GSA.
I scrolled to the Ls, thinking maybe there was an LGBTQ group. Nothing again.
I had to be missing something. I went up to A and pored over the alphabetical items. Astronomy Club, Culinary Club, even Fandom Freaks. My heart was about to drop out my butt when I finally got to Q and saw the QSA: Queer-Straight Alliance.
I’d been so focused on getting some boy-on-boy action, I completely overlooked the fact that I had the opportunity to meet all kinds of queer kids. I would no longer be the gay kid, I would just be one gay in a whole alphabet soup of LGBTQ realness. No more fielding conversations alone from well-meaning but totally misguided classmates like, “But if you’re both dudes, who pays for the date?” or “If you’ve never been with a girl, how do you know you’re gay?” What my new school offered me wasn’t just the chance to make out with guys for the first time, but to meet and commiserate with and learn from others who share a queer bond. People who could help me when I went about the Gay Agenda, who could share in the ups and downs as I had different relationship milestones, who knew what it was like to feel and be different from so many other people around you. I wouldn’t be alone. I could make a whole new friend-family.
It was time to add an item to my agenda.
JAY’S GAY AGENDA
1.Meet another gay kid. Somewhere, anywhere . . . please! in Seattle in, like, days!
2.Go on a date with a boy at the Space Needle and hold hands within the first ninety minutes.
3.Go to a dDance with a boy and have my first kiss slow dancing to Shawn Mendes while getting caught in a surprise Seattle downpour.
4.Have a boyfriend, one who likes to wrap me up in his arms and let me be little spoon, and maybe smells like coffee from all the cafés he goes to.
5.Fall in love with a boy, but wait for him to say it first so I don’t seem too desperate, and maybe he says it for the first time at Pike Place Market or in the first Starbucks.
6.Make out, with tongue, and hard enough that I’d get a little burn from his stubble.
7.See another penis besides my own, IRL, and do fun things with it!
8.Lose. My. Virginity!
9.Become part of a super-queer, super-tight framily.
The QSA could be the answer to crossing off all the items on my list, including the new one. Finding it would be step number one on the first day of school. But once I found it, that still didn’t answer the question of how to ask someone on a date if that opportunity ever (please, Andy Cohen, Hayley Kiyoko, Billy Porter, any Gay God!) came up. Fortunately, the Urinal of Destiny’s other inscription of YOU’RE MOM, grammatically incorrect or not, sparked an idea.
“I know the two of you met at Dad’s shop,” I said, loud enough to be heard over Dad shouting along to Shania Twain, “but, like, how exactly did you start dating?”
Dad cut short his off-key shouts to grunt knowingly in the passenger’s seat. “Your mother played up the damsel-in-distress trope.”
I face-palmed. “Ew, gross, Mom. What about feminism?” Mom was the manager everyone looked up to, the one who had worked her way to the top. She was regularly on the phone with her employees making sure everyone got enough hours or that shifts were covered when someone’s kid got sick. To hear that she’d pretended she was anything but the kickass boss she is was . . . cringey.
Mom whapped Dad in the back of his head without taking her eyes off the road. That was more like the woman I knew. “I did not,” she said. “My brakes were legitimately squeaking when I came into your shop.”
“So you’re saying it was just a coincidence that your left blinker, then your brake lights, then your right headlight, then your right blinker all went out within that same month?” Dad asked. “And it turned out they all were just a little loose and easily screwed back in?”
Mom grinned. “What? It’s not my fault it took you so long to get the hint and ask me on a date.”
“You’re right, Tam,” Dad said. He grabbed Mom’s hand and kissed it. “But I’m glad this slow guy finally figured it out.”
Not only did their cuteness make me want to barf, but their story was no help whatsoever. “Due to the strict rules of a couple totalitarians I know, I don’t even have a car, so flirting with a guy over a broken brake light is out of the question.”
“I thought all you kids found love online anyway,” Dad said. “Swiping left and right and whammo! Soul mates!”
“Don’t rush it, sweetheart.” Mom looked at me in the rearview mirror, her eyes crinkled with a knowing smile loaded with sympathy. It made me feel super pathetic that my parents had so much game when I’d never even been able to start playing the game. “Love will show up when you least expect it. Look at your dad and me. I didn’t expect to meet my husband at the mechanic, but the stars aligned, and here we are.”
I looked up at the sky as we drove through the mountain pass. My obsession with stats and probability made it nearly impossible for me to believe that those far-off suns had anything to do with finding a soul mate. Or even someone to fool around with, for that matter. But on the off chance Mom was right, I wished the stars were lining up perfectly to bring two gay boys together.
Me being one of them, just to be clear.
4.
Humiliate Yourself in Front of a VSB
Mom’s new Fresh Savings was located right in the middle of Capitol Hill, which, just my luck, was the heart of the gay neighborhood in Seattle. According to the last census, up to 25 percent of all households in Capitol Hill could consist of same-sex couples. One. In. Four. That’s a lot of gays!
Not even the drizzly gray gloom that seemed to constantly hover over the city could squelch how bright Capitol Hill was. There were rainbow flags and Human Rights Campaign decals hanging outside businesses on every block; guys were holding hands or just good old-fashioned making out when you walked along the deep green grass of Cal Anderson Park; and it was like my eyes were homing beacons for colorful, heart-shaped Love Is Love bumper stickers.
I couldn’t believe it. We went from living hours outside any civilization to being smack-dab in the middle of it, and it was as gay as a Pride parade. Talk about winning the gay lottery.
Our duplex was right in the center of the party. Mom’s boss knew a guy who knew a lady who owned a couple properties in the area, so we got a deal on a furnished place to rent. Thank gawd Mom got a raise, because even with the friend-of-a-friend discount, rent in the city was expensive. But how could you put a price tag on living in a gay mecca? My jeans and favorite denim jacket might have been damp from the rain, but nothing could dampen my mood as I walked the eight blocks to my new school.
Back in Eastern Washington, everyone looked and acted and dressed and dated exactly the same way. But as I stood in front of the main building of Capitol Hill High, a squat gray structure draped in the school’s colors of blue and white, nothing could have been more different from Riverton. There were kids of every race, kids who sported religious emblems for things other than ProteBaptatholic, and—like shining beacons of love—kids with rainbow flags and HRC patches on their backpacks.
I was home.
It was such a surreal feeling. I immediately knew I belonged in this physical space even though I’d never been there before. There was this sort of tingling throughout my body, and my heart started to race like it had finally found the rhythm it’d been waiting almost eighteen years to beat. This was where I was meant to be. Where I’d finally find my queer community. Where I’d find the person to give me my first kiss, to become my first boyfriend, to cross off item eight with a condom and a flourish!
It was in that moment, nothing but a gleam of hope in my eye and a bit of horniness in my crotch, that I was shoved to the ground. Hard. The impact was enough to make the duct-taped JanSport backpack I’d
had since eighth grade split down the middle. Granted, the bag was a real pile of crap, but that didn’t make it any less jarring. Everything I owned exploded all over the sidewalk.
“What the frack!” I screamed. My left palm scraped the concrete, and my right landed directly in a pile of chewed gum. Whatever Stats Gods had started putting life in my favor by bringing me to this gay paradise were clearly no longer on my side.
“Shit, I am so sorry!”
I looked up to see what appeared to be a printer on wheels staring at me through googly eyes glued to its front. Two human hands kept shifting over its sides to get a good grip on the machine, the googly eyes shaking up and down with each new attempt at a hand position. The person holding it eventually gave up and set the printer down, revealing what Lu would call a VSB: Very Sexy Boy. He was Asian, had the best wave in his thick, black hair, and had the most gorgeous dark eyes accented by tortoiseshell square-framed glasses. You know those statues where you’re like, I’ve never seen a jawline that chiseled in real life? His totally was. And—even though I was still on the ground—I could tell he was tall. Just the thought of having to look up at him to meet those mesmerizing eyes sent shivers down my spine.
VSB stuck his hand out. “Sorry about that. Let me help you up.”
Under his sexy boy spell, I stuck my gum-gunked hand right into his. This was not the meet-cute Mom and Dad promised.
“Oh gawd, that’s gross.” I face-palmed with my nongummed hand, my skin stinging from all the sidewalk scrapes.
VSB laughed, and oh. My. Gawd. My insides melted. You know how you always read books or see movies and the main character is like, “His laugh swept me off my feet” or “One deep chuckle emanated from the middle of his chest and it set my insides burning” and you roll your eyes like, Yeah, right. Laughs don’t have magic powers? His totally did. He was a laughing, sexy sorcerer.
“Don’t worry about it,” VSB said. He wiped his hand on his jeans without any mind that half a wad of gum now stuck to his thigh. He knelt down and grabbed a handful of pens that my backpack had vomited. “Let me at least help you pick some of this up. I’m Albert, by the way. Albert Huang. I don’t think I’ve seen you around before.”
“New. I’m new,” I said, nodding for some reason, and a stray lock of bangs stuck to my forehead. I instantly clocked that as strange because I never put enough product in my hair to make it stick to my skin. My signature face-palm hair billowing would be impossible.
I tried to pull the wayward hair from my face. Oh frack. I somehow got gum on my forehead and my hair was sticking to it!
“I’m Jay,” I said, trying to very nonchalantly flick the gum off my forehead with my nonsticky hand. But whatever nonchalance I was trying to put out there was completely blown away by the fact that my cheeks were on fire. Choking-related accidents from things like chewing gum kill about 2,500 people a year. Right then I wished I could rip that gum from my forehead, cram it down my throat, and be one of them.
“Nice to meet you, Jay.” Albert was about to hand me my notebook and more pens, but he stopped and motioned to my scraped hand. “That looks like it hurts. Maybe I should carry your stuff for you?”
Sexy and sweet! This was turning into the adorable meet-cute Mom said was written in the stars after all. But I needed to get my notebook back before Albert opened it and the moment was ruined by the Gay Agenda in all its purple, horny glory.
“It’s fine,” I said. “I’ll just—” I snatched my notebook from Albert, ripped a page from the back, and dabbed the blood off my palm. I turned to the trash can behind me to throw out the paper and try to collect myself even the tiniest bit. This was my first shot to try to impress a boy. I could not let it end with bloodied hands and a gummed forehead.
I turned back around and met Albert’s gaze. How come no one at Riverton had ever mentioned how good it feels for your insides to turn to jelly? Or how your insides could be melting while a very outer part of you does the exact opposite of liquefy? I suddenly realized that literally anybody I met that day could be the first person I saw without any clothes on, possibly even Albert. I would not mind at all seeing what his torso looked like under his Henley.
Albert’s eyes went wide. Was he thinking about me shirtless too?
“You’ve got something on your face,” Albert said. “Just a little blood. It must have been from your scraped hand. You know, when you wiped that gum off?”
This was definitely not the situation I’d imagined when I’d thought about a VSB inspecting my body for the first time.
I ripped another page from my notebook and blotted the blood from my forehead.
“Th-thanks.” I reached forward and took the rest of my stuff from Albert.
“Don’t mention it,” he said. “My dad’s a heart surgeon. He’s shown me a lot worse than just a little blood.” He bent over to get a solid grip on his printer-creature, his butt on full display. A VSB’s derriere was just feet away from my face, but I was too embarrassed to really appreciate the view.
“Once I install the battery pack, I’ll finally get to use the wheels on this thing.” Albert stood back up and smiled, big and openmouthed. He had one bottom tooth that overlapped another in his otherwise perfectly aligned teeth, like he’d worn braces but then stopped wearing his retainer. “See you around, Jay.”
“Yeah.” Could I have been any less smooth? I felt like that prepubescent dweeb who watched the suave and sexy kids from the sidelines all over again. Not only did I have zero idea how to flirt when confronted with a VSB, but I’d tried it with gum in my hair and blood on my face. At this rate, I’d be dead before I could even cross one item off the Gay Agenda.
Oh gawd, I would die a virgin.
I gave Albert a good head start before sulking into the office to grab my schedule. It took the whole way to the office to get rid of the rest of the gum on my fingers, and I figured it would take the whole rest of my life to get rid of the embarrassment from my Albert encounter. But as I looked down at my schedule to see that calculus would be my first class, numbers took over. The odds of the very first person I met at Capitol Hill High being gay were slim to none. There were almost two thousand kids in the school. If in some strange stroke of luck the 8-percent-of-the-population-is-queer stat finally came true, that would mean I had a one in twelve and a half chance of the first person I spoke to (read: Albert) being gay. Those were small odds that were totally in my favor. There was no way Albert could be interested in me because there was such a tiny chance he was gay. So it didn’t really matter that I looked like such a fracking idiot in front of him. Maybe the Gay Gods were just giving me a chance to get the nerves out of my system. Then I could go full force into the Gay Agenda without any more buffoonery.
Phew. Close call.
5.
Spill Your Secrets
I hadn’t had first-day-of-school jitters in years. My new-school-year routine always went like this:
BACK-TO-SCHOOL SCHEDULE
1.Wake up from a heart-racing nightmare that I’d overslept and somehow missed all my finals even though it was the first day of school.
2.Make sure all my pens were in the right backpack pocket and organize my notebooks by color spectrum order.
3.Get to school and grab my schedule so I could label said notebooks appropriately.
4.Check what the fall play was going to be and volunteer to help the drama teacher with costuming (my hoedown duct-tape and safety-pin talents are legendary).
5.Wait for one of Lu’s journalism classmates to ask if I’d finally gotten action over the summer and begrudgingly mumble “no” while a headline blared over my head, screaming VIRGIN! VIRGIN! VIRGIN!
It was all so routine, so predictable, but at least I was a part of the Riverton community. And yes, while not everybody there fully understood who I was inside, or only saw me as the token magical unicorn gay friend, I’d been with them since kindergarten and they were familiar. How did I start from scratch?
I tried making e
ye contact with my locker neighbor, but they were instantly distracted by someone tackling them and making out like they were trying to swap bodies. It figured that everyone here was in SexTown too. Later on, somebody tapped my shoulder in calculus, but it was only to ask for an extra pencil. I couldn’t muster up the courage to introduce myself to anyone, let alone ask them if they knew about the QSA and where I’d find all the gays.
There was also the horrible moment of being the new kid at lunch. I had no idea where to sit. I wasn’t athletic enough to sit with the jocks, not musically talented enough to sit with the band kids, and my denim jacket was way too bright to sit with the goth group. Realizing that I might go my entire senior year of high school with zero friends made me really miss Lu. I ended up Skyping her from a wet bench in the quad outside the cafeteria.
“Everyone keeps asking where you are,” Lu said. “It’s really depressing having to repeat over and over that you’ve moved. Not that we’re not all happy for you. Give me the scoop. Have you already met your future boyfriend?” She sang it like she was going to follow up with sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
“Well,” I said, “that would require me actually talking to someone.”
“What?!” Lu flung the phone screen around so her whole lunch table could see me. “Guys, tell Jay how much we love him and how cute and charming he is and how he’ll have a boyfriend in no time.”
“Lu!” I got what she was trying to do, but I did not need half the Riverton Reporter crew talking about what a virginal dweeb I was.
I was bombarded with a chorus of “You got this, Jay” and “Go get ’em, tiger.”
“See?” Lu said, turning the camera back toward her. “We all believe in you. I know it’s weird being the new kid, but just put yourself out there. There’s got to be somewhere all the gays go, right?”
