by Alex Gino
“Good time today, huh?” Grandpa Ray said as he pulled into the garage below his building and eased into his parking spot.
“Super good. And don’t worry, I won’t tell Dad about … you know.” He gestured at Grandpa Ray’s outfit. “The Smithfield Special.”
“Smithfield Special. I like that. I mean, it’s not that I want it to be a secret, really. It’s just, he’s so hard to talk to.”
“Don’t I know it!”
“But maybe it’s time I said something. Once you break through, he’s a pretty good guy. I mean, Rose and I raised him, after all. And times are changing. More people are talking about bending gender roles than they used to.”
Dad texted Grandpa Ray that he was pulling up to the curb, so Rick hugged Grandpa Ray goodbye and exited into the bright afternoon air.
“Nice ears,” Dad greeted him when he got into the car. It sounded like Dad was being sarcastic, but Rick thanked him with a smile and didn’t take them off.
“Did you have a good time with Grandpa Ray?” Dad asked.
“Totally!” said Rick.
“I’m glad to hear it. I worry about my dad sometimes. Especially since your grandma died. Sometimes it seemed like she was the only person who really understood him. I’m glad you’re getting along with him. He seems to like you even better than Thomas and Diane. Me, I’ve never quite been able to connect. Sometimes it’s like I barely know him.” Dad turned to Rick with a distant thought in his mind, but if he had words for it, he didn’t share them. Then he chuckled. “Oh, but look at you.”
“What?” asked Rick.
“You’ve got some lipstick on your cheek!”
Rick pulled down the visor and noted the reddish-purple splotch. He had gotten a kiss from Grandpa Ray. “Oh! Oh, that?”
“Did you meet a pretty girl at the con?”
“NO!” Rick shook his head. “I mean, no. It’s just from, um, there was someone there, and they wanted to say hi. But it’s not like that.”
“It’s okay, bud,” said Dad. “You’re allowed to think about girls.”
Rick could have let the moment pass. A month ago, he would have let the moment pass. But a month ago, he had never been to a Rainbow Spectrum meeting and he had a jerk for a best friend.
“I’m really not thinking about girls like that.”
“Okay.” Dad opened his mouth a few times, but he didn’t say anything else.
“I’m not thinking about boys like that either.”
“Okay,” Dad said again. “Don’t worry, it’ll happen soon enough.”
“I’m not worried,” said Rick. “Have you ever heard of being asexual? Or aromantic?”
“I can take a guess what it means. But you’re too young to be something like that.”
“I’m almost twelve.”
“Everyone has their own path.”
“And right now, my path is that I’m not interested in anyone.”
“That might change.”
“It might. It also might not. Either way, it feels good to have a name for what I’m feeling. Or, um, not feeling.”
Rick thought Dad would say something in response, but he didn’t, until the silence grew wider and wider, and out of the chasm grew a thought in Rick’s mind.
“Dad,” said Rick.
“Yeah?”
“Have you ever told Grandpa Ray that you feel like you don’t know him?”
Dad gave his head a sudden shake, and then another one, slower this time. “Why, I don’t know that I ever have.”
“Maybe you should,” said Rick.
“Yeah,” said Dad, nodding slowly. “Maybe I should.”
Ronnie popped his head into the classroom-turned-dressing-room across the hall from the auditorium. He was wearing all black like a proper stagehand and had to yell over the commotion of sixteen kids practicing a dozen different acts one last time. Green juggled. Mika and Talia practiced their dance moves. Delia played her violin solo once more. It was too loud to concentrate on quarter spinning, but Rick fingered the quarters in his pockets. He had chosen ten of the shiniest he could find in his jar that morning.
“Are we ready to open the doors?” asked Ronnie.
“Almost!” yelled Xavier as he added a few final touches of blush to Melissa’s face. She wore a navy-blue dress with silver polka dots and a wide, silver belt. Xavier popped a silver sequined top hat onto her head and declared her done. She headed out toward the auditorium.
Outside the classroom, the hallway walls were covered in artwork, from Kelly’s photographs and Ronnie’s smiling sketches to a giant papier-mâché rainbow that Sam and Tracey had made and hung above the auditorium entrance. The hallway itself was filled with people: parents, grandparents, teachers, families with kids, groups of classmates, and tons of noise.
Mr. Sydney sat with his boyfriend, Minh, taking money and stamping hands so people could go in once the auditorium doors opened. Kelly and Leila meandered through the crowd with long chains of raffle tickets wrapped around their necks like necklaces. The tickets were a dollar each, and the winner would get to keep half of the money that was raised. The other half would go to the fund for getting more QUILTBAG+ books into the school library.
“Salutations! Salutations!” Melissa cried as she squeezed through the mass of quieting people to reach the auditorium entrance. “Welcome to you all, and thank you for coming to the Rainbow Spectrum’s first-ever cabaret! I’m Melissa, and I’ll be your emcee for the evening. Come on in and have a seat. The show will begin shortly!”
She opened the doors and welcomed people with a wave and a smile and a tip of her sequined top hat as they entered. She greeted everyone cordially, except one woman, who she nearly leapt on with a giant embrace and kiss on the cheek.
“I’m so excited to see you onstage again, Melissa!” said the woman. “And this time, I’m ready!” She was dressed in jeans and a simple black long-sleeve shirt, and she wore a pin that said Support Trans Kids.
“I love you, Mom,” said Melissa. “And take pictures!”
“I will!”
“You’re gonna be great, kiddo!” Kelly’s father was right behind Melissa’s mom.
After another hug, Melissa’s mom went with Kelly’s dad to find seats near the front.
Rick looked around and found Mom, Dad, and Grandpa Ray waiting on the line to get in. They each gave him a giant hug, and Grandpa Ray told him to break a leg.
Fifteen minutes later, Melissa was onstage and the acts began. Xavier, Yaya, and Zoe went first, because they had insisted that a Broadway opening number was sure to get the audience geared up for the rest of the show. Next was Green, who juggled two oranges and an apple and even took a bite out of the apple while the oranges were in the air.
After intermission was the raffle drawing, which Mr. Vincent won with a hoot they could hear in the dressing room. Roberto started up the second act by playing acoustic guitar. Chris read a poem he had written after that, followed by Mika and Talia, who were good singers with even better dance moves. And then it was Rick’s turn.
“This next act is a lot smaller, but don’t let that fool you,” Melissa announced as Ronnie, Brinley, and Kadyn rolled up the gym mats behind her and replaced them with a table. Meanwhile a screen came down from above. “This kid really knows how to twirl some heads! And some tails too! Because Rick is going to share with us the wonders of quarter spinning! Here’s Rick!”
Rick came up to applause and dropped a stack of quarters onto a corner of the table. He looked down, trying to forget that there was an audience of people staring at him and Mason’s zoomed-in video on the screen above, where his hands were bigger than his real head. He told himself he was at the kitchen counter at home.
He neatened the stack and placed the first coin between the middle finger of his right hand and the thumb of his left. With a quick flick, he set the quarter spinning and the audience leaned in to watch. He set a second coin going. The third coin shot forward, right off the table, and in his speed and
nervousness, Rick spun the fourth too hard and it knocked the second one out of place. Only one coin remained upright, and it wasn’t long before that coin had fallen too.
The audience gave a collective “Awwwwwww!”
Rick shared a look with Melissa and tried again. He took a deep breath, and on the exhale, he set the first coin spinning. Quickly, he fired off a second and then a third. He took another breath before the fourth, and set it spinning perfectly in place. The first coin was starting to wobble but he launched a fifth before it had stopped buzzing. The audience clapped and Rick took a bow.
Melissa shuffled over to Rick while the audience was still clapping. “You still want to do the other part?”
Rick rubbed a quarter between the thumb and index fingers of both of his hands. He could say no. He could give up. He had already messed up onstage once. He could go for good enough and not chance another mistake. Or he could move forward, into the unknown.
“Yeah,” Rick whispered back. “I’ve been practicing.”
“You got this!” Melissa gave Rick a thumbs-up and went back to the mic.
“Amazing, right? Don’t let them tell you kids aren’t good with money! And now, for Rick’s grand finale. I’ve seen him do it in homeroom, and I promise you folks, this one’s gonna leave you on the edge of your seat!”
Rick took a quarter in each of his hands and balanced them between the backs of his thumbs and the pads of his middle fingers. A quarter didn’t spin nearly as long if you only spun it with one hand, but for this trick, Rick didn’t need them to spin for more than a moment. Simultaneously, he spun the coins, let them twist, and then touched the edges lightly enough with his fingertips that he could stop them in midair. Then he let go, and the coins remained, balanced on their sides, until the audience broke into applause that shook the air enough to knock the quarters down.
Seeley and Trish came up after that and sang the 1960s song “My Girl” together, dressed in pastel dresses with long, wide skirts. Xavier had put their hair up in what he called bouffants, which Rick learned was a fancy hair way of saying round and puffy. They left the stage holding hands.
Then the Rainbow Cabaret ended with Yaya and the rest singing and dancing to Miss Kris’s “We Are All Beautiful.” Rick did the steps and hand claps he’d learned the week before, and thought about the QUILTBAG+ people in his life. Melissa. Green. Himself. He thought about Grandpa Ray dressed as Senator Smithfield. And he thought about real friends, people like Ronnie, who were excited to find out more about him. He thought about everyone onstage, and everyone in the audience. And the more people he thought of, the harder he smiled, until his vision got distorted and his cheeks hurt. But he didn’t stop. He didn’t want to stop. He smiled and laughed his way through the finale, and when the song was over, he clapped and cheered and shared high fives with the people around him.
Everyone onstage held hands and took a bow, and then they clapped some more. Rick waved at Mom, Dad, and Grandpa Ray in the audience. He even noticed a little kid waving a quarter back and forth with a giant grin on their face.
After the performance, everyone poured into the dressing room to get back into their regular clothes. Rick didn’t need to change, but he wanted to be in the air of excitement. People kept congratulating him and a few people offered hugs. Rick wasn’t used to having friends who wanted to hug, much less who asked first, and he accepted every one happily, but none so happily as Ronnie’s.
“That was really awesome! Maybe we could hang out after school tomorrow.”
“That’d be cool,” said Rick.
And they did. And the next day at lunch. And the day after that. And the day after that. And the day after that.
Language is changing swiftly around us, especially for the QUILTBAG+ community. I’m not a historian, but I’d like to provide at least a little context here for some of the language that has been used to refer to people who are not straight (attracted to the opposite sex) and cisgender (gender matches the one assigned at birth). Only fifty years ago, people generally spoke of the gay community, or the gay and lesbian community, since gay, a word to describe people who are attracted to the same sex, often refers only to men. Lesbian describes women who are attracted to other women. In the 1970s and 1980s, bisexual people, who are attracted to more than one gender, called for visibility, and by the 1990s, many people and organizations spoke of the lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) community.
Over the last twenty years or so, especially in the last five to ten, more and more people and groups have recognized that when we talk about our community, we need to acknowledge transgender folks (whose gender doesn’t match their gender as assigned at birth), intersex people (who are born with, or later develop, sex characteristics that do not fit traditional definitions of male or female bodies), asexual individuals (who are not attracted to anyone, or only in specific situations), and pansexual people (who are attracted to many genders). Around the same time, many activists reclaimed queer as a more radical way of talking about our community, especially by people who didn’t want to fit in with straight culture. They took a word that had been used as an insult against them and turned it into a label of pride. While it has become a primary identity for some, others don’t like the word because of its history.
That doesn’t mean that TQIAP+ folks are new to the LGB community, but that we as a culture are learning more comprehensive ways to talk about ourselves. And there’s more language to come. The question becomes: How do we talk about our community in ways that are both aware of the value of commonly understood language and respectful to people who deserve to have language that works for them?
The most common acronym these days to represent this range is LGBTQIAP+ (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer Intersex Asexual Pansexual and more). The plus sign acknowledges that our understanding of sexuality is growing, and that many people use other language to describe themselves. I’ve also used the term QUILTBAG+ (Queer Unsure Intersex Lesbian Transgender Bisexual Asexual Gay and more) in this book, as coined by feminist artist Sadie Lee in 2006. I appreciate how easy it is to say, as well as the quilt imagery. We are a community of disparate people who come together to create something beautiful, and the reference to the AIDS Quilt is worth noting. However, I don’t think QUILTBAG+ is perfect—I wish it included pansexuality, and some people don’t like the -bag ending. I hope that I have done justice to the real-life process of developing language in the way I represent the Rainbow Spectrum’s conversations. And I look forward to what comes next as we continue to refine language to meet our needs.
If you’ve been thinking about your own gender and/or sexuality, you can research online for terms that might help you put a name to how you’re feeling. And if you don’t know how you’re feeling, there’s language for that too—questioning and being unsure are real parts of life, especially if you might not be straight or cisgender. You might face some tough times if you haven’t already, so set yourself up with a support network of people you know you can talk to—whether that’s your friends, family, teachers, or someone else you trust to listen and to support you. At the same time, you don’t need to share your feelings with anyone you don’t want to.
Know that there are resources out there for you. Many cities and towns have local community centers, and growing numbers of middle and elementary schools are developing groups like the Rainbow Spectrum. The Trevor Project, an amazing organization for LGBTQIAP+ folks under twenty-five, has the TrevorLifeline (866-488-7386), support by text (text START to 678678), and TrevorChat (thetrevorproject.org), where you can talk with a counselor 24/7. Please, if you need help, reach out. And if you’re not sure if it’s for you—it is! We need you around.
Thanks for reading and for being yourself.
Keep reading for another inspiring Alex Gino novel, George!
George pulled a silver house key out of the smallest pocket of a large red backpack. Mom had sewn the key in so that it wouldn’t get lost, but the yarn wasn’t quite long enough to
reach the keyhole if the bag rested on the ground. Instead, George had to steady herself awkwardly on one foot while the backpack rested on her other knee. She wiggled the key until it clicked into place.
Stumbling inside, she called out, “Hello?” No lights were on. Still, George needed to be certain the house was empty. The door of Mom’s room was open and the bedsheets were flat. Scott’s room was unoccupied as well. Sure that she was alone, George went into the third bedroom, opened the closet door, and surveyed the pile of stuffed animals and assorted toys inside. They were undisturbed.
Mom complained that George hadn’t played with any of the toys in years, and said that they should be donated to needy families. But George knew they were needed here, to guard her most prized and secret collection. Fishing beneath the teddy bears and fluffy bunnies, George felt for a flat denim bag. Once she had it in hand, she ran to the bathroom, shut the door, and turned the lock. Clutching the bag in tightly wrapped arms, George slid to the ground.
As she tipped the denim bag on its side, the silky, slippery pages of a dozen magazines fell out onto the tiled bathroom floor. Covers promised HOW TO HAVE PERFECT SKIN, TWELVE FRESH SUMMER HAIRCUTS, HOW TO TELL A HOTTIE YOU LIKE HIM, and WILD WINTER WARDROBES. George was only a few years younger than the girls smiling at her from the glossy pages. She thought of them as her friends.
George picked up an issue from last April that she had looked through countless times before. She browsed the busy pages with a crisp flip-flip-flip that stirred up the faint smell of paper.
She paused on a photo of four girls at the beach. They modeled swimsuits in a line, each striking a pose. A guide on the right-hand side of the page recommended various styles based on body type. The bodies looked the same to George. They were all girls’ bodies.
