Out Now

by Saundra Mitchell

  QUEER WE GO AGAIN!

  A follow-up to the critically acclaimed All Out anthology, Out Now features seventeen new short stories from amazing queer YA authors. Vampires crash prom...aliens run from the government...a president’s daughter comes into her own...a true romantic tries to soften the heart of a cynical social media influencer...a selkie and the sea call out to a lost soul. Teapots and barbershops...skateboards and VW vans...Street Fighter and Ares’s sword: Out Now has a story for every reader and surprises with each turn of the page!

  This essential and beautifully written modern-day collection features an intersectional and inclusive slate of authors and stories.

  Books edited by Saundra Mitchell

  available from Inkyard Press/Harlequin TEEN/HarperCollins

  Out Now: Queer We Go Again!

  All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens throughout the Ages

  Defy the Dark

  Out Now

  Edited by Saundra Mitchell

  Candice Montgomery

  Caleb Roehrig

  Eliot Schrefer

  CB Lee

  Will Kostakis

  Mark Oshiro

  Julian Winters

  Kate Hart

  Katherine Locke

  Jessica Verdi

  Tanya Boteju

  Hillary Monahan

  Kosoko Jackson

  Tara Sim

  Saundra Mitchell

  Meredith Russo

  Fox Benwell

  For every queer kid out there—in, out, questioning; rocking it, hiding it, getting used to it; holding the line for your generation and the next:

  You are beautiful.

  You are valid.

  You are loved.

  Contents

  Kick. Push. Coast. by Candice Montgomery

  What Happens in the Closet by Caleb Roehrig

  Player One Fight! by Eliot Schrefer

  Lumber Me Mine by CB Lee

  Follower by Will Kostakis

  Refresh by Mark Oshiro

  Victory Lap by Julian Winters

  A Road of One’s Own by Kate Hart

  Seditious Teapots by Katherine Locke

  Star-Crossed in DC by Jessica Verdi

  Floating by Tanya Boteju

  The Soft Place by Hillary Monahan

  A Pound of Flesh by Kosoko Jackson

  One Spell Too Many by Tara Sim

  Far from Home by Saundra Mitchell

  The Coronation by Meredith Russo

  Once Upon a Seastorm by Fox Benwell

  The Editor

  The Authors

  Excerpt from All Out edited by Saundra Mitchell

  KICK. PUSH. COAST.

  by

  Candice Montgomery

  Every day, same time, same place, she appears and doesn’t say a word.

  Well, she doesn’t just appear. She takes a bus. You know she takes a bus because you see her get off the bus right in front of 56th Street, just in front of the park where you skate.

  You know she takes a bus and gets off right in front of the park at 56th Street because you are always at the park, waiting to catch a glance of her.

  She—her appearance—is a constant. Unlike your sexuality, all bendy like the way your bones got after yesterday’s failed backside carve.

  Bisexualpansexualdemisexualpanromanticenby all bleeding bleedingbleeding...into one another.

  That drum of an organ inside your chest tells you to just be patient. But now, here you are and there she is and you can’t help yourself.

  She’s beautiful.

  And so far out of your league.

  You’re not even sure what she does here every day, but you probably shouldn’t continue to watch her while trying to nail a Caballerial for the first time. Losing focus there is the kind of thing that lends itself to unforgiving injuries, like that time you broke your leg in six places on the half-pipe or the time you bit clean through your bottom lip trying to take down a 360 Pop Shove It.

  You’re still tasting blood to this very day. So’s your skateboard. That one got split clean in half.

  She looks up at you from underneath light brown lashes that seem too long to be real. She reminds you of a Heelflip. You don’t know her well but you imagine that, at first, she’s a pretty complicated girl, before you get good enough to really know her. You assume this just given the way her hair hangs down her back in a thick, beachy plait, the way yours never could.

  Not since you chopped it all off.

  That’s not a look for a lady, your mom says repeatedly. But you’ve never been very femme and a few extra inches of hair plus that pink dress Mom bought you won’t change that.

  You hate that dress. That dress makes you look like fondant.

  Someone nails a Laserflip right near where you’re standing and almost wipes out.

  Stop staring. You could just go introduce yourself to her.

  But what would you say?

  Hi, I’m Dustyn and I really want to kiss you but I’m so confused about who I am and how am I supposed to introduce myself to you if I can’t even get my label right, oh, and also, you make me forget my own name.

  And in a perfect world, she would make eyes at you. She’d make those eyes at you and melt your entire fucking world in the way only girls ever can.

  Hi, Dustyn, I’m in love with you. Eyelashes. All batting eyelashes.

  No. No, the conversation probably wouldn’t go that way. Be nice if it did though. Be nice if anything at all could go your way when it comes to romance.

  You push into a 360 ollie while riding fakie and biff it so bad, you wish you possessed whatever brain cells are the ones that tell you when to quit.

  If that conversation did go your way, on a realistic scale, she’d watch you right back. You would nail that Caballerial.

  Take a break. Breathe. Breathe breathe breathe. Try something else for a sec.

  Varial Heelflip. Wipe out.

  Inward Heelflip. Gnarly spill.

  Backside 180 Heelflip. Game, set, match—you’re finished.

  That third fail happens right in front of her and you play it off cool. Get up. Don’t even give a second thought to your battle wounds. You’re at the skate park on 56th Street because there’s more to get into. Which means, you’re not the only idiot limping with a little drug called determination giving you momentum.

  Falling is the point. Failing is the point. Getting better and changing your game as a skater is the point. Change.

  But what if things were on your side? What if you’d stuck with that first label? What if Bisexual felt like a good fit and never changed?

  Well, then you’d probably be landing all these 180s.

  If bisexual just fit, you’d probably have been able to hold on to your spot in that Walk-In Closet. But it doesn’t fit. It doesn’t fit which kind of sucks because at Thanksgiving dinner two years ago, your cousin Damita just had to open her big mouth and tell the family you “mess with girls.” Just had to tell the family, a forkful of homemade mac and cheese headed into said mouth, that you are “half a gay.”

  That went over well. Grams wouldn’t let you sit on her plastic-lined couches for the rest of the night. Your great-uncle Damian told her gay is contagious. She took it to heart.

  No offense, baby. Can’t have all that on my good couches.

  You glance up and across the park, memories knocking things through your head like a good stiff wind, and you find her taking a seat.

  Oh.

  Oh, she never does this. She never gets comfortable. She’s changing things up. You’re not
the only one.

  Maybe she plans to stay a while.

  You love that she’s changing things up. You think it feels like a sign. It’s like she’s riding Goofy-Foot today. Riding with her right foot as dominant.

  The first time you changed things up that way, you ended up behind the bleachers, teeth checking with a trans boy named Aaron. It felt so right that you needed to give it a name.

  Google called it pansexual. That one stuck. You didn’t bother to explain that one to the family, though. They were just starting to learn bisexual didn’t mean you were gay for only half the year.

  You pop your board and give the Caballerial another go.

  It does not want you. You don’t stick this one either.

  If pansexual had stuck, you’d introduce yourself to the beautiful girl with a smaller apology on your tongue. Hi, I’m Dustyn, I’ve only changed my label the one time, just slightly, but I’m still me and I’d really love to take you out.

  And the beautiful girl would glance at your scraped elbows and the bruised-up skin showing through the knee holes in your ripped black skinny jeans. She’d see you and say, Hi, small, slight changes are my favorite. And then she’d lace her bubble-gum-nail-polished hand with yours.

  But you changed your label after that, too. It was fine for a while. Your best friend, Hollis, talked you through the symptoms of demisexuality.

  No wonder holding the beautiful girl’s hand seems so much more heart-palpitating than anything else. A handhold. So simple. Just like an ollie.

  You take a fast running start, throwing your board down, and end up on a vert skate, all empty bowl-shaped pools that are so smooth, your wheels only make a small whisper against them.

  A whisper is what you got that first time you realized sex was not for you. Not with just anyone. This was...mmm, probably your biggest revelation.

  It was like you’d been feeding your body Big Macs three times a day and suddenly—a vegetable!

  Tic-tacking is when you use your entire body to turn the board from one side to the other. It’s a game of lower body strength, but also a game of knowing your weight and knowing your board. You are not a tic-tac kind of girl.

  You are not a girl at all. You are just...you.

  That.

  That one’s sticking forever. You know it all the way through to your gut.

  You make one more attempt, which probably isn’t super wise because you are so close to the spot where she’s sitting that not only will she see you bite the dust, but she’ll hear that nasty grunt you make when you meet the ground.

  You coast by.

  The friction vibrates up through your bearings and you know you’re going too fast because you start to feel a little bit of a speed-wobble, that lovely, untimely, oscillatory behavior that means bro, you are about to lose control.

  And you hate that word. Control. You hate that word because it is so very rare that you have any. Over your life, your sexuality, your gender, your pronouns, your heartbeat when you’re around your beautiful girl.

  But then you do.

  You gain control. And you nail that Caballerial.

  And the three guys who’ve been watching you make an ass of yourself all afternoon pop their boards up, hold them over their heads and let out wolf shouts.

  And you’re smiling so hard. You get like that when you nail a particularly difficult one. You’re smiling so hard you don’t notice the someone standing behind you.

  Beautiful girl. You don’t even want to control your smile here.

  “You did it,” she says.

  * * *

  WHAT HAPPENS IN THE CLOSET

  by

  Caleb Roehrig

  Vampires might be unpopular these days, but apparently nobody told them that. They keep showing up at our parties anyway.

  Orchard Bay isn’t even that big of a place, but the bloodthirsty jerks can’t seem to leave us alone. Monsters: They’re real, and they’re annoying.

  You’d think that at some point, after the third or fourth serious attack by the undead, the city council would get its act together and pass some sort of public safety ordinance. But our local political scene is a “complete nightmare,” (according to my dad) and the mayor “has her head up her ass,” (according to my mom, after two glasses of red wine).

  When the recession hit, the municipal government had the bright idea to create jobs by hiring and training a volunteer squad of vampire hunters. Spoiler alert: It was a lousy idea. And if you know anything about the Salem Witch Trials, you can maybe guess what happened when they gave paranoid, desperate townsfolk a bunch of weapons and a blanket directive to destroy human-faced monsters.

  The truth is, vampires aren’t a constant, terrifying scourge. The smart ones rarely Turn anyone. It’s in their best interests to lie low, so they’re mostly a nuisance. They mesmerize people, drink a little blood, and move on. But once in a while, some vamp comes to town looking to raise an army and take over—like four years ago, when a group of newly Turned undead swarmed the senior prom at Orchard East and ate a dozen people.

  But four years is four years, and about the only thing shorter than the span of an Orchard Bay resident’s life is the span of their memory. So this year, instead of holding our homecoming dance at the school—which is actually equipped for lockdown procedures—they’re having it at a country club.

  “What could possibly happen?” My best friend Taisha scoffs as we show our tickets at the door. She’s a lesbian, but she’s my date tonight because neither of us has a lot of options. Besides me, there are only two other out gay guys at Orchard East, and they’re together. And they’ve been together since eighth grade. “There are vampire emergency kits all over the place, and you’ve got your crucifix, right?”

  I shoot her a dirty look as I hold out my hand to get it stamped. “Did you seriously just ask, ‘What could possibly happen?’ Why not read aloud from the Necronomicon if you want to jinx everybody!”

  She rolls her eyes. “Don’t be so dramatic, Austin.”

  “He has a point, Taisha,” sniffs Julie Whitmer—senior class president, chair of the homecoming committee, and royal pain in the ass—who happens to be holding the stamp. “This is a vampire town. You should take jinxes more seriously.”

  This time, Taisha and I both roll our eyes, because Julie. She’s one of those people that makes you want to argue against stuff you believe in, just so you won’t be on the same side.

  Once we’re inside, we wander the dance floor, looking for our friends.

  The Harbor Haven Club is gorgeous. Big and modern, it’s got a whole wall of windows that look out over the water. We’re not members here—“on principle,” (my mom again, three glasses of wine). I’ve come with Julie’s family once or twice, because the Whitmers live next door to us and Julie doesn’t exactly know that we’re enemies. Anyway, it feels very sophisticated, even if the DJ for the dance tonight is talking to us all like we’re fifth-graders.

  We find Katie and Joshua right away, and then Miyu arrives with a hip flask she managed to sneak past Julie. Taisha really wants to find Gabi, because they kissed after rehearsal last weekend, and my best friend is hoping for an encore. Only, when we track Gabi down, the night takes an immediate nosedive, because she’s dancing with none other than Lucas Coronado—my sworn rival.

  Here’s the thing about Lucas: He’s one of those guys who’s funny and nice (to everyone except me), a super talented actor (I say I don’t see it, even though of course I do), and he’s, like, unfairly hot. Nobody as obnoxious as Lucas has any right to be that attractive on the outside. Oh, and he and Gabi take dance together, so they’re doing this complicated salsa thing when we find them, and the way he moves is unreal. Even though I hate him, it turns me on.

  When they’re done, Taisha is fanning herself theatrically. “Ohmygaw, you guys, that was sexy as hell!”

 
“Hey, Taisha!” Lucas greets her with this huge, megawatt smile. Then he glances at me and his tone gets, like, fifty degrees colder. “Klein.”

  “Coronado,” I reply, so frigidly my tongue almost gets frostbite.

  Here’s the other thing about Lucas: He says he’s not gay. I can’t believe it, because the signs are all right there. His skin is flawless, his eyebrows are perfectly shaped, and when he starts talking to Taisha and Gabi, his hands wave everywhere like he’s conducting a symphony, but if you so much as hint he’s gay, he gets all furious and offended. When we first met freshman year, I thought he was cute and tried to flirt with him. He gave me a look like I was covered in diarrhea and snapped, “I’m not like you.”

  So we’re not friends. Plus, there’s a chronic shortage of guys in the Orchard East Drama Club, and we’re always competing against each other for the same parts. There was an incoming senior who was arguably a better actor than both of us, but he got eaten by a vampire in July.

  The three of them strike up a conversation that almost deliberately doesn’t include me, so I turn away and take a look around. A disco ball throws light against the walls, the bass thumps, and people stand in awkward clumps because nobody but Lucas and Gabi actually know how to dance. Joshua and Katie are making out, and Miyu has joined up with some other kids from the Asian Student Union, so I head for the refreshments table by myself like a sad loser reject.

  Unfortunately, the refreshments are almost as sad as I am. Some kind of off-brand potato chips, store-bought brownie squares with the consistency of Lava soap, and a pile of withered grapes on a plastic tray. If the night was in a nosedive already, then one of its engines just exploded.

  “Dude. Is this not the most pathetic thing you’ve ever seen?” The voice is right at my shoulder, and I jump, spinning around. Standing behind me is a guy I don’t recognize, and he’s definitely not dressed for the dance. In a polo shirt and flip-flops, he looks like he came in on one of the boats moored outside. “Someone on the dance committee needs an intervention.”

  He acts and sounds very, very straight, and I shift a little, uncomfortable. Straight guys don’t usually talk to me, but I force a smile. “I’d rather eat the table.”