Tips on Having a Gay (Ex) Boyfriend

by Carrie Jones

  I shrug.

  “That’s stupid.”

  I shrug again, which is not the best comeback. My palms tingle. I pull out my ponytail holder and start all over again.

  “That’s not it at all.”

  “What is it then?” I say.

  He is silent. Then he says, “God, you really don’t know?”

  Herr Reitz passes back our tests from yesterday. I’m afraid to turn mine over.

  Tom taps me on the back. That’s what he does when he wants to share. I breathe in deep, afraid to look at him, afraid of what I’ll see in his eyes. I turn and see them, tree-bark brown and strong. There’s no pity there. No lies.

  I hold my test up. Ninety-eight. Two points off for forgetting an umlaut. Love, love me do . . .

  Tom holds his up. One hundred.

  Bob’s all alone. Not even Rasheesh is asking him what he got. Sorry, I should call him Crash. That’s what Rasheesh has renamed himself.

  “Bob,” I say, while Herr Reitz starts opening windows to let October leaf air in. “How’d you do?”

  Deer caught in the headlights, he stares and stares at me.

  “What?” he croaks it out.

  “You do okay?” I ask him. I turn sideways to face him, look over at Tom, he’s got a dog-eating-peanut-butter grin on his face, but Bob, Bob gives me a real smile and holds up his test.

  “Ninety-seven.”

  “Excellent,” I say. He keeps smiling. Tom shakes his head and once Herr Reitz starts talking a little folded-up note flips over my shoulder and lands on my notebook. I bite my lip and unfold it.

  I should start calling you, Softie.

  I snort.

  I write back: You better not.

  I toss it over my shoulder when Herr Reitz starts the radio. We’re singing again. “All You Need is Love” this time.

  “All together now!” Herr Reitz shouts. He’s dressed in green scrubs today. He lifts up his mask to sing.

  The note flips back to me.

  You like Commie better, it says.

  I scribble and sing, scribble and sing. Herr Reitz shouts, “Louder.”

  I write: I like Belle best.

  Tom gets the note, scribbles again in his boy writing, straight, scrawling yet tight.

  I unfold the note: Softie fits you better.

  When Herr Reitz turns around and starts dancing, I discreetly salute Tom with my finger. He laughs and laughs and laughs. Even Herr Reitz notices.

  “Want to share, Tom?” he asks.

  Tom lifts up his hands like he’s about to be hit by a speeding car. “No . . . No. That’s okay.”

  The moment Herr Reitz isn’t looking, the note flips back.

  Didn’t know you had it in you . . . Softie Commie Belle Pinko.

  I write back: Thanks. What’s your name again? Is it Tom, Dick, or Hairy?

  Tom chortles again and I smile too. And then I realize it, for the first time in years, I’m not thinking about Dylan. I’m not thinking about Dylan at all, and the greatest part of this is that I don’t feel bad about that. I don’t feel bad at all.

  He shoots me one more note, this time it’s on a piece of duct tape folded up and stuck together. The duct tape is shaped like a tiny soccer ball, but it’s still a note because there’s writing on it.

  It’s a quote.

  Of course.

  I have to twirl the ball around to read it all. The letters are miniscule, just absolutely tiny.

  It says: Embrace your desires. They make us love, make us create, make us long, make us live.

  Hhmm. I don’t know how to kick that ball back to him, or even if I want to.

  Reasons Why Calling Me a Fag Hag Is Not Cool

  Because it’s bigoted. Duh.

  Because it is not the most clever of rhymes.

  It’s not appropriate. I’m really a beard.

  Because all fag hag means is that I don’t care if a guy is gay and that I’m still friends with him.

  Which I don’t know if it’s really true. If I am friends with him. I want to be, but he lied to me.

  Because it makes me sound like I have long, stringy, tangled hair and a wart on my nose, which I most emphatically do not and if I did then I would have it removed. Nor do I cackle.

  Because if you do it again, whoever you are, I will pound your face into the locker until it is unrecognizable and people looking at your yearbook photo will shirk away, afraid, very afraid. Well, I would if I weren’t a pacifist. I will, however, most certainly think about doing this.

  After far too many German Beatles songs, Herr Reitz turns off the stereo and beams at us. He reaches around his back to tie his scrubs tighter.

  “So, are we all psyched to go to the German restaurant tomorrow?”

  Crash groans. I slam my head with my hand.

  “Belle, liebchen, did you forget?” Herr Reitz asks.

  I nod and blush.

  We are going to some German restaurant in Bangor tomorrow. Meeting after school. People are driving their own cars or riding with Herr Reitz. I cannot ride with Herr Reitz and I cannot drive. Damn seizures. Why didn’t Emily take German?

  Tom leans over and mumbles, “Drive with me, okay? I don’t want to get stuck with Crash or Bob.”

  I turn around. His eyes don’t show signs of teasing. His hair sticks up a little in back. His fingers are fiddling with some duct tape, making something. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  I squint my eyes, point my finger, try to be a hardie not a softie. “No name calling.”

  He makes a fake frown. “Not even Softie?”

  I make my hand a fist. He grabs it in his much bigger hand. His fingers curl around my hand. I shiver. He holds onto it for a second and then lets go.

  Crash giggles like he’s two years old or something. “Some-body likes Bel-le.”

  Tom blows him off and says, “What are you, like six?”

  Crash laughs and skips out of the room, more like he’s four. Tom shakes his head, watches him go, and hands the duct tape he’s been working on to me. His fingertips graze the palm of my hand.

  “It’s a guitar,” he says.

  It is. It’s a perfect tiny guitar, with twisted-up duct tape for the strings and a hole in the center.

  “Wow,” I say. “I can keep this?”

  He nods, stands up, and rocks a little bit on the balls of his feet. Herr Reitz scoots by and yells, “No hanky panky in here, guys.”

  I glare at my teacher. My teacher laughs.

  “It’s really good. It’s like a sculpture,” I say to Tom once Herr Reitz is completely out the door. “You’re really into duct tape.”

  “I’m really into a lot of things,” Tom grabs his books and I blush hot and crazy and shove that comment right out of my mind and then he says, “You sure you don’t need a ride home?”

  “Yeah.”

  When he leaves, I sit there and sit there, staring at my little duct tape guitar and wonder why my hand tingles like this, like electricity, like love meter and passion twist and good, good things.

  I am not so shallow that I’m over my one true love already. I am not. I refuse to be.

  I grab my things and follow everyone else out the door. Still tingling, my hand wraps itself around the duct tape guitar.

  Emily and I trot through the old pale halls. It smells like sloppy Joes and sneakers. Just a few stragglers, overachievers like us, hustle off to soccer or cross-country practice, heading to clubs. It’s like the paleness of the halls has swallowed everybody up, pinned them into lockers or paled them out of existence. Maybe the dullness of it pushed them out the school doors, into their cars, the yellow rinky-dink busses, the sidewalk toward home and work and home and work.

&nbs
p; “There’s not much to look forward to in life, is there?” I ask Emily.

  “The dance,” she says.

  I groan.

  She tries again, because Emily is like that, an Energizer Bunny–type friend, but instead of keep going and going, she keeps trying and trying. “Freeing the oppressed? Stopping the torture? Ending human rights violations?”

  We have Amnesty International after school today. I’m the president. My mom’s big into Amnesty because she founded it back when she was in high school. Then it was all about apartheid (my mom calls it apart-hate) in South Africa and El Salvador. Now, it’s about genocide, torturing suspected terrorists, and women’s rights. It’s crazy that twenty-five years have passed and we’re still fighting over the same things: respecting people, recognizing that people are people, human kindness.

  My hands tremble and the Postum I guzzled down at lunch sloshes in my otherwise empty stomach.

  Emily grabs my elbow. “You okay?”

  I nod. I think about the little duct tape guitar I put in my purse. “Yep. I’m good. No. I’m scared.”

  “It’s okay to be scared,” she says.

  “I’m a weenie.”

  “You’re not a weenie.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  She laughs. “No, just a dweeb.”

  Dylan is in Amnesty International . . . I’m afraid to see him . . . I have to see him.

  Em whips out her camera.

  I put my hands up, pleading. “Not another picture.”

  “No,” she flips it around so I can see the back where you review the pictures. “Look at this.”

  It’s a picture of me, way too close. “Ew. You can see my pores.”

  She pokes me in the arm. “No you can’t. Look at the whole picture.”

  My face is white, my eyes are down and seem about to tear. Everything about this girl is drooping.

  “Is this the picture you took at my house after Dylan dumped me?” I ask her, pushing the camera away. Em keeps her “important” pictures on her camera. She can store about 150 on there. She downloads most of them, but the ones she wants to remind herself about she keeps, so she can just stare at them any time. I do not like that this is one of those “important” pictures. My body heavies thinking about how sad I look.

  “No,” she shuts the camera off. “It’s what you looked like right after you were named Harvest Queen and Dylan kissed you and then went over to high-five Bob.”

  I swallow. She waits. I swallow again. “You think I’ve always known somehow?”

  She shrugs. She hugs me. She says, “I think the two of you were not meant to be.”

  There’s a part of me that does not want to think that I always knew something was wrong. There’s a part of me that wants to shake my head and stomp my feet and make it all go away. This is probably the same part that didn’t look at the evidence that was right before my eyes, and even though I know this, it doesn’t stop me from defending the fairy tale.

  Words tumble out of me, “But he was so perfect. He was the best hugger ever and he was so philosophical.”

  “Preachy.”

  I glare at her. “Philosophical.”

  Em grabs her camera again and fiddles with it. I wait. I try to breathe slowly, good, deep breaths. Finally she says, “Do you ever think that maybe you romanticize Dylan a little bit? You know, you only think about his good stuff and forget how he always burped after he ate spaghetti or how much his feet stank and stuff.”

  “I don’t do that,” I say, but even as I say it the truth of it sinks into my stomach and pits itself there. I ignore it and grab Em’s hand, yanking her toward our meeting. “We’re so late.”

  We bullet into the classroom, the president and the vice president.

  “Late as usual,” announces Julie Speyer, but she’s smiling. People are used to Emily and me being late.

  “Sorry.” I blush and look around.

  There’s no golden blonde boys. There’s no newly announced gay boys with pink triangles on their shirts and sparkles in their green, green eyes. My breath escapes my mouth, pushed out by tongue and tension. I imagine it’s wind that whips across the classroom, touching the walls, looking for him everywhere. He’s not here, it tells me. Not here.

  I breathe back in, maybe relieved, maybe disappointed, maybe both. I tell my hands to stop trembling and start the meeting.

  I can do this. I can live my life. I can.

  I read them this, taken directly off the Amnesty website. By the time I get to the end I can hear the tension in my voice rising.

  Amnesty International today welcomed the detention of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori and called upon Chile to ensure that he stays in the country pending a judicial determination whether to extradite him to Peru or to try him in Chile.

  Amnesty International considers that the widespread and systematic nature of the human rights violations that were committed under the government of Alberto Fujimori between 1990 and 2000 constitute crimes against humanity under international law. During his term in office, Amnesty International documented hundreds of cases of “disappearances” and extrajudicial executions. In addition, torture and ill-treatment by the Peruvian security forces throughout the ten years that Alberto Fujimori was in power were widespread.

  How can things in the world get to be so wrong?

  “That sucks!” Kara Raymond of the black clothes and multiple piercings shouts. Back in grade school, she used to wear all purple and looked like Barney, the annoying dinosaur on PBS, that’s because she’s built like Barney, with too much in the front. She doesn’t have a green belly or a tail though.

  “Let’s write letters,” Emily says.

  Kara pumps her fist in the air. Her bracelets jangle. “Letters!”

  I clear my throat. “Can I read the next one?”

  Everyone nods for me to go ahead. I clear my throat. This one goes for the gusto, because this one is about us.

  I read and as I do the door pops open and Dylan, golden boy, all serious comes in. He shoves his hands in his pockets. The edges of his pink triangle crumple and curl in, as if they’re rebelling and attempting to become a parallelogram or a trapezoid, something, anything other than a triangle.

  Muhammad Faraj Ahmed Bashmilah and Salah Nasser Salim ‘Ali

  These two friends from Yemen told Amnesty International that they were arrested, detained, and tortured for several days in Jordan. They said that they were then held incommunicado without charge or trial in unknown locations for more than a year and a half. They said they were transported between detention facilities by air, held and interrogated by guards they say came from the USA. Neither was ever told why they were detained.

  Emily’s hand shoots up to cover her mouth. She stares at me. I stare at her.

  Julie Speyer sputters in her chair, but Kara’s lost all her manic energy, depressed, overwhelmed.

  “It’s like El Salvador all over again,” I say. “Only we are the ones who make people disappear.”

  My words seem hollow to me, just hollow. I don’t know why I think we can do anything, ever. We can’t even fix ourselves. One of the millions of long fluorescent lights in the room sputters above my head.

  “We’ve got to do something,” Emily says, scratching at some dry skin on her hand. “More letters?”

  No one says anything. The light blanks out, but the others stay on so no one notices.

  “I’m sick of writing letters,” I sit up straight. I put down my papers. “How about a concert?”

  “A concert.”

  “Yeah, like a benefit concert,” I say. “A benefit for the disappeared. We could have local groups play.”

  “That’s cool,” Julie says. “And the next night we could do like a poetry reading or something. And the ne
xt night something else.”

  “Yeah, a whole week of stuff,” Brian, the quiet boy in the back says.

  We all tuck our hair behind our ears, except Kara. She’s shaved hers off. We all get started. We all know it might not do anything, nobody might pay attention.

  “But we’ve got to try,” I mutter. “We’ve got to try.”

  “Don’t you think,” Dylan says, “that maybe we should start working on discrimination at home, instead of overseas?”

  No one says anything.

  He stomps all the way into the room, swings the door shut behind him. Emily’s breath whizzes out between her teeth. My hands shake. I swallow. I remember to breathe in, breathe out, breathe in.

  Beautiful Dylan boy looks at all of us, one at a time. He is on fire, his gold glow is fire glow and it rages around us unstoppable. “Do you know how many people called me a fag today?”

  No one answers.

  He hits the wall with his fist and we all jump. We’re a pretty pacifist group, Amnesty International. We aren’t used to violence in our actual presence and Dylan is a strong guy.

  “Thirty-seven!” he shouts at us. “Thirty-seven people called me a fag. I thought these people were my friends. I can list them! Belle, you want me to list them? Dakota Murphy, Jake Star, Mimi Cote, Eddie Caron, Colin Troost . . .”

  All his gold anger ebbs away as we watch him crumple. Julie stands and opens up her arms. Dylan steps into them and she hugs him. He leans into her body. That should be my body, supporting him, keeping him up. Soon, one by one, all the members of Amnesty International walk over to Dylan and Julie and hug them. Arms wrap around backs. Shoulders and bellies press together. Heads bow.

  I sit on the top of the desk and watch them. Emily comes over and grabs my hand. Without saying anything, she pulls me over to the group and we reach out our arms and try to encircle them, but we can’t, we can’t. The bodies are too many. The need is too big.

  “Postum was created by Charles Post. He went to this town in Michigan for a health cure and decided that coffee and caffeine were the root of all evils. So, he created Postum and the Postum Cereal Company. He started Postum and then he created Grape Nuts,” I tell Emily in the car on the way home. We have not talked about the meeting. We have not talked about Dylan.