by Scott Hale
“Good girl,” Lux whispered, and then to Asher: “You ever see him around Tiffany’s?”
Asher thought long and hard and then said, “Few times, yeah, actually. He was with his bros.”
“Bunch of fuck-boys, if you ask me,” Ramona said. “They all went off to the same college, you know? He didn’t get in.”
“They hung outside the bar, tried to pick some fights, but they were a bunch of twigs,” Asher said. “Salinger never said anything, though. I’d say he looked embarrassed.”
“All things considered, I thought he was an alright dude, until that hand job shit,” Ramona said. “I think he wanted in on our group. Caught him eavesdropping a few times.”
“He did,” Lux said.
“Did he talk to you personally about it?” Fenton asked.
“I just knew,” Lux said, dodging the question. “He wouldn’t have made the cut, though. He never knew who he was.”
“He sent you some messages, didn’t he?” Echo asked.
Lux’s eyes went dark. She took a deep breath, and swallowed it, like a demon might swallow a soul. “Fenton gave us the facts. Ramona?”
Fenton dealt in details, and Asher had his finger on the pulse of Bitter Springs’ various scenes. Echo hadn’t found her niche, yet. When it came to Ramona, besides her foul mouth and not-so-cheery disposition, she was their psychologist. After all, she was getting a minor in the field.
“Depression and anxiety?” Ramona said. “I bet that started before Salinger’s dad left, but when his dad left, it got a lot worse. He was an alright dude, but then he started hanging out with shittier people… probably because we wouldn’t let him hang with us.”
Fenton looked away, embarrassed.
“He was trying to find acceptance in all the wrong places,” she said. “I heard he came to your get-together at the micro-brewery. I bet he was rejected there, being straight and all.”
“Had no right to be there,” Lux said.
Ramona looked as if she disagreed, but didn’t voice it.
Lux sat there a moment in quiet contemplation. She fingered the gaps in the table’s metalwork and stared at the clouds that were crawling across the sky. There were so many thoughts racing through her skull, one could almost see the human braille of their being etched into her forehead. She took out her cell phone, considered a message, and then swiped it away. Then, decided, she nodded and began.
“Salinger Stevens was a twenty-one-year-old, white, poor but still over-privileged, cisgender male who had been battling a losing battle with both depression and anxiety. His mom was a push-over when he was a kid. You all might not know that, but I do. Believe me. His dad was a piece of shit. Big surprise. In fifth grade, not sixth, Asher, his dad walked out on him. Judy Stevens butched up, and so did Salinger. He started trying-out for all the teams, started making friends with all the jocks and meatheads. But he was soft on the inside. I always knew he wasn’t straight, but I didn’t want to label him.”
The group simultaneously raised their eyebrows and bit their tongues.
“Salinger Stevens was gay. His ex knew it, and he couldn’t have sex with her because of it. He was living a lie. Tried to be tough, but he was a total twink. He wasn’t talented enough to get into college for sports, and he wasn’t smart enough to get into college with his grades. It’s no wonder he started spewing conservative propaganda. Reaction formation. That’s the word to use next time, Ramona.”
Ramona muttered an enraged, “Thanks.”
“Here’s what I think happened,” Lux said. “He came to my gathering thinking he could come out, but it was too much for him. He was too mainstream. So, he left, but he was followed by a man, obviously, and I bet he brought this man back to his place. Depressed, anxious, he was looking for anyone to make him feel better. But instead he got himself killed by some hateful, white male bigot, age thirty-five to forty, who had probably read his crude hand job message on his page and targeted him for it.
“You know what I think it is? I think someone doesn’t like the changes we’re making. I think someone thought Salinger was close to us—probably a teacher, or a parent; maybe even his father—and they killed him to get to us. The ‘faggot’ being seared into his chest is obviously the work of someone who was just as repressed as Salinger. Someone who probably had sadomasochistic or psychotic tendencies. His face had been degloved. I tried to look that up on my phone, what that looks like, but I can’t even. Obviously, they want to strip us of our identities. They want to reduce us to ‘faggots’ and ‘queers’ and ‘niggers.’ I think—”
A server, Ansel, approached their table with an uncomfortable smile upon his cleanly-shaven face. In blue jeans and a button-down shirt, he dressed the part of an employee at the shop, but his face, according to Lux, was all wrong. It was a mask, she told the group once, to hide to who he was deep inside, which was a cisgender male who was guilty of cultural appropriation on account of dating a Hispanic woman. According to Lux, he had no business working at the coffee shop; he should’ve had some bullshit job, like coaching the girls’ volleyball team at Bitter Springs High. The only tip she ever gave him was to wake up.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Ansel said, “but we’ve received some complaints about some of the things being said at this table. We want this to be a safe space for others, but the aggressive nature of your conversation is making some of our patrons uncomfortable.”
Lux’s jaw dropped. She stared at him as if he had just spent the last few seconds speaking in a foreign language. Pointing at him, looking at Fenton, Asher, Ramona, and especially Lux, and with a rattle in her voice, she said, “Are you kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me right now? There is someone out there trying to thin out the LGBTQIA community, and we’re trying to figure out how to stay safe. This safe space? I know. That’s because of us. We’re here to be safe. This micro-aggressive shit isn’t going to fly. Let me speak to your manager.”
Ansel nodded and began to turn away.
“You know what?” Lux stood, nearly knocking her chair over. “Don’t bother. We’re leaving.”
Echo was the first to rise. Fenton second. Ramona, slowly, the third. Asher polished off his coffee, and even then, he didn’t stand upright completely. He stayed crouched, hopeful perhaps, that this might blow over.
“You all know what to do,” Lux told the rest of them.
And with that, she grabbed Echo’s hand, the same way a mother might grab a child’s when they dawdled too long in the toy aisle of a store, and stormed off the patio. She was two paragraphs deep into her new blog post before they even made it to their bikes.
Ramona liked working at the library about as much as she liked reading books; that is, she couldn’t be bothered with either short of threats of death or dismemberment, or even worse, being fired. She was a closeted dyslexic, and that, in combination with a nasty case of ADHD, made even the sight of words exhausting. Like Salinger Stevens’ long-con, working at the library was a front for something Ramona found incredibly embarrassing, because she equated her struggles with literacy to her white trash side of the family, as if she had been doomed to inherit what she so affectionately called their “bumfuck genes.” But as she worked her way through her freshman year of college, another possibility emerged through her coursework: that the dyslexia, ADHD, or both, were psychogenic in nature—that they weren’t rooted in anything physical; her wack-ass mind had simply made them up. That presented a whole host of other issues for her to contend with, but she always felt she had a strong control over her mind. It was her body she couldn’t best.
The library was in transition today; the head-honchos had ordered more computers, and to fit them in, Ramona and her co-workers had to break-down the shelves and box-up the books that’d been on them. Trading books for computers; the idea made Ramona laugh. Even the goddamn library had gone corporate.
With the coast clear to coast, Ramona ducked into the aisle where they kept the anime DVDs (no one who watched these was going to
rat her out) and spent an excessive amount of energy casing the scene for her superiors. If she had even put a fraction of that energy to her actual work, she could have easily had several shelves broken down and boxes filled, without any worries about getting chewed-out for sitting on her ass all day. But that wasn’t the point. She knew that. It was a game. If anyone actually did anything, workers and bosses alike, they’d all be out of a job. It was the illusions they maintained that mattered. And at this rate, given her pathetic productivity and her lips firmly pressed to the head-honchos’ asses, she’d be running the place in no time.
Tiny sneakers sneaking across the dull gray, blue-speckled carpet set off Ramona’s internal alarm. She straightened up and backpedaled out of the aisle, eyes probing for gaps in the DVDs to see who was coming.
“Cool!” a little girl yelled. And then, even though she was alone, in a whisper: “Cool.”
Eyebrows cocked and ready to rock a mean consternation, Ramona parted the DVDs, sending a movie about andromorphic owls and their high school lovers one way, and a show about post-modern demonic astrologists the other. With a grin of satisfaction, she rested her chin on the shelf and felt her faith in humanity restored.
There was one aisle clear of the computer-induced construction; or rather, one portion of an aisle—five shelves—that was growing at an inspiring rate. It was Ramona’s aisle, or rather, her idea she had planted and, with a little bit of Lux’s special brand of brutality, seen to fruition.
The Bitter Springs library hadn’t exactly been lacking stories that had been written by, for, or in regards to the experiences of People of Color, nor had there been a dearth of literature written by, for, or in regards to the experiences of the LGBTQIA community. But there wasn’t much of it, and it wasn’t easy to find. It was hard to say if Lux, or their group, were really responsible for the increased awareness and presence of individuals from minority groups in town, but in Ramona’s experience, it was undeniable that the need and interest was there. Although she wasn’t a reader herself, she understood the value of books, and words, and the influence they had on others.
So, like an adventurer from a far-off land carrying stowaways from home, she released her foreign beliefs into the local library system and let them build their hives, for inquiring minds to buzz about, when once they’d had nowhere else to go.
And though the aisle had been busy, mostly with people from her age group, it was the little girl she heard and now saw there, crouching down, sloppily pulling out children’s book after children’s book, that made Ramona feel as if the brutality, the threats, and the not-so-peaceful mid-week protest had been worth it. The little girl was black, with an afro so dense and dark it could’ve been a moon with its own field of gravity. In her hand, she had a picture book about some black family and some good moral of the story (again, Ramona detested reading), and at her heels, there was another picture book about some white family and, undoubtedly, some good moral of the story. It wasn’t that one was better than the other (or was it? Ramona was still trying to figure that part out); it was that the little girl had finally found what she was looking for, and that it was cool.
Ramona watched the girl gather up a gluttonous amount of books to consume and then detached her chin from the shelf. She took a step back, and backed into something. Her heart went haywire. One hearty “fuck you!” on her lips, she twisted her neck. Asher was standing behind her, making a face.
“Fuck you,” Ramona said, the words rolling over her teeth like air being vacuumed into space. “The hell? Why’re you always sneaking up on people? Poor fucking trigger discipline.”
Asher looked around the library, to hear if anyone else had heard her cussing. “I just thought I’d drop in on you. So sorry.”
“Why?”
“No reason.”
Ramona huffed and rolled her eyes. As she slipped past Asher—
“To apologize.”
She stopped, turned around.
“For… earlier. I’m sorry I made fun of your make-up.”
Instinctively, Ramona touched her cheek. She had taken all of it off the moment she got to work. People said she looked better without it, but what did that mean? That she couldn’t doll herself up worth a damn? It was such a stupid fucking thing to care about, and she couldn’t believe she bought into the grotesque bazaar of glam. Sure, she’d entered of her own volition, but now she wasn’t so sure. She wasn’t sure of many things these days. She felt captive.
“Yeah, well, whatever.” She smiled to show that she forgave him. And then, bluntly, she said, “I got work to do,” which meant she really hadn’t forgiven him at all.
Asher ballooned his cheeks out like a chipmunk’s mid-foraging.
“Oh my god, what? What do you want?”
“Can we, like, sit somewhere? This cartoon stuff—” Asher grabbed one of the DVDs—a middle school girl was bent over on the cover, her panties glowing like some ancient artifact before a throng of men—and shuddered, “—gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
“You’re seriously overusing that phrase.”
“Heebie.”
Ramona’s eye shut, as if she were having a stroke.
“Jeebies.”
“Come on!” She grabbed him by the front of his shirt and shoved him forward. “Go sit in one of those oversized chairs, you child.”
Ramona led Asher to the chairs, which were properly lubricated with human grease. Grabbing a magazine off the reading table beside it, he laid it down over the cushion, the same way he might toilet paper over a toilet seat. Satisfied with the coverage, he plopped down to a loud, crinkling sound that landed all nearby eyes on him.
“Speaking of children,” Asher said, nodding to the library’s entrance and the slowly opening, glass doubled-doors. “Looks like the cavalry has arrived over there yonder.”
Son of a bitch, it was Sunday, wasn’t it? Ramona copped a squat next to Asher, put her best “I’m on my fucking break” look on her face, and watched as one by one, stunted legs after barreled bodies, a troop of kindergartners came shambling into the library. At the head of the procession was their teacher, Ms. Lucy, in loose fitting jeans and with a head of wild hair that screamed “kill me.” Holding up the tail end of the sniffling, sneezing, booger-eating brats was a single parent—an over-privileged, overbearing, overweight, and, if you asked her, underappreciated white mother of one who attached herself to these library outings like a tick who never knew when too much was too much.
Her name was Tessa—a name that damned anyone who donned it to a life of mini vans, mini bars, and those mini bibles so often found in the nightstands that accompany one-night-stands. Her child was the one farthest away from her, nearest the teacher, as if he were prey mingling amongst prey, to disappear from a predator. The child’s name was Morgan, and Tessa claimed Morgan was non-binary. Like kids with a peanut allergy, pronouns were explicitly forbidden from being administered to Morgan, out of fear the moldable child may take on a form that differed from the one Tessa saw fit. Initially, Ramona supported Tessa’s determination, and wished her own parents had been supportive at that age. But when a second child joined the library group a few weeks ago, she wasn’t so sure where she stood on the matter.
The second child’s name was Zoe, or Zeke, depending upon where Zoe, or Zeke, fell upon the spectrum that week. Today, Zoe was Zoe, and Zoe had on skinny blue jeans, a nicely fitting cardigan, and a choker. Zoe’s hair was slicked back like a 1920’s gangster (well, as much as a kindergartner could pull off such a look), and on their back, a pink backpack that matched their pink-and-white striped shoes. Zoe looked comfortable, and none of the other kids gave them shit.
It was and continued to be such a stark contrast to Morgan and Tessa-fucking-le Fay (yeah, Ramona had read a book or two in her day) that Ramona found herself feeling better for Morgan. Today, as on most days, Morgan was rocking an aquamarine dress, combat boots, earrings, and rainbow-colored hair that matched the unicorn backpack they wore. It looked good o
n Morgan, but Ramona imagined it was how Tessa wished she could have dressed, before her stomach started touching her zipper. It was the way Morgan wore it, and the way Zoe wore what they wore, and how Morgan tore at the dress like they had ants crawling over their skin, like a schizophrenic deep in a psychotic break. Ramona had always struggled with her body and the dysphoria it brought her, but Morgan looked downright depressed, and violent, as if they might hurt themselves, or someone else. They looked captive, too.
“Those two the two you were telling me about?” Asher asked.
Tessa closed in on Morgan. Morgan gave her the slip and took off with half of the group towards the computer banks.
“Sure is,” Ramona said.
Tessa stood at the doorway, faking a “non-binaries will be non-binaries” face at Ms. Lucy, who shrugged and headed, with the rest of the kids, Zoe included, to the computers.
It was then, with everyone’s attention off Tessa, that Ramona saw it. Tessa made a fist and pretended to punch the back of Zoe’s head. Her arm didn’t go much more than a few centimeters, but the gesture was undeniable. And to add insult to injury, in that way only children know how, Zoe turned around, grinned an ankle-biter grin, and said, wispily, “Bye Misses T!”
Tessa’s eyes went small and dark, and she took on all the jittery qualities of an irate amphibian. “Be a good boy,” she said, emphasizing the word, as if it were a spear she was wrenching into Zoe’s side.
Zoe didn’t catch her meaning, or care, because with a skip, Zoe took off.
Asher grabbed the armrest of Ramona’s chair and coughed out, “Shit, she hit her!”
“What?” Ramona shook her head. “What’re you talking—”
He was talking about the blood, not on the back of Zoe’s head, but the patch of bleeding through the pocket of their jeans, where the outline of their small cell phone bulged. Zoe didn’t appear to be in any pain. Before Ramona could even think about calling out Zoe’s name, they were gone, back into the cozy confines of the other children, to watch videos on the Internet on repeat until it was their eyeballs that bled.
