Big Love

by Rick R. Reed

  She headed for the bathroom and, on the way, shouted to Truman, “Good morning, sweetie! Thanks for getting breakfast going. You’re a peach!”

  “How do you want your eggs, Mom?”

  “Scrambled. Like my brains.” She went into the bathroom and sat on the toilet. After she finished, she looked at the countertop around the sink. It looked like a beauty school explosion had taken place. Almost all her makeup had been taken down from the medicine cabinet. There was a crumpled box of Special Effects hair dye in the wastebasket in a shade called “Cupcake Pink.” Patsy had no idea where that had come from.

  She washed her hands and tried to ignore the nagging feeling developing in the pit of her gut. “Lord, what’s he gone and done?” she wondered aloud to her reflection.

  There was only one way to find out. She slipped from the bathroom and stepped into the kitchen. It wasn’t a long journey in a house that totaled only about 800 square feet.

  And there her boy was, at the stove, turning bacon. He turned to smile at her.

  Patsy smiled back. Her breath caught in her throat, and without thinking about it, she clutched the front of her housecoat. She wanted to freeze this moment in time, file it prominently in her mental book of family images.

  Her boy was beautiful. Radiant.

  A truer, better version of himself.

  SETH WAS glad he was the first to lay eyes on Truman as he emerged from the beat-up Dodge Neon that morning. He’d wanted the chance to accompany the kid to homeroom, just to make sure everything was okay. He wanted Truman’s first day back to go smoothly, with no undue stress.

  Truman waved to his mother, whom Seth could see behind the wheel. The car sputtered smoke out of its exhaust and sounded more like a diesel truck than a compact car. Truman turned to him, so bundled up that Seth wouldn’t have placed him if he hadn’t first seen Patsy at the wheel. He reminded Seth of Kenny from South Park.

  Truman’s down coat had its collar pulled up, shielding his lower face. The top half was also nearly hidden under a bright red woolen cap, pulled down so low that all one could see were Truman’s eyes.

  Seth smiled and started toward the boy. “Hey there! Good morning. Glad I ran into you.”

  “Hey, Mr. Wolcott.” Truman lagged a little behind as Seth led the way to the double doors, which were open for the brief period between first bell and final, tardy bell.

  Other kids swarmed around them.

  Once they were inside, Seth walked with Truman to his locker. He repeated what he’d told him before, how he and “Mr. Bernard” would both be there for him, especially today, when Truman was trying to make what had to be a difficult reentry back into the high school. “Anytime,” he told Truman, “Even if I’m in class. You come get me if there’s anything you need.”

  “Sure, Mr. Wolcott,” Truman said.

  The tone and tenor of Truman’s voice was good, strong and not indicative of nervousness or fear. Seth felt a bit of relief creep in. Maybe things would be okay. At least for today.

  Truman removed his hat, so the first thing Seth noticed was his hair.

  A bright pink stripe now divided his pale blond hair down the middle. Seth didn’t mean to, but he gave out a little gasp. He chuckled.

  Truman turned to him to ask, “You like it?” He pulled off his coat and turned back around to hang it in his locker.

  And that’s when Seth saw the rest—the eyeliner, the lip gloss, the oh-so-subtle touch of blusher on Truman’s pale cheeks.

  Truman repeated, “Do you like it?” He grinned. “You said I should be myself. I think that’s some solid advice.” He removed his coat to reveal the white T-shirt emblazoned with its homemade design and legend across the chest in jagged letters:

  Sissies Rule.

  He had paired the T with his dowdiest accompaniment—relatively speaking, anyway—a pair of skinny black jeans. On his feet, sensibly distressed combat boots.

  He looked like a cross between RuPaul and Billy Idol.

  “I will accept any of the ‘f’ words in regard to my appearance,” Truman said, smiling. “Fierce. Fabulous. Fine. Even ferocious.” He shook his head and wagged a finger at Seth. “But not faggy. Unless, of course, I say it. If I say it, I own it.”

  Seth could feel kids in the hallway stopping behind them. Stopping to stare. Stopping to giggle. Seth had an urge, and hated himself for it, to shield the boy from their view.

  But what was he supposed to do with this? Sure, he’d told Truman to hold his head up high, to be proud of who he was, to love himself. But he didn’t know Truman would take things to this extreme.

  In his own odd way, Truman looked adorable, Seth thought. It was what an old friend of his back in Chicago referred to as “genderfuck,” or playing around with conventions of male and female and challenging them, reclaiming them, and most importantly, defining for yourself alone how you would interpret them.

  Along with the sound of snickering, there were whispers. And Seth thought, Here we go again. Without thinking, he took hold of Truman’s arm and led him toward the office. He knew the school’s guidance counselor office sat empty. The position had fallen victim to budget cuts, necessitated by a levy that had failed during the last election.

  “Tru-woman! Lovely to see you!” A kid in a varsity letterman jacket called out, and his posse guffawed.

  “Did you see that fag?” one guy wondered to his buddy as they passed.

  Once inside the office, Seth closed the door. “Truman. Are you sure you wanna do this?” Seth himself wasn’t certain how he should proceed. On the one hand, he didn’t want to see Truman set himself up for more ridicule and pain. But on the other, in a weird, stronger way, he was proud of the kid and, yes, his courage. Truman had taken Seth’s message of self-love and strength to an extreme, sure, but it demonstrated strength of character and an unwillingness to accept anything less than life on his own terms. Seth didn’t want to be the one to wipe out that new and, he suspected, very fragile sense of self.

  And Truman came back to him with what Seth thought was the best answer possible.

  “Look. Kids here hate me. Right? They think I’m weird. They think I’m a queer, a sissy, a fag, a pantywaist. You name it, I’ve been called it. Nobody wants to be around me. I guess they think they’ll be tainted somehow by gay cooties.” He giggled. “So why bother?”

  “What do you mean?” Seth asked, although in the back of his mind, he knew he already had the answer.

  Truman shrugged. “Why not just be who I am? They’re gonna hate me either way, so why not have some fun with it? Show them I don’t give a crap about their opinion of me. Because I am what they say.” He looked at Seth. “I own it.” He pointed to the legend on his shirt: “Sissies Rule.”

  Seth plopped down in the guest chair in the small office and shook his head but was unable to keep the smile from his face. “They do indeed,” he said softly. He then looked up at Truman. “But what if no one agrees with you?”

  Truman smirked. “They never did to begin with. This isn’t about other people. This is about me. I don’t want to spend my whole life being someone else, what someone else thinks I should be. I want to be me. I don’t want to look in the mirror and see a person I don’t recognize.”

  “Wow. I couldn’t have said that better myself. Truman, I have to warn you, though, you’re going to—”

  Truman held up a hand, cutting him off. “I think I know what you’re going to say. I’m in for a world of hurt. People, especially kids my age, can be cruel.” He shrugged. “I realized I don’t care. I’d rather be different than one of the crowd.”

  “That’s some very good thinking.” Seth stood up as the final bell for homeroom sounded. “We both need to get going. Stay fierce. Stay strong. And know that I am here for you.”

  They started from the room. Seth reached out to lay a hand on Truman’s shoulder. He felt so bony, so insubstantial that a wave of protectiveness rose up in Seth’s gut. “I have a prediction for you.”

  Truman
glanced over his shoulder.

  “You’re going to find people like you. Compatriots. Others who march to the beat of a different drummer. Maybe not today. Maybe not next year. And maybe it will only be a scattered few, but I promise you, they’re out there. And when you find one another, you’ll know. And they will be family.”

  Truman stopped for a moment. He peered into Seth’s eyes. “Thanks, Mr. Wolcott. I’ll keep my eyes peeled.” He grinned and hurried away.

  “God help him,” Seth whispered to himself and headed off to homeroom.

  IT WAS Dane’s free period. Normally during this hour he’d hang out in the teacher’s lounge, ostensibly to grade papers and catch up on his lesson planning, but the truth was it was a time to gossip and joke around with his fellow teachers, a release valve, a break in the daily adolescent battles with people who understood.

  But ever since he’d made his admission to practically the entire school that he was gay, Dane felt better being off by himself. Not that anyone treated him any differently. There was a surprising lack of interest among his fellow teachers, and in fact Betsy Wagner had suddenly seemed to take more of an interest in him than she ever had, as though he’d become someone different from who she encountered every day since she’d begun working at the school five years ago. Dane almost felt like a victim of reverse discrimination.

  So he spent his free period alone in his classroom with the door closed and the lights off. It wasn’t exactly sitting in the dark, since one wall was all windows above the storage shelves. There was a lot of light streaming in. He sat on one of these shelves now, staring out at the valley spread below him, watching the Ohio River’s curve as it made its way south toward a rendezvous with the Mississippi.

  The class just before his free period, freshman composition, had been… how should he put it? Different? Interesting? Terrifying? It seemed there were no words in the English language, or at least in Dane’s vocabulary, that could describe the complicated feelings that arose within the confines of that fifty-five minute period.

  Maybe it would have gone a different way if Truman hadn’t been the last one to enter the class.

  Just before he came into the room, the class was, as always, abuzz—lots of laughter, whispers, hurried conversations before the second bell rang and everyone simmered down. Or at least that’s what they were supposed to do. Dane usually had to yell or say something shocking to put an end to the classroom chatter.

  Not today.

  Today, Truman made his entrance.

  The class went immediately silent. It was like some divine hand reached out and with a tap, hit the Mute button. The class went so silent so fast it was almost eerie. Mouths dropped open. Eyes actually widened.

  And it wasn’t just his students who reacted with stunned silence. Dane was frozen too. There was Truman, the kid who usually tried to hide behind the pile of books and notebooks he always carried under one arm, eyes cast downward. But today there was Truman, the unwitting—or was he?—center of attention.

  Pink hair. Makeup. And the T-shirt with its legend about sissies.

  Dane was taken aback. Should he pull Truman from the class? Take him into the hallway and try to explain that he had taken things too far? That he was only courting his own downfall? That the best he could hope for by day’s end was name-calling and the worst, a beating or two?

  There wasn’t time for that. It would have only drawn more attention to the boy, and that was the last thing Truman needed, as far as Dane saw it.

  He watched as Truman made his way to his assigned seat near the back of the classroom. On his way there, a pudgy kid named Adam Lance, with a face like a French bulldog’s, stuck out his foot to trip Truman.

  Truman stopped, put his hands on his hips, and stared down at the offending foot. He cocked his head. The silence seemed to expand, and Dane watched as Adam’s face began to color.

  Truman pointed to the foot. “You might want to put that back under the desk where it belongs. A person could trip and break something.” Truman made a little gesture, a flick of his wrist, indicating that Adam’s foot belonged under his desk and not in the aisle.

  Truman did not move, and Adam sat there stymied, Dane thought, but also not moving.

  Finally, Truman said, “You missed out, Lance. You didn’t get to trip me. Not today. Better luck tomorrow.”

  Truman continued to stand there until finally, with a sheepish grin and a roll of his eyes, Adam Lance put his foot back under his desk.

  Truman smirked, said “Thank you,” and took his seat.

  Dane’s lesson plan was all but forgotten. His mind felt like someone had come in with a Swiffer and dusted away any preparation he had made. He drummed his fingers on his desk and finally stood.

  He licked his lips and addressed his class. Today needed to be something beyond the vagaries of dangling participles. Without really planning what he was going to say, he simply asked, “So, what does everyone think?”

  No one responded until Dane prompted the class again. They simply stared at him with bovine eyes, as if he too had dyed his hair pink. It was like he’d asked the question in Mandarin Chinese.

  He cleared his throat and glanced back quickly at Truman to gauge his reaction. Truman simply met his gaze with interest. Dane looked away and repeated, “So. What does everyone think of Truman’s new look?”

  Adam Lance was, predictably, the first to pipe up. “He looks like a fag. Course he always looks like a fag, but today he ramped it up. Called in the big guns.” He snickered.

  There were a few nervous titters before the class returned to silence. A few people shifted in their seats. Dane thought this wasn’t what they were expecting, and maybe it made some of them uncomfortable.

  “What does a ‘fag’ look like, Adam?” Dane wanted to know. “Although I should stop here and correct you. Maybe you should refer to gay people as just that: gay. Or lesbian.” Dane smiled. “Or LGBT.” He stepped forward, a little closer to the class. “Or maybe just human, but perhaps that’s too broad for you. Maybe that scares you because it would necessarily include you under the same umbrella.” He drew in a breath and moved forward to stand directly above. “So tell us, so we know, what a gay person looks like. To you.”

  Adam looked desperately around the room, his narrow piggy eyes hungry for someone to take his side. But Dane noted that no one would even return his gaze.

  “I don’t know,” he finally said.

  He opened a spiral-bound notebook and began furiously staring at it, his face crimson. The notebook page, Dane noticed, was blank.

  Dane moved away. “I’m sorry, Adam. You seemed so sure, I just thought you could enlighten us.” He let his gaze roam over the rest of the class, all with expressions Dane could read as “Please don’t call on me. Just please—don’t.” He had to ask, though. He’d dived into the pool headfirst, in a manner of speaking, and the only way not to drown was to swim. “So, anyone else? Does someone else have the courage to say what they think of Truman’s look today?”

  Bonnie Petrovich, a girl with curly dark hair and big eyes who was president of the John 3:16 Club at the school, raised her hand timidly.

  “Bonnie?”

  “It’s wrong,” she said. “Boys aren’t supposed to look like him. It’s unnatural.”

  Dane nodded. He didn’t want to jump all over the girl and make her defensive. He wanted this to be an open and honest dialogue. So he held in check a lot of things he wanted to say and instead asked, “Unnatural? What makes it that way?”

  She squirmed and slid down lower in her seat. “I guess it’s the makeup. Boys aren’t supposed to wear makeup.”

  “And it says that in what? The Bible?”

  Bonnie tittered—a nervous laugh. “No. I don’t think so, anyway.” She rolled her eyes and sat up a little straighter. “I’ll check and get back to you on that.”

  “Then what makes it unnatural, Bonnie? I notice you have a little makeup on yourself today. Is that blue eye shadow I see?”r />
  The class laughed. And Bonnie slumped lower in her seat. Softly, she replied, “But I’m a girl.”

  “Yes, you are. And a very pretty one,” Dane said. “And I would imagine you’re a girl who gets up in the morning and decides what she’ll wear, even what makeup she might apply. Why do you do that?”

  “Because I want to look decent, respectable when I’m at school.”

  “Okay. But why do you make the choices you do? Why not green eye shadow? Or high heels over those… what are those?”

  “Hunter boots,” Bonnie filled in.

  “Got it. So you make choices in the morning. Why?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Let me try to help. I would say that all of us, to a degree, when we dress ourselves, or style our hair, or—for some of us—put on a little blush and lip gloss, we’re making choices in how we want the world to perceive us. Clothes, hair, makeup, all of these things are visual cues to the world about who we are. Don’t you agree, Bonnie?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Maybe Truman doesn’t want to hide.” Dane looked back at Truman, whose attention was now rapt, laser-focused on Dane’s face. “Truman, do you have anything to say? Maybe you can help us understand the decisions you made this morning.”

  Truman shook his head. “No, sir.”

  Dane didn’t want to put the boy on the spot any more than he already had. He was about to ask the class again about self-expression and how we want the world to perceive us when Truman piped up in a trembling yet strong voice. “My appearance speaks for itself.”

  Dane nodded. He went back to his desk, where he reclined on the edge of it, gnawing for a moment on a pencil he picked up from its surface. He thought about how he himself was dressed today: a pair of Dockers khakis, a button-down blue Oxford-cloth shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a pair of clean running shoes. The outfit was pretty much his uniform. He looked like the male version of a soccer mom, he thought.

  But was it him?

  Do we dress the way we do to show the world who we are or to hide it?