The Princesses of Iowa

by M. Molly Backes

  The homophobic and hateful signs on the front lawn of Willow Grove High School shocked me. As much as the video about Matthew Shepard had upset me, I still felt safety in my distance. Matthew was killed in Wyoming, but I lived in Iowa, where people were kind. How could this be happening to us? These were our people, Midwesterners living under the same wide blue skies, standing on our school’s front lawn with signs proclaiming ADAM AND EVE, NOT ADAM AND STEVE and HOMOSEXUALITY = DEATH. Iowa was supposed to be better than that.

  Traffic past the school was slow, each driver craning his neck for a better view of the action. I was no different, searching the crowds as I drove, picking out the distinctive shape of Jeremy Carpenter standing under the flagpole near the Stonehenge circle of benches. A few feet away from him stood a camera crew, its young reporter smoothing her hair as the videographer fiddled with the equipment. I watched the media crews like you watch a crush at a party, not wanting to seem too eager, too interested. A few feet behind them, I saw Elizabeth and Alison with signs that said ERASE HATE and JUSTICE INDIVISIBLE. Warmth spread through my chest slowly, a feeling I finally identified as pride. We’d done this. Jeremy and Elizabeth and Jessica and Alison and Jenna and Shanti and everyone else, working through lunch, pulling together over paint markers and tagboard signs to make this happen. We’d done this.

  I parked out by the back tennis courts and hurried across the parking lot to the heart of the action.

  I couldn’t get to Jeremy’s side without passing through the God Hates Fags camp. I half jogged past them, trying not to look, trying not to be seen. I was nearly there when Jake grabbed me.

  “Paige, wait.”

  “Don’t touch me,” I said, struggling to pull free.

  He squeezed my arm harder, imploring. “Paige. Will you listen?”

  With one good twist, I broke his grasp. “No! I can’t believe you brought those people here!”

  “Babe, I didn’t. That’s what I wanted to tell you.” He reached out again, but I stepped back. Unable to look at his face, I trained my eyes over his shoulder instead, seeing Lacey and Geneva down near the street. They stood before a camera, earnestly nodding as a J. Crew–model type held a large microphone to their faces. Just feet away, a pale woman marched back and forth carrying a large sign. Her thin lips were pinched in a line. KEEP OUR STUDENTS SAFE, screamed her sign. Her body was rigid as she turned north, toward Jeremy’s half of the school’s wide lawn. The other side of her sign said SCHOOL DAYS, NOT SCHOOL GAYS.

  “Look at this!” I said, sweeping my arm across the whole spectacle. The news vans, the protesters, the students, the worried teachers, the crowd growing larger every minute as curious neighbors and parents and townspeople joined the milling herds of students. “You did this.”

  Jake shook his head miserably. “I didn’t mean to, Paige. That’s what I’m trying to say. I never meant for it to get this big. My dad —”

  “Oh, your dad? It’s never your fault, Jake. It’s your dad, your mom, it’s Lacey, it’s your friends, it’s alcohol, whatever. Take responsibility for once.”

  He grabbed for my sleeve. “Paige, no — I didn’t — my dad was the one who called these guys . . . I didn’t mean for all this . . .”

  “It was you, Jake. You told the lie that got Mr. Tremont fired. You caused all of this, even if your dad was the one who made the call,” I said, then spun on my heel, leaving him alone in the hateful mob.

  When I reached the other side of the yard, my sister dropped her placard (HATE IS NOT A FAMILY VALUE) and threw her arms around me. “You’re here!”

  “Hi!” I said, startled and pleased.

  “Jeremy’s over there, talking to the media,” Mirror said, tossing a hitchhiker’s thumb over her shoulder. “Isn’t this great?”

  I looked past her to where Jeremy stood, his red hair catching the morning sun as he spoke earnestly before the camera. Funny, on the surface he looked so much like Lacey and Geneva talking to that reporter, I thought. But Jeremy actually belonged in front of the camera, while Lacey and Geneva, I was certain, were butting their way into the spotlight merely for the chance to be on TV. “Great?” I echoed.

  “Yeah,” Mirror said, nodding eagerly. “Jake’s bringing in the God Hates Fags people makes our position so much stronger.”

  Feeling sick, I thought about Jake’s words. His voice had sounded so small, so lost. In fact, I couldn’t remember a time when he’d sounded worse. It set me off balance, made me nervous. Since when was Jake smaller than the world he built around himself?

  A familiar voice called for my sister across the quad. “Mirror! Mirror!” Ethan ran up, stopping abruptly when he saw me. “Oh.”

  “Hi,” I said.

  He took a long breath and looked at my sister. “Mirror, Jeremy needs you over by the Channel 27 people.”

  My sister’s ocean eyes searched the crowd. “Okay,” she said, smoothing her dyed hair. “I’ll be right there.”

  Ethan ducked his head. “Great.” Without looking at me — looking anywhere but — he said, “Catch you later,” and hurried off.

  Mirror sighed. “Not good, huh?”

  I shook my head unhappily. “Not good.”

  She glanced toward the Channel 27 van. “I would stay —”

  “Jeremy needs you,” I said. “You’d better go.”

  “Okay,” she said, looking as though she wanted to say something else. After a moment, she shrugged and ran off across the lawn.

  The crowd had to be more than a thousand strong now, between the students and the bystanders and the teachers and the protesters. Above my head, I heard the low chopchopchop of the news helicopter. I shivered, pulling my jacket more tightly around my shoulders. Jeremy was still talking to the Channel 27 people, still nodding solemnly. The picture would be appealing to TV viewers, I thought, Jeremy standing beneath the flag and the turning autumn leaves.

  Shanti snuck up on me a moment later, startling me. “When did you get here?” she asked.

  “Twenty minutes ago?”

  “It’s terrible, isn’t it?” She gestured to the circus around us.

  “I hate it.” My voice was bare, stripped clean of its defenses. “I don’t think I can stay.” I didn’t mean to say it, but the moment I did, I knew it was true.

  “You want to go find Mr. Tremont?” Shanti asked. Far overhead, a vee of geese flew across the rich-blue sky, muttering and honking.

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  “Great,” she said. “I’ll go get Ethan.”

  But of course Ethan didn’t come with us. How could he, when he couldn’t even stand to look at me? I’d been a little ways away when Shanti asked him; he was on board until Shanti mentioned that I’d be coming. Then he stammered and stuttered his way back out of the invitation. Jeremy needed him. Jenna wanted his help on a donut-and-coffee run for the gang. I had tried to fade into the tree I stood behind, had tried not to feel so thoroughly rejected.

  “So how are you, really?” Shanti asked now.

  Over the next rise, I knew, was a falling-down old barn, collapsing more into its gray center with each passing day. Every time I drove this road, I waited to see the barn with the thrill of things falling apart, half welcoming and half dreading the day it would finally be gone. Eventually someone would demolish it completely and clear out the rubbish, maybe build something new in its place, but for now it remained: wound in vines and wildflowers, bowed in the middle with outer beams pointing to the sky, splintered and deteriorated but remaining. I sighed. “I’m here.”

  She looked at me from the driver’s seat, and for a second it was there: the recognition, the understanding, the feeling of being on the exact same page. She smiled faintly. “Me too,” she said.

  Mr. Tremont wasn’t at the Java House or Prairie Lights or the Thai restaurant where Shanti said she’d run into him once before. Nor at the university library, the bagel place, the funky little record store. “This is stupid,” I said, kicking at a squarish rock on the sidewalk. I was emba
rrassed for us both, thinking we could just wander around downtown and magically run into him. A flock of pigeons suddenly took to wing, casting shadows against the September-bright buildings.

  Shanti sighed. The sun glinted off her black sunglasses, flashing like cameras. “I don’t know,” she said, and I got the feeling that she was talking about more than whether we’d been stupid to come.

  She kicked a rock next to me, and we scuffed our way down the street. Fat cinnamon squirrels hopped across the sidewalk in slow parabolas. A plane droned overhead, followed by a lazy white tail. Shanti and I matched our feet together. Scuff, scuff. Scuff, scuff. A man rode his wobbly bike past us, its wire basket packed full of junk. Lights turned green, red, green. Cars paused, drove. People strolled by in ones and twos, students mostly, in sunglasses and baseball caps, with their faces to the sky. It didn’t seem right that people should be moving through their daily lives like nothing was wrong.

  And then we found him. He was sitting on a bench near the river, sandwiched between Padma and the bearded guy from the reading, Mason. They were watching some little kids feeding ducks by the river and didn’t see us until we were practically in their laps. Shanti cleared her throat loudly, and they all looked up together.

  “Oh,” Mr. Tremont said, drawing in a breath. He looked anxious, older.

  Padma clapped her hands together in delight. “Our friends!” She beamed up at us, but she looked older, too, the skin around her eyes darker and more crinkly.

  “Hi,” I said, lifting my hand awkwardly, like a wave or a gesture of peace.

  Mason smiled at us. “Hello, girls.”

  The five of us stayed quiet for a moment, wondering how honest we could be. Shanti broke the silence at last. “Mr. Tremont,” she cried. “This sucks!”

  He nodded gravely. “Indeed.”

  “People are marching at school today,” I said.

  Mr. Tremont sank slowly back into the bench. “Oh, God.”

  Padma looked at me searchingly. “People?”

  “They have signs,” I said. “They say things like ‘God hates fags.’”

  “Oh my God!” Padma was indignant, horrified, but Mason and Mr. Tremont looked resigned.

  “We’ve seen this before,” Mason said sadly. “In college.”

  “One of our professors was going to marry her partner in the university chapel,” Mr. Tremont added. “People were protesting outside their wedding.”

  “People suck!” Shanti said angrily.

  “It can be difficult,” Mason agreed. A breeze kicked up, ruffling the leaves above our heads and tugging the river into long ripples.

  “But it’s illegal, Cam,” Padma said. “They can’t just fire you for being gay!”

  Mr. Tremont shrugged. “Allegations were made . . .”

  “But they’re lies!” I said.

  “Yes,” Mr. Tremont said, “but parents were calling, and Dr. Coulter . . . Well, it doesn’t matter. The point is, I chose to leave.”

  Shanti’s voice was pleading. “Mr. Tremont, we need you. It’s not the same without you.”

  “It’s not,” I agreed, thinking of the postapocalyptic feel of his classroom, when he hadn’t yet been gone a full day. “You made school mean something, Mr. Tremont. You changed us.”

  He sighed, smiling faintly. “None of us is delicate enough to touch anyone else without hurting them a little bit.” His voice had a hollow, reflective quality, as if he were reciting a quotation only he could recognize.

  Padma dabbed at her dark eyes. Mason reached down and squeezed his hand. My gaze seemed to get stuck there, staring at Mason’s furry little hobbit hand wrapped around Mr. Tremont’s perfect one. There was a tiny glint of silver from the band on Mr. Tremont’s hand, and I searched Mason’s for a matching one, but his hands were jewelry free.

  “Mr. Tremont,” Shanti said again. “We need you.” Blocks away, the faint sound of a siren oscillated through the early-afternoon streets, bouncing off buildings and skipping across the river. I ripped my eyes from their hands and tried to focus on the conversation.

  “I’m sorry, Shanti.”

  “How can you stand the injustice? The hatred? Why don’t you take a stand — you could make a difference in the world! You could make the world a better place!” She planted her fists on her hips, looking just like she had on the playground in fourth grade.

  “Shanti,” he said quietly, “even if they asked me back, I wouldn’t go. I couldn’t. I don’t want to be a political figure. I just want to finish grad school and live my life.”

  “But you owe it to —”

  “I owe it to myself to finish my dissertation. Who I love shouldn’t be a political issue. I don’t want to be a poster child for gay rights. I just want to write, to write . . .”

  “A sonnet cycle about high school?” I asked.

  He smiled. “Exactly.”

  Shanti stomped her foot. “But it’s not fair!”

  “No, it’s not,” he agreed, and looked at us. “So use it.”

  He gave us his email address and phone number before we left, offering to write college recommendation letters, as if that somehow made up for abandoning our cause — his cause! Shanti and I took his offered scraps reluctantly and tucked them into our pockets before heading back to the car for the disappointing drive home.

  We sat in silence for a long while, each of us lost in our thoughts. Finally, I gave voice to the question that had been on my mind since I saw them holding hands. “So,” I said. “Is Mason, uh . . . ?”

  “Mr. Tremont’s boyfriend?” Shanti asked. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”

  “So he actually is gay.”

  Shanti gave me her fiercest look, her eyes sparking and snapping. “Yeah?” she asked. “And?”

  The and was that it was slightly jarring to see it up close. I’d never known a real gay person before, and while I would fervently defend Mr. Tremont to all the small-minded people in Willow Grove, it was just kind of . . . weird, I guess, to see it for real.

  “Who he loves doesn’t change who he is,” Shanti said, “and if you aren’t cool with it in two seconds, I will seriously kick your ass and dump you on the side of the highway.”

  I smiled sheepishly. “No, I’m cool. You’re right,” I said. “He’s still Mr. Tremont, right? Even if his boyfriend is kind of . . . boring.”

  Shanti giggled. “Okay, I wasn’t going to say it. But Mr. Tremont is just so . . . It’s hard to imagine anyone being good enough for him. But you’d think it would at least be, like . . .”

  “A prince?”

  She laughed. “Yeah, or like, a Nobel laureate.”

  “Who’s devastatingly handsome.”

  “But totally humble.”

  “Of course!”

  “Who goes to Haiti twice a year to build hospitals.”

  “Who speaks seven languages and can write love poems in each one.”

  “Who built his own ark before Noah and saved the unicorns.”

  We were laughing at our own stupidity and at the senselessness and futility of the entire day. Everything was so messed up — and so surreal. Our giggling finally died down, and we both sighed at the same time. “Mason’s just so . . . normal,” I said at last.

  “And so short!” Shanti cried, and we were both off again, giggling and guilty and slightly crazy. It was awful, but God, was it a relief just to laugh.

  We got back to Willow Grove around dusk, and Shanti pulled up alongside my car in the school parking lot. I reached for the door handle but she shifted her car into park. “Wait.”

  I turned to look at her. She bit her lip. “I have to tell you something.” The radio suddenly blared the opening bars of a bouncy dance song, and Shanti reached forward to turn it off. “Um.”

  I braced myself for another lecture about Ethan. She’d been mercifully silent on the issue all afternoon, and I assumed she’d gotten it out of her system. I sighed and leaned back in my seat.

  Shanti looked down at her hands. “I, um
.”

  The last sliver of red sun disappeared behind the tree line. Out on the highway beyond the football field, the cars had their lights on, a string of traveling stars.

  “I was the one,” she said at last. “Who, um, told.”

  “Told what?”

  Her face was creased with shadow in the fading light. She sighed. “On Jake.”

  I turned. “What?”

  “Don’t hate me,” she said. “It’s just . . .”

  “What? It’s just what?”

  Her voice came out in a flood. “He was drunk! And he could have hurt Ethan, seriously hurt him — he was out of control! He could have hurt you! And it’s not fair that people like him get away with everything, and they can just ignore the rules and everyone else just kowtows to them — it’s not fair! And he’s a real asshole, Paige. You should have heard what he said to Ethan when you weren’t around in school, in the hallways. He’s an asshole and you can do better and you’re in love with Ethan not Jake!”

  I knew I should argue, should put her in her place. Should say: It wasn’t your right to tell. And: Who are you to decide who I love? Shouldn’t I get to decide who I date, just like Mr. Tremont? But silence fell across me like velvet, heavy on my shoulders, and I kept my mouth closed.

  “You hate me, don’t you? Paige, look, I’m sorry. Dr. Coulter probably wouldn’t have even acknowledged it, but Mr. Berna was standing right there and he’d seen Jake push Ethan, had heard him yelling, and you know how strict he is about the zero-tolerance policy with the cross-country runners, and I bet he’s tired of seeing the football dudes get away with shit, too, so he jumped on it and it was out of my hands and . . . I’m just tired of watching the jocks get away with everything.”

  I wasn’t mad. I wasn’t anything. I felt like a little piece of me was floating above, watching the scene, taking notes for later. Analytical. Look at Paige. She’s not reacting at all. She’s just sitting there. That’s kind of strange.