My Fairy Godmother is a Drag Queen

by David Clawson

  I grabbed the shoe, extracted myself back into the hallway, slipped off the other shoe, and placed them both on top of the chairs, which I scuttled back to the safety of my new friends.

  Oh, so if you’re wondering what the second thing I learned was, it was that the Kennerlys had arrived at the Autumnal Ball. Which meant that Iris’s plans for Kimberly, and the family, were on their way to possibly coming true.

  “Her tits are as fake as mine,” Special Kaye said as she peeked between the curtains screening the stage from the mingling socialites in The Grand Ballroom. Aphra Behn shouldered her aside to get a look for herself. “Well, hers are real. And she’s got the warm knees to prove it.”

  I chuckled, but then turned to see Coco shaking her head. “Are they always so mean?” I asked.

  “It’s the oldest story in the book—the bullied become the bullies.”

  Special Kaye twirled away from the curtains. “I’m not mean. I’m just honest.” Then she began to sashay towards the back of the stage. “And I’m so nervous I honestly think I’m about to vomit.”

  Turning to face us, Aphra Behn sighed jealously as she tapped her long fake nails against her distended belly. “If only I could vomit. For years I’ve dreamed of being bulimic, but I can only get the binge part right. It turns out I just have no gag reflex.”

  Special Kaye harrumphed. “I wonder how that happened.”

  Aphra Behn smiled proudly. “You’re just jealous.”

  Special Kaye slid her hands along her flat belly. “Am I?”

  Aphra Behn’s smile turned into a sulky frown. “Bitch.”

  “Ladies, no fighting!” Coco said as she clapped. Then she held out a hand to each of them. “It’s time for prayer circle.”

  “Prayer circle?” I asked, not expecting to hear anything about prayer from these three.

  “It’s what we do before every performance. Haven’t you ever seen a Gaga concert video?” Coco said, as they joined hands. “Why don’t you go find yourself a good spot to watch the show from while we get ourselves ready? Just meet us backstage afterwards, okay?”

  I nodded, then walked off as quietly as I could as an unexpectedly serious mood overtook the trio. It occurred to me that for all of their frivolity and joking, this meant a lot and was very important to them. I guess acceptance and approval always are.

  Once I left the backstage area and entered the ballroom, I had the strangest reaction. All I wanted to do was hide. I didn’t know any of these people, and while my family was there, I had this weird feeling like I would get in trouble if they found out I’d made it in. Maybe just the idea of explaining it seemed too complicated. I’d have to justify hanging around a bunch of drag queens. After feeling sorry for myself for not getting to attend the ball with my family, now that I was there with them, I wanted to keep it a secret.

  So I found my way to the corner of one of the side alcoves that bordered the ballroom so I could look out at the rich and powerful people. I tried to figure out which conversations were between old friends, and which were between people scheming to appear like old friends. There was definitely a sense of seeing and being seen, but it took me by surprise that no one looked like they were having much fun. It all seemed like so much work. Somehow I’d always imagined the kind of expensive event that I couldn’t afford to get into as being lots and lots of fun. There was plenty of glamour, sure, but even the laughter had an oddly showy quality.

  And then the first of the evening’s many unexpected things happened.

  I guess because I was trying to unobtrusively observe by slipping myself into the shadowed corner, unless you knew I was there, I was easy to miss. Because before I realized who was talking, I heard a young man’s voice trying to be jovial while still complaining. “I wish I hadn’t let you drag me to this thing. They’re like piranhas.”

  And then a woman’s voice said, “Some people would find the attention flattering.”

  And then an older man’s voice said, “Just make sure you get a pre-nup.”

  And then the woman’s voice mixed good humor with a tinge of exasperation, “Jonas, you’re not helping.”

  Jonas?

  I turned my head to see less than two feet away from me none other than Jonas Kennerly—American royalty, ex-presidential candidate, richer-than-God Jonas Kennerly. And beside him was the object of the security guard’s MILF fantasy, Jonas’s wife, the legendary beauty, Jennifer Kennerly. And they were both talking to the man I’d seen earlier on TV and thought was probably the handsomest man alive, J.J. Kennerly, who turned out to be even better looking in person.

  I’m not quite sure how long I managed to go without taking a breath. I’m not even sure if I blinked, I was so afraid of doing anything that might draw attention to the fact that their private conversation was being overheard.

  “J.J., I just want you to meet Missy Easton’s daughter. She’s at Yale and was on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar last month.”

  “Mom, you know it’s tough out there for a pimp,” J.J. said as he looked to his father for sympathy.

  Jonas, however, put his hand on J.J.’s shoulder and asked, “Do I need to give you the St. Crispin’s Day speech? ‘The fewer men, the greater share of honour.’”

  “Thanks Dad,” J.J. said, “but I’m thinking more about shuffling ‘off this mortal coil.’”

  His dad laughed, and I, if I’m being totally honest, might have swooned. How many guys can top a quote from Shakespeare with another quote from Shakespeare? Especially hot guys?

  All I could think about was how lucky Kimberly was. I mean, sure, she hadn’t even met him yet, but if anyone had a legitimate shot at it, it was Kimberly. Then my stomach soured a little, because even though she was my stepsister, honestly, she was kind of a bitch a lot of the time, and it wasn’t fair for someone like her to end up with someone like him.

  I almost ached as I watched the Kennerlys reenter the melee. Sigh. Straight girls have all the luck, I couldn’t help but think.

  And then the second—but not the last—totally unexpected thing of the night happened.

  I was still trying to keep my eyes on J.J. Kennerly as he and his parents made their way across the room, when I heard a very familiar voice say, “I know I just saw him over here. I’m sure of it!”

  “Mom, it’s not well-lit, and you’re probably seeing double by now anyway, so would you quit jerking me around the room with every supposed Kennerly sighting?”

  “Kimberly, I’m telling you, it was him! If you had come with me the second I told you—

  “I was in the middle of a conversation!”

  “—we would have made it here in time. Damn it, that waiter with the wine is walking in the other direction!”

  No sooner had they shown up than Iris and Kimberly were off in pursuit of one kind of refreshment or another.

  If I hadn’t breathed or blinked while the Kennerlys were standing so close, I’m not sure if my heart even beat while my own family was there. Maybe I was afraid that it would burst the bubble of my unexpected adventure.

  And then, after that, it occurred to me that I’d also passed up the opportunity to warn them to tone down the pursuit. I’d just heard J.J. saying he felt like he was being attacked by little flesh-eating fish, and Iris’s level of subtlety was somewhere between a barracuda’s and a great white shark’s. Later I would think about this a lot, questioning my own motives in a lot of what eventually transpired.

  The ballroom lights dimmed as spotlights hit the stage curtains, and I had to abandon my safe little corner to get a better view. But that only meant finding a pillar a few feet away. Little steps are generally the way I like to take life’s changes, especially when wearing shoes that are way too big.

  Now I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but I admit that when I had found out Coco and company were performing a drag routine to songs by The Supremes at the biggest society event of the season, I had my doubts. I just didn’t see how all of those elements went together. But once they start
ed performing, I finally realized the cleverness in choosing them to open the entertainment portion of the festivities. The old-school music had the more staid attendees bopping their heads, and having it performed by drag queens made it edgy enough to win over the more adventurous. Also, having only seen them bicker and kvetch for the last hour, I had no way of knowing how crisp their unison would be, nor had I been prepared for the fearless charisma that Coco exuded in front of a crowd.

  After their third song, I added my own enthusiasm as they took their bow (actually, curtsies), then slipped through a door so that I’d be waiting for them in the hallway behind the backstage area. From the sounds of the applause, I think they took another curtain call, and then it sounded like the comedian who was emceeing might have engaged them in a little patter before he moved onto his regular shtick. I don’t know exactly what they were up to after that, but I was left waiting for longer than I’d expected, and feeling rather antsy, I fell into my usual habit of pacing. Of course, I also started obsessing about all of the homework I should be doing instead of standing around waiting for three drag queens who were evidently not going to show up. It wasn’t a terribly long hallway, and as I began to feel increasingly anxious when Coco and the girls failed to appear, I got distracted as to whether I was supposed to have met them somewhere else, and I wasn’t really paying attention to the whole walking thing, because, you know, most of us don’t have to by the age of seventeen, which meant I wasn’t really paying attention to keeping on the too-big-for-my-feet shoes, and the left one slipped off, and I guess I was trying to slip my foot back in at the same time I was turning, and, well, I sent the shoe flying into the air like a David Beckham field goal. Right at the face of the guy who had just rounded the corner.

  Who just happened to be—yeah, this is the BIG totally unexpected thing of the evening—J.J. KENNERLY!

  Yes, that’s right, I had just inadvertently kicked a shoe right at the face of The Most Eligible Bachelor In America, The Most Handsome Man I Had Ever Seen In My Life, and The Man Who Was Supposed To Save My Family.

  Just the two of us. Me and him. Him and me.

  And, of course, the shoe that I had just accidentally torpedoed at his no-doubt-ridiculously-expensive dental work.

  And then, as if that weren’t embarrassing enough, I GASPED. Yes, an honest-to-god, did-it-out-loud in a really big, fat, gay way, gasp.

  Luckily all of those pictures in magazines and on-line of J.J. Kennerly playing sports aren’t just photo opportunities, because just as quickly as I emitted my never-to-be-lived-down-at-least-in-my-own-head gasp, his hands flew up and caught the shoe.

  Then, casually holding it out to me with a charming smile and a sparkly glint in his dark brown eyes that you’d swear was a movie special effect, except that this wasn’t a movie, it was real life, and my miserable real life at that—have I mentioned that when I first met J.J. Kennerly at the Autumnal Ball, that I FREAKING GASPED?—he said, “Did you lose something?”

  I think I stared at the shoe in his hand for an extremely long time. (Really nice hands by the way, doesn’t chew his nails.) Or maybe it just felt that way. Maybe it was just a split second. But it felt to me like forever. Regardless, when I finally managed to lift my eyes away from the proffered Ferragamo, an inferno of embarrassment exponentially increasing my body temperature and breaking a sweat onto my brow, I looked up into J.J. Kennerly’s eyes, and ….

  I swear I’m not making this up just to make myself feel better, or to make it sound like I’m in denial about how queeny I must have sounded when I let out “The Gasp,” but when J.J. Kennerly’s eyes met mine, I heard just the slightest, softest, wouldn’t-have-even-heard-it-if-everything-and-every-other-sound-in-the-world-had-not-just-stopped, intake of breath come from J.J. Kennerly.

  We both stood perfectly still—him holding out the shoe to me, me unable to move a single muscle—and stared into each other’s eyes. It was probably only for five or ten seconds, but it felt both instantaneous and infinite.

  So, yeah, THIS turned out to be the most unexpected thing of the night.

  But it wasn’t the last one. Because there was one more. And it came just at the end of those five or ten seconds that J.J. Kennerly and I had been staring into each other’s eyes.

  “J.J.?” a female voice said.

  J.J. and I both flinched, and then I realized I knew the voice.

  “Kimberly,” I whispered.

  J.J. swallowed in what was really more of a gulp. “Is that your girlfriend?” he asked softly.

  “My sister. And she doesn’t know I’m here.”

  Suddenly I was moving very quickly, and it was in the direction opposite Kimberly’s voice. Without even really being aware of it, I was running, in just the one shoe, which somehow stayed on fine. Through doors, and hallways, and out into the unexpected night.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE MORNING AFTER

  I don’t remember anything about the subway ride home. My mind was totally occupied by reliving that eye-to-eye moment I’d just had with J.J. Kennerly. I had looked openly at him, and he—I was quite sure of it—had looked openly at me. I wouldn’t be able to explain it in any concrete way, but there was just something that let me know with one hundred percent certainty that we had shared one of life’s rare and special moments—the moment of the indescribable wow. Love at first sight, the whole shebang. Me. And J.J. Kennerly. No matter how I tried to figure out other ways to interpret what had happened, none of them mattered, because it was just so obvious.

  Okay, so maybe I can’t say that I really believe in the concept of love at first sight, but I do believe in the moment when you see someone and know that you easily could fall in love with them. Even a cynic should be able to accept the possibility of this moment, because there’s no denying that most of the people we see on any given day we know, even with a brief glance, that we could never fall in love with them. So, if the negative extreme inarguably exists, then why can’t the positive extreme? It’s only logical, right?

  The first thing I did when I got home was hang up the designer suit jacket Special Kaye had brought for me, and that was when I let out my second gasp of the night. (Don’t judge. I’m being honest about these things, so the least you can do is not judge. I’m already punishing myself enough as I recall all of this, believe me.) I had run out of there so speedily, with only the thought of getting back to the safety of my own room, that I had totally forgotten to say thank you and goodbye to Coco and the girls, and I had, arguably, stolen a very expensive jacket and one very expensive shoe. I could only hope that maybe Coco had run into J.J. Kennerly, seen the other shoe, recognized it, and somehow gotten it back.

  Although then it occurred to me that if J.J. had hightailed it out of that hallway as quickly as I had—well, almost as quickly, since I’d fled before he’d even reacted to Kimberly’s approaching—then he was probably gone by the time Coco arrived. And then it occurred to me that if he hadn’t gotten away before Kimberly arrived, and if he and I really had shared the moment that I knew we had, well, then Iris’s plan for Kimberly to save the family’s future by marrying into the Kennerly fortune had hit a major obstacle. Then I started to wonder if I’d been judging Iris’s dependency on white wine too much all of these years. Because, although the one time I’d taken a sip and hadn’t really understood the appeal, I was tempted to revisit something which I had perhaps previously discounted too quickly.

  Instead, realizing how dirty my un-shoed foot had probably gotten even though I’d had a sock on, I decided to take a shower to see if it would help me relax. After I was cleaned up and in my pajamas, I went downstairs to wait for the report from the rest of the family’s perspective on what had happened at the ball. I sat on the couch, and then laid down, and evidently I fell asleep, because the next thing I knew I heard the sound of laughter, and I opened my eyes to see Iris, Kimberly, and Buck all leaning over the sofa and smiling down at me.

  “Oh Chris!” Kimberly said.

  “W
e’re so happy for you,” Iris said, throwing her arms around me in perhaps the first genuine hug she’d ever given me.

  Buck playfully punched my arm in more of a tap. “We’re proud of you, guy.”

  I wanted to ask, who are you people and what have you done with my family? But instead, as I sat up, I said, “What’s going on?”

  “It’s J.J. Kennerly!” Kimberly sat down right beside me, our legs touching, as she threw an arm around my shoulder. “He’s in love with you! All he could talk about during the entire ball was Chris, Chris, Chris!”

  As I swallowed my stomach out of my throat, I managed to get out, “But—”

  Iris smiled understandingly as she sat down on my other side, kindly patting my thigh. “It’s okay, Chris, we know you’re gay, and it’s okay. We just want you to be happy.”

  “That’s right,” Buck said. “And now that there aren’t any secrets between us anymore, let’s start acting like a real family.”

  It was all so surreal. My head was swimming, but they went on.

  “That’s a great idea,” Iris said. “In fact, in the morning, I’ll make breakfast, and Buck, you’ll take out the trash.” Buck nodded.

  “What about me, Mother?” Kimberly asked, her flawless brow showing a slight wrinkle of concern. “What do I get to do to help?”

  Iris thought about it for a second. “I know! You can take Chris shopping to get some new things for his first date with J.J.!”

  Kimberly let out a squeak of excitement.

  Although, alas, as it turned out, that squeak wasn’t Kimberly. It was the front door. Because it had all been surreal; it had all been a dream. A dream that it almost hurt to wake up from. They say that it’s always darkest before the dawn, but sometimes it’s really darkest the moment you realize a dream was just a dream.

  But as I sat up and turned to face them as they entered the room, I had one of those confusing, groggy moments when you wake up, and the events in real life are too much like what was just happening during your slumber, so you aren’t sure if you really are awake, or if it’s one of those Inception dream-within-a-dream things. Because they all were beaming huge smiles, and Kimberly actually somehow looked even fresher and more beautiful than she had at the beginning of the night. There was a never-before-seen effervescence to everything about her and, perhaps even more disorienting, to Iris, too.