Parrotfish

by Ellen Wittlinger

  BRIT: How about that Kleinhorst guy? He’s big, and I hear he hates her. He’d probably do it.

  SARAH: We’d have to get all new makeup, though. I mean, I wouldn’t use my stuff on a queer—I’d have to throw it all away afterward.

  MIRA: Why? You think Angela has cooties?

  LAURA: I think Angela has a mental illness. Why is she doing this to me?

  Oh yeah, I made up a few involving Eve, too, but they were even more depressing. Besides, Eve’s good buddy Danya said what she thought right to my face, so I didn’t have to imagine it.

  I ended up not coming out to Mr. Reed, but I think he knew anyway. How could he not? He was a smart guy and not deaf or blind. I kept trying to decide if he was treating me any differently, but, if he was, he was only nicer. And then I wondered if that should make me mad too, but you can’t just go around being mad at everybody all the time. It’s exhausting.

  “The assignment sheets are up for December—we’ve got two shoots together!” Sebastian said when I walked into TV class one afternoon. “First we’re taping the chorus concert Friday night.”

  I groaned.

  “Hey, it’s better than another basketball game. All those giants with long, skinny legs and size fifteen feet.”

  I could see Sebastian’s point.

  “Besides,” he whispered, “Kita Charles is in the chorus!”

  I whipped my head in circles to make sure Russ Gallo wasn’t standing near enough to hear.

  “Will you shut up about her?” I whispered back. “I told you I’m not—”

  “Yeah, I know what you told me. I also know what I know. Every time somebody says her name, your face lights up like a jack-o’-lantern.”

  “Sebastian, please,” I begged.

  “And you’ll be interested to know that I heard her and Russ arguing this morning before my math class, which, by the way, Kita is in. We’re becoming quite friendly.”

  “Where’s the list?” I asked, turning away from him.

  He followed me to the bulletin board where Mr. Reed had tacked up the new assignment sheets.

  “You have to work tomorrow morning’s assembly, too,” Sebastian pointed out. “With Russ.”

  “So? I like doing assemblies. I get out of part of the classes right before and after.”

  “It’s a basketball assembly.”

  “I know. You have to go too—everybody does.”

  “Yeah, but I can sleep through it,” Sebastian said.

  “Sleep? Through all that cheerleader noise—the whooping and screaming?”

  “Well, I can close my eyes, anyway.” He pointed at a spot farther down on the second page. “Did you see this? We’re going to the dance together after all!”

  There it was: DECEMBER 23, WINTER CARNIVAL DANCE: RUSSELL GALLO, SEBASTIAN SHIPLEY, GRADY KATZ-MCNAIR.

  Wait a minute. GRADY KATZ-MCNAIR. Why hadn’t I noticed that before? I slid my eyes back to my other two listings. Yup, Grady.

  “I never said anything to Mr. Reed about calling me Grady. Did you?”

  “I think I mentioned it to him,” Sebastian said.

  “You mentioned it to him?”

  He turned his palms skyward in the universal gesture for “What’s your problem?” “He heard some of the other teachers talking about it, and he asked me if you were changing your name. So I told him.”

  “Did you tell him why I was changing it?”

  “Grady, I don’t think that’s much of a secret anymore.”

  Another thing occurred to me. “Did you ask him to put us on the crew for the Winter Carnival?”

  He looked away. “I might have—”

  “Mentioned it. Jesus, Sebastian, are you running my life now?”

  “Well, somebody has to! Besides, it’ll be fun!”

  I groaned. “You have an odd idea of fun. Watching a bunch of teenagers doll up and dance at the country club, pretending to be grown-ups. I bet Russ is mad. He was probably planning to take Kita to the dance.”

  “Yeah, I’m a little bummed,” came a voice from behind me. I shuddered. Thank God Sebastian hadn’t made some crack about me liking Kita with Russ standing right there.

  “But Kita will go with her friends, and I’ll take some breaks to dance with her. She won’t care that much—she’d rather talk than dance anyway.”

  “So, we’ll have three cameras at the dance,” Sebastian said. “We should be able to get some great footage.”

  “What great footage? It’s just people dancing. And not very well either, I would guess. Does anybody even watch these videos afterward?” I asked. I wasn’t sure why, but I was suddenly in a very pissy mood. “I mean, don’t you sometimes feel like you’re wasting your time taping all these silly events?”

  “The Winter Carnival dance is not silly!” Sebastian said, clearly irritated.

  Russ laughed. “Well, it is kind of silly, but the girls like it. And I like the girls. Especially when they’re dressed to kill.”

  Girls, plural? Or just Kita? If Kita dressed to kill, I just might die.

  “And for your information, Grady, lots of people watch the local cable channel. My mother’s cousin is constantly telling me how much she enjoys it,” Sebastian said.

  Oh, well then, that made it all worthwhile. Sebastian’s mother’s cousin was watching.

  Russ put a hand on my shoulder. “So, Grady, I guess we’re doing the assembly tomorrow. That should be okay. Word is that George Garrison and Ben London have some secret plan to kick it into high gear. Should be funny.”

  “Yeah? Great.” Russ was acting almost as if we were friends now, which I really appreciated. Actually, it picked my whole mood up. Not that I minded having only one, tiny, goofball friend, but having a second, more or less normal one couldn’t be a bad thing.

  “I’ll meet you here at quarter to ten to get the equipment!” he said as he walked away.

  “I’ll be here!” I called back, smiling perhaps too hugely.

  Sebastian noticed. “Calm down. You’re just taping an assembly with him, not dating him. Or his girlfriend.”

  I turned a blistering look on him. “Stop saying stuff about Kita.”

  He shook his head. “Wow. You’re crazy about her, aren’t you?”

  I bent down to hiss in his ear. “What difference would it make if I was? Kita Charles is not interested in someone like me. So shut up about it!”

  But, of course he didn’t. “Why wouldn’t she be interested in you? She could be. You’re very good-looking, you know. Actually, you’re better looking as a guy than you were as a girl.”

  “What? How do you know? You aren’t a girl.” Even though I pretended Sebastian didn’t know what he was talking about, now that he’d pronounced me good-looking, I was hanging on his words.

  “I have eyes, don’t I? I’m saying, you always looked good, but now that you’re a boy you just seem more comfortable with yourself, and that makes you more attractive.”

  “You think I’m attractive?” The begging was getting a little bit pathetic, I know.

  “Hey, I asked you to the Winter Carnival dance, didn’t I?” Sebastian shook his head at my obtuseness and walked away. I still wasn’t convinced though. After all, Sebastian was not a regular person—he got excited about parrotfish.

  The assembly started out just like all sports assemblies: A herd of cheerleaders clad in blue miniskirts and white turtlenecks with BUXTON (which always looked like BUXOM to me) written across their chests in blue script came tumbling out onto the gymnasium floor, their sneakers seemingly spring-loaded, chanting and yelling all the way. Their excitement was echoed by the crowd stuffed into the bleachers, who hooted so loudly that you could barely understand the words to the cheers. Sleep tight, Sebastian.

  Mr. Reed had told Russ and me to bring just one camera, since we wouldn’t have to get any fancy angle shots. You didn’t really need two people to do a job like this, but Mr. Reed always sent us in pairs so if somebody goofed up or forgot something, there’d still be a
decent chance the other person wasn’t as big a dope and the whole shoot wouldn’t be ruined. We set up the tripod and camera halfway up the bleachers at a spot over a doorway so nobody was in front of us, and we connected our equipment into the microphone down on the gym floor so we wouldn’t pick up only audience noise.

  I happened to see Kita walk into the gym with a group of her girlfriends. She knew Russ would be filming, of course, and she scanned the bleachers until her gaze landed on us. She waved.

  “There’s Kita!” I told Russ.

  He’d been focusing the camera, but he looked up briefly, saw her, and waved back. I figured once he’d done it, it was okay for me to wave too. The girls found seats on the lower bleachers, and Kita turned back to them. It was too bad I’d seen where she was sitting, because from then on it was almost impossible to keep my eyes from drifting in that direction.

  Dr. Ridgeway stood up to give his usual brief “Fight, fight, fight” speech, which always seemed ironic, since normally he’s the one telling everybody not to fight. When he sat down again, the cheerleaders went into their introduction cheer: “Johnny, Johnny, he’s our man! If he can’t do it, no one can! Johnny Silva!” And then, just because he could manage to throw an orange ball through a small metal hoop once in a while, the crowd went wild as scrawny, zitty Johnny Silva ran out from the locker room. We went through this same routine for each player, building up to the climax, which is when the cheerleaders would do a double cheer for the co-captains of the Buxton Eagles.

  “This should be good,” Russ said, checking the camera angle and repositioning it a bit. “These guys are so crazy.”

  They’d never seemed particularly crazy to me—just egomaniacal, like most of the highschool athletes at Buxton. But hey, now that I was friends with Russ, sort of, I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Can’t wait to see what they’re up to!”

  “Ben and George, they’re our men! If they can’t do it, nobody can! Ben London and George Garrison!” The girls bounced even higher than usual, ricocheted off each other’s hips, and split themselves in half, a maneuver that always made me cringe, especially when I was having my period. And despite the lack of a decent rhyme, wild enthusiasm greeted the heroic duo as they waltzed out into the gym. And I do mean waltzed.

  George and Ben entered the gymnasium dancing arm in arm, or maybe I should say boob to boob, because each of them was wearing women’s clothing, their chests sculpted so monumentally by whatever was stuffed underneath that their make-believe tits banged into each other. The crowd went nuts.

  Then, still holding hands, they curtsied and ran up to join the cheerleaders. Ben was wearing a long blond wig and lots of jingly jewelry. George was in brown pigtails and a skirt that twirled wide to reveal some kind of lacy bloomers underneath. Both of them had slathered themselves with makeup, but they wore red Converse All Stars underneath their outfits, just so nobody misunderstood that they were still really basketball studs.

  While the audience howled with laughter, the cheerleaders hoisted the two guys onto their shoulders, and they all did another cheer before Ben and George jumped off and made ridiculous attempts to do splits. I guess it was funny. I mean, yeah, they certainly looked silly with their hairy, muscled arms and legs sticking out from under the girly clothes and their padded boobs flopping all around. But everybody was laughing themselves sick, as if this role reversal was so unbelievable, it was killing them. I was confused. I hated to think I didn’t have a good sense of humor, but I felt myself getting angry.

  I guess it was supposed to be funny because being female was so much the opposite of who these big athletes were. But was that really true? I mean, this was hardly the first time I’d seen something like this. It seemed to me that the more macho the guy, the more he loved prancing around in high heels and a wig, just to prove to everybody that he could. He had enough testosterone to get away with it and not be ridiculed. But you had to wonder if there wasn’t some part of these guys that was thrilled to wear the dress with the coconuts or whatever they were shoved inside. That they got off a little bit on the swingy hair brushing against their blushing cheeks. Maybe they needed a break from performing that whole machismo act day after day. Oh, I knew I’d never get any of them to admit it, but it seemed to me that the excitement of being a girl, if only for a few minutes, was about something more than just getting a good laugh from it.

  The assembly was over a few minutes later, and everybody managed to pull themselves together enough to head back to class. I turned off the camera and unhooked it from the tripod, trying to look remarkably busy in case anybody felt like saying anything to me.

  I could tell Russ was a little uncomfortable, but he tried to finesse it. “Man, I told you those two are crazy. They’ll do anything.”

  “Yeah, that was so crazy,” I said, not bothering to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.

  He bent down to wind up the extension cords, but then turned back to me. “You didn’t . . . I mean, you shouldn’t take it the wrong way—”

  “How is he supposed to take it? Is there a right way?”

  Kita had run up the bleachers and was standing behind us, fuming. “That was the stupidest, most insensitive thing I’ve ever seen!”

  Russ made a face at her. “Oh, come on, Kita. It was funny.”

  “Funny? You know they know about Grady—the whole gossipy school has been talking about nothing else all week. Don’t they have a brain between them? This was offensive on about ten different levels.”

  I stared at Kita, trying to pretend I hadn’t just tripped and fallen into the deep dark mine shaft of love from which escape is impossible. I finished breaking down the tripod and handed it to Russ, who had the electrical cords over his shoulder and the camera in his hand already.

  “You’re way off base, Kita,” Russ said. “This isn’t about that. It was just for laughs. You take things too seriously.”

  “I can’t believe you’re defending them, Russell!”

  Russ was getting pissed off now too. “I’m not defending them! I don’t even think they need defending!”

  “Well then, you’re as thickheaded as they are!”

  Russ grunted. “I’m done listening to this, Kita—you’re nuts. I’m going back to the TV studio. You can stand here and gripe to Grady if you want, but I don’t see the problem. It was a joke.” He hiked the equipment onto his shoulder and took off down the bleachers at an angry clip.

  “Not a very funny one!” she called after him.

  “Unfortunately, I think 99 percent of Buxton High would disagree with you there,” I said.

  “Buxton High,” she said scornfully, “should get a clue. I’m sure it was meant to be offensive to you, but I think it’s insulting to all women when guys parade around like that, acting like we’re no more than jiggling body parts. I can assure you that George Garrison with sock boobs does not equal me!”

  Then, almost before I knew it had happened, Kita put her arms around me in a fleeting hug. “And they don’t equal you, either, Grady,” she said. “You have more courage than a whole football team full of those idiots.” Then she stomped down the bleachers and disappeared, taking my adoration with her.

  Chapter Eleven

  For the rest of the day I had the feeling people were staring at me even more than usual, as if they were trying to scope out my reaction. Sebastian, of course, met me at the door of the TV studio, ready to recap every thought he’d had since the morning’s drag show.

  “What kids are saying is that they don’t think George and Ben’s act had anything to do with you,” he told me. “The party line is that it was just for laughs, guys have done this for years, what’s the big deal, et cetera. But the fact that people are discussing it means it is a big deal. You’ve made them think about it. Well, not all of them, but at least the people who are capable of thinking.”

  “I’m thrilled,” I said as I searched the uneditedvideo shelf for the footage we’d taken
that morning.

  “Russ has the videos,” Sebastian said, pointing to the editing machine against the back wall where Russ was already ensconced. Fine. He could edit this one all by himself. I could live without seeing George and Ben shaking their fake hooters again.

  “You know what I’ve been thinking?” Sebastian asked.

  “Not a clue.”

  His eyes got slitty, and I could tell this was going to be more than just a casual thought or momentary idea. No, the way Sebastian was spreading his hands before him in a descriptive swath promised a full-blown theory. “What if,” he began, staring into the distance, “you put the most macho guy you could think of—say, Sylvester Stallone or somebody like that—on one end of a football field, and the most feminine woman you could think of—say Paris Hilton or . . . Jennifer Lopez—on the other end . . .”

  “You could sell a lot of tickets to that game.”

  He frowned at me. “What I’m saying is that if you had everybody else on earth lined up in between them according to how masculine or feminine they were, there would be a lot of people in the middle of the field, you know? Not everybody would be standing next to Sly or Paris.”

  “Can I stand next to Jennifer?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “This is a very big football field, Sebastian.”

  “I’m speaking metaphorically, Grady.”

  “And who gets to decide how masculine or feminine everybody is?”

  “You decide for yourself.”

  “Most people would lie. They’d try to clump up around Sylvester and Paris.”

  “Well then, some greater force would decide. The Great Scientist Who Knows Everything would decide.”

  Wouldn’t that be perfect? Everybody exposed, turned inside out like me, on an enormous, metaphorical football field. I smiled and nodded. “I like it, Sebastian. Your brain is warped in a very interesting way.”

  “I know,” he said, returning my smile.

  SCENE:

  The Feminine End of the Football Field

  PARIS: Jenny, you need to move over, hon. I’m supposed to be right here, at the very end.