All Out--The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens throughout the Ages

by Saundra Mitchell

  “Who was your favorite character?” Dee was hoping he’d say Lizzie, Jane or Mr. Darcy.

  Vince tilted his head. “I guess...that Bingley dude.”

  Dee’s eyes widened. “Mr. Bingley?”

  “Yeah. He was okay. I think I related to him most. How he knew he liked Jane, but was too polite and chickened out of telling her. And it took him twenty years to finally get around to it.”

  “It wasn’t that long.”

  “Well, it felt like reading it took twenty years.” At that, Dee pushed him away. He smiled and arched back toward her, and she found herself smiling, too. “What I mean is, I get how hard it is to tell someone what you’re thinking. Especially when you like them. And sometimes you’re so close, you assume they know what you’re thinking, but it’s not really fair... I mean, I’m kinda rambling, but—”

  “No,” said Dee quickly. “I get it.”

  She took in a deep breath and let it out again. She understood what he meant, not just for him, but for her, as well. She curled her fingers into her palms, readying her words like armor. Because what was she waiting for? She was no Mr. Bingley.

  I am a twentieth-century black Lizzie Bennet. I like a boy. I like talking to him, I like his eyebrows, I like his laugh when I tease him, I like how he debates me on nineteenth-century heroines and twentieth-century superheroes, I like his secret sports conversations with my dad, I like how he focuses so hard when he dances even though he’s not good at it, I like how he skates like he was born to do it. I like what I like and I don’t like what I don’t. I have nothing to apologize for.

  “Kissing makes me laugh,” said Dee quietly.

  Vince turned sharply, peering at her through his long bangs. “Who’ve you been kissing?”

  “No one. Just...the thought of it. It’s just weird to me. All of it’s weird to me, dating, and couples, and making out...” She rolled her hand and left it at that.

  “Oh.”

  “I’m just a prude, I guess,” said Dee.

  “I’ve never called you a prude.”

  “No, but everybody else does.”

  As the song ended, the DJ seamlessly slid on another record. The lights dimmed low, way low, almost to full darkness but for the slowly turning tinted lights that passed over the floor and the walls. Dee held her breath against the flutter in her heart.

  Couples’ skate. Here they were again. Some skaters took this opportunity for a break, going to the restrooms, grabbing snacks from the bar. Other skaters found each other in the dark and linked hands.

  Vince kept skating, and so did Dee.

  “It’s just, I don’t know what it all means,” said Dee. “I don’t know why I feel this way, or if I’m gonna change—if I’m supposed to change, or—”

  Vince laughed, and normally Dee would already be puffing herself up to give him an earful, but it just made her sad.

  “I guess I’m being dumb,” she said.

  “Nah,” said Vince. “I don’t mean it like that. It’s just skate night, Dee. We’re just skating. I’m still trying to figure out things about myself, too. Who I am, who I want to be. But it’s not gonna happen all at once.”

  “How do you know?” said Dee. “Maybe this is going to be the moment that the spotlights turn on and you have a big epiphany right here in the middle of the floor.”

  They fell silent. They looked around. But the lights stayed dim and the music kept playing, and they laughed.

  “All I’m saying,” said Vince, “is we don’t need to have ourselves figured out in one night. You know?”

  Dee’s heart was fluttering again, but in a different way. She felt a warmth there that was spreading to her stomach and her limbs. She turned her head away a little, because she couldn’t suppress the smile growing on her face and she didn’t want Vince to see it, not quite yet. “Yeah. I know.”

  Dee dropped her hand by her side. She didn’t want to wait to see if Vince would grab it. She didn’t want to guess what he would think if she made him wait. So she turned up her palm.

  And Vince’s fingers grazed her skin, prodding and searching. Their fingers slid together slowly. They rolled along, their arms brushing, blue and purple lights casting an artificial twilight over skaters in like, or in love.

  Lizzie Bennet would enjoy skating, Dee thought.

  * * * * *

  BURNT UMBER

  BY

  MACKENZI LEE

  Amsterdam, 1638

  Two weeks into the new year—the third of our apprenticeship—the master painter Cornelius van der Loos declares me the best of his students.

  Though not for my skill behind the easel—I have yet to master shadows in the still lifes, so my light often seems to be coming from a cosmically improbable sun that has been spread across the sky like a pat of melted butter.

  But I am the boy most accomplished at not becoming distracted by the first naked woman we draw. Which is something, I suppose.

  It has been all vanitases and still lifes for us for years, though just before Nieuwjaarsdag we graduated to plaster casts of the human frame, so the appearance of the living versions in our studio seemed inevitable. But the first day that van der Loos plucks a round-hipped girl from De Wallen and perches her in the center of our circle atop a stool for us to sketch, the study for the other apprentices seems to be more about keeping themselves in control as van der Loos calls for her to change positions and she presents us with an arched back that make her breasts reach for the ceiling.

  But for me, it’s as easy as not going hard over the Delft candlesticks and Jakartan pomegranates we have been sketching since we were twelve.

  Though if it were Joost Hendrickszoon reclining naked on a ragged sofa in front of me, a barely there whisper of silk draped over his most vulnerable bits—or, God help me, perhaps no silk at all—it would be me gasping down lungfuls of the frigid January air with my breeches tented, trying not to think about how desperately I would like to put my hands on some tackle that wasn’t my own.

  It’s been a time since I spoke to Joost—though spoke seems too generous a term for the blushing conversations I occasionally stammered my way through with him after Sunday services. That hasn’t stopped me from fantasizing about him without his clothes on when I am supposed to be staring at van der Loos’s girls and sketching them in repose. His family put their money in Viceroy bulbs and when the tulip market shattered, he had to abandon his own apprenticeship with the faience maker and take up work with the dockhands who load the cargo onto the East India clipper ships.

  I catch sight of him sometimes from afar, down at the docks, when van der Loos sends Augustus and me to fetch his imports for his vanitases and sacks of pigment powders, the sort than can be bought only on the other side of the world. As we load our handcarts with the smalt blue of Delft china or the yellow ochre stripes on the inside of an Iris petal, the thought of Joost somewhere nearby always has me by the throat. Even when he’s not in my sights, I can picture him—the muscles in his arms tense beneath the weight of porcelain, the concave hollow of his back bowing beneath their weight. All the anatomy lessons of my apprenticeship put to questionable use. Once, when he passed us by with a crew of the burly dock men, he winked at me, and I was so flustered I dropped a crate full of dried puffer fish from the West Indies I was holding. When we cracked the lid back at the studio, we found half of them had crumbled into dust, and I took a lashing over the knuckles for it from van der Loos.

  But Joost winked at me. All things have a balance.

  So my apprenticeship gives me charcoal stains in the creases of my palms, knuckles scratched from catching loose nails when we spread canvas over frames, my fingers dyed the color of Admiral Liefken tulips from priming red ochre pigment, while Joost broadens out his shoulders, sculpting him a silhouette like one of those Renaissance Christ paintings in church I used to stare at so long my mother thought I
might become a clergyman.

  But so long as it is a woman draped across the sofa in the center of our sketching circle, I’ll be, as van der Loos proclaims, the best apprentice in the Guild of St. Luke.

  Though, it is mortifying to be declared thusly in front of a room full of the other boys, half of them rising to attention when our model stands at the end of the session and reaches down to touch her toes, presenting us with a near-telescopic view of her nethers. Johannes’s charcoal falls out of his hand and breaks in two against the floor, and Augustus already has that glazed look in his eyes of being halfway through a fantasy about taking this girl out behind the Wolf’s Head and getting his head under her skirt. Though knowing Augustus he’d be so sweaty with nerves if he ever got this girl alone he’d probably slide right off her. When we boil the linseed oil for binding, he can hardly look me in the eyes—I can’t imagine a girl would be any easier on him.

  From the back of the room, van der Loos knocks a hand against the wall, so hard and sudden that all the boys startle, eyes ripped from the model. “Good lord, it’s like you’ve none seen a woman before.”

  None of us want to be the one to admit that we haven’t—Braam, the oldest of us, is fifteen, so up until now it’s been mostly mothers and sisters and the occasional tavern whore for all of us.

  Van der Loos shoos the model into the back room, then stalks forward to the center of our circle. A curtain sheltering the high windows catches on his lace collar as he passes and he swats it free.

  “What’s this?” He flicks at Braam’s parchment, which is mostly devoted to breasts. “Is this what a woman looks like, or what you want her to look like in your fantasies, Englen? And this, Hermanszoon?” he snaps at Johannes, who reaches up like he’s going to cover his work and keep the rest of us from seeing it. Van der Loos passes Augustus’s easel without comment, but pauses on mine. I brace for a criticism, but instead he says, “This is well done, Constantijn,” and I start—I hadn’t realized he was so near to me.

  He takes up my sketch and holds it for the other boys to see. “And you know why this is well done? Because it does not reek of childish fantasies. Constantijn here has sketches that are anatomical. No breasts that defy gravity or exaggerated curves. You would all do well to adopt his attitude—this is not the last naked figure we’ll be drawing, and I expect a certain level of work from you.” He drops my board back on the easel, then claps me hard on the shoulder. “Well done. You did very well today.”

  I try to look pleased, but the compliment sends my heart hiccuping. A singling out is enough reason to be taunted on our walk home, perhaps get a handful of snow stuffed down the back of my breeches. I’ve done the stuffing before—we all have. But to be called out for being the only boy entirely disinterested in the female body could have a different end. They drowned a guild master in Delft last year, and shaded taunts don’t take long to darken into rumors. Though the danger of a jest holds little water with these rich boys whose parents pay fifty guilders a year for them to become painters, who will never have to grit their teeth when they lie with a woman or worry their minister will confront them about their unclean desires that could end tied to a millstone and tossed into the sea. Whose desires their masters condemn, but at least they’re boyish.

  I leave the studio that night sweating in spite of the winter cold. Most evenings, the five of us apprentices walk from van der Loos’s studio along the Uilenburgergracht to Dam Square, where we break apart, following the veins of the canals to our homes, but I try to clean up as quick as I can and escape alone. I’m the first one to leave the studio—I realize halfway down the stairs I’ve left one of my gloves behind, but I can’t muster the courage to go back to fetch it.

  I’m half a flight from the gate when I hear the lumbering thud above me of the other boys’ klompen on the stairs. They swarm around me on the street, like I’m a boulder in their stream. I speed up, trying to stay a few steps ahead with my scarf pulled tight around my face, but I can still hear them behind me.

  “Eyes ahead, Constantijn,” Braam calls. “Don’t want you getting distracted.” He strikes the last syllable like a cymbal, just as a clump of slushy snow slaps the back of my head. I don’t turn around.

  “Look at Constantijn, so focused.”

  “Doesn’t even notice the girls all around him.”

  “Have you ever seen a girl before, Constantijn? Come out tonight and we’ll give you some tutoring.”

  Another lump of slush hits near my feet. No wonder Braam’s vanishing points are always a few inches off.

  I pull up the collar of my cassock and walk faster, but my klompen slide on the stones, still slick with last night’s new snowfall. I have to grip the bridge rail as I cross the canal like it’s a lifeline just to stay upright.

  “What do you like more, Constantijn—girls or dogs?” Braam calls, and Johannes laughs.

  “Girls or chickens?” Johannes adds.

  “Girls or sailors?”

  “Go to hell, Braam,” I say, quiet enough I think they won’t hear me but I’ll still get the satisfaction of having told them off under my breath.

  But Johannes hears—he’s deaf to instructions about canvas priming but he’s dog ears for everything that isn’t meant for him. “What’s that, Constantijn? You’re going to hell?”

  Dam Square looms at last—the milky green dome of the weigh house wears a hat of new snow, militias of sharp icicles lined along the gutters. The low clouds swallow the spire of the Westerkerk over the tops of the canal houses. A breeze spools off the water, bitter and ripe—I can smell the stench of the harbor, oysters spitting seawater and herring left to fester in shining piles upon the rotting slats of the docks. My stomach heaves.

  I would be smart to joke back jovially, pretend like the taunts didn’t sting like rust on a razor, then say yes to a drink when Johannes suggests it. Probably would have been good to muscle down a kiss with a carmine-cheeked whore just to prove that I don’t find the female form almost entirely repellent. Maybe if I look long enough it won’t be; all these weeks of nude studies adding up have built up my tolerance. Maybe sinful desires can be cleansed through prolonged exposure, like colors faded from a canvas by hanging too long in a sunny corner of the house.

  But instead I keep walking as the boys peel off toward the Wolf’s Head, letting their taunts roll off me like the snowballs melting down my back. I duck down Raadhuisstraat and across the Singel Canal, toward my parents’ house. They’ll have the stove lit, peat smoking in its belly, and my sister will take my cassock and my klompen and they’ll want to know about what I’m painting and my mother will have herring and none of this will matter. In a few moments, I can be home and pretend everything is fine.

  “Constantijn, wait!”

  Against my better judgment, in the middle of the bridge, I turn. Augustus jogs up beside me, his feet sliding on the icy planks. I grab his arm before he falls. “Thank you.” He ruffles his hair, a powdered snow like the sugar dusting on oliebollen scattering over the front of my cassock. “Sorry, I...” He starts to brush it off for me, then stops, his face going red.

  “What is it, Augustus?” I ask, and my voice sounds like van der Loos’s, pinched and tired.

  “What? Right. Yes.” He fumbles around in his satchel, then comes up with my missing gloves. “You left this. Back at the studio.”

  “Oh. Thank you.” I try to take it, but he doesn’t let go as fast as I think he will, and it clenches up between us like a taut sailing rope. Neither of us let go for a moment, but Augustus shies first, and the glove slumps into my knuckles.

  He scuffs a toe along the ground, his klompen making a horrible scraping noise against the ice. “They’re just jealous, you know. Because you draw so well.”

  “Is that what it is?”

  “Truly. You’re the best of us.” He kicks a lump of muddy snow and it bursts against the rail like a Catherine wheel. �
��Have you thought of your specialization yet?”

  “Landscapes. Maybe. I don’t know. Not nude women.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’re...” I scratch the back of my neck. “Not really my subject.”

  “Nor mine. I liked when we were painting the fruit.”

  “The fruit?”

  “Fewer breasts on the fruit. I mean...” He presses his hands to his cheeks. “I’m not good at breasts.”

  “Most fruit is rather breast shaped, though.”

  “But they’re not so squishable. They’re more solid. So the shadows are easier on the fruits. And I like the colors.” He’s got his hands up in front of him, flexing them, gripping these imaginary not-breast squishable fruit, but then he shakes them out, like he’s only just realized what he’s doing. “God, what a conversation. If someone were to overhear us.”

  I laugh. “The scandal of naked fruit.”

  “The church would have a whole business around making dresses for apples and pears by the week’s end.”

  “That’ll be the new commodity now that the tulips have failed.”

  “And it would be a very specialized profession, since only those with the tiniest hands could sew these tiny dresses for the fruit.”

  I laugh again, almost more from surprise than at what he’s said. Augustus is so quiet and nervous in class, I’ve never heard him speak so freely. Or realized how funny he was. When he looks up at me, the reflection of the dying light off the canal catches his eyes, the warm umber of cane sugar.

  Augustus smiles, the tips of his ears poking out from under his knit cap pink where the cold nips at them.

  “Well,” he says, after a moment of staring at each other, our breath fogging the air between us. “I’m back that way.” He points back over his shoulder, toward the square. “Don’t worry about what Braam said.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I know. But if you were. Or if you need to hear it. You’re all right.”

  He reaches out and touches my shoulder, so quick it’s almost imaginary, then walks away, leaving the cold clawing at me, each breath burning as I swallow it and coming up misty and white, warmed by my lungs.