Drag Teen

by Jeffery Self

“Okay, so you are.”

  She slapped her phone down onto the checkered tabletop.

  “You can be such a jerk sometimes.”

  “I was just messing around,” I argued.

  “You think I’m here to be your sidekick. The fat girl who devotes her life to her two gay friends.”

  The way she said it, it sounded like something she had clearly been thinking about for a while now. I had never thought of Heather as anything other than my best friend, ever. Best friend was not a sidekick position.

  “No. That’s not it at all.”

  “I want some adventure too. Or is that too much to ask because I’m the third wheel? The girl?”

  “Hey,” Seth intervened, “don’t say that. JT was trying to protect you. That guy is a creepy bouncer.”

  “I do not need protecting,” she said loudly, almost at a yell, then went back to her phone.

  “Let’s just drop it,” I said. But even though we dropped it, it stayed with us for the rest of the meal. I knew it was pretty bad because none of us wanted dessert. Not even as we passed at least a half-dozen ice-cream places on our way back to the apartment.

  Heather held back, texting some more. This gave me a little space to ask Seth how he was doing.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “I mean, how are you doing?”

  “I’m good. It’s great here.”

  “You had a great day?”

  “Totally.”

  I felt like a fool for wanting to ask, But didn’t you miss me? I’d said I’d missed him, hadn’t I? Why isn’t it possible to just hold up a sign that says exactly how you’re feeling without having to say it?

  Both Tash and Pip were out of the apartment when we got there, Pip having signed up for a three-hour group chant around the corner to get himself into the right headspace for the pageant. I had no idea of or interest in where Tash might be; I was mostly just happy to have the place to ourselves, free of his gloomy cloud of bitchiness.

  “Where is my blue suitcase?” I asked, eyeing three pieces of luggage in the corner of the room where once there had been four.

  “I put them all over there when we brought them in.” Seth pointed to the three suitcases.

  “Yes, but one is missing.”

  “It is?”

  “Are you guys messing with me?”

  Seth and Heather exchanged confused expressions as I began ripping through the other bags, opening and dumping out the contents of each, hoping maybe we’d double packed or something. There had to have been a mistake, a terrible mistake! Seth joined me in my search, looking under the futon, in the bathroom, everywhere, to no avail. Heather, still pissed off from dinner, was actively zero help.

  “Maybe they’re in the car. Maybe I left them in there last night.”

  “But we brought all the bags inside last night,” Seth reminded me calmly. My eyes shot daggers at him until he quietly backed away and went to search in the foyer.

  I let myself into Pip’s room to make sure the costumes hadn’t been put there by mistake.

  Pip’s room was way more orderly than I would have expected. His costumes hung in garment bags in the open closet, while everything else had a clearly designated spot. Mind you, the bulk of his belongings were a row of wigs on Styrofoam heads, a stack of incense sticks, some weird-looking prayer beads, a comically enormous bong, and a framed photograph of Deepak Chopra standing next to Angelina Jolie and Elmo. My costumes were nowhere in sight, and it was clear Pip never could have mixed them up with his own.

  “Not in the kitchen or the hallway,” Seth said, with a nervous look of defeat.

  The search was pointless. I knew exactly what had happened—I could feel it in my gut. I was almost afraid to say it out loud because it would only confirm what I was fearing. From the minute he laid eyes on me, for whatever bizarre reason, Tash had clearly decided I was enemy number one, and today’s rehearsal had clearly been the final nail in my coffin. I was on the verge of tears.

  Seth saw this, and wanted to head it off. “Wait. Let’s calm down. Panicking or crying is not going to solve anything.” He started pacing the tiny space around the futon. “Let’s think.”

  “It was Tash,” I spat out quickly, as if the words themselves tasted gross in my mouth.

  “Huh?”

  “He hates me. You’ve seen the way he looks at me when I talk about the pageant.”

  Seth sighed. “Come on, JT. Don’t be so insecure. Nobody would go out of their way to sabotage you like that.”

  You know how sometimes people say just the exact wrong thing and everything suddenly goes into slow motion as you lose your shit? So yeah, that happened.

  “Well, excuse me, Seth. Not all of us can be secure as you, Mr. Perfect.”

  “Hey, JT. Come on. That’s not fair. I told you I don’t like when you call me perfect.”

  “I’ve told you everything, ever since I’ve known you. I’ve shared everything and you acted so open and honest, but all that time you had this past you never told me about. Why? Because you didn’t trust me to hold your baggage but just wanted to hold on to mine. Did it feel good to be the stable one for the crazy mess? And is it possible, just a little bit possible, that now that I’m getting my life together, now that I’m actually excited about something, you don’t know what the hell to do except tell me how insecure I’m being? Because that’s the guy you signed up for?”

  “JT. Hey, come on.”

  “I have trusted you with so much, Seth. Everything I feel, I tell you. Because I love you. And this enormous thing, this person you used to be—you never thought to tell me? It hurts my feelings, okay? It hurts my stupid feelings.”

  I stormed into the bathroom, flinging open the door to find Heather midway into putting on more makeup than I’d ever seen someone wear—and lest we forget, I had spent the day with drag queens. She’d crammed herself into the kind of tight black dress she never would have worn in Florida. In fact, it was the kind of tight black dress that very well might have been illegal in some parts of Florida. She looked up at me, guilty but assured. Then she brushed past me and Seth, eyes glued to her phone, where she was mid-text, grabbed her purse, and was out the door.

  Seth and I looked at each other, knowing exactly what was going on—but not having any way to stop it.

  “I’ll see if I can catch her,” Seth said, running out the door. I wondered if he was just taking it as a convenient excuse to leave, escaping my characteristically random freak-out.

  “I can’t believe this!” I screamed.

  But there was no one around to hear me.

  SETH CAME BACK A FEW minutes later, shaking his head.

  “Go work on your speech,” he said. Code words for I don’t really want to talk to you right now.

  I tried. For hours, I tried. Seth was right next to me, not prodding me at all. It felt weird to not be prodded.

  It was after midnight when Pip got home, coming in with a sweaty yoga mat and a disgusting-looking green juice. I was comatose on the futon, in a state of shock and defeat. At this point, I figured why bother writing a speech if I had no costume to deliver it in.

  “Salutations, dudes. I didn’t expect you both to still be awake,” Pip announced, predictably cheery.

  I launched into the whole story about the costumes and how we suspected Tash. I asked him a million questions without giving him a chance to answer any of them: “Did you see the costumes?” “Did Tash say anything about taking them?” “Has Tash ever stolen before?” “Is Tash some kind of comic book villain?”

  Pip was a little overwhelmed by all my questioning, which was understandable seeing as he’d just come from a group chant and meditation and had now just walked into a frenzy of crazed paranoia. He attempted to calm me down, but Seth told him that, based on personal experience, it was probably not the best idea to try to calm me in the midst of panic and that he should probably just go to bed. Pip told me he’d pray for the almighty universe’s rightful return of the cost
umes, and I tried my hardest not to scream again.

  It was getting later and later, but I couldn’t go to sleep until I spoke to Tash or Heather. She wasn’t responding to our calls or our texts. It wasn’t that out of character for Heather to run off in the midst of being upset, but this was New York City; this was different. I knew Heather wouldn’t do anything to put herself in immense danger, but she was definitely capable of doing something stupid, like putting on a skimpy dress and meeting up with a thirty-year-old bouncer from a gay nightclub who she’d met only once before.

  I stopped calling and texting her over and over, as I figured that was only making things worse. She was tired of feeling babied by us, she wanted her own adventure, and after dragging her across the country, who was I to deny her that?

  Seth dozed off beside me on the futon. I lay wide-awake, waiting for the moment when the front door finally burst open and Tash stomped into the room.

  “Sorry!” he said loudly. “Hope I didn’t wake you up! I know it’s important to get a lot of rest before the pageant.”

  I stood up, trying my hardest to maintain composure.

  “Tash. I know what you did and it’s not okay.”

  Tash sheepishly held up a grocery bag with a carton of ice cream in it.

  “I know, I know. I have no business having ice cream the night before a pageant, but I just couldn’t resist. Fine, twist my arm, I’ll share. Shall I get us some spoons? Where’s your little girlfriend?”

  I could feel the beads of sweat forming on the back of my neck, the ones that always came when I had to deal with confrontation of any kind.

  “I’m talking about my costumes.”

  Tash’s face shifted into the kind of phony expression you’d make in a school play when the teacher asked you to look surprised.

  “Don’t you dare pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, Tash! Don’t you dare!”

  I was about to lunge in his direction, but Seth, awake now, put his hand around my waist.

  “Okay, babe,” he soothed. “Don’t lose your cool.”

  Tash clucked his tongue. “I have no idea what it is you’re accusing me of right now, but I have to say, I find it utterly offensive. You know what? For that, I’m not going to share my ice cream with you.”

  Tash made his way to his room, but before he shut his door, he stopped and, with the cruelest of smiles, said, “And, Miss Thing, I saw those costumes, and whoever did steal them probably did you a very big favor.”

  He slammed his door and locked it before I had a chance to explode. I was trembling; I had never experienced something so blatantly cruel in my life. Before I knew it, tears were streaming down my face. Seth pulled me into his chest. I could hear his heart beating as I choked on my cries.

  It felt stupid to cry about a polyester pantsuit and some gowns, but that’s exactly what I was doing.

  And wigs. I was also crying over the wigs.

  All night, I tossed and turned with the images of my missing marabou circling my mind. Also, Heather hadn’t come home.

  Seth was keeping some distance, but not so much that he made me feel like I was in this alone. I really appreciated that. Every now and then he’d wake up and murmur something like, “We’ve come so far already” or “We’ll figure something out.” Then he went back to sleep, and I could only hope the perfect solution would come to him in a dream. Because right now the pageant was less than twenty-four hours away, and I had zero costumes and zero wigs.

  When it was time to go in the morning, Pip offered to walk over with me. Tash’s door was still closed—there was no way to storm his room and get to rehearsal on time. Seth told me not to worry about Heather, that he’d track her down and make sure everything was okay. I told him that I’d stop worrying about it, but it was clear that neither of us believed it.

  That morning’s rehearsal was spent running through the choreography for the opening number. When Tash got there, he avoided any form of eye contact with me whatsoever, and I was too tired to keep arguing anyway. Eric Waters was in drill-sergeant mode, shouting at us from the back of the theater.

  “How was your night? Did you get into any trouble? We did!” Milton bounced over and asked in one single breath, while we were on break.

  He and Red shared excited smiles as they recounted their outrageous New York night, which included seeing a musical about Diana Ross (“The wigs, gurl! The wigs were to die for!”) and dinner at some fancy restaurant in the West Village where they were pretty sure the person seated behind them was one of the ladies who had been a Real Housewife of somewhere, at some point, maybe. They were buzzing with delight and it was hard not to envy them.

  “What about you?” Milton asked, this time pausing for my response.

  “I … well, I had dinner and then, um, it wasn’t that great.” I fumbled all over my words and blushed. Was I actually going to cry here over lost wigs?

  “Did something bad happen?”

  My attempt to keep it bottled up was clearly not working, I could feel my hysteria creeping out of me like coffee spilling out of a Starbucks cup when they overfill it and then have the audacity to still put on the lid so that it becomes your problem and not theirs once you walk out of the store.

  “My costumes, my wigs … all of it … He took them.”

  “Who did?!”

  I lowered my voice, taking deep breaths to calm myself down. “Tash. I think. He says he didn’t, but they were at the apartment and I know Pip didn’t take them. And you said that he took that one queen’s wig a while back, right? I don’t know what to do. I want to tell Daryl or somebody, but I’m afraid they won’t believe me and will think that I’m only after their sympathy.”

  Red and Milton had become very serious, listening like detectives at a brutal crime scene.

  “Don’t! Don’t tell anyone.” Milton was eerily calm but stern. “He will find a way to turn it against you.”

  A paranoid Red kept looking over his shoulder and shushing us to keep it down. Milton obliged, visibly shaken.

  “The last time somebody turned Tash in for stealing a wig, he framed the person for stealing his. That was poor Miss Tootsie Roll, and she was never the same after she got disqualified from the pageant. Poor thing, she works at an Old Navy in White Plains nowadays.”

  Milton winced at his own words.

  “Disqualified?” I asked. “But how did Tash get away with it?!”

  Milton shook his head with a frown. “I don’t know, girl. But he did, and he will again. Trust me. He always gets away with his shenanigans. The only thing you can do is ignore them and bounce back.”

  “But I don’t have other wigs, or costumes, and I’m assuming no one here has extras, right?”

  Milton and Red told me how much they wished they could help but that they only packed what they needed. They tried to calm me down, telling me that it would work out as long as I didn’t say a word.

  I was called to the stage to rehearse my number, which was the last thing I wanted to be doing. Linda Lambert played Tina’s song and I sang it as best I could, but there was nothing there, none of the emotion or notes that had been there before. I was just trying to get it over with. When I’d finished, Linda looked at me quizzically.

  “That was … good.” She tried to make her lie sound convincing, but it didn’t work. “Are you okay?”

  I could feel everything welling up inside me, and I wanted to tell her what had happened. I felt like I could trust her—that maybe, hell, she’d loan me one of her pantsuits. But standing in the wings directly behind her were Milton and Red, both mouthing for me not to say a word.

  “I’m fine. Just a little tired.”

  “No problem. I get it. Save your energy for tonight. After yesterday’s rehearsal, I’m certain you’ve got your song down perfectly. Just do it like you did then and they’ll go crazy for you.”

  Linda’s Tony Award–winning supporting words would’ve meant a lot more if I wasn’t wondering if I’d get to perform in the
pageant at all.

  I was sitting in the dressing room with headphones, not actually listening to anything but wearing them just so that no one would try and talk to me. My phone lit up with a text message from Seth reading: Come outside when you can. I have something to show you.

  I snuck out the stage door into the alley behind the building. Seth was there with an enormous plastic shopping bag.

  “Ta-da!” Seth exclaimed, handing over the bag. Inside was a pile of multicolored clothes and one super-cheap-looking pink wig.

  “What is all this?” I asked.

  “I know it’s nowhere near as nice as the stuff you lost, but it’s better than nothing.”

  I pulled the wig out of the bag. It was one of those awful bright-colored bob wigs you buy at the drugstore during Halloween that are marked 100% FLAMMABLE MATERIALS.

  If I kept going like this, that would end up being my drag name.

  “Wow. Thanks.” I attempted to sound sincere, but with the sad excuse for hair in my hand, it wasn’t easy.

  “Hey. You don’t have to pretend to like it. I know it sucks, but it was sorta the best I could afford.”

  If I could have stepped outside my body in that moment, I might have seen just how lucky I was, with or without this pageant. However, stepping outside your body is impossible, and I was a moderately troubled seventeen-year-old boy freaking out about his missing wigs. This was not a time for introspection.

  “JT, look. I’m not going to tell you not to worry. I can see how that’s not what you need right now. I get it. But while you’re worrying, let’s try to focus on what you still have. Because this contest isn’t about the outfit or the wig—it’s about you being the best drag teen you can be. And I have no idea what that means, but I know that you do, and that’s what will get you through. ”

  I understood his point and he was absolutely right. The only problem was that to be the best drag teen I could be, I needed to actually be in drag.

  “Where’s Heather?” I asked.

  Seth sighed. “She was just getting in when I left this morning.”