by Cris Beam
“Dude, you got a light?” a guy with a goatee was saying to J from across the counter. He had a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He seemed to be very far away and too close at once. J reached into his pockets but knew he didn’t have any matches.
“Nope,” he answered.
Goatee Guy walked over to the stove and lit his cigarette from the flame. J studied the way he bent at the waist, feet parted—the way he shoved his hair from his eyes so as not to catch it on fire. Every move was quick and deft, though somehow also thick, as if his bones carried more weight than J’s. “You go to PS three eighty-six?” he asked. It was the New York City public magnet school for math and sciences, in midtown.
“Yeah. You?” J was surprised a stranger—a guy—was talking to him.
“Yeah. I hate it.”
“Me, too.” J tried to look tough, but the room was swaying.
“You know Stacey Ramirez?” the guy asked.
J thought. The name sounded familiar, but his thoughts were sticky, slow. He shook his head.
“She’s only a freshman… and I’m kind of worried about her. She’s in the master bedroom right now giving head to seniors—twenty bucks to anyone who wants it. She was advertising at the beginning of the party.”
“Cool,” J said. He was so surprised that Goatee Guy was talking to him, he almost didn’t register what he had said. J tried to copy the way the other kid was leaning against the counter. He wished he had a cigarette, too. He thought about Stacey, about the line of guys, briefly wished he had twenty bucks, then erased the impossible thought.
“It’s not cool, actually,” Goatee Guy said, now eyeing J suspiciously. “Don’t you think we should get someone to intervene? I mean, she’s so young, and I don’t think she knows what she’s doing.” Goatee Guy took a long pull on his cigarette, flicking his eyes briefly over J once more, and then stared upward at a spot in the ceiling, like he didn’t care.
But Goatee Guy obviously did care, and J wondered why. The word intervene sounded so weird. Intervene. Like intravenous. Like the rat J’s biology class would be dissecting on Tuesday. What would it be like to be Stacey Ramirez? What would it be like to give head? Gross. It would be gross.
Goatee Guy was now staring at J as though he expected some kind of answer. J didn’t know what to say. He was thinking about Melissa. Would Melissa do that with Daniel? Suddenly he was angry, very angry. Melissa had come to this party with J, and now she wanted to mess around with Daniel, who sat in corners and read books like he was better than everybody, smarter than everybody. J was Melissa’s real friend; J was there when Melissa fell apart after a bad dance class, when she cut her arms, when she fought with her mother, when guys broke her heart. But where was J now? Talking with Goatee Guy about some stupid girl giving it up for money.
“Look, I don’t care about some dumb-ass bitch,” J said.
Goatee Guy looked shocked. “You’re an asshole,” he said, and walked away.
Wait, what went wrong? J thought. Did that guy think I was a dude? I was being cool to him. Everybody here’s an ass. And he went to look for Melissa.
Melissa and Daniel were still in front of the fireplace, but they were standing closer now. J took a long swig of beer and positioned himself behind a ficus tree that somebody had strung with Christmas lights. Melissa was laughing at something Daniel was saying—what could he be saying?—and Daniel was looking serious and pompous, as usual. Melissa reached out and touched Daniel on the nose, and then touched her own nose, as though connecting them by an invisible string. Suddenly, Daniel leaned in and, very gently, kissed Melissa. J threw up in the plant.
“Nasty!” two girls standing nearby shouted. “Get this bitch to the bathroom!” J felt himself being shoved from behind, and he saw a pathway between the bodies open up before him. Another heave welled up inside him but, mercifully, a toilet bowl materialized, and J made it in time. He slumped down against a bathtub and leaned his head against the cool porcelain. He flushed the toilet, then lay down on the floor. After what seemed like a long time, Melissa’s pink ballet slippers, which she had striped with black paint, appeared in front of J’s face.
“Dude—what happened?” Melissa was shouting. “You just barfed all over a tree!”
J moaned and closed his eyes.
“Come on, let’s get you home,” Melissa said, pulling J up from the elbows, her tone a little gentler. “You can sleep at my place.”
In the taxi, J drank some water Melissa had in her bag, and Melissa gushed about Daniel. “First he was talking about chess and the way it mirrors life. The way most of us think we can move in only one direction, one step at a time. We’re so restricted. But the knights—they get to jump over everybody else and make unexpected sideswipes.” Melissa was glowing. “Daniel feels like he’s the knight, all erratic and misunderstood. He thought maybe I was a knight, too.”
“Are you?” J asked weakly, his head against the taxi window.
“I told him I was a queen, but unprotected. All my pawns have left me.”
“That’s dramatic,” J said.
“Daniel’s the type of guy who likes to hear himself talk. But he’s smart, too.” Melissa looked out the taxi window at Fifth Avenue streaking by. J could tell she was hurt he didn’t like her crush. True to form, she fought back. “At least he doesn’t throw up in strangers’ trees.”
J felt a hot rush of shame. “How was the kiss?” It was torture to ask, but he had to know.
“Wet. Too much tongue. He didn’t know how to be delicate, you know?”
J didn’t. At seventeen, he’d never kissed anybody save for the neighbor girl he’d played “bar” with in fourth grade. The girl, Laureleen, used to live in the apartment downstairs, and after school she and J would take their cups of juice and lean against Laureleen’s bookcase, pretending they were in a bar. J would be the man; Laureleen, a chick he was picking up. They must have seen this on TV. They’d “practice” making out for hours, Laureleen pretending to resist and J encouraging her to take a ride in his car. They never talked about what they did, but they played the game several times. “Daniel’s a fool,” he said.
Melissa ignored him and paid the fare.
Melissa’s mom was out for the evening. The apartment smelled like cloves and candle wax, and the cats were underfoot, meowing for dinner and attention. J had known the cats since they were kittens, rescued from some bodega’s back room in another winter, years ago. Melissa had begged to keep them, and when Karyn relented, J and Melissa had tried to train them to do tricks, one kitten with a ribbon around its neck pulling the other in a plastic toy wagon. J had tired of the game quickly—the kittens were always jumping away and dragging the wagon under the bed—but Melissa was patient, rewarding them with treats and cooing in their ears. She was often patient like this with J, too, encouraging him to talk about the pictures he took, stretching her legs again and again while he struggled to find words. Once when his father and mother had argued about money, Manny left the house and didn’t come home for three days. J went to Melissa’s, and she let him watch all the music videos he wanted on her computer, even though she usually hated the female dancers. That time she didn’t press J to talk, but when he spent the night, she took his hand and held it, kissing his thumb once before he fell asleep. Nobody understood J’s moods like Melissa; nobody else let him be who he was.
Melissa started boiling some water for tea, and J crawled into Melissa’s bed, his head throbbing. The comforter felt thick and warm, like being inside a loaf of bread, and when the kettle whistled, J covered his ears.
“Here, drink this,” Melissa said, handing J a cup of chamomile. “You’ll feel better.” She took off her shoes and pulled her bra off from under her shirt and climbed in bed beside J. He wondered, briefly, if she didn’t want him to say anything about the cuts. Usually she tossed off her clothes with abandon and scrutinized her body in front of the mirror, pinching imaginary fat or looking for blemishes before she pulled on some boxers to sle
ep. He’d seen her naked countless times. “Want to watch Late Night?”
“No, too noisy,” J said. “My head hurts.”
“Okay. So let’s talk. What do you think of Daniel?”
“I think he’s a pretentious prick.”
Melissa mock-slapped J on the arm, sloshing tea onto the comforter. “No, he’s not! He’s just quiet.”
“I’m quiet,” J answered.
“So? What does that have to do with anything?” Melissa touched the razor lines in J’s hair, above the ears. “Why’d you shave these stripes in?”
“I dunno. Better my hair than my arms.”
“Ouch,” Melissa said, pulling back but watching J closely. “What’s the matter? You mad at me or something?”
J considered this. “No. I’m not mad. I don’t know what I am. I think I’m just sick from the alcohol.”
“Okay,” Melissa answered, snuggling down into the bed. She curled her feet around J’s. “Let’s go to sleep, then.”
In the dim light cast by the street lamps outside, J examined Melissa’s face. He could see the shape of the large eyes beneath her lids, and he watched her eyelashes twitch slightly, as though some invisible breeze were touching them. Her lips parted, and her breath came slowly; she made a kaaah sound with each exhale, and a curl fell across her forehead. Was she really sleeping? Could a person fall asleep so fast? J wondered. Or was she faking it?
J and Melissa had slept this way dozens of times before. It was the only reason J could appreciate being born female: girls like Melissa—well, actually, only Melissa—let J in on their secrets, their biggest plans, their most frightened, sad places. Melissa let J see how smart she was. Other girls, of course, rejected J, saw only the most superficial aspects of him—the way he was so butch and tough-looking—and they’d run away, thinking he was a freak or a dyke or both. Something predatory, something hard and impenetrable. They’d never know, as Melissa knew, that J was a photographer, that he loved the interplay of light and dark and finding the wavering balance between them. They’d never know how gentle J was inside, and how scared, how he wanted to do the right thing but often couldn’t. They’d never know how confusion and cruelty change people, make them hard—the way the deepest cuts make the toughest scabs. As long as he could remember, J had been taunted, tested, and mistreated for the way he looked.
It was, in fact, in the middle of a schoolroom taunt that J and Melissa had met. It was in middle school, and both of them had been placed in a program called Arts for Gifted Children. Sixth grade was well under way, but J had skipped most of the arts classes—until a six-week photography rotation was announced. All the other “gifted artists” knew one another when J showed up, his old 35 mm stuffed into his backpack. The teacher was reading the roll, and she came to J’s name.
“Jenifer Silver.”
“Um, it’s J,” J said quietly, looking down.
“I can’t hear you; what did you say?” The teacher was bottle-blond, middle-aged. She sat next to a tall stack of magazines that she had brought from home.
“My name. It’s J.”
“Okay,” the teacher said, smiling just a little. “You might be J in your other classes, but this is photography. In photography, we strive for accuracy, for telling the truth in pictures. That’s why we’re not doing digital work here—so nothing can be altered. So in this class, I think it’s important for you to be as honest as the subjects you’re photographing. You’ll be exactly who you are—no deception, no fooling.”
J had no idea what the teacher was talking about, but his head was starting to swim. The other kids had turned to stare at him. The teacher continued. “In my class, you’ll be Jenifer. Roberto will be Roberto, Frances will be Frances. No changes, no alterations, no lies. It’s an important part of the learning process. Understood?”
J couldn’t answer. His tongue felt like a thick sweater in his mouth, and his hands started to sweat. Somebody laughed.
“I can’t hear you,” the teacher persisted.
Suddenly, a girl in neon tights and braids piped up.
“ ’Scuse me, ma’am?” she said, completely unafraid. The girl had a tough street accent, which J would later learn could be adopted and abandoned at will. “J is my cousin, and something real bad happened in our family. She can’t be called Jenifer no more, ’cause of the memories. That’s why her name is J.”
“Oh!” the teacher said, her mouth a small circle, her eyebrows lifted in surprise. She weighed the situation for a moment, seemingly steeling herself for a battle. Then she dropped her armor. “Okay, then. I’m sorry. J it is. Let’s go on.”
After the class, J thanked Melissa. It took all his courage to stop her in the hall.
“Don’t worry about it,” Melissa had said. “That teacher was an idiot. I mean, since when is photography honest? There’s a Picasso quote from the first teacher—the one who taught painting. I love it! It goes, ‘Art is the lie that tells the truth.’ That teacher was waaaay better.”
J knew, right then, that he loved her.
More than five years and countless sleepovers later, J wondered: could Melissa feel J’s own breath as he moved microscopically closer to her in the bed, his own lips now almost touching Melissa’s? He was sure Melissa shifted toward him, too. J thought suddenly of Stacey Ramirez and wondered whether she had really wanted to do that, or whether she just craved attention. Or money. Melissa’s knees pressed harder into J’s, J was sure of it, and a flame rose up in J’s stomach. J’s eyes were closed now, and he didn’t dare open them; Melissa might see him watching and move away. He could feel Melissa’s breath on his upper lip, and though the alcohol smell made him queasy, he didn’t want the moment to end. And yet he wanted more. He wanted to be in the lineup of guys with Stacey Ramirez, he wanted to be in Puerto Rico, he wanted to fly a plane. He wanted Melissa.
Suddenly, they were kissing. J’s mouth on Melissa’s, his hand lightly hovering above her hip. J felt Melissa’s lips part in response, her tongue dart out and back again.
Melissa sat straight up. “J!” she said. “What are you doing?”
Melissa got up and walked across the room. Her bare feet made a slapping sound on the wood floor, and then an overhead light shattered the darkness. J threw the comforter over his head to protect his eyes. “I was sleeping!” J shouted, his voice muffled. “Same as you!”
“No,” Melissa barked. “You kissed me.”
J peeked out from the blankets. Melissa’s face looked strained and confused.
Melissa came back and sat on the edge of the bed. She hung her head and looked at her toes. Her black nail polish was chipped in several places, and she leaned down to pick away at some more. “People warned me about you, again and again and again,” she said. “But I ignored them. I thought you were my friend.”
J just looked at her. His headache was worse than ever.
“J—” Melissa started again, “I’m not a lesbian.”
J sat up straight in bed. He screamed at her, inside his head, louder than anything he’d ever screamed before. I’m not, either!
Melissa, of course, couldn’t hear him. She picked up J’s bag from the floor and said, “I think you should go home.”
CHAPTER
TWO
“Jellybean, wake up.” J’s mom was standing over his bed and shaking his shoulder. Carolina was wearing her hospital nurse uniform and looking at her watch. “It’s after eight o’clock. You have to go to school.”
J had spent the weekend hiding from his cell phone, hoping Melissa wouldn’t call or text him, yet checking the screen every hour to see if she did. So far, she’d ignored him completely. On Monday, he played sick, and Carolina went for it; he couldn’t face the school hallways and their wretched stink of raspberry body wash and bleach, and the risk of Melissa’s disdain. Today in biology, they’d be continuing a rat dissection. Melissa wasn’t in that class. Maybe he’d just go to biology and then come home again. He murmured from his pillow. “Okay, I’m up.�
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J slept in the living room on the pullout couch, and his parents let him decorate that corner of the room. He’d put up a few of his own photographs from last year, when he was taking pictures of shadows on sidewalks. One showed the outline of what looked to be an old man in a bowler hat; another was a bird that seemed caught in barbed wire, even as it was flying. He’d also taped up magazine photos of Daddy Yankee, surrounded by women in bright, skimpy dresses. There were other shots of Yankee, in Puerto Rico or somewhere warm, standing on the hood of a car, with a mic, arm outstretched, reaching for a crowd that loved him.
Dressing that day, like all days, was painful. J kept his clothes in an old trunk his dad had brought home from the lost and found of the MTA; Manny worked there and was forever trekking in treasures. The trunk was ancient cracked leather, with shiny brass hinges and locks, and J liked the way it always looked packed and ready to go somewhere better. J hated his clothes. His mother had long ago given up on taking him shopping; now she handed him money and let him fend for himself. But J couldn’t stand dressing rooms with their multiple mirrors or clerks with their snarky smiles, so he just grabbed jeans off the stacks in the neighborhood shops, bought sports jerseys on the Internet, and got thermal underwear from a Target in the Bronx, where he bought his boxers, too. Every size was a guess, and then he guessed three sizes up, which made everything swim on him. It was a style, but it never looked good.
That day, like every day, J pulled out three shirts—a tank top, a thermal, and a flannel for the top. It was mid-October and already cold, and J loved the winter, when he could legitimately cloak himself in layers. J’s body was scrawny and long, his hair shaved close to the scalp, with razor lines around the ears. He tried to stay skinny by not eating much; he’d heard that really skinny girls could make their periods stop, but that had never happened to him. Besides, by dinner, usually, he was starving and would throw back a large portion of whatever his mother served. Luckily, J had a high metabolism from all his years of swimming, and he still lifted free weights at night. He hoped that the muscles would develop, thick and ropy beneath a thin layer of skin, if he could continue to keep the fat, and the way it maddeningly clung to his hips and backside, at bay.
