You Know Me Well(62)

Mark says, “You look like a lesbian artist fairy.”

And I laugh again because he looks so much like himself in his jeans and plain T-shirt and baseball cap from our school team. And by that, I mean he looks perfect. So far from a boy trying to win the love of his best friend by dancing almost naked on a bar. So far from someone too heartbroken to get out of bed. So far from a boy waiting for me, lost, on a sidewalk.

I hug him again.

“They’re expecting us back in half an hour,” I say. “That’s when Violet gets here.”

“Thirty minutes of our own,” he says. “What should we fill them with?”

I grab his hand and pull him back into the crowd.

“Where are we going?” he asks, but I don’t answer him until we’re at the entrance of Happy Happy and he laughs and says, “Perfect,” and I say, “I thought so, too.”

A minute later we’re carrying gin and tonics to the table where I sat when this all started. The bar itself is almost quiet. The true party is out on the street; most of the bars won’t fill until later. There’s too much to see, and there’s the need to be seen. But for now all I want are a few minutes with my friend. I’ve already heard about his day with Taylor and Ryan. He already knows how excited I am about seeing Violet.

Mark lifts his glass.

“We need to toast,” he says.

“Yes.”

“What a week,” he says.

“Somehow we survived it.”

“We more than survived it. We kicked this week’s ass.”

“We tongue kissed it.”

“We fucking married it,” Mark says. “This week will be with us forever.”

We clink glasses, take sips, and it’s the weakest gin and tonic I’ve ever had, but I don’t mind.

“I think he knows we’re underage,” Mark whispers.

We grin at each other, and I will be happy if all we do is sit and sip our tonic waters in the presence of each other for the rest of our minutes alone, but then the door opens and fills the bar with the roar of the street. We turn to look and our mouths drop in synchronized disbelief.

Here’s another teenager, younger than us. He squints and then sees us. He freezes and steps back toward the door. I gesture him over.

“Should I try to get a drink?” he says once he’s reached us. And then, whispering, “I don’t have a fake ID.”

Even as he’s saying it, he’s looking through his wallet as though an ID may magically appear.

“Not worth it,” I say. “This is a monumental waste of ten dollars.”

He puts his wallet in his pocket, but then he has nothing to do with his hands, and I see that they’re shaking.

“What are you doing here?” Mark asks him.

“Oh, uh,” the boy stammers. “I, um … I was just…”

If Garrison Kline were here, he’d take a look at this boy and know exactly the right thing to say. He wouldn’t look into the boy’s soul, but he’d make him look into it himself, until what he saw didn’t scare him so much anymore.

But Garrison Kline has disappeared from our lives in a puff of fairy godfather smoke. Somehow, I can feel that with certainty. All we have, at least for now, are ourselves and each other.

We introduce ourselves, and the kid says his name is Wyatt and that he read about the bar on the Internet and that it seemed like kind of a cool place to just, you know, check out sometime, and he has no idea why he’s even here, he just felt like getting out of the house, and I can’t listen to him talk like this anymore.

On his shirt is a tiny rainbow pin. I touch it.

“This is beautiful,” I say, even though it’s only flimsy metal and cheap paint. “Did you get it for today?”

He stops his rambling. He nods.

“Someone handed it to me when I got off BART.”

“And how does it feel to wear it?”

He breathes in and exhales. Smiles at the table and wipes his forehead with his arm.

He gathers the courage and looks at me.

“Feels good,” he says.

“Happy first Pride, Wyatt,” I say solemnly.

“Thanks,” he says.

Hiding and denying and being afraid is no way to treat love. Love demands bravery. No matter the occasion, love expects us to rise, and with that in mind I check my phone.

“Boys,” I say. “We have a party to attend.”

*

The party has spilled from Shelbie’s house to the street, where some neighbors are blasting music from a huge speaker in their garage. Lehna and Candace are sitting with their arms around each other on Shelbie’s stoop. Lehna smiles when she sees me. June and Uma are dancing along with so many others. I don’t know if the people around them are Shelbie’s friends, but I do know that on a day like today there is no such thing as a stranger.

“Let’s dance,” I say to the boys.

“I’ve never danced with a girl in a leotard and wings before,” Wyatt says.

“I bet you’ve never danced with a guy before, either,” Mark says, and Wyatt blushes, and Mark grabs his hand.

The warm sun. The people filling the streets. The bass so powerful it thrums through me. The people hawking Jell-O shots and bottles of water. The drag queens and drag kings. The trans men and trans women. The straight couples cheering us on. The topless girls, waving from apartments above us. The gay boys on fire escapes, shaking their asses. The bears, holding hands in matching wedding rings. The lesbian moms with toddlers on their shoulders. And those not as easily identified or defined. The bi, the genderqueer, the questioning. All of us with love in our hearts.