1
“He doesn’t get me at all,” Daniel said.
The boy—the young man—was sitting in a cluster of teens: a girl with her head shaved, a different girl with her hair dyed green, a boy with a T-shirt that said GAY THE PRAY AWAY, and a long-limbed boy with doe eyes.As usual, the kids had taken over the tower room—what they called the low-ceilinged room at the front of the pseudo-Victorian house.Daniel was leaning against the doe-eyed boy’s shoulder in a way that might have been friendly or might have been more than friendly; it was impossible to tell.
Tean, observing from the second-floor landing, suspected that might be the point.
In response to Daniel’s announcement, the other kids stirred up in excitement.
“My dad’s so toxic,” the boy in the T-shirt said, as though agreeing with Daniel.
The girl with the shaved head said, “My mom wants me to take sewing lessons.Seriously—lessons!”
The girl with her hair dyed green and the doe-eyed boy both began to speak at the same time, and the conversation picked up steam as the teens vented what sounded—to Tean, anyway—like typical teenage complaints: my parents don’t understand me, my parents are so dumb, my parents are so mean.
On the other hand, at Rainbow House—a support center for queer teens—those complaints tended to have more substance behind them.
“Maybe I should take sewing lessons,” Jem said as he joined Tean at the doorway.
“Maybe you should,” Tean said.He chose not to bring up the, quote,matching pajamasJem had tried to make for him and Scipio.
“We got that free sewing machine.”
“We don’t know that it was free.”
“Babe.”Jem’s groan was mostly exasperation.“It was sitting on the curb.It’s not like I broke into an old lady’s house and mugged her.”
“I’m just saying we don’t know.We’ll never know.Maybe whoever owned it sold it for—for soup money, and it was one of those Facebook Marketplace things, and she got her grandson to carry it down to the curb, and then you took it, and the deal fell through, and she didn’t get any soup money, and she called her grandson for help, but he couldn’t do anything because he hurt his back carrying it down to the curb, and she was too proud to ask anyone else for help, so she probably starved to death.”
Jem slurped from a McDonald’s cup for a few moments, his blond eyebrows knitted together.And then, holding up a finger, he said, “What if it was a man?”
“What?”
“What if it was a man who owned the sewing machine and put it down by the curb?”
Tean stared at him.
“Ah ha!”Jem shouted.When the teens turned to look at him, Jem announced, “Tean’s making sexist assumptions!”
Five sets of judgmental eyes settled on Tean.
“I didn’t—” He made himself stop because he was an adult.
But it felt like a long time before the girl with the shaved head made a sound of disgust and said, “Are you eavesdroppingon us?”
“Uh, no,” Tean said.“Just, you know, waiting for the show to—”
“Because this place isn’t for adults.”
“No problem,” Jem said, and he caught Tean’s arm and tugged him away from the room.
“I wasn’t making sexist assumptions,” Tean whispered furiously, wrenching his arm free.“Youwere the one talking about breaking into an old lady’s house and—”
Too late, Tean saw the drag queen.
For the last few months, the drag queens had been a fixture at Rainbow House, performing at community nights and teaching semi-regular classes to the teens who were interested.Their stage names were frequently cringe-inducing, at least for Tean: Queen Bee, Ivanna MoreMan, Eliza Manelli, Lupita Bonita, Illa Manila.This one stood well over six and a half feet tall in her heels and was built like a ranch hand.She wore a magenta wig and a velveteen suit, and her makeup was somewhere between Halloween and hair metal—a thick layer of black and white.She must have caught part of what Tean was saying because she slowed as she passed them and gave them a once-over.
Face heating, Tean mumbled, “That was out of context—”
