Page 100 of My Own Kind of Person

I close my eyes.

I’m always wishing for someone else to come and make everything okay.

I ask myself now to become the person I wished for.

I open my eyes.

There’s a knock at the door. “This is your five-minute call.”

Time moves quickly. A woman with a headset leads me to the side of the stage and I stand in the darkness. Under the closed curtains is a sliver of light from the auditorium. The woman says we have one minute. The sliver of light under the closed curtains darkens. The curtains open and the stage lights go up. The woman tells me I’m on.

I step out to loud conversation and scattered applause. The spotlight hits me and I take the mic. There’s more applause but mostly more conversation. Christy’s cheering cuts through the noise.

“Good evening. My name is Sean O’Brien. This is a big room and it would take a while to get to everyone’s names individually, so would you please all shout them out?”

A couple people shout their names, followed by a couple more, and more, until the sound builds to a chaotic roar, daring me to be louder.

I wait until the room quiets. “Nice to meet you.”

There’s a little laughter. Then silence.

In the first few rows I see Mr. Mazzei, and Mom with Mr. and Mrs. Z. Near them are Christy and Andi and Tony, and an empty seat.

“When I was a kid,” I say, walking across the long stage, “a girl would tell a guy she liked him by beating him up. And let’s just say all the girls liked me. A fair number of the boys did too. One boy liked me so much he gave me a chipped tooth.”

This seems to be a successful opening, and I smile. “I came home and told my mom I had to go to the dentist, and she looked in my mouth and said, ‘Eh, it’s a baby tooth.’ Money was tight in our family. The tooth fairy usually left me two dollars, but one morning I woke up and the tooth fairy had left me twenty-one. I told my mom and she was like—” I pull the mic away as I curse.

“There was one girl in elementary school I had a secret affair with. Secret because it was only when the teacher wasn’t looking that she’d kick me in the shins. That girl struck fear into my heart and urine into my pants.” I pause at the center of the stage. “A few years later she came out as a lesbian. Which is funny because a few years after that I came out as bi. I think this means that in a few more years we’ll get married?”

And I go back to walking. “It’s weird being bi. If I’m dating a girl and tell her I’m bi, she just thinks I’m gay. If I’m dating a guy and tell him I’m bi, he just thinks I’m definitely gay. And if I tell my nonbinary friend I’m bi, they just think I should check out this YouTube video about social constructs.” I smile. “We’re living in the future now, though, thankfully. Everyone in this room is probably very open-minded about gender and sexuality.” People applaud. “It’s just our next-door neighbors who aren’t.”

There’s laughter, and there’s also unrelated conversation. Some people are scrolling through their phones. One guy in the second row may be asleep.

“What a weird time period, huh?” I continue, feeling oddly confident. “There’s a guy at my school who probably wouldn’t say he’s misogynistic or racist or homophobic, but all those topics are a joke to him. And the more he jokes, whether we laugh or not, the idea inside his joke becomes more normal, and it spreads. If you try to push back, you’ll get casually made fun of, which is the most insidious and socially acceptable way of enforcing what’s okay to say. And, slowly, what starts as ‘just jokes’ ends up changing people’s actual thinking.”

I look out over the crowd. “Anyway, that’s why I don’t like comedy.”

Someone in the balcony shouts, “That guy sounds like a freethinker.”

“Oh my God,” I call up. “Is that you, Jay?”

Jay replies quietly—possibly sheepishly?—“Yeah.”

Everyone laughs.

“What are you doing here? We don’t like each other!”

Everyone laughs harder.

“I dunno,” he says. “You’re funny.”

I touch a hand to my chest. “Aw. Thank you.” I look to the other side of the balcony. “Is the guy who chipped my tooth here too?” After a second, I turn back to where Jay is. “Wait, real talk. Do you have a secret crush on me?”

“Nah.”

I hang my head dramatically. “That’s okay, I have a boyfriend already. He’s a dancer. He’s also not speaking to me. So maybe he’s not my boyfriend? We had a minor disagreement and I spiraled into madness and banged my head repeatedly on my desk in English class.”

I move my hair to the side to show the bump on my forehead. Everyone gasps.