Act III

I sit in the park with dusk approaching, facing a small, candle-lit vigil.  A world cast in pink and yellow.  A cool zephyr bites my face and I watch the candles dance to the music of the wind.  Today they’re the only ones dancing.  Tomorrow the rest of the world will move on and no one will speak her name.  Her picture is there, several of them lifted from her social media and printed out, laminated.

“Did you know her?” they ask me.  Did I know her.

Did I fucking know her.

I was gay.  Today I laugh.  It all seemed so important, then.

Gay.

The word stung me the first time it came from Rachel’s lips.  Her plush, sweet, appetizing lips.  Her venomous lips.

“He’s gay.”

The thing is, I wasn’t mad at her.  I was at first, but that soon changed.  There was that initial moment when you hear something like that from a girl you’re massively attracted to and your spirit just breaks.  She might as well have said:

“This guy is so utterly repugnant and useless that I shouldn’t imagine any female wanting him.  He’s beyond hope.  He’s dead to me, as he ought to be dead to all of you.  Give up.”

So if you look at a pretty girl you’re a sinner but if you don’t you’re gay.

I got into my mom’s car and rode home.  She asked me how it went and I told her it was fine.  To be sure, I’d already resolved to never go back there again.  I’d sooner limit my options to the girls I watched from a distance at school and never again daydream about dancing a pas de deux with such a female.

“When you’re ready to talk about it, let me know.  Okay sweetie?”

“OK, mom.  Thanks.”

But somewhere on that ride home, past the gas stations and mini malls and the endless store lights and street lights and car lights blurred into a palette of reds, whites and blues where everyone obeyed the traffic laws in their neutral-colored, shiny SUVs that you can have when you pry them from their cold, dead hands, it dawned upon me just how kind Rachel had been not only for bringing me to the land of milk and honey but with that assessment of my sexuality.

I was gay.

Think about it.

All that time it had been my principal concern to not be labeled a pervert.  A stalker.  A creep.  Never once did it occur to me that I could have received the polar opposite.  And the thing was, like my dad said, this ain’t the fifties.  Back in the fifties, you could smoke on an airplane, lynch a black man and stack the jury with the people who helped you do it, fire your secretary for not sleeping with you, make racist caricatures of anybody who isn’t white, global warming didn’t exist, mass murder with nuclear weapons was a good idea, sugar was healthy, LSD was medicinal, tapeworms helped you lose weight, a woman couldn’t get birth control without her husband’s permission, a priest could safely rape a boy in silence, and if anybody disagreed they were a communist.  And, you were expected to ogle pretty girls.  When you saw one, you hollered and whistled and to be gay was a capital offense.  Quite frankly, being gay isn’t what it used to be, as evidenced by the fact that Rachel felt comfortable stripping down to her skivvies right in front of me.

And why did she feel this way?

Because she accepted that I wasn’t some pervert thinking perverted thoughts about the delicate crease in the center of that mound between her legs or the tantalizing patch of dark hair peeking through the white lace of her underwear.

So in other words, as long as I was gay, I could look at these girls to my heart’s content, soak in all the glory of their supple bodies and I’d completely get away with it.  Then on top of that, I would get to see the most amazing views just as Rachel had given me.  They would probably feel comfortable talking to me, too, telling me all manner of dirty little thoughts.  All because I’m not looking at them ‘in that way.’

It was so perfect; I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of this before.  I even pondered how I might let out a similar line at school.  There were girls at school that I also liked looking at, you know.  There was Jaime, Meadow, and Cara just to name a few.  And oh, there was Gina from Algebra.  And I wondered maybe if they thought I was gay, then I could be their gay friend and get to have long, intimate conversations with them and talk about which pair of underwear made her butt pop the best.

Maybe.

That evening, there was a reality show that my mom wanted to watch on TV where some women were sitting around talking about some drama.  I was eager to watch the thing with her just to shut my brain off when something caught my ear.

I hate it when I have to tell a man to make a move.

I know, right?  Like I was with this guy, and I know he was feelin’ me, but he just sat there and I’m like, what do you want, an invitation?

OMG what a wuss!

I know, right?  Like, it’s such a turn-off when I have to tell a man to touch me…

OK.

So here was the conundrum, and so much for shutting my brain off.

If the instructions were to make a move, don’t be a wuss by waiting for an invitation, how was I supposed to reconcile that with what dad had told me the other day?  I didn’t understand: if I waited for an invitation I was a wuss, but if I made a move without an invitation I was a creep.  What the frell?  All the more reason to just stick with the third option and let everyone think I was gay.  That way I could sit on the sidelines until I could figure out how humans reproduced.

It was an endless pondering.

I pondered these things in class through the next day while listening to Alyssa have an argument with my history teacher.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“How do you not know anything?  Aren’t you supposed to be the teacher?”

“I never said I didn’t know anything; I said I wasn’t there.”

“So what do you know?”

“Good question."  Ms. Wynkoop-Rogers glanced up at the board, where a projection of the stone tablet in question was displayed against a sterile, blue backdrop.  “I know that most scholars agree that this is an accurate translation.”

“OK, so then we know this is how the Egyptians conquered Israel.”

“That’s how this piece of evidence has been translated, you mean.”

“Same thing.”

“Is it?” she smiled.

“OK, so then that’s what it says, so that’s how we know what happened.  I don’t understand why you’re making this complicated.”

Ms. Wynkoop-Rogers tapped her chin in thought for a minute and glanced at the screen.  “Well, who do you think wrote it?”  She tapped the large screen and a new slide appeared with the text of the artifact rendered conveniently into English.

“It says it at the top, ‘I, King Merneptah…’”

“So you think King Merneptah wrote this.  By his own hand?”

“Why wouldn’t we?”

“That’s a good question.  Why wouldn’t you?”

“We’re asking you.”

“Maybe a scribe wrote it,” added Martin.

“Obviously,” Alyssa countered him.

“That wouldn’t be the king, then,” the teacher clarified.  I glanced around the room.  Anna was busy on her phone, Roman was busy doodling, and Daria had fallen asleep.  Alexander was watching the board, but then nobody ever knew what he was thinking; he was that kid that you just knew was going to do something fucked up sooner or later.

“What’s the difference?”

“Well, it’s a totally different character.  It’s tempting to overlook the influence of characters who exist outside the narrative.  Until it’s too late, that is.  As for this scribe, we don’t know who this is or what could have motivated them to tell a different story, if that’s what they did.  We don’t know if they had any reason to be honest.”

“So you think this stele is a lie, then.”

“I’m not saying that.”

“What are you saying, then?”

“OK, how’s this: people lie sometimes, especially if they feel like they can get something out of it.  So let’s do this: is there anything about this stele, this text, or any of the surrounding evidence to indicate someone might be motivated to make up something like this?”

“So you’re saying it’s a lie, then.”

“No.  What I’m saying is that you can’t take anything at face value just because you want to believe one way or another.  You always look for corroborating or contradicting evidence, and you apply critical thinking.  A lot of times, the clues are there, right in front of our faces but we don’t see them or we choose to ignore them.  Maybe Merneptah dictated this, maybe he didn’t.  Maybe this was commissioned by someone else, and maybe this person wanted to give an accurate depiction, and maybe this person wanted to aggrandize the pharoah’s accomplishments.  Maybe this person was there and gives an eyewitness account of what he or she saw, and maybe they’re parroting state propaganda.  Maybe they’re recording events accurately according to their perception, but are being lied to by someone else.  Can you tell me the pharaohs, whose whole identity was based on being invincible and all-powerful, had no incentive to boast of victory when they were actually defeated or perhaps never even went to battle?  One piece of evidence, you have to look at it as just that: one piece of evidence.  You have to look at what the evidence is, how it’s being presented, when, where, why, and how it’s created, and more or less get to know the thing.  In short, you have to study it.  It is possible that the statements on the Merneptah stele are truthful and accurate; that’s a possibility.  My point is that we have to accept it as a possibility, but not necessarily as a fact.  This whole narrative might not be about what it appears to be at all but something far more dark and sinister.”

Silence.

“How do we know what really happened, then?”

That’s when the bell rang, and I soon found myself in the lunchroom, gazing at a video on my phone.  I’d found one of Faith Stanislavovna doing the Sugar Plum Fairy and my, my, my, those legs.  It’s such a weird feeling that just a few weeks ago this was gay art.  Now I was gay, and this was porn.  This was better than porn; I’d never seen any porn woman so utterly fine.

“Oh my God what are you looking at?” Some guy’s voice interrupted my reverie. 

I turned to face him.

“What a fag!  Are you a fag?”

Another guy joined his taunt, and I pondered just what it would have meant had I let that stick.  “Hey check this fag out!”

What the hell did I care?  I liked what I liked, and wasn’t about to let some random fool stop me.  Besides, that was the road I was on anyway.  I turned back to my video.  After all, you’re supposed to ignore people like that and they’ll go away.  At least that’s how they tell you to handle bullies.  These guys had better be careful, though; you never know who’s going to snap.

Two bodies sat next to me, one on each side.  Both male, both feigned interest in what I was watching.  Not wanting to risk losing my phone, I put it away and looked at them.  “Can I help you?”

“Are you a fag?”

“Why?  Do you want to kiss me?”

“EWWWW!”  With that, they got up and made a big scene out of leaving and hitting me with that word a few more times.

“Go away dipshits!”  That voice I knew.  It was Dylan, and the best way I can think to describe Dylan was the school’s resident queer.  So you know, this is my own definition, but I differentiate between gay guys and queers as follows: a gay guy is a guy who likes other guys, whereas a queer is one of those flamboyant types who wears his sexual orientation on his sleeve.  He talks with that gay voice and does the gay hand gestures, all that.  And don’t act like you don’t know somebody like him, either.

Anyway, Dylan was cool.  He sat down across from me.  “What was that all about?”

“Uh… I think they’re just jealous.”

“What were you looking at?  May I see?”

“Sure,” and I showed him.  Together we watched, mesmerized as this petite professional from the other side of the world demonstrated the most delicate feats of athleticism, control, and balance.

“She has a nice ass,” Dylan informed me.  That made me laugh.

Then from behind me I heard another voice.  “Hey, Dylan!”

I didn’t need anyone to tell me who that was.  Rather, my heart came up to my throat and smacked me with a baseball bat.  That could not have been real.

“Hi, Sara.”

I didn’t turn.  I didn’t say a word.  Sara Temptation went to MY school?  Sara freaking Temptation went to my freaking school?!?

Oh yes.  She most certainly did.  And, she sat down right next to me, then turned to see who I was.  Her autumn eyes locked onto mine and her face cracked into a light grin.  “You go here?”

I nodded.  I couldn’t will my voice to respond with such intense beauty inches from my face and her shoulder brushing up against mine.  She was dressed in that same oversized Yale sweater that came down to her sumptuous legs and tight, purple yoga pants.  Her hands were mostly covered as her fingertips barely peeked out from the sleeves.

I wanted to look at her so badly, but forced my gaze in a general downward direction.  I wasn’t ready for this.  I wasn’t ready for the stray lock of nut-brown hair dangling down the right side of her beautiful face, or the narrow, pink lips that hung open in innocent curiosity.  I wasn’t ready for her.

“You guys know each other?” Dylan quizzed her.

“We have dance together,” she explained.

“Oooh,” he replied.

“What are you guys looking at?” she asked.

“Who is this?” Dylan asked me.

“Faith…” my voice broke.  I had a lump in my throat.  The cat had my tongue.  I was all knotted up.  I was tongue tied.  The cat tied my tongue into a knot around the lump that was in my throat.  It came out as some kind of whisper.  In my lungs I could feel a burning at the prospect of Sara discovering my dirty little secret, that I was watching ballet for some reason other than it being a beautiful, entrancing art form.  No, I’m really not that cultured.

I tried to cough the cat out and speak again.  “Faith Stanislavovna.”

Sara studied the video for a moment, as mesmerized as Dylan and me.  “Wow, she has perfect control…”

And thighs, too.  I was not about to say that out loud.

“Wow, that échappé was flawless.”

Sure was.  I mean, whatever an échappé is, it was flawless.  Hey, I was new to this.

“Nice ass, too,” Sara continued.

My face froze.

“I know, right?” added Dylan.

She giggled, then passed her brown eyes up and down my face.  She smiled.  Oh how she smiled at me, glancing all over me within inches of my face.  “Don’t tell me you didn’t notice.”

I did.  Believe me, I more than noticed that Faith Stanislavovna had a toned, woman’s ass that I was planning to appreciate later on in the privacy of my own room.

Sorry, I didn’t just tell you that, did I?

“Well I, Um…” I tripped over my words.  “I wouldn’t think you noticed such things, that’s all.”

“Am I not allowed to notice?”

Shit.  Of all the girls there, her?  Did it have to be her?