“Beer pong, but with Skittles!” He’s already walking away.
“Did Mx. Prager OK that?!”
“It’s fine! We’ll pick up anything that spills!”
I follow him and it’s exactly as he said: Each end of the table has three rows of cups, in bowling pin formation, filled with Skittles. Nyx is waiting for him at one end.
“Finally,” they say when he walks up. They seem a little more relaxed today, not so much like a cat I could scare off with a sudden movement.
“I was just getting them in on the game,” he says, jerking a thumb at me.
“I’m not playing,” I say quickly, and look over at the other team. Jayden smiles at me sheepishly from his place beside Alexander. “Jayden!”
“It’s not messy like beer pong is!” he says quickly.
“You don’t even drink,” I say, but I can’t help it; I’m grinning.
Alexander flutters his fingers at me. “We do need a referee.”
I side-eye him for a second, and then I nod, and they all cheer. A glow swells in my chest, and I take up my position beside the table, at the center.
We’re mid-game, Jayden and Alexander winning, when the bell rings to signal the end of lunch. It jolts me out of the warm, happy glow of the party and back to reality, where we have a ton of stuff to clean up and only five minutes to do it in before fifth period.
“We’re good,” Forrest says, his eyes catching mine just as I’m about to panic. “I asked Mx. Prager to write us all passes.”
“Oh.” My shoulders settle. “You really did think of everything.”
“Not so bad having a co-president after all, huh?” He smirks at me as he sweeps Skittles from the table into a cup.
I smirk back. “It’s not the worst.”
He snorts and I join him in tidying. Jayden and Alexander are at the next table, putting the remaining snacks into a big reusable bag, while the rest of the Queer Alliance bustles around the library taking down decorations.
“Forrest!” We both look up at the voice to see someone I don’t recognize, tall with long blue hair, golden-brown skin, and dramatic cat-eye makeup.
“Mercury!” Forrest steps forward and the two of them hug. He turns to me. “Sidney, this is Mercury. She’s a sophomore, and is in theater with me. I’ve been trying to get her to come to Queer Alliance forever.”
“Hi!” I smile up at her. “Thank you for coming.”
“This was so fun,” she says. “I didn’t know Queer Alliance did stuff like this.”
“Well, we do now,” Forrest says.
“I gotta get to class, but ...the meeting is on Friday next week, right?”
“That’s right,” he says.
She flashes us two thumbs-ups and slides past, toward the double doors. Forrest turns to me. “She just came out,” he says in a low voice. “We started talking last year while we were both on set crew and she was questioning things.”
“I didn’t know you did set crew.” I glance back at Mercury, her giraffe-like frame disappearing into the hallway. Forrest has a whole life outside his posse, is friends with people I didn’t know he knew. And he told them about Queer Alliance. Got them to come to this party, this thing I thought was a terrible idea, a waste of time, and...
It wasn’t.
He winks. “There’s a lot of things you don’t know about me.”
I huff. “Oh yeah, you’re so mysterious.”
He wiggles his fingers at me like he’s casting a spell, then turns to take the cup of Skittles to the trash. I scan the library; almost all the decorations are put away, and Riley is pulling down the last of the flags. The only one left is Mx. Prager’s Pride flag on the wall behind their desk, which has every single color including the trans Pride chevron with the black and brown stripes, and the yellow triangle with the purple circle that signifies intersex people. It hangs there year-round, a comforting reminder that there are people working at this school who have our back no matter what the outside world is like.
