She nods. “Fair. So you were just chilling in my room?”
“I was looking for you,” I tell her. “And for your information, I totally covered for you when Mom came home.”
“Thanks,” she says with a sigh.
I reach under my bed and grab my laptop. “I did a thing last night and if I show you, you can’t make fun of me.”
“Waylon, I would never make fun of you.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it.”
She nods, conceding. “Okay, but I would never make fun of you for something that was actually important.”
She gasps. “Is this why you called for an emergency pep talk?”
My stomach turns at the memory of sitting in the back room, waiting for Lucas to return. “Not quite,” I say as I open up the video and hit play.
I wait for her to say something, but she watches in silence.
On-screen, after introducing myself, I lip-synch to Lizzo’s “Good as Hell,” Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own,” and “Lady Marmalade” fromMoulin Rouge. At the time, I felt my selection showed range. Thankfully, the middle-of-the-night blaring music coming from my room is nothing new for my parents. Between each song, I tell funny stories about myself. The first and only time I wore a skirt in public (outside of Halloween), which happened to be at school in eighth grade because Clem got in trouble the previous day for wearing a skirt that was shorter than her fingertips even though the cheerleaders routinely wore their uniforms to school, which were much shorter. And besides, my sister has very long arms and shouldn’t be punished for our father’s genetic makeup. There was nothing in the boy’s dress code about skirts and definitely nothing about hemlines. Of course, I was tormented for weeks, and I think this was probably the first time that I promised myself if I could just survive high school, there’d be a better version of my life waiting on the other side.
The second story is my coming-out story, and how I’ddreamed of the moment the way some people dream of their wedding day. In the end, though, the whole family kind of shrugged and said they knew all along while Clem stole the show (without warning me) and dropped the bomb that she was gay too. My third and final story was a recounting of last night and how my disappointment over the results ofFiercest of Them Allhad turned into a very specific kind of motivation that had spurred me on to create this very video.
“And that’s why I’m here in this wig and lipstick,” I said. “Eat your heart out, y’all. Miss Pumpkin Patch is here to slay the day and my fat ass won’t take no for an answer. Your season seventeen queen has arrived. Game fucking on.”
Clem sits beside me, her jaw unhinged. “That. Was. FIERCE.” She turns to me and grips my shoulder. “You never told me you wanted to do drag, Waylon!”
I shrug. “It didn’t even feel like drag. It’s like I was showcasing a very specific part of myself, ya know?”
She gasps. “Waylon, what if they actually cast you?”
I scoff. “Never gonna happen. I’ve never even performed. I probably won’t even send it in.”
She jumps up to her feet, standing on my mattress as she towers over me. “What are you talking about? You have to send it in!”
“Clem. Come on. The people who try out for these shows are pros. They’re actual performers. This was just for fun.”
She crosses her arms over her chest before plopping backdown and nuzzling against my shoulder. “You know, Hannah says the Hideaway has a few drag nights.”
I shake my head. “I’m good.” The Hideaway is the scary former biker bar outside of town that could barely stay in business, so for three nights a week they have what they call Rainbow Nights, and it’s definitely not a church outreach event dedicated to celebrating the promise of God’s love like Mrs. Michalchuk, my former Sunday school teacher, had thought it was.
“You know—” I start, intent on asking her about my discovery. By the time I fell asleep last night, I’d convinced myself that the email was no big deal. Just Clem testing the waters to see if she could even get in and how far she could take it before backing out. The same thing happened with swim team in tenth grade. She joined, quickly became the best on the team, and won the district championship in the hundred-meter butterfly. When the time came to pick it back up again the following year, she skipped out and said she’d already proven to herself she could do it and that was enough. Clem is a joiner. She likes to join every club and team and group there is. To her, life is a buffet, and everything from mock trial to astronomy club to the soccer team is on the menu.
She reaches out and rubs the light stubble on my chin. “Isn’t it so weird that we have body hair? I swear to God, one day we were eleven years old and hairless and then BOOM! Pubes and facial hair!” She jumps up. “Okay, I promised Hannah’s grandma I’d come over today and force Hannah to organize her room. It’s the only way she’d lether out of the house this weekend.”
“That sounds miserable,” I groan.
“I didn’t say I’d be doing the cleaning,” she points out. “Just watching.”
“Kinky.”
Six
I like to think of my life in moments. In scenes. Like the moment I came out to my family in ninth grade over Christmas break. I could see it exactly in my head before it even happened. My mom would cry and my dad would clear his throat (the closest thing to crying I’ve ever seen him do), and they’d both tell me that they’d love me the way I was no matter what. It would be a moment in time when their hopes and dreams for me would change. I’d never marry a girl in a puffy white wedding dress, and maybe some people in town would think differently of us. It would take adjusting. It would take time. It would be difficult, but I would prevail and maybe one day Mom and I would walk in a Pride parade and we’d hold hands, our eyes glistening as we remembered all the obstacles we overcame.
I know that, in reality, coming out is not an easy thing for most people, but imagining this slice of my life as a dramatic highlight reel gave me the courage to follow through with it and maybe even got me a little excited about it too? Is that so bad? To love a bit of drama?
But what happened instead the morning I came out was about as eventful as announcing I had an anatomy quiz.
