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  I shuddered and escaped into the wardrobe to escape their gaze, and look for something to wear, but Damaris’ voice traveled in after me.

  Oh, come on. Look how pretty he is. Like a little girl.

  I went through my loungewear, looking for something that would make me feel better. I ended up pulling on yoga pants and a long-sleeved t-shirt made of viscose. The soft, stretchy fabric felt like a hug, reassuring, no hard edges.

  I wandered into the den and sat down in the recliner.

  Not for the first time, I thought about all of the people I had disappointed when I went into drag. Sue Ellen. My mom. Abuela. I even felt like I’d disappointed my college counselor, for god’s sake. They formed a second row behind the judging panel of DT, Machyl, Marcus and Damaris.

  You’re wasting your potential, Sue Ellen said, putting down her book of critical theory.

  After all of the advantages you’ve had in life, Ms Sheehan shook her head and me and looked at me over her reading glasses.

  Mamá glanced at me, then went back to her magazine and cup of herbal tea. We spent a lot of money on that boy’s education.

  Abuela waved me away with her hand. Why can’t he do this without telling everyone? It’s embarrassing.

  I ran my nails over the fine-grained corduroy of the armchair upholstery. It scratched well. Felt good and rhythmic under my nails.

  It was too late to do anything about any of them. They would always be there, thinking what they did, disappointed, disagreeing.

  But my drag sisters… my own drag mother… they were supposed to support me. Be there for me. Damaris said this was my chosen family. She said they would accept me for who I really was.

  But they didn’t.

  Why are you blaming them? The voice in the back of my mind whispered. You’re the one who sucks.

  I didn’t want to admit it, but the voice was right. Sometimes I didn’t know why they bothered to keep me there. Why not just fire me and be done with it?

  I didn’t have any talent, not like Machyl had for dance, not like the others had for performing. They made it look easy, and it was anything but.

  There wasn’t anything I could do about that. If you didn’t have inborn talent, then that was that, wasn’t it?

  Well there must be something you can do, the voice hissed angrily. Look how much they all hate you. You obviously did something wrong.

  I knew what I had done wrong.

  Damaris had done everything for me. She had brought me into the club, introduced me to Duane Tyrone, pointed out why I should become part of the House of Ellegrandé. She protected me against Machyl and defended me to Duane Tyrone.

  I shouldn’t feel the way I did about her. It was no way to repay her kindness to me.

  When I saw her that first time in the club, I had imagined kissing her.

  That was where I had gone wrong.

  I need to stop.

  I needed to stop loving her. As Sue Ellen had said, she was never going to feel the same way about me.

  And on top of that, it had become clear that the way I loved her was wrong. The way I was attracted to her was wrong.

  Sue Ellen had said I was too focused on the physical side of things. I wasn’t really sure how I was supposed to ignore that side of things.

  If I wasn’t supposed to be attracted to it, then how was I supposed to feel about it? Was I supposed to be disgusted? Was I supposed to hate the fact that she had physical traits that weren’t exclusively female?

  Don’t be a fucking idiot, the voice said derisively. You know you don’t believe that.

  It wasn’t important, as Sue Ellen had said. So I was supposed to ignore it. Block it out. And I hadn’t been doing that.

  And if Damaris ever found out my deepest, darkest thoughts about her… I cringed at the thought. That would be the worst betrayal I could ever commit. She could never, ever find out.

  She wasn’t going to find out. Of course she wasn’t.

  But that in and of itself wasn’t the only negative thing that had come from my infatuation.

  If I wasn’t in love with Damaris, I wouldn’t have gone to the club three hours early to try to spend time alone with her. I wouldn’t have overheard the argument, and I wouldn’t have had the fight with Damaris afterward.

  And the whole thing with Marcus wouldn’t have happened, and I wouldn’t be in the mess I was in now.

  So it was crystal clear now what I needed to do. From this day onward, I was going to stop. I would give up all my secret hopes and wishes.

  From now on, I would be her friend, and her friend only, and my thoughts would be strictly platonic.

  I stood up, took a deep breath, and left the den. I started walking toward my bedroom to get my phone, then realized that if I did, I would have to face Marcus’ response last night after I didn’t respond to his messages.

  He’ll be angry.

  He had told me he was thinking about me. And I had just ghosted away and said nothing.

  He’ll be so angry.

  Angry enough to go back on his word and tell Machyl? I didn’t know Marcus that well. We had never hung out outside of the club. I wouldn’t even say we were friends, really.

  But Marcus and Machyl? I knew they were friends. I knew they hung out outside the club, went drinking and dancing at other gay bars.

  Oh, god.

  There was every possibility that he had told Machyl. Fear prickled up my spine and I felt sick. If Marcus had told Machyl, Machyl would have spread it all over the club immediately.

  They might be talking about it on the group chat.

  I can’t.

  I couldn’t face my phone right now. Absolutely not.

  Trying to calm down, I went to the kitchen, past the island and up to the fridge. There was half a bottle of peach and banana smoothie left in there and I poured it into a glass and tossed the empty plastic bottle in the recycling.

  Then I walked over to the landline phone hanging on the wall and took it off its cradle. Sue Ellen’s cell number was the only one I had memorized apart from my own.

  I punched in her number and held it to my ear, listening to the dial tone.

  I took a sip of the smoothie. It had been in there just a little too long and it was going slightly fizzy with a sour tang. It still tasted good though. I kept drinking.

  If I got sick for real, that would give me an excuse to stay home the rest of the weekend without lying.

  “Sue Ellen Filbert speaking?” Sue Ellen’s voice sounded different in this phone.

  “Sue Ellen. It’s Anthony.”

  “Anthony? Did something happen to your phone?”

  “Uh—” I looked at the ceiling, trying to think of an excuse. “It needed to update or something. It, like, had that spinning wheel.”

  “The spinning wheel of death? What, was it frozen?” She sounded skeptical. Big surprise.

  “I don’t know, it was just spinning and anyway, it wasn’t responding.”

  “It doesn’t sound like it was updating. Did you try restarting it?”

  “Sue Ellen, this isn’t about the phone,” I said.

  “Okay, okay,” she muttered. “Did you see my messages?”

  “Um… no I didn’t see those…” I drank some more smoothie as a way to stop talking.

  “Okay,” Sue Ellen sounded a little annoyed. “Cause I sent you like a huge thing.”

  Machyl would leap on that and make some childish dick joke. But I wasn’t really in the laughing mood. “What did it say?”

  Sue Ellen sighed. “You need to read it.”

  “Well, I can’t right now,” I said, getting annoyed myself.

  “I know,” she said. “You just told me. Whose phone is this anyway?”

  “It’s the landline in the apartment,” I explained. “My mom hates talking on cell phones.”

  “That’s why the number looked weird,” Sue Ellen muttered. “Are you mad at me by the way?”

  “No,” I said quickly. “Of course not.”


  “Because I wasn’t trying to hurt your feelings last night. I was just telling it like it is.”

  “Yeah, Sue Ellen, I know,” I said, then realized the way I’d said it sounded kind of bitchy. “I mean I know and it’s okay.”

  “Good,” she said simply. “Because I thought you might be mad when you didn’t respond.”

  Fuck. I was right about Marcus. I had made him mad, and he had probably told everyone already—and then, I would bet anything in the world, he had gone online and found another date for the evening when he finished at the club. Some beefcake with thick muscular thighs and strong hands.

  “Well, I’m not,” I said. “Something else happened yesterday that I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Okay. What happened?”

  I cleared my throat. “Marcus told me he liked me.”

  “Marcus?” She said incredulously. “Bone China? That Marcus?”

  “Um. Yeah.”

  “He likes you?” She repeated. She sounded shocked beyond belief.

  I understood why she was shocked. I had no idea what Marcus would see in me, either.

  “Do you like him?” She asked.

  “Um,” I said. I was twisting my finger in and out of the coiled telephone cord. It was just the right size for my index finger and it felt weirdly good to coil the plastic cable all the way from the base to the tip.

  I had kissed Marcus back. I had put my arms around him, I had arched against him and gripped his hips with my thighs and I had enjoyed it.

  Who was I to claim I didn’t like him?

  I’m going to fuck you. I’m going to make you come so hard you’ll think your cum was made of solid silver.

  Just hearing him say those words had made me roll my eyes up in my head with sheer arousal. Just thinking about him saying those words now was enough to make me start getting hard again.

  I forced myself to change position, to get my mind off it, I went and sat at the breakfast bar and traced my finger over the iridescent flecks in the marble counter top.

  “I don’t know,” I said, letting the phone cord drop. It was a really long cord. I assumed it dated from the long ago times when people didn’t have cell phones. They had to be tethered to these wall phones all the time and presumably wander around the house with them, that was why the cords were so long.

  “Do you find him attractive?” She asked.

  “Well—yeah, of course,” I said. “He’s very attractive.”

  That didn’t mean anything, of course. That I found him attractive. It didn’t mean anything at all.

  “He—he kissed me,” I admitted.

  “What?” Sue Ellen gasped. “Seriously?”

  “And, um. We sort of almost had sex.”

  “What??”

  “But I—I had to stop,” I said. “I was—I felt really overwhelmed,” as I said it, I realized how true this was. It had been a shock, to my entire system, like a tidal wave enveloping me. “So I just stopped and I left.”

  “So, wait…” she said. “Where did this come from? I mean, you haven’t mentioned anything about him…”

  “It came out of nowhere!” I said. “I was as surprised as you are!”

  “Hmm,” she said. “Was it… a positive experience?”

  “I—I don’t know,” I said helplessly.

  “Did you feel like you could leave if you wanted to?” She said, a note of concern coming into her voice. “Did he try to get you to have sex with him?”

  “Oh…” I said. “I—I didn’t want to make him mad,” I said.

  “You don’t owe him anything,” she said, sounding even more concerned. “If he gets mad because you didn’t want to sleep with him, that’s a red flag. I want to make sure he wasn’t trying to coerce you.”

  “No, I… I know,” I said. The problem wasn’t that I didn’t want to. The problem was that I did want to. “He didn’t get mad when I stopped. He—” I took a deep breath. “He told me he wanted me and he wanted to come out to Duane Tyrone, even if it meant we would get fired.”

  “Oh,” Sue Ellen said, sounding relieved. “I forgot about that stupid rule. It’s like it’s the nineteen-fifties in that place.”

  “Well,” I said. “What should I do?”

  “It’s obvious to me what I would do in your place, but you’re not me, so what does it matter what I think?”

  “Because you’re my best friend,” I said. “So I want to know.”

  “I think you already know what I’m going to say,” she said.

  Yes, I knew what she was going to say. And that was why I had called her.

  Because I had already seen the outcome when I tried to make my own decisions. I had landed myself in this mess I was in now.

  I was the problem in my life. I had made a mistake, and then kept making it, and refusing to admit I was wrong and there was a problem.

  I had fallen in love with Damaris, or I thought I had, but it wasn't right, and just saying the word love didn’t make it okay, or excuse it. I had been using that as an excuse for months.

  It wasn't good for me, and more importantly it wasn't good for Damaris. Just as Sue Ellen said, I needed to just be a supportive friend to Damaris.

  I didn’t need to be thinking about her in sexual situations, imagining kissing her neck, taking her hair in my hands and twisting it up and out of the way, putting my hands around her waist, under her top and hearing her breath hitch when my hand ran over the soft skin of her midriff.

  Stop. Stop it now.

  “I don’t know what you’re going to say,” I reassured her. “Just tell me.”

  “I think that you’re twenty years old and you just had your first kiss yesterday,” she said. “I’m sorry if that sounds harsh, but it’s reality.”

  I felt my heart sink. I needed to hear this. It was tough love. This was why I was telling Sue Ellen all of this.

  “I think you need to get out there and explore the world of relationships,” she continued. “And I know you hate dating apps—”

  “You know I don’t have casual sex,” I said quickly.

  “So filter out the men, then,” she replied instantly. That was what she always said.

  “Women have casual sex too!” I retorted without hesitation.

  “Yah,” she said in a bored voice. “I’m not saying they don’t. I’m still saying that’s a better strategy if you’re so obsessed with casual sex, I mean, avoiding it.”

  “What women are going to be interested in me?” I snapped.

  “Anthony, are we having this conversation again?” She snapped right back. “You’ll never know until you try. This is just another excuse to prevent you even putting yourself out there.”

  “I don’t know why I can’t meet someone in real life,” I could hear the whine in my own voice. “Why do I have to use apps?”

  “Because that’s what everyone else does?” Sue Ellen sounded irritated. “You always have to act like you’re the exception to the rule,” she said, sounding like she was shaking her head while she said it.

  I huffed. I was getting really annoyed now. This was not why I had called her. She was right, we had had this conversation before.

  “As I was saying before you interrupted me,” Sue Ellen said, “I think you need to get out there. That’s all I have to say.”

  “But what about Marcus?” I asked.

  “What about him?” She asked.

  “What should I do? I don’t want to get kicked out of the club.”

  “What were Damaris and Marcus doing this whole time?” She asked. “We saw them in that alley over a year ago. Did they get special permission or something?”

  “No…” I said. “I don’t think so. Even though I am really surprised that Damaris would go behind DT’s back. They’re really close. And he’s done so much for her.”

  “Well if it was me,” Sue Ellen said. “I would just fuck who I wanted to fuck and screw some weird internalized homophobia rule that makes no sense anyway.”<
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  Yes. That was what I wanted to hear.

  “He is very pretty…” I said. “Marcus, I mean.”

  “And,” Sue Ellen pointed out, a hint of eagerness coming into her voice now. “He said he was interested in a relationship, right?”

  “Yes…” I agreed.

  “So it’s not casual sex,” she said. “So there’s a very beautiful boy who wants a relationship with you. What’s the problem here?”

  “He told me he wanted me to go back to London with him if we got kicked out,” I said.

  “He said what?” Sue Ellen in surprise. “Why wouldn’t you just get another job at another drag club in New York?”

  “Because you can’t,” I said. “Only the drag mothers can re-assign queens between houses. Unless you get really famous, like if you make it into a big international pageant like Vivesse. Then you’ll have some bargaining power and you can negotiate with them.”

  “Okay, I didn’t realize it was literally like a cartel system,” she said incredulously. “So if you get kicked out of Ellegrandé, what would happen?”

  “That would be it,” I said. “I mean, the other mothers will back DT up.” I shrugged. “That’s how it works.”

  “Oh, fuck all of that, Anthony,” she groaned. “That’s just ridiculous. These so-called drag mothers don’t own you. Just do whatever you want.”

  “I mean…” I said. “Marcus and Damaris kept it a secret all this time. And nothing bad happened.”

  “Exactly,” Sue Ellen said with a note of satisfaction in her voice.

  Unless Marcus already told.

  If Marcus had already told, then it was too late anyway. In that case I would have to go to Duane Tyrone, get down on my knees and beg him to let me stay. And I would promise to never do anything with Marcus again.

  But if Marcus hadn’t told…

  I bit my lip. I could feel Marcus’ erection pressing against my inner thigh. I could feel it as if I had been transported back in time.

  There was only one thing to do. I had to go and get in touch with Marcus and find out if he had told or not.

  “Okay,” I said to Sue Ellen. “I’m going to contact Marcus.”

  “Excellent,” she said. “And I want to hear everything.”

  “Ew, Sue Ellen! Please!”