Chapter 22
Twenty-Two
On Sunday, button distribution is in full swing—except no one will give me a button. Lola insisted it would be safer to wait until everyone else has theirs.
I try to ignore the guilt lancing down my spine. No one questioned me when I said I didn’t want to be the face of the pronoun
button action.
Everyone took my emotional exhaustion at face value, offering the escape hatch without me asking. They’re not asking for more
than I have to give, even if I feel like I should be giving more.
But I know better. There’s no way management won’t trace this back to me. Employee zero.
Still, I humor them. I wait and watch buttons pop up on shirts and lanyards all around me.
After my late lunch, I track Stanley down to catch up with his tour group. Except, instead of Stanley, I find Efraín on the
second floor of the silo.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, breathless.
“Looking for you,” he replies.
“So I gathered.” I cross the empty gallery. “Aren’t you supposed to be in the gift shop?”
“I took a fifty-five.”
The ceiling rattles above us, a few heavy footfalls, a tinny shriek, but it’s eerily quiet on this floor.
“You’ve already been gone longer than five minutes, haven’t you?”
“Not like anyone keeps track on ‘emergency breaks.’”
“Everyone keeps track!”
“Guess I better be quick, then.”
“Quick about wh—”
He has me crowded into the alcove by the upper stairs before I realize what’s happening. He steals a kiss fast enough to evade
museum security. He pulls away before my body catches up enough to kiss him back. Over his shoulder, I make eye contact with
a familiar lens.
“Hey,” I whisper. “Not that I don’t want to live out a stock scene from every Art/Harry fic, but there’s a camera right there, and I’m pretty sure making out on the job is a fireable offense.”
“Who’s in HQ right now? Do you think they’d look the other way if I Venmo’d them twenty bucks?”
“Efraín.”
“No, you’re right. Can’t forget inflation. What’s the going rate for a minor bribe these days? A hundred?”
From this angle, he eclipses the track lights, kept dim to protect the artifacts and cool-toned to up the eerie factor. I’m face-to-face with a sight worthy of his own museum display: Efraín, happy, as close to carefree as he gets.
“I never thought I’d have to talk you out of bribing someone. Bribes are the epitome of capitalist corruption. I can’t believe you’d—”
“I’d be exploiting a flaw in a corrupt system for the greater good.”
I blush. “Why did you really come up here? Because some of the best fics take place in the compartment downstairs, but that’s
a photo-op logjam during open hours—”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You know, episode sixteen, ‘The Compartment,’ which was the bottle episode filmed entirely in—” I can just barely discern
his bafflement. “Okay, this is how I know you’ve never actually watched Nuclear Seasons.”
“Ms. Hutchinson made us watch an episode during our California history unit.”
“That was third grade, which, come to think of it . . . is maybe too young to expose impressionable minds to tentacle monsters
and scurvy zombies?”
“What?”
“Exactly. You have no idea which episodes I’m talking about.”
“Those are actual episodes?”
“Oh my God, how do you even work here? Wait, don’t answer that. I’m going to fix this. We’re going to watch the show. I’ll curate a sampler of greatest hits, and we can—” I look up at him, insecure all over again. “Unless you don’t want to. Never mind. Just forget—”
He tilts my chin up. “Hey. Elisha. I can survive watching an episode or two with you.”
“It doesn’t have to be with me. I can just send you an annotated list of the best episodes—”
“Oh hell no. If I’m going to watch this, I’m only going to watch it with you. As long as you agree to let me take you out.”
“What?”
“A date. Our next day off.”
“I think that can be arranged.”
“Good. Now, time for the feature presentation.”
“What are you—”
He takes my hand and presses something against my palm. I know what it is—I’d be able to guess even if I didn’t feel the straight,
cold metal pin bisecting my lifeline. “What do you think?” he asks, soft and vulnerable, like my opinion really matters to
him.
I try to study the button clinically, like he’s dropped a gemstone in my palm and asked me to assess its quality, clarity,
and value. I nudge him aside and hold the button up to the light.
The final design isn’t that different from the mock-ups I saw yesterday. Sometime before going to print, though, Efraín changed the background from pastel pink to lavender. Does he know purple’s my favorite color?
Between my Vans, my backpack, and my phone case, it should be painfully obvious to anyone that violet is my favorite range
on the spectrum of visible light. Is there some deeper meaning in the last-minute switch, or am I reading too much into this?
I’m definitely not misreading the text at the bottom, where he has ignored my advice thrice now and kept that reckless “PLEASE DON’T MISGENDER MUSEUM WORKERS!!!” line, which is so predictably Efraín that my face hurts from holding back my smile. Realistically, I should be grateful he used please.
The thing is, this isn’t any gemstone he’s handed to me; it’s a priceless jewel. Literally priceless because we’re taught that something’s value is determined by how much someone is willing to pay for it. Efraín’s
offering me this gift freely. This button is worth more than every artifact in this museum combined.
“Elisha?” He’s impatient, worrying his lip between his teeth.
“It’s perfect.”
“Honestly?”
“As perfect as it could be given that you didn’t follow my instructions.”
“Instructions?” His mouth quirks between a smile and a smirk. “About the—no one else complained.”
“I wasn’t complaining; it was a critique. You know as well as I do that no one was going to argue with you after you appointed yourself the button design czar—”
“Here I thought you said it was perfect.”
I look up at him, trying to tease out the line between bicker and banter. “It is. Subjectively. Maybe not objectively.”
“So it’s perfect in a ‘it’s the thought that counts’ kind of way?”
“Yes, exactly. But also because—” I swallow down the “no one’s ever done something like this for me” and shake my head. It’s
only then—out of the alcove, a few steps into the light—that I finally notice the button pinned to his own shirt. “I think
the buttons will be effective. The institution might object to the messaging—”
“The institution was always going to object.”
“—but museum guests will see them. Read them. Hopefully—”
“Listen to them.”
“No one can listen to a button.”
“Now you’re just being pedantic on purpose.”
“It’s not a crime to want things to be correct, and even if it was?
We’re all abolitionists here.” I fumble with the button because I’m beyond ready to put it on.
My fingers slip, and the needle exacts a blood toll on my thumb.
It doesn’t hurt any more than Sputnik’s love bites, but I don’t want to get blood on my loaned-not-owned uniform shirt.
Except scrunching up my shirt and angling the button one-handed requires more coordination than I possess.
“Here, let me.” Efraín pries the button from my clumsy fingers. He pins it just above my name tag. I am keenly aware how close
his hands are to my chest.
The button occupies collarbone territory, technically, but my heart’s pounding like it doesn’t know where my binder fits or
whether it matters at all. Ironic, isn’t it, that Efraín’s close enough to cop a feel with plausible deniability while holding
a button designed to remind the world that I’m a boy, in case they were misled by the size of my chest, among other lipstick-red
herrings?
I want to believe Efraín doesn’t need the reminder, but how am I supposed to know what any of this means when I can hear his
own uneven breathing?
Then he smooths his thumb over the “he/him” like he’s touching something holy. “There,” he murmurs. “Now you’re ready to fight
the museum.”
“I don’t want to fight the museum.”
Efraín’s hands settle on my shoulders. “Then I’ll fight it for you.”
I want to fight him on it and insist that I don’t want him to fight the museum, either. I don’t want anyone to fight the museum.
I want the museum to get with the times. Just because it’s a monument to old things doesn’t mean it has to be a timeless mausoleum.
The button should be a message, not a grenade. Efraín should know that. I want to explain it to him, but he’s touching me.
I should thank him, but he’s looking at me. I don’t know how to want all these things at once.
He nudges me back, and my back hits the corrugated metal wall beside the shadowbox with thirty-two of Art’s bow ties. I know
I’m standing in a panopticon. At least three security cameras have eyes on me. But Efraín occupies my entire field of view.
I touch his button because I can. I don’t know how to thank him with words, so I just touch the button and look up at him
and hope he understands these little gestures I make in place of things I can’t say.
I don’t know if it works, but he kisses me and kisses me and—
Downstairs, Stanley’s talking about the mystery of whatever happened to Victor Kane’s grandmother’s crystal goblets. Heavy
footfalls trudge up the staircase, and I’m still smothering my laughter against Efraín’s shoulder.
“So,” he whispers against my hair. “When can you start your fifty-five?”