Chapter 2
Chapter two
Eight Years Earlier
The cafeteria smelled like industrial mac and cheese.
I sat at the corner table by the windows.
Nobody wanted it because the sun hit you straight in the face after eleven and you couldn’t see your own food.
I’d taken it on purpose. Being lit up in the corner felt safer than sitting in the middle where people could come at you from any angle, and where the angles included the back of your head.
Ma had packed me arroz con pollo. Again.
I loved it. She made it on Sundays with extra sofrito, the way her mother had made it before her.
But the smell announced me to a room of people whose lunches did not announce them.
The white kids ate sad turkey sandwiches on Wonder Bread and looked at my Tupperware like it was a specimen from the back of someone’s basement.
Sixteen. Gay. Wrists that looked breakable if I held my backpack wrong. Alone.
Well. Mostly.
Near the vending machines stood a girl with twilight-blue eyes and a camera around her neck. Sierra Turner. She was photographing the lunch ladies’ hands while they scooped mashed potatoes. The mechanical patience of people who had given up on joy years earlier.
Sierra Turner stayed on my radar. Hard not to.
She saw things nobody else looked at. The kid picking at the peeling paint on the wall.
The janitor dancing when he thought he was alone.
Once, in October, she had spent a whole lunch period photographing the back of someone’s neck, and the photo turned up in the school’s literary magazine three months later and was probably the best thing in the issue.
She was also queer. The way she held herself, the way her eyes lingered on the softball captain a beat too long. It took one to know one, and I knew one.
“Is this seat taken, or are you hoarding it for your imaginary friends?”
A girl stood over me. Sharp eyeliner. Black boots that had been through something. The expression on a person daring me to fumble a single word. She didn’t wait for an answer. She just dropped into the chair across from me like she’d already decided the table was hers.
“I’m Raven.” She pulled out a Tupperware container of something black. Was that rice? “Before you ask, yes, it’s squid ink. No, I’m not in a cult. Maybe.”
I blinked. “Uh, Jett.”
“I know who you are.” She stabbed her fork into the rice. “You’re the guy who got shoved into a locker last week by Brad Dickhead and his merry band of assholes.”
The heat in my neck was the kind that goes all the way to the ears.
Brad Mitchell and his friends had cornered me after gym class on a Wednesday.
He’d made some comment about me checking out guys in the locker room.
I hadn’t been, but also, so what if I had?
He decided a locker was where I should go to think about it.
I had barely fit. My too-thin frame folded like paper, the way it folded into anywhere people wanted to put it, while they laughed.
It wasn’t the first time. It wouldn’t be the last either, probably. Small made me an easy target, and gay made me an obvious one.
“His name’s Brad Mitchell,” I muttered.
“I know what I said.” Raven’s eyes flicked to my lunch. “Your mom make that?”
“Yeah.”
“Looks good. Way better than this experimental bullshit my mom’s on.” She took a bite, anyway and made a face. “Yeah, this is trash.”
A laugh escaped me. Short, startled. The first one in weeks.
“There we go.” Raven pointed her fork at me. “You looked like you were about to dissolve into the floor. This school’s already depressing enough without people disappearing into the linoleum.”
“I wasn’t…”
“You were.” She glanced over her shoulder, then back at me. “Look. I’m gonna be blunt because that’s how I operate. You’re gay, right?”
I froze. My fingers tightened around my fork. Every muscle in my body tensed, ready to deny, deflect, or run. “What?”
“Relax. I’m not asking to out you to the entire school. I’m asking because…” She gestured vaguely at herself. “Bi. Questioning. Still figuring my shit out, but definitely not straight. And I’m tired of sitting alone with the theater kids who think being quirky is a personality.”
A knot I’d been carrying for months, maybe years, loosened.
“Yeah.” My voice came out small. The word landed in my chest. Terrifying. Freeing. “I’m gay.”
“Cool. Welcome to the club. We meet Tuesdays and complain about heteronormativity.” Raven smirked, but something softer sat underneath. Relief, maybe, at finding someone else in the same wreck.
“Wait. We?”
“Oh, you haven’t been formally introduced to the island of misfit queers yet?” Raven stood up, grabbed her tray with one hand and my wrist with the other. “Come on. You’re about to meet your people.”
She dragged me across the cafeteria. Past the jocks, who didn’t look up. Past the theater kids doing vocal warm-ups, which to my deep relief nobody asked us to join. The stoners by the emergency exit registered our existence and decided not to care. Far corner table. Two girls.
One was Sierra. Her camera was on the table next to a half-eaten salad and a Diet Coke.
The other had spiky red hair that looked like she’d cut it with kitchen scissors and a personal grudge.
She wore a flannel jacket three sizes too big.
The energy suggested she could burn the school down or save it, and the decision would depend on what Mr. Henderson said to her in third period.
“Ladies,” Raven announced, shoving me into an empty chair. “New recruit.”
The red-haired girl’s eyes lit up. “Oh, thank God. We needed more testosterone to balance out the estrogen. I’m Calliope, but you can call me Calli unless you piss me off, then it’s Calliope with the full four syllables and eye contact that will end you.”
“Jesus, Calli, let him breathe.” Sierra smiled at me, warm and real, and it stayed warm, which I wasn’t used to. “I’m Sierra. I’ve seen you around.”
“I’ve seen you, too,” I said, then immediately wanted to crawl into a hole. That sounded creepy. “I mean your photography. It’s good. Really good.”
Sierra’s smile widened. “Thanks. You’re Jett, right? You’re in my English class.”
“Yeah.” She did that in study hall, too, doodling in the margins of her notebook instead of taking notes. She drew intricate patterns of vines and flowers and geometric shapes that somehow made sense together.
Calliope leaned forward, resting her chin in her hands. “What’s your story? Are you a baby gay still in the closet, a confident gay who’s out and proud, or somewhere in the messy middle where most of us are rotting?”
I glanced at Raven, who just shrugged like, ‘Welcome to the chaos’.
“I’m…” I took a breath. Might as well. If I couldn’t say it here, where could I say it? “I came out to my mom last month.”
All three of them perked up as if I’d just announced free pizza.
“And?” Calliope prompted, eyes wide.
“She… she was good about it. Really good, actually.” My throat tightened remembering it.
Ma had cried, but not the bad kind of crying.
The relieved kind. The ‘I love you no matter what kind’.
She’d hugged me so tight I couldn’t breathe and told me she’d always known, always loved me, and always would.
“She said she just wants me to be happy.”
“That’s beautiful,” Sierra’s voice dropped, and there was something wistful in her voice. “My parents don’t know yet. I’m not sure they’d be that understanding.”
“Mine know,” Calliope tossed off. “My mom asked if this meant she’d get a daughter-in-law with good taste in wine. Very supportive in her own bizarre way.”
Raven snorted. “My parents are in denial. They keep talking about when I find ‘the right guy’ like my entire lesbian Tumblr phase never happened.”
“You had a lesbian Tumblr phase?” I asked.
“I’m in a lesbian Tumblr phase. Ongoing. Indefinite.”
We all laughed, and something clicked into place. Something I hadn’t had a name for until right now.
For the next hour, we talked about everything and nothing.
Teachers who sucked. Movies. The specific airlessness of being different at a school that rewarded sameness.
Calliope had a story about getting kicked out of the library for excessive giggling over fanfiction, which she maintained was a hate crime.
Sierra showed us photos she’d snuck back to take after dark of the school empty, fluorescent, like the set of a horror movie that hadn’t started yet.
Raven mentioned tarot. Calliope demanded a reading on the spot and informed us her future contained, with certainty, a purple-haired wife and a cottage with chickens.
I listened at first. Then Calliope asked me my favorite movie, and I said, “Moonlight” without thinking, and somehow, I was talking about how that film had wrecked me in the best way. About seeing myself on a screen for the first time. About the specific ache of wanting to be seen.
“God, you’re one of us!” Calliope declared, throwing an arm around my shoulders. “We’re keeping you.”
“Do I get a say in this?” I asked, but I was grinning. Actually grinning. My face ached from smiling so much.
“Absolutely not,” Raven said. “You’re stuck with us now. Welcome to the dysfunctional queer family you didn’t ask for but definitely need.”
Sierra raised her water bottle. “To misfits.”
“To weirdos,” Calliope added.
“To surviving this hellhole,” Raven muttered.
I clinked my bottle against theirs, warmth spreading through my ribs. “To us.”
That night, Ma made my favorite dinner. Tostones with garlic sauce.
Pernil. Rice and beans that had been on the back burner since I’d left for school.
She set the table with the nice dishes, the ones we only got out for birthdays and holidays and the time my abuela visited from Santo Domingo, and I knew something was up.
“Mijo.” She settled into the chair across from me. Her accent always thickened when she had something to say, vowels slowing down, the way her own mother’s had. “You seem happier today.”
I looked up from my plate, caught off guard. “I do?”
“Sí. You’ve been smiling at your phone. You hummed while setting the table. This is new.” She reached across and squeezed my hand, her skin warm and calloused from years of work. “Tell me.”
So I did. I told her about Raven’s blunt-instrument introduction.
I told her how Calliope had inhaled me into the group, like that was a thing groups did.
I told her how Sierra had smiled at me and then kept smiling, which was something nobody at that school had ever bothered to do.
I told her about the way they’d claimed me without asking permission first. About sitting at a table where the people seated around it knew I existed and were apparently glad about it.
Ma listened with shining eyes. When I finished, she stood up and pulled me into a hug that smelled like sazón and the lavender lotion she’d been using since I was eight.
“Mi amor, I’m so happy you found your people,” she whispered into my hair. “Everyone needs that. A place where they belong.”
“I know.” The words came muffled against her shoulder. “I really think I do. Belong, I mean.”
She pulled back, cupping my face in her hands the way she’d done since I was little. “You listen to me, Jett. You are perfect exactly as you are. Don’t let anyone make you small. Not the kids at school, not anyone. You hear me?”
I nodded. The problem was that I already was small. Literally. Shortest kid in my grade until eighth grade, and then I’d just stayed narrow. Skinny enough to look breakable, which had turned out to be the exact invitation Brad and his friends kept accepting.
Ma must have seen something in my face because her expression softened.
“Mijo, you’ll grow. You’re still young. But even if you don’t…
” She squeezed my shoulders. “Your strength doesn’t come from your muscles.
It comes from here.” She tapped my chest, right over my heart.
“And here.” My forehead. “Don’t forget that. ”
“I won’t, Ma.”
“Good.” She kissed my forehead and sat back down. “Now eat. You’re too skinny.”
A laugh slipped out. I obeyed, shoveling rice into my mouth while Ma watched with the satisfaction only a mother feeding her kid could wear.
Later, in bed with my phone glowing in the dark, I caught my reflection in the mirror across the room. Scrawny arms, narrow chest, the body of someone who looked like a target to anyone hunting one.
Ma was wrong about exactly one thing. Strength did come from muscles. Maybe not only from muscles. But they helped. They helped enough.
I pulled up Google and typed: how to build muscle at home.
Someday, I told myself, scrolling through workout plans and protein shake recipes I would never make, nobody was going to shove me into a locker again. Someday I’d be the kind of person they didn’t even try.
I screenshotted a beginner’s workout plan and then switched over to the group chat Calliope had created.
The Chaos Coven (because Calliope named things the way she did everything else, loud and without asking permission)
Calliope: Official ruling: Jett is in. No takesies backsies.
Raven: Seconded. He stays.
Sierra: Agreed. Welcome, Jett. You’re stuck with us now.
Jett: You guys know I can see this, right?
Calliope: That’s the point, darling. Transparency is key in all healthy relationships.
Raven: Transparency would be picking up the phone. This is theater.
Sierra: Speak for yourself. I’m in my room.
Jett: Same.
Calliope: Well, I’m having a moment down here and it’s VERY sapphic and you’re all missing out.
Raven: Calli. You are alone in a basement.
Calliope: Existing in proximity to myself is inherently sapphic when you’re this gay.
Sierra: I’m going to bed before this gets weirder.
Jett: Same. Night, everyone.
Calliope: GOODNIGHT, SWEET PRINCE. MAY FLIGHTS OF ANGELS SING THEE TO THY REST.
Raven: She’s been drinking her mom’s wine again.
Calliope: LIES AND SLANDER.
I would look at the thread later when I needed proof. I had people now. Loud, ridiculous, looked-me-in-the-face-and-didn’t-flinch people.
I fell asleep with the phone still in my hand. Lighter than I’d been in months. Safer than I’d been in years.
The strong part would come later. I’d already started.