Idlewild

by James Frankie Thomas

N: “Okay, so, percentage-wise, how many people in the world are gay?” F: “Ten percent, supposedly, though if you adjust for the closet it’s probably more like, I don’t know, a hundred.”

LOL

People who don’t attend Quaker schools often remark, upon learning about Meeting for Worship, that speaking during Silence sounds like a terrifying prospect. They are correct, which is why, in practice, most Meetings for Worship consist of twenty minutes of unbroken Silence. When someone stands up to speak, it’s like bumping into Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman at the video store on West Twenty-second Street: you have to play it cool, but there’s no denying it’s the most interesting thing that will happen all day.

had no idea what signs to look for, so every girl on earth was Schrödinger’s lesbian.

Well, I knew from my gay corner of the Internet that “HoYay” stood for “Homoeroticism: Yay!” If Fay knew this too, then she must have been visiting the same gay corner of the Internet. Which meant … which meant.

She caught me looking at her (heart attack), smiled (double heart attack), and spoke (RIP Nell Rif kin, dead of three consecutive heart attacks).

We walked inside—not together, exactly, but the junior benches were mostly filled up, which meant that Fay and I had no choice but to sit together. She sat down. I sat next to her. My butt touched her butt. I mean, we were basically having sex.

When you look lovely, everyone is lovely toward you, and thus life has never given Daylily Jones a reason to be anything but lovely toward everyone in return. This is also why she’s not funny.

it was already so clear that my role in our friendship was to be the dumb one. Even when I came up with something smart, it was only in the service of my dumbass golden retriever love for Fay.

What a marvel she was! I would never have dreamed of admitting aloud that I read fanfiction; I was too intellectually vain to admit it even in that moment.

Iago is gay in the way that we the F&N unit aspire to be gay, but it’s harder for girls.

Actually, we the F&N unit were the ones who nominated him. Actually—he doesn’t know this—we the F&N unit ripped up our scrap-paper ballots into smaller pieces and wrote his name on all of them and stuffed the ballot box for him. He’s our favorite person at Idlewild, after ourselves.

The sparkle of the sunshine feels almost violent. All beautiful days hold a certain horror now. We walk west down Fifteenth Street, wishing for a storm.

When I was younger I had trouble thinking of myself as a real lesbian. For one thing, I had zero experience, sexually and romantically speaking. I was studying to be a lesbian from books and movies and TV,

I began to cry, right there at the computer. I was alone in the apartment, so I could really let loose with it, and I was openly sobbing as I typed my reply: m k fantastico: LOL m k

OmiPalone212: asadf;kj WHAT??????????? Fay always wrote in full sentences with perfect punctuation, so to see that I’d reduced her to keyboard-smashing all-caps—even now, it gives me a little thrill of pride.

moved in only one direction.

One direction

soliloquy,

Taylor swift taught me this word

“He could be bi,” said Nell. “Oh, grow up.”

I was a person whose life was ruled by the fear of making someone mad.

I just kept imagining myself the way Jimmy saw me—selfish, immature, a fair-weather friend—and I felt physically sick about it.

“Well, let me put it this way.” He angled himself away from the computer and faced me directly. Our chairs were so close that his knees touched mine. I pulled away. “You and Nell ever … play around?”

Excuse me

“Not really?” he said, delighted. “Oh, you’re not getting off that easy. I’ve got all day.” He chuckled, resting his hands behind his head. “Give me the dirty details.”

Hellllllllllll no

That was actually what I believed. Appeasement, in general, has always been my policy. This might be my least favorite thing about myself.

wasn’t jealous—not exactly—that Daylily and Juniper were doing a fake-lesbian act for attention. It just made me feel invisible. No, worse than invisible—I felt ugly. I imagined how my classmates would react if I announced in the Meetinghouse that Fay and I were hooking up. They’d probably be weirded out, or altogether grossed out. Then I was mad at myself for caring.

But I was excited. I would never have admitted it then, but I can admit it now: on some level, I wanted to get away from Fay. If I hadn’t wanted that, I wouldn’t have made it happen. I knew what I was doing. That was the worst part of all.

had attended Mount Holyoke, were officially “rivals,” and some ribbing about Nell’s risk of becoming a Republican, given that both Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush were Smith alumnae. “If they ever come to campus,” said her grandmother, “give them a big kick in the pants from me.”

Lol

I was suddenly overwhelmed by how big other people’s lives were, and how little I knew about them at any given moment.

In my imagination I slap her the same way she slapped me, proving to her—proving to myself, really—that I exist outside her mind. I’m a person. What do I have to do to make her see me as a person?

But as I already knew, Idlewild wasn’t the kind of school where kids got bullied for being openly gay. Idlewild was the kind of school where theoretically it was okay for kids to be openly gay, but no one was dumb enough to test this in practice except me, and now I would never be known or remembered as anything but Nell the Lesbian.

I was so excited to be gay, and she was the only one who really got that. What a stupid irony that she also ended up being the

but Eddie declared that “as people of fat-kid experience,” we’re allowed to be smug when skinny girls join our ranks.

I regret who I was back then. At the same time, I don’t know if I’ll ever be happy in the same way again. And I don’t know what to do with that.

Hm