The Latecomer

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

Boo Radley.

Of course they’d been throwing Gender and Sexuality in Society down our throats since third grade at the Walden School, and at least half the faculty and staff brought their same-sex partners to Founder’s Day, the annual school celebration, but I had also been taught not to make assumptions based on how a person looked, spoke, gestured, dressed, or wore their hair, which was confusing since it was ridiculous not to note the correlations.

My own lesbian classmates at Walden had no discernible markers; they looked like everyone else and dressed like everyone else and in fact widely preferred newer terms like “pansexual” to the old-fashioned “gay” or even “bi.”

the lesbian teachers, mainly my siblings’ age, were all powerful women with short hair in button-down shirts and sometimes a tie, and they looked you in the eye and told you—silently!—that they’d taken far too much shit for far too long to tolerate your acting in any way like a dick about any aspect of who they were, so if you were not completely chill on the subject it was ...

scrim

“Fuck applying to college!” I shouted. “Fuck this ridiculous, pathetic, thoroughly manufactured ‘rite of passage’ that’s supposed to tell you if you’re qualified to make money in America, and reassure your parents they did a good job raising you. It’s the most asinine thing!

shanda.”

scrum

lacunae

Klezmer band