Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix (Remixed Classics)

by Anna-Marie McLemore

Daisy glanced toward me, one hand under her chin. That glance told me that if people like us wanted to make something of ourselves in a world ruled by men as pale as their own dinner plates, we had to lie.

With the next snap of the candle’s flame, my mind blinked back to my ancestors, in the place now called Texas. I thought of land we’d sown for hundreds of years and then lost, the border of the United States crossing us long before we ever crossed it.

“Boys like us always know one another about a thousand years before anyone else knows us, don’t we?”

I could understand it now, her draw to money. It let you do things for people you loved.

that feeling of someone seeing into the center of you and recognizing you, what else could that be but love? Don’t even best friends have to fall a little in love?

“Boys like us get used to having to lie about everything else just so we can tell the truth about ourselves.”

Gatsby looked back at me how any boy in the world would want to be looked at—as though there was such infinite possibility in me, such infinite light, that I was one endless, longest day of the year.

Tom had just realized that Daisy was in love with Jay Gatsby. I had just realized that so was I.

I tried to acquaint myself with the idea that an insult could be reclaimed into something softer, something fit for the space inside a heart or between sheets.

But Gatsby noticed the things that were wrong in the world alongside the things that were beautiful. Perhaps there was no white boy in New York who might understand someone like me, a family like mine, better than Jay Gatsby.

Gatsby and I may have been nothing to men like Tom Buchanan, but men like that did not know we were as divine as the heavens. We were boys who had created ourselves. We had formed our own bodies, our own lives, from the ribs of the girls we were once assumed to be.

If you turn yourself into someone everyone can like, you’ll probably end up not liking yourself much. If everyone in the world loves you, then really nobody does.

“Fairy,” he said. “It’s a word I forgot to tell you about. It’s a word they use for boys like us. They mean it to be an insult, but I take it to mean there’s something magic about us and they know it.”