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“Boys like us always know one another about a thousand years before anyone else knows us, don’t we?”
“And I assure you I find you just as handsome, but alas”—she gave us both airs of regret—“neither of you will ever win my heart on account of being men, so please do give up all hope now.”
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.
“The gayest place in New York.” Gatsby pushed on a wood panel that turned into a door. “In more ways than one.”
The celebratory fever around us was the only explanation I had for why I kissed him. And it was the only explanation I could come up with for why he kissed me back.
Please, claim me. Claim the brown of my skin and the black of my hair and my eyes that are a darker version of yours. Daisy Fabrega-Caraveo, admit that I’m yours.
“I know everyone in both Eggs. I know every egg in the carton. Now get in.”
Were there any who loved other men? Did those kinds of self-made boys exist? If I loved another boy, did that make me less of one?
The Toms want to slip the Daisies onto velvet alongside their cuff links. The Jays want the Daisies to prove something to them about themselves. If you really want to know what I’m telling you, I’m telling you that if I were Daisy, I’d leave them both alone.”
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.
She was the sun around which his being orbited, and I was his moon, shadowed and undetected.
For the thousandth time since meeting Gatsby, I marveled at how a boy could have such a beaten-up heart and still have his wonder so untarnished.
We’re looking for ways to make a bright light or a loud sound be just a bright light or a loud sound, and not a hundred things we don’t want to remember.”
And how could I blame him? If I’d seen what he’d seen, known what he’d known, I’d grasp at whatever beauty I still found in the world.
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.
“You touch him again,” she said, “you touch anyone here again, my heel’s going up your ass. And I’m quite fond of them. They’re new. Don’t make me waste a Louie heel and an almond toe on someone like you.”
“Men love beautiful, useless, expensive things. So I’m meant to be one. I’m not supposed to be anything but a beautiful little fool.”
If everyone in the world loves you, then really nobody does.
Know the light you’re following.
But now the word “lesbian” feels like a beautiful song on my tongue and I just want to sing it at all hours.
If a fairy godmother had asked me to make a list of all I’d like in a young man, he’s what she’d cook up.
I stood in wonder at how this boy lived in both dreams and details. Jay Gatsby’s romantic heart was far more practical than I’d realized.
A handful of green lights in me broke loose. I grabbed Jay Gatsby by his suspenders, and I kissed him with the reckless enchantment of following a thousand luces malas. He kissed me back like I was the light of every bulb and chandelier in his gardens.
“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.”
I never imagined that it was worse than this, that you thought the right to being a man was something you had to pay back with interest.
You don’t owe us anything for seeing you as you truly are.
“Properly speaking, there are in the world no such men as self-made men. That term implies an individual independence of the past and present which can never exist.”
As trans boys, we make ourselves, but we don’t do it alone. None of us makes ourselves alone.
You are worth being seen as you truly are. You are worth imagining your life for yourself instead of how you may have been told your life must be. You are worth your own dreams.
