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

by Anna-Marie McLemore

People treat a girl very differently depending on how she looks. Doors open that you didn’t even know could be doors because they always looked like walls.”

“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.

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.

He laughed, lifting his hands toward the bubbles as though offering butterflies places to land. 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 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.

I wasn’t much of a fighter. But when you were a bookish child in Wisconsin who understood mathematics better than you understood the girl you were expected to be, you had to either run or fight, and I was never very fast.