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

by Anna-Marie McLemore

This boy whose shoulders I held in my hands, I wanted him to have the shimmer of the whole world.

“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.

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.

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.

Gatsby was a self-made boy, in so many ways. He had sandpapered down his accent and taught himself to say sofa instead of couch, to toast good health instead of cheers.

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.

“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.”