Boy Talk
Up West 115th street near a laundromat, a gay psychic tells me that I will spend my life as a dilettante. He says I need to "embrace" this fact, in order that I might survive. I know instantly that 1) it is true and 2) it will be a reality I violently fight, even as it continues to be true. I dash: between ideologies and love interests; opinions and idols. It is my worst fear confirmed: that I am doomed to a life on the periphery; not just of families and community, but even of knowledge.
The psychic seems so right, so close to what feels real about me. I consider again whether such a life is worth living.
Equivocation can expand and even create; there is beauty in wanting something both ways.
•
Stuck in bed, paralyzed by sadness, I text my friend Richard with an unfair question:
JF 1:03 PM
Is it possible to make art that isn’t smarmy? Is earnestness dead? Has the attention economy poisoned it all?
RS 4:37 PM
Whenever I get really sad, my therapist reminds me that during the Siege of Leningrad, people took their children to parks, and played piano, and drank wine and fell in love.
•
East Williamsburg, June 2014
It’s my first night at Bath Salts. By day a burrito bar called Don Pedro’s in East Williamsburg, Bath Salts transforms, every Monday at midnight, into a queer performance space. Some downtown magazines have been writing about Bath Salts, but every write-up misses the point. They call it a “drag bar” or an “alternate night club,” or they compare it to some kind of performance-art gallery. It is all of those things; aesthetically and from a distance. Yet, it isn’t also none of those things. To the people who choose to perform here, to be deeply vulnerable here, Bath Salts feels something like home.
Each week has a theme: tonight is “White Christmas.” My new friend Greg buys me a whiskey sour. He invited me coyly: “I want you to see what you’re missing.” We sit up front, in wobbly plastic chairs. Greg is cute, but we’ll see.
On stage, they’re covering “All I Want for Christmas is You.” Covered in fake blood — their voices rise to a shriek.
Before I know it, one of the performers, Vincent, jumps off the stage and sits on my lap. She mimes the final stanzas into a microphone, looking straight into my eyes. The crowd coos and catcalls and whistles. Normally this kind of fuss, on me, would be terrifying. Tonight, it feels safe, inviting, maybe even a little arousing. The shrieking nears its end. Vincent reaches down and kisses me, hard. Greg looks on, blushing, yet cool.
•
Christopher Street, West Village, Later that June
Everett and I leave New York Pride early. It’s extremely hot, and we’re sweaty and exhausted. More than exhausted, we’re sad. All over the West Village, billboards exclaim that we should “HAVE A HAPPY PRIDE!” Flags and banners hang from the entryways of every major bank in the neighborhood. Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Fidelity. In the march, all of the non-profit queer groups (the local floats and dancing brigades and even the queer churches — an overlooked and under-appreciated pillar of queer New York) have been pushed to the back. “We had to make room for Best Buy and Home Depot and Chevron,” an event planner explains to me when I ask. “They’re the ones that pay to put this whole thing on now.”
Tall, chiseled, (mostly) white men strut aggressively next to us. I imagine them by day: probably lawyers and businessmen. A good number of them push and shove passersby. This shoving grows more intense when Andy Cohen’s float passes by. They seem oblivious: to their stature, their maleness. These same chiseled men are on Grindr, too. Their profiles are tragically predictable to anyone who’s spent even passing time on gay dating apps: “masc only, no Asians, no fatties, no fems.” The more savvy profiles will caveat that these are “just preferences. spreading love to everyone <3.”
There are almost no trans people at the parade. I feel stupid for letting that surprise me. Of course there weren’t. “If I didn’t know better,” Everett says, “I would think this was a men’s rights convention.” It practically is, I whisper, wanting to cry.
Greg joins us later on, at Julius’ in the West Village. This is the first time Greg and Everett are meeting. “He’s so beautiful,” Greg whispers into my ear when Everett gets up to refill his drink. “Not handsome, beautiful.”
I’m familiar with this reaction: it’s the way people have responded to Everett, my best friend, since we were in high school together. There are the obvious things: bone structure, linearity, complexion, but it’s never really that. Everett embodies this lightness, this grace, that feels otherworldly sometimes. It’s a quality that never felt like something a teenage boy was allowed to have; a secret power.
Still, parts of Pride are beautiful, subjectively and objectively. The sun shone but the crushing heat stayed away. I hid rum in a coffee cup and got drunk in a happy way; my friends are becoming friends.
The buzz lets me forget how much everything is changing, almost.
“I’ve never felt less like a gay man than I do today,” Everett whispers at night end, as we drink Bud-Light Limes in Thompson Square Park. The second part comes even quieter, and isn’t directed to me. Never felt less like a man.
Same, I mouth, hoping he can’t read my lips.
•
Northfield Preparatory School, Spring 2009
There is a picture of us, in high school, on our way to a dance. Everett and I are both in dresses and badly applied makeup; our arms and legs easily drape over each other. We're laughing, so hard we’re almost almost out of control, practically choking. The joke that started it was probably at someone else’s expense. We weren’t nice girls. Young, cocky, strong-willed, but not necessarily kind. Not yet.
Everett looked at me and mouthed something quietly, so that no one else could hear. We look like ourselves, finally. I laughed loudly, pretending it was part of the joke. We both kept laughing.
At the end of the night, after pictures and dancing and the breaking of at least ten school rules, Everett walked me home. At my door, I tried to kiss him. He fumbled trying to kiss me back. I wanted to feel something I knew neither of us felt.
My eyes watered. “I wish we could be lesbians,” I sighed.
“I know. Maybe someday we can be.”
•
August, The Hottest Night of, 2014
Bath Salts again. While Greg is getting us drinks, I strike up a conversation with a woman in her fifties named Monica. Monica is trans. She wears a lavender top and velvet capris; her sand colored hair is slng into a side ponytail. Something about the way Monica listens makes me trust her.
Without thinking (about the rudeness of monologues, the rudeness of making a stranger play therapist at a bar, about whether Monica wants to hear any of this) I dive in.
“I’ve thought about transitioning,” I say at Monica, more than to her. “I just don’t know if I could handle losing the attention of men. It’s all just so scary.” I know I’m whining.
Monica listens attentively. It strikes me that she’s probably had to listen to men like me cry to her before.
“Baby. You have to be about you at least 1,000 times more than you are about them.”
By the time my friend gets back from the bar, Monica floats onto the stage, and starts singing How Will I Know?
•
Biddeford Pool, Maine, Labor Day, 2014
My family’s summer home is haunted, I decide as I sit on its airy front porch. I’m involuntarily touring memories. It is here, upstairs in the purple bedroom, that my aunt and I have our most bruising fight. I insist on wearing a “women’s blouse” to a picnic. In the downstairs bathroom, over the sink made from an old sailboat deck, I am forced, forced! to remove nail polish after summer camp. This is necessary, my uncle politely reminds me, because “this town is traditional.” He says things like this with a politeness I had learned could quickly wear thin. Both of these incidents happen when I am 16.
I’m 22 now, and my cousin Rebecca is 16. We all sit together, my aunt and uncle and Becky. We try to stick to small-talk. Becky quickly derails this when — “we had a transsexual come speak to us at our school last month. For ‘awareness’ or whatever” She rolls her eyes, waits a beat, then smirks: “I still think it’s disgusting.” My uncle and aunt let out an awkward laugh. My aunt looks annoyed, uncomfortable. My uncle chuckles and looks toward Rebecca with the same smirk she just gave him: he knows enough to stay out of it, but he finds her candor refreshing.
Then, as quickly as the laughing stops, they look all to me. “Isn’t she quirky? Isn’t she ridiculous?” There is a look of faint apology in my aunt’s eyes, a look of pleading. Please don’t take the bait. My uncle’s look is different: I know immediately that if I say anything, the blame for stirring up discord will be mine alone.
We stay out on the porch for awhile. Eventually it’s just me and Rebecca. “I just don’t see myself as a feminist,” she says, sipping her iced tea. “Really?” I ask, trying to sound like I’m just listening. She looks uncomfortable. “I mean, I’m not not a feminist, I just don’t see why they need to parade around the way they do.”
Later, as we walk to the beach, Rebecca seems anxious. I ask why: “There’s a beach party tonight at Elle’s house.” She points to a group of teen boys a hundred or so yards away. “They’re all going to be there.”
“What about it feels scary?”
“I guess I’m still afraid of being seen in my bathing suit. I really need to lose 10 pounds, and I need real breasts. Elle lost 10 pounds and now she has a boyfriend.”
•
Boston, Winter 2016-2017
On the night that Donald Trump is elected president, my boyfriend of a year hits me outside of what is supposed to be a Hillary Clinton Victory party. We break up, and I stumble back to my parents house to sleep for two months. For the majority of this period, I exist in a depressive fugue, waking for a few hours to eat and cry and pretend to apply for new jobs. One night, about halfway through, I wake and begin to manically write. The absurdly small font made it feel safely insignificant, a sketch. The phony, detached, “academic” style of it gives distance: from anything too ugly or recent or real. I show the finished product to friends, joking that it’s a “manifesto.”
•
Twink-Punk
❏ Twink-punk is: an integration of "twink" beauty norms within the cultural context, also:
❏ an acknowledgement of the power of these norms ( they uphold a certain kind of class contextual whiteness, they appropriate trans-fem culture for the purposes of achieving a curated, softer version of masculinity, they ultimately help strengthen, not abolish, traditional maleness)
❏ also an understanding that these norms aren't simple to shed: their continued use can be politically, socially and sexually mandatory
❏ it is also an acknowledgment that twink culture is a product of the male gaze. it is one formula through which to achieve the approval and validation of that gaze
❏ it is a creation of tension within these norms, and a suggestion, if not a belief, that these norms and formulas should be rejected. their rejection can be both liberatory and disempowering. twink-punk is more tension than ethos because it neither exists within or without these norms, per se
❏ the "twink" has been in gay usage since at least 1963, finding roots in the British gay slang phrase "twank" (for male prostitute). attributes the culture most generally associates with the twink are: slimness in build, minimal body hair, "effeminate nature" and appearing "younger than chronological age." the OED defines twink as "a homosexual or effeminate, or a young man regarded as the object of homosexual desire." essayist Jeb Z. Tortoricci, in examining gay porn, defines the "twink" as "consumable and visually/ anally receptive to masculinity"
❏ twink-punk acknowledges these understandings of twink and attempts to refute them — specifically twink punk attempts to refute being "consumable."
❏ one path to twink-punk is to think about contemporary twink culture, and to view it as a "big, uncool thing." to critique Lady Gaga, the David Barton (or Equinox) chain gyms, fad-dieting, and some kinds of waxing is twink-punk. to participate in and love these same things can also be twink-punk. twink-punk is an admission that we exist within a "big, uncool thing:" a structure that we sometimes like, sometimes are hurt by, sometimes benefit from disproportionately
❏ twink-punk could not exist without the contemporary queer framework; it is a subsidiary, an extension, and outgrowth
❏ twink-punk is not a “camping”of twink culture. while it doesn't reject camp ethos, twink-punk is not a casualty of irony. it's not "Neo-twink,”"ironic twink,” “post-twink,” and it is certainly not “woke-twink.” Twink-punk rejects the wokeness-industrial complex which has commercialized an intersectional understanding of identity and attempts to sell people an identity that insulates them from confronting the realities of the 21st that make us all, in varying ways, bigots.
❏ Twink-punk is not a critique or a mockery of the femme components of twink-culture; twink-punk rejects any framework that minimizes the feminine as "silly" or small. It is, though, a recognition that parts of performative femininity repress and constrict. It's closer to a politicized "failed twink" and it is predicated somewhere between failure and political refusal
❏ twink-punk is not, and should not be, an explicit macro political stance. two people can disagree about what twink-punk means and still be doing twink-punk
❏ twink-punk is similar to other punk movements (cyberpunk, specifically) in that it is bound in time. twink-punk exists as a reaction to a particular political and cultural moment. twink-punk might originate from and expand beyond late 20th/early 21st century hypercapitalism, but it is probably not a useful lens to examine queer culture throughout history. it certainly isn’t a useful diagnostic framework on it’s own.
❏ twink-punk attempts to avoid an easy or obvious separateness: from the "twink,” from the culture and biases of its creators, from the pressures that shape the creation even of this framework. there can be no twink-punk without the rules and norms that govern twink culture, and twink-punk is not an explicit choice to leave that culture, altho it is an explicit rejection of twink norms as uniformly "liberating" or “progressive” or inherently egalitarian.
❏ twink-punk rests on a firm distinction between critique and shame, and seeks to uphold that distinction in critical practice. to critique twink norms (and their extremes) is not to invite open, voyeuristic mockery of individuals for participating in them. this is necessary for the same reasons that it is necessary to notice how plastic surgery ridicules women and still profits from that ridicule: that people (most often women) with plastic surgery are shamed, mocked, and harassed. especially so when that plastic surgery goes "too far." let us notice that the individual, often fem, is singled out for ridicule for trying to follow the rules. attempting and failing to adhere to rigid and violent standards placed upon them is a group betrayal, it reveals an unspoken, collectively agreed-upon lie.
•
It’s not as though I’d never been in love or felt terrible pain before. But never had I seen the two stitched so inextricably together as they were in Josh.
We meet about three months after I graduate from college. I’m 22, he’s 37. He’s a psychiatrist and he’s married and he had once been my camp counselor.
We talk a lot about books, I make sure of this. I curate how I want him to see me: smarter and hotter and more worldly than the other twinks he fucks, when he isn’t with his husband.
His favorite book is Infinite Jest. I pretend I’ve read it, and deflect actually having to talk about it by dismissing the whole conceit of the book. "Every straight white boy with a college degree reads that book and spends the rest of their young adulthood explaining it to unwitting dates." I say this and roll my eyes.
He gives me a look that says no one has said this to me before.
Pushing back is fun and exciting. It’s a clean break: from a life of polite silence (or speaking and writing in tics and fits of uncertainty when I couldn’t muster politeness.) Talking to Josh made me sure of my rightness, solid in my verbal fencing, safe enough to dispose of formality.
I never ask him to, but he reads Judith Butler, and tells me about it.
Once on a drive, I tell him I’m not sure if I’m a twink.
"Oh you're absolutely a twink, you're like a fucking twink Kennedy. Those legs, those eyes."
I say nothing.
He knows his answer isn’t what I wanted.
"......You're a twink….. who reads."
September 11th, 2001
Josh had just graduated from Columbia and spent his last summer before adulthood in the woods. He sat in a tree-house, overlooking the lake at Camp Becket, where he’d served as a counselor since 15. He was finishing a ropes course, slowly. With him: a camera, transistor radio, bottle of gatorade and nylon shorts. Camp is over for the season but a million small projects remain: the year book, the front office, endless nature paths. Then the radio: news bulletins about a single engine plane hitting the World Trade Center. He winces: in college, he and some buddies would drunkenly sneak up to Windows of the World to steal expensive wine bottles from the kitchen. They would joke about how appallingly easy it was to steal up there. He wondered what the kitchen would look like filling up with dirty smoke. Then the radio tells him that the second plane hits — he jumps 20 feet from the treehouse to the dirt ground. Racing to his old Jeep, he drives without stopping to the place we now call ground zero. A college EMT, he thinks he might be useful. 8 days later, without sleep, after hauling smoldering debris and stretchers and jugs and jugs of Gatorade, he wonders if he was.
2004 is my first summer at Beckett. I am too fat for a 12 year old, and I’m aware. 30 pounds overweight, I’m also “unbecomingly effeminate,” in the words of my mother. But I like it here, and I’m making friends. By the lakefront, Becket has a makeshift water park: just a regular children’s playground slide, positioned at the end of a dock. Some of the richer campers scoff at it, but I fucking love that thing. Every afternoon, I wait patiently for my turn. As I take off down the metal chute, the rolls of on my stomach wobble up and down. Kids watch from the beach and count the number of times the fat rolls each time I slide. It becomes a game they call jiggle. Someone finally tells me. Once I know I’m safely alone, I cry for hours. This sounds like a traumatizing story: the kind that sad adults tell.
“I guess I should have had a scarring experience there, but I didn’t.” I tell Josh about camp, eleven years later, over beer. I’m extremely balanced. I’m totally neurotypical. I can handle a good hazing. I am not a sad adult.
I lie naked on the floor with Josh. Rolling up and stumbling, from the combination of wine and poppers, I look around blearily. The carpet burnt my back. Josh stands up with me. He hugs me and my muscles relax. “You have a perfect body, babe.” He whispers this like I’m hearing it for the first time. I am.
“You’re a sweet boy.”
I always feel earnest when I’m drunk. Grabbing my belly, I demonstrate how it mushes around in my hands, how globby it is. I imagine the version of me he wants to see: someone who eats their greens, runs everyday, easily endears themselves to children, who jumps into action during a crisis. I want to kill this version of me. I’m soft. I’m so soft, my friend Rafi says, and that’s so okay. I want him to say that being soft is so okay. It’s not.
I’m here because of the softness I couldn’t manage. He’s here because of the softness he destroyed.
Holding my belly in my hands, I smile at him and sigh. “This is it. This is all of it. ”
I don’t know how much more grandstanding about my “self esteem” I can fool him with. I give him another blowjob.
I can’t do pushups or situps. I think a lot about how my partners can, probably, do a lot of them. I think about this at inconvenient times, like during sex.
Josh is on top of me, about to go inside. On my back, I look up at his face. He looks satisfied, the way I imagine a Trump son might look after they kill an endangered lion.
I look down, at my stomach. Ingrown hairs, patches unshaved.
I know he’s about to go in, I know how long I’ve made him wait. How long I’ve teased him.
My muscles clench; I wince.
He gutterally rolls his eyes. “Again?”
“I’m sorry!” My words are more a plea than an apology.
This is the fifth time I couldn’t make myself bottom for him.
Between visits, during those first months, I remember that I mostly lay in bed and ate. Take out containers filled with pasta sauce and tiramisu and chicken fingers with honey mustard pile up, and I read or watch tv as I stuff forkfuls into myself.
During the visits, these containers disappear, the sheets are changed, the laundry is done. I shower, extra thoroughness and aggression. I make sure to put on deodorant.
Josh spent years fucking women. He had a different girlfriend each year at Columbia, and would punctually break each of their hearts by the end of the second semester, right on schedule. Usually they were sweet, bookish girls from Nyack or Upper Darby or Concord, and they were sweet enough to not say anything to their friends when he asked them to finger him.
I wondered how much of Josh’s bad behavior depended on the niceness of polite women. How the sweetness of “good” girls was insurance: inoculation from having to come face to face with their anger.
•
“Show me a gay man without an eating disorder, or body image issues, and I’ll show you a fucking unicorn.” my friend Johnny laughed darkly, and handed me a cigarette. I don’t know how this had become our routine: jokes, normalizing the same things that might slowly be killing us.
For the first time in my life, I stopped wishing I was older.
I wanted to stay young. I knew he’d stop loving me if I wasn’t.
Not just young: I wanted so badly to be thin for him, boyish for him, flex certain muscles; build and widen others for him.
I had read about this contest, these olympics. Logically I knew these were games I could not win. Ones that nobody ever had. I was ill equipped to even compete: my eating was emotional, my hygiene poorly regulated, my body in constant flux.
And: I knew that even the best athletes of these games eventually lose. That my butt would sag and my hairline would recede and my pitched voice would stop sounding cute and start sounding weak as I grew older. That no product would stop this. Time had never been my enemy before.
This made me extremely sad and scared. He told me that those were fleeting feelings that I could conquer. Feelings are fickle. We both knew, deep down, the things rationality cannot conquer. Fear is never unrooted.
After fear, came anger. Out of anger, narcissistic, self satisfied protest.
Instead of shaving and dieting and douching, I just didn’t. I didn’t even try. I ate more, exercised less, wore sweatpants, gained ten pounds.
When I tell my friend Simon this, over bowls of badly made borscht in his apartment, he listened and laughed. “Failure is an act of political refusal.”
I snarled back “I’m doing ‘PRAXIS’.” Our laughter was far louder than the joke was funny.
With Josh, I still said nothing. I was daring him to break the wall.
He noticed me gain weight and wash my hair less; he saw me skip brushing my teeth before bed.
I wanted acknowledgement of the obvious — that our love didn’t live in a vacuum. It wasn’t immune from commercials, the economy, the shiny. The culture has a fixed idea of a young gay man. Our love hinged on my resemblance to that idea, my ability to maintain the idea would surely prove it was true. Successful maintenance came with reward, but required jumping through hoops and passing measurements I already knew I couldn’t.
Failure as political refusal. This phrase ricochets around in my head, lodging itself inside me, disguised as conviction. I knew I would be thrown away, but I was determined to make it happen on my terms.
At the beginning of my revolt, Josh’s love seemed only to grow. Our fighting became wilder and angrier. Our sex became stranger and darker; more violent and more intimate.
The most foolish thing began darting across my mind around this time, and stuck on my insides like the truth. Maybe I could take off the costume. Maybe this was safe, maybe this was home.
One morning I woke up with a delicately box next to me. Inside, a rainbow clock. Instead of counting hours, the hands tick away passing months. A small folded note lies on top: "love, over time."
•
September 2016
I’m with Eva again, at a high school “alumni networking event.” She’s been on hormones for two months, and it is the first time I’ve seen her since she started. The bar is crowded and loud. I don’t recognize many people and the ones I do are not recognizable. People I once smoked pot with are wearing firmly pressed suits and talking about “the managerial track” at their finance firms. Eva is lost somewhere among the suits.
When we finally reach each other, she asks if I want a cigarette.“Badly,” I say.
Outside in the dimming light of midtown, I start to notice things. If it’s possible that someone’s skin could become even more clear, estrogen has made this possible for Everett. Her hair is developing a sheen; it now grows thicker and falls, bouncing, below her shoulders. She wears a sheer top, and I see the beginning of two breasts that would make Rebecca jealous. “They fucking hurt like hell.”
We sat on the sidewalk, and I put my arm around her. “Remember that night in the East Village?”
“Yeah, after Pride?”
“Yeah.” I take a deep drag, and look away, my arm still draped over her shoulder. “And remember that night after the Arts Gala?”
“Of course,” she looks at me and kisses my right cheek. “I think that part came true, didn’t it? We are lesbians now.”
I don’t think the joke is funny. “I’m not.” We sit in silence for a few minutes.
“I know. I thought you were coming with me.”
“I thought I was too.”
•
Ohio, Fall 2014
I’m in my college dorm room with a boy named Andy. We sit on my bed and he looks at me, sweetly. “So I read the article,” he says.
That week, I spoke with the college newspaper about “gender.” They asked me to talk about my non-binary identity, which I’d recently started sharing publicly with friends.
The whole thing felt a little ridiculous. I sat for the interview in a plaid red shirt and a baseball cap. Anyone who saw me from a distance would have no trouble discerning I was male. The girl interviewing me approached the whole thing like a science experiment; she was thrilled and fascinated by the new, exotic terminology. It was voyeuristic, but I was happy to comply.
I was essentially outing myself for having the feeling of being between genders. If you had called the whole thing a vanity exercise, you wouldn’t have been totally wrong.
Andy hesitates. “Do you want to tell me more about it?” The way he asks makes it clear he isn’t a voyeur. He just wants to know more about me.
Suddenly I clam up. Everything I want to say feels too risky now, the promise of a new relationship tethered to walking myself back.
“I mean, don’t worry,” I stutter. “I still identify as male, or whatever. I’m not going to start wearing dresses or anything.”
“Well, if you ever want to tell me more,” he sighs, looking right at me, “I’m around.”
“I’d like that.” I won't mention it again.
11. New York, April 2019
I have a new boyfriend, Mike. I sent him pictures from 2014, of college, when I’m in drag. Did I want to provoke him? I don’t know.
12:41 AM
Don’t love the first pic, bc i hate clogs tbh.
You’re gorgeous in the second and third. The eye shadow esp
But
In the time I’ve known you, I don’t think I’ve been exposed to you in this way
If that makes sense
So it feels a little bit foreign
Not in a bad way, just unfamiliar.
Two months without our earlier butterflies, a few related fights, and fatigue from our jobs pass. We’re texting again, to avoid talking.
9:07 PM
ever since you sent those pictures in the middle of the night
out of *nowhere*
something about you has felt erratic and mercurial
I don’t know how to date that, or you, I don’t think
We break up the next week.
East Williamsburg, last night of August, 2014
My last night at Bath Salts. Tomorrow I leave New York for the summer. No one seems to know what the theme is. I’m with Greg again. Monica is there, so is Vincent. Summer is ending, and some people wear sweaters. Nothing heavy like fleece, just the occasional silk black cardigan, maybe a silver shawl. A performer, Alexis walks by. Her cobalt sweater falls off a shoulder. The bones of her upper chest, her neck, are uncovered.
Borderline by Madonna comes on.
That song: starts so faintly, with chimes and high, quiet piano keys. It’s a song about making demands, melodically it’s the sound of someone, very politely, saying “please?”
Greg leans over to me at the bar. He brushes my bangs aside.
“I’m over being a boy.” I sip the drink he bought me.
“I know.”
He kisses me in front of all the boys and girls waiting in line. We smudge each other’s lipstick.
John Foley is a writer in Boston, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in the Fabulist, Persimmons, All Set, and HIKA. As an undergraduate, he co-edited the Kenyon Observer, the oldest political commentary magazine at Kenyon College. Foley is the co-founder and current managing editor of GRIFT, a literary and political journal.