Tiffany Scandal - Jigsaw Youth

“What’s up?”

“Just remembering is all. Had this guy point a rifle at my face, once. I’d been dating this girl for a couple of weeks. She told me that her parents would never accept her dating a woman, so we had to keep our relationship on the down low. I was like, cool, I can totally be just-your-friend-Nicole. She was a cool kid. I liked her a lot. But one day, I showed up to get her so that we could go to the movies. I guess her dad had done some snooping and found this journal entry where she talked about us. Like, the gory details. He got real pissed and met me at the door before I could even ring the doorbell. I could smell the whiskey on him.”

“What’d you do?”

“What could I do? I smiled and waved and said, ‘Sorry to bother you, sir,’ and turned right the fuck around and kept walking. I saw her a few days later, at school. She had a black eye, some other bruises. Couldn’t even look my way, let alone talk to me. I felt terrible. Her dad was a piece of shit for that.”

“How old were you?”

“Fifteen.”

We sat in silence for a moment.

Then she burped. Shook the empty can and chucked it across the balcony.

“Looks like I need to reload.”

I cracked one open and handed it to her.

“You’re a good egg, E. Cheers.” She lit a cigarette. “Tell me one of yours.”

“Dude, all my shit seems tame by comparison.”

“Ever have a gun pointed at your face?”

“No.”

“Good, ‘cause I’ll kill a motherfucker.” She laughed.

I liked Nic, though not in a romantic sense, she was just a rad person to hang out with. We worked in the same building, and the first time we saw each other, it was like a really loud gaydar alarm went off and we immediately went to sniff each other out. She had brown hair with blonde patches that she kept in a mullet. She wore men’s jeans and button up dress shirts, and drove a Subaru. Nicole sang and played folk music on guitar. I asked her what her favorite beer was and she said Hefeweizen. I called her a textbook lesbian and she told me to go fuck myself. We’ve been friends since.

I was drawing a blank on what stories could be worth sharing. Yeah, I dated closeted girls in the past, but I’d never had a hard time making people believe we were just friends. When I wasn’t out to my family, I played off my girlfriends as “just real good friends,” easily. In fact, when people would learn I was gay, I’d just get comments like, “You’re too pretty to be gay,” or, “You just haven’t met the right man.” And the times I experienced grief while out with a girlfriend was from men getting upset we wouldn’t give them the time of day.

“So tell me. I’m getting bored.” I hadn’t noticed the length of the silence.

“Well, one time, this girl and I were walking around downtown Fullerton, holding hands. Her family was out of town, so, for once, she wasn’t scared of getting caught. We started crossing the street, and some dude in a Civic hauls ass to pull right in front of us, almost hitting us in the process. Just to shout, ‘There needs to be a dick in the middle of that!’ Then he spat at our feet and drove off. She mumbled some words under breath and let go of my hand. She never wanted to hold hands in public again.”

“Because some asshole wanted to stick his dick in both of you?”

“I don’t know. I just think she didn’t like confrontation.”

“Hah. Can’t live your life like a door mat. How long did you date?”

“Two and a half years.”

Nic spit out her beer and started to laugh. “How?”

I leaned over the rail and shrugged. Then I turned and raised my beer can, toasting to tits. I looked back down at the street, watching someone walk a dog. Mensa popped into my head.

“What else?” Nic belched.

“I lost my childhood best friend.”

“Lost as in she died, or stopped associating with you because you were gay?”

“Both.”

I told her the story about how I came out to my best friend of thirteen years. We were seniors in high school. I had never seen someone that angry or upset before. We completely lost touch after graduation. Years later, after introducing a girlfriend to my family, I heard that friend had passed away. No one wanted to talk about it, which made me realize it had been suicide. Mexican families are sometimes too proud to acknowledge things like mental illness, so they’ll refer to it in catch-all terms like, ‘problems’ or ‘troubles,’ even when it’s that deep black ‘leap off the cliff or face the tiger’ depression.

“What were her last words to you?”

“She told me that she hated me.”

“Rough.”

We tapped our cans together one more time, drank, and waited in silence, watching the rest of the sunset.

Static. Flicker. Turn the knob. Tune into something different.

I’m a bottle baby. I desperately suckle the rubber teat. I don’t know anything different, or better.

I curl into your cold steel arms. They’re hard and uninviting, but my arms are still too short to hug myself. There’s a fleece blanket. It’s pink because the doctors labeled me female shortly after I emerged into the world. The blanket’s thin, getting thinner by the day, getting scratchy against my skin. But I sleep with it, still. I bunch it into a ball and push it in between my head and your steel. The blanket has a scent that is not my own, but that too fades with each passing day.

Between the bars, there’s a television. My eyes focus on the screen. From it, I learn words. I learn about violence and oppression.

I turned in the above paper for a creative writing prompt in the sixth grade. The teacher called it “interesting.” Later I was called into the principle’s office and was asked if everything at home was okay. There was a police officer there and his presence made me feel uncomfortable. I shrugged my shoulders and said, “sure.” Never heard anything else about that.

I remember the day I heard that Kurt Cobain was dead.

I was nine and in the fourth grade. I was stomping home from school in my boots, humming whatever stupid song was stuck in my head, purposely stepping on every crack on the sidewalk. I walked up the driveway, past flowers I could never remember the names of, past the planter that had my name on it.

The front door was already open. My family knew I was going to be home soon. I pulled open the screen, threw my backpack on the ground and walked toward the mirror in the bathroom. I had an idea for the color I wanted my hair to be when my family would finally let me color it, and I wanted to look into the mirror and imagine it.

Electric blue. Like a comic book character.

I pictured blue dreads emerging from my scalp like snakes and framing my face. The bounce, the texture — full, fluffy and wild.

My aunt walked up behind my reflection. I made fish lips and looked at her through the mirror. Her arms were crossed and she looked serious. I looked down and played back my entire day and tried to think of what I could’ve done to be in trouble. Coming up blank, I made another goofy face at her in the mirror.

“Kurt Cobain died.”

I told her to be quiet. Her joke wasn’t funny.

This aunt liked to play jokes. Like, a time we went to Disneyland and rode The Haunted Mansion. She kept tapping my head during the ride but would say it wasn’t her, telling me instead that a hand would come out of the wall behind us and tap the heads of little children. I stared at the back of the car for the rest of ride, waiting to see if I could catch it next time it came out. I stared for the rest of the ride and nothing happened. When we got off the ride, my aunt laughed and told me I was gullible. I didn’t think it was funny. And this wasn’t funny, either. I walked past her and went outside to see what bugs I could find in the backyard.