Chapter 9

Chapter Nine

Avery

THE PERSON AT the door stamped my hand with a red X when I showed my ID, but at least I'm allowed inside. I sit nervously near the back of a crowded room that's clearly usually a dance floor. Folding chairs line up in rows with a lane down the center, all pointed at a makeshift stage with a curtain hanging before it.

I bounce my leg, but it's not the drag show I'm nervous about. I check my phone, but there's no update since I sent Diego the time and location for this and he responded with a simple "thanks." I haven't texted since then, too afraid that any excess communication will scare him off. It's a miracle he accepted the invitation at all, as terrified as he is of our every interaction. No matter how innocuous, he always looks like he wants to run .

I catch movement out of the corner of my eye, but it's a couple on a date and not Diego. Someone tries to sit next to me and I bashfully explain I'm holding the seat for a friend. They don't seem to mind, but the tiny interaction sets my heart racing. I sure hope I'm holding the seat for a friend. Otherwise, I'll look like a fool sitting here by myself next to an empty seat. I check my phone yet again. Still nothing. And there's only a few minutes until the show is supposed to start.

"Come on, Diego. Please," I mutter under my breath.

Restless, I go to the bar, show my red X, and ask for a soda. Optimistically, I ask for two sodas. The bartender doesn't bother charging me for them.

I'm carrying them back to my seat when I see him.

Diego stands at the back of the room where the performance will take place. His head swivels, and he shifts from foot to foot, his nerves apparent.

I can't stop a smile from breaking across my face. I hurry toward him before he can flee or disappear or turn out to be some kind of overly hopeful hallucination on my part.

"Hey," I say.

He startles when he spots me beside him. I hold up a plastic cup full of soda.

"Want a drink?"

"You shouldn't be drinking," he says.

I roll my eyes. "It's soda." I hold up my hand, displaying the big red X the bouncer placed there to mark me as under twenty-one.

Diego finally accepts a cup, and I lead him to the seats I snagged, moving my jacket aside so we can sit. It turns out we're just in time. We barely settle on the chairs before the lights go down and an excited murmur ripples through the crowd.

The emcee all but leaps onto the stage. She's literally sparkling in her sequin bathing suit. Thigh high boots climb up her legs. Her wig is teased up so tall it nearly hits the stage lights as she jumps around hyping us up for the show. Then the queen tells us to get ready for the first performance, and I almost splash soda on myself from squeezing my plastic cup so hard.

Music blares. The lights flash and swirl as a drag queen struts across the stage lip syncing to "Baby One More Time." At one point, the queen drops into a split, her tiny school girl skirt riding up around her hips, and the whole crowd goes nuts and throws bills at the stage. I crumple up a dollar of my own and toss it at the stage for the queen to collect at the end of her performance.

In the brief breath of quiet between performances, I chance a look at Diego. He's fixated on the stage, his fear receding behind a wave of pure awe and delight. I have to bite my lip to keep from smiling too much at that, but fortunately the lights soon shift as the next queen bursts onto the stage .

We get all the hits over the next hour or so. "Bitch Better Have My Money," "Dancing Queen," Cher, Madonna, you name it. There's even a performance of "Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)" by a drag king who's devastatingly handsome in full cowboy getup, complete with a ten-gallon hat. He struts down the center row, like many of the queens did, then locks onto me and Diego and sprawls over our laps for a dramatic moment. I shove dollar bills at him and he struts off, but Diego is wide-eyed next to me, and it's all I can do not to laugh. Despite his field of study, it's painfully obvious how far out of his comfort zone he is, yet he's soaking it all up, taking it in with joyful earnestness.

The show wraps up after a couple more performances. Everyone throws whatever cash they have at the stage. Diego digs awkwardly through his wallet, but all he has is a twenty.

"Don't worry about it," I say. "Just remember to get some ones for next time."

The mention of a next time puts the tension right back into his shoulders and face, and I almost regret suggesting it. But he clearly had fun, and nothing weird happened. We sat and watched a show. What's so awful about that?

We have to vacate our seats and head to the other side of the bar so the crew can clear out the area for the dance floor. The night is just getting started, and as long as I play it cool I can probably hang around and dance .

The other half of the bar is just a literal bar. It's crowded with most of the show's attendees hanging around, but I don't mind. I lead Diego to a corner where we can toss our empty sodas and escape the worst of the crush vying for the bartender's attention.

"So, how'd you like it?" I say. I have to yell above the din, but Diego and I stand so close that I know he can hear me. I also know he's nervous about our proximity, like when I stepped around his desk the other day. I, however, am not. I like being so close I have to look up at him, so close we can't help accidentally bumping into each other. It gives me an opportunity to appreciate all the warm shades of brown in his eyes, from amber to chestnut to umber.

"It was interesting," Diego says.

"Just interesting? Come on. I know you've never seen something like that."

"Not in person, certainly."

"It's so much better than a textbook," I say. "The music. The looks. The makeup."

His head must be spinning. Diego just saw all of his studying in action in a way he's never witnessed before. From what he's admitted about his hometown, it definitely didn't have anything close to the performance he saw tonight.

"How are you not freaking out right now?" I say. "That was so good."

"How do you know I'm not freaking out?" he mutters .

Even with the noise of the bar around us, I catch it and laugh. "Okay, fine. But you're freaking out so quietly. Come on, tell me what you really thought."

He looks down at me, and his gaze turns genuinely thoughtful, like when we were talking about my paper. I'm beginning to understand that this is the way past his high walls, not perfect hair or flawless skin or an idealized body, but a mind that's a match for his own.

"I thought," he starts slowly, "I thought it was fascinating. I want to know why they chose what they chose. The makeup. The shoes. It must take practice just to walk in those things, and they were doing far more than walking. Why go to such effort? What drives it?"

"Euphoria," I answer immediately, and his gaze sharpens. I have his interest now, beaming down on me like the full light of the sun in the middle of the day, and I'm basking in it. "Some people get a rush from playing with the gray areas, from bending the rules. Even if some of those queens take off the makeup and wigs and are are cis men underneath, there's a kind of high from blurring the lines, even temporarily. And for some people, it's not so temporary."

"For you?"

It's a brash question, but I don't shrink away from it. Few people are bold enough to actually ask me something like that.

My hair is sitting in its usual high ponytail. I take a lot of pride in its length, in flaunting its sheen every day. I also put on a little eyeliner for this. I'm wearing two long, dangling silver earrings and a slinky sweater that drapes over my slight frame and the tight jeans beneath it. It's not as far as I sometimes go, but it's what I felt like wearing tonight, it's the presentation that felt good today, and that's most of how I make these sorts of decisions.

"Yeah," I say after a sizable pause. "It's not temporary for me. But it's also not one stable thing. It can change from one day to the next. But I decided a while ago that I'm going to go with what feels authentic to me instead of what feels normal for everyone else. And people can think whatever they want about that."

He looks at me for a long time, like he's weighing out each and every word I said on some scale inside his head. I'm desperate to know what he's thinking, what he makes of all this, of me, but his placid face betrays nothing.

A beat starts up in the other half of the bar. They must have finished clearing out the chairs and stage for the show. The crowding eases as people filter back over to that side of the venue.

"I studied this for so long," Diego says eventually, almost to himself, "and somehow never really experienced it. I thought being gay in my small town was enough. I didn't realize how much I was missing."

"That's why you came here, though, right?" I say.

He nods. "Yes. But still. Thank you for inviting me out to this. I wouldn't have done this on my own."

I can't stop grinning. "Thank you for showing up. I was afraid you wouldn't. I just wanted you to see what I'm so excited about in my research."

"Your research," Diego says.

Suddenly, I flash back to that conversation in his office and my bold suggestion that he join me at this event … for research. The phrase meant a lot more than gathering quotes for a required essay, and the way Diego repeats the words now suggests he remembers that. Vividly.

Heat trembles low in my gut. Diego is staring at me like he's waiting for something, but I have no idea what to do about this. If he wasn't my TA it would be so obvious, so easy. Normally, someone eyeing me up like this would be a blinking green "go" signal, but I have to be more careful here.

Or do I?

We aren't at the university. We're anonymous patrons at a bar. No one here knows us, and we don't know them. The lights are low. The music is loud. We're just two strangers in a bar, two strangers with an obvious and voracious attraction.

For the first time in a long time, all the stress of juggling the café and my degree lifts off my shoulders. Perhaps that's what makes me bold enough to grab Diego by the hand .

"Dance with me," I say.

He freezes for a second, but doesn't jerk free of my grasp. Then he nods, just once.

It's all the confirmation I need.