When Everything Feels like the Movies (2 page)

I hoped he might come to the hospital to visit me while I was recovering. I sat in my bed waiting, and when he didn’t show up, I was so furious that I almost told the tabloids, I mean the police officer, everything when she asked about the boy who dropped me off. “Did he do this to you?” she asked. But I kept my mouth shut, even about Matt, because I knew that Luke would go down with him. And maybe that’s what he deserved, but I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t destroy the only memory of him that showed he felt something too.

Once the stitches had healed, Angela would touch the scar on my forehead and say, “You’re a wizard, ’arry,” every time she was stoned.

I saw Luke again on the first day of school. I was in the bathroom touching up my face when he walked in. The tap stopped running, and the only sound was the water swishing through the drain in the wall like hushed gossip. He came over to the sink next to me and put down his backpack. Our eyes met in the mirror before he turned to look at me. At the real me. I was sure that the reflection in the mirror was just another scene from the movie always playing in my mind; I was scared that if I looked away and faced him, the screen would fade to black. So I stood perfectly still as the reflection of his hand came toward my face like the most beautiful special effect ever created. He traced my scar slowly, from top to bottom, then looked down at the makeup on his fingertip and smiled.

2

Hair and Makeup

I
t was the beginning of the end. The first day back to school after winter break. I had to hit snooze, or I’d have had a breakdown by third period. When I finally woke up, my eyes squinted from the light shining through the snow packed against my basement bedroom window. The dog-piss streaks were glistening like the yellow brick road, blinding me. All I wanted for Christmas was a sleep mask, but my grandma said Santa thought I was already too dramatic.

Stoned Hairspray started licking my face. Her tongue felt like sandpaper, but it was my favourite feeling in the world. She was purring so hard my mattress vibrated. Stoned had brown- and caramel-coloured fur and yellow eyes. She followed me home one day, and I decided to keep her because Ray was allergic to cats. My mom said she couldn’t stay, but I promised to keep her in the basement where Ray almost never went. There was nothing down there but my bedroom and the laundry room, both of which he avoided. So Stoned became my cellmate, making prison life more bearable. Angela and I named her Stoned Hairspray on account of huffing a can of hairspray when we were trying to come up with a name. It just sort of stuck.

When Stoned was done cleaning my face, I reached for my laptop on the floor so I could Facebook stalk Luke Morris. He still hadn’t accepted my friend request. I jerked off to my favourite picture of him, which he’d posted from his family’s cabin during the summer. He was standing on a dock, and his swim trunks were wet. If you looked closely, you could see the outline of his crotch. That did it every day. Usually more than once.

I had a new comment on one of my Facebook pictures, the one I took in Photo Booth where I’m posing like an underage girl doing a Terry Richardson shoot who actually thinks dreams come true. The comment was from Kenny Randal. He wrote, “faggot!!!!!” with five exclamation marks. I don’t know why I bothered with my privacy settings when Facebook just went back to default every time a bored Zuckerberg got even more Orwellian.

I almost deleted the comment, but decided to keep it like another badge from the Pretty Boy Scouts.

When I went upstairs to shower, I saw my mom was in the kitchen, burning pancakes. She’d just gotten home from work and was still dressed like a slutty nurse. Keefer sat at the kitchen table playing a game on his DS. All I could hear were gun shots and screams. The shower steamed up the bathroom mirror, and when I got out, I drew a heart so I could see my reflection. The steam streaked it, and it looked like the heart was bleeding.

I used my mom’s eyeliner and pink lip gloss, and then sprayed some of her Mademoiselle in my wet, dirty-blond hair. The bottle I’d stolen from her was already empty. My hair was almost down to my shoulders—long enough that I was always getting mistaken for a girl, which I liked. Tranny chasers are so hot.

I stared at my reflection in the perspiring glass, tucking my dick between my legs and pursing my sticky pink lips. I was transparent; I could’ve already been a ghost. Every mirror I looked into turned to water, and I was always ready for my close-up. Since I was born by caesarean, I wasn’t deformed from childbirth. My mom said all the nurses and parents told her how beautiful I was. “Lord knows you were no immaculate conception,” she laughed, “but you sure were immaculate.”

In the first picture ever taken of me, I’m lying in the hospital nursery wrapped in a yellow blanket. Not blue like all the other baby boys or pink like all the girls. It was a yellow blanket, which I kept my whole life. I’d sleep with it every night. Even when I was too old and it embarrassed me, I loved it. But then I always loved things that didn’t love me back.

I used to wonder if the parents who looked at me and my yellow blanket in the nursery with all the other babies thought I was a little boy or girl. If it mattered. If, on my first day on earth, I wasn’t either.

I was just beautiful.

When I was done with hair and makeup, I was ready to start filming. I walked to school, but imagined I was in LA. I turned the bungalows with snow piled on decaying shingles into Beverly Hills mansions. The dogs tied up in backyards, sticking their frozen noses in the air and barking, became the honking horns of limos with starlets overdosing in the back. The mine was a studio lot. The thick grey smog that hovered over town was the pollution from a traffic jam on the Hollywood Freeway. I zigzagged down the sidewalk, slipping on ice and pretending it was the Walk of Fame.

I’m not going to tell you what town I lived in because it was a dump, and it will just depress you. It had everything you needed if you didn’t need anything at all. The movie theatre only had one screen, which played one movie a week, and it was usually a couple months old. We always got things a little later than everyone else, once they had trickled through the rest of the world. The town had one newspaper, which you could read cover to cover on the toilet and still have time to raid the medicine cabinet for anything that might help you catch a buzz. There was a mine where almost everyone worked, including my dad before he died.

The funeral scenes were tragic. It was always a gruesome death. Usually I killed him off in a car accident that left him decapitated like Jayne Mansfield. If I wanted real tears, I’d think of her. My father always came back from the dead like a Soap Star, so maybe that’s why I cried for Jayne, because she couldn’t. Her heart only beats on a screen in the dark.

When I stepped through the school doors, my fans went crazy. I had arrived just in time for the end of morning announcements. Our principal, Mr Callagher, was saying through the speaker that the school was throwing a Valentine’s dance, and if anyone wanted to help organize it, they should come to the office at lunch and shove their finger up his ass.

Everyone was busy talking about what they got for Christmas and how wasted they got on New Years. No one gave a shit about Mr Callagher. His voice boomed overhead like God’s, but no one was a believer. Hadn’t he seen the portraits of him scribbled on the tables in the caf? Pants down, hairy balls, pencil dick up Janitor Jim’s ass.

They made portraits of me, too. They were my graffiti tabloids. I was totally famous. I’d imagine that the drawing in the handicap stall of my alleged crotch with “Hermafrodite Jude/Judy” scribbled next to it was the cover of the
National Enquirer.
Misspelled headline included. I was addicted to them. I’d look all over the bathroom and on all the walls in the hallway, and if there wasn’t one waiting for me on my locker for Jim to paint over at the end of the day, I was crushed. I wanted them to hate me; hate was as close to love as I thought I’d ever be.

While Mr Callagher made his announcement, I stared at Luke, who had morning wood sticking out of his gym shorts. I couldn’t believe it. It made the crotch-shot on the dock seem amateur. I don’t think he even noticed; he was looking bored and tapping his foot on the floor. He was wearing the shoes with Madison’s lip print still smudged on the side. The shoes were his Christmas present. Of course, she had to give them to him on the last day of school, five days before Christmas, in front of everyone. Standing right in the middle of the hall, she took one of the white Nikes out of the box and kissed it. She wore a glossy red lipstick that made her lips look juicy, like she had just sucked on a tampon, which I’m pretty sure she did once just to get her YouTube channel more views. Luke seemed embarrassed as Madison passed him the lipsticked shoe. He was smiling, but it was like he was being forced to take a picture first thing in the morning before he’d even had a chance to rub one out or eat a Pop-Tart.

Mr Callagher was reminding everyone that smoking was forbidden on school property as Luke crossed his hands on his lap to hide his bulge—or rub against it. Probably both. He stared straight ahead and barely blinked. His thick eyelashes were so dark that it looked like he bought them at the drugstore, like I do. I fantasized about gluing them on his eyes and then ripping them off as he climaxed. I wondered what he was thinking about. I wanted to crawl into his head and see what I needed to be to become the thing that he was thinking about.

When Mr Callagher was done speaking, Brent Mackenzie asked Mrs Kennedy if she’d go to the Valentine’s dance with him, which made a few people laugh. The few who’d been lucky enough to wake ’n’ bake. Mrs Kennedy did her best to look unimpressed, but her cheeks were as red as a spanked ass in a BDSM porno. I would know. Angela and I watched all the DVDs in the box under her parents’ bed, like, twice.

3

The Set

M
y middle school was basically a movie set. No one was real. Especially me. We were all just playing our parts. You might be sort of real when you start school but you’re quickly typecast and learn all your lines by rote—mostly because you’ve written them in detention so many times.

Everyone fell into one of three categories:

1. The Crew: They made things happen. They took over the honour roll, sports teams, extracurricular activities, and clubs. They had the most volunteer credits and were first to raise their hands whenever the teacher asked a question. They weren’t necessarily the smartest, most talented, or prettiest, but they were involved. Without the crew, nothing would ever get done, and we’d all be wandering down the hallways in search of our marks.

2. The Extras: All the misfits, outcasts, and social rejects. If you were as chipped as my nail polish and didn’t belong, you were an extra—kind of the opposite of the Crew. They were there, but you didn’t really know it; they were just bodies in desks filling space, anonymous smiles in faded school photos on a boulevard of broken dreams.

3. The Movie Stars: No one thinks they’re more special than they do, but everyone wants to be tagged in a Facebook picture with the stars and get their autographs in the yearbook. They’re selfish, spoiled, and overly sexed. There isn’t much beyond the surface of their flawlessly airbrushed skin, and everyone talks about them behind their backs. Their eyes light up when you can do something for them, and everything that comes out of their mouths is totally fake.

I didn’t fit into any category. I definitely wasn’t a part of the Crew; I wasn’t about to be involved in anything unless it was court-appointed. I wasn’t an Extra because the last thing I could ever be was anonymous. But I wasn’t a Movie Star either because, even though everyone knew my name, I wasn’t invited to the cool parties.

So there was me, the flamer that lit the set on fire.

I was usually in the spotlight, but every now and then I felt like Norma Desmond because the spotlight would fade, and I would be forgotten. That’s when I would wear the most makeup, or throw myself to the floor in the middle of the hallway, like I had just tumbled out of a limousine after snorting an eight ball.

When I was in the spotlight, they all stared. Matt asked, “New lipstick, Judy?” Even though it was the same one I always wore, which he already knew, because he was so desperate for me to leave a ring of it around his prodigious cock.

The studio renamed me Judy the day Matt added a “y” to my name on the attendance list. Mrs Kennedy said “Judy” during roll call, and everyone burst out laughing. Poor Mrs Kennedy. She was so clueless. She kept calling “Judy Rothesay?” and asking if we had a transfer student.

It became my official stage name when the media picked up on it. Every time I walked down a hall/red carpet, the reporters would call me “Judy” to try to get my attention, but I’d refuse to comment. I’d turn their dirty looks into camera flashes and make them my paparazzi. They’d scream my name, and I’d let them take a little piece of my soul with each flash. Why not? They were going to take it anyway. The flashes would dim, and then the fluorescent hallway lights would again illuminate pimples and the dark circles you get from all-nighters spent either reading a text book or doing lines off of one. Everything would become real again.

Even the teachers watched me, like they wanted to remember every detail so that one day they could tell
People
magazine “I knew him when” for a pay-out bigger than their measly salaries. I had a faculty fan club that wrote me love letters. I saw one on Mr Dawson’s desk. I was having lunch in his classroom, like I sometimes did when I felt like making him my Paula Strasberg. I’d refuse to step on set without him.