One
“YOU CAN BAIL ANY TIME you need to,” Nicole reminds me for the fourth time today.
I nod. I don’t tell her that I really can’t—at least, not without feeling bad about it—but I know what she means. She means I can escape to the bathroom, that I can slide out of the space quietly and lock myself in a stall until the meeting is over, or I can leave and catch the bus to downtown and walk back to my apartment. I can even call my mom to pick me up if I really want to.
But even if I can do that, I won’t. I have no idea how this group will respond to a new guy showing up out of nowhere and then leaving halfway through, and I’m not gonna chance it. But I know my best friend well enough to get that she means well. So I just say, “I know,” and Nicole smiles as I hold the door open for her.
Glenwood’s only youth center is small. The building is unimpressive from the outside, tall and gray and easily overlooked. Inside isn’t much different, but the owners—the workers? The volunteers? Whoever’s in charge of decorating?—they’ve clearly tried their best to make it as lively as possible. In the lobby, colorful afghans are slung over the backs of secondhand couches and delicate lights are strung over the chipped countertop. Art lines the walls—figures of people dancing, splatter-painted self-portraits, flowers and buildings and things, all with their artists’ names and ages displayed under their art.
I look at it all while Nicole talks with the woman behind the front desk. The paintings are throughout the lobby, and I follow the artwork until I’m in a hallway. The pieces change to photography, black-and-white images of teens in various generic poses—arms crossed loosely, sitting on curbs, talking to one another, looking directly at the camera with somber expressions. I guess it makes sense that this is the kind of artwork they display here, especially when the whole point of having the youth center available and free for the public is to actively help at-risk teenagers in the city.
Am I an “at-risk teenager”?
I don’t know. Maybe.
Across from the photographs are two doors. From the lobby, I hear Nicole wrapping up her conversation. She finds me, and we head through the doors together.
The room is large and mostly empty, save for some round tables and a rolling whiteboard at the front. A few kids are already here, sitting on the floor or standing around. I don’t know any of them, but they obviously know Nicole. They’re
quick to greet her, launching into more pleasantries and conversations while I stand around awkwardly.
Everyone looks to be either my age or younger, placing Nicole, at twenty, as maybe the oldest person in the room. More kids trickle in from the lobby. Nicole finishes exchanging all her polite how are yous and that’s good to hears and slings an arm around my shoulder, pulling me close to her.
“Hey, asshole,” she says, which is Nicole-speak for Come join the conversation.
“That’s me,” I say, which is Gael-speak for Please don’t make me do that.
She snorts and opens her mouth to say something when a boy I recognize from school comes up to us, grabbing Nicole’s attention.
“Aww, hey!” she says brightly. Nicole says most things brightly. “You made it!”
“Yeah! My mom ended up taking my brother instead, so,” the boy says. We’re in a class together, but we’ve never really talked. He’s shorter than me, with a bright smile and deep dimples, his blue raglan shirt pushed up to show off warm brown forearms. His dark corkscrew curls are pulled into a short ponytail at the base of his neck.
Nicole is telling him something, still with her arm slung over my shoulder. She chokes me a little when she tries to use both hands to talk, but this is par for the course for her.
“Oh! And this is Gael,” she says, finally letting me go, only to do something worse: motion broadly toward me, in that here’s-what-I’m-presenting-for-you gesture, which I didn’t realize I hated until this exact moment.
“Hey.” He extends a hand for me to shake. “I’m Declan.”
“Gael,” I say, taking it, and then, a moment too late, “Nicole already said that.”
He laughs a little, like he’s not completely sure if he should or not. “You go to GHS, right? I’m pretty sure we’re in the same AP Lit class?”
“Oh.” I blink. “Yeah, I think we are.”
“How are you feeling about senior year so far?”
I shrug. We only started back at school this Wednesday, but I don’t say that. “It’s all right. You?”
From the corner of my eye, I can see Nicole watching this interaction between glances at her phone, a smile forming on her lips. No doubt she’s happy that I’m talking to someone new.
“Good so far. I’m hopeful about the year.” Someone behind us laughs way louder than necessary, and Declan and I both glance at them. More people have arrived since we started talking. A few are sitting down already, some with backpacks next to them, clearly getting here straight from school. He turns back to me. “I guess we should get settled so the group can start. But it was nice talking to you!”
“You, too.”
Declan heads to the opposite side of the room and sits next to a girl I recognize from my Environmental Science class.
Nicole takes a seat on the floor, and I follow her example, keeping as close to her as I can.
“All right, everyone.” Nicole claps her hands together. “Circle up, circle up.”
Slowly, the chatter dies and the group calms. Nicole leans back on her palms, the room’s attention on her.
“Hello, and welcome to our first Plus meeting of the school year!” She aims her blinding smile around the circle. “Before we get started with group discussion, let’s go around and do introductions: name, pronouns, and for today’s icebreaker . . . something you like to do to relax. I’m Nicole, my pronouns are she/her, and when I want to relax, I go for a long drive with my music playing.”
A few people in the room express their approval of her answer with polite snaps, and she turns to me expectantly. I’m hit with a wave of nervousness.
“Um.” I run my finger over an eyebrow nervously. “I’m Gael, he/him. I guess to relax . . . I crochet?” I don’t mean to end it uncertainly, but the eyes on me turn my statement into a question. From where I’m sitting, I can see Declan, pressing his shoulder to his friend’s. He’s looking at me—not weirdly, just in that way that you do when someone in a group has the floor, but it makes me blink and look away from him.
Nicole pulls me away from overthinking the moment with a hand on my arm. The next person is already speaking, and she squeezes my arm gently. She doesn’t have to say it; I know she’s happy I got through introductions okay.
It takes a while for everyone to go, but when we’ve finally gotten back around to Nicole, she announces this meeting’s theme: “Arts and Expression,” which she writes on the whiteboard in large, neat letters. “Can y’all think of any LGBTQIA+ artists, writers, musicians, or actors who inspire you? It can be anyone at all.”
Hands are already up before she’s finished asking. As Nicole calls on people, they offer different names, some I recognize, some I don’t, and she writes every answer on the board. Janelle Monáe, Freddie Mercury, Audre Lorde. The list keeps going. Some examples come to mind, and Nicole makes hopeful eye contact with me, but when I don’t raise my hand after a few seconds, she moves on to someone else.
Once she can’t squeeze any more names onto the board, Nicole puts the cap on her marker and turns back to us. “Small group time! I want you to get into groups of four or five and discuss the role of the arts in the LGBTQIA+ community—what it means to you, why these people on the board inspire you, your own experiences with art, anything at all. And while y’all are talking, I want you to make something.” She gestures to round tables with buckets of markers, crayons, colored pencils, and other various art supplies. “It can be a poem, a picture, a song—I don’t care as long as you’re creating. In thirty minutes, we’ll get back together and share in the large group.”
She gestures toward the tables in a final go-ahead, and people are already getting up and finding their places, naturally gravitating toward their friends. Nicole watches everyone for a moment, then glances at me, still sitting on the ground. She grins and offers her hand to pull me up. “Come on, loser.” You can stick with me.
I don’t say anything, but I know she understands what I mean. Thanks.
Nicole chooses a table in the back of the room, with a few containers of Play-Doh, some falling-apart boxes of crayons and markers, and white printer paper. Declan is already seated, rummaging around for the right crayon colors. His friend, who introduced herself as Jacqueline when we went around, is shorter than Declan, with box braids pulled into a bun on the top of her head and lots of ear piercings, and the neon pink Play-Doh she’s already claimed matches her nails. Nicole plops into the chair across from Jacqueline. I sit next to Nicole.
Declan and Jacqueline talk, and Nicole starts on a drawing of her and her girlfriend, McKayla, while I go for the blue Play-Doh. I scrape out the last bits from the bottom of the container, then shape it into a cylinder. I pull it apart while half listening to Declan tell a story about his younger brothers.
Nicole is drawing two miniature lesbian flags for stick-figure Nicole and stick-figure McKayla to wave around when she says, “So, about the prompt . . . Gael, you have any thoughts on the whole arts thing?”
“Um.” I press my thumb into the dough until it starts to fold in half from the pressure. “Not really.” "
Nothing at all?”
If it were just Nicole and me, I wouldn’t have any issues discussing this. We’ve talked about trans art and trans artists, all the musicians and actors we look up to. She knows that even though I don’t consider myself artistic, I’ve still thought about this—how it helps, or doesn’t help, or could help.
But Declan and Jacqueline are here, sitting across from us, looking at me—and I’m not looking up, my eyes still trained on the Play-Doh, but I can feel their stares, and the weight of it makes me press my thumb into the dough harder—and suddenly I can’t think of a single thing.
So I just say, “Nothing,” and hope she gets what I mean.
She doesn’t push me after that. She talks about Laura Jane Grace while I just keep pressing into the dough, until it’s so thin that it’s almost falling apart. I don’t say really anything at all until we’re nearing the end of small group time and Nicole holds up her drawing to show off. “Ta-da!”
“It’s cute,” I say. “But, um, what’s under McKayla’s nose?”
“It’s her septum ring.” She gestures toward the image with a pink crayon.
“Oh, clearly.”
“It sort of looks like a giant mole,” Declan says.
Nicole turns the paper around to take another look. She frowns at the smudge.
“I think it’s still cute,” Jacqueline says, and Declan knocks her elbow with his.
When he looks up again, our eyes meet. I panic and look away, then worry that looking away so quickly was a weird
thing to do. But he doesn’t say anything, and a minute later, we’re cleaning up our tables and heading back to the large circle, completed projects in hand.
He sits in the same spot as earlier, and for the rest of the meeting, I make sure our eyes don’t meet again.
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