11

I always thought that after my first kiss, the clouds would part and the sun would shine down on us, and the world would become this wondrous Technicolor cartoon landscape where little forest critters and birds would break out into a thumping song about how lovely love is, and we’d dance off into the sunset. Or something.

For a second, it kind of was like that.

Then Jack disa-fucking-ppeared, and the cheesy song came to a screeching halt.

Yet I can’t stop thinking about it. The kiss. His lips, the stubble on his cheeks, the way his heart beat so erratically until I kissed him back and then slowed to a steady rhythm in time with mine.

I think about it on the walk back to my dorm that night, alone. I think about it when I text Jack in the days that follow, and he leaves me on read every time. When I call him, but it goes to voice mail. I think about that kiss when I wake up and trudge to class, hoping I’ll run into him because I memorized his schedule. When I wait outside our favorite dining hall, expecting him to show up for dinner.

He never shows.

It’s almost as if he never existed at all.

A few days after, I stop by his dorm, but when Rhett opens the door, he says Jack has hardly been around and that he only shows up to shower and sleep. Benny assures me that Rhett has no idea about Jack and me, but the way Rhett looks at me with pity swelling in his eyes makes me feel like he knows something.

I loop the night of the kiss and every minute I’ve spent with Jack over and over again in my head. The thing I keep coming back to is that he admitted, out loud, to himself and to me that he was gay for the very first time. Then he kissed me. And then he evaporated into the night sky.

Was it because I’m chubby and undesirable? Did I somehow make him feel pressured? Should I have been more resolute about pulling away from him? Of all people, I should know that coming out is a major fucking deal. Your head spins with uncertainty right before the plunge, but then once you say it out loud to another person and it’s real and not just an idea in your mind, there’s an immense, weight-lifting relief and niggling fears that you won’t be met with love every time you come out. Because you’ll be coming out in small ways every fucking day of the rest of your life.

Leila was the first person I came out to as gay freshman year in high school, even though Rae and I were closer. It was easier because she always called herself “a gay man in a woman’s body” and boasted about how “all the Instagays love my Insta content, yaaasss queen!” At the time, it made me think she would be accepting, and I just ignored the gross discomfort I felt when she said that. Because the fact is, she’s not a gay man, so she’s appropriating what doesn’t belong to her. Granted, this isn’t something only Leila does—many straight white girls co-opt queer culture like fashion accessories when it suits them but stay silent when we talk about the actual struggles of being queer. It’s like we’re only worth our meme value and only when it fits into a binary: Acceptable versus Everything Else.