I’ve begun to shift my style. Out go the smoked plastic glasses, replaced with sharp new oval wire-rims. And I’ve taken to avoiding or refusing haircuts, and have arrived at a stylish length like the Beatles on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s, and suddenly I’m getting it: I have a new status in the eyes of my peers, I’m a person whose opinions and interests matter. It’s the beginning of sophomore year, and I’m in Advanced-Placement English, reading Fitzgerald and e. e. cummings. A new English teacher—bearded, hirsute, all that body hair somehow like an expression of his simmering nervous energy, as if he’s literally wired—has us pull our desks into a circle and discuss Ferlinghetti poems (I dislike them even then), as well as give ourselves our own grades. We think he’s ridiculous but entertaining, and he’s fired in about three weeks. No matter, we go on with The Great Gatsby anyway; my new glasses, it occurs to me, must resemble the pair of spectacles on that spooky sign mounted out on Fitzgerald’s Long Island dunes.

Something new’s happening. I am relaxing into myself, tasting what it’s like to approve of myself a bit because other people do; if you’re a cool kid, then you’re not a sissy, at least not till fourth period, after lunch, and the daily forced march to the locker room. We’re creating a new category, in our school, my friends and I, a social niche to serve as an alternative to soshes (yellow windowpane plaids, canvas belts) and cowboys (stiff Wrangler jeans, white T-shirts) and hoods (greased or ratted hair, eyeliner, black leather). Or rather, we’re absorbing something that’s happening out there in the wider world, an emergent category of otherness. We’re about to be what we’ll call “freaks,” and some of us couldn’t be happier about it; the label denotes a stylish, desirable otherness. Heaven only knows how many of us, downstairs in the drama club, were young homosexual men and women; that aspect of ourselves simply did not come under examination, was not made visible in our new category. A freak, by definition, wasn’t a sissy, wasn’t queer. It was a form of liberation, strangely, this new place to dissemble, the best place yet to hide. One day I solidified my new fame by going to school in a shirt I’d made myself, a simple dashiki cut from an Indian block-printed cotton bedspread in a soft print of yellow and orange paisley shapes. Simple, you just cut out two pieces and stitch them up by hand with a needle and thread. Voilà: a new world, heady, its horizon nowhere in sight.