“You should have her get killed by Satan himself.” Ben pantomimed stabbing someone. “Herself, I mean. She can whack your protagonist with a magic Lesbian Satan death blade. Hey, the school’s calling you.”
He passed the buzzing phone back to Abby. The caller ID read Fawcett School. Weird. “Hello?”
“Hello, this is Ms. Jackson in the middle school office calling. I’m trying to reach Abby Zimet?”
“Yes, this is Abby.”
“Oh, good, I’m glad we found you. If you’re still on campus, could you come to the office, please?”
That was even weirder.
Something didn’t feel right about this, but there was no real reason to say no. Abby wasn’t exactly on campus, but she was only a block away. And at least this would get her out of having to go home and interact with whichever of her parents was in town today. “Uh, okay. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
Abby told her friends what was going on, and they all got ready to leave. Linh tried to catch her eye, but Abby pretended not to notice. Flirting was one thing, but she’d learned the hard way that it was best to stay quiet when it came to stuff that may or may not turn out to be actual problems.
Everyone split up and waved goodbye, tucking their signs under their arms. Abby tried to maneuver her sign without bending it. It said Women Deserve Health Care! If You Don’t Believe Me, Ask the Woman Who Gave Birth to You, and she wanted to save it for the next protest.
As she turned to start up Wisconsin, squinting in the bright sun, a groaning 96 bus rolled past her. Abby adjusted her backpack, took out her phone and pulled up the website she’d found.
She was already behind on her research for Ms. Sloane, so she’d Googled gayness in the fifties earlier that afternoon and landed on some ancient government report. It was a faded, scanned PDF, dated December 15, 1950, and titled Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government. Abby had put off reading it, since it didn’t exactly sound cheery, but now she picked a page at random and zoomed in.
There are no outward characteristics or physical traits that are positive as identifying marks of sex perversion.
Undoubtedly, the authors of this report had thought themselves brilliant to have made this point. Also they were apparently using “sex perversion” as a synonym for not being straight, so that was...interesting.
Abby glanced up as she crossed the alley in front of the Whole Foods, then turned back to her phone.
Sex perverts, like all other persons who by their overt acts violate moral codes and laws and the accepted standards of conduct, must be treated as transgressors and dealt with accordingly.
Well, that sucked.
Abby scrolled, looking for something more relevant to what Ms. Sloane wanted from her, but this document read like a parody of an old textbook. There was no way people in the fifties, or any other time for that matter, seriously sat around worrying this much about each other’s “moral codes.”
One homosexual can pollute a Government office. This subcommittee is convinced that it is in the public interest to get sex perverts out of Government and keep them out.
Abby sighed and closed out of the PDF while she waited for the light to change. She was almost back on campus, and this document had nothing to do with lesbian pulp novels. The characters in Women of the Twilight Realm didn’t exactly sit around reading government reports.
Besides, Abby had spent her entire life in DC. She knew how much the people in Congress loved to hear themselves talk. Some guy was running for Senate who’d said homosexuality was evil and should be against the law, but him saying that didn’t change the fact that gay marriage had been legal for years. That guy might believe Abby was going to hell for being in love with Linh, but that didn’t make it true. Abby didn’t even believe in hell.
She crossed the parking lot and reached the bottom of the short hill that separated Fawcett Middle School from Fawcett High. Abby had barely been inside the middle school building since she’d finished eighth grade. Walking down the green-tiled front hall felt like going back in time.
She was startled out of her nostalgia when she pushed open the office door and saw her eleven-year-old brother, Ethan. He was sitting alone in the waiting area in his dance class uniform—a white T-shirt and embarrassingly tight black leggings. His arms were folded across his chest, and when he saw Abby, he groaned.
“What are you doing here?” Abby’s mouth fell open. “Why did they call me?”
“Abby. Good, you’re here.” Ms. Jackson, the office assistant, gestured to her from behind a desk. “We’ve been trying to reach your parents. Do you have another number for either of them?”
She’d come all the way here for this? Abby tried not to let her frustration show. “Probably. Which numbers have you tried?”
They compared phone lists, and Abby read out the numbers for Mom’s work cell and Dad’s assistant. Ms. Jackson thanked her, then vanished into an inner office and shut the door. Abby carefully laid her protest sign by the desk, but she kept her backpack strapped to her shoulders so she could get out of here fast when this was over.
Meanwhile, her brother was staring at the ceiling as though Abby wasn’t even there. Ethan was in that weird stage halfway between looking like a little kid and an almost-teenager. All he cared about was dancing—he took regular classes with the rest of the sixth graders during the school day, plus extra advanced classes in the afternoons—and he didn’t bother to change clothes afterward, which didn’t do much to offset his overall awkwardness. It was as if puberty was being intentionally mean to him, and he hadn’t noticed yet.
Abby and Ethan had been pretty close when they were younger. They used to have a running joke about how they were a two-person superhero team. Their parents were the villains, especially when Dad was trying to limit their screen time or Mom was making them eat vegetables.
Once, when Abby was in fifth grade and Ethan was in kindergarten, he’d fallen from the climbing gym on the temple playground and his nose turned into a bloody mess. Abby had wiped off his face and hugged him until he stopped crying. When their mom got there, Abby didn’t really want to let him go. It had been kind of nice, feeling needed.
Lately, though, she’d been avoiding her parents and Ethan altogether. Mom and Dad were just insufferable—on the rare occasions when one of them tried to relate to her, they only made it that much more obvious that they had no idea what it was like being a teenager, much less a queer one, in 2017—and as for Ethan, he’d basically turned into a different person than the kid she remembered.
“Okay, so.” Abby put her hands on her hips, the stiff fabric of her vintage dress rustling. “What’s going on?”
Ethan shrugged and tilted his head back, avoiding her gaze.
“Don’t be a dick, Ethan.” At that, his head shot up. She’d never called her brother a dick before, but if he was going to act like a dick... “Did you get in trouble?”
“I didn’t do anything.” His eyes trailed down to his sneakers. “Mr. Salem started it.”
“Mr. Salem?” Abby didn’t hide her surprise. “What did he do?”
Ethan loved his dance teacher. When they used to have family dinners he’d always go on and on about what