Tonight, though, when they looked at me, they’d see something else. This morning, a story had come out that had temporarily made me the most famous student at Martha Jefferson Academy for Young Women in Washington, DC. It would probably only last until the next senator’s daughter got caught shoplifting at Neiman Marcus, but still.
It took all my concentration just to breathe as I walked through the ballroom doors. My date, Renee, beamed out at the rapt crowd, still hanging on my arm.
For her, the attention was fun. For her, tonight was nothing.
For me, tonight was everything.
It was too much. My stomach clenched, unclenched and clenched again as my brain whirred with a thousand thoughts at once.
I’d won. I’d actually won.
We turned the corner and saw the crowd. A few hundred of our classmates and their dates, dressed up in their finest finery.
All I saw was their eyes. Hundreds—no, thousands, it felt like thousands—of eyes fixed right on me.
I looked down, took a breath and tried to focus on something else.
My outfit. That was something.
Tonight was one of the first times in my entire life when I actually liked what I was wearing. Spiffy new gray-and-black-striped pants, a bright blue shirt, shiny black shoes, black-and-white-striped suspenders, and a black top hat.
Granted, the top hat might’ve been a little much, but the suspenders rocked. Before we’d even made it through the parking lot, a dozen different people had come up to high-five me about the lawsuit. Half of them complimented me on the suspenders, too.
There’s something about looking exactly how you want to look—finally—finally—that feels like you’re being set free.
Like most of the girls at our school, my date, Renee, had gone the fancy-designer-dress-and-matching-high-heels route. She’d worn bright blue to match my shirt, which was awesome of her. She kept her arm tucked through mine and beamed at the crowd as we entered the cheesy hotel ballroom through the balloon arch we’d spent hours making at yesterday’s Student Council meeting.
“You go, T!” a guy I vaguely knew yelled from across the room, giving me a thumbs-up. “Lesbians rock!”
I gave him a thumbs-up back. Even more heads had turned in my direction at the guy’s shout. People grinned and held their punch cups out to me.
“You’re popular tonight.” Renee grinned and waved at the crowd again.
“Oh, that guy was just expressing appreciation for how my suspenders show off my übertoned physique,” I said. Renee laughed and fake-punched me in the arm. I made a face like it hurt, and she laughed again. Renee was just a friend, being straight and all, but I was so, so glad to have her there with me that night.
My hands shook as I exchanged smiles and nods and more high fives. I made a big show of escorting Renee around the room, holding her elbow and using my free hand to make swooping motions with my arms like a guy in an old movie might do. That made her laugh.
I laughed, too. I couldn’t believe tonight was really happening.
I never thought I’d win. For so long it had seemed impossible. Then, last night, the school administration had finally backed down.
For years, I’d begged. I’d written strongly worded letters that were just as strongly ignored. I’d given impassioned speeches to my classmates. I’d gone to administration meetings and made presentations full of graphs and statistics and quotes from important court cases.
It hadn’t mattered what I said. I spoke at meeting after meeting, but at each one, the administrators just thumbed their phones until I’d stopped talking.
Then last week our school’s Gay-Straight Alliance decided that since we’d already tried everything else, we might as well go the old-fashioned route and have a rally. We made posters and sent out an invitation telling people to gather on the front lawn of the main building after eighth-period bell. We figured we might get a dozen people there.
Instead, almost the whole school showed up.
I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t think anyone besides my closest friends even cared, much less agreed with me, but those speeches I’d been making had paid off. The photos in the news reports that day showed hundreds of my classmates waving homemade posters and burning old school uniforms with the gleaming glass Martha Jefferson Academy sign in the background. You could hear the chants on the video clips.
“What do we want? Equal rights! When do we want them? Now!”
“Gay rights are everybody’s rights!”
And, embarrassingly, “We stand with Toni! We stand with Toni!”
The news coverage woke the school administration up. So did the letter my newly acquired ACLU lawyer sent over. She called me last night with the news. I could hear the glee in my lawyer’s voice as she told me they’d caved.
Starting immediately, I was allowed to wear pants to school.
It was like being let out of prison. Except my prison was the entire world. I would never, ever have to wear that stupid blue-plaid uniform skirt again for the rest of my life.
The Washington Post called to ask me a bunch of questions. My lawyer drove me to two different TV stations to do incredibly scary on-camera interviews, and a profile of me went up on a website that was so big even my grandparents read it.
And now I was at the Homecoming dance, and everyone was looking at me.
I’d been buzzing and giddy for hours, but as I stared around at the crowd, another feeling climbed in. The one that comes when you know people are talking about you but you don’t know what they’re saying. It’s like bugs crawling over your skin. It was nearly as bad as it was before, with my mother, when she... No. I wasn’t going to think about my mother right now.
It was all too much. My mind was skittery, unsteady, unfocused. I couldn’t deal with this rapidly growing ache.
I needed to get out.
The idea bloomed fast inside me. I’d feel so much better if I’d just turn around and walk off the polished wooden dance floor. Go hide in the parking lot until everyone found someone else to stare at.
Then I saw her.
She was dancing. Her head was thrown back with laughter. Her eyes sparkled. Her smile radiated light.
Everything else that had been spinning through my head floated away like air.
GRETCHEN
The last thing I wanted to do was go to the Homecoming dance.
We’d only moved down to Maryland the day before. I hadn’t even unpacked. I wouldn’t start my new school until Monday, and going to a dance where I didn’t know a single person was guaranteed to be the most awkward experience of my life, basically.
But my parents thought it was the best idea ever. They even found me a date. My dad knew someone who knew someone who had a nephew who went to the University of Maryland who wasn’t doing anything that night. A recipe for true love if ever there was one.
So I opened my suitcases and tore through my boxes until I found the green-and-silver lace dress I’d worn to my brother’s wedding last year. It was a little tight, but I could dance in it. Mom lent me a pair of heels that pinched my toes so much I wound up leaving them in the car and going into the dance barefoot. At least my toenails were still polished from when my friends and I gave each other mani-pedis at my goodbye party back in Brooklyn.
The nephew, whose name was Mark or Mike or one of those, turned out to be a pretty nice guy. He told jokes that made me laugh. He poured my punch for me, which was cute. And since neither of us knew anyone else and we didn’t have anything to talk about, after just a couple of minutes of