My Life in Pink - Part 4

The pretty girls’ patronage was useless at middle school, and it was a miracle I survived my first day. No fewer than half a dozen groups of boys surrounded me between classes or at my new locker to loudly wonder, “What the fuck is this?” It occurred to me that maybe I should have listened more attentively to Karen and gone easier on the eyeliner, and foregone my eyebrow pencil entirely. Maybe I should have saved my fluorescent pink high-tops for later in the week. A couple of my teachers’ mouths dropped open at the sight of me, and if looks could kill, I wouldn’t have made it through PE, in which my teacher gave me the most hateful glare in the history of glaring.

Once again, it was the fairer sex that rescued me. Just before fifth period, a trio of girls in low-riding combat pants, lots of liquid eyeliner, and huge hoop earrings — two latinas and a black — pushed aside the three boys who’d come over to ask while I opened my locker if I liked taking it up the ass. At first I thought I was done for — that the girls had come over to show the boys how much more deadly is the female of the species. Imagine my relief to discover that what they wanted was to pay their respects. Their leader, whose name I later learned to be Pilar, offered me her fist to touch mine against, and said I was due “mad respect” for having the cojones to come to school looking as I did. “Anybody jack with you, homegirl,” she said, “we jack with them.” It seemed a strong possibility to me that the three of them had learned their style from TV and movies, as there was no real ghetto in our town, but if it worked for them, it was certainly fine with me.

The odd thing — and I must apologize here for not mentioning this before now — is that I honestly hadn’t the slightest interest in taking it up the ass. I may have had neither interest in nor aptitude for baseball, for instance, while I had the utmost interest in shopping and clothes and hairstyles, but there was no question in my mind that I was straight. My fantasies were of looking fantastically pretty, and having sex with a girl of comparable prettiness. I’d gotten fairly heavy into self-stimulation by this time, and it was always sexy girls I thought of in the act.

Nonetheless, I thought it in my best interests to let Pilar and her posse believe whatever they wished to believe, without ever actually lying to them. They would complain to me about their boyfriends as they might have to another girl. When they asked when I intended to get a boyfriend of my own, I would look coy and say something like, “I’m just exploring my options, yo.” They always managed to read enough into that to be content.

I wouldn’t have lived through four semester of middle school PE if the girls hadn’t told various boys to look out for me. The first year, it was Pilar’s boyfriend Alejandro and a couple of other Dominican boys, one of whom, Enrique, took up the slack when Alejandro went on to high school in my second year. It wasn’t that most of the other boys didn’t make a big display of never keeping their backs to me in the showers, and a few of the bolder ones apparently thought it hilarious to announce, “Faggot alert!” whenever I entered them. But I gave them nothing to work with, never looking anywhere other than up or straight ahead, and slamming the door on any thoughts of Pam Anderson or Heather Locklear the second they appeared in my mind’s eye.