Drag Teen (14 page)

I WAS ON CLOUD NINE when I met up with Heather and Seth after rehearsal at the cutest New York café around the corner, which I realized once I walked inside was actually just a Starbucks. They’d had their own kind of New York sightseeing-packed day, taking selfies in front of Carrie Bradshaw’s brownstone and walking around Central Park for, as an exhausted Heather put it, “what felt like three and a half days.” The evening’s plan was to go out for a big and cheap-as-possible dinner in Little Italy. Then I had to go back to the apartment to write my “Why I Drag” speech.

“It was crazy,” I told them. “I wish you two could have been there. I was standing at the piano and something in my head told me to do Tina’s song instead of ‘Part of Your World.’ And I did it, and I was terrified, but when I finished, people clapped. It felt so good, you guys!” I couldn’t stop smiling.

“Babe, that’s amazing. I’m so proud of you.” Seth kissed my forehead, getting crumbs from the black-and-white cookie he was eating in my hair. “So you’re feeling ready for tomorrow?”

“I feel scared to say so.” I looked around, as if one of the other contestants might be listening. “But yeah, I actually am. Is that cocky bad luck?”

“NO! Don’t be ridiculous!” Heather slapped the table. “You
should
feel ready! You’re going to kick drag ass!”

We walked all the way down to Little Italy, subtly using the maps on our phones to try to look like we knew where we were going. For some reason, looking like a tourist in New York seemed like the most mortifying thing any of us could ever do. I supposed when you wanted to belong somewhere as badly as all three of us wanted to belong here, you hoped people would just assume you already did.

Seth was a natural at it, which didn’t surprise me at all. I wondered if he felt like he was already walking through his future. I wondered if he felt me by his side while he did.

Little Italy wasn’t quite as magical as it seemed in movies. The coolest part was the Little Italy sign made out of lights that hung from the streetlamps. It was so crowded, and everywhere we went, so many people shoved menus in our faces that we didn’t really have a chance to make up our own minds or actually look around. We finally settled on a place midway down the block because we were tired of all the pushy people with the menus and because it had our one requirement: red-and-white Italian restaurant tablecloths. Heather and Seth were immediately excited because the waiter didn’t card them; they shared a carafe of red wine that smelled like expired salad dressing.

“Can you believe we’re really here?” Heather asked, already tipsy on her second glass of the nasty wine. “We’re
so Girls
right now!”

“You guys, I’d like to make a toast.” I lifted up my Diet Coke. “I can’t thank you enough for doing this with me. I can’t believe I’m lucky enough to have such amazing friends, and I just want you to know I wouldn’t be here without you.”

Heather lifted her glass, spilling a little bit onto the table. “Oh, JT, don’t worry. We know.”

Seth remained strangely silent, but he did clink my glass, at least.

I spent the rest of the dinner gossiping about all the other contestants in the pageant. I told them about how everyone seemed to be terrified of pissing off Tash, and speculated about whether Red and Milton were a couple, and detailed the Afro guy’s magic act. I told them about this contestant named Roxanne Roll, who absolutely terrified me because she seemed to have made it her mission to be terrifying and, as she had referred to it to Eric Waters,
hard-core
.

I waited until the end to mention that the guest judge was going to be Sam Deckman.

“SAM DECKMAN?!” Heather shouted, her jaw almost dropping into our basket of garlic knots.

“Shhhh. But yes. Apparently he’s on their board of directors. They’ve also got Nathan Leary and—”

“Do I get to meet him? I want to meet him. I have to, JT. It’s only fair. You know how much I loved
Aqua Man
!” Heather managed to say all of this in one breath.

“I’ll see what I can do. But you have to promise you won’t embarrass me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked, offended.

“You can come on a little strong when you’re excited. You know that. Look at how you acted around that creepy bouncer at that club. Plus, right now you have an enormous glob of garlic-and-olive-oil sauce on your chin.”

“He has a point, Heather,” Seth added.

I could tell we had both said the wrong thing and, frankly, replaying the words inside my head, they sounded pretty bitchy.
Oh God
, I thought,
is Tash rubbing off on me?

“Sorry! That came out wrong. Forget it. Also, you really do have pasta sauce all over your face.”

She grabbed a napkin, humiliated. My instinct was to keep apologizing, but I could tell Heather’s guard was up from the way she kept staring at her phone for the rest of the meal.

“So are you ignoring us now?” I asked carefully. Heather looked up, as if she hadn’t heard me.

“Huh?”

“Okay, so you are.”

She slapped her phone down onto the checkered tabletop.

“You can be such a jerk sometimes.”

“I was just messing around,” I argued.

“You think I’m here to be your sidekick. The fat girl who devotes her life to her two gay friends.”

The way she said it, it sounded like something she had clearly been thinking about for a while now. I had never thought of Heather as anything other than my best friend, ever. Best friend was not a sidekick position.

“No. That’s not it at all.”

“I want some adventure too. Or is that too much to ask because I’m the third wheel? The girl?”

“Hey,” Seth intervened, “don’t say that. JT was trying to protect you. That guy
is
a creepy bouncer.”

“I do
not
need protecting,” she said loudly, almost at a yell, then went back to her phone.

“Let’s just drop it,” I said. But even though we dropped it, it stayed with us for the rest of the meal. I knew it was pretty bad because none of us wanted dessert. Not even as we passed at least a half-dozen ice-cream places on our way back to the apartment.

Heather held back, texting some more. This gave me a little space to ask Seth how he was doing.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean, how are you doing?”

“I’m good. It’s great here.”

“You had a great day?”

“Totally.”

I felt like a fool for wanting to ask,
But didn’t you miss me?
I’d said I’d missed him, hadn’t I? Why isn’t it possible to just hold up a sign that says exactly how you’re feeling without having to say it?

Both Tash and Pip were out of the apartment when we got there, Pip having signed up for a three-hour group chant around the corner to get himself into the right headspace for the pageant. I had no idea of or interest in where Tash might be; I was mostly just happy to have the place to ourselves, free of his gloomy cloud of bitchiness.

“Where is my blue suitcase?” I asked, eyeing three pieces of luggage in the corner of the room where once there had been four.

“I put them all over there when we brought them in.” Seth pointed to the three suitcases.

“Yes, but one is missing.”

“It is?”

“Are you guys messing with me?”

Seth and Heather exchanged confused expressions as I began ripping through the other bags, opening and dumping out the contents of each, hoping maybe we’d double packed or something. There had to have been a mistake, a terrible mistake! Seth joined me in my search, looking under the futon, in the bathroom, everywhere, to no avail. Heather, still pissed off from dinner, was actively zero help.

“Maybe they’re in the car. Maybe I left them in there last night.”

“But we brought all the bags inside last night,” Seth reminded me calmly. My eyes shot daggers at him until he quietly backed away and went to search in the foyer.

I let myself into Pip’s room to make sure the costumes hadn’t been put there by mistake.

Pip’s room was way more orderly than I would have expected. His costumes hung in garment bags in the open closet, while everything else had a clearly designated spot. Mind you, the bulk of his belongings were a row of wigs on Styrofoam heads, a stack of incense sticks, some weird-looking prayer beads, a comically enormous bong, and a framed photograph of Deepak Chopra standing next to Angelina Jolie and Elmo. My costumes were nowhere in sight, and it was clear Pip never could have mixed them up with his own.

“Not in the kitchen or the hallway,” Seth said, with a nervous look of defeat.

The search was pointless. I knew exactly what had happened—I could feel it in my gut. I was almost afraid to say it out loud because it would only confirm what I was fearing. From the minute he laid eyes on me, for whatever bizarre reason, Tash had clearly decided I was enemy number one, and today’s rehearsal had clearly been the final nail in my coffin. I was on the verge of tears.

Seth saw this, and wanted to head it off. “Wait. Let’s calm down. Panicking or crying is not going to solve anything.” He started pacing the tiny space around the futon. “Let’s think.”

“It was Tash,” I spat out quickly, as if the words themselves tasted gross in my mouth.

“Huh?”

“He hates me. You’ve seen the way he looks at me when I talk about the pageant.”

Seth sighed. “Come on, JT. Don’t be so insecure. Nobody would go out of their way to sabotage you like that.”

You know how sometimes people say just the exact wrong thing and everything suddenly goes into slow motion as you lose your shit? So yeah, that happened.

“Well, excuse me, Seth. Not all of us can be secure as you, Mr. Perfect.”

“Hey, JT. Come on. That’s not fair. I told you I don’t like when you call me perfect.”

“I’ve told you everything, ever since I’ve known you. I’ve shared everything and you acted so open and honest, but all that time you had this past you never told me about. Why? Because you didn’t trust me to hold your baggage but just wanted to hold on to mine. Did it feel good to be the stable one for the crazy mess? And is it possible, just a little bit possible, that now that I’m getting my life together, now that I’m actually excited about something, you don’t know what the hell to do except tell me how insecure I’m being? Because that’s the guy you signed up for?”

“JT. Hey, come on.”

“I have trusted you with
so much
, Seth. Everything I feel, I tell you. Because I love you. And this enormous thing, this person you used to be—you never thought to tell me? It hurts my feelings, okay? It hurts my stupid feelings.”

I stormed into the bathroom, flinging open the door to find Heather midway into putting on more makeup than I’d ever seen someone wear—and lest we forget, I had spent the day with drag queens. She’d crammed herself into the kind of tight black dress she
never
would have worn in Florida. In fact, it was the kind of tight black dress that very well might have been illegal in some parts of Florida. She looked up at me, guilty but assured. Then she brushed past me and Seth, eyes glued to her phone, where she was mid-text, grabbed her purse, and was out the door.

Seth and I looked at each other, knowing exactly what was going on—but not having any way to stop it.

“I’ll see if I can catch her,” Seth said, running out the door. I wondered if he was just taking it as a convenient excuse to leave, escaping my characteristically random freak-out.

“I can’t believe this!” I screamed.

But there was no one around to hear me.

SETH CAME BACK A FEW minutes later, shaking his head.

“Go work on your speech,” he said. Code words for
I don’t really want to talk to you right now
.

I tried. For hours, I tried. Seth was right next to me, not prodding me at all. It felt weird to not be prodded.

It was after midnight when Pip got home, coming in with a sweaty yoga mat and a disgusting-looking green juice. I was comatose on the futon, in a state of shock and defeat. At this point, I figured why bother writing a speech if I had no costume to deliver it in.

“Salutations, dudes. I didn’t expect you both to still be awake,” Pip announced, predictably cheery.

I launched into the whole story about the costumes and how we suspected Tash. I asked him a million questions without giving him a chance to answer any of them: “Did you see the costumes?” “Did Tash say anything about taking them?” “Has Tash ever stolen before?” “Is Tash some kind of comic book villain?”

Pip was a little overwhelmed by all my questioning, which was understandable seeing as he’d just come from a group chant and meditation and had now just walked into a frenzy of crazed paranoia. He attempted to calm me down, but Seth told him that, based on personal experience, it was probably not the best idea to try to calm me in the midst of panic and that he should probably just go to bed. Pip told me he’d pray for the almighty universe’s rightful return of the costumes, and I tried my hardest not to scream again.

It was getting later and later, but I couldn’t go to sleep until I spoke to Tash or Heather. She wasn’t responding to our calls or our texts. It wasn’t that out of character for Heather to run off in the midst of being upset, but this was New York City; this was different. I knew Heather wouldn’t do anything to put herself in immense danger, but she was definitely capable of doing something stupid, like putting on a skimpy dress and meeting up with a thirty-year-old bouncer from a gay nightclub who she’d met only once before.

I stopped calling and texting her over and over, as I figured that was only making things worse. She was tired of feeling babied by us, she wanted her own adventure, and after dragging her across the country, who was I to deny her that?

Seth dozed off beside me on the futon. I lay wide-awake, waiting for the moment when the front door finally burst open and Tash stomped into the room.

“Sorry!” he said loudly. “Hope I didn’t wake you up! I know it’s important to get a lot of rest before the pageant.”

I stood up, trying my hardest to maintain composure.

“Tash. I know what you did and it’s not okay.”

Tash sheepishly held up a grocery bag with a carton of ice cream in it.

“I know, I know. I have
no
business having ice cream the night before a pageant, but I just couldn’t resist. Fine, twist my arm, I’ll share. Shall I get us some spoons? Where’s your little girlfriend?”

I could feel the beads of sweat forming on the back of my neck, the ones that always came when I had to deal with confrontation of any kind.

“I’m talking about my costumes.”

Tash’s face shifted into the kind of phony expression you’d make in a school play when the teacher asked you to look
surprised
.

“Don’t you dare pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, Tash! Don’t you dare!”

I was about to lunge in his direction, but Seth, awake now, put his hand around my waist.

“Okay, babe,” he soothed. “Don’t lose your cool.”

Tash clucked his tongue. “I have no idea what it is you’re accusing me of right now, but I have to say, I find it utterly offensive. You know what? For that, I’m not going to share my ice cream with you.”

Tash made his way to his room, but before he shut his door, he stopped and, with the cruelest of smiles, said, “And, Miss Thing, I saw those costumes, and whoever
did
steal them probably did you a very big favor.”

He slammed his door and locked it before I had a chance to explode. I was trembling; I had never experienced something so blatantly cruel in my life. Before I knew it, tears were streaming down my face. Seth pulled me into his chest. I could hear his heart beating as I choked on my cries.

It felt stupid to cry about a polyester pantsuit and some gowns, but that’s exactly what I was doing.

And wigs. I was also crying over the wigs.

All night, I tossed and turned with the images of my missing marabou circling my mind. Also, Heather hadn’t come home.

Seth was keeping some distance, but not so much that he made me feel like I was in this alone. I really appreciated that. Every now and then he’d wake up and murmur something like, “We’ve come so far already” or “We’ll figure something out.” Then he went back to sleep, and I could only hope the perfect solution would come to him in a dream. Because right now the pageant was less than twenty-four hours away, and I had zero costumes and zero wigs.

When it was time to go in the morning, Pip offered to walk over with me. Tash’s door was still closed—there was no way to storm his room and get to rehearsal on time. Seth told me not to worry about Heather, that he’d track her down and make sure everything was okay. I told him that I’d stop worrying about it, but it was clear that neither of us believed it.

That morning’s rehearsal was spent running through the choreography for the opening number. When Tash got there, he avoided any form of eye contact with me whatsoever, and I was too tired to keep arguing anyway. Eric Waters was in drill-sergeant mode, shouting at us from the back of the theater.

“How was your night? Did you get into any trouble? We did!” Milton bounced over and asked in one single breath, while we were on break.

He and Red shared excited smiles as they recounted their outrageous New York night, which included seeing a musical about Diana Ross (“The wigs, gurl! The wigs were to die for!”) and dinner at some fancy restaurant in the West Village where they were pretty sure the person seated behind them was one of the ladies who had been a Real Housewife of somewhere, at some point, maybe. They were buzzing with delight and it was hard not to envy them.

“What about you?” Milton asked, this time pausing for my response.

“I … well, I had dinner and then, um, it wasn’t that great.” I fumbled all over my words and blushed. Was I actually going to cry
here
over lost wigs?

“Did something bad happen?”

My attempt to keep it bottled up was clearly not working, I could feel my hysteria creeping out of me like coffee spilling out of a Starbucks cup when they overfill it and then have the audacity to still put on the lid so that it becomes your problem and not theirs once you walk out of the store.

“My costumes, my wigs … all of it … He took them.”

“Who did?!”

I lowered my voice, taking deep breaths to calm myself down. “Tash. I think. He says he didn’t, but they were at the apartment and I know Pip didn’t take them. And you said that he took that one queen’s wig a while back, right? I don’t know what to do. I want to tell Daryl or somebody, but I’m afraid they won’t believe me and will think that I’m only after their sympathy.”

Red and Milton had become very serious, listening like detectives at a brutal crime scene.

“Don’t! Don’t tell
anyone.
” Milton was eerily calm but stern. “He will find a way to turn it against you.”

A paranoid Red kept looking over his shoulder and shushing us to keep it down. Milton obliged, visibly shaken.

“The last time somebody turned Tash in for stealing a wig, he framed the person for stealing
his.
That was poor Miss Tootsie Roll, and she was never the same after she got disqualified from the pageant. Poor thing, she works at an Old Navy in White Plains nowadays.”

Milton winced at his own words.

“Disqualified?” I asked. “But how did Tash get away with it?!”

Milton shook his head with a frown. “I don’t know, girl. But he did, and he will again. Trust me. He always gets away with his shenanigans. The only thing you can do is ignore them and bounce back.”

“But I don’t have other wigs, or costumes, and I’m assuming no one here has extras, right?”

Milton and Red told me how much they wished they could help but that they only packed what they needed. They tried to calm me down, telling me that it would work out as long as I didn’t say a word.

I was called to the stage to rehearse my number, which was the last thing I wanted to be doing. Linda Lambert played Tina’s song and I sang it as best I could, but there was nothing there, none of the emotion or notes that had been there before. I was just trying to get it over with. When I’d finished, Linda looked at me quizzically.

“That was … good.” She tried to make her lie sound convincing, but it didn’t work. “Are you okay?”

I could feel everything welling up inside me, and I wanted to tell her what had happened. I felt like I could trust her—that maybe, hell, she’d loan me one of
her
pantsuits. But standing in the wings directly behind her were Milton and Red, both mouthing for me not to say a word.

“I’m fine. Just a little tired.”

“No problem. I get it. Save your energy for tonight. After yesterday’s rehearsal, I’m certain you’ve got your song down perfectly. Just do it like you did then and they’ll go crazy for you.”

Linda’s Tony Award–winning supporting words would’ve meant a lot more if I wasn’t wondering if I’d get to perform in the pageant at all.