“Of course not,” I say automatically. I recognize the frustration in his eyes when he asks this. This isn’t just a rhetorical question for my benefit. This is an admission to a struggle I know all too well.
And I know a small part of him, a little voice in his head, was worried I’d say yes. The same little voice that I hear when I can’t understand something Dad says in Spanish right away and I watch him, slightly tired, stop and repeat himself in English. I feel it when I can’t handle the extra spices he adds to his sopas or in the ají for empanadas from Ollas Amarillas. I feel it in the way my name is spelled with a ph instead of an f, Spanish not sliding over it as easily as Miguel or Rojas. The way diaspora colors my relationship to Cuba and the legacy of my blood.
And when Mom celebrates Saint Patrick’s Day or cheers for Ireland in an international competition, I never know if it’s my place to stand there beside her. If my skin and last name and distance from her heritage mean they aren’t mine to touch.
Half of my blood and heritage is one thing, half is another, and more often than not, it leaves me feeling less like a whole person with a complete, unique makeup, and more like two halves of a girl who is never enough.
I guess I’ve always struggled with the expectations set for me.
“Liking one girl and countless boys doesn’t make you less queer than if it were half and half. Or if you liked countless girls and a couple of nonbinary people, or people of all kinds of genders in any assortment of percentages,” Wesley says. He leans toward me and takes my hands, the sincerity in his eyes so intense I don’t worry about how clammy my palms are or whether or not it means anything that a cute boy is holding my hands in a dark room, alone. Because yes, he’s a boy, and yes, he’s here and kind and cute and wonderful, but I don’t like him. It shouldn’t mean the world to me to realize this, but it does.
“Being queer is hard enough. Don’t lock yourself out of all of this just because you’re scared you won’t fit in the keyhole, without even trying.”
“Metaphors, again?” I joke, my eyes wet. But as quickly as the laughter comes to us, it subsides. “How do I talk to them? Sammie and Agatha and my parents?”
“However you want to,” he says, rubbing his thumb across the back of my hand.
“I just feel like, especially after these past few weeks, that everyone thinks they know me completely, but I don’t even know me completely. If anything, what happened with Talia is proof of that. I know kissing and liking Talia shouldn’t change who I am to them, or to myself, but it does. And maybe they’d say ‘Oh, this doesn’t change anything!’ or ‘You’re still the same Ophelia we know and love!’ but it does, and I’m not the same. And they can’t possibly understand that. It’s not just that I’m scared they’ll hate me for this; I’m scared they won’t even see it.”
“People confuse acceptance with erasure,” he says with the weight of understanding that only someone else who has battled this same internal conflict possibly could. I think of Dad saying he loved his father and Paola and me and wonder if sexualities outside of “straight” are just qualifiers for that kind of love.
“I don’t want to risk everything if this isn’t real,” I whisper. “But I also don’t want to pretend like this doesn’t change things for me. Because it does.”
“I know,” he says. “Your sexuality doesn’t define you, but it is a part of you.” His words are tight, voice breaking ever so slightly. I squeeze his hand gently, an understanding passing between us. “But questioning who you are? It’s a risk we all take. It’s your risk to take if you want to. No one else gets to decide this for you; it’s your life.”
I don’t reply, the single tear trickling down my cheek saying what my voice can’t. So Wesley turns to the walls instead, using his free hand to point out more flags for me as I nod silently along.
He uses words and labels I recognize, and defines the ones I don’t. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, pansexual, asexual, demisexual, polysexual, genderqueer, nonbinary, aromantic, grayromantic, demiromantic, and on and on.
Even if none of them click for me, if none sound like my experience wrapped up in a convenient label, I know they do for other kids out there. Kids who may have sat exactly where I am now and realized who they were for the first time. Today, that’s enough for me.
I’m nearly drifting off to sleep from the comforting hum of Wesley labeling the flags for the second time around, taking an endearing amount of pride in his ability to recognize them as quickly as he does, when I feel my phone buzz in my pocket.
“Shit,” I say, awake in an instant. I answer the call against my rebellious desires, too scared to let it go to voice mail. “Hi, Mom.”
“Do you want to tell me why the school just called to say you were absent for the second time this week? I had to listen to some snotty secretary tell me my daughter was probably ditching after I said your father dropped you off this morning.”
Foolishly, I avoid the question. “I’m okay. Can you come pick me up?” I say, voice quivering. She asks me to send her my location and hangs up.
I take one last look around as Wes gets up to leave.
He returns his keys to the mysterious Addy while I wait outside, joining me right as Mom’s car skids into the parking lot. With a final wave and tight smile, I silently thank him for what he’s done for me. I’ll thank him better later, but for now I focus on walking toward Mom without running away again.
Maybe none of those flags or words are me. Maybe one day they will be. But maybe I don’t need them as armor to have this conversation. Maybe all I need is the thing I lost more than my confidence in knowing myself: my honesty.
TWENTY-THREE
Mom is scarily quiet as I get in the car. At first, I think she’s taking me back to school, but we drive straight past it, as well as home. I start wondering if she’s just driving off her anger, waiting for her steam to run out, but then she pulls into the parking lot of Ollas Amarillas and gets out, slamming the door behind her after saying, “Stay here.”
I wait for ten minutes. When she comes out, she tosses a paper bag at me and pushes back her seat. I recognize the smell immediately but peek inside to be sure it isn’t my mind playing tricks on me. Sure enough, half a dozen papas rellenas are steaming inside, two of them already smushed.
“I don’t understand,” I say, closing the bag. It feels like a trap.
“That makes two of us,” she sighs, fussing with the hair around her temple. “Why were you at a gay youth center with Wesley?” She motions for me to pass her the bag and tears into a papa before I can reply.