My Awkward Phase

An overt display of our divergent sexuality at Homecoming would invite retaliation by the jocks who held high school rituals sacred, the Saved by Christ cult in whose eyes gays, lesbians and especially transsexuals were damned, and the gangsters who targeted LGBT students as vulnerable victims. The closet was the safest place to survive Uni High in the fall of 2001, so we held our fire at Homecoming and planned a more strategic escapade.
Secret Persona
Uni High was my neighborhood school, but I was an outsider. My parents shipped me off to an elite boarding school, St. Aybert’s, after a traumatic eighth grade when my classmates bullied the skinny nerd whose puberty had lagged. But St. Aybert’s had no tolerance for gender variance and stripped my scholarship after my junior year, leaving me no option but returning to Uni High, barely changed from the effeminate prepubescent that had left.
My male classmates had grown into roughshod manhood, and initially regarded the returning, half-forgotten waif with amused contempt. But that soon soured into resentment of my intellectual hauteur and derision of my androgynous appearance.
St. Aybert’s stringent academics and practice of muscular Christianity had stunted me socially. Exposed to the vulgar whirlwind of adolescent fads at Uni High, I became a pop culture junkie obsessed with observing the Byzantine rules, and skirmishes between the cliques and the genders.
I affected the pose of a sarcastic social critic. But my image was a façade, a cage and fortress behind which a secret slut languished, awaiting her debauch. She would willingly be drugged and smuggled out of Homecoming by a heartless jock, submit to casual back-seat sex, and be cast off and recycled for the next guy’s fun fuck. But she imprisoned by ambition and inhibition.
I didn’t dare reveal my feminine persona to the bigots and gangsters that ruled Uni High. I scuttled between my Advanced Placement classes like a refugee through a no man’s land. Jocks bumped me in the halls, dopers mocked me in the quad, the born-again Christians lectured me about conversion therapy, and the gangsters glared and mouthed “faggot” at me. Did the gangsters’ connections with crime and commercial sex let them peer through my intellectual condescension and see the submissive sissy slut inside?