The Inside of Out (13 page)

GOING LIVE TOMORROW!!

Adam Cohen {[email protected]}

to {me}

DAISY-

Thanks again for the interview/article fodder. Here's the piece. Already out to my professor. She passed it off to
The Banner
(university paper). They're running with it! On website Monday. Print edition Tuesday. They might want to make this a series of articles so LET'S STAY IN TOUCH!!!

-A

ps go Pirates

“Whoa.” I shook my head to clear it. Between this and French homework, my
cerveau
was
rotario
. Or was “
rotario
” Spanish? I kept getting them mixed up.

Adam sure seemed excited. I was strangely nervous. Maybe because the last time my name appeared in print, it was in reference to the Stede Bonnet opera.

“This is different,” I said, warding away visions of a target on my chest. I bit my lip and clicked.

PALMETTO SCHOOL BOARD CANCELS HOMECOMING DANCE OVER SAME-SEX FLAP

James Island, SC—On a muggy September evening, in an unassuming government meeting room, the Palmetto School Board holds its first public session of the year—and a high school junior waits to be heard. She sits modestly, her hands smoothing the speech she's written. Her outfit is muted, a simple gray polo and freshly pressed black trousers, in deference to the crowd she's preparing to address, but the bottom two inches of her blond hair are dyed robin's-egg blue. It is the first hint of the defiant spark she'll show the room moments later.

When it's her turn to speak, she does—forcefully and well. She cites the Constitution and the legal precedent for her request. She appeals to the school board's sense of patriotism and justice. They appear to listen. The gathered crowd is silent as she concludes.

“On behalf of all of the students of Palmetto High School, I ask you to allow same-sex dates to dances, effective immediately.”

When she sits again, it's out of shock. In response to her request for a change to a rule that was first put in place during the Eisenhower administration, School Board President Harold Tompkins has just announced that they'll be circumventing the topic by canceling the homecoming dance outright.

“We don't want our schools to be caught in the middle of a hot-button issue,” Tompkins says. “It would only be a distraction to students and a headache for our community.”

And that might have been the end of it, a disappointing conclusion to a student's exercise in free speech. But the student in question is Daisy Beaumont-Smith, 16, the spokesperson for Palmetto High's LGBTQ Alliance—and she is not accustomed to backing down.

“It's about more than gay rights,” Beaumont-Smith later tells me at a local diner near her school's campus, her blue-blond hair tucked neatly behind her ears. “It's about the basics of how we treat one another. If you're telling a certain group of students they don't have the same rights as all the other students, then you're creating an unlevel playing field. And that's not what America is all about.”

Her hazel eyes sparkle as she talks about her cause, as well as when she mentions fellow junior Hannah von Linden, to whom she is fiercely devoted and with whom she plans to attend college.

Perhaps, Wednesday night, it was with that very friend in mind that Beaumont-Smith climbed onto her chair, refusing to be quieted, and announced the creation of a competing homecoming event open to students and alumni of any sexual orientation.

The Palmetto School Board concluded the meeting early and has refused to comment on Beaumont-Smith's proposed event. In the meantime, plans are moving ahead, says Beaumont-Smith, from planning her homecoming's football game to nailing down a possible venue.

“There are a lot of people in the community who would love to shut us down.” Recalling her reception by the school board, Beaumont-Smith falls somber. And then—unbroken—she smiles. “But we've got a lot of support behind us too.”

Was it a million degrees in this room? I pressed my hands against my hot cheeks to squelch my furious blushing. And then I read it again. Giggling.

It was so complimentary. He'd painted me with heroic strokes. He hadn't mentioned my fried food obsession, which was charitable. And he called my eyes hazel! Not mucky light brown, no-color. To him they were hazel. And
sparkly
.

The third time I read it, my giggles dwindled. Was my memory acting up, or were some of my quotes weirdly out of context? Was that how you wrote articles, by cutting up interviews and piecing bits of them together into a collage?

I took a breath. Adam was the journalism major. What did I know? And I had said all of those things and meant them. This was a positive slant on our cause. It was perfect.

It wasn't until I'd forwarded the article to my Allies, plus Hannah as a bcc, that I realized what was missing.

Nowhere in the article had Adam said that I was straight.

He didn't lie, exactly, didn't say that I was a gay student, or that I was personally suffering from bullying or discrimination—but he sure did imply it. And that mention of Hannah . . . was I losing my mind, or did it kinda, sorta sound like we were dating?

“I
am
fiercely devoted to her,” I muttered, just as a reply came in from the girl herself.

“Amazing article, Daisy!!!!”

And then, immediately, a second text.
“Any chance you could get my name taken out? Ack! :)”

I decided to focus on the first text and hope she was kidding about the second.

On the way to school Monday morning, Mom kept glancing
over at me with a hint of a smile. I should never have let her read that article.

“So this reporter . . .” she said, her voice trailing out musically.

“Adam.”

Her eyes brightened. “This is the boy I saw you with.”

Here we go
. “Yep.”

“He sure seems to think you and Hannah are an item.”

I turned to stare. Her eyes danced to mine and away again. Knowingly.

“We're not. Because I'm
straight.
” I scowled out the window. “Seriously, Mom, stop theorizing! You're gonna give me a complex.”

“Well.” She huffed and tugged on the steering wheel to pull us up in front of the school. “
Either way
, I'm proud of you.”

I waved good-bye and marched into school feeling like the girl from the article.
Daisy Beaumont-Smith doesn't back down, so get out of my way!

The seniors blocking the lobby didn't get out of my way. Apparently they hadn't read the article.

I tried to nudge past. “Excuse me.”

“Morning, lesbo,” said a voice off to the side. I turned to find Madison peering up the steps at me, arms crossed over a low-cut shirt bearing a huge sparkling cross. She smiled sweetly. “You're going to hell, you know.”

“I . . .” My mouth opened and closed like a sock puppet.  “. . . have no response to that.”

“I do.” A wiry arm looped through mine and propelled me
through the doorway. “But I doubt she'd understand it. I use a lot of
big words
.”

I blinked myself out of my stupor to find that, of all people, Raina Moore had come to my rescue. Even more shocking, as we made our way through the lobby and up to the main school corridor, she began to smile.

“That article,” she said. “It was good, Daisy. It was what we needed.”

“You think?” I scanned the buzzing hallway for angry faces, but for once, Raina's wasn't one of them.

“If nothing else, we've got that reporter on our side. Better than nobody.” She lingered as we reached my locker. “You heard everybody in our meeting last week. And now you've heard”—she nodded to the school entrance, where Madison was still cheerfully blocking traffic—“the other side. You see how important this is.”

I rested my head against my locker. “Yeah.”

“It might get worse too, for all of us.” She looked down the hallway, teeming with bodies making their way to homeroom. “But this article. It'll help.” She raised her fist as she turned, like the Statue of Liberty. “I've got a feeling!”

I tried to mentally bottle her confidence and dab it onto my pulse points like perfume throughout the day. It sort of worked.

But then, seventh period, disaster.

“Let's mix things up, make some new friends,” our AP bio teacher said, clapping her hands as if rearranging lab partners were her favorite hobby. “Miss von Linden? Table eight, please.”

Hannah's new spot was the back of the room with a boy she knew from Chess Club, while I was handed over to Steven—not Steve,
Steven
—who buttoned his shirts to the neck and snorted when people answered questions wrong.

To make matters worse, AP biology had abruptly stopped making sense to me sometime last week, when we'd started breezing through the curriculum at lightning speed, everyone else nodding along like we were reviewing letters of the alphabet.

“Is an organelle a cell?” I asked Steven. “A cell
inside
a cell? Or—”

He shushed me.

Craning my neck, I waited until Hannah spotted me, then fluttered my textbook in the air and mouthed “Help!”

After class, she walked with me to the English wing. “Why are you even taking bio? You hate science.”

“I do not.”

“‘It strips life of its magic,'” she quoted.

“Well, there is that.”

“So is this for college applications too?” She looked genuinely perplexed. Apparently the idea of signing up for classes to spend more time with your best friend was foreign to her.

“I guess, yeah,” I lied.

Her eyes twinkled the way they always did when she'd arrived at an answer. “I'll help. Dinner tonight? I'll tell you everything I know about cells—in the most magical way possible.”

She waggled her fingers.

“Will there be glitter?”

Her fingers stopped moving. “I cannot promise that.”

“I accept anyway.”

“Meet me after school?” She turned toward her English classroom.

“In the lot?” I called after her, then added, “
Shotgun!
” just in case.

“Just us,” she answered drily. At her glare of warning, I restrained myself from prancing down the hall.

Tan von Linden was not a chef. I'm not even sure she'd ever taken down the shining pots that hung above her pristine kitchen island. She didn't need to. She was flirt-friendly with every chef within a one-mile radius of her antiques shop. In a foodie town like Charleston, it had kept her and her daughter well fed for years. And as an honorary member of the household, I got to enjoy the spoils.

Tonight's dinner was grilled bacon-wrapped scallops over fresh fettuccini, with a side of spicy fried Brussels sprouts. I was in heaven. But Hannah was barely touching hers. She'd placed her cell phone next to her plate and her eyes drifted to it every thirty seconds like clockwork.

“We haven't seen much of you in the last few weeks, Daisy.” Hannah's mom dabbed the corner of her mouth with a cloth napkin, careful not to muss her lipstick. “Busy year so far?”

“Not really.” I tried to stare down Hannah, but all I got was the top of her head. “Not for me anyway.”

Hannah dragged her eyes from the phone. “That's not true.” She turned to her mother. “Daisy's joined the LGBTQ Alliance. She's really involved.”

Tan rested her chin on her hand, smiling dimly. “The LGBT . . . Q . . . ?”

“Alliance,” I repeated. Had Hannah not brought up the group before? “We've got some big things coming up.”

“LGT . . . Q . . . is the gay group?” Hannah's mom squirmed elegantly in her chair. “I'm confused. Hannah said you were still straight, Daisy.”

Still straight. As if you could switch back and forth. Hannah flushed.

“I'm asexual,” I said matter-of-factly. “It's the
A
in QUILTBAG.”