Jet Toomer

Real People Real Stories—A Prologue

Don’t come out to your mother if you know better. You will be seventeen years old, weeks before you get you a “dyke” haircut and months before your first girlfriend invites you to her family’s apartment in Rahway, New Jersey. This is the summer you go to Pride when The Pier on Christopher Street is finally open.

You don’t talk to your mother anyway. Not about those kinds of things and that’s OK too. It makes the both of you uncomfortable. Plus, you are lying to yourself and everyone else around you—especially those who you think may want to fuck you. At seventeen years old there is not much to tell. But you will know everything. 

You will have mastered obliviousness, and your reward will be a veil. Only you will be the only one who can see it. 

Then one day, after weeks of planning, you will emerge from a dreamlike state, fuzzy from all the good shit inhaled in a Midtown East Manhattan orthodontist office. You will be dumb, for those four little impacted nuggets have just been ripped out of the back of your mouth. You will believe you are safe. You will think you are smart. You have on your veil, you think. But ah ha! No, nigga, you are not hidden. Everyone can see you.

Your sister tried to tell you in her chicken scratch onto long yellow legal paper ripped from Mommie’s notepads and stuffed into an envelope. She will do this two summers in a row and mail them to you when you’re away at summer camp. She reveals things in her writing that are both intimate and illegible and because you know so much you forget.

You sit your ass on that sofa, plopping down in the way that gives your mother the right to blame you for its misshapenness. She’ll squeeze down in the space between you and the armrest. And because you know so much, like a fool you “come out” to your mom who has known about your attractions and has actively ignored them for years.

This moment will haunt you and you will never forgive yourself. Rhetoric will emerge in the decade after you’ve harmed yourself to the tune of “Straight people don’t come out,” and you will tell this to folks—leaving out the “I think I like girls” tour you went on after graduating from high school. 

This is when you’ll learn how to relocate your blame on to her. It’s got to be someone’s fault. First, though, you will act like it has never happened. And with that will do a hokey-pokey of sorts—“in” and “out.” Then as your right foot follows your left foot out—it will stay put. Next, as you remember, you will try to forget.

This will look different every year, and as you change, and you will, the blame will shift and eventually it will be no one’s problem but your own. You will compile a list of who did what, and when, maybe even where. You will look at this blotter of loved ones who have fucked you over and your present self and your seventeen-year-old self will decide how to report it out. Luckily, you’ve been collecting this research for years!

You will stare at the corkboard your mother gave you in high school with that quote from Thoreau tagged in the center, the “fuck bush” lapel pin, the mini rainbow flag from before you understood pride, and then you will “remember.” Here’s the comedy: Mommie and Sister—they will remember too. One day you tell them your plans to become a writer. Which is odd because they already saw you that way, but when you say it, one will hope and pray that you will feel some relief and the other will just be excited. 

You will not be able to discern who said and felt what. For some reason you keep getting them mixed up when it’s time to tell the story. (HA! “For some reason,” the reason is you’re scared.) You don’t think they can handle the retelling from your point of view. You can’t handle your imagining of their interpretations. So, every time you type a sentence it’s like they are right there with you, in your phalanges, the flesh, in the color you picked for your nail polish, in the ink, they are the blinking cursor on the dim screen. Encouraging you and dissuading you. 

You write it like this first (and this will be the best way to tell it too):

I say: Mommie, I have something to tell you, I like girls.

She says (crying): I know, but I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me first.

I say: Nothing.

And that will be how you end your perfect little story about how—though she (they) is (are) good—how she (they) made you feel bad. You will not write what is really bothering you, because you now, you then, and your seventeen-year-old self, will not be sure how you felt.

Later, when looking squarely into the eyes of a lie detector, you will be given the sensation in your lower throat as if you’d just finished sobbing. And you write this.

About the Author

Jet Toomer is a writer and muse living in New York City. She is a LAMBDA Literary Emerging Writing Fellow and MFA Candidate at Columbia University.