Andy leads Tommy to the library in his quest to find out how to be queer.
 

 
I had no idea how to become queer, and further, no idea how to find out about the subject. And how was I to find out if Paul wanted me to be queer for him?

Tommy offered no real help, even though he had forgiven me. He didn’t have any other friends either. We left school together that first day and attended classes just like we had at Canyon Balboa Elementary. This was a fair walk, more than a mile each way, up and down hills. But we would never ride the bus.

“You’re going to get us killed,” he kept saying. (Which was the problem with riding the bus, too.) This conviction of our mortality made him paranoid; he expected the school bullies to jump us and put an end to our miserable existences at any moment.

And we were sort of miserable. Tommy expecting to be killed, and me, well, I couldn’t seem to think of anything except Paul and whether he would like me if I became a girl for him. But I didn’t know how I was supposed to do that.

“Are we going to the library again?” Tommy complained after school when I turned left at the school gate instead of right toward our homes.

“I need to look something up, and it’s Thursday, the library is open till nine,” I said. I’d been looking things up for a couple weeks now, in-between times of being all moony and moody over Paul, and the intervals when I tried to do actual schoolwork.

“I can’t stay out till nine again,” Tommy complained. “My folks’ll kill me.”

“Everyone is out to get you, aren’t they?” I joked.

“Yeah, well, your Mom spoils you ‘cause you almost died, and you got that thing in your head. She probably doesn’t even scold you. My folks are Asian, and they got this whole deal about duty to family and heritage and….” He trailed off, and I felt bad for him. A lecture from Mrs. Nakamura was something to be feared. I’d even caught a few of those myself, earned by luring Tommy into some sort of misdeed.

Like staying at the library too late. But I wanted to have enough time for research. That’s what the librarian called it when I told her I wanted to look things up.

But Tommy had a legitimate worry about facing his Mom over something I talked him into. “We’ll use the payphone to call your folks, so they’ll know where you’re at,” I said, trying to reassure my friend.

Tommy just moaned, shaking his head. “I’m doomed. My best friend is turning queer, and I’m just doomed.” But he didn’t desert me to go home alone. Instead, he kept plodding along beside me, exactly like a nobleman in the French Revolution on his way to the guillotine, which we had just learned about in History that week.

“Maybe you should just turn queer yourself,” I teased him. “There must be some good-looking guy at school you could fancy. One who would love to have a short, chubby Japanese girlfriend.”

Tommy reacted as if he were fighting off a cloud of biting flies, waving his hands in front of his face and around his body in jerky spastic movements. He lost hold of his English and Math books while doing this and hurled them into some bushes, narrowly missing me. “Argh!” he snarled. “You’re going to get us killed!”

He stood there on the sidewalk panting while other kids walking home after class gave us lots of room. Some even crossed the street to avoid us.

I wanted to laugh at Tommy’s dramatics, but the truth was, I had provoked him and laughing would add an insult to the offense. In the end, I just made faces at him, and he glared at me, then we retrieved his books from where he had hurled them.

We continued to the library in a more sober mood. I didn’t think Tommy was right, not literally anyway—we weren’t likely to be killed by our schoolmates. At least, I hoped not.

But I felt compelled to find out what I could about being queer. My feelings for Paul grew every time I saw him, to the point where I could think of very little else. Was I in love with him? It didn’t seem likely, but what else could it be?

I sighed, and Tommy grumbled, “Don’t start that, you sound like one of my sisters mooning over some guy.”

“I do?” I asked. Tommy had two older sisters, Amelia and Emily, twins, who were seniors at our school this year. “Were they in love with someone? Both of them? With the same guy?”

“Argh!” said Tommy, so I shut up.

We reached the library, and I found some change so Tommy could use the phone outside the front entrance to call home and tell his Mom—what? After a quick discussion, it was decided to blame it on homework assignments and my desire to do research.

“Imagine if they did give assignments to research this?” I offered cheerfully. “Wouldn’t that be funny?”

“No,” said Tommy. He stomped off to make his call, so I shrugged and went on inside, making my way toward the reference works. This was a long table in the adult section of the library, an area I had spent very little time in.

First stop, dictionaries where I found another half-dozen words to look up. Encyclopedias next but those were not much help, so on to the card catalog, which of course, had entirely too many threads to follow into books hidden in the darker parts of the library shelves.

When I emerged, two hours later, my pants were dusty from sitting on the floor to read passages I had found, and my hands were grimy from touching books that hadn’t been pulled from their shelves for weeks if not longer. I didn’t have anything I thought I wanted to check out, so after a quick trip to the restroom to wash up a bit, I went back to the reference section to retrieve my school books I had left there.

“Did you need any help?” the librarian asked as I passed her desk.

I shook my head, saying, “No, thank you, ma’am,” and went in search of Tommy.

I found him with his head resting on his hands on top of a big picture book full of colorful photos of dog breeds. Tommy had wanted a dog desperately for years, but his mother continued to say no. When I woke him by whispering his name, he sat up, peeling his face off a picture of three collies.

“We going?” he asked.

I nodded. “We can go, and it’s not even seven, so your mom won’t kill us.”

“Huh,” he said, not quite agreeing. “We better hurry, it’s getting dark, and Mom hates digging in the backyard after dark.”

I frowned at him. “Why would she be…?” I started to ask.

Tommy supplied my answer before I finished asking. “To bury our bodies, of course,” he said, grinning. Inscrutable, my Japanese-American friend was not.

We kept our laughs down to snickers while we headed out of the quiet zone. “Did you find out what you needed to know?” Tommy asked carefully as we trotted down the fifteen concrete library steps to the street.

I sighed. “Yeah, but…” It was clear to me after my reading that I needed to try wearing girl’s clothes to see if I was really queer. But I didn’t have any sisters. “Do you think you could steal some of Amy and Emmy’s clothing for me?”

Appalled, Tommy waved his arms and whispered fiercely. “You’re going to get me killed!”