From the Vault: Straight as a Roman Road

continuity: Set right before Chapter 20, at the beginning of Part III: Inoculate.

content warnings: workplace harassment, AIDS mention, a whole lot of gender dysphoria, internalized fatphobia/transphobia (pertaining to passing anxiety, but expressed in an unhealthy way)

Nearly six weeks in, I can finally admit that gift shop shifts are, unequivocally, the worst.

When I’m selling tickets, I’m selling the Experience to Nuclear Seasons true believers—that’s worth a high premium. Although the galleries are reproductions, the artifacts are real. But here in the gift shop? Hawking scratchy, politically incorrect Fruit of the Loom T-shirts and plastic cups whose ink will flake off after a single round in the dishwasher, it all feels so fake.

To make matters worse, I’m beginning to think there’s an actual conspiracy afoot because I’ve been stationed here with Efraín again. It’s been dead all morning, and anyone else would let the dead air lie. Everyone else on the clock today would read the room and let me be.

But Efraín has mistaken the tentative détente we negotiated Friday night as an actual declaration of friendship. He keeps trying to talk to me. Not quite the easy-breezy volley he’d kick up with Lola or the meandering philosophical path he’d take with Stanley, but something more than idle smalltalk. He has tried to engage my interest on everything from free speech absolutism to my favorite X-Men character. Then he even tried to bait me with rumors he heard from Eden about some previously undocumented box of Kane’s correspondences, but surely I would know if—

No. I’m not falling for it.

I’m too busy obsessing over how I’m selling knockoff Egan’s Creek sheriff badges in the name of a good day’s work. Every time I tidy a stack of made-in-a-sweatshop shirts, I’m reminded that my shirt size depends on whether I’m binding that day or not, and the only thing that will change that costs more than the limited edition framed film cells in the locked display case.

I can’t afford the shirts I’m folding or the smalltalk Efraín’s making. I can’t afford the union, either, but I’ve been assured it’s a low-risk, high-reward investment. Of course, Efraín’s would also be the first to tell me that the stock market’s a scam.

Thankfully, Blake’s first tour ends on time, spitting guests out in the gift shop, kids delivered directly to Wonka’s workshop. Efraín hand sells custom Funko Pops and heat-changing mugs to our willing marks while I ring them up.

It’s nonstop, a steady stream of smiles and pleasantries. I lose myself in the familiar rhythm of scanning barcodes and running the card reader. When we’re busy, I don’t have to feel guilty about being complicit in the system. I don’t have to feel much of anything unless someone says, “Thank you, ma’am.”

Twenty minutes later, the last guy in line has an armful of merch and a receding hairline. The longer the transaction goes on, the harder it is to avoid smalltalk. “So,” I smile, pretending I haven’t just had this exact conversation with ten other customers. “Did you enjoy the tour?”

“Oh, yes,” he says with a crisp British accent. “Very much. I wasn’t expecting it to feel so real.”

I don’t gush in agreement the way I would’ve six weeks ago, but I also don’t remind him how much of it isn’t real. No one wants to be reminded that, on a scale of Madame Tussauds to Disneyland, NSX is roughly as authentic as Dresden’s reconstructed Frauenkirche. “What was your favorite part?”

“Oh, the costumes, definitely.”

“They’re in fantastic condition,” I agree, grateful that he named a collection that is, to the best of my knowledge, entirely genuine. “The wardrobe department spent weeks scouring estate sales and thrift stores looking for authentic ‘60s designer pieces for the Spectors.”

“Right, right. Art’s Hugo Boss suit…”

Something about his tone gives me pause, scanner in hand over a set of Spector Vineyards wine glasses.

When he meets my gaze, his eyes are deadly serious. “You know, I am straight as a Roman road, but Sam Schatz…. The things I’d do to him—”

“He died in 1987,” Efraín cuts in, smooth, suave, and, for once, impossible to argue with. I don’t know how he managed to slip behind the counter without me noticing, let alone flinching, but here he is. Right by my side. “The commemorative fountain is on the tour.”

“Right,” the man replies, nodding. Chagrined. “Of course. Beautiful fountain. Excellent stonework. Very clean… grout.”

I clear my throat. “That’ll be two-hundred and thirty-one dollars.”

After a minute of crinkling tissue paper and stifled coughs, the barn door thuds shut behind him.

Efraín and I look at each other.

We burst out laughing. I don’t stop until I run out of breath. I lean over, bracing my elbows on the counter because my ribs hurt, giggling halfway to wheezing. “What does that even mean? ‘Straight as a Roman road?’”

“Fuck if I know.”

“Well.” Every lecture I’ve ever heard Mom give about Iron Age civil engineering floods back. “The Roman Empire had a reputation for infrastructure, you know.”

“Did that include notoriously straight roads?”

I tilt my head to look up at him. He’s leaning against the counter, smiling, but not his habitual smirk. There’s nothing smug about it. I’m not the butt of one of his sanctimonious jokes; we’re in on this together.

“Straight”—I cough—“is not an adjective that applies to anyone who would use that metaphor.”

“Or any man who talks about fucking Sam Schatz that way.”

This is the part where I should thank him for stepping in before the guy pulled out his dick and started detailing his graphic masturbation fantasies about Art Spector in front of me, but that would mean thanking Efraín. For saving me. Again.  Which is not how this anecdote is going to be recorded in the history books.

There will be no anecdotes involving Efraín and me in the history books.

I shake my head at the thought, grasp for the first words I find. “Sam Schatz? Really?”

Efraín cocks his head, assessing. “What have you got against Sam Schatz? How many Halloweens have you dressed up as Art?”

I don’t know if he misinterpreted me or missed the point, but either way—

His words rip my smile off like a Band-Aid. A little prick of pain; an open wound. Everyone told me it would get better, but maybe it’s time I accept that it never gets easier.

All roads lead to Rome.

Because I still look at someone like Sam Schatz—a cis gay Ashkenazi Jew with unruly brown hair, caterpillar eyebrows, and an overgrown nose—and think that should’ve been me. It’s stupid, and it’s unfair, because it’s not like Schatz had it easy as a closeted gay actor in the ‘80s. He died of AIDS, for fuck’s sake, and I’m pouting because I’m jealous of him? For looking the way that I imagined I’d look if I were cis. The way I thought I’d look once I started T. The way I’d need to look to get queer guys to look at me.

“So he’s not your type,” Efraín says mildly, utterly and predictably oblivious to what’s right in front of him. “I thought you’d have some twink solidarity.”

I blink. The gift shop comes back into focus. Efraín and me behind the counter. Him leaning a bit too close. “Did you just call me a twink?”

“If the shoe fits.”

I straighten up. Not straight like a Roman road, not straight at all because I’m not steady on my feet. Because I know I don’t look like Sam Schatz, wouldn’t even if I passed, and I know I don’t pass like I know that if any twink were ever mistakenly cast to play me in a biopic, they’d be outfitted in a prosthetic nose.

If it’s not my height or my hips, it’s the way I hold myself. The je ne sais quois of gender better known as the feminine mystique—maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s Maybelline, maybe he can’t get rid of it no matter how hard he tries.

Even top surgery won’t change that. I know that. I don’t know why Efraín’s slinging gay slang with the accuracy of a drunken archer. “Are you calling me a twink because of my high voice, short stature, and inability to grow facial and/or body hair?”

Efraín rolls his eyes. “Relax. We’re seventeen; no one can grow facial hair—except Jared O’Connor, but he’s a dick. There’s not much biodiversity in the rural queer high school biome mid-puberty. Everyone’s small and hairless. The definition of a twink.”

“There are bear cubs like Jared,” I argue. “Big, broad guys who play sports and will have immaculately groomed beards by the time they’re old enough to hit the clubs. And you—” I look at the thick, dark hair on his forearms, and I can’t help but envision the tuft of chest hair when he wears those low-cut tanks. “You’re a perfectly passable otter.”

Efraín crosses his arms over his chest. I’ve shocked him silent. Like he’s trying to work out whether I meant that as a compliment; best of luck to him, because I’m not sure, either. “Does it bother you? That I called you a twink?”

I duck my head, unwilling to let him see my face. Because this, too, is stupid and unfair. Efraín called Sam Schatz a twink, too, right as I was wistfully wishing I looked like Sam Schatz. Technically, Efraín was comparing us. Favorably. Even if it was just another backhanded compliment.

I have to say something, and he’s being so uncharacteristically quiet. Like he actually cares about my answer. The truth is a risk, but I take the gamble and admit, “It’s just that ‘twink’ can have other connotations.”

“Like what?”

“Effeminate,” I spit, and I can’t help it if it comes out like venom. “So if you’re calling me a twink because you see me as feminine, then—”

“Fuck, no. Elisha, stop. You know I—” His hand is, inexplicably, on my bicep. His grip only tightens when I try to shrug him off. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“How else could you have meant it? Because I don’t actually fit the rest of the brief. I don’t have that slim build or a twenty-eight inch waist. What I do have are child-bearing hips and boobs and—”

“Elisha.”

His tone completely and utterly disarms me, just like it always does when he says my name with that volatile mix of exasperation and concern, laced with some other emotion not found on the periodic table.

I blink up at him, utterly mortified. I didn’t mean to say any of that, and sure as hell not in front of him. “Fuck.”

He has both hands on my shoulders, steadying me. I’d fight him, if I were sure I wouldn’t fall over without his support. “I’m sorry,” he says, neither bark nor bite. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I won’t call you a twink again.”

“It’s not—” I shake my head. It’s not about the word, I don’t say. It’s about the fact that I wouldn’t mind him calling me a twink if he meant it. If it meant he saw me as a queer boy, a worthy object of desire. Not for him, of course. But for other queer boys. “It’s fine.”

He lets go of me and shrugs as if he believes my lie.

“I should—” I glance around the store, at anything and everything but Efraín. “We need to clean up before the next tour ends.” I push past him, toward the mountains of rumpled T-shirts that need to be refolded and stacked. By the time I have the first shirt aligned on the folding board, I’m relieved that Efraín is going to let this go.

But, of course, then he wouldn’t be Efraín.

“You know, I’m about as straight as Lombard Street, but Roman road guy was right about one thing,” he says to my back. “Sam Schatz really was hot.”