There had always been rumors about me, but this week in particular they’d gotten a lot louder. And my father now knew they were true.
Face flaming, heart pounding, I turned to the vice principal again.
“I would also like to remind students of our school dress code,” she was saying. “No pins, badges, or garish accessories will be allowed during school hours and on school uniforms. As always, Our Lady girls are expected to be well groomed, well presented, and uphold the reputation of our school. Slán agus beannachtai Dé oraibh.”
Goodbye and God’s blessings be on you. Provided you aren’t wearing a rainbow pin.
The two seniors stood at either side of the assembly hall doors as the school trickled out, proud sentinels handing out printed leaflets calling for a student protest.
I hung back. One of them beckoned me over. Her earrings had just been confiscated and she kept reaching up with her free hand, feeling their absence.
“You joining the protest?” she asked. I wondered if she could sense it on me. “The details are on the event page.” She pointed to a link printed on the flyer.
I couldn’t join the protest. It would be like painting a big rainbow target on my back. Still, I felt my cowardice like a toothache, sharp and constant.
“I’m sorry your earrings got confiscated,” I said to the girl instead. “They were awesome. It’s completely unfair.”
The girl looked surprised for a moment, then smiled, as if she was pleased I had noticed. “Thanks,” she said. “I made them myself.”
“What? Really? They’re amazing.”
She pushed the flyer into my hand and I took it automatically, grinning stupidly.
“Monday morning,” she said. “Scheduled walkout. See you there.”
She turned to wave her leaflets at a group of sophomores behind me and I carried my flyer and my smile halfway down the corridor, thinking that maybe things could be okay, that maybe I could even talk to pretty older girls who made their own earrings, that maybe if I joined the protest nobody would suspect a thing.
Until I slowed by the bathroom and overheard four girls from my class talking about me in front of their lockers.
“Oh my God,” one of them was saying. “Did you see Deena Rys drooling over that senior? Scarlet for her.”
A flurry of whispers erupted in the wake of her words. I shoved through the door toward the bathroom, to splash cold water on my burning face.
When the door closed behind me, I thought I could hear one of them saying, “Okay, you win. I’m changing my vote.”
* * *
—
I didn’t wonder long what vote she meant. When I walked into French, before the teacher but after most of the other girls, it was right there on the whiteboard at the front of the class.
It said, in glaring bold black letters:
IS DEENA RYS A LESBIAN?
Underneath the words were three columns. The first said Yes. The second said No. The third said, in somewhat squashed writing, She’s too ugly to get a boy so she may as well try dykes.
In the first column there were ten votes. In the second there were three. In the third there were twelve.
It was every nightmare I’d never even thought to have, and I was so mortified I didn’t even feel it. I stared at the board for a long moment, loaded silence coming from the desks behind me.
I could have said something. I could have gone to the vice principal with her “zero-tolerance bullying policy.” Instead, I walked out of the classroom and nobody stopped me. Tears trailed hot and shameful down my cheeks, but still I slammed the door so hard the crucifix above it fell off the wall and crashed to the floor.
3.
The Rys family curse
Dublin, 2012
Without it being a conscious decision, I walked all the way to Mandy’s, crying, in the rain, my umbrella forgotten under an assembly hall chair.
Mandy had never lived with Rachel and me—not since a little after I came along anyway. I, the afterthought, the accident, the small slip of the tongue, born seventeen whole years after my sisters, the final straw that killed our mother. At around the same time that our father left, Mandy and Rachel fell out, loudly and dramatically—at our mother’s funeral, no less, or so the family always said. Mandy had left Dublin, to who knows where and doing who knows what, but she came back after I’d started school. Since then, she’d lived in a dingy flat in Fairview with two friends and a revolving cast of couch-surfers with varying degrees of personal hygiene. As far as I was aware, she’d given back her key to the family home. Whenever I asked what they had fought about so seriously, my sisters were uncharacteristically united in their silence. But there was nobody else to ask; the rest of our family had had very little to do with us since that very fight.
Mandy had quit school at sixteen, told me she’d learned everything she knew from the Marino public library. She had once been fired from a job in a bar because she had punched a man who’d groped her. She’d had a scandalous affair with a married banker, spent two weeks in his penthouse apartment in Marbella. She’d toured with a punk band for a few months in her teens. She’d joined a cult, briefly, in her twenties, had lived off the land with other white-clad, barefoot women, until she grew weary of their rules, said they were just as bad as the church she’d left as a girl.
She’d let me smoke a joint with her last year, laughed when I told her that her gray eyes were exact mirrors of mine, fed me chocolate cookies until I fell asleep. She snuck me into concerts and burlesque shows, convincing the bartenders I was over eighteen, slid sugary cocktails across the table to me. She let me borrow books that Rachel would undoubtedly have considered unsuitable, which I read curled up wherever I could find a clear bit of space in her bedroom, sipping coffee, listening to the rain.
I had never come out to Mandy, but I had long suspected I didn’t have to.
“Our family tree blew down in a gale and we are the bad apples it shook off,” Mandy said, the moment she opened the door of her flat.
“What?”
“Bad apples,” Mandy repeated. “Isn’t that what Dad always says?”
I stood openmouthed and dripping in the hallway, unable to tell my sister that Dad had used those exact words that very morning, that her saying this, specifically, right at that moment, was eerie.
“Bad apples don’t have history,” she went on, handing me a towel. “They don’t have roots. They just sit in the grass where they fell, rotting alone.”
Or they walk all the way to Fairview in the pissing rain without an umbrella to knock at their sister’s door.