Queer

By David Gearing

In his most provocative novel yet, David Gearing throws light onto a generation that's sick of your $H!&.

Elliot Slater is a self-professed nerd who, despite being black and gay, blends in anywhere. It seems no one knows his name. Not even his teachers.

Then he meets the mysterious Hadrian. Hadrian, who goes by they/them pronouns, defies every rule that high school has to offer, and shows Elliot that there is a different way to exist in high school.

But when a violent outburst threatens to get Hadrian expelled, Elliot decides to run for student body treasurer, because whoever has the money has the power. There's just one thing he didn't predict: Hadrian has some plans of their own. Mayhem ensues when Hadrian's philosophy spreads to a high school of students who demand to stand out, demand to make noise, and demand to be heard at any cost.

If Fight Club had an angsty teenager with The Wave, this novel would certainly be it.

David Gearing is the author of over 35 novels across different genres and pen names. He writes and lives with his husband in the Pacific Northwest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Gearing
• Release date: Dec 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393856702

David Gearing

David Gearing is a recent transplant from the harsh Arizona deserts to the green forests of the Pacific Northwest. He plots, he games, he pretends to be his own living room rockstar when no one is looking. His other books range from various genres from thrillers to gothic horror and beyond. You can find him at his webpage DavidGearingBooks.com or at his publisher's website AkusaiPublishing.com

Book preview

Chapter 1

Ms. Young stands in the middle of the parking lot. It’s a beautiful day for the most part. Sun shining when there really should be the lingering doubt of a rain shower coming our way. She stands with her legs separated shoulder-length apart, her face in complete and absolute horror. One hand reaches for her mouth, as if that could somehow disguise the not-so-school appropriate words that are coming off her lips rapid fire like a machine gun.

Her shadow is stretched out over the black asphalt of the parking lot, over the sidewalk that separates emerald green from obsidian black. Shadows of her dark blond strands whip back and forth on the red brick wall of the school building. From this position, she looks like she could be twenty feet tall, though to look at her in person, I’m pretty sure our principal feels maybe three inches tall.

The other hand, appropriately, holds a gun. A small silver pistol that I’ve only seen women in detective movies pull out of a garter belt or their pantyhose. The gun had been fired about three minutes ago. It trembles in Ms. Young’s left hand. Shaking and rattling against her wedding ring.

And it seems like I’m the only one to notice, but a seventeen-year-old person in a black skirt and pink shirt that says, It’s not easy being a princess, they’re lying on the floor clutching their right shoulder with their left hand. This person—let’s call them Hadrian—they grasp at their shoulder and squeeze it like they’ve known about this technique all their life.

They look at me, standing beside them with my eyes wide open and a set of keys in my hand. Whose keys? Couldn’t tell you. They weren’t mine. They weren’t Hadrian’s either.

And Hadrian looks over at me, those hazel eyes piercing through the emotional shield I’m trying to keep up, to keep me from freaking out because my friend just got shot by the principal. Hadrian looks at me with those big hazelnut eyes and nods for me to kneel down beside them.

I carefully position my knee to keep from getting into the red and sticky pool of what I assume is blood creeping up the cracks of the parking lot’s asphalt. The dark black rocks, shiny in the sun’s rays, now a faint red translucent shade of move style blood.

Hadrian pulls their head to the side, asking me to come a little bit closer.

And I do.

What the hell have you done, woman? someone screams from the front of the school building. The people across the street watching us? I don’t know if they are concerned or entertained.

I assume it’s possible they are a little bit of both. One of the housewives, Mrs. Grayden, she has her camera out on the both of us, then to Mrs. Young, then to us. She's not sure where the action is going to be next.

And honestly? I know the feeling.

There are sirens echoing off the buildings down the street. But it'll be a few minutes more before they finally come up the street and pull their guns at this black boy standing over this white person who is bleeding. They might ignore the white woman holding the gun. The series of expletives that are too extreme for cable television, these words will never be recorded.

But what I do, what I do is exactly what I was taught to do when I was younger. I sit and wait for the police to arrive. And when they are positive that the police are almost here, Hadrian coughs this big empty, fake cough to elaborate on the fact that he might be dying. From a gunshot wound to the shoulder. They close their eyes and mumble something to themselves.

Then, eyes coming open slowly as if they just had some kind of epiphany, they look out into the open and I realize that they're looking at me. Closer, they say.

And I lean in closer.

Hadrian leans up, kisses me on the corner of my mouth, before groaning and shifting their body on the asphalt.

I couldn't tell you how we got this far. How we got to the point that we're watching my friend bleed on school property, and how the cops that arrive on the scene do not come running for me but somehow come directly to principal.

It's only when one of the cops arrives, a short white one with blond hair cut so short that he looks bald, he points at me and reaches for his sidearm. He holds out a hand, open palm, at me and says, Stay there. He says, I need for you to calm down.

And the funny part, I guess I am calm. About as calm as I can be.

When I'm about to put my arms up and on the back of my head like Poppa taught me, I feel the tug of Hadrian's hand against mine. A brief flash of warm skin-to-skin contact before I have the white man's hands squeezing my wrists tight.

You'll be fine, I say to them. You're doing great.

But really, it's a wonder it took things this long to get out of hand.

Chapter 2

Chaos doesn't just happen in a short few minutes. It's not like I can just turn the page in a book and magically appear somewhere else in the timestream. Believe me, if I could, you wouldn't see many LGBTQ people just sitting around in high school waiting to be accepted. Waiting to not be made fun of. Waiting to find each other and not have to find dates or people to talk to online. We'd be happy and accepted in our mid-twenties, getting drunk and enjoying those nights out with friends and maybe a new potential beau or two.

And by the by, this is months before the enigma that is Hadrian comes and finds me. Before we become inseparable for better or worse. Before The Disciples.

What every old person will tell you if you let them, they’ll say that time is like a roll of toilet paper. It seems like it takes forever to spin around and empty at first. But the more you use it, the shorter it gets until it’s all up. Imagine high school as that roll of toilet paper. Imagine your freshman year, running through hallways trying to find your classes, but because you don’t get priority scheduling, your classes are here and there, up this hallway and down the one at the far end of the school.

I was that poor fool. The one who had PE with the juniors who are better at everything than me. Then I actually get art with the one person who is so soft spoken and so gentle that I begin to wonder if he's maybe made up of marshmallows. Just sweet and fluffy all the time.

It’s in that art class that I realize that I am drawing figures that look like mannequins. I’m drawing them playing basketball, one of them with a number twenty-three on it because yes, I know who Michael Jordan is. And no, not the actor, the actual legendary basketball person.

Okay, so I know who he is, I don't know what position he plays. Sue me.

And I'm drawing these mannequins with no faces and those big blocky ovals for hands because that what those drawing mannequins look like. When I'm adding a slight hint of shading along one side of the hand, the art teacher, a certain fluffy Mr. Brooks, he kneels down next to my piece and says something like, This? This is why I wish I had an advanced art class.

I smile for a moment and simply say, Thank you. He doesn't offer me any other criticisms. Nothing about the faces. Nothing about the fact that I have to be doing my shading all off. Just nothing.

Just walking away.

And I know I'm doing something wrong, so I get up and take my piece of heavy Bristol paper toward him. He's already moving on to the next student, leaning over the student's shoulder and nodding. He approves of whatever the hell that thing is on the paper, but says nothing again.

Excuse me? Mr. Brooks.

He stands up tall, or as tall as a man that round can be, he looks at me with his dark green eyes and frizzy orange hair and he says, You're done? He seems legitimately happy that I'm done. He offers to take the piece from my hands and there's a bit of anger in my jaw. Hidden just on my left side.

I'm clenching tight when I say, What? No I'm not done. Why would I be done? I show it to him, looking over the lines, the lack of background. There's not even a damned court anywhere. Barely an outline of a ball. Why would I be done?

I assume he sees what I see, but he doesn't. He sees something else entirely. And it's then that I look at his twinkling eyes, the kinds of soft eyes that I imagine Santa Claus has. The real one, not those fakes on Hallmark TV movies. There's a twinkle there that just calms you down a little bit.

But I don't calm down.

Why would you say this is done?

I was just wondering, Elliot. You got up and walked toward me. What did you think I was going to say?

And I look at the paper, scratching the side of my head. I don’t know. Listen, I say, shifting my weight from my left leg to my right one. My hips shift in the process, and if you didn’t know I was gay before, then you do now. Believe me, it’s a clue that some of us call Gaydar. But the truth? They’re just microscopic hints.

How come you didn’t give me any advice? Nothing to work on?

Are you done?

Again with the done thing, I mutter. I just hand the paper over to Mr. Brooks. Look, it’s not done. But what can I do to make it better?

Who’s to say it’s not good now?

Because it’s incomplete?

Mr. Brooks waves me over to his desk, to his computer. A black flatscreen monitor sits on top of a black metal rectangle that’s humming so loud it’s cleared for takeoff. Mr. Brooks types in something so fast I can barely read it. Up pops a painting of geometric shapes. A block of baby-puke yellow in the middle. Surrounded by lots of white space, a few thick black boxes and then some green boxes and rectangles on the bottom.

What do you think that is?

I shrug. I don’t know. Art is art. It could be anything.

The title of that piece of art is called ‘The Cow’.

I don’t see it.

Mr. Brooks takes a step back and cocks his head to the side just a little bit, as if he’s seeing it for the first time ever. Yeah. Not a lot of people do. He crosses his arms and looks to me with a smirk. It’s an abstraction of a grazing cow. Theo van Doesburg wanted to show people how things are made up of other things. He broke down this version of a cow in a meadow—if you see the green here, that’s the grass—and he abstracted it into basic shapes.

It doesn’t take that strike of lightning for me to see where he’s going with that.

To me, Mr. Brooks says, that looks like that could be a halfway point. He shrugs, more or less, between what we see here and what would be a caricature illustration.

Looking back at my picture, I realize that there’s only two players. A bunch of rounded shapes and if I were to abstract them some, they would be ovals and rectangles and that’s it.

Thank you? I say.

If you try hard enough, Mr. Brooks says, you can explain anything as art. The trick is to have the confidence to carry it and mean it. Mr. Brooks pats me on the shoulder and points me back to my seat on the far end of the room. Always mean it. Whatever you do. Now go. Finish or don't finish. Just don't ask for more help. You don't need it.

Except I do.

When I sit down and look at the pictures of people around me, there are illustrations of turtles eating flowers, big sharp jaws and stretched out necks. There are bursts of color everywhere.

As opposed to my pathetic black and white and gray all over.

It’s the pictures and the colors that make me angry. It’s the fact that I didn’t use color when I should have. That I wasn’t faster. Or better, after all the time I’ve spent studying body parts and anatomy.

I walk up to Mr. Brook's table and put my paper on the desk, face down.

Mr. Brooks raises a shaggy red eyebrow.

Right. Right. I sign the back of it with my name and period three.

I'm done.

Mr. Brooks raises a thick meaty hand and lifts the paper and stares at it. He wraps his lower lip over his upper lip, nods, then says, Good choice.

I didn't do anything to it.

No, he says. Good choice.

Whatever. By the time I make it to my seat, the bell has rung and we're off to our next few classes.

Chapter 3

When well-meaning adults, especially straight white ones, feel guilty, they start a club. They offer to be the adult in the room while young adults take over the world with their new ideas. The theory is that we'll just start rising up, raising our fists like Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the Olympics. These white women, they want to feel some kind of way when we take our first steps, or when we sound out our first syllables. They want to know that they did it. That we'll succeed because they did something.

Then, they'll pat themselves on the back because it was always about them, never about us.

Being black and not straight, I couldn’t tell you how many times that not us part comes up. And sometimes, I need to decide which us isn’t being represented.

Today, I try out The Rainbow Club. It’s probably what you think it is: a not-so-cleverly hidden reference to the rainbows you find at every Gay Pride Parade ever. It’s what type of cake every extravagant showoff Youtuber wants to make for their mom before they come out to the world—as if we didn’t already know.

Like, bitch, we saw your lip gloss. Straight people don't wear strawberry passion pink lip gloss. You're not fooling a single person out there.

The classroom is set up in a circle for today’s meeting. A row of trays of cookies with rainbow M&Ms baked right in line at the back of the classroom on tables pushed up tight against the wall. The others, they just sit in their clicks because that’s what they’re used to doing. The one thing they also tell you about high school? It’s who you know.

To those teachers that say that high school is nothing like the real world?

Well, screw you. It's all about who you know, how you know them, and your reputation on the way up and down the social ladder. It's exactly what it's like out there in the real world. The difference is, some of us ain't gotta have jobs just yet. Some of us still have Mom and Dad at home.

For today, we’ve called a meeting because we have had an incident and we want to decompress. By we, I mean the angry white lesbians, Monica and Davies. They sit across from me on the other end of the room, wearing black shirts. Both of them. One of them has waist-high jean shorts, the other one has low hanging red high waters that aren’t actually that bad. Monica with the butch look, Davies with the lipstick lesbian vibe, they are a perfect power couple. And a power couple they are.

We need to talk, everyone, Davies says. She stands up, with nothing between us, we can see just how tall she really isn’t. But with an attitude like hers, you realize just how little you need height. I’m Davies, my pronouns are she, her, and hers. She motions to Monica, who stands up as well. Black boots make that heavy sound as she stands up straight. I’m Monica, and I use she and her pronouns.

Monica extends a hand out to me. A big smile of white teeth surrounded by dark rose-red lips, and she says, And we have a newcomer.

The others look at me and smile at me. But not with me. I’m a decoration in a room full of bright and shining people.

I nod but put my hand up, looking away toward the door. Please.

No, please, Monica says. Who are you and how do you identify?

And it’s this moment I stand up and adjust my khakis, pulling them down past my ankles because right now, showing ankles feels extra extra gay.

I’m just gonna go. I clap my hands together and look out around the room. Pairs of eyes of every color look at me, making a fool of myself, each one of them judging me, no doubt. Judging for coming into the classroom full of posters that say acceptance while they make the only black person in the room take the floor.

And it’s at this point I bow slightly, nod my head and say, I need go. Thank you for having me.

As I leave through the doorway and out into the hall, I feel that intense need to kick myself. That urge to stop and scream at myself in real life instead of in my head. The internal desire to just scream that I shouldn’t have apologized, and it’s not my place to apologize to a bunch of queer white people for letting me into their space.

And who the hell were they putting me on the spot in the first place?

I mean, what the hell?

My blood boiling in my veins, I turn down stairs and skip over a few at a time. But about halfway down, at the point where the stairs spin around so I’m facing the wall instead of the windows, I realize I don’t need to apologize. I don’t need to be someone else just for them.

The railings in the hallways are still warm, giving me all the heebie-jeebies. The sheer number of hands that have touched this part of the railing, unwashed hands by guys and girls who didn't use hand sanitizer or tissues to wipe their nose. By the time I'm up and off the railing, I can see a pair of eyes peeking at me through the doorway of where the club was.

There's some hushed whispering like I really can't hear what they're saying. And I walk back into the room. Mrs. Pike, the teacher and sponsor of the club, has returned, sitting at her desk and eying some papers. She might not know that I know, but she's rubbing her forehead with her fingers.

Monica doesn't say anything to me when I come into the room. Davies says exactly zero syllables to me when I take a seat in the back, near the cookies. But cookies were for members, and I wasn't even willing to introduce myself to them. Monica seems to have finished an impassioned speech about equality and something about equal rights. People clap, and by people, I mean everyone except me and Mrs. Pike.

Please, Monica says. She motions toward me and for a split second I swear I can feel my heart beating in my throat. I swallow it back down and pull off to the side. Monica's arms don't move and it's the cookies she's pointing to. Not me. The cookies. Please take some. Kevin's mom was nice enough to bake these, we should be nice enough to eat them.

Kevin's mom? one of the boys says. A lean blond thing that thinks midriffs have come back in this season. Ugh, last time we had brownies by her, we threw away half a box of broken plastic knives. The others burst into an intense laughter that's totally not necessary. They laugh so hard in that you had to be there kind of way.

Then they're coming at me. Or near me.

For the cookies.

I pull away from the charging cattle of queer people, coming at me for the cookies and rainbow chocolate candies.

The best way to stay out of their way is to stand at the end of the tables next to the doors. There have to be maybe twelve people here and standing in a somewhat organized circle of hungry teenagers. All of them staring at the walls or at which cookie they want to eat. They grab a cookie all politely and then pull away into the seats again. Butts in chairs, they talk about stuff I can’t hear.

My feet swing off the floor I'm sitting so high up off the ground. I'm barely five-eight, which means sitting on desk table lifts me completely off of the floor.

The other people's eyes, the white people in the room, they pretend to not see me, looking away at the windows or the walls. I stand near the door, but to avoid me they will avoid looking out the