Being a girl inside Blue Park is insanely humiliating, but I am prepared to weather the storm. I am cased in my androgynous armor of enormous jorts from the early aughts and a baggy N-Sync shirt that subtly signals irony in an overtly post-ironic way — the mustache finger tattoo of my generation. God bless me, I am positively swimming in a sea of cute boys. I feel like I am in a fanfiction, but I am way too ugly to be Y/N and no one here even cares that I am reading Nietzsche’s Collected Works. Nonetheless, I am doing my best to project an effortless cool, the kind that all guy’s girls have, like the one in sexy clothing who is offering me a hit of her blunt right now. It is an act of solidarity, not friendship, because she is not my friend, just my friend’s girlfriend. I no longer have girlfriends after what happened to Dasha. I also don’t go into the ocean.
After I watch the boys skateboard in the concrete park I follow them to Joe’s concrete apartment building, where I am allowed to watch them watch skate videos or even watch them play Tony Hawk’s Skate 3 on Xbox 360, or possibly PS2, I’m not really sure. It’s part of my research as I build an internal lexicon of tricks like bean-plant and sex-change and Casper, like the ghost. I perform my silent assimilation ritual secretly on the couch and before anyone notices I’m one of the freaking boys. I can smoke weed if I throw in, I can do a line if I Venmo Joe $5, I can have a Coors Banquet tall boy if I steal it myself and quickly enough that I don’t keep them waiting. I don’t think about Dasha or the ocean or the ghost and the boys don’t think about me. Sometimes they sleep with me and sometimes they don’t and sometimes they get it up and sometimes they don’t and for some reason none of them ask me to be their girlfriend, even though I am doing such a good job of being just like them. I’m pretty sure it’s because they somehow found out I’ve seen every single episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, even though I wipe my web history every time I watch it, but it could also be that I’m ugly. It also could be that they think I’m a lesbian simply because I bite my nails and have a strong jawline and can’t afford to buy weed and shaving cream at the same time so I keep choosing weed for five years, but I kinda don’t think it’s that.
The “third space” is the basement called Heck, where people with dyed hair and gender troubles play the sounds of rattling chains and creaking door hinges off of sub-bass speakers that got broken from being left out in the rain. The boys throw their bodies at each other and I throw my body at their bodies and we all laugh because violence is funny, especially with your friends (they taught me this). A girl dressed like me is there and she makes all the boys laugh and I wonder what her secret is until one of the boys says she’s a lesbian. Figures — everything good happens to people who don’t want it anyway. She asks me to bum a cigarette and I pretend I don’t have one and I turn red hot with embarrassment from lying and also maybe from all the body heat. One of the boys gives her a cigarette and she doesn’t even have to Venmo them $1, which is insane. They are monkey-fucking and my heart swells with jealousy and also maybe some other unparsable passion, I’m not sure.
The lesbian is breezier than a windchime and laughs twice as loud and I swear I’m not that funny. She wants to smoke weed after the punk show together in my apartment, nearby and covered in dust and ash and socks that smell bad. I say yes because saying no is harder and also I’m out of weed. I’m probably not a lesbian but I’m sure it will be fine. She rolls us a spliff raw dog on my Amazon plywood coffee table and she explains to me an episode of 30 Rock and all her favorite jokes in it and I say “Wow that’s crazy” seven times and by the eighth time I realize I should probably say something else so I say “Wow, that’s… insane.” It’s here that she decides to kiss me.
“Her lips are so soft,” I narrate along in my head, preparing for how I will describe this to the boys at Blue Park. I figure if we can talk about fucking pussy together I will be better girlfriend material. I am choosing which boy I want the most in my head when suddenly the lesbian pulls her lips away from my lips. I am worried for a second that I did something wrong, but also kind of relieved that I won’t be munching box or whatever, until she looks at me with that’s amore eyes and says: “Have you ever seen a ghost?”
I haven’t seen a ghost but I have seen all one million thousand episodes of RuPaul’s Drag Race in shameful secret. I haven’t seen a ghost but I have seen Dasha follow one into the ocean and never come back. “I haven’t seen a ghost, but I’m sure you have, so… what’s the story?”
Usually “the story” is a painting that fell off the wall in your great aunt’s house, or a shadow that passed by your bedroom window of a childhood vacation home and the floorboard creaked from the weight of its absolute spookiness, and every once in a blue moon the story is that a ghost with my name and my haircut is drowning you in the ocean and you are swallowed by the water and the night and all the void-like things that haunt them. But the lesbian doesn’t have a story. “I see ghosts all the time,” the lesbian is like. “There’s like two ghosts in your apartment right now, and they’re both girls. One of them looks kind of Russian. The other one looks kind of like you.”
Then she tries to kiss me again, but I am too busy being haunted by Dasha and the ghost that once replaced me in her life. The lesbian calls herself an Uber, muttering under her breath about how expensive it is to sail just halfway across Brooklyn until, finally, she leaves me alone with my ghosts. The Google search “Do lesbians have higher rates of schizophrenia” yields unsatisfying results. Thankfully RuPaul’s Drag Race is already open in another tab, God bless me, and I drift into the ocean of the night, the sea of sleep, and dream of ghosts.