The sky was a demonic, pale gray on the Friday that I had to explain to my father that I wasn’t gay.

It was my dad’s Einstein idea to flee Puerto Rico and raise me in a place where I’m more likely to become a fancy lawyer or a police officer. Well, it’s been seventeen years. We now live in Jersey City, New Jersey, and I want to be a ballet dancer.

My house is the only orange-juice-colored building on our entire avenue; my dad painted it. He said he chose it because, “it was the cheapest paint color at the hardware store,” and my mother didn’t fight him about it because it matched six of her sun dresses and one of her nightgowns. According to her, the coincidence should excite me. They’re not really prize-winning adults — as you’ve probably already assumed. Yet, if you were to count every grain of sand on a beach, and multiply that outrageous number by infinity, you’d get the amount of love I have for them.

Every weekday morning excited me the way your taste buds might get excited by the flavor of tap water. Work for them, high school for me. Except for the Friday my dad asked if I was gay. On that day, I ditched classes to stay home, and began choreographing a dance for an audition I had scheduled at Juilliard’s Dance Division. An acceptance into that program is my ticket to being the person I want to be.

I made sure that, like  shadows on a cloudy day, I became invisible to my parents. I slithered outside after a hurried, “Te amo Mami, Te amo Papi.”

To which my mom responded, “Bring home the A’s, or I’ll give you one of those slaps on the head that you like so much,” which always made me giggle.

My dad just responded by saying that I should “try out for the baseball team or something today,” which always enflamed my annoyance, especially because he very well knew that I lacked the ant-sized talent that it took to hold a baseball bat correctly, let alone hit a homerun, or make the team.

I hid among a small family of trees that served as a border between the Johnsons’ home and the Rivera home. I was a ghost staring down my parents as their aging bones clicked and clacked on their journey into my father’s rusted, night black pick-up truck. I think about their aging bodies every day and how my bones will one day start clicking and clacking too. Shit, I’ll probably be the old man in Room 235, on his deathbed, trying to dance to the music they play on the hospital radio.

Once I was one thousand percent positive that my parents had driven far away from our home, towards their separate jobs, I bulleted into my room, carefully tied my ballet slippers on, squeezed on a pair of black tights and surrendered to music’s authority.

God, I know my body was built to dance.

I was a feather-weighted eagle with wings so sprung open that they could have stretched around the curvy hips of the Earth and given it a hug. I ruled over the kingdom of air that my twig-thin body twirled itself into. When I’m dancing, there is no womb in which worry might develop its body.

When I’m dancing, I swear I feel like the strongest man in existence, but it never lasts as long as I want it to.

I pirouetted my body down into the hardwood floor, as three murderous knocks, rammed their way into my room’s door.

My heart suddenly felt as if it were being shredded to pieces in the razor-filled mouth of a starving shark, and my lungs felt chained to an anchor under deep waters. My voice became void of all muscle. My face a purple, white tint.

“JAMES?!? WHY AREN’T YOU AT SCHOOL? WHAT IS THAT MUSIC? IF YOU DON’T START TALKING I’LL SLAP THE HELL OUT OF YOU!”

I could only sit there paralyzed, working my ass off just to simply muster enough strength to breathe. Breathing is astoundingly taken for granted, as are open-minded fathers.

Papi bolted forward into my room. He stood over me. His eyes glazed over, entirely unlatched, piercing into my very being like a spear. His breath sounded as if he had just run 200 miles without a single moment to rest — each deeper into his big belly than the next. His face was fuming red with irritation and grief. I could easily see the eternal number of thoughts that stomped in circles within his narrow mind.

His voice trembled when he finally uttered his accusation. “James…you…are gay?” Those words tasted like a bucket load of salt upon his tongue.

“No Papa…I’m not…gay…I just love to dance…I want to go to school for ballet. I love the way I feel when I dance, Papa. I love the music and the flying and the twirling. It’s very athletic and…”

“SHUT UP! You’re a boy, James. Boys…boys don’t do this twirling you talk about and boys don’t do these shoes! You are not being a boy. You are not being a good son. You are acting like a gay boy. I came back to this house to grab my wallet and I find this…sin.”

“PAPA THIS IS NOT A SIN! I’M A BOY AND I’M GOOD AT DANCE. MEN IN THE BIBLE DANCED PAPA. I LOVE GIRLS AND I LOVE GOD AND I LOVE TO DANCE. I KNOW BASEBALL PLAYERS AT MY SCHOOL THAT ARE GAY.”

“I did not raise you to be a ballet dancer. I taught you how to play boy sports. I taught you how to be a man! And don’t you dare bring the Bible into this. Those men danced for our God, and they didn’t wear these tight pants.”

“I feel so strong when I dance Papa. I feel like a man.”

“I sacrifice everything for you, James. Me and your mother left Puerto Rico so you could be anything you wanted to become, and you want to dance with girl slippers on?”

“It’s who I already am Papa. There are other boys who like dancing just like I do. Please just forgive me.”

I was a puzzle with 2,098,998,999 pieces to me, and my father felt as though he needed to solve me. I was something to be fixed.

He violently turned around, and raced out of our arsenic argument. I lay there still. Still a dancer, still not gay, still a boy, but not so much a son anymore.


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