Laurie Boris

Joey’s pulse raced when his parents said they were going out and Meghan would be babysitting, although he tried not to look too excited. He liked her better than the others, not because she was pretty or nice or did babysitter-y things like make cookies or play games with him. But because most of the time, she watched TV or talked on the phone with her friends and basically left him alone. Sometimes he thought she didn’t like babysitting or even kids, but he never ratted her out.

Especially tonight, he was glad it would be Meghan because he had a plan and needed to keep it secret. When his parents were busy with other things, he mumbled something about homework and went into his room. He opened his backpack and took out the big spiral notebook with the pockets in the back, and pulled out the photograph. It was a page he’d torn from a magazine at the dentist’s waiting room when no one else was there, then quickly stashed it away. Since then he’d folded and unfolded it so many times that the creases were as soft as cotton, but he could still see everything important. He’d already made numerous renderings of the man’s face in his sketchpad with colored pencil—the painted lips, the delicate contours of his cheeks, the super-long lashes. The man was wearing makeup and a wig and a dress that made him look like a woman. A very beautiful woman, like a movie star at the Oscars. At first Joey only knew he was a man because of the caption on the photograph, but he’d torn that away, so if anyone saw his sketches, or the picture, they’d think it was a woman and not bother him about it.

So far, nobody had.

He ached to once again recreate that face, that beauty, but now he had a different idea. He’d been thinking about it for weeks. And every time he thought about it, and the shoebox under his bed, he blushed and felt afraid to even try. What if he got caught? His heart raced again; his cheeks flamed with heat. He took some deep breaths like he saw on the internet another night when Meghan was babysitting, and he started feeling calmer.

While his parents talked about who was driving and where they’d park and what to do if they saw certain people they didn’t want to run into—which usually fascinated him—Joey tried to play it cool. When Meghan came, he made the necessary polite talk then his parents left and Meghan flopped onto the sofa and grabbed the remote and said to let her know if he needed anything.

Joey nodded and, a little lightheaded, walked as normally as he could back into his room and eased the door closed. He sat on the bed. Rubbed his hands over his eyes. Thought about how he would start. Funny how drawing on a piece of paper felt so easy to him. But nearly impossible when he thought about how to do it on his own face—the canvas he knew infinitely better than any sketchpad in the world.

He slipped to the floor and retrieved the shoebox from beneath the bed. Opened it and, as always, felt the marvel and shame at the contents within. There was the lipstick he’d stuffed into his jacket when the clerk wasn’t looking. Ditto the mascara, the eyeliner, the shadows, the little bottle of foundation that didn’t quite match the tone of his skin, but to take any longer to match his face to the chart on the shelf felt too risky. He also had some wipes that the internet said he’d need to remove it all. He’d studied his mother’s makeup on afternoons when his parents were at work, or other nights when Meghan was engrossed in some stupid TV show, and learned which little tubes and pots and bottles did what, carefully replacing each item in her dressing table drawers. He didn’t dare use any of it for fear he’d leave evidence, but he made a mental list of everything he needed to acquire. And here it was, and here he was, and he slipped across the hall to nab his mother’s hand-mirror and returned to the safety of his bedroom.

He sat cross-legged on the bed, shoebox before him, and examined his face. His pale freckled skin and light green eyes, the way his nostrils flared when he wiggled his nose, the way his jaw looked a tiny bit more angular lately, a feature his aunt crowed to his mother about, a marker, she said, that he was growing into a handsome young man.

Joey did not feel handsome. He looked nothing like the older boys at school. Very often he felt like…nothing. He wanted to feel like the man in the magazine photo—dressed as a woman he looked so confident and happy with himself, not caring what anyone else thought. But those thoughts made Joey blush with shame and want to throw the box in the trash but then he feared that his parents would find it and his mother would know it wasn’t her makeup and then there would be questions.

He didn’t want to answer questions. Just like he’d dared himself to steal the lipstick, he dared himself now to open it. He swiveled the fire-engine red column of waxy stuff up, looked at it a while before smoothing it over his lower lip the way he’d seen a woman on a TV show do it. It felt thick and sticky when he smacked his lips together. It looked funny to see it on his face, but a good kind of funny. He reminded himself that it was just like sketching, and after a while he lost himself in the application of the different media to his new canvas.

He was so lost he didn’t hear the footsteps, the voice, the knock on his door, but he definitely saw Meghan as she walked in and started to say, “Joey, you’ve been so quiet, are you—?” Then she said, “What are you doing?”

She hadn’t said it in a scolding way, more of a curious one, but still, he was so afraid that he froze, staring at her face. He peed himself a little. But he didn’t notice that until later. “I… I… It’s for school. I’m in a play. I wanted to practice…”

She tilted her head. “Do you want any help?”

“I think… I—”

“Shove over.” He moved like a reflex as she sat beside him and grabbed the package of remover wipes and snapped one out like she’d been doing this all her life. “You look like one of my little sister’s dolls. Mind if we start again?”

And this time she waited for him to answer. He’d hate the idea of someone erasing a sketch he’d made, but he obviously had no idea what he was doing, so he nodded, and she cleaned his face.

He watched her as she worked. Her eyes had this great lost-focused look in them, and he wondered if that was what he looked like when he drew. Her hands were gentle but expert as she dabbed this here and that there, told him to open his eyes wide for one thing and close them for another.

Not once did she ask him what play it was, which role he had, and even if this was his mother’s makeup. She couldn’t have helped not seeing the magazine page on the bed, because he didn’t get a chance to whisk it away.

“There,” she said finally, with a smile, and handed him the mirror. “You’re gorgeous.”

He stared. And stared and stared and stared. He wasn’t the man in the photo, but he looked really pretty. A little bit like his mom, maybe.

“I always thought you’d make a beautiful girl,” Meghan said.

But then the shame returned, and he felt as if the heat from his face would melt all the layers of stuff she’d painted on him.

“Don’t worry.” She frowned then smoothed a spot above his brow with a finger. “I won’t tell your parents.” Meghan lowered her voice as if his parents might hear the words hanging in the air when they returned. “My older brother does drag. I help him with his makeup sometimes.”

He screwed up his nerve to ask a question. “Does he…is that what he does, like, for a job?” He gestured to the magazine page. “Like that?”

Meghan looked at the picture more closely. “Well. That guy is like, famous. He makes a lot of money. My brother has fun with it, and does a lot of shows and makes a little bit of money, but he waits tables and stuff to pay the bills. Do you…think you might like to do something like that one day?”

It had never really occurred to him before that it could be a thing to do instead of just a dare or a new art project. “I don’t…”

“Well. You should definitely talk to your parents about it. My brother was super afraid to, cause my folks can be kind of judgey and yours seem a little…well, they’re real nice and all, but—anyway, when my brother told my mom and dad they were a little weirded out at first, but now they’re his biggest fans.”

Joey thought about that for a long time. He thought about that as he stared into the mirror. As she helped him take the makeup off and hide the evidence, and long into the night after his parents returned and Meghan went home and he sat up in bed staring at the picture of the man Joey now knew was famous for dressing up like a woman.

Maybe he did want to do that. Someday. But the next morning, as his father came into the kitchen and gave him a soft fist-tap to his only-recently-angling jaw and said, “You’re growing up too fast, little man,” Joey couldn’t imagine ever telling his parents.