Addie on the Inside Read Free

know
that to love Skeezie is to ignore him.
    â€œMoving on,” I say as Skeezie sucks his fangs
into his maw and his molars move into action,
mashing and grinding and finding more fun
in two sticks of starch than in Disney World
and Six Flags combined. I remind myself
to ignore him and repeat “moving on” when
he belches and says, “Well, excuse
you
, Addie.”
Maddening, really, but what can you do?
    â€œThis is what I get for hanging out with boys,”
I say with a sigh. “It’s an established fact that
boys mature more slowly than girls.” The boys—
except Zachary, see above—roll their eyes
as I wonder why it is I
do
hang out with them,
why I am not at the mall with an all-girl posse,
applying lip liner at the Body Shop. Why I am
here
, preferring fangs dripping ketchup blood
to lips all glittered and glossy.

The Way the Forum Works
    I pick a topic, something really important such as What I’d Do for Love or
    How to End World Hunger,
    and then, after we’ve eaten our burgers and fries (a veggie burger for me,
    on a whole-grain bun)
    we order our ice cream and talk about the topic of the day. Well, to be
    honest, it’s often about school—
    something that happened or something that’s going to happen, like an
    election or a dance
    or what a teacher had to say or what we think is wrong and needs fixing,
    and that’s an endless topic.
    I write everything down, every word, even if it’s about ice cream or
    Skeezie’s french-fried fangs,
    because these are the minutes of our meetings and I only wish there could
    be minutes of every minute we live.
    Today we discuss the Gay Straight Alliance and the disgusting homophobic
    display put on by the boys
    running past room two-twenty-two, the pounding on the door and the
    shouting of names.
    We are all very serious, even Skeezie, because he knows enough to know
    that this is about Joe
    and Joe is right here at the table. “I think,” says Skeezie, “that we should
    track down who did it and
    cut off their—” I cut him off, saying, “That’s a tad medieval, and one evil
    does not negate another.”
    Bobby says, “How about the Day of Silence Mr. D suggested?” I write it
    down, underlining twice:
    a day of no speaking to express solidarity with those who are silenced for
    being themselves.
    â€œI don’t get it,” says Zachary. “Why should anyone have to be silent about
    who they are? That’s so . . .”
    We wait. Is he going to say it? No way. My pencil breaks its point before
    Zachary makes his.
    He looks at each of us in turn. “That’s so ridiculous,” he says as the rest of
    us exhale collectively.
    Joe thinks Zachary is gay but doesn’t know it. I agree, but it isn’t p.c. to
    label, and anyway,
    â€œwho cares” is the whole point. It’s decided we’ll do the Day of Silence,
    and I want to talk more
    with Joe as we head home together. But Joe’s walking with Zachary today
    and they’re talking video games
    and Skeezie says, “I’d like to see
you
be silent for a whole day, Addie!” And
    this is the way the Forum works.

Writing it down
    is the way I make it real,
the way I find my way
into what it is I feel.
    The words on paper or
computer screen
tell me more than
what I knew before
I wrote them,
    help me remember
what I’m afraid
I’ll forget,
    let me keep
what I don’t want
to lose,
    say to me:
You
were
here.

So I walk home alone
    thinking about Joe and how it used to be
before Zachary moved to the neighborhood.
I like Zachary, don’t get me wrong, but
I miss Joe when I’m walking home alone.
I think of that poem from the book I read
when I was little, the one that said, “I
loved my friend. He went away from me.”
    Oh, I know Joe is still my friend and I’m
just being silly, but I miss how we’d talk
and how he’d blurt out “Ministry of