“Didn’t love me.”
“Brothers? Sisters?” I ask.
“Only child.” He shrugs.
“But—But there must have been a kind aunt or grandparent who loved you... A best friend...”
“No, never.” He shakes off the gloom. “Don’t pity me, please. I’ve plenty of time to find love. Isn’t that right?”
“Of course that’s right,” I assure him. “Of course it is. You’re just a kid, really. In fact, we’re the youngest two people in this room. When’s your birthday? Mine is July seventh. Let’s see which one of us is the youngest.”
“Will you give me a birthday present if I tell you?” he asks.
“Of course I will,” I declare. “What do you want?”
“Just this,” he says. “To be in your company, speaking the truth to each other. I’m so tired of hiding.”
“I feel exactly the same,” I say, excited by the connection. “I’m always hiding, and it’s so exhausting. Always wondering if someone will find me out. Afraid that some small slip of the tongue might give me away.”
The boys who are masquerading are all dolled up now. Brendan is in Elizabethan dress and a frilly red wig. Cyril wears nothing but boots and a corset, his figure cinched into tight curves. “Howest doth we looketh?” Brendan asks, and everyone laughs and claps.
Shams turns to me with a smile. “You don’t want to masquerade?” he asks.
“Oh... I... It does sound fun, but—”
“But you’re scared?” he asks.
“That, yes.” I stare at Jack, who places a floral hat atop a classmate’s head. “Also, I don’t want Jack touching my face.”
Shams laughs, and I notice a red smudge on his front teeth. “There’s lipstick on your teeth,” I say.
“Which ones?” he asks.
“I can fix it,” I offer. “Smile.” He smiles big, and I rub my index finger over his two front teeth. When I’m done, he briefly closes his lips on my finger and pushes his tongue toward it. The wetness of his tongue on the tip of my finger sends warm shivers through my body, like I’m hot and cold all at the same time.
“What if I did your makeup?” he offers. “Then Jack wouldn’t touch you.”
I nod shyly. Shams crosses the room and snatches the makeup from Jack’s desk. Jack is too busy dancing in the center of the room to mind. Shams returns to me and begins the process of transforming me from Oliver into whoever I’ll become when he’s done. Someone new, with no past, only future. Shams puts rouge on my cheeks. He draws a line around my lips before filling it in with a ruby-red lipstick. As he works on my eyes, framing them in smoky mystery, I whisper, “It’s strange, isn’t it? I’ve never been more honest with a person as I just was with you, and yet we’re hiding behind these... disguises.”
“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person,” he says, like he’s reciting. “Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.Do you know who wrote that?”
I shake my head.
“Oscar Wilde.” He speaks the name like he’s summoning a ghost.
“Perhaps Oscar Wilde felt that way because he was forced to wear a mask,” I propose. “Maybe if he had been luckier... to live in a time when men like him didn’t have to... I don’t know...”
“I know what you mean.” Shams turns me toward the small, dirty mirror above Brendan’s desk. In the foreground of the mirror is my unrecognizable self. In the background are the dancing boys,some dressed as girls. The reflection of us appears so joyful. Like we’re frozen in this room, in this moment, far from all the fear and judgment outside. “He did what he felt he had to do, in his time. The wife. The children.”
“I want children,” I declare, shocked by my words. “I do. I want to love a child the way Mother loved me. But I don’t... I don’t want a wife. I don’t want to deceive the people I vow to love. I feel cursed sometimes. Fated to have a family who will never know the real me.”
“That may change,” he suggests quietly. “Look at how society has changed in just this last decade. And what’s family anyway? Perhaps this is a family.” He throws his gaze toward the dancing boys. “A family we get to choose for ourselves. A brotherhood.”
“I wouldn’t want to exist in a brotherhood,” I say. “I much prefer women to men. Can’t we be a personhood? Not men and women, but simply people. Just the wordmanis so limiting.”
“I think the maquillage has freed a piece of you,” he says with a smile.
“Maybe.” I look deep into his glowing eyes, under the spell of their browns and oranges. “I suppose I don’t want to be limited to a world of men just because I am... what I am. Mother is the person I love most in the world. Even at the Rooster, the person I connected to the most was Edna, the sapphic Radcliffe girl.”
