Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter by Alison Wearing Page A

pulsed with the high-pitched, chimpanzee-esque chanting of the Bee Gees and I felt cool and sophisticated for the first time in my life. And then the words came out:
    â€œMy dad’s gay.”
    There. I’d said it.
    Oh my God. I’d
said
it. I’d
said
it. I’d actually fucking
said
it.
    Jessica lay beside me, torturously silent.
    The panting and squealing of the Bee Gees throbbed around us.
    â€œGet outta town,” Jessica eventually said in a tone that meant
stop fooling around
.
    â€œMy dad’s gay,” I said again. (Oh my God, I’d fucking said it
again
!)
    More silence.
    Until finally she asked, “You mean, like a
fag
?”
    I didn’t know how to answer that. So I didn’t.
    â€œFor real? Like … he does it with other
guys
?”
    I didn’t know how to answer that either. Or maybe I just didn’t want to answer that.
    Jessica shifted her position on the floor. Drank some more. Let another song go by. By the time she spoke again, she was thick-lipped and droopy, the alcohol seeping into all the spaces between the words.
    â€œSo … is yer mom gonna kick ’im out?”
    I shrugged. Had no idea.
    â€œSo … is it kinda weird t’be around him now or is it just kinda the same?”
    I shrugged again. Had no idea.
    We both retreated into our respective stupors, letting the primatological disco music dominate the moment.
    â€œWell, I’ll still like ‘im,” Jessica eventually promised. “And I won’t tell anyone anything
—honest
.” She tipped more rum into her can of Coke, tucked the bottle back under the sofa and leaned into my ear. “And holy fuck, you think that’s bad,” she said in a husky whisper. “My dad’s been havin’ an affair for the last twelve years. He’s even got a kid over’n East City that we’re not s’posed to know about.”
    Mr. Bell. Lawyer, school board trustee, pillar of the community.
    Once Jessica had poured out the details of her story, we sat on the floor together, blinking in all the new information.The music ended, leaving the needle of the record player tripping—
flumb flumb flumb
—against the label. We sat in the blurry stillness of the basement until Jessica said, “Shit, man. I can’t figure out which one of our lives is more fucked up.”
    â€œYeah, I know what you mean,” I said, stupefied.
    We roped our arms around each other like survivors of a shipwreck and carried each other upstairs. Sitting on the shag carpet of her lacy, pink bedroom—neither of us felt steady enough to sit on her bed—we stared at the ceiling and digested the evening’s revelations all over again.
    â€œYou know what?” Jessica finally said angrily, kicking through the silence with her signature expression: “Men suck.”
    In Jessica’s mind pretty much everything eventually sucked. School sucked. Summer holidays sucked. Snow sucked. The boy she had liked at school sucked. The girl he now hung out with sucked. And now men sucked. It was hardly a surprise.
    â€œYeah,” I said, feeling nauseated from my initiation into alcohol as I lay down on the carpet and pressed my cheek into the crimps of the shag. It felt nice against my face. I wished I had shag carpeting in my bedroom.
    â€œGet off the floor,” Jessica said, prodding me softly with her foot. “My mom’ll know we’ve been drinking if we’re lying all over the floor. Not that it matters: they went to a party, so my dad’ll be hammered too.” She paused, then concluded: “My dad sucks.”
    We heard their car pull into the driveway and we climbed into bed. The front door opened and closed, her parents clomped up the stairs, and a few terse words passed betweenthem as they walked down the hallway towards Jessica’s bedroom. Something about “… so don’t deny it, Jack, I’m not