Words Are Flowing

Oh Maxwell

When I was only eight years old, I knew there was something wrong with me. My parents either never noticed, or were in denial, but my best friend always pointed it out to me.

“You’re an odd one, Max,” Joan told me every day. I just told her that she must have been just as different to be my friend.

The other boys in my second grade class stayed home all the time, but I always found a way to escape my own house and go to Joan’s. Her older sister babysat us, but she usually just ended up listening to her parent’s radio, letting me and Joan run amok. When this happened, Joan would tell me later, my oddness came through.

“Joan,” I’d ask her. “Can we play dress-up?”

She’d smile, nod her head, and we’d dash across the hall to her sister’s room. While she was busy finding the drawer where Valerie kept her makeup stashed, I investigated the closet. My eyes fell to the floor and, from there, to the tall rack full of shoes. Shiny, sparkly; flat, heeled; every color under the sun, it seemed. On this incident, I took two pairs of heels, yellow spotted and pink leather. I looked up and saw Joan carrying quite a bit of makeup. We headed back to her room.

Joan closed the door behind me and pointed to her small bed. My adrenaline was pumping as I adjusted and organized the things we had raided. Joan went to work trying to find things from her own closet that matched the shoes I picked, and came back with treasures.

“I want the pink!” I told her, and she threw a full, flouncy dress towards me. I carefully put the shoes on the floor in front of me and unlaced my own sneakers.

Joan looked away as I stripped to the boxers my father told me to wear, but she smiled at me when I pulled the dress over my head. She turned me around and buttoned up the back to the nape of my neck.

I sat down on her bed as she changed into her yellow blouse and skirt, but I busied myself picking from the selection of makeup in front of me. When she finished, I had chosen and she approached me.

“Pucker up, Max,” she whispered to me and I son felt a smooth cream rub over my lips. As Joan pushed a brush into my cheek, her sister called.

“Max! Your mother’s here!”

Joan’s eyes darted from me to the door and back again, but I put on the too-big pink heels, looked at myself in her mirror, and brought myself down the hall to my mother.

“Mommy! Look at me!”

“Oh Maxwell.”