He walks into his grade-two classroom with hair spiked liked a punk, earlobes infected from the recent piercings he got at Claire’s, skateboard under his arm, and a lunchbox filled with Brie de Meaux. It’s 1999 in Vernon, British Columbia; the grocery stores don’t carry such foods (they have cheddar cheese and spam.) His mom had just returned from Belgium, their home country, and brought all the delicacies she could risk sneaking back.

“Nice Spitfire skate, girl-lover,” says a boy in a logo-ridden skateboard hoodie. The same boy had recently called him a girl-lover (A harsh insult apparently) after refusing to chant, “Boys rule, girls, drool,” alongside the other boys. Instead, he said, “come on guys, one day we’re gonna marry them.” That caused most of the girls to squirm.

“Yeah, it’s pretty rad. Deck has good pop,” the foreign boy says.

“Come ride in the parking lot with us,” the boy in a logo-ridden skateboard hoodie.

“I thought that wasn’t allowed?”

“Don’t be such a girl.”

It’s lunchtime, and the foreign boy watches the other boys attempt kickflips and pop-shove-its behind the vehicles (most of which are pick-up trucks) to avoid being seen by the supervisors.

“Let’s see some tricks, foreign boy,” says the smallest of the boys.

Foreign boy stands on the skateboard. He’s unaware that he’s goofy (right foot forward) as he copies the other boys. His stance feels awkward, and he instinctively switches his footing. He notices the other boys laughing at him but decides to keep on riding.

“Do an ollie,” shouts the smallest boy.

The foreign boy attempts an ollie, and the skateboard shoots out from under him. He falls flat on his back as the skateboard hits the small boy in the shin.

The kid yelps in pain, falls to the ground and says, “this skateboard is mine now, loser!”

The foreign boy, ignoring his own pain, gets up and offers the boy his hand.

“Ew, you think that I’d touch your foreign hand? You probably eat snails or poo with it.”

The other boys laugh and help their friend. They walk away with the foreign boy’s skateboard.

“You can’t take that from me!”

“Yeah, we can, or we’ll tell the principal that you were skateboarding and hit one of our friends,” says the small boy.

The foreign boy gave up. He had already gotten in trouble with the principal for his self-portrait — he drew himself naked. He thought he’d emulate something similar to Francesco Clemente’s self-portrait, The First, which he had seen in one of his mother’s art books. The principal thought the foreign boy was trying to get attention with inappropriate behaviour; there would be a one-week suspension if anything like that happened again.

The foreign boy will come home crying. His mother and father will do anything in their power to make him feel better. His parents will put on his favourite music — Manu Chau and Bob Marley. He will run upstairs and force himself to listen to the Backstreet Boys. The mother and father won’t understand. The foreign boy will create several imaginary friends. The imaginary friends will make many bets, for instance, telling him that if he runs across a highway, he will be popular one day. He will keep looking up to skateboarders and snowboarders. The boys in his school will grow their hair and have ‘wings’ that come out from under their hats. He will try and adopt this look and put curlers in his hair. The boys will call him a girl. He will contemplate killing himself. He will become one of the best snowboarders in his school. In high school, his peers will praise his fearless attitude. His self-image problems will linger. He will turn orange with self-tanner. His peers will call him an Umpa Lumpa. He will go to the gym. He will get invited to parties and start smoking weed. He will start writing and fall in love with it. He will discover the power women hold over him. He will discover the power he holds over women. He will get on the honour roll. He will graduate with many friends. Vernon’s grocery stores will diversify — the stores will even carry Kombucha. The fact that he has lived in different countries will be considered cool. He will show his friends Manu Chau, and they will become fans. He will attribute much of his success to his fearlessness. At eighteen, he will move to Vancouver to pursue a writing career. He will no longer be considered a foreign boy.

They walk into their grade-three classroom with straightened long hair, nails painted black with a sharpie marker, and wearing a baseball cap tilted downwards. They join their peers sitting in a circle on the floor for show-and-tell. They hunch into a ball, arms wrapped tight around their knees.

A boy brings his hamster adorned in miniature camouflage attire — seemingly cute until the boy tells the class he wants to create an army of para commando hamsters to destroy communists. When the teacher asks the boy if he knows what communists are, the boy replies, “Asian-types that want to destroy our way of life.” The teacher doesn’t see much wrong with the statement. After all, it’s 1998 in Abbotsford, British Columbia.

The corpulent boy sitting next to the hamster-kid pulls out a bag of raw cookie dough from his pocket and tells the class that it’s a special recipe his mom makes. A girl unrolls a poster of Brittney Spears and explains why she’s her idol. Another girl displays her Magic School Bus Book series and tells the class she wants to be a doctor one day. She passes the show-and-tell “speaking ball” to the person next to her, but they don’t answer.

“Take the ball, hun,” says the teacher.

“I didn’t bring anything,” they say under their breath.

“Can you please look at us when you speak? It’s rude not to make eye contact,” says the teacher, western ideals being the only ones she knows. “Is there anything else you might have? You don’t want to receive a zero for today’s show-and-tell participation.”

They stand up and grab their bag. They hesitate, but the awkward silence is unbearable, and so, they pull out a vintage antique doll. Their hair is curly like the dolls, but the doll wears a blue, catholic schoolgirl dress. The doll’s nails are also painted black with a sharpie.

“This is my favourite doll because — ”

“Boys shouldn’t have dolls,” says one of the boys. “Right, teacher?”

“Well, it’s not normal, but anyone can play with what they want.”

“Yeah, it’s weird,” says the corpulent boy with a mouth full of cookie dough.

“The doll’s kind of ugly,” says the girl that idolizes Brittany Spears.

They can’t hold back the tears, and the teacher tells the class that we should respect one another and that there is nothing wrong with being unique. The teacher tells her crying student that he can leave and talk to the councillor if he wishes.

They will go home and discover that their mother threw out their doll collection. They will avoid their drunken father. They will play with their younger brother until he tells them to go away when his friends arrive. They will sneak into their father’s capacious alcohol cabinet in eighth grade. The accessible alcohol will help them find a couple of “friends.” Together, they will take the greyhound to Vancouver. They will see boys kissing boys and girls kissing girls. They will become aroused when they look at a naked boy’s body. They will stare at their own penis and feel confused. They will drink more. They will try ecstasy and feel loved. The week in Vancouver will end when their parents finally find them. They will be beaten. They will dress in women’s clothes. They will be beaten again. They will change their hair weekly. They will want boobs. They will rub self-tanner on their body to accentuate their pecs. They won’t get hired for any apparent reason. The family will outlaw them. They will move to Vancouver after graduation. Caitlyn Jenner will dominate the news. For the first time in their lives, they will be celebrated for who they are. They will remain under one percent of the population and demand that language change. They will be free to be who they are.

When he arrives at his friends’ “man den,” he decides that sitting is out of the question. A film student saving up for his masters and a dude that doesn’t leave the couch share a basement suite in a soon-to-be teardown home in East Vancouver. Pizza boxes and Cariboo beer cans adorn the carpeted stained floor. The furniture is a product of well-practiced dumpster diving.

He and the film student hit it off. If it weren’t for his best friend, a semi-pro skier that had a ski movie to make with the film student, he wouldn’t have known that these boys had also left Vernon to advance their careers and/or indulge in big-city debauchery. They talk about the foreign films they had seen at the Vancouver film festival. Once the bong is passed his way, he and the aspiring master’s student talk about the philosophical rhetoric in arthouse flics.

The more everyone drinks, the more they try and one-up one another with their most lascivious stories.

“I had a threesome in a club washroom last night.”

“I paid a hooker with La Senza gift cards the other day.”

“I had a ball-cuzi.”

“What’s a ball-cuzi?”

“It’s like a jacuzzi for your balls. You just flop ’em in a glass of warm milk, and the chick blows bubbles with a straw.”

It doesn’t matter who says what. Everyone is drunk and twenty, a collection of could-be-men, forming a squadron of boys ready to hit the town.

They arrive at the first bar. The professional skier dances on stage with the band playing top-forties cover songs. Bouncers approach, and the professional skier jumps off the stage while performing a backflip and runs away.

The night becomes blurry, and everyone unwittingly splits up. It’s three in the morning, and all that’s open are the after-hour bars. The film student stands in the line for Gorg-a-mesh, the after-hour bar, unsure what he’s there for, but there are people, and that’s all that matters. The writer searches for his best friend but instead sees the film student in the lineup, and they decide to stick together. Everything becomes a blur — smoking indoors, dancing in cages, people having sex in the washroom, people snorting anything, water bottles being passed around — and they end up in a cab on their way to an apartment party with… they can’t remember their names. All that matters is that they had perfect breasts.

The apartment is spacious, and maybe it has a view of the city. It’s hard to know what’s going on. There are half-naked people, and the place seems luxurious. Sexual moaning comes from one bedroom. A woman invites the boys to join the bedroom fun, but they politely refuse. The boys notice everyone drinking a bottle cap full of something — -they’re told it’s GHB. They think they decline it. The people that brought them there ask if they want to leave the party — the boys agree. Are they leaving the building? Are they even walking? They’re floating. They’re definitely floating, and suddenly they’re both laying on a giant bed, naked.

“Do you mind that we’re queens?” They ask as they reveal their symmetrical plastic breasts.

“I don’t think so,” the boys say.

“Try this,” they say.

“What is it?” one of the boys asks.

They tell them something about it being organic and legal. That it only lasts a few minutes and will give you a quick rush and make your blood flow — it’s poppers. The boys inhale and suddenly feel hornier than a teenage boy that just discovered how his penis works. The queens go down on them, and after an unperceived amount of time, one of the queens stands up, and the writer sees their dick. He feels nauseous.

“I’m sorry, but we have to go.”

“I need to finish this, dude!” says the film student. The queen was now lying on their stomach.

The writer thinks he begs his friend to come with him, but who knows if anything he says makes sense. He’s running or stumbling; it’s hard to tell because he can’t feel his body, only his mind, which is racing to get home.

He will get home and see his best friend passed out on the ground. His best friend will get up when he hears him puking in the washroom. He will cry when he tells his friend what happened. His friend will laugh his ass off. They will laugh together. His best friend will say, “you got a little bit raped. Didn’t know that can happen to a dude.” He will get checked for STIs. He will be clean. The film student will seek counselling. The film student will be okay. The writer will go to the University of British Columbia. He will take a humanities class that discusses marginalized groups. Discussions about orientalism, black people, and natives will take up about fifty percent of class time. Queer theory will take up the other fifty percent. He will be told that members of the LGBTQ society are victims of the heteronormative patriarchy. Victims… He will struggle with that class, but he will agree. He will learn that they will be ridiculed, challenged, accepted, or praised for demanding the pronoun that suits their identity. They feel the power of a single word. And he? He will be too embarrassed and ashamed to use the word I.