Lexi Seidel

“You don’t know me or Maggot. If you saw the two of us let’s say in second grade, you’d see two of a kind. Two white boys more or less. My dead father being Melungeon, which passes generally for white, mixed with my little blondie mom. So I’m not as white as some, but enough to say so. Two little rascals then, in Walmart tennis shoes and dirty fingernails: if you’re from the city, I guess you’d say a couple of little hillbillies. Matched pair.
Now I’m going to jump ahead, which is breaking my promise, but just for a minute. Ninth grade. I’ve got a lot of growth on me and a tiny red mustache. Maggot has grown his hair to his shoulders and started stealing eyeliner and nail polish from his cousins, worse case Walgreens. He’s got spending cash, but a boy can’t walk in and buy those things. Because he aims to use them. To switch out the tennis shoes also. Mrs. Peggot’s homemade clothes we had turned against hard, no-thank-you on the fringe cowboy shirts. But now Maggot’s tastes have started circling back around to the eye-catching.
Now take a look at us: a straight boy and a queer. No matter who you are, whatever else you might say—“Good for him,” or “I want to kick his face in,” or even “I don’t give a damn”—you still saw what you saw. A boy and a queer. The eye sees what it cares enough to see. Even though I’m exactly the same kid I was, and so is Maggot. He was always the same Maggot.
It was me that started calling him that. We were little, and it was hilarious. And it was me that kept it up. Because Matty Peggot goes to school, and what is he going to be there but Matty Faggot? I tried to make an end run around that one. I can’t say the other names never got called, they did. But apart from that night with Stoner, they weren’t said where I could hear them.
I wasn’t clueless to people’s thinking. But a thing grows teeth once it’s put into words. Now I felt that worm digging, spitting poison in my brain, trying to change how I saw Maggot. How I felt about people seeing the two of us together.
Up to then, I was a casual collector of reasons to hate Stoner. That night a fire got lit. For what he’d done to my head, I would burn the man down.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead