Conklin was routinely late for first period. He should have been in one of the clusters of kids hanging around waiting for Mr. Which was why he shouldn’t have been standing alone. It made him an easy vote and I’d bet he won by a landslide. So that left Andrew.Īndrew was the type who’d gotten popular by being nice to people and by getting involved wherever he could help out, which was the best type of popular. There was no way I was voting for the jock, who was certain to pick up three or four Most Something-or-Other titles by the time the voting was done.

I was gay too, but no one knew it back then and I didn’t figure that meant I had to vote for Roger. They’d given us three choices for Most Popular Boy: Andrew, Rick the quarterback, and a gay guy named Roger who was the flamboyant theater type. They’d handed out the ballots in homeroom back in the fall, before I’d gotten so jaded about personal relationships, back when I’d had my own clique and didn’t really care who was more popular than who because I had what I needed. In our yearbook, fresh off the presses last week, there was a photo labelled Most Popular Boy, and the photo was of Andrew Lavoitt-lacquered dark brown hair and wide, dark brown eyes, dressed in a lime green polo and over-dyed skinny jeans, sporting a grin so sincere it didn’t make you want to smack it off his face, not even with the label Most Popular hanging over his head. He was the most popular boy in our graduating class after all. Andrew Lavoitt was never meant to be an island.

Kitchen Sink Dom by Tanya Chris