This Story is Not About You You are 14 years old, the only daughter of your mother and father, spending the two defining teenage years of your life in the middle of nowhere. Of course, the middle of nowhere has a name; one hour and 53 minutes outside of Roswell—of UFO crash site fame—is Good, New Mexico, a small town off I-285 with a population of 4,206 people. It is exactly 11 miles from the Texas border if you were to draw a straight line, and the host of what you consider to be the smallest military base in the United States. You live in a concrete duplex with a green tin roof built for shift workers, with the bedrooms at the front of the house and the living room at the back, like all the other military families. It is in a cul-de-sac of a neighborhood of identical duplexes next to a playground made of green plastic. This neighborhood is backed up to the place where an arroyo winds its way below the Cherish Range, which is really nothing more than rocky hills above the flat land that look artificial, like a billboard cutout against the blue, cloudless sky. You go to Good High School, the only high school in the town, with seven other military teenagers in ninth grade. The middle and elementary schools are located on the same campus, comprised of single-story buildings capped with white tin awnings and a carefully manicured lawn for recess. You sit next to Brian on the bus home. Your school bus is driven by a woman named Shirley, who drinks from an extra-large cup of soda every afternoon and never looks in the rear-view mirror as long as everyone is quiet enough. At the back of the bus, students crowd into the aisle next to each other and bus surf, all trying to maintain their balance without gripping onto the seat backs as the bus moves and sways and stops. The bus stops for you down the road from the casino, a restaurant called the Nice Slice, and the convention center where there was once a Def Leppard concert, so that you can cross the street to your uniform neighborhood and walk down the road to your uniform cul-de-sac. You meet the Wilson family for the first time at Nora Park for the Good Talent Show-
Q* Anthology of Queer Culture 51
