It should feel like a retreat. It should feel like my love is diminishing and my feelings are contracting. But instead I have a sense that they’re expanding. And they are doing it because they have to.
I am sure that later on I will doubt this. I know that I will regret it, that I will wonder if this sudden understanding was just a trick of the light. But there are no illusions here. Today is finally today. We are no longer what we were. We are now what we’re going to be.
“I know you’re not ready,” I tell him. “I’m not ready, either. But you know what? It’s happening anyway. And we’re going to be okay. We’ll risk the good thing for the better thing. We’re really, truly going to be okay.”
I feel nearly empty as I finish this sentence. I’ve pulled out as much of myself as I can, and I am offering it to him now, no longer a part of me but not entirely relinquished. And in return, he lets go of the pillow. He opens his arms and says my name over and over, as if at long last he’s found me, as if at long last we understand that this is what we needed to learn.
* * *
Katie is still waiting for me outside.
Of course she is.
I get into the passenger seat, but I don’t close the door. I don’t want her to drive away.
“How’d it go?” she asks.
“I don’t think either Mark or I will be going to school today.”
“Oh wow. Meaning…?”
“Meaning that although for some reason National Coming Out Day is not, in fact, a part of Pride Week, we are rearranging the calendar so Ryan can have his own Coming Out Day. Movies like Pride and old episodes of Glee will be watched. Ice cream will be eaten. There may be some wild dancing to Robyn and Rihanna. You never know.”
“Ice cream? Is that really part of the coming-out process?”
“Hells yes. Ben and Jerry have lasted so long together—they’re our role models.”
“And then…?”
“And then we might invite Taylor over. So I can get to know him, since it looks like he’s my best friend’s boyfriend.”
I try to say this casually, but I stumble a little. After all, it’s the first time I’ve ever had to say it.
“Oh, Mark,” Katie says, concerned. “Is that really smart? You don’t have to do that.”
“No, it’s okay. I’m told that if you’re going to fall in love with someone, it’s always best to fall for someone who’s going to love you back. That’s never going to happen with Ryan, and I am strangely okay with it. At least for now.”
“The heart is a treacherous beast.”
“But it means well.”
Katie smiles. “Yes—the heart is a treacherous beast, but it means well. That just about sums it up.”
“What they never tell you is that it’s actually the friendship part that’s harder. Kissing is easy. Kissing has its own politics, but at the end of the day, it’s kissing. It’s the real stuff—the being-part-of-each-other’s-lives piece of it—”
“—being close to twins without being twins—”
“Yes! That is both the challenge and the reward.”
I look at Katie and know that sometimes it isn’t all that hard, that sometimes you can just fall into step with someone and keep pace for a good long time. Again, it amazes me that a week ago we barely knew each other’s names. Now we’re on this journey together. I know I can only help her so much and she can only help me so much—ultimately, we have to solve our own problems. But it helps to have someone else in step. It helps to have someone to talk to when it’s time to take a break from solving everything.
“So,” I say, “do you think you’ll be talking to Lehna today?” It was obvious last night from her shell-shocked reaction to Lehna’s poem that Katie needs to resolve some of the sentences they’ve left dangling.
“I will,” she says. And then she says it again, as if the first time wasn’t certain enough. “I’ve already talked to my parents about taking a break from the whole college plot. And I still need to talk to Violet about where the hell we go from here. I’ve loved her wandering heart for so long … but I have no idea what all that wandering means for her and me. I feel the urge for going, but I have no idea if it’s meant to be a solo exploration or not.”
“You’ll figure it out,” I say. Not because it’s this vacuous space-filler of a thing to say, but because I genuinely believe it. Katie is going to figure it out. She has enough of the world in her hands to do that.
“Thank you,” she says. Then she leans over and gives me a kiss on the cheek. “Now go help that boy find his way. And remember—as supportive as you want to be, if he and Taylor start being all boyfriendly, you have every right to leave the room and get some space. Empathy is wonderful, but you can still overdose on it if you try too much too fast. Noted?”
“Noted.”
“And while I will turn a blind eye to your willful disregard of your educational responsibilities today, I shall fully expect to be seeing you tomorrow for the grand finale, and again for the full host of Pride Weekend activities, not the least of which is the parade on Sunday. For all her worldliness, Violet’s never seen a pride parade, and I swear by Tegan, Sara, and the Holy Ghost that we’ll be showing her the best one ever.”
“It will be Ryan’s first as well.”
“How lucky they are to have us!” Katie says.
I kiss her back on the cheek and say, “How lucky indeed.”
20
Kate
Making my way toward Lehna at lunch, I feel the closest I’ve ever felt to being one of those lonely freshmen in the first days of school. The unfortunate boys and girls whose families have uprooted them just in time for high school, or the quirky, formerly homeschooled kids, or the kids who live in nearby, more dangerous towns and have found their way, through lottery luck or parental cunning, to our suburban haven of a school.
Lehna and I use to say blessings for them. Let purple backpack kid with the scarf find his people. Pigtailed girl with brand-new white Converse, head north to the circle of girls with their Sharpies out and make those shoes your own.
Eventually, unless they were very unlucky, each of them would find somewhere to belong, but for those first self-conscious, wandering days when they nibbled their sandwiches with their heads down, Lehna and I agonized on their behalf. We had arrived at school hand in hand, both of us newly out to the world with a summer’s worth of scavenged rainbow paraphernalia gracing our backpacks. Rainbow friendship bracelets, Legalize Gay T-shirts, the paper bag covers for our textbooks emblazoned with all the Tegan and Sara songs we knew by heart, which was every one of them.
We were beacons to the other queer kids. We got the hard part over with in eighth grade. No awkward boys asking us to Homecoming, thankyouverymuch. June and Uma, then strangers to us and each other, found us by the rainbow glow of our backpacks. A boy named Hank found us, too, and for six months he filled our lives with comic books and Frank Ocean. And then he started dating Quinn and his parents found out, and he began his slow fade from our school and, eventually, from our lives altogether.
We should have known it already—the world was trying to tell us in so many ways—but Hank is the one who taught us that life wasn’t so easy for all of us. Hank is the one who told Lehna and me that we were lucky. Hank is the one who made luck a sometimes complicated thing.
And it’s Hank I’m thinking about now, as I step down to where my friends are lounging, their backs to me, on the senior deck. They’re looking out at the rest of the school from this hard-won place of seniority. I set my backpack down next to Lehna. I get out my phone and pull up Frank Ocean’s “Super Rich Kids.” I turn the volume up as loud as it’ll go and set it on the railing in front of us.
We bob our heads and listen.
When it’s over, Uma says, “He should be here with us.”
June says, “I went on a rampage once, trying to find him online. I searched everywhere. I even thought of all the fake names he might use.”
“I d
id that once, too,” Uma says.
“Kate and I did, too,” Lehna says. “And I thought I saw him once, on Telegraph. I called his name, but he didn’t look up.”
“We were so young when we were friends.” It’s the kind of proclamation adults would roll their eyes over, but it’s true. “We were fourteen. His voice hadn’t even changed. He was skinny like a little kid. I don’t know if I’d even recognize him now.”
“Hank,” June says. “We are sending you our love, wherever you are.”
We sit in silence for a little while, and then I say, “I have something to tell you guys.”
“Let me guess. You and Mark are getting married.”
“Come on, Lehna,” June says, and we all turn to her, surprised. “What? Things feel normal for the first time in a week. Let’s just try to stay positive, okay?”
“Well, okay,” Lehna says. “Sorry, everyone. Kate, go ahead.”
“I’m going to take a gap year.”
“Seriously?” Uma says. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“But where did this come from?” June asks. “You never even mentioned it. Like, not even as an idea.”
“I know,” I say. “It just kind of came to me.”
“But aren’t you excited about college?” Uma asks.
“Only in a distant-future kind of way.” I feel Lehna looking at me, not critically, but like she’s really listening. I see my opening. I take it: “Distant, like the way I think of my wedding day with Mark.”
“Right,” Lehna says. “You in your white veil, him in his black tux.”
“I know it will happen, but I have to sow my oats first.”
“Work your way through the rest of the baseball players.”
“Only the Varsity team.”
“All those muscles. Those skintight pants, that sexy bulge—”
“Excuse me, but this is actually pretty serious,” June says.
“Is it?” I ask. “I don’t know.”
“Um, yeah. We’re talking about your future. We all worked hard to get into our colleges.”
“And I’m still going to go to college. It’s just…” I wrack my brain for a good reason to give them, and then I give up and just say what’s true. “I want to let things be messy. I want to be free, but only as free as feels right in the moment. And,” I say, “I want to be with Violet.”
“Oh,” June breathes.
“Oh,” Uma echoes.
“Love,” they say.
“Maybe,” I say, because it’s more prudent than yes, because it’s been less than a week since our first kiss, fewer than twenty-four hours since I asked her to trust me. I say maybe because when you’re a teenager there’s this rule: You aren’t supposed to make decisions based on love. You are supposed to tell your heart that it’s an immature and fickle thing. You’re supposed to remind yourself of Romeo and Juliet and how badly it turned out for them.
Your poor teenage heart. It isn’t equipped for decisions like this.
Except maybe. Maybe. It is.
* * *
I still need to talk to Lehna.
Lunch ends and we head to our lockers together.
“What are you doing after school?” I ask her.
“Going over to Shelbie’s. Candace is going to be there, so we’re all going to grab some dinner.”
“Want to get coffee first? I’m heading over there, too.”
“To see Violet?”
“Yeah, and I have to stop by AntlerThorn. I got a message from Brad. Something about the auction.”
“Oh yeah. Congrats on that, by the way.”
“On what?”
“Your painting.”
“What about it?”
“The bidding had just ended when we left the show that night. Yours sold for a lot.”
“Really?”
She laughs, amazed that I don’t know this already.
“Yeah. Like, thousands. I was too pissed for it to totally register, but I know it raised more money than any of the others. Anyway,” she says. “Yeah. I can do coffee.”
* * *
It’s four hours later, and we’re across from each other at a café table in the Mission, identical foam ferns gracing the tops of our cappuccinos. I see the way they match and I just say it.
“Twins.”
She shrugs.
“It was a great poem. Everyone thought so,” I say.
I think about it now, all the ways we had been twin-like, with our identical taste in books and music, our simultaneous realizations that we liked girls, the way we never even entertained the thought of us fooling around because sisters just don’t do that. We even came out together, gathering both pairs of parents in Lehna’s living room as though we were all one family.
“We’re lesbians,” we said in unison, our sweaty, fourteen-year-old hands clasped.
“Are you a couple?” my dad asked.
We turned to each other, surprise at the suggestion momentarily wiping out our nervousness, and cracked up laughing.
I’m crying now. I didn’t see it coming, but here are tears down my cheeks, and then Lehna is crying, too. This café is full of the young and queer and beautiful. Everyone’s slightly older than we are; everyone has lived through something like this already. But still. I know that I’ve ruined something between us. I know that I stopped feeling like Lehna’s twin a long time ago, and it’s a terrible thing to be the one who walks away.
But it’s Lehna who says, “Look. I need to apologize.”
“What for?”
“All that bullshit with Violet. Like telling you to reapply your lipstick, and saying you looked normal, and making you come up with a fake gallery show as if who you are isn’t good enough.”
“Why did you do it?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve been trying to figure it out. It’s just this feeling I got … like you didn’t have fun with me anymore. Like I suddenly wasn’t interesting enough. And I didn’t like feeling that way.”
“I don’t really know what happened to me,” I say.
“You just changed. You went from Katie to Kate. And I don’t really think you wanted to take anyone with you.” She shakes her head. “It sucks to be left behind.”
“I felt so lost,” I say.
“And then, what? Mark helped you find yourself?”
“I’m allowed to make other friends.”
“Of course you are. And you’re allowed to switch them out for me like I was just a stand-in for the real thing the whole time. You’re allowed to replace me, but I’m allowed to be angry about it.”
“I wasn’t trying to replace you,” I say, but even as I get the words out I’m wondering if it’s true.
But now—as Lehna wipes tears off her face—in this moment it’s what’s true. The thought of losing her forever is impossible.
“It’s fine if you make new friends,” she says. “We’re both going to make new friends. For the first time in our lives we aren’t going to live near each other. We aren’t even going to live in the same state. I just don’t understand why it had to happen now. This is the last week of high school, Kate. These are our last days together. They aren’t supposed to be like this.”
I nod.
“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
We stare into our cups. Lehna takes a sip, and I do, too.
“People probably think we’re breaking up or something,” Lehna says.
I smile, wipe the tears off my face, and look around, but I don’t catch anyone paying attention.
“Seems like things are good with Violet,” she says.
Even in the midst of all of this, happiness surges up from some deep place within me.
“Yeah,” I say.
“I’m glad. You guys are gonna be great together.”
“And with Candace?”
She breaks into a slow grin. I recognize her feeling.
* * *
Brad waves to me as I st
ep inside the gallery.
“Hey,” he says.
I brace myself for his verbal onslaught, but nothing follows.
“Hey?” I say. “That’s all?”
“Long day. Audra left early. Sometimes a boy’s gotta take a break.”
“A break from what?”
“From what everyone expects of me,” he says. “Come on back.”
He leads me through the gallery and up a short flight of stairs, his gait less buoyant than usual. Even his hair is more subdued.
“Welcome to my office,” he says.
It’s a small space with concrete walls, metal file cabinets, and a fluorescent light.
“Cozy.”
“It’s a fucking cell. I think it’s Audra’s idea of a joke.”
“She’s a real sweetheart.”
He snorts.
“I just need you to sign this, saying you’re giving the proceeds of your painting to the Angel Project.”
He hands me a contract.
“Sure,” I say.
“We raised over twenty grand for them.”
“That’s amazing.”
“Your painting accounted for almost a third of that.”
“Wait, what?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Total bidding war.”
My hand trembles as I sign my name. I thought Violet was going to be my only collector.
“Garrison’s picking it up today. I told him you would be dropping in around now. Mind waiting a few minutes?”
“Garrison bought it? I can wait.”
We head back into the sunny gallery, and only then do I see my painting. It’s hanging on a wall in a prime spot. I see my others, too. I want to throw a sheet over them to spare me my embarrassment. But this one is different. I can see that.