by Katie Heaney
“Wow.”
“Still wasn’t enough,” she added. I laughed as if I agreed, like I wasn’t wondering if Elon might still need a babysitter now.
We reached the end of the promenade, and without buildings on either side of us the breeze cut coldly across my shoulders. Ruby saw me shiver and looped her sweatshirt-covered arm through my bare one. I was afraid to look at her but I did it anyway. We were close enough that I could see twin freckles at her temple, which for some reason made me think of Frankenstein, which I still hadn’t finished. I was supposed to be halfway into Ceremony by now.
“It’s the least I can do,” said Ruby.
“What is?”
With her free arm she pointed at the one wrapped around mine.
“Oh right. Thanks.”
We crossed the bridge into the rose garden, which was lit only patchily, and therefore empty. I couldn’t tell Ruby about the duke-and-duchess thing (obviously), but I wanted to play my game. I wanted to do whatever I could to make the night last. So I told Ruby the rules: find your favorite flower here, and I’ll find mine. I started to walk away—I liked to start in a particular spot—but Ruby took my hand.
I froze, staring at our hands like I’d never seen anything like them and didn’t know what to do next. But I didn’t let go, and neither did Ruby.
“I’m scared,” she said.
My heart was in my throat.
“It’s dark,” she continued.
Oh, that.
“Can’t we find our favorite ones together?”
Technically speaking, that was against the rules. That sort of thing compromised the integrity of the individual’s choice. But I figured I could make an exception, just this once.
“So tell me the deal with your dad,” she said. Her hand was warm and small in mine. I wanted to look at it, lift our hands to my face, but then what? I couldn’t risk alerting her to their togetherness. If she thought about it too much she might stop.
“What do you mean?”
“You said he’s moving back from Virginia.”
“Maybe moving back. From North Carolina.”
“Same thing,” she said, and we grinned at each other in the dark before she continued. “So would that be a good thing, if he came back? Or not?”
“Not if I’m going to be there for college,” I said, surprising myself with that if. I needed to change the subject. “These are good ones,” I said, using my free hand to point to the yolk-yellow roses labeled GOLDEN CELEBRATION. Ruby peered at them politely. “I’m worried you’re not taking this seriously,” I added. She laughed.
“I’m old-fashioned,” she said. “I think roses should be red.”
“Ah.” I nodded. “Well, just wait for the Ingrid Bergmans.”
“So which one of your parents filed for divorce?”
I was delighted by how blunt she could be. “Why, you a lawyer?”
“Sorry.” She shrugged. “Sometimes I wonder which of my parents would be the one to file. Like, I think my mom loves my dad more than he loves her, but I also think he needs her more than she needs him. So I go back and forth.”
“Dark,” I said.
“I know.” We walked in silence for a minute, dipping in and out of lamplight, passing the beach roses, the Gertrude Jekylls, the Sunsprites.
“It was my mom,” I said finally. “But according to her, he basically forced her hand.”
“You don’t believe her?”
“No, I do,” I said. “I don’t know why I said it like that.”
“You’re still mad,” explained Ruby, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. But I wasn’t. I knew they shouldn’t be together, and maybe never should have been. I was relieved when they’d told me. I’d always liked them better individually. But.
“I just didn’t want him to move,” I said. “But he’s been gone so long I’m not sure I want him to come back.”
“This one,” said Ruby, stopping suddenly. She unclasped my hand and pointed to a full, blood-red bloom, lit from the lamppost above. I beamed, quickly cured of the devastation of not holding Ruby’s hand by the all-encompassing pleasure of being right.
“Ingrid Bergmans,” I said. “I told you.”
“You get me.”
My hand tingled where hers had touched mine. I didn’t know what to do with it. What had I used this hand for before holding Ruby’s? It hung at my side, useless and cold. And then, as if guided by a force I couldn’t control, it lifted to the stem of Ruby’s favorite rose, breaking it off in one clean snap.
Oh my God, I thought. I am going to jail. I offered the rose to Ruby, who looked as shocked as I felt. And, I thought, more than a little impressed.
“Wow,” she said. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. “Now we have to get out of here.”
“What about yours?”
I looked around me, but there was no sign of the law, at least not yet. So I grabbed Ruby’s free hand and pulled her into a run, making a break for the orangey-pink Louis de Funès roses. “There!” I whispered, pointing randomly as we flew past them, back over the bridge, laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe.
* * *
—
On Saturday my night with Ruby felt like a dream come true. On Sunday it just felt like a dream—a rose garden? Really? By Monday I was starting to question my sanity: Had it happened the way I remembered it, or had I made the best parts up? My therapist, Jennifer, had once explained that my memory didn’t work right when I experienced severe anxiety, but I hadn’t been anxious that night, had I? I was nervous and excited, and sometimes that felt similar, but it wasn’t the same. I was an anxious individual, but that did not mean I’d invented two (two!) separate instances of fairly prolonged hand-holding with the literal coolest girl at school.
What it meant, though, was still a mystery. History had taught me to be cautious of the casual girl-on-girl handhold. For some reason, straight-girl best friends did it all the time, and I was supposed to believe none of them wanted to kiss. Ruby knew I was an out, proud, capital-L Lesbian, and so it must have occurred to her that I might think it was more than friendly. But whenever I thought I knew anything about the things straight girls did, they moved the goalpost.
It didn’t help that Ruby and I hadn’t texted the rest of the weekend, leaving me without any sort of verbal confirmation. (What, did I want her to text me Thanks for the romantic hand-holding in the Balboa Park rose garden, Quinn Ryan? Yes, that would have been nice.) I was going to, but then I thought I should let her go first, seeing as the last move made was mine. But then she didn’t go at all.
It did occur to me that she might be waiting for me the same way I was waiting for her. And then I thought: Yeah, right.
I’m not saying I’m psychic, but all Monday morning I knew something horrible was about to happen. I texted my mom at work to make sure she was okay, and she was. I found Ronni in the hall between second and third period and asked her if she was okay, and she told me to get a grip. I raced into the cafeteria at lunch to make sure Jamie and Alexis were okay too, and when I saw them sitting there, apparently alive, I exhaled in relief.
But then I saw they weren’t alone. Natalie freaking Reid was sitting next to Jamie, at our lunch table, and voilà: I’d found my something horrible.
I had three choices: One, I could make a break for the nurse’s office, claiming sudden-onset flu. I probably wouldn’t even have to fake it. I definitely felt like throwing up.
Two, I could sit with Kate and Janelle from my team and their assorted friends, and explain myself later.
Or three, I could sit in my normal spot, across from my best friend and my worst enemy, because I knew if I did anything else, all I would do was wonder what I’d missed. What I hadn’t been there to see for myself.
I approached th
e table too fast, sat down too fast, said “Hey, guys” too fast, opened my lunch too fast. Ronni gently put her foot on top of mine, both a warning and a private show of support. “What’s up?” she said in a tone that communicated You are acting insane.
I laughed. “Not much.” I could feel Natalie’s eyes on me, so I met them. “Hey, Natalie,” I trilled. “How are you?”
Ronni pressed harder on my toes.
“Hey,” said Natalie. “I’m…good. How…are you?”
“Great,” I said. On Jamie’s other side, Alexis radiated excitement, like a kid on Christmas morning. I wanted to yank the string cheese from her hand and hit her with it.
“You guys hear about Mr. Hughes?” Ronni half shouted. Everyone’s shoulders dropped two inches, relieved to have something impersonal and uncontroversial to talk about: the skeevy tenth-grade biology teacher suspended for sexual harassment. Or, well, an investigation regarding sexual harassment claims. But calling it that was, for us, an irrelevant formality. Between the five of us only Ronni had had him for biology, but it didn’t matter. Every girl in the school knew, whether they’d taken his class or not: he did it.
We took turns rehashing the rumors we’d collected since that morning, when he didn’t show up for class.
“I guess his sub announced herself as the ‘long-term substitute,’ ” said Jamie.
“She did,” confirmed Alexis. “She said Hughes was out attending to ‘personal matters.’ ”
“I wonder how he got caught,” said Natalie freaking Reid.
“Emails,” said Alexis.
“I heard there were pictures, too,” said Ronni.
“Instagram screenshots, yes.”
“Who’s the girl?” I asked, just for something to say. “Or, girls.”
Alexis leaned in confidentially. “Danea Traverso. Sophomore. Obviously.”
Natalie’s eyebrows rose clear off her head.
“You know her?” said Ronni.
Natalie nodded. “She’s my neighbor.”
Alexis pounced. “Really? Do you talk to her? Apparently she didn’t come today. Maybe you should check on her.”
“We don’t really talk anymore,” said Natalie. “She’s…” She trailed off, shrugging judgmentally. From her tone, and the look on her face, it was obvious that Natalie thought Danea was bad somehow. Maybe even deserving. I looked at Jamie, who was watching Natalie, realizing the same thing I was. I’d never met Danea Traverso, or even heard her name, but I felt certain then that I would kill for her.
“So you really don’t know her, then,” I said.
“Well—”
“Shouldn’t we be focusing on Hughes?” Jamie interjected. “He’s the grown man DM-ing teenagers on Instagram.” Her eyes landed on mine for a millisecond before dropping to her lunch tray’s half-eaten contents.
“Totally,” said Alexis.
There ensued an awkward silence in which I worried everyone could hear my heart thumping angrily against my chest. I had to say something.
“So, Natalie,” I said. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”
The bones in my toes crunched beneath Ronni’s boot. Luckily, I no longer felt pain.
“What?” said Natalie.
“Because you don’t normally sit with us,” Jamie explained. No one else would have heard the exasperation in her voice, but I did.
“Oh!” Natalie giggled. “I was like, ‘What?’ ”
“I wanted her to,” Jamie cut in. This time it was me who had to feign interest in my food. Jamie and Natalie had band together before lunch, and now I pictured them leaving it together, walking here together, having so much to say to each other that they couldn’t possibly separate for twenty-three minutes.
“Aw,” said Natalie. I tried not to stare as she rested her head on Jamie’s shoulder. I felt Ronni watching me. The warning bell rang, and I leapt up, my sandwich entirely untouched.
“I—forgot a book I need,” I explained hurriedly. “See you guys later.”
I held back tears all the way to my hiding spot, the weird two-stall bathroom at the far end of the hallway between the locker rooms and the gym. I allowed myself a brief cry while I ate my sandwich on the toilet, and when the second warning bell rang, I got up, splashed water on my face, and reentered the terrible world outside.
That night, I decided something had to be done.
Jamie had tried extra hard to talk to me in Civil Liberties, and I had ignored her, pretending to be fully absorbed in the Fourth Amendment. I smiled once at Ruby across the room, and while she smiled back, it was pinched and joyless. After class I caught her in the hallway, but I had soccer to get to, and she had a ride to catch, and I didn’t want to know who with, so we only talked for a minute. No acknowledgment of the rose garden or the mythical hand-holding was made. Ruby said she’d text me later, and I said, “Okay, I’ll text you a reminder.” This, at last, made her smile for real.
Here was my secret: I’d used that line before. And as soon as I said it to Ruby, all I could think about was the time I’d said it to Jamie. And then, for some reason, I pictured Jamie using it on Natalie.
It was then and there that I decided the reason I wasn’t moving forward with Ruby was because Jamie kept dragging me backward. It wasn’t even the real her, because the real her was clearly occupied with Natalie freaking Reid. It was last-year Jamie, last-summer Jamie, who was still squatting in my brain. I didn’t want everything I did with Ruby to only be a shadow of something I’d already done with Jamie. If I was ever to be so lucky as to kiss Ruby, I didn’t want to compare it to anything else.
So after I ate the dinner my mom had left out for me, and poked my head into her office so we could confirm we’d both lived through the day, I went into my room, closed the door, and removed the pieces of Jamie from their hiding spots one by one. I slipped the note from The Return of the King that changed everything. From under my mattress, I removed the photo-booth strip of us making faces and kissing. I surveyed the room like a crime scene, collecting every potential clue: the movie-ticket stubs; the hair ties she’d left behind; the books she’d lent me, her name and the year printed neatly inside each cover. Once all that was done, I could no longer pretend I wasn’t avoiding the most incriminating evidence of all: the shoebox that held our letters, pushed deep under my bed.
The plan was not to reread them. The plan was to throw them away, or maybe even burn them. But I had never once cleaned my room without first examining every object I’d ever owned, no matter how many times I’d done so before. I studied the box from all angles, like a foreign object I’d only just dug up. On the lid I’d written BABY PICTURES, thinking, I guess, that this would seem less suspicious for me to store under my bed than an unlabeled shoebox. I lifted the corner of the box top with one finger, pretending for the benefit of no one that I was barely interested in what was inside. Somehow I felt that if I pulled each piece of paper out one by one, without ever removing the top, it didn’t really count.
I tried skimming them, focusing on the spaces between the lines, and for some of them—the boring ones from early on, when we were so enamored that every point-by-point description of the other’s day was Nobel-worthy poetry—it was almost easy. But toward the middle, and then the end, as the notes got less frequent, I got lost in them, looking for signs that she’d stopped loving me, or would soon. I’d done this before, right after it happened, and hadn’t seen them. But I’d been raw then, in total denial. By now, I thought, I should be able to tell myself the truth about what I saw.
But I read, and I reread, and I still didn’t see it. Not even in the ones I knew she’d written after we had a fight. And even though that didn’t make it any easier to understand, it allowed me to unclench my jaw, and un-hunch my shoulders, and imagine a future in which I never really understood, and was okay anyway.
In order to get th
ere, I knew I had to get rid of the letters. Everything was layered chronologically like sediment, and the line where our friendship turned into something else was clear. I excavated everything above that line and put it in a plastic grocery bag I retrieved from under the sink, and tied the handles into a knot. I dumped the rest of the box on the floor and sifted through the early notes, the fake tattoos we saved for who knows what, a small stack of flyers for our failed Gay-Straight Alliance. I picked up a tight paper football, realizing what it was before I even opened it: the Straight Girls We Wish Weren’t list.
I could’ve sworn Jamie had the list, or that we’d long ago thrown it away. I unfolded it carefully, the paper worn thin from so many openings and refoldings and amendments. Straight Girls We Wish Weren’t (SGWWW) was written at the top in Jamie’s neat purple handwriting, and below it, Ruby Ocampo was number one.
Just like I remembered, Natalie Reid was number three.
I scanned the rest of the names, some of which I still felt the same way about, some of which I didn’t. I imagined the revisions we’d make if Jamie were with me: we’d cross out Melissa Moore, who moved away, and replace her with some cute sophomore or junior. We’d have to cross out Indya Schoenberg, who’d taken a hard right, politically speaking, and no longer seemed as attractive as she once had. I’d add Erin Moss, who turned eighteen early and got four tattoos before senior year started, and if I knew Jamie, she’d add Ariel Park, who’d become a six-foot-tall volleyball superstar. For a minute I considered drawing a line through Natalie’s name, wondering if the list might work like a voodoo doll and make her disappear. Either way, she no longer belonged there.
But changing the list, especially alone, would ruin its sanctity. It felt a little eerie finding it now, with number one and number three so newly enmeshed in our lives. Neither of us had considered the list actionable, and yet here we were. And even though I still hated Natalie, and always would, I couldn’t help feeling proud of Jamie and me. Our younger selves would be so impressed.
