by Katie Heaney
* * *
—
Twenty years later, I sat in my truck in Ruby’s driveway, opening and closing and reopening the cooler to check to make sure its contents were still cold. I’d pulled up at three on the dot, and decided I’d give her until 3:06 before I texted her to let her know I was there. It was breezy out, so I’d dressed in a jean jacket over a flannel, and I could feel sweat prickling my lower back. I opened the window a crack and flapped the hems of all my shirts up and down until it dried. And then it was 3:06, so I gave her another minute. I was deciding whether or not to give her another minute after that when the front door opened and Ruby emerged. I inhaled sharply. She wore her hair up, with a bandanna tied into a headband, and a very cool oversized fleece jacket that looked legitimately vintage and not fake Urban Outfitters vintage. Bright blue tights covered the skin the tears in her black jeans exposed, and on her feet were floral combat boots.
Again, I thought, That is not the outfit of a strict heterosexual.
We waved at each other through the glass, and smiled at each other when Ruby opened the side door.
“Hi,” she said, climbing into the passenger seat.
“Hi,” I said. “You look great.”
We both blushed, and I turned quickly to look over my shoulder so I could begin the long, backward journey down Ruby’s driveway.
“Thanks,” said Ruby. With her boot she prodded the cooler at her feet. “Is this for us?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Can I look?”
“No.”
Ruby laughed. “Fine. Then I get to choose the beach.”
I panicked a little. This had not been part of the plan. We were supposed to go to my beach, the one with the overlook parking lot, so we could sit in the back of my truck and look at the ocean without getting sand in our food. I wanted us to be safe and at least semi-secluded so we could kiss. Et cetera.
“Which one?”
Ruby smiled. “Just take a right at the stop.”
Three turns later, I pulled into the parking lot of one of La Jolla’s nicest private beaches, famous for allowing—pause for internal screaming—nudity. I’d never been. I wouldn’t say I was afraid of it, exactly; having spent so much of my life in a rowdy girls’ locker room, I’d gotten comfortable enough being naked and seeing naked people. But that was a sports thing, and you were only naked briefly in order to get into different clothes. This was just…voluntary. And Ruby was not my teammate.
“Don’t you have to be eighteen to go here?” I asked, still clutching my steering wheel.
Ruby gave me such a withering look that I half expected to shrink to the size of an ant. “It’s a clothing-optional beach, not a strip club.”
Even the mention of strip club made my face hot. A flashing pink neon sign reading SEX lit up my brain. I was worried if I opened my mouth, it would fall out.
“Are you coming?” said Ruby. Her door was open, and she had one foot on the ground and her beach bag in her lap.
“Yes. Sorry.”
“It’s mostly going to be old-man dicks.”
She was trying to reassure me, but it didn’t work. I took a deep breath, grabbed the cooler and my bag, and got out of the car anyway. We stripped off our outer layers and tied them around our waists. Underneath her jacket, Ruby was wearing the red cropped T-shirt she’d worn onstage at Triple Moon, and I wondered if that was on purpose.
As we began the hike down to the beach itself, I was grateful for two things: one, that Ruby led the way, which meant she’d have to see the naked people first; and two, the trail was long and winding, and for a while I was able to preserve the hope that we might never actually arrive. There were several scenic stops along the way, and each time we approached one I prayed Ruby would announce that she was too tired to carry on, and why don’t we just hang out here. But she never did. The beach and all its nudity got closer and closer, and then we were there.
We paused near the bottom of the trail, ostensibly scanning for the perfect spot.
“You were right,” I said. Among the fifteen or so people I could see, only a few were naked, and they all had one thing in common.
“OMDs?”
I laughed. “Yeah.”
“Let’s go this way.”
We trudged laboriously over the sand, Ruby’s hair whipping around in the wind. When we found a spot she liked, she dropped her bag and bent over to untie her boots. I tried to shake the jumbo-sized towel I’d brought for us to sit on, but the wind wouldn’t let me, so I flung it down and walked around the perimeter, pulling each corner flat. Ruby watched me, looking amused and a little impatient.
“May I sit?”
“Yes. Sorry. Please,” I said.
I joined her, and pushed my tennis shoes off with my feet. For the moment, that was as much as I was willing to take off, even if the sun threatened to burn through my jeans. Ruby tucked her shirt up under her swimsuit top so her stomach would tan, and I tried not to openly stare.
“Are you ready?” I asked.
“For what?”
I pointed to the cooler. “Food.”
“Oh. Yes. Sure.”
This was not as much enthusiasm as I’d hoped for, but I popped open the plastic top and gave Ruby the rundown anyway.
“Wow,” she said finally. “This is, like, an actual picnic.”
“That’s what I promised, isn’t it?”
“No, yeah. I just figured you’d bring, like, a bag of chips.”
I pulled the bag of chips from my tote bag and set it on top of my fancy spread. “Ta-da.”
Ruby smiled in a way I wasn’t sure how to interpret and opened the chips. I made myself a cheese-and-salami cracker and popped the whole thing in my mouth. Then I made one for Ruby, hesitating before handing it to her.
“Oh my God—you eat meat, right?”
She nodded, and the panic rising in my throat subsided. I handed her the cracker and she bit into it.
“Good? Do you want another one?”
Ruby blinked. “I mean, I’m still—”
“Right. I’ll give you a minute.”
I became uncomfortably aware of the sound of her chewing, and my watching her chewing, and my knee bouncing against the towel beneath me. I forced myself to look away, directly at the ocean, where there were no nudes. Except for all the animals. Before I could do anything to stop it, that picture of the giant pink whale penis we’d all been obsessed with for a full week during freshman year was in my head.
Ruby reached over and clasped her arm around my wrist, which made me jump.
“Quinn. Relax.”
“Sorry,” I said. We looked at each other. My leg came to a halt. Her hand was still on my arm. So I leaned forward, and I kissed her.
This wasn’t the plan. We’d just gotten to the beach. We’d barely picnicked at all. The sun was still up. There were naked men not very far away.
But I let all that go as soon as she kissed me back. And it was unmistakable: she leaned forward, and my whole body shifted back with the force of her face pressed into mine. Her skin smelled like almonds. Her lips were soft. Her breath was salty like salami, one of my favorite foods. I reached out, so eager to finally touch her hair, but before I got there she pulled back. Quickly. And just like that, my panic was back in full force. Wind whipped against my ears, so cold it hurt.
“I’m sorry,” I said reflexively. She looked down at her lap instead of at me. “Did you not…” I trailed off. The polite thing to do, I knew, was to give her plausible deniability. But I’d felt what I felt. She’d wanted to kiss me, too.
She did, right?
“No, I did,” said Ruby. “I just…it’s just…I’m not sure.”
My living-room floor. Jamie refusing to look at me. Jamie getting up to leave. Months of silence and confusion. I
felt it all again, now twice as strong. I thought I might cry, so I leaned back, making a pillow of my flannel shirt, as if all I really cared about was working on my tan.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
“You don’t want to talk about it?” My eyes were closed and I couldn’t tell from Ruby’s voice whether she was disappointed or relieved. But I knew which was more likely.
“It’s okay, really,” I said. I opened an eye to squint at her. “Let’s just pretend it didn’t happen.” She was watching me, so I attempted a smile. “Seriously.”
She smiled back, and it broke my heart.
Ruby lay next to me, not too close, not too far away. We were quiet for what felt like hours, and maybe it was. I had wanted to ask her about the band, and the benefit concert, and—I almost laughed out loud—homecoming, but there was no way I could do that now. I couldn’t believe I’d let myself count on the best possible version of events. I kept opening my mouth to say something, but then—what? I couldn’t come up with a single thing. Eventually the sun started to fall, and the wind picked up, and I could hear the naked people packing up their chairs and umbrellas.
“Are you cold? I’m kind of cold,” she said.
“Freezing,” I said. “We can go.”
My meticulous picnic was still mostly intact, and I knew I’d be sadly chipping away at it in packed lunches all week. The trail I’d appreciated on the way down was torturous in reverse. The worst part was that our backs were turned to the changing sky. The sun set when we weren’t looking. The darkness I dropped Ruby off in didn’t feel romantic, or exciting, like the good kind of trouble. It felt ominous and cold.
“Thanks,” she said in her driveway.
“Sure,” I said, wondering what for. I was pretty sure she’d just been on the worst non-date of her life. She slung her bag over her shoulder and jumped out of the truck. Go, I pleaded in my head. Please just go. But she hesitated.
“See you tomorrow?”
Did I have a choice?
“See you tomorrow,” I said. And then she left, and it was over. Once I turned off her street I put on Céline Dion, and I let myself do the crying I’d been holding in for hours.
So, fuck homecoming, if you asked me. Frankly, it was an imposter of a dance—a big bureaucratic hoax. Every year, the student government led a spirit week leading up to the Friday pep rally, where we engaged in the collective delusion that this year, our football team might be good enough to finish the season in triumph. That this year, they’d draw crowds far beyond the players’ girlfriends and the handful of students who picked the bleachers as a place to be drunk or stoned on Friday nights. In fact, those kids would stop drinking and smoking altogether. The unlikely scrappiness of our newly beloved Mustangs would turn us all into starry-eyed, well-behaved superfans who got into all the right colleges.
As usual, Monday was Pajama Day. But I did not wear pajamas.
Tuesday was Dress Like the Nineties Day. Any resemblance between my outfit and those worn in the 1990s was entirely coincidental. In Civil Liberties, Jamie and I presented our debate to our very bored classmates, most of whom wore some combination of baggy jeans and plaid shirts, choker necklaces and ponytails in scrunchies. Mr. Haggerty gave us ninety-one out of one hundred. Jamie was mad. I was thrilled.
Wednesday was Meme Day. Thursday was Halloween, for which I dressed, lazily, as Megan Rapinoe, wearing her jersey and a silver chain necklace. Friday, School Spirit Day. I wore my soccer sweatshirt, but not because I felt spirited. I was just tired of dressing myself by then, and it was the clothing item closest to my bed when I rolled out of it.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been as miserable as I was. Every day since our ill-fated kiss, Ruby had texted me, numerous times. Not about the kiss itself, or what it meant, but normal things, like what we would have talked about before. At first I was excited to see her name on my screen, relieved that she would not be taking the total shunning route. But then a day passed, and then another, and she remained so insistently friendly that it started to make me feel worse than if she’d never texted me at all.
As if that weren’t enough to worry about, Ronni and I had the Beach Cup that weekend, the last tournament of the club team season. Held on the UCSD campus in La Jolla every early November, the Beach Cup was a college showcase, attended by hundreds of coaches looking to make their final selections for the following season. On Saturday every team played three or four games, and on Sunday, depending how well you did, you played up to four more. If, like most girls on my team, you’d already accepted a school’s offer, the Beach Cup was low-stakes, a chance to show off, gossip about the other teams, and eat parent-provided snacks on the sidelines. You went home bone-tired and sunburned but essentially happy, impressed with all your body could handle. I’d felt that way as a junior. But going into the same tournament as a senior with no set college plan, it felt like stepping onto a rope bridge stretched precariously between two canyons. I couldn’t see the other side, and I couldn’t see where I’d land if I fell. After the Beach Cup, the school season started up. And if by our first game, a week after the cup, I still didn’t know which college team I’d be playing for, my soccer career was as good as over. Some no-name D-II school would surface, offering me the chance to be their very best player, and that would be the last you ever heard of Quinn Ryan.
So it was with this outlook on life that I arrived home on Friday, having bailed at the last minute on the team carbo-loading at Kate’s house, citing family obligations. (Mercifully, Ronni, understanding I needed to be alone, changed the subject on the team group text so everyone would stop harassing me.)
I staggered in the door, weighed down by my bag, which was filled with a season’s worth of water bottles and socks and various trash. I felt my pocket vibrate but ignored it, sure that Kate or Janelle was still giving me shit. I let my bag drop to the floor and threw myself on the couch before retrieving my phone.
I gasped. My team hadn’t texted me. Ruby had.
What are you doing tomorrow night
I gasped again. I bolted upright, watching the text bubble reappear, then disappear, reappear again, disappear again. What was I doing tomorrow night, she wrote…? As if tomorrow weren’t Saturday, the most datelike of all nights? As if—oh my God—tomorrow weren’t also the night of the homecoming dance? For a brief, deranged moment, I wondered if Ruby Ocampo was about to ask me to the dance. Then I pictured her saying or even thinking those words—Will you go to the dance with me?—and burst into laughter. There was no way.
So then what?
The bubble returned and I held my breath.
David’s having a party
if you wanted to come
I exhaled. I had to admit: I was ever so slightly disappointed she wasn’t asking me to homecoming after all. But this…this was better. This was a party for people too cool to care about homecoming, of which I was not one.
David Tovar? I asked, for some reason. As if it could be any other David.
Lol yes
Idk why I clarified, I wrote.
I would have agreed to any David.
Cool. Pick me up at 9?
I screamed a little.
OK, I texted.
I hugged my phone to my chest, eyes closed, already imagining the following night. Then my phone buzzed again, and I grinned, ready to read another conversation-extending sign-off from Ruby. But this time it was just the soccer group text again, a picture of heaps of spaghetti meant to make me question my choices. Which, now, I was.
Fine. I’ll be there in 20, I wrote, and ran out the door grinning.
* * *
—
On Saturday, I used my excitement for the party with Ruby as both fuel and distraction. It helped, under the eyes of so many coaches, to have my mind a few hours ahead, with something more than my athletic fate to look forward to. All
the coaches I’d ever spoken to were there, including UNC and UCLA, though I didn’t look for them in the stands. I’d emailed both beforehand to remind them of my interest, as was standard protocol, but coaches weren’t allowed to talk to players at the tournament, or vice versa. This was fine with me, as it further helped me pretend they weren’t there. Before the first game began I did all the pressure-lowering techniques I’d learned in therapy, and they actually kind of worked. We won two of our four games and tied one, but I made some of the best plays I’d made all year, and got team-tackled twice.
By the time I got home I was physically exhausted but mentally amped. When I showered I was pleased to find I’d tanned fairly evenly, which made my teeth and eyes look brighter. I dried my hair before slathering it in wax, then began trying on every combination of T-shirt + pants I owned before landing on a black T-shirt, black jeans, and black Vans, plus my blue jean jacket, for variety. Then I had to fix my hair again, which took more wax, and then more water, and then spray, until it reached a stiff sort of sheen.
When I left, my mom eyed me suspiciously.
“Did you wash your hair?”
“Yes!” I said, but I ducked before the entryway mirror to double-check.
“Oh, so that’s, like, the look.”
“Mom. Please.”
“No, I get it now. You look dope.”
“Mom.” I opened the front door. “I’m going now. Bye.”
She waited at the door a moment before calling out another of her favorite jokes: “Don’t get pregnant!”
I tried to suppress my smile. I didn’t want to encourage her.
On the way over to Ruby’s I sang along to a playlist called Modest Expectations, formerly Everyone Is Counting on You. (Ronni’s revision.) It was a playlist I typically listened to within the privacy of headphones on the bench before soccer games, but I needed its (modestly) hyping effect now more than ever. World Cup anthems blasted through the speakers until I turned onto Ruby’s street and abruptly turned them off, figuring she’d be less likely to judge me for a silent car than one playing Shakira’s “Waka Waka.” Good thing, too, because this time, Ruby was waiting at the bottom of her driveway. She was tapping furiously at her phone, but she smiled when she looked up and saw me.
