by Katie Heaney
“You were always going to leave me,” she said. “From the minute we got together, or maybe even before—and I just didn’t notice because I liked you so much—you were fixated on the future. And in your future, you moved across the country and became a national soccer star, and it was clear I wasn’t there.”
I felt a knot form in my chest and descend to my stomach. My face got hot and my ears rang. All the signs were there: I’d been called out, caught doing something wrong even if I hadn’t fully realized I was doing it. Though part of me had known. I had to have known. Because I knew instantly that Jamie wasn’t wrong to have felt that way. I’d looked so far ahead for so long that I’d forgotten she was there with me, then, in the present. Now past. First I was too early and now I was too late.
“It wasn’t like I planned to break up with you right before college,” I said. “It wasn’t, like, oh, I can’t wait to meet a different girl at school.”
“I know,” said Jamie.
“Do you?”
She shifted in her seat. “I think putting it that way trivializes my point. You’re making it out to sound like I was just this jealous, insecure girlfriend.”
The knot kicked around my stomach, called out once more.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean it like that. But it’s not like it didn’t occur to me that you might meet someone else at school.”
“Like who?” Jamie looked at me incredulously, as if it were impossible there could ever be anyone else, and a warm, buzzing electricity shot through to my toes.
“We’re not always gonna be the only queer girls we know,” I said. “We already aren’t.”
Jamie flushed, and I knew we were both thinking of Ruby, and Natalie, too. All the things we did and didn’t want to know. “You think that’s why we got together? Just, we’re both gay? That’s a little homophobic.”
“Is it really homophobic, or is it more heteropatriarchal? Something-normative?”
“You’re being a brat,” she said.
I was quiet because I knew she was right, but I wasn’t about to let her know that.
“Okay,” she sighed. “I’m gonna move past that, because I know that’s not really what you think. I know you loved me.”
I noted the past tense, and a small but insistent part of me cried out, wanting to correct it, but I was petrified. You don’t tell the girl who dumped you that you still love her four months later. That’s not how you retain the little dignity you have left. It wasn’t fair of her to put me in the position to correct her, and it wouldn’t be fair to Ruby if I did. So instead I said nothing.
“All I meant,” Jamie started again, “was that we always had an expiration date, as girlfriends. And if you know that, why wait around for it?”
I looked down at my lap just in time to pretend Jamie couldn’t see the tears sliding down my face. As embarrassed as I was to be crying here in public, in front of her, I was also relieved. The thing I’d most wanted to avoid doing in front of Jamie post-breakup was happening. It couldn’t get any worse. And knowing that made me free. I wiped my cheeks with my sleeve and looked up.
“I was planning trips,” I said. “I was gonna meet you in New York so we could take a bus to DC and see all the government buildings and statues and stuff.” It was Jamie’s turn to look away, dropping her gaze to her favorite clicky pen. We both watched her thumb wedge its way under the pocket clip and turn red.
“Quinn,” she said. “I didn’t even apply to NYU. I haven’t wanted to go there for more than a year.”
“What?” I said dumbly. “Since when?”
“I just told you—”
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “I got it.”
I ran through my memory, certain it was full of Jamie-made proclamations like “Next year at NYU” or “When I’m a freshman at NYU, not long from now” or “I, a seventeen-year-old, can’t wait to go to college in New York.” But I couldn’t find one. How was this possible?
“We talked about this,” I said. “We were both going to be on the East Coast.”
“You talked about it,” Jamie countered. “If I agreed with you once in a while it was vaguely, and it was only because I didn’t know what I was going to do, and it was easier to go along with your imagination than to tell you mine was blank.”
“So you just let me believe something that wasn’t true.”
Up until that point I’d felt mostly sorry, and confused. I was willing to admit I’d spent too much time in my head, but at least I’d been honest about where I thought I was going. How was that so much worse than what Jamie had done, pretending that what I imagined for us was still possible? Suddenly it all felt like her fault: not just the dumping-me part, but me not getting into UNC, and me failing to properly move on with Ruby. In that moment even Triple Moon’s money problems fell under Jamie’s terrible, dream-killing reign.
“It wasn’t untrue,” Jamie said gently. “I just wasn’t as sure of everything as you seemed to be.”
“I get it,” I snapped. “I’m delusional.”
Jamie sighed, giving me a look I couldn’t quite read. “You’re a romantic.”
I felt my face reddening, but I pressed on, determined not to let her lessen my anger. “And that’s a bad thing?”
“It’s not inherently bad or good,” said Jamie. “It’s just a thing about you.”
A dull throbbing had started on the right side of my head, and I pressed uselessly at it with my fingers. Maybe I am starting to get migraines, I thought. Great. I dug in my bag for my travel-sized aspirin bottle and swallowed two with what remained of my water.
“I’m not feeling very well, so maybe we can talk about this later,” I said.
“Oh,” said Jamie. “Uh, okay. Are you okay driving home?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. It’s just a headache.” I got up to put my water glass in the dirty-dish bin and returned to the table, not sitting but standing over it, willing myself to say what I knew I needed to. Jamie watched me expectantly.
“I’m sorry I didn’t listen,” I started. My voice shook a little, and I hoped that somehow Jamie didn’t notice. But of course she did. “I’m sorry I didn’t make it clear that you mattered more to me than UNC did, or soccer in general. Because you did. I mean, you do.” As I corrected myself, Jamie’s eyes dropped to her hands, fidgeting with her pen. “I’m sorry I held on too tight to something that didn’t make sense for you,” I continued. “I didn’t know there was more than one way for things to turn out okay, in the end.”
“It’s okay,” Jamie whispered. Finally she looked up from her pen. “Thank you.”
“Well, I’m gonna go, but we’ll talk later,” I said. I turned to leave and then turned back. “Where are you hoping to go next year?”
“Berkeley,” said Jamie. “I should find out next month.”
I nodded. It wasn’t the first time she’d mentioned it as a possibility, but Berkeley had long been background noise for Jamie, the school to which her AP US History teacher had suggested she eventually apply based on her very evident interest in political science. At the time, we’d rolled our eyes, mortified at the idea of staying in state. Or at least that was how I remembered it. The idea had stuck with her, clearly, turning over and over until it fit just right.
“I’m sure they want you,” I said. She looked up at me, her expression inscrutable. I stared back, trying to figure it out, until she broke, and looked away. I turned, and with a quick goodbye to Dee and Gaby, I was gone.
The next morning, I got the official offer from UCLA. They offered to cover half my tuition and all my textbooks, and they said I had two weeks to decide. But I didn’t need it. There was nothing else to wait for, and, finally, nothing I wanted more. I signed my letter of intent and sent it back. Three and a half years I’d waited, and it was over in twenty minutes.
Over the next we
ek, Jamie and I worked out our Triple Moon plan over text and FaceTime. It was Jamie, surprisingly, who insisted we go forward with the Sweets show, and so I looped in Ruby, feeling very much like a band manager, and I wondered if this was the feeling Jamie got from starting clubs: the mild thrill of creating an event dependent entirely on you, having ungraded administrative tasks to perform and calendars to coordinate. Because the show would fall in December, it was Jamie’s idea to give it a Krampusnacht theme. Krampusnacht, Wikipedia taught us, was a European pre-Christmas holiday on which a “wicked, hairy devil” appears in the streets to give bad kids coal. This idea seemed very much in line with Sweets’s vibe, and when we texted Ruby the idea, she proclaimed it dope. (Somehow, when Ruby said it, it worked.) We convinced Dee and Gaby that we could charge thirty dollars a head—six times as much as last time—of which the band would keep just eight (two per member), leaving the coffee shop with twenty-two.
I immediately started doing calculations: If fifty people came, Triple Moon would earn eleven hundred dollars. If a hundred people came, twenty-two hundred. If two hundred people came…but then Jamie interrupted me over text, reminding me that the coffee shop couldn’t even fit that many people inside.
Jamie also texted me to tell me she’d biked to the LGBT Community Center in Hillcrest and convinced them to put out a donation box for the holiday season, agreeing to split any profits between the center and Triple Moon. This inspired me to ask my mom if she knew any young queer reporters who could write a story about the coffee shop’s impact on queer teenagers and twenty-somethings who lived here, and simultaneously advertise for the show, and she put me in touch with a college grad named Davey, who promptly emailed to ask about setting up phone interviews with me, Jamie, Dee, and Gaby. If you didn’t know Jamie like I did, it would’ve been easy to miss how impressed she was with me when I told her what I’d done, and she texted back Wow. Period. But I knew. That wow was everything.
Over the same few days, Ruby and I had texted back and forth, trying to decide on a time to hang out before the show. It shouldn’t have been any harder than usual, but I noticed we were slow to respond to one another, and vague when we did. Ruby bailed on the first afternoon I suggested, and when she counter-offered the following night, I ended up canceling with the excuse that I had a migraine, which was only half true. I didn’t know why, exactly, but I was nervous to see her again. It had only been about a week since I had, but it felt like twenty. At night when I couldn’t sleep I tried to replay our hookups in my head, but I found they didn’t rush to me like they used to. I squeezed my eyes tighter, trying to concentrate, but that only made it less sexy, and more like a fact I was trying to remember for an exam. The Fourth Amendment is the right to security from unreasonable search and seizure. Carbon has four valence electrons. First I kissed Ruby there, and then she put her hand here. Or was it the reverse? I gave up.
The obvious solution was to see her again, and do it again, but part of the reason I put off seeing her was because I was worried I wouldn’t want to. I was also worried that I would want to but she wouldn’t. But as the date of the show crept up on us and I texted her more and more about those logistics, it got weirder and weirder that we weren’t hanging out, so finally, on the first of the month, we met up at Balboa Park. It was my suggestion, offered because it felt romantic, a throwback to before we kissed but clearly wanted to. But also, maybe, I suggested it because it was neutral territory, a public place not particularly close to either of our beds.
At the moment the calendar flipped to December, Balboa Park was lit with strands of green and red and white lights, strung across the main plaza and draped from flagpoles in the shape of Christmas trees. Those trees that weren’t covered in bulbs were lit by rainbow lamps dug into the ground, and little kids and their parents lined up outside Casa de Balboa, waiting to meet Santa Claus, who was set up inside for photos and present requests. Another Santa, this one made of wood, sat in his sleigh, just beginning to take flight between the Plaza de Panama and the Organ Pavilion. This part had been my favorite as a kid, and was even now, because I loved the reindeer’s long painted lashes, and the shiny wrapped presents, which looked poised to spill off the back of the sleigh. The effect was best at night, when you couldn’t quite see all the wires and stands holding the displays together.
It was warmer than usual that night, but Ruby and I had planned to meet at the concession stand for hot chocolate, and because it was almost Christmas, we went ahead with it. I paid for us both, and we carried our steaming cups to the nearest open table, pausing to watch a woman pull her wailing four-year-old boy toward the line for Santa. The boy went limp, collapsing to the ground as if being led to his death, and rather than pick him up, she waved goodbye and walked ahead, pretending to leave him there. Seconds later he got up, hiccuping, and ran after her.
“I feel for him,” said Ruby. “I never wanted to sit on Santa’s lap. I always knew it was just some creepy guy.”
I laughed. “Always?!”
“By age five, yeah. My older brother told me Santa wasn’t real, and I was like, that makes sense.”
“Wow. That’s young.”
Ruby smirked. “Why, how old were you?”
“Umm,” I said. “A little older.”
“How old.”
I picked up my cocoa, knowing full well it was still too hot. “Ten or eleven?” I murmured quickly before taking a scalding sip.
Ruby’s astonished laughter made me feel warm and bashful.
“I don’t have any older siblings!” I exclaimed.
“Didn’t you have friends?!”
“Yeah, mainly Ronni. She conspired with our other friends to keep it a secret,” I said. “She didn’t want to ruin it for me.”
Ruby shook, holding her fingers under her eyes to catch any trailing mascara, and though my later-than-average credulity had previously been a sore spot for me, I finally agreed. It was really funny.
“That’s true friendship, right there,” said Ruby.
“I know,” I said. “I’m really gonna miss her. Maybe you guys can be friends at Stanford.”
“Maybe.” Ruby smiled politely.
We took cautious sips of cocoa and looked around at the lights, each of us struggling to come up with something to say next. I watched Ruby press her thumbnail, currently painted white, into her cup, leaving a little half-moon pattern around the rim. After a nearly interminable silence I settled on a question I’d already asked her, in varying forms, three times at least: “Are you excited for your show?”
“Yeah,” said Ruby. “It’ll be fun. I hope it helps.”
“Me too.”
“I was gonna say, actually—they can keep my share. Dee and Gaby.”
My heart sank a little. “You really don’t have to do that,” I said.
“I want to.”
I quickly ran the math in my head. “Are you sure? That’s, like, probably more than a hundred bucks,” I said.
“I don’t need it,” said Ruby. “Honestly. They’ve been really cool to us, and I want them to have it.”
Suddenly I was so sad I almost couldn’t speak. I tried to thank her, but it came out like a whisper. Ruby reached across the sticky table and brushed away a tear I didn’t feel until it was gone.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know why I’m so emotional.”
“It’s Christmas, it’s senior year, you aren’t going to school where you thought, you’re trying to help some friends in trouble?” Ruby guessed. “PMS, maybe?”
I laughed. “All of the above, yeah.”
“We synched up,” said Ruby, looking so fond of me I had to look away.
“Jamie told me that’s a myth,” I said. “But I don’t believe her.”
“I like that you want to believe in things,” said Ruby. “It’s a really good way to be.”
My vision
clouded with tears again, because I could feel it: we were breaking up. Only I couldn’t call it that, because we hadn’t been girlfriends in the first place. A year or two from now, when I wanted to describe to someone what Ruby Ocampo had meant to me, what would I call her? Not a friend. Not an ex-girlfriend. My former lover, I thought, and snorted involuntarily. Nothing fit. Nothing would do our brief, informal, up-and-down, exciting, stressful, thrilling time together justice. It would be too much and too weird to tell anyone I didn’t know very well that she was the person who’d made me believe in love again, but she had.
“Why are you crying?” Ruby asked gently.
“Because you’re not in love with me,” I said. I laughed, embarrassed and astonished by what I was willing to say out loud.
For a moment Ruby looked like she might cry too. “I mean, are you in love with me?”
I had wondered, but as soon as she asked, I knew. “No,” I admitted. “But I think I could have been, eventually.”
Ruby smiled. She pulled at her rubbery mint-green phone case, suddenly shy. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt that way about anyone.”
Even though I was the one being dumped (or whatever), I felt sorry for Ruby then. Before her, I thought that quote about it being “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” was bullshit. The losing hurt too much. I would have given anything not to feel it.
Ruby was watching me now, I realized. “You have,” she said.
It was a question, but it wasn’t.
“Yeah,” I said. “Just the once.”
It was impossible to explain, and somehow, simultaneously, it was as simple as everyone said: when you were in love, you knew. What surprised me most was the way the feeling morphed and faded and brightened again, reliable only in its unreliability. When I told Jamie I loved her for the first time, it meant something different from the last time I told her I loved her. But both times, and every time in between, it was true. I felt it in my bones. Sometimes I felt that love still knocking around my body. It was like a fish, once granted an entire ocean to swim in, now restricted to a tiny bowl. Still, it moved within me.
