Plunge

by Brittany McIntyre

  Seemed like a hard yes.

  I handed the cards back to Sean and felt like I was giving something up. Like in losing control of that little stack of cards, he was gaining the power to dictate what would happen to my life. Defiance welled up like a bubble in my chest and I folded my arms across me as I waited for his reading.

  He pulled the top three from the stack and laid them out in front of me. “We are going to do a simple spread,” he told me like I knew what that meant. “The first card will represent your past, the middle your present, and the last will tell us your future.”

  Three cards, I thought. I didn’t know much about tarot, but three cards didn’t seem like enough to encompass my whole life. If we used all the cards, it still didn’t seem like enough to tell the story of a whole life. With a quick shake of my head, I realized I was starting to take it all too seriously. I was with Sean to get Marley off my back. There was nothing in the cards that would change anything.

  Sean looked me in the eyes as he flipped the first card. It was strange; on its surface was a man in a robe holding what looked like a wooden cane with another one sticking out of the ground beside him. In the hand that wasn’t grasping the pole, he held a small globe. I kept trying to figure out the canes, though, because they weren’t even canes: there were leaves sticking out of the limbs. Almost like he was holding two branches, but straight, narrow ones.

  “This is the Two of Wands,” Sean said. “This represents your past. It symbolizes a plan for action. Goals. So, according to this card, your past was a time when you wanted to move forward and you thought about how to make that come true.”

  Oh my God, I thought, my voice frozen in my throat. The hairs on my arm stood on edge and I felt the faint, cool prickling of goosebumps hardening along the surface of my arm. My mind flashed to the list I’d made that, even now, was scrawled in chalk on my bedroom wall. A plan for how to make my goals come true.

  Without giving me much more time for reflection, Sean flipped the second card: my present. I examined it: it was an image of a man atop a horse, a large goblet in his hand. Sean chuckled and my eyes flashed back to him. Heat was spreading through my cheeks.

  “What?” I snapped. I didn’t know why I was so mad about something I didn’t even believe in, but it felt like a slap in the face that he was chuckling away at something that was supposed to symbolize my whole life.

  “It’s just the Knight of Cups is such a stereotypical girl card,” he said with a shrug. He must have seen the look in my eyes because he went on hastily, “When you have the Knight of Cups, it means you think with your heart. So, what this is saying is that in your past, any time you have had the choice to make, you have wanted to choose love.”

  I thought about how I’d been chasing after Lennox and gasped. How could these cards already hit me so close to home, with so much truth? I had the thought that maybe Marley was in on this; that she had given Sean an overview of what had been going on and he was just making stuff up based on her stories. But I knew even as I thought it that it wasn’t possible. Marley might be stubborn and thick headed, but in all our years of friendship, she had never done anything deceitful.

  “It’s not a bad thing,” he said, his voice steady. “Keep in mind that none of these cards are a judgement, even if they feel like it.”

  My eyes narrowed into slits. He was good at this whole thing. I mean, not necessarily reading the cards because as far as I could tell that was just a matter of flipping a card and reciting some memorized speech. No, Sean was good at the delivery. So much more even and thoughtful than I ever remembered him being. I nodded him on, eager to see what my future would reveal.

  He flipped the last card: the words “the lovers” were scrawled along the bottom. There was a man and a woman, nude, standing with their palms outreached to each other. Smiling down on them was what I could only imagine was meant to be God. He was larger than them and his head was popping down from the clouds, so that pretty much lined up with what I had always assumed God would be like.

  My heart thumped in my throat as I waited for Sean to explain the meaning of the card. It had to be good, right? A card with lovers on it had to mean that I would have one.

  Sean cleared his throat. “So, your future is represented by the lovers, a card that suggests harmony in a relationship.” He paused and looked at me with narrow, searching eyes. It felt like he was looking for answers, too, but the moment passed, and he went on. “In your future, you will find a partner that brings you balance and harmony. Someone that will be easy to love and find it easy to love you.”

  My heart caught in my throat.

  It couldn’t be Lennox, then. If there was anything that was hard for Lennox, it was letting herself love me. The tears beaded hot and hard in the corners of my eye and I told myself this was the last time I would let them form. Lennox was never going to offer me that kind of easy love. I had come to Sean’s to get answers and now I had them: it was time to move on.

  I told myself I wasn’t going to spend any more time dwelling on Lennox. I had plenty of real problems and the way they’d popped up on me just when I was feeling a nagging complacency made me feel like I had brought them on myself. Be careful what you wish for and all that. Now, instead of being the girl whose life was one mundane day after another, I was the girl who had no clue what was happening or how to navigate her own life. I didn’t know what I was going to do about my dad, I didn’t know how long I could keep everything a secret from Ari, I didn’t know whether I was mad at my mom. Lennox, no matter how amazing, was a distraction that I couldn’t tolerate.

  So, what should I do instead? Put a pin in the whole dating idea until life settled down? Sit in my bedroom pining away on the off chance that Lennox would stop fighting herself and messing with my head and we’d be together? I couldn’t do it. If she wanted to be unhappy, that was on her. If she wanted to spend her teenage years in the closet and alone, she got to make that choice. It wasn’t what I wanted. I wasn’t going to be a sixteen-year-old version of my mother, spending night after night curled up in an armchair with nothing but the newest thriller novel for company. If she couldn’t let herself want me, I’d find someone who did.

  It felt wrong, logging onto a dating site. There wasn’t a chance in Hell for Lennox and I now, but somehow it felt like a betrayal. How could I think of letting someone else into my heart so quickly after her? There was so much hopelessness in the way she talked about what it would be like if we were together. There was too much giving up for a sixteen-year-old girl. I told myself it wasn’t my job to worry about any of that. I told myself that I couldn’t make her be ready to admit who she was. I tried to tell myself all these things as though they had changed anything, but my skin still burned where she had touched me hours before. How could I sit in this chair, knowing that I was falling in love with her, and actively search for someone else to be with? How could I just give up on her when I’d seen how much pain she was in?

  Swallowing down my own doubts, I told myself it didn’t matter how it felt. Fake it until you make it. I was sitting cross legged in my desk chair staring at the dating site I’d read about on the entertainment blog Pulsestream. Lavender Menace was a new site that was designed specifically for LGBT teens and I liked the way it was laid out; you could input certain preferences on things like politics and body type like on other dating sites, but there was also a feature that searched for keywords so you could filter out people with similar tastes and hobbies. It had taken me about thirty minutes to set up my own page. I had hated every minute of the process of setting up my profile because I was too in my head to make any decisions or enter any information without typing it out in full and deleting it at least five times, especially when I got to the point where I had to pick a username. Usernames are always this chance to make this clever, funny first impression, but I wasn’t really feeling like I was either of those things. Every effort I made felt forced. Deciding to keep it simple, I went back to what everyone had called me in
childhood: HanHan.

  Next came the fun part. I had never been all too excited to pick a name that would be the sum total of my online persona, but I was really excited about my profile picture. It was one that Marley had taken of me the night before school started this year when it was still sticky hot, and we’d been at the park with slushies from the convenience store down the road.

  I wasn’t on my bridge, but the one that leads from the front, more central part of the park to the trails and the Rose Garden. I wasn’t really leaning on it, more like just barely up against it, my foot propped up against the wall like I was putting weight on it. My hair was blowing in the cool evening wind and a strand was stuck in the wax of my lip gloss, but there was something very boho and ethereal about the way the hair curled around the angles of my face. I wasn’t smiling and I had agonized over whether using a picture where I looked serious would send the message that I was somber or took myself too seriously, but ultimately I chose it anyway because the expression on my face was so lost in thought and dreamy that I couldn’t reject the image. It wasn’t that I necessarily thought that it was the kind of expressionthat would garner lots of admiring suitors, just that it said so much about who I was: a dreamer who loved a fairy tale.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Lennox

  I hadn’t had the sense to ask where we were going. I mean, yeah, they had said shopping, but that could mean anything. That could mean the mall, downtown, Ashland. I had no idea where, specifically, we were going. Being completely honest, I hadn’t cared. There was nowhere we could go that would be far enough away to get me out of my own head, away from all the worthless doubt that was drowning me.

  When we pulled into the mall parking lot, I sighed. Malls were always so crowded this time of year, which never made sense because hadn't the people got the shopping bug out of their system? But, I reasoned, first choice or not,I had lots of parent approved gifts to return and it was save me from having to find my way there some other day.

  Later, while we were browsing through the picked over aisles of Old Navy, I thought about what Noah had said when we were still sipping our drinks in Grindstone. That he couldn’t be out because of his parents. It struck me that he was the only person I’d ever known who was in the same situation as me and probably the only resource I had for getting practical advice.

  “Noah,” I started, trying to think of how to phrase my question. “do you ever hate not dating?”

  He furrowed his brows in a way my mom always called making elevens and shook his head. “What do you mean? I have a boyfriend.”

  Heat spread across my cheeks and I felt dumb for assuming. “Oh,” I said. “When you said your parents didn’t know you were gay, I just assumed that meant . . .” I trailed off.

  He laughed. “Nah, Lexi here always teases me about being a huge slut.”

  Lexi barked out a seal like laugh and stuck her tongue out at Noah. I suddenly wondered how long they’d been friends. Their banter seemed so natural and easy. I was insanely jealous. Even back in Columbus, I didn’t have anyone I could just let go around like that.

  “I just don’t tell my parents,” he shrugged. “My boyfriends are just guys I’m hanging out with. I’m out at school and they just believe what they want to.”

  I imagined that. I imagined being at school with Hannah, weaving our fingers together in the hallway, playing footsie under the lunch table in the cafeteria while our friends prattled on all around us. Just me and Hannah, all the noise irrelevant. Then just going home and pretending like it never happened if my parents asked me about my day. Answering with a curt response about the day being good. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

  “But what if someone else told them?” I asked. “Like if a teacher or another parent mentioned it.”

  Noah shrugged, but he did frown a little as he thought about it. He reached out and let his fingers run over the smooth fabric of a crushed velvet top. “I guess I would just pretend to be mad and say it was all gossip. They probably wouldn’t believe me, really, but you know. People believe what they want to believe.”

  He held the top up in front of him and looked down. I didn’t quite know what to make of Noah, but he had a point. My parents had bought my Susie Homemaker act until I chopped off all my hair even though they had to know it was all bullshit. They bought it because it was the easiest course of action. No more tomboy Lennox meant no more worried faces and sad exchanges. The same would be true if I took Noah’s advice.

  I followed his lead and picked out a blouse to hold against my narrow frame. It was a bulky, fuzzy sweater in a pale cream. The kind that looked itchy and hot. I hung it back on the rack.

  We’d been shopping for a few hours when Noah announced he was leaving. Lexi looked at him with surprise, but he waved her silent with a quick “tell you later.” We stood and watched him go, his bags bumping against his legs as he took off down the crowded corridor. Lexi turned to me and smiled.

  “What next?” she asked, and I shrugged, not sure there was much left to buy. I looked down at my bags as though I’d find the answer there.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “Whatever you want, I guess.”

  Lexi looped her arm through mine and led me towards the food court of the mall to a side door that exited in front of TJ MAXX. It was separate from the main door and a little more private. A rush of wind swept her hair from her face and I reached up to push some strands that had stuck to her thick lip-gloss. Then, Lexi’s lips were against mine with no warning, soft and full. They were like laying on a soft, warm bed all wrapped in a thick comforter. I wanted to fall into her kiss, give myself over to it, but instead, I pulled away.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t know her. That would have been far too logical. It wasn’t that I was afraid to kiss her so openly with people all around. It wasn’t even that nagging, blistering voice reminding that my parents were ashamed of me. It was Hannah. Kissing Lexi felt like being unfaithful to Hannah.

  It was like waking up. As soon as the thought crossed my mind, something changed. I couldn’t keep fighting something that felt like it was everything. What was the point? To make my parents happy? They wouldn’t be. I could hide who I was and die alone and there would still be a problem with my voice or career choice or my clothes. They weren’t going to accept me and I had to stop making myself miserable for approval that wasn’t going to exist.

  I stepped back and looked at the ground in front of me, absorbing the distance of the space between us. Part of me was scared that I had just ruined my newly forged friendship and part of me was irritated that I’d missed yet another chance at potential happiness, but most of me was just knotted and tense and feeling awkward about the whole thing.

  Lexi smiled at me with the kind of smile that’s really just a tilt of the lips. The rest of her face was like a mask: frozen and plastic across her skin. “Sorry,” she said. “That was weird, I guess. It just felt like when you reached up to push my hair back, there was something . . . happening between us.”

  “No,” I answered quickly, my hand reaching out to pat her but stopping mid-air. I wanted to be comforting, but I wasn’t sure touching was a great idea. “I just like someone else. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  She nodded, her head bob lasting a beat too long. “Hannah?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I answered.

  “She’s a good person,” she said lightly, and this time her grin crinkled her eyes. Relief flooded me; she didn’t seem fazed by my rejection. “Should we get coffee?”

  I nodded and my new friend and I made our way to Starbucks for our second caffeine boost of the day. With a red cup in hand, I made one more stop before we finally left the mall: I bought a belated Christmas gift for Hannah, determined to take my chance to give it to her.

  That afternoon, when we were all shopped out and I’d spent the last year’s worth of hoarded cash, I pulled out my laptop and logged on to an LGBT based dating site I'd read about online. It was dumb luck that I saw her profile.
I’d bookmarked Lavender Menace as a way to get a feel for who was part of the LGBT community in Huntington so I would know who to avoid in my efforts to keep my head down and my mouth shut for my final year of high school. After the first time that I’d gone through the profiles—and there was only a dozen or so in my age category, more female than male—it had become a habit to peruse them when I was feeling lonely. I never made a profile because I’d never planned to talk to anyone, I just wanted to bask in the excess rays of their happiness.

  Something about the pictures people selected, them at their happiest, when they felt the most beautiful and confident, took my breath away. It was like being surrounded by this community of people with all this hope and even though I ridiculed myself for it, there was this part of me that thought if I kept browsing, some of that optimism would have to rub off.

  Since Hannah had stormed out of my room the other day, loneliness had been a consistent force. It was a loneliness that was different than any other I’d felt because it covered me less like a blanket and more like fog, finding its way into my crevices, my lungs, my heart. When it started to feel like it might really suffocate me, like the anxiety was tightening my chest so much I couldn’t quite inhale, I logged on to get a quick fix of hope.

  When I had gotten home from shopping with Lexi and Noah, something felt different about the browsing. It wasn’t a sadness killer or way to live vicariously anymore. All of a sudden browsing the profiles made me realize that this wasn’t my journey to walk alone and I didn’t have to be so damned hopeless.

  Hers was the first profile I saw that afternoon and I swear to God, my heart skipped a beat. It was like fate. She’d named her profile HanHan and the picture she used for her profile showed me everything I loved about her. The wild, unruly hair blowing into her eyes, the tiny wrinkles beside her eyes as she smiled. She was like a spark, like something so alive and real that it almost burned to try to hold it in your hand.