But they're standing up for another reason, too. I shiver.
For a weird, electric moment...time stands still.
“Are you done with the sign?” the voice asks, coming closer, the woman who possesses it climbing those concrete steps toward us. “Because we may have used the wrong screws on the small corner piece, and I think they installed it incorrectly, so I'm going to give the contractor a call—”
I'm standing, yes, but it suddenly feels like the world is falling away from me. Because... It's odd, impossible, but...
But I know that voice.
I take a deep breath, my heartbeat thundering inside of me as I try to explain away what I'm hearing. I know, logically, that it can't be her. And yet, it sounded just like...
The woman continues to walk up the concrete steps from the below-ground club. She's fallen silent now, as she puts one foot in front of the other. Finally, she stops on the landing. We're standing only about three feet apart, and when I look at her, the world screeches to a halt. I'm sure that time still moves around the both of us, flowing like a river, but it feels as if the earth itself has stopped turning.
Because somehow, it's her.
“Stevie,” I whisper, the word falling from my lips.
It's been seven years. Seven long, excruciating years, and I know that I've changed, but Stephanie Whitmore has somehow, maddeningly, remained the same. Maybe she's a little different: her long, shining black hair isn't loose around her shoulders anymore; it's been drawn up into a high ponytail that spills over her shoulder like a night full of stars. She's more muscled than she used to be, a fact that's quite noticeable because she's wearing an athletic tank top and hip-hugging jeans, jeans so tight that I can see the muscles outlined beneath them. She must have taken up working out after she...
After she didn't show up that night.
I feel dizzy. This can't be real... But I know it's real. There are so many memories vying for attention in my head, and while I try to and mostly succeed in pushing them away every other day, I can't seem to do that now, not when I'm standing directly in front of the woman who shattered my heart.
What can I possibly say to her?
But I don't have to say anything. Because the iPad that Stevie was holding in her fingers starts to slip from her hands. She's staring at me, her full lips parted. And somewhere deep inside of me, I'm glad that she's just as shocked to see me as I am to see her. Her high cheekbones still draw my eyes, just like they used to, and those gorgeous, sculpted brows still pull my gaze. She was beautiful seven years ago in a gangly, teenage way, but she's matured into a woman so magnetic that she...
She takes my breath away.
The iPad is out of her grasp now, falling to the ground, and neither of us is moving to stop it. But then the woman who'd been on the ladder—Jessica, I think her name is—catches the iPad before it crashes onto the unforgiving concrete.
Jessica holds the computer to her chest, and then she clears her throat, glancing from me to Stevie, back to me again, with one brow raised, her mouth pursed.
And that's what breaks the spell. The two of us wake up, shaking ourselves as if from out of a trance. I fold my arms in front of me, but Stevie lifts a hand, as if she's trying to soothe a frightened animal.
“Hello,” Stevie whispers then, the word low and soft, as if she's afraid to give voice to it, as if she doesn't know what to say. She coughs, says, “Hello, Amber,” as her hand drops back down to her side.
I stare at her like I'm seeing a ghost. I almost am.
Because seven years have disappeared, just like that. I'm back in Kankakee in the blink of an eye, waiting that night...
Waiting for her.
“Look,” says Jessica, taking a step backward, holding up the iPad as she shrugs a little sheepishly. “I'm just going to...uh...head back inside.” She picks up the bag of tools and turns away from us.
Stevie licks her lips, blinks, shakes her head. “Will you please come in, Amber?” she asks me quietly, gesturing behind her toward the steps that lead down to the nightclub's entrance. “Can I offer you a drink?” she asks me soberly, holding my gaze with her unwavering brown eyes, a brown that's so deep and dark and absolute that they're almost black.
I used to be able to get lost in those eyes. But I can't anymore. I feel like I'm falling to pieces as I stare at Stevie, as I find myself unable to say anything to her. And, God, I want to say so much.
In a single heartbeat, I run the gamut of emotions: shock, blistering anger, deep and total heartache—and, at the end of them all, the one I'm most ashamed of...
A flicker of hope opens its wings deep inside of my belly.
“Please, Amber, come inside,” says Stevie, taking a step forward, holding her hand out to me. That hand that traced its palm over my heart. That hand that I held so tightly I thought I'd never let it go.
I don't take her hand, can't, and after a long, silent moment, she drops it beside her thigh again. There's a haunted, hunted look in her eyes, and I'm fairly certain I'm not the only one time-traveling right now, going back seven years, to a warm, humid night full of possibility...
That night that was supposed to change both of our lives forever.
And my life did change—irrevocably.
Just...not in the way it was supposed to.
---
I'd just turned eighteen, which was one of the most exciting things that had ever happened to me. I don't know if you've ever been to Kankakee, Illinois, but it's not a tremendously nice place. Oh, it's all right, I guess, for what it is. It's this smallish town outside of Chicago that's bordered by a lot of farmland, and it's full of kids wanting to escape. There is, sadly, a ton of crime in Kankakee, because there are all of these kids wanting to escape... To put things into perspective, Letterman donated two gazebos to the town in '99 because it was rated the worst metropolitan area in the country to live. That's my city!
So everyone either wanted to get away or were content to live there indefinitely...
But me? Well, I'd worked out a plan to get the hell out of Dodge. I didn't love my town, and I didn't want to stay there. I was going to move to Chicago come hell or high water.
But that wasn't the best part.
The best part was that Stevie was coming with me.
Stevie? Stevie was my entire world. The reason I got up in the morning, and the reason that my life was good and not terrible, like it should have been. I lived in a small, rundown trailer park on the outskirts of Kankakee, which was just as rotten as it sounds. And it wasn't that I was better than anyone there—because I wasn't. It's that I had big dreams, and I wanted more than anything to make them a reality, and I knew that my dreams weren't going to come true in Kankakee.
I wanted to be a writer, the kind of writer whose articles you read in Time or Vanity Fair or, really, any publication bigger than my school newspaper. My English teacher told me I had talent, and I wanted to see where it could take me. With my drive and determination, I hoped I could make something of myself.
So, yes, I wanted to move to the “big city,” as cliché as that sounds, for a million reasons, like being able to get a good job doing what I love. But the biggest reason I wanted to make a home for myself in Chicago—the most important reason—was one I'd been hiding for a very long time.
And it was this: moving to Chicago would mean that I could be free to be myself. Because I was gay in a town that didn't exactly welcome gay people.
And I was keeping it a secret.
Maybe you've hidden part of yourself from others like I have... Maybe you know what it's like, that searing ache, deep in your chest, to constantly be afraid of being caught, to constantly be afraid that somehow, just by looking at you...they'll know. I lived with that terror every single day, trying to act so straight in a world that would ruin me, if it knew who I really was.
My mother was dead, and my father was doing the best he could to raise me and my sister Meg on minimum wage, working for the gravel plant. And he wa
s a good man, and he loved me very much...but I was under no misconceptions. I knew that the moment he found out I was gay, no matter how much he loved me, it just wasn't going to be something he'd be able to stomach or even understand. I knew he was going to throw me out into the streets. Being gay to him was something dirty, something only the lowest of the low were, and if I was gay, that would mean that I was, by association, bad, filthy, evil. And I would be asked to leave his presence, and that of my sister, forcibly.
I couldn't imagine leaving my home like that, and I wanted to beat him to the punch, if I possibly could. I wanted to leave home under my own power, not be thrown out of it, and I, above all else, desperately wanted the freedom to be myself.
Chicago, like a far-off Emerald City, glittered full of raw possibility and hope. Chicago, which had a Pride parade. A parade that celebrated being gay, rather than condemning it. I could hardly believe it sometimes, because it seemed, living in Kankakee, that Stevie and I were the only gay people in the world.
But in Chicago? I knew there were other people like us, maybe a whole lot of other people like us...and I hungered for that community desperately.
I'd met Stevie when we were just kids. She'd moved to Kankakee from Anchorage when we were both about ten years old. Anchorage was, to my mind, a whole world away, and Stevie was exotic and cool to me because of that.
But there was so much more to Stephanie Whitmore than where she'd come from.
Even when I was ten, I knew that Stevie was the one for me. Yes, I knew that, bone deep, when I was that young. I knew it like I knew that my favorite ice cream flavor was strawberry, like I knew that you had to be careful swimming in the Kankakee River in the spring, because it drowned kids all the time.
I knew it like I knew nothing else. I knew that Stevie was the one.
And the first time I knew that was the very first moment I saw her.
It was a late August afternoon, and I'd just come back from swimming in the river. I was dripping wet when I'd started home, barefoot and wringing my hair out on the path, but the walk back to the trailer park had dried me almost completely. It was hotter than hell, and I was contemplating heading right back to the river (I was already sweaty again, and I'd gone for a swim to remedy that) when I saw her on the edge of the park.
She was lying on a big, flat rock in front of her trailer, one of the older trailers that was in greater disrepair than the others.
She was sunning herself on that rock, her long, black hair fanned out around her face, her face with its high cheekbones and effortlessly graceful lines already so beautiful. She had long black lashes that rested gently along her tan cheeks, quivering as she dreamed—because she was fast asleep. She was lean and lanky; I knew just from looking at her that she was going to be tall. She had one leg up, crossed over her knee, and her hands were pillowed behind her head, and she looked perfectly relaxed. Even in sleep, there was this smile on her face. She looked so peaceful...so...happy.
I was pretty sure that I never looked peaceful, not even in my sleep, so to see someone who was so effortlessly content... Well, something happened inside of me. Something that unfurled, deep within, that drew me to her like a moth to a flame, pulling me forward. I wanted, desperately, whatever it was that she had inside of her, that could make someone who looked like she was in a situation very much like my own feel...happy.
I would later find out that her life was actually much worse than my own. Her parents had lost their jobs in Anchorage, and Stevie's grandparents had taken in Stevie and Carl, her brother, while the parents looked for jobs. Or, at least, that's what Stevie told me, and at the time, I believed it. Probably her parents had skipped town on the kids, or been killed, but I never learned the true story. Her grandparents were quiet and kept to themselves, and I never saw them much, but it seemed to me like Stevie's relationship with them was strained. And her brother was a little jerk, constantly getting expelled, vandalizing things from a very young age, and eventually trying to set fire to the school, for which he was caught and expelled.
So the thing was, Stevie didn't have a good home life like I did. She had a terrible one.
But you could never have known that, that late August afternoon, the sun filtering down through the trees on the edge of the trailer park, covering her in a glow of gold, her hair changing colors like a raven's wing, midnight black one moment and then a deep, burnished blue. My eyes followed the shifting patterns of the light over her hair, the shadows of the leaves on her skin.
We were both ten years old, and—in that moment—my heart skipped a beat for the very first time.
I'd stopped on the path, stopped and paused as I was awestruck by the sight of this new girl. But when I took a step forward to continue on my way toward my own trailer—I couldn't bring myself to disturb her; she looked too peaceful—my foot fell on a small stick, and it broke beneath my weight. It was a relatively soft snap, and the sound of the highway right beyond this perimeter of trees should have drowned it out, but she heard me, anyway. She heard me, and her eyes flicked open and took me in as she sat up on her elbow, her lips lifting into a soft smile as she gazed at me.
When our eyes connected... I'll never forget that feeling. Her eyes were so dark in her softly tanned face, so dark they were almost black, a depth to the brown of them that reminded me of the forest deep beneath the trees, in the shadow of tall pines. Her eyes were like the stillness of an overgrown wood, calm yet somehow wild, free.
I'd only been in the woods once. There weren't many forests around Kankakee, with the flat land full of cornfields surrounding us, and I hadn't been out of Kankakee much. But once, we'd gone to the Arboretum near Chicago. This was before my mother died. I didn't know my mother was dying at the time (I was really little), and I wandered that big park like a wild hooligan, a huge smile on my face the entire day, because beneath those trees, I had found something that I'd never known I craved my whole life.
It was the first time I'd felt peace.
I felt that exact same peace, the same deepness of contentment, as I locked eyes with this girl. Her long black hair was draped around her shoulders, and I don't know why I thought it, but I did:
Even though she was smiling at me, even though she looked perfectly relaxed...she looked...
Well, she looked wild to me.
And I liked that. I liked that very much.
“Hello,” she told me, in the softest voice imaginable, soft and low like a bumblebee's hum. Her lips turned up more at the corners, and then she was genuinely smiling as she sat up fully, leaning forward, leaning toward me. She pinned me to the spot with that intense, brown-eyed gaze, and I found myself clearing my throat.
“Hello,” I told her, shuffling my feet beneath me, because I was suddenly shy. She'd caught me watching her.
There was a long moment of silence between us as she took me in, as we stared at one another.
“My name is Stevie,” she finally said, like she was telling me a secret. She lifted her chin, her dark eyes flashing triumphantly as she got up from the rock, brushing off the butt of her jeans with tan hands. She raised an eyebrow at me, her grin widening. She took a few quick steps forward and jutted out her hand. “What's your name?”
“Amber,” I told her, taking her hand gingerly and shaking it, just like the grownups did. I'd never shaken the hand of another child before. Stevie's palm was very warm and just a little sweaty, and she shook my hand with a great deal of strength. I liked that, too.
“Well, Amber,” she said, not letting go of my hand but pulling me forward and wrapping her arms around me. She nestled her nose in my hair, a little bit like a dog would, inhaling deeply. I stiffened in her embrace, because I was suddenly worried that I still smelled like stale sweat, like I'd done before taking the swim in the river, but this strange girl pillowed her cheek on my shoulder with a happy sigh.
“I wanted a friend,” she murmured wistfully, drawing back and batting her long lashes at me as her mouth turned up at the corners. �
��Will you be my friend?” she asked me then, taking a step back, holding tightly to my shoulders with her strong, small hands.
I took a deep breath. “I've...I've been wanting a friend, too,” I said, surprising no one more than myself. Had I really just told this complete stranger the truth, the truth that I normally kept hidden in my heart, that I was desperately lonely?
Sure, I had my little sister, and I loved her, and she was my friend, but I wanted something...more. I wanted the type of friend that I saw on Disney movies, the kind of inseparable friend you go on adventures with, discover the world with, connected together forever through the journeys you've undergone and all you've shared together.
“Well, then...let's be friends,” Stevie told me simply, her lips twitching into a secret smile as she drew me close again. She had her nose buried in my hair for a second time, her arms wrapped tightly around me, holding me as close as a secret.
As we stood there beneath the branches of that lone tree on the edge of our trailer park, as we embraced tightly, and as Stevie chuckled, the cicadas singing around us...I knew. I was only ten years old, and I'd experienced little of life at that point, but I still knew, at that moment, that Stevie was going to be the most important person in my life—forever.
And I was right.
We were inseparable as we grew older, the two of us constantly together, every moment of every day. We knew each other instinctively, knew what the other was thinking, how the other would react, what the other was going to say. And if Stevie was a little different from the other girls at school, I chalked that up to her being better than them. I wasn't better, but I knew Stevie was.
Stevie was better than everyone.
When I was sixteen years old, the feelings that had been unfurling deep inside of me suddenly had no place else to go. I had felt attraction for Stevie constantly since I'd hit puberty, and the attraction was growing, strong and silent and aching. I couldn't contain the wishes and wants anymore, could no longer squish them down, shoving them into boxes and locking doors in my own mind and heart.
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