by Robin Talley
“My dad would be scary, too, if my dad was ever home,” I say. “But that doesn’t usually happen, so.”
“What particular variety of scary are your parents?”
“Oh, your basic Republican nouveau-riche Harvard-alum lawyer-for-the-overprivileged and semialcoholic housewife couple. They hate me, I hate them, et cetera. All we’ve talked about since I came out was my GPA.”
“When you came out as gay, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“How’d they take that?”
I shrug. I’m starting to wish I hadn’t asked Derek all those questions.
“I’m not sure my dad even heard,” I say. “Dad was listening to a Bluetooth headset the whole time. Had it on during my valedictorian speech, too. My mom, though—she flipped out. I had to go stay with my friend Chris for a week.”
“Seriously? She kicked you out of the house?”
“Not technically. It was like we were playing chicken. Mom was all, ‘I won’t tolerate this under my roof,’ and I was all, ‘So rent me an apartment,’ and Mom was all, ‘Don’t get smart with me, Antonia,’ and I was all, ‘What if I did move out? Would you even care?’ and Mom was all, ‘Don’t be absurd, I’m simply stating the facts, and the fact is, I will not have any foolishness in this family.’ So I bolted.”
I’ve told this story before. I always leave out the parts about the crying and the doors slamming and the thinking I was going to have to transfer to public school and move into foster care and never make it to Harvard. I figure people can fill in the blanks.
Even though I wind up thinking about it every time I tell the story anyway.
“Wow,” Derek says. “But you went back home eventually?”
“Yeah. Chris’s dad negotiated on my behalf.” I take another sip. My Coke is getting warm. “Can we talk about something happier, please, before what little buzz I have left is gone?”
“Absolutely.” Derek smiles. For the first time since I’ve known Derek, the smile looks forced. “I think you should show me some pictures of your girlfriend and tell me the story behind every single one. It may be the closest I’ll ever get to true love.”
I force a smile of my own. “Fantastic idea!”
I take out my phone and we go through the pictures. Derek seems genuinely fascinated by it all. And talking about how things were between Gretchen and me in high school makes me feel a little better about us than I did before. Our relationship has the most solid foundation it possibly could. We’ll see each other in a couple of weeks for Halloween, and it will be amazing. As soon as I put my arms around Gretchen again, everything is going to feel a thousand times better.
It’ll be easy again. All we have to do is touch. That’s the only thing I’ve ever needed.
Before
FEBRUARY
JUNIOR YEAR OF HIGH SCHOOL
5 MONTHS TOGETHER
GRETCHEN
I was the first one to say “I love you.”
I’d been thinking it way before that night. I’d been thinking it a lot. But the saying-it-out-loud part seemed impossible.
I thought one of us might say it the first time we slept together, but that had already come and gone. Even without an “I love you,” that night was amazing in its own right. I’d had sex before, with my last girlfriend before I left New York, but there was something completely different about being with someone you actually, seriously cared about. Someone you knew so well they were almost a part of you. Afterward, lying under the beige Pottery Barn quilt on Toni’s huge brass bed, we’d laughed and whispered until I had to leave to make curfew, and then we’d written secret notes on each other’s phones that we promised not to look at until later. When I got home and read Toni’s note, it said,
I knew it was you. The first time I saw you, I knew it would always be you.
I clutched that phone to my chest and grinned like a doofus until I fell asleep.
It was the happiest I’d ever been. I’d probably thought I love you a hundred different times that night, but I’d never found the breath to say it.
When it finally happened, I didn’t have to find the breath. It found me.
Toni found me first, though. It was a dark, cold Tuesday night, and I was home with my parents watching basketball. I went to the kitchen to get a glass of water, and a pair of headlights out the window caught my eye.
Toni was sitting in her Nissan out front of my house. The streetlight was on the opposite side of the road, so Toni was just a dark silhouette, her forehead tipped against the steering wheel, a hoodie pulled up over her spiked hair.
I looked at my phone to make sure I hadn’t missed a text saying she was coming over. I hadn’t.
I told my parents I was going for a walk. They looked at me like I was crazy—it was freezing outside—but they couldn’t tell me not to. We lived in an incredibly boring suburb in Maryland where nothing bad ever happened. When I was growing up in Brooklyn, my brothers acted like they had to keep a watch out to make sure I didn’t get mugged walking to the deli for a soda, but from where we lived now I could probably walk all the way into DC without running into a single wacko.
I hugged my sweatshirt around my arms as I tiptoed down the driveway, shielding my eyes against the glare from the headlights. Behind them, Toni and her car were completely still. The engine was off and she wasn’t wearing a coat. She had to be freezing.
She didn’t look up when I approached. I tapped lightly on the window. She turned toward me, her forehead still resting on the steering wheel.
I could tell right away something was wrong. Something had happened.
Toni smiled a faltering smile anyway.
TONI
Lord, it was good to see her.
I unlocked the doors, and Gretchen climbed inside. She wasn’t wearing a coat, and she was rubbing her hands together against the cold. “Aren’t you freezing?” she asked.
“Oh. Right.” I turned the key and flipped the heat on. Warm air flowed out of the vents, making my bare fingers prickle. I hadn’t realized it was that cold out.
“I didn’t know you were coming over.” Gretchen took one of my hands and held it between hers. Her skin was warmer than mine. “Do you want to come in?”
“No.”
“Do you want to drive somewhere?”
I shook my head.
When she spoke next, her voice was lower, like she already knew my answer. “Did something happen?”
I’d never told Gretchen much about my family, but that didn’t mean she didn’t know. Our friends had probably told her things. And she must’ve noticed that we only went over to my house when my parents weren’t there.
I’d met Gretchen’s parents the night of our first official date. It was all very old-fashioned. Well, we’d already made out a half-dozen times before our first official date, not counting the time on the dance floor at Homecoming, so it wasn’t that old-fashioned, but the date part kind of was. I’d driven over to pick her up, knocked on the door and been greeted by her dad, Mr. Daniels. I’d gone inside and met Gretchen’s mom and one of her brothers and their dog, a rescued greyhound named after the actor who played C3PO in Star Wars. That was the sort of family Gretchen had. Gretchen’s dad was about seven feet tall, or that’s what he looked like next to me anyway, but he was really nice. He and Gretchen’s mom both acted like it was perfectly normal that their daughter was going on a date with another girl.
Gretchen had never met my parents. She’d hinted a couple of times that she wanted to, but she hadn’t pushed. That was the thing about Gretchen. She never, ever pushed.
I’d wanted to keep her away from all of that. I’d wanted what I had with Gretchen—this perfect, precious thing we had together—to be separate. Untainted.
That wasn’t up to me, though. That wasn’t how life w
orked.
I realized it right there, sitting there in the car with her holding my hand, both of us shivering while we waited for the heat to fill the car. You didn’t get to put all your stuff in little boxes where nothing touched each other. You could try, but sooner or later the boxes would start bursting at the seams. Everything runs together in the end.
So I took a long breath, and I squeezed her hand, and I told Gretchen what my mother had done that afternoon.
GRETCHEN
I’d never met Toni’s mom, but I’d heard enough stories from Toni’s friends to know Mrs. Fasseau was a complete bitch. I just didn’t understand exactly how complete a bitch she was until that night in the car.
When Toni first started to tell me what had happened, she looked calm. Her face was composed. She looked—professional, almost. She recounted the story in the same even tone I’d heard her use to make presentations in class. Like she was being graded on her oratory skills.
Toni and her sister, Audrey, had gone shopping after our Gay-Straight Alliance meeting that afternoon. Audrey had bought two pairs of shoes for Easter even though Easter was still a month away and no one needed two pairs of shoes for it regardless.
The Fasseaus only went to church at Christmas and Easter, and the whole family dressed up for it. Whenever they all went anywhere together, there were all these rules they had to follow—fancy clothes, no chewing gum, no looking at phones, no slouching and other stuff that basically would’ve been impossible to follow for any regular family. Which the Fasseaus, apparently, were not supposed to be.
Audrey had been in a shopping mood that day—Audrey was pretty much always in a shopping mood—and she’d begged Toni to get something for Easter, too. Toni gave in and went over to a table full of ties. She meant to just grab the first thing she saw so Audrey would get off her back, but that plan changed when she saw what she called “the most awesome tie ever created.”
She showed me a picture of it on her phone. It wasn’t anything supercrazy—the fabric was electric blue with cinnamon-and-gold stripes—but I could tell from the way she talked about it that Toni had developed a mild obsession with this tie. As she smiled down at the phone screen, I hoped she liked me as much as she did this blue-striped tie.
When they’d gotten home, Mrs. Fasseau had made a big deal about wanting to see what they’d bought. She did that sometimes, Toni said. Feigned interest in her children’s activities. Usually when she’d been out with her friends and they were comparing notes about how impressive their respective children were.
Mrs. Fasseau hadn’t been happy with Audrey’s shoes, though. She’d examined both pairs, proclaimed them “cheap,” and ordered Toni’s sister to return them to the store.
“Buy something people will have heard of, for heaven’s sake,” Mrs. Fasseau said, swooping her hand over the shoeboxes as if to banish them from her sight. Then she opened Toni’s bag.
Toni had tried to not let her see. By the time she was telling this part of the story, Toni’s class-presentation voice was gone. There was a glimmer in her eye as she told me how she’d tried to slide the Macy’s box into her backpack. She wasn’t quick enough.
When Mrs. Fasseau saw the tie, she didn’t react at first. She just stared at it as if she wasn’t sure it was real. Then she pulled it out of the box and dangled it from the tips of her fingers, a full arm’s length away, like it was a wet painting that was going to jump onto her crisp white sweater.
“Is this supposed to be a joke?” Mrs. Fasseau asked.
Toni didn’t say anything, so Audrey did. “You don’t have to hold it out like that, Mom. It doesn’t have rabies.”
Mrs. Fasseau ignored her. She jutted her chin at Toni but wouldn’t meet her eyes. She hadn’t looked Toni in the eye in years. “Is it a gift for your father? Because he has better taste than to wear this, I’m afraid.”
Toni shook her head. She didn’t know, she told me, what made her say what she did—whether it was her mom insulting the thing she loved, or whether she just wanted to see how her mom would answer—but whatever the reason was, Toni stood straight up and told her mom, “No. It’s for me. I’m wearing it for Easter.”
Her mom didn’t even blink. “You’re planning on wearing this to church, hmm? In front of everyone we know? In front of God?”
The fact that Toni didn’t make a snarky comeback to that—that she didn’t even mention having thought of one—was how I knew Toni was really, really, really upset. Religion was not a topic of discussion in the Fasseaus’ house. For Toni’s mother to accuse Toni of doing anything in front of “God” was so hypocritical as to be automatically funny in any other circumstances. Later, Toni would tell me she couldn’t remember her mother ever uttering the word God before that afternoon. She was pretty sure her mother thought of “God” and “everyone we know” as one and the same.
Toni’s mother strode across the kitchen to the junk drawer and pulled out a pair of scissors. Toni could already see what she was going to do, and Audrey was saying, “No, Mom, don’t,” but it was too late. Mrs. Fasseau sliced the tie neatly into two, letting the wide bottom part fall into the sink. Then she strode out of the kitchen without looking back while Audrey shouted after her, “Nice one, Mom! Are you going to pay her back, at least?”
“It was just a tie,” Toni kept saying that night in the car. “Just a stupid tie. It didn’t mean anything.”
“I know,” I said.
“My mom’s reading all of this, like, I don’t know—stuff into it. It’s so presumptive. She’s acting like the tie was a symbol. Like she can cut off whatever it’s a symbol of. When it’s just a tie, you know? It’s just some stupid fabric somebody stitched together in a sweatshop in, like, Bangladesh or something. It’s just that it was a really nice tie. I didn’t actually care if I wore it to church or not, you know? I just liked it. I didn’t even use her credit card to buy it. I used my birthday money from my grandmother. She didn’t ask how I got it, though. She didn’t care.”
I care, I wanted to say. I care about everything about you, I wanted to say.
“I’m sorry,” I said instead.
Then I said, “I love you.”
TONI
I couldn’t believe she actually said it. Out loud.
I’d wanted to say it for months, but...what if she didn’t say it back? What if she laughed at me? What if she thought I wasn’t taking this relationship seriously? What if she wasn’t taking this relationship seriously?
“I love you, too,” I said.
It didn’t make me want to cry any less. It didn’t mean that when I fell asleep that night, I wouldn’t still be thinking about my mom standing there with the scissors in her hand.
But it meant I’d have something else to think about, too. Something that made me feel like I wasn’t completely worthless.
Actually, if I was being completely honest, what Gretchen just said made me feel like I was the king of the stupid planet. Not the whole planet, I mean, not, like, Earth, but my own personal planet. Mine and Gretchen’s.
Gretchen was the beginning and end of everything. She was all I’d ever need. I’d been searching my whole life for something, but until now I didn’t know what that something was.
Gretchen saying “I love you” proved that I wasn’t making this all up in my head. That maybe this fantasy I’d been living in for the past five months wasn’t just a fantasy. Maybe it was my actual life.
And as for my mom cutting up the stupid tie, as though she was trying to show what would happen if I crossed that invisible line, the one between girl and boy, the line that might not even actually exist—and here we were all pretending this was as simple as whether I wore a stupid tie to stupid church in front of her stupid friends (and God, we mustn’t forget God, obviously)—as for that...
Today, my mom cut up a stupid tie an hour before the world�
�s most perfect girl told me she loved me.
“I love you, too,” I said again.
We kissed. It was our best kiss ever. My best kiss ever.
We couldn’t stay in the car much longer. Gretchen’s parents would be getting worried. She hadn’t even brought her phone out with her. She’d just come outside to find me, shivering in her sweatshirt, tapping on the window. She’d come because she knew I needed her.
I would always need her.
As I watched her walk back to the house, I knew something between us had changed that night. Something that had been intangible had become solid. Something unspoken was now resolute.
I knew I would always love Gretchen.
What I didn’t know then was that love changes. Just like everything else.
6
OCTOBER
FRESHMAN YEAR OF COLLEGE
2 MONTHS APART
GRETCHEN
“Tell me how this works,” Samantha says while I’m trying to read. “Do you wear a dress and she wears a tux?”
“Nobody wears a tux,” I tell her. “It isn’t a wedding.”
“Do you both wear a dress?” Sam asks.
“I might wear a dress if we can find one I like. I don’t know what Toni will wear.”
I pointedly look at my laptop. I’m rereading the instructions for Boston University’s spring transfer application. The due date is November 1. Exactly one week from today. I need to decide soon if I’m going to apply.
I haven’t said anything about that to Toni. But then, Toni hasn’t asked me about it, either.
“Does she pick you up and buy you a corsage?” Samantha asks. “Do you dance together at the dance? Who leads?”
Samantha is very, very sweet. I have to remind myself of this often, because Samantha asks these questions all the time, and it would be annoying if she weren’t so sweet.
“No,” I tell her. “Toni’s not picking me up. We will walk from Toni’s dorm room to the other side of campus.”
