Dating Sarah Cooper

by Siera Maley

  “I had an old friend from another school: a guy,” Violet added while I was still trying to absorb Jessa’s story, “who messaged me online to tell me he thought I was really brave and that if I ever had any problems I should tell him and he’d stick up for me because he knew what it was like to get picked on. It was really sweet, actually. Cut to three months later and we’ve been in touch for a while; he gets drunk and tells me all about how I need to come visit him and smoke a joint or drink with him and then try having sex with him because he’s different and I should try everything once.”

  “All of us have stories like that,” Hattie added. “So you’re not alone.”

  “And we all have stories about getting picked on, or getting beaten up or called names,” Henry added. “I’ve been called a faggot dozens of times. That doesn’t make it hurt any less when it happens, but I guess at some point you just have to realize that there are a lot of people who are ignorant out there, and that that’s all they are. Just ignorant people. And we have each other to help us get through it.”

  “That’s why we come here,” Jake agreed. “To share our stories. So we can sit here in this circle and know we’re not alone.” He smiled. “So if you’d like to share… How has your first week been?”

  I took them all in. All thirteen of them were watching me, and at my side, Sarah folded her hands in her lap and kept her eyes on her interlocked fingers. And it might seem strange, but for a moment, I forgot I wasn’t gay. I’d only been fake-gay for a week, but sitting there with them, having walked in their shoes for the past seven days, I felt just as much a part of the group as any of them did.

  “Well,” I said, thinking only for a moment before I began, “I guess one thing that kind of hurt was that there was this girl I used to wave to every other day or so when we’d see each other between classes…”

  Sarah and I were only alone for a few seconds after the meeting, between Jake saying goodbye to us by Sarah’s car and Jessa coming up to us to offer her version of an apology, but those few seconds were so uncomfortable that Jessa was actually a welcome distraction.

  “Hey,” she began, a thin smile on her lips. “I guess… I don’t know, maybe I should say sorry?”

  “Maybe,” Sarah replied, playing the role of affronted victim calculatingly well. Jessa pressed her lips together tightly for a moment, and I stayed silent.

  “Look,” she finally continued, “I don’t know what I saw the other day anymore. Maybe I misinterpreted it. Maybe I didn’t. If I did; if there’s something I missed, then I’m sorry. But if I didn’t, you guys are gonna have a lot to own up to when the truth comes out.” She smirked. “And if I didn’t… have a fun, not-awkward-at-all drive home after that very convincing kiss.”

  She stalked away without further ado, and once she was out of earshot, I didn’t even make eye contact with Sarah before declaring, “I’m gonna walk home.”

  “Katie, c’mon,” she countered hastily, grabbing my arm before I could leave. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Ridiculous?” I glared at her. “You wanna talk ridiculous right now? Seriously?”

  “It was the only way!”

  “Then we should’ve told the truth.”

  “Why? That was really cool in there, what just happened at the end. We were all getting along, and you wish we’d told the truth and made them hate us?”

  “So instead you haul off and kiss me. Because that makes sense,” I countered. “We agreed we weren’t gonna do that.”

  “Desperate times call for desperate measures,” Sarah said. “We were backed into a corner.”

  “And whose fault was that? Who spent four days making all of the decisions without telling me anything?”

  “I thought I had it covered.”

  “You always do.”

  I turned and started to storm off, but she caught my arm again. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means we only do what you want and in the way that you want. Aren’t we supposed to be in this together?”

  “Not if you’re gonna ruin everything at the first sign of trouble.”

  “Ruin everything,” I echoed with a roll of my eyes. “Really, Sarah. Everything? So by that do you mean your reputation, mine, or your chances with a stupid boy?”

  “He’s not stupid, and all three.”

  “You don’t even know him.”

  “And you do?”

  I shook my head at her in disbelief, then threw my hands into the air and turned to walk away. “No, I don’t. And apparently I don’t know you, either.”

  “You’re really gonna freak out like this over one kiss?” she called after me, and I knew she’d missed my point entirely. I didn’t bother with a response.

  I walked home. When I got there, I was already drying several of my own tears, and my mom took one look at me and knew that this time I was actually fighting with Sarah.

  “Honey, what happened?” she tried to ask, but I ignored her and shut myself up in my room. That was where I stayed for the rest of the night, crying into my pillow and wondering why kissing Sarah just once had felt better than all of the hundreds of times I’d kissed Austin combined.

  Chapter Six

  I claimed illness the next day to avoid going to school and seeing Sarah, and Mom let me get away with it, especially after our talk over the weekend about how much rougher things had been for me lately. I sensed she wanted to take off work to spend the day interrogating me about what had gone wrong this time, because there was no doubt her “something is wrong in the world of Sarah and Katie” senses were tingling. But as it was, I ended up home alone and in bed, eating ice cream and watching the second episode of freaking The L Word because I wanted to know if Jenny was still into Tim or if she was already switching teams for Marina this early on.

  I was halfway through when the doorbell rang. When I checked through the window by the door and saw it was Sarah, I almost didn’t answer, but then I realized that if she was here she probably knew I was home, and, being Sarah, wouldn’t give up until I answered.

  I set my expression to a glare and then opened the door, but it was hard to stay angry when she was staring at me so hopefully on the other side of the threshold. “I know I screwed up,” she began, and I groaned aloud and opened the door wider, then left it that way to pad into the kitchen. I heard her trail in behind me and close the door behind herself as I moved to make myself a bowl of cereal.

  “Why aren’t you at school, Sarah?” I asked her.

  “Because I knew you wouldn’t be.”

  “So why are you here?” I glanced at her as I poured milk into the bowl.

  “Because,” she sighed out, “I wanted to fix things, obviously. You know it’s like… the planets are out of alignment when we’re fighting.”

  “Who says we’re fighting?”

  “Don’t be passive aggressive,” she demanded. “You’re angry at me for…” She looked around, and then lowered her voice. “For kissing you.”

  “There’s no one home,” I told her stoically. “And I don’t want to talk about the kiss.”

  “Why not? It happened. We can’t just not talk about it.”

  “That’s exactly what we can and will do,” I decided, and sat down at the table with my cereal.

  “I don’t think that’s fair,” she said, joining me. “Look, I can admit I screwed up. I wanna fix it. That involves talking stuff out.” She chewed on her lip for a moment, and for the first time, she looked really nervous. The most nervous I’d seen her in a while. “Katie, I don’t know about you, but… when we kissed, I-”

  “I want,” I interrupted, using a spoon to spool milk over a few dry bits of my cereal, “… I wanna be the one making the decisions from now on. That’s what I think.”

  “Shouldn’t we split them?” she asked, looking perturbed. “Like a compromise?”

  “Yeah. But I want final say. Clearly my comfort level is way lower than yours, so rather than pushing my boundaries, I’ll just set the
m, because you’ve set the bar way too high for me.”

  “How is that a compromise?”

  “Well, you get to keep this fake couple thing going to get your guy, and I get to set the terms since I’m literally getting nothing out of this anyway.”

  She opened and closed her mouth for a moment, tracing shapes on the table with her finger. “I… I just feel like you’re doing this out of anger.”

  “Yeah, a little bit,” I admitted. “Can you blame me?”

  “I just don’t understand why you’re being so defensive. I skipped school to come apologize to you and to try and work things out. I think that I have some valid points here if you’d just listen.”

  “Like what? Go ahead, then.”

  “Well.” She took a deep breath. “We kissed. And I know we said we didn’t want to, but it helped a lot with Jessa, and… I think it could be something we might wanna do in the future-”

  “No way.”

  “Just every now and then. Just to keep the illusion going.”

  “Nope.” I closed my lips over my spoon, then removed it from my mouth and pointed it at her accusingly. With my mouth comically full, I declared, trying to break the tension, “You just want an excuse to kiss me again.”

  She rolled her eyes, but the corners of her lips tugged upwards, and I knew she could tell I was starting to defrost a little. “Obviously. At the very least, I think we went about this the wrong way. I should be more focused on you and less on Sam. He’s already noticed us; the rest will come naturally from him if he’s interested. I’ll play hard to get and be hopelessly devoted to you, Katie Hammontree.”

  “That sounds absolutely terrible,” I told her. “Just awful.”

  “I’m sure. Me carrying your books everywhere, telling you how pretty you are, waiting on you hand and foot…”

  “Horrifying.” I nodded at her and raised another spoonful of cereal to my mouth as she grinned. I smiled back at her once I’d gotten the cereal into my mouth, and felt some milk dribble down my chin. She laughed and reached out to wipe it away.

  “And apparently you need me, anyway.” With the milk gone, she tapped at my chin once with her thumb and then took her hand away. She’d done it before in the past, but something about it felt a little different now.

  We were quiet for a moment, and then she let out a heavy sigh and cupped her cheek in one hand, resting her elbow on the table. “Well, at least you’re a good kisser.”

  “Don’t even start,” I warned her, but she was already grinning again.

  “Am I? C’mon, you can tell me. I know I am.”

  “You’re so full of yourself.”

  “That doesn’t make me any less of a good kisser. Seriously though, you made kissing a girl strangely pleasant.”

  “You’re too honest sometimes.”

  “I know.” She shrugged her shoulders. “My parents say it’s a gift and a curse.”

  “I… Okay, you know what?” I let out a sigh and shook my head, aware that I’d probably regret this. “How about this? If I call all of the shots from now on, you can be responsible for making us a convincing couple, considering you have way more experience with actually being part of a couple. But you have to get my approval first.”

  “Done deal.” She smiled at me. “Easy.”

  “Alright, then.” I took the last bite of my food and then offered her my hand to shake. “Let’s be the best lesbian couple we can be, then. We might as well, now that we’re in this deep.”

  “You got it, girlfriend. Time to take this school by storm,” she agreed, and we shook on it.

  Things changed rather quickly between Sarah and me after that.

  We were friends by night, and a couple by day, and things that’d started out as “Sarah and Katie coupley things” quickly wormed their way into our “friendly things”. Sarah spent a week taking my hand in hers and rubbing her thumb along my fingers whenever I got nervous at school, say, right before a test or whenever we were being teased or harassed in some way, and so on Day Fifteen of our new arrangement, when we were alone in my bedroom and I had a test I was trying my hardest to cram for, her hand was suddenly in mine and her thumb was caressing my fingers, and I didn’t think anything of it until long after she was gone.

  Stuff like that happened constantly, and not just with touching. Kissing became a semi-regular thing, and it took me much longer to get comfortable with it than it took Sarah, even though we’d agreed to only pecks for now. She’d kissed a lot of people, and I’d hoped that me being the first girl she’d kissed might slow down the progression a little bit and leave us both on the same page, but for some reason she pretty much just dove into being physically affectionate with me and never looked back.

  We pecked in hallways between classes, mostly, which was my preference, were I to choose between that and the kind of kissing we’d done at the LAMBDA meeting. Kissing Sarah was fairly pleasant, but really kissing her ultimately did my brain and body more harm than good and made me feel things I wasn’t comfortable nor used to feeling.

  We went to another two LAMBDA meetings, and even as Jessa slowly began to ease off of Sarah and me, Jake, Hattie, and Violet emerged as three people we really got along well with. All thirteen of them were nice for the most part, though, and all of them had something we could talk to them about. Being gay was like that; you could have nothing in common with someone, but the gay thing was always there to fall back on. For me and Sarah, it just meant falling back on our original fake stories we’d told.

  Two and a half weeks after our first kiss, Sarah surprised me at lunch with a folded piece of paper in her hand. She and Hannah bore matching grins as she handed it over to me and announced, “Guys, look at what we’re doing tomorrow night.”

  I unfolded the paper and took in the colorful writing on it. “Justin Barnes is having a party,” I announced, struggling to sound enthusiastic. “Cool.” He was a football player, which probably meant a night of booze and debauchery. I knew Sarah was probably aching for a party at this point after over a month of nothing, so there was no doubt she’d be dragging me along.

  “Awesome.” Connor grinned, leaning over to examine the paper in my hands. “I’m there. Who else is in?”

  “Everyone, of course,” Sarah replied. “The whole school should be there, for the most part. Justin throws the biggest parties of the year. Graham and Bonnie, you guys are going, too.”

  “Hey, I’m not complaining,” Graham agreed, raising his hands in the air defensively. “I just can’t get caught with alcohol on my breath again. I’ll drive.”

  “Perfect. You’re the only one with a car big enough to hold all of us, anyway,” Hannah said.

  And that was how on Friday I found myself squished between Dina and Sarah in the middle row of Graham’s eight-person SUV around nine thirty at night. I felt bad telling my parents I was spending the night at Sarah’s, but it wasn’t like that was necessarily a lie. I was going to spend the night at Sarah’s. There was just a small stop in between that I’d failed to mention.

  Justin Barnes’s house was kind of huge. The only person I knew who lived in a house bigger than his was Sarah, in fact. It was three stories high and already filled to the brim with teenagers, and I could hear the music blasting from all the way down the street. I wondered briefly if the neighbors would wind up calling the police because of the noise, but then I realized that in this particular neighborhood, the houses were spaced further apart. Justin’s was one of only three on his entire street, and the music was faint as we passed by his neighbor.

  Graham parked on the side of the road and we agreed to meet back at his car at eleven-thirty, to give him time to get everyone home before midnight. We split up pretty quickly after we got inside: Dina and Josephine grabbed Bonnie with the intention of forcing her to dance, Connor and Graham went off somewhere – most likely to scope out girls to hit on – and Hannah left to grab a drink and then mingle with the rest of her other friends on the football team and the cheerleadin
g squad.

  That left Sarah and I alone to get drinks by ourselves, and although she didn’t bring up Sam at first, I could see her scoping out the other people at the party like she was looking for someone.

  “Do you think Sam is here?” I finally asked her, as we stood together near the wall of Justin’s living room, sipping our drinks and watching the crowd of dancers in the center of the room. I mostly watched Dina, Josephine, and Bonnie, who looked like they were having fun in the center of the crowd.

  “I don’t know,” Sarah said. “But I’m sticking to the plan either way: don’t approach; be approached.” She smirked at me. “Besides, I can’t do anything with him here, anyway. At least not in front of everyone. I’m here with you.”

  “Plenty of empty rooms,” I pointed out, not really meaning it, and she laughed.

  “Yeah, I guess. We’ll see.”

  We fell silent as I scanned the room for another moment. Right around the time I finally found Sam, sitting in a circle off to the side and seemingly engaged of a game of Spin the Bottle, Sarah nudged me and pointed straight ahead of us. “Hey, look,” she said.

  I followed her gaze and my eyes landed on Austin, front to back with another girl amongst the crowd of dancers, his hands tight on her waist. I didn’t know how to feel about that. I wasn’t upset, but it was strange to see him with someone else. I wondered idly how much he’d had to drink; he’d always been shy about dancing with me.

  “We should do something fun,” Sarah declared, and downed the rest of her drink. “Wanna dance?” she asked as she set her empty cup aside.

  A brief image flashed in the back of my brain: Sarah and I, pressed together the way Austin was pressed against the mystery girl with him, swaying to the beat of a heavy bass with fuzzy minds and wandering hands.

  “No thanks,” I barely managed to get out. She sighed heavily.