Meet Cute

by Jennifer L. Armentrout

  “You could be wrong,” Nia said, though the realization that Lucian was a good enough friend to catalog even minor signs of her pain made her feel ashamed for snapping at him.

  “I don’t think I’m wrong,” he said with a grin. “You don’t become the world’s greatest lover without knowing how to read people.”

  “Jesus Christ, dude,” Nia said, but she was smiling. The GPS instructed her to turn a little late so she looped around a trailer park, feeling the same out-of-place tension she always felt when she was in a rural area. “Fine. Fine. I’m still not talking to her.”

  “What about rehearsals?” Lucian said.

  “I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it,” Nia said.

  LEXIE

  Lexie spent all Friday evening and Saturday morning worried she would be late. Her parents told her she could only drive their car if she left the phone off, and that they would call her to see if it went straight to voice mail, so she had to write down directions off the Internet, which meant she probably needed to leave early, especially since she wasn’t a very experienced driver. The farm was only forty minutes away, but it was technically in a different time zone, which she hadn’t known, but when she finally arrived at Vaughn’s farm and found it empty, save for Vaughn himself sprawled out in a hammock with a book over his face, she realized her mistake. She wasn’t sure if it would be rude to wake him up, so she killed the engine and checked some of her favorite fashion blogs to pass the time.

  Lexie didn’t actually care about fashion. She wore nothing but hoodies, cardigans, and T-shirts from church. Lexie did like girls, though, and this was the only safe way to look at them without her parents catching on immediately, though she doubted they would believe she had any interest in haute couture. Still, the women in these photos, with their high chins and their dark eyes and their movements like hunting cats, seemed more like drawings than real people, like something out of a story come to life. They felt like the guardians of a life she wanted but could never have, a dream she would bottle and hang from the rafters of her heart with bits of twine as she grew up and found a husband and started a family. Looking at them made her soul sing and groan all at once, and she couldn’t stop.

  A knock on her window caused her to scream and throw her phone across the car as if it had suddenly burned her. She looked up, her chest heaving, to find Vaughn looking down at her with a mixture of confusion and concern.

  “Just a—” She leaned down to gather her phone and her purse and banged her forehead on the steering wheel. “Dang it! Just a sec.”

  “Didn’t mean to scare you,” he said as Lexie stumbled out of the car. He shoved his hands in his pockets and leaned against a knobby fence. Lexie caught her breath and really looked around for the first time, taking in the deep green of the surrounding woods and the vast, open fields laid around the two-story farmhouse. “You looked like you were crying.”

  “Oh,” she said. She made herself smile. “Nah. Nah. Just, you know, hanging out. Just chilling. Didn’t want to wake you, was all.”

  “Okay,” he said. He jerked his chin toward the trees across the street from the farmhouse and took off down the driveway. “Come on. Since you’re early you can help me gather firewood.”

  “Yes, sir!” she said, snapping off a salute. She’d hoped it would seem cute or quirky, but he just stared at her for a second before giving her a small smile and a nod. She followed him into the woods with her stomach twisting, certain she was going to puke before the party was over. And really, if just meeting the rest of the cast and crew made her this nervous, what business did she have getting onstage? She shoved a bundle of sticks under her arm and closed her eyes, trying to find her center.

  “Can I ask you a question?” Vaughn said. She looked up to find him tying his flannel shirt around his waist and pulling his dark, wavy hair into a bun. Lexie recognized that he was attractive in an objective sort of way. She nodded, though she was sure she wouldn’t like the question.

  “Are you and Lucian a thing?” he said. She blinked. He braced his foot on a branch as thick as her arm and snapped it off, throwing it over his shoulder. “You seem pretty close.”

  “No?” she said. She wiped dirt off on her jeans and frowned. Boys were indecipherable to her most of the time, but she’d thought Lucian was just being friendly. “Did he say . . . ?”

  “Nah,” Vaughn said. He jumped up and grabbed a low-hanging dead branch and swung on it until it snapped off. Lexie yelped when he fell, certain he was going to break a leg, but he landed with a little puff of breath. He smiled at her and swung both branches over his shoulder. “Just checking.” He scratched his chin and swept the ground for more branches. “I think he has a thing for the girl playing Audrey II.”

  “Nia?” Lexie said, freezing in a kneel with her hand half closed around a bundle of twigs.

  “Yeah,” he said. “The transgender.”

  “He almost never talks about her,” Lexie said. Oh, no. He wasn’t just acquaintances with Nia—they were close enough that people suspected they were together, and he’d never mentioned it. Why was he so nice to Lexie? Why did he go out of his way to talk to her in class without acting like a creep? Why did he push her to come today? She thought they were friends. She’d thought he was one of the first friends she’d ever made who she didn’t know through either church or her parents, but what? Was he just being polite? Everything inside her felt like the sound of metal on dry ice.

  Vaughn just shrugged. “Can you blame him? She’s hot. But you know, not my type. Come on, let’s take this back.”

  She followed a few steps behind him, her arms loaded with tinder, wondering what Nia would think if she heard Vaughn say that, and whether it was hypocritical to worry about the other girl’s feelings now.

  NIA

  Nia was wrapping up a conversation with Constance, the gangly redhead who’d been assigned as Audrey II’s puppeteer, when Lucian jogged up with a smug grin. She didn’t acknowledge him at first, but then he started dancing on his tiptoes like a kid who needed to pee.

  “I’m sorry, Constance,” Nia said, “but it seems my son has lost his mind. Can I catch you later?” Constance shrugged and went back to her tribe, the semicircle of pierced, black-clad tech theater kids, and Nia turned to Lucian with a look she thought of as “matronly annoyance.” “Yes?”

  “I’ve got evidence,” he said, leaning forward and speaking in a stage whisper.

  “Of what?”

  “Look over there.” He grabbed her by the shoulder and pointed her across the fire, where Lexie and Vaughn shared a log, him with his legs spread and his hand making languid sweeps as he talked in that laconic drawl straight girls apparently thought was sexy, her watching him and nodding slowly, looking like a tourist who didn’t quite understand the language she was hearing. “See? I told you.”

  “Talking to Vaughn makes girls gay?” she said.

  “No,” he said. “Quite the opposite: our boy Vaughn is, by every conceivable metric, as desirable as a guy can be at our school without being an athlete.”

  “I don’t see it,” Nia said. She frowned and looked at Lucian. “Are you sure you’re straight?”

  “Shut up,” he said. “I’m a student of love in all its forms. He’s . . . look, he’s tall, good hair, just enough fashion sense to seem cool without accidentally coding himself as gay, laconic in an artsy way, visibly fit, clear skin, and he’s got presence. Look there and there, at Whitney and Keeley.” Nia followed his finger to either side of Lexie and Vaughn, where two of the girls cast for the show’s Greek chorus sat on opposite logs. She wasn’t sure what he wanted her to see at first, since it looked like they were having completely separate conversations, but then she noticed it: every few seconds they glanced away, with either an obvious look of longing at Vaughn or one of simmering resentment for Lexie. And all the while Lexie just nodded at him absently, glancing at her phone whenever she got a chance.

  “Holy shit,” she said. This changed everythi
ng. “Holy shit, you might have a point. Wait here.”

  “See?” he said. “I told y— Where are you going?”

  “I have to talk to her,” she said, shooting him a wide-eyed look over her shoulder, the dancing shadows of the late-evening fire making her look like a crazy person.

  “But—”

  “Too late!” And with that she was gone, striding across the lawn toward the fire.

  LEXIE

  “Hey,” someone said. Lexie looked up from her phone and her heart screeched to a halt when she saw Nia standing over her. The other girl’s hands were in her pockets and a smile that must have been fake was spread across her lips. Nia started to speak, but then Lexie realized that she’d never been this close to her before, and now that she looked close . . . Yes, there were the thick eyebrows, there was the skin the color of a fawn’s coat, there were the lips as suited for kissing as they were for grinning. She looked just like Arisce Wanzer, the only transgender model Lexie followed online. Lexie wondered if Nia cultivated that look on purpose, maybe did something with makeup because the trans model was an inspiration, or if it was just a happy accident. Either way, she was so spellbound for a moment that she didn’t register what the other girl said.

  “We were talking,” Vaughn said, sounding vaguely annoyed in a way Lexie had learned over the past few hours probably meant he was very annoyed.

  “Oh?” Nia said with a twist of her head. “Is that what you call it?” Vaughn’s eyebrows crawled together, but otherwise he stayed silent as Nia returned her attention to Lexie. “We need to talk.”

  “We do?” she said. Her mouth felt dry. She wanted to turn inside out, and she suspected she was one wrong move away from throwing up.

  Nia nodded. “Walk with me?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “I’m not gonna murder you,” Nia said, her smile shifting into a wolfish grin. “We’re not all serial killers. Just most of us.”

  “Okay.” She ran her fingernails across the bark beneath her, clenched her teeth, and, for the first time in her life, decided to face something head-on. She said good-bye to Vaughn, though he was already paying attention to a girl on the next log and didn’t seem to notice, and followed Nia away from the campfire, into the growing, ocher darkness of the fields farther away from the farmhouse. When they were far enough away that the tinkle of conversation had faded to match the rustle of the woods in the distance, Nia turned and put her hands on her hips.

  “So.”

  “Uh,” Lexie said. She rubbed her arm and shifted her weight from foot to foot, barely noticing as the wind tore strands of her hair out of the tie that held them in place. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

  “Uh-huh,” Nia said, her eyes half lidded. “I’m sure.” She pulled her hair back and sighed. “So I saw you on the news.”

  “I . . . Yeah.” Lexie suddenly felt like she was going to throw up. “Yeah, I figured you would.”

  “And that didn’t bother you?” Nia said, her voice like a storm cloud.

  “I mean . . .” Lexie took a deep, shuddering breath and forced herself to look Nia in the eyes. “Yes. Yes, it bothered me, but I don’t have anything against you, I think you really are a girl, it’s just . . . what’s to stop boys from saying they’re like you and coming in?”

  “Yeah,” Nia said, nodding slowly. “Believe it or not, I do actually know how scary the idea of sharing a locker room with guys is. Weird, right?”

  “I hadn’t—”

  “—thought of it that way?” Nia squatted and started pulling blades of grass out of the dirt and braiding them. “No, of course not. Your theoretical problem is much more important than my real, current problem.”

  “That’s . . .” Lexie began. She took a small step forward. “I could talk to the school, help them work out a way to keep you safe.”

  “Maybe that would work for bathrooms, but what am I supposed to do for phys ed? Cross the entire campus to the office or the teachers’ lounge? Change in the janitor’s closet?”

  “I don’t—”

  “But if I don’t get those credits, my GPA tanks and I can’t get a scholarship, without which I can’t afford college,” Nia said. She swiped her hands on her thighs and sighed. “I was going to go to Lincoln. I was going to be the first person in my family to go to college.”

  Lexie wrapped her arms around herself, feeling suddenly dirty and small. “Oh.”

  “Yeah. So thanks for offering to help, but it’s too little, too late. At least I know you’re not completely evil. That’s something.”

  “I want to understand,” Lexie said, voice surprising her with its force. “I know I don’t know, okay? What I believe now isn’t what I have to believe, it’s just all I . . .” She swallowed and touched her throat. “You could help me understand. I would like it if you helped me understand.”

  “. . . really?”

  “Really,” Lexie said. “And you might find I understand more than you think.”

  Was it Lexie’s imagination, or did Nia’s eyes twinkle a little bit at that? Nia stood and tied a bracelet of grass around her wrist and admired it for a moment, then seemed to deflate. “I really wanted to hate you, but, I don’t know, I guess your heart might, maybe, be in the right place. And I mean, you’re wrong about boys following me into the bathroom, and I can explain why, but . . . later.” Lexie’s stomach untwisted all at once and her cheeks felt warm. Nia bit her lip and scrunched her nose, thinking hard about something. “So you’re gay, right?”

  “I would love to talk about—” Lexie started, but then she registered the final question and her guts twirled back into their knot. “What?”

  “You heard me,” Nia said. She untied the bracelet and tossed it in the air, watching dispassionately as the wind tore it apart.

  Lexie balled her fists and looked down at her shoes, alarm bells ringing everywhere as anxiety inscribed itself into her flesh. She swallowed, hard, desperate not to lose control.

  “Wh-what makes you think that?” she said eventually.

  “The straight answer would have been no,” Nia said, one eyebrow rising as her mouth tipped up in a faint smile, but then she grew serious again. “Now please, be honest with me. How much of you repping your parents’ fight about where I pee was actually, really real?”

  “I don’t . . .” Lexie said. She’d never said this out loud. She’d never even typed it, never so much as written it in a journal, and yet somehow Nia saw her. Who else had seen her? She felt naked, suddenly. Was someone going to tell her parents? Did they already know, and she was just making a fool of herself? Were they going to send her to one of those camps to try to pray her better? “I . . .” Her throat tightened and her eyes felt suddenly hot and wet and her face twisted up and this was worse than throwing up, definitely worse, but then she felt arms around her and she opened her eyes to find her cheek pressed into Nia’s neck, her nose filled with lavender and bergamot hiding just under a blanket of woodsmoke, and the tears faded.

  “It’s cool,” Nia said, her voice inches from Lexie’s ear. “I did so much stupid shit before I came to terms with stuff.” She pushed Lexie out to arm’s length and smiled as she thumbed her tears away. Lexie shivered, fighting the urge to nuzzle her cheek into the other girl’s hand (and holy crap, Lexie’d had her doubts about it, but Nia really did smell like a girl, and her skin was so soft, and—), all her years of pent-up longing bursting out of her torn seams now, in this moment, with this girl who should have hated her. “I can help you with it. Okay?” Lexie sniffled and nodded.

  “Good. Good.” Nia smacked her forehead and chuckled. “This is, uh, not how I saw this conversation going, honestly.”

  “I’m glad it did,” Lexie said. She rubbed her nose with her wrist. “Could we be friends?”

  “Yeah.” Nia’s eyes glittered in the dawning moonlight. “We’ve gotta do a show together anyway, right? Might as well.” She turned and started rummaging in her bag. “I’ll give you my number to make it official.”
She pulled out her phone and swiped the screen, but something she saw made her freeze in place.

  “What’s wrong?” Lexie took a step toward her, but Nia flashed her a look so full of anger it reminded her of sitting near the bonfire, as if all the pleasant feelings of a moment before had evaporated.

  “Apparently,” she said, her voice quavering, whether from anger or sadness Lexie couldn’t tell, “I missed a text from my dad.”

  NIA

  “What did it say?” Lexie said, as if she couldn’t have fucking guessed.

  “Your folks got what they wanted,” Nia said. She stomped and let out a curse so loud it drew the attention of everyone still at the fire. Like she cared.

  “It’ll be okay,” Lexie said, trying to make her voice as soothing as possible. “Like I said, I can talk to the faculty and—” She held out her hands and moved in for a hug, but Nia held an arm out and gave her a look she hoped communicated even half the rage and hurt coursing through her.

  “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t touch me. I . . .” She swallowed and wiped her eyes, hating how weak this made her feel. “I know you were just trying to—I know it’s your parents and not you, but you still helped them.”

  “Could we please talk about—” Lexie began, but Nia stormed past her, back toward the fire. Lucian intercepted her at the edge of the light and pulled her into a hug, and this one she gladly accepted. She let the waterworks flow, going limp and soaking his shirt collar and not even feeling embarrassed. He patted her back, and through the anger and the fear she felt a sting of shame for how mean she was to him sometimes, for how she took him for granted even though he was as close to a brother as she would ever have. She slung her arms around him and squeezed so hard he coughed, but she wouldn’t let go.