Drama Girls: A Lesbian Romance

by Mia Archer

  I wasn’t going to go through that again. I wasn’t going to give them a chance to hurt me again. I’d turned away from the church girl thing and I wasn’t getting drawn back into it.

  The feeling was strong enough that I was starting to think maybe it had been a bad idea to even let myself get tangled up with a good little church girl. Now there was a surprising emotion.

  “You don’t have to be such a jerk,” she said. “You’re being judgmental because you think they’ll be judgmental!”

  I sighed and it took all of my strength not to roll my eyes. That was a lot of strength.

  “Look. You don’t get to pull that card on me,” I said. “People like your Pastor Dave are bullies, and the sooner you realize that the happier you’re going to be. Bullies don’t get to turn around and play the victim card when someone calls them out on their bullshit either, even if you see that happening a lot these days.”

  I was starting to get heated. I knew I shouldn’t be acting like this with Chloe. So I took a deep breath. I was surprised that we were in the middle of our first fight, and I was even more surprised that it happened so fast.

  And after everything had been going so well, too.

  17

  Sarah

  I’m not sure why I went to the drama room. Maybe it was some instinct deep inside me. When I was upset the drama room was a safe place to go. It was a place where I felt the most comfortable in this school.

  I sure as hell wasn’t feeling comfortable right now. I could feel tears threatening to spill over and it was all I could do to keep from crying in the middle of the hall.

  That would be wonderful. Everyone’s favorite ball busting lesbian bitch sobbing as she made her way to the drama room. I knew more than a few people would have a field day with that.

  So I bit my lip and tried to keep it under control. The real miracle is I managed to make it just in time.

  Actually I think the real miracle was there wasn’t anyone on the other side of that door to see me break down. It must be Mr. Thompson’s free period or something, because the room was totally empty.

  That or maybe whoever was using this room was at lunch right now.

  So I leaned against the door in the dark room and sagged down. Let the tears finally overtake me. I couldn’t believe I’d acted that way around Chloe.

  She didn’t deserve that. She’d come so far and she’d done so well so far. All she wanted was to try and bridge our two worlds and I’d gone and blown up at her.

  Of course that argument with Chloe wasn’t the only reason the waterworks were taking over. No, talking with her about a church youth group was bringing up a lot of memories I’d rather keep buried deep inside me.

  People who should’ve been my friends. A youth pastor with a smile on his face who acted like he was everyone’s friend. Up until the moment he found out I might be interested in girls.

  I could still feel his words stinging even after all these years. I’d heard the asshole left the church shortly after that blowup, but still.

  I couldn’t go back. Mr. David might’ve turned everyone against me at that place where I thought I was safe, where I thought I was among friends, but at the end of the day they’d all gleefully turned against me.

  That wasn’t something I could forget. That sure as heck wasn’t something I could forgive. I didn’t care if that might not be nice.

  Why should I turn the other cheek when they didn’t? It infuriated me.

  “Sarah?”

  The voice was gentle but firm. I looked up to see Mr. Thompson peering out of his office and looking very concerned.

  “What’s wrong Sarah?” he asked. “Did somebody hurt you?”

  I could’ve almost laughed. Did somebody hurt me? Well yeah, somebody did hurt me. There was something about his tone that said if there was someone out there who’d hurt me then he was going to have something to say about it.

  Only this hurt had happened years ago and I didn’t even know where the person who did it was these days. No, there was nothing that could be done about it now but cry.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, trying to wipe tears from my eyes and not doing a very good job of it because they kept coming. “I’m just having some trouble today.”

  “Do you want to maybe come into my office and talk about it?” he asked.

  Oh great. That was just what I needed. Sitting in Mr. Thompson’s office sobbing my head off not able to get anything out because every time I opened my mouth to talk more tears came out.

  Still, it would be good to talk to someone. I’d never talked to anyone about this, and I was feeling like a piece of shit for what I’d done to Chloe.

  Maybe this would be a good time to chat.

  I got up. Walked over. Somehow managed to plop down in a seat across from his desk. The same seat I sat in the day he told me he was giving me a leading role in the play. The first leading role I’d ever had. Something I’d dreamed about since I was a freshman.

  “So do you want to tell me what’s going on?” he asked.

  I looked down. Didn’t say anything. Now that I was in here, now that he was asking questions, I couldn’t quite bring myself to talk about it.

  “Does it maybe have something to do with the freshman girl who seems to have caught your eye?” he asked.

  I jumped. I mean sure it had to be obvious that something was going on between me and Chloe. Heck, he’d been up in the lighting room when they caught us having that kissing session on the couch before we knocked our performance out of the park.

  Still. It was one thing to know people knew about that. It was another thing entirely to be confronted with it.

  It sort of felt like as long as no one acknowledge what had happened it felt like everything was still a secret. A safe secret. Hearing him actually talking about it made me realize how silly that thought was.

  “Maybe it is,” I said.

  And I spilled my guts. Really spilled them. I found myself telling him everything, and for a surprise Mr. Thompson listened with a sympathetic ear rather than laughing me out of the office for all my silly teenage drama.

  Damn it. This is exactly the kind of preppy popular kid dating drama I promised myself I’d never get involved in. I figured when I came out as a lesbian I’d find a perfect world of dating girls where this kind of thing never happened.

  Unfortunately the more I experienced the world of dating girls the more I realized how silly that thought had been.

  I told him everything. From the first time I noticed there was something about the way Chloe looked at me in the halls to kissing her to the argument we had just a few minutes ago in the cafeteria. How everything had been going so well but then I blew up at her.

  Mr. Thompson paused for a moment. Pressed his hands together and looked up at the ceiling as though he was trying to think of an answer. I wasn’t sure if I needed an answer so much as I needed someone to listen.

  But presumably he’d been around the block a few times. Maybe he knew something I didn’t. Some secret to dating that made everything easier once you were an adult.

  A girl could dream.

  “That’s quite a lot to process Sarah,” he said. “But I’m glad to see my hunch was right about the two of you.”

  “Your hunch?”

  “Well yes. I thought it was pretty obvious from the beginning there was something going on there. Why do you think I assigned her to you?”

  My mouth fell open. It was devious. Devious and genius. I guess I never conceived of a world where a teacher would be able to realize I had a crush on someone. I certainly never thought I’d live in a world where a teacher knew I had a crush on someone and then did their best to make that crush happen.

  “You sneaky bastard,” I said, the words leaving my lips before I had time to think about it.

  In all fairness it’s not like I was in the habit of swearing around teachers. I liked to cultivate a bad girl reputation, but I wasn’t that bad. It’s just that was something we said aro
und the drama room when someone did something sneaky and it just sort of snuck out of my mouth as I sat there realizing exactly how involved Mr. Thompson had been in my love life lately.

  He didn’t seem in a mood to be upset about me calling him a sneaky anything, at least. He just chuckled and shook his head.

  “Maybe I am,” he said. “But right now we need to figure out what’s going on here. Why do you think you reacted so violently to the idea of going to Chloe’s youth group?”

  I blushed. Looked down and away. I was aware that was very much what Chloe did when she was embarrassed even as she did it.

  I guess I’d picked up some habits from her even as she’d picked up some habits from me.

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  “Well I certainly have time. The lunch period is going to go on for another twenty minutes or so,” he said.

  That’s when it hit me that I was technically skipping class to come down to the drama room and have a chat with Mr. Thompson. No, I wasn’t technically skipping class. I was skipping class.

  Mr. Thompson seemed to read that panic on my face for what it was because he held a hand up.

  “There’s no need for you to worry about not being in class right now. Considering the circumstances I’d be more than happy to explain it to your teacher in whatever class you have right now.”

  “Math with Mrs. Norris,” I growled.

  Mr. Thompson frowned just a little at that. It was nice to know that Mrs. Norris had as much of a reputation among the teachers as she did among the students. Hopefully he would actually be able to explain the situation to her.

  The woman was known for being more about the numbers than having a heart.

  I really had no excuse now though. I guess today was just a day for spilling my heart out. So I told Mr. Thompson a story I’d never told anyone else. Not even my parents.

  Sure my mom had suspected something was up when I came home from youth group that night with tears in my eyes. I think she’d suspected even more when I refused to go back and I often wondered if she maybe had something to do with the rumors I heard that the youth leader lost his job very shortly after the incident, but I’d never asked her about it.

  I did tell Mr. Thompson though. Maybe it was because he wasn’t as close to me as my mom. Maybe it was because I’d already spilled my guts about Chloe. Whatever it was, I felt safe talking with him.

  I told him about going to the youth group. About first being confused about who I was and liking girls. How I’d talked to my youth pastor about those feelings because I thought that’s what you were supposed to do.

  How he’d blown up at me. Made fun of me in front of everyone in the youth group. Told me I was a sinner and I was going to hell and said just about every nasty thing you could think of.

  I started crying again just thinking about it. I hated that the asshole still had that power over me. I hated that I could still get this upset over something I’d tried so hard to forget. Something I’d tried so hard to act like it didn’t bother me at all.

  When I was done I looked up to Mr. Thompson and there was sympathy written plain on his face. He let out a deep sigh and leaned back in his chair. It creaked under his weight even though he wasn’t exactly a large man.

  “I’m so sorry that you had to go through that Sarah,” he said. “No one should ever have to deal with something like that.”

  “Yeah, well after that I don’t want to ever go to another church thing again,” I said. “If they’re going to treat me like that then I’m not going to give them a chance to hurt me.”

  My voice firmed. I felt some of the anger that had strengthened me when I was talking with Chloe starting to come back. It felt good. I held onto that anger and let it wash over me.

  “It’s natural for you to feel mad Sarah,” he said. “You do feel mad when you think about that night, right?”

  “Yes,” I said, more a growl than a word.

  “You were mad that night, right?” he asked. “You were mad but you were so surprised at everything that was happening that you couldn’t find the words to fight back. You were younger and you probably didn’t think about fighting back.”

  “Well yeah,” I muttered.

  It was a little too close to the truth for my comfort. I hadn’t fought back that night. I’d relived that night countless times in my memory before going to bed. I thought about it every time I did something that was out of the ordinary. Something that separated me from the normal airheads that walked the halls of this school.

  But I hadn’t done anything that night.

  “If you’re walking around with all that anger that can start to eat at you Sarah. Believe me I know,” he said.

  I eyed him sideways. “What would you know about something like that?”

  Mr. Thompson looked at me for a long moment. Some of his gray hair that was combed over his bald spot in a look that fooled absolutely nobody fell forward and he absentmindedly pushed it back up over his shiny cueball of a head like he always did.

  He took a deep breath. Let it out.

  “You know I’ve never told this to a student, but I think maybe it’s something you need to hear,” he said.

  I leaned forward. Wondered where this was going.

  “You know I grew up in this town, right?” he asked.

  “Um. Well I sort of assumed,” I said. “There aren’t a lot of people who willingly come back here if they’re not from here.”

  Mr. Thompson smiled. It was a thin ghost of a smile, but it was there.

  “You’re right, of course,” he said. “It was a different place when I was a young man, but just like a lot of the kids here now I couldn’t wait to get out of here.”

  I leaned forward just a little. He’d gotten a far off look in his eyes and it almost felt like he’d forgotten that I was even in the room. No, he was in a far off place. In the distant past well before I’d been born.

  “For me it turns out that getting out of here was going out to San Francisco,” he continued.

  A smile spread across his face. It was clear he was thinking back to happier times. It made me wonder what had happened between then and now to bring him back to this tiny little podunk town in the middle of nowhere.

  I knew if I ever hit escape velocity and got out of this place I sure as hell wasn’t planning on coming back!

  “Yeah, San Francisco was the place to be back then if you were a certain way. That’s how they phrased it in this town back then. I was a ‘certain way’ and I didn’t really fit in because I didn’t want to sit back and be a single confirmed bachelor my whole life. ‘Confirmed bachelor’ was another codeword they used,” he continued.

  I blinked a couple of times as I realized what he was telling me. A certain way. Confirmed bachelor. Maybe it said something about how little changes in small towns that both of those sounded familiar to me.

  I’d heard them in the here and now a good thirty years or so after he probably left for the good life in San Francisco.

  “Yeah. It was an exciting time in my life,” he said. “It was a good time to be a young confirmed bachelor in the city. Until it wasn’t.”

  He looked at me and I was surprised to see the hint of tears in his eyes. This was suddenly getting a lot more real than I ever would’ve thought.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “I’m talking about watching everyone you were friends with dying. And through it all there were groups that said we deserved it. That it was God’s punishment.”

  He paused for a long moment. Seemed to have trouble gathering his thoughts. A single tear moved down the side of his face and I had the overwhelming urge to hug this man who was baring his soul to me.

  I didn’t. Something told me he wasn’t done yet.

  “I watched the love of my life believe those lies. Believe he was being punished. He went home and I didn’t get to see him before he passed,” Mr. Thompson said.

  I blinked a couple of times. Was he sa
ying what I thought he was saying? He looked up at me and smiled.

  “You know I hated his parents for the longest time. I hated the churches that preached that hate for years. Decades of it burning right here in my breast,” he said, tapping his chest with a fist.

  “But eventually I realized that’s just not something that’s healthy to live with. You need to let it go. You need to not let them have that power over you.”

  He fixed me with a sharp gaze then.

  “I didn’t get a chance to be with the one I loved at the very end and I carried that with me for years. You have a chance to be with a girl you like, maybe love, and you’re letting the hate you carry with you get in the way. Maybe you should think about that.”

  I opened my mouth but I couldn’t think of what to say. There really wasn’t anything to say to something like that.

  “Thanks,” I finally managed to get out. “Maybe there’s something to that.”

  “There is,” Mr. Thompson said with a smile. “It took me a long time to realize it, but maybe you’ll learn sooner than me. I was one of the lucky ones who got to live. Maybe you’ll be one of the lucky ones who gets to love.”

  There was a brief pause. He clapped his hands together and started rummaging around on his desk.

  “Right. I need to get you a pass to your class, right? You said Mrs. Norris?”

  Again with that frown. “Maybe I should walk you up there myself. I don’t think a pass is going to do it.”

  I forced a smile, but my mind was still reeling from everything he said. Sure his situation wasn’t exactly the same as mine, but there was some truth to what he said.

  Maybe I should go apologize to Chloe and at least go into things with an open mind.

  Plus if I went to her youth group I could prove something to myself. That those bad memories really did have no power over me at long last.

  18

  Chloe

  “I’m so glad you decided to come here after all,” I said.