First Time for Everything

by Andrea Speed

  She still kept her back to them as she changed, shrugging out of baggy jeans and hoodie and into equally baggy sweatpants and a Birchwood High T-shirt left over from before.

  She wasn’t sure the weather was really warm enough for just a T-shirt, but Katie, who’d apparently forgotten to mention that she was a total slave driver, made them run laps round the field to warm up.

  Jen was halfway round her second lap, wondering when she’d gotten so unfit that she couldn’t keep up with the other two, when she caught sight of someone running across the field, heading straight for them. It was a guy, waving and shouting something she couldn’t hear, just the harsh tone of his voice carrying on the cool air.

  She stopped, catching her breath and trying to swallow against the familiar surge of fear, just the three of them out in the field and no one to say or do anything. “Hey,” she called out to Katie and Liz, still running. “Hey, wait.”

  Katie slowed, turning slightly. “You okay?”

  Jen started jogging toward them, watching the figure get closer. “Yeah, just—wait for me, yeah?”

  Katie looked in the same direction Jen was, then started moving back toward her. “Liz, come here a sec.”

  Jen stepped closer to them both, feeling an odd wave of protectiveness she couldn’t shake.

  “It’s probably nothing,” Liz said quietly.

  “Latecomer,” Katie agreed.

  Jen wondered if they were expecting her to protect them. A year ago, even less, and she would have stepped in front of them out of habit, because her father had always taught her that young men never let a woman get into a fight, and she hadn’t ever, she’d never….

  “Jen!” For a second, she was sure she’d heard, “John,” her heartbeat kicking up with fear that was closer to panic. “Jen, hold up. What, you couldn’t wait five minutes?”

  And then she knew the voice, of course; she knew the person it was attached to, and the relief made her knees a little weak. “What, you don’t own a watch?” she yelled back.

  Cam wasn’t quite close enough for Jen to see if he smiled or not, but he slowed to a jog.

  “It’s okay,” Jen said more quietly, as much to herself as to Katie and Liz, who’d already started to move away from the slightly defensive formation they’d fallen into. “It’s just Cam.”

  “Great,” Liz said dryly. “Now I’m going to feel like even more of an amateur.”

  “HOW DO you do that three times a week?” Jen asked an hour and a half later, walking back toward school next to Cam, who had his hockey stick over his shoulder like a movie gangster with a rifle. “My legs feel like I’ve just run up a mountain.”

  “You get used to it,” Cam said cheerfully. He wasn’t even winded, just a bit windswept, and it made him look really good. Jen would bet she’d gone red and splotchy, and her hair, which still wasn’t really long enough to do anything with, looked like she’d been in a wind tunnel or something. It really wasn’t fair that her best friend was so hot.

  “How long does that take?”

  Cam grinned at her like he had when they were seven years old and she hadn’t been able to catch the ball in Little League. “I’ll help you. Come over to my house on the weekend. We’ll do some drills.”

  Jen swallowed the lump in her throat—she’d signed up to play hockey, not to have three emotional gut punches in one evening—and said, “Sounds good.” They walked a little farther in silence; then she couldn’t resist. “Thanks for coming today.”

  Cam didn’t say anything until they were nearly back at the building, and she was starting to think he wasn’t going to say anything. “You’re my best friend,” he said finally, quietly. “And I’ve only been trying to get you to play hockey since we were ten. I wasn’t going to not join in.”

  “Thank you,” Jen said again. She had to turn away a little, her eyes swimming with unexpected tears, totally loving Cam in that moment.

  Even more so when he slung his arm round her shoulders, pulling her close, and she went with it, just being next to him, feeling protected and safe.

  “SO,” KATIE said, sitting in the art room the morning after their second session. “You and Cam.”

  “What?” Jen wasn’t paying much attention—she’d started drawing the small china cat on Ms. Carter’s desk before Katie turned up, and she was in the zone.

  “Are you, you know…?” Katie trailed off, and Jen had to look up. Katie had her hands clenched tight together and wasn’t really looking at Jen. “You know.”

  “I was up until midnight doing my math assignment. I barely know what day it is.”

  Katie rolled her eyes, which Jen thought was a bit much. “Dating.”

  “Are—what?” Jen said intelligently. “What are you—why are you asking me that?”

  “Because I want to know?” Katie grinned, suddenly. “And also because watching you make fish faces about it is kind of fun.”

  Jen rolled her eyes, relief rushing through her at the thought that Katie was just kidding. “Thanks a lot.”

  “No, but seriously. Are you dating?”

  “I’m not dating anyone,” Jen said honestly.

  “But you want to.”

  Jen put her pencil down, since she obviously wasn’t going to get anything else done. “Is this girl talk?”

  “We’re girls, we’re talking. Okay, about boys, in whom I have, like, less than no interest, but yeah. Maybe.” Katie looked uncertain, which was kind of how Jen felt about the whole thing, uncomfortable at the thought of being asked to actually put a label on how she felt about Cam. Talk about a subject she preferred not to think about. “It’s just that you seem really close, and I was wondering.”

  “We’re not dating,” Jen said firmly, since that was the easy part to answer. She looked down at her own hands, folded neatly in her lap like she’d watched Cam’s mom do when she was a kid. “We’ve been friends forever.”

  The thing was—the thing with Cam was—that she’d sort of thought he wouldn’t be her friend anymore after she came out. Like he’d worry about all the times they’d shared a bed as kids, or camped out as teenagers, and maybe he’d start finding other friends, and she wouldn’t matter so much to him anymore.

  Except he was still there and still her best friend and still treated her like Jen, not like a girl or a boy. And Jen had enough going on with figuring out how to be herself, without trying to figure out how to be someone’s girlfriend.

  “People change,” Katie said quietly. When Jen looked up, Katie was watching her, all sympathetic-looking in a way Jen definitely didn’t want. Whatever else people felt, she didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for her.

  Especially because, when she let herself think about Cam, sometimes she thought about the time, when they were fifteen, that they’d stolen some beer from Cam’s parents and snuck out to drink it, late at night in the summer. Cam’s mouth on hers had tasted sort of bitter, but Cam had thought she was a boy then, and they hadn’t ever talked about it.

  “Like me,” she said and let Katie think what she wanted.

  Cam, after all, was kind of a traditionalist, and senior prom wasn’t a million years away. Not that Jen would ever wear a dress—she wasn’t that kind of girl—but that didn’t mean she couldn’t have a little hope.

  “YOU KNOW why no one comes to this, right?” Liz asked after the third session, at which they’d acquired their fifth member, Daniel, who was a junior and not someone Jen knew at all.

  “No, but I bet you’re going to tell us.” Cam knocked the ball forward to Katie, who caught it on her stick and spun it back to him.

  “Everyone thinks you’re weird.”

  “We are weird,” Katie said mildly. “That’s the point.”

  Liz rolled her eyes. “I meant, there’s all these other people who are, you know, like you, except they think if they come and play hockey with you all, everyone’s going to pick on them as well.”

  “You come,” Jen said, mainly so that Daniel, who didn’t really say muc
h, wouldn’t have to make any kind of statement about whether he was “like them” or not. Also because it really seemed like Liz was about to say something stupid, and she didn’t want to have to start hating Liz for making stupid comments.

  “Sure, but I don’t care what people think about me.” Liz stepped awkwardly over the ball as Cam knocked it wild trying to pass it back to Katie. “Don’t mind me, I don’t need ankles. I’m just saying, if you didn’t make it so obvious, more people would probably come.”

  “Yeah, and while we’re at it, I could go back to pretending I’m really a boy, and Katie could find a nice guy and settle down, right? Because then we wouldn’t get picked on so much.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that.” Liz stopped and turned back to Jen, her face horrified. “I didn’t—I’d never say that.”

  “You just did,” Katie said softly. “That if we made people think we were like them, they’d accept us better.”

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” Liz said again. “I would never—I come here, don’t I?”

  “Why do you come here?” Cam asked. He had his head down, so Jen couldn’t read his face at all, and his voice was totally neutral. It made him sound really grown-up, and she wasn’t sure she liked it. He didn’t sound like Cam when he did that.

  “To play hockey?” Liz looked uncertainly between the three of them, ignoring Daniel, who was looking away and probably pretending to be a tree or something. “’Cause I can with you all.”

  “Because it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks about you, right? Because you’re normal, and you can probably prove it, so it’s like they didn’t really say it at all.” Cam still wasn’t looking up, but his voice had gone hard. Jen saw Liz flinch and couldn’t control a tiny mean part of her that thought Liz deserved it.

  Or the bigger part of her that totally loved Cam for saying that, for standing up so she and Katie wouldn’t have to, because they almost always did.

  “That’s not my fault.”

  “It’s not Katie and Jen’s fault that they can’t feel like that,” Cam said. He turned his hockey stick in his hands, the ball spinning with it. “You’re not scared because you’re normal, but they’re normal too.”

  “Oh,” Liz said, very quietly.

  Daniel said, “I have to go. My mom’s picking me up,” and took off for the school building at a run.

  “Last we’ll see of him,” Jen said, watching him go. She sort of didn’t mind; this felt like it should be just the four of them, and she could see why Daniel was a bit freaked out.

  Katie shrugged. “Five’s awkward anyway. Can’t split up properly.” She slung her hockey stick over her shoulder, the way Cam did. “Liz is kind of right, though. ’Cause it’s like we’re trying to say that we’re queer without actually, you know, saying that we’re queer. Like it’s not something we should tell people.”

  Jen tried to imagine Mr. Sheppard’s face if they changed their name to the Birchwood Queer Hockey Club. He was lenient, but she didn’t figure he was probably quite that lenient, not with some of the things the other parents would say.

  “You want to change the name?” Cam asked, reading Jen’s mind.

  Katie scrunched her face up. “Maybe not the name. Maybe just, like, the advertising or something.”

  WALKING HOME through the city park together, Jen bumped her shoulder against Cam’s and waited for him to look at her. His hair was still damp from the shower, curling a little over his forehead, and she really wanted to touch.

  She tucked her hands into her pockets instead and said, “Thanks for earlier.”

  Cam shrugged. “She shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Thank you anyway.”

  Cam looked away, watching an older woman walking a white dog a few yards in front of them. Jen was pretty sure he knew she was still watching him from the way he hunched into his jacket. “What?” she asked quietly.

  “I just… I kinda didn’t do it just for you and Katie,” Cam said to the ground. When Jen didn’t say anything straight away, he glanced sideways at her. “I mean, I don’t know or anything, I….”

  “You think maybe you’re gay?” Jen asked. She wanted to give Cam a hug and tell him it was all fine, and, just a tiny bit, she wanted to feel sorry for herself, because if Cam was gay, then the kiss had been about John, not Jen.

  Before she could get too deep into thinking about it, though, Cam was shaking his head hard. “I’m not gay,” he said, dropping his voice when he was halfway through “gay” and it was too late. He stopped walking and turned to Jen, one hand drifting toward her like he didn’t really know what to do with it. “I kind of—Captain America’s really hot, you know?”

  Jen did know, though she’d probably have gone for the Black Widow or the Falcon first, if anyone gave her the choice.

  “But I think about that time we kissed,” Cam said, looking at the path again. “Maybe about whether we could do it some more.”

  Jen’s heart did a weird swoopy thing that made her hands shake. Cam’s hand was still vaguely reaching out to her, even though he wasn’t looking at her. Slowly, in case he changed his mind, she wrapped her fingers around his, then, when he didn’t stop her, slipped her hand fully into his. His hand was cold, his skin rougher than hers, and as she looked at their joined hands, he squeezed hers.

  “Yeah?” Cam said, quiet and hopeful.

  Jen looked up to see the same hope on his face, a smile slowly curving his lips. She felt herself smiling back and didn’t think she could have stopped even if she’d wanted to.

  Which she really, really didn’t.

  “Yeah,” she said and squeezed back.

  ON THURSDAY, Jen and Cam dragged two chairs close together in the computer lab and made new posters on Ms. Jackson’s digital art program. Under the club name, there was a picture of the four of them (Daniel never came back), each with a hockey stick slung over their shoulders. Under Jen’s it said “Trans,” under Katie’s “Dyke,” under Liz’s “Straight (not narrow),” and under Cam’s “Figuring it out.”

  At the bottom, it read, “There are no boxes in hockey.”

  She was pretty proud of it, even if they had decided it was maybe better to just put them up and not ask Mr. Sheppard first. “Better to seek forgiveness than permission,” Ms. Carter had agreed when she’d caught them talking about it and promised not to say anything unless they needed someone to stand up for them with the other teachers later.

  Jen wasn’t really surprised, walking to biology with Cam after lunch, to find Todd standing in front of one of the posters, carefully writing “Faggot” over Jen’s face.

  “Ignore him,” Cam said quietly, tugging her arm. “Come on, we’ve got time to take the long way round.”

  Jen shook him off, gently, ignoring the shiver that rolled down her spine when his breath brushed her ear. She hadn’t figured the hormones she’d been taking for the past couple of months were doing anything for her sex drive until her and Cam’s little moment; turned out they really, really were. “I don’t want to. It’s raining, and these are my good pants. Anyway, you’re the one who gave the little speech about fear and being normal, remember?”

  “And I’m sensing I’m about to start regretting it,” Cam said. He let go of Jen’s arm anyway.

  She was glad when he stayed close. There was a big difference between not being scared on the hockey field, with three people she knew she could trust, and not being scared in front of a transphobic, homophobic idiot, with no one there except her best friend and maybe boyfriend.

  Actually, put like that, maybe there really wasn’t.

  “You thinking of joining us, Todd?” she asked, raising her voice and hoping it wouldn’t choose now to crack.

  “Like I’d waste my time playing with a bunch of homos.”

  “It’s actually one homo, and she prefers dyke.” Jen tried out her sweetest smile.

  Todd glanced over at Katie’s picture, which made her look about five times as terrifying as she was in real l
ife. “I bet they let you change in the girls’ locker room.”

  Jen bit her lip, tempted to laugh at how much of a weak comeback that was. “We all change together,” she said, keeping her sweet smile. “I dunno, I guess maybe we could ask Cam to close his eyes for you, though. Since you’re such a fragile flower.”

  “Trust me, you wouldn’t have to ask.” Even behind her, Jen could feel Cam’s shudder of revulsion. “I don’t think my eyes could stand seeing him naked.”

  “You’d love it. You probably think about me fucking you when you jerk off.”

  “Yeah, okay.” Jen turned on her heel, heading back over to Cam, and that felt like a victory, more so than talking back to Todd did. She’d never been able to just turn her back before. “We have to go. I need to go throw up.”

  “You saying the thought of me jerking off makes you sick?” Cam asked. He touched Jen’s shoulder, just for a second, smiling at her, all warm and secretive, like he knew exactly how thinking about him jerking off made her feel.

  “You saying the thought of him fucking you doesn’t make you sick?”

  Cam shuddered. “Fair point.”

  Todd shouted “Faggots” after them, with what Jen felt was a little less conviction than he usually managed.

  “Not for you,” Cam shouted back, hand brushing against Jen’s.

  WHEN JEN walked past the poster on her way to hockey practice that evening, someone had crossed out “faggot” over her face and replaced it with, “Pretty sure she’s straight (unfortunately). Signed Cassie, member #5.” Underneath that, unsigned but obviously from Cam, was written, “Fortunate for some,” and a tiny heart.

  Jen grinned, slung her hockey stick over her shoulder, and let herself bounce, just a bit, all the way to the locker room.