I pushed myself up in bed, horrified.
At least I hadn’t screamed. That was my goal, to never, ever scream, because that would just make it worse: my startled grandparents rushing in to check on me, instead of my mom.
My phone, when I reached for it, said 4:53. Too early to get up, but I knew I wasn’t going back to sleep. So I switched on my light and got an old fantasy novel down from the shelf, reading until the sun came up, and filling my head with magic instead of monsters.
Later that morning, I was squeegeeing the shower, my eyes scratchy from lack of sleep, when I saw Adam and his girlfriend in the backyard. They were sprawled across an enormous trampoline two houses down, reading thick paperback novels. They had sunglasses and headphones on, and a box of donuts sat between them.
It looked like a scene from one of those indie movies about sad white boys and the quirky girls who rescue them. Or maybe one of those aesthetic Tumblr photos I would have reblogged in middle school. Except this wasn’t staged, and it wasn’t fiction. It was two people, in real life.
I stood there for a minute, transfixed by the tiny, perfect universe of that backyard trampoline. By a girl who had said literally one word to me. A squeak from the squeegee against the shower door brought me back to reality.
Tomorrow was the first day of my junior year. The definitive end of my hiding out here and pretending none of this was really happening. Tomorrow, I’d become a student at the same high school my mom had attended when she was my age.
It was like I’d fallen into a story that wasn’t mine, and was living the life of the missing main character, waiting for someone, anyone, to notice that I wasn’t supposed to be here. Except I was here. This was my life now, and my mom wasn’t coming back to claim it from me, and that was just how things were.
She’d never make me her special cheese omelet or proofread my essays or help choose an outfit for a first day. She’d never sit in the stands at my high school graduation. She’d never help me move into the dorms at college. I hated that my grandparents were the ones who would do those things now, stepping into every chapter of my life where my mom should have been.
Which is why, when my grandmother insisted on taking me back-to-school shopping at the last possible moment, I told her that she really didn’t have to. But Eleanor seemed so excited about a “girls’ outing” that I gave in and let her drive me to the mall.
I was expecting something indoors, with a Macy’s and a food court. Instead, what I got was an upscale outdoor lifestyle center. It was all Spanish tiles and palm trees and elegant fountains and designer boutiques. A store selling two-thousand-dollar stationary bikes had a shirtless male model riding one in the window display. I stared at him in fascination, confused at how that was an actual job.
I couldn’t imagine that my classmates actually shopped here. But then I saw girls my age ducking into Free People and Brandy Melville and Sephora, their arms loaded with bags, so apparently they did. I watched a group of blond girls cluster around a pink cupcake ATM, taking selfies.
One of them had on the exact Reformation dress I’d stalked on Instagram until I saw the price tag and quietly died. I tried not to stare, but I couldn’t help it. I’d thought only influencers and models dressed like that. Not suburban teenagers hanging out at the mall.
Another girl walked past with her mom, both of them with matching Gucci bags. It was like I shouldn’t even try. What was the point in getting some new sneakers or jeans? They weren’t going to help me fit in here.
It was a losing battle. And one that I didn’t want my grandmother to dedicate herself to.
“Grandma, you really don’t have to buy me stuff,” I said.
“There are rips in your jeans.”
“That’s the style,” I promised.
“Not in Bayport,” she retorted, marching into J.Crew.
I hung back, slightly terrified, as she prowled the racks, picking out “sensible basics” that I never would have chosen.
But then, I never shopped here. It was way too expensive. My mom and I shopped at the outlet mall, or at thrift stores, where you could buy like an entire wardrobe for the cost of one J.Crew sweater.
Although I doubted asking my grandmother to drop me off at the nearest Goodwill would go over well.
“These aren’t really my style,” I said meekly, after checking a price tag.
Not that I had a style. At my old school, I’d copied the status quo, wearing whatever my classmates wore to blend in. Secretly, though, I loved fashion. I followed influencers on YouTube and Instagram, studying their haul videos and their outfit posts, and wondering what would happen if anyone showed up at Randall High wearing over-the-knee boots with a beret and a plaid blazer.
“You’re sixteen, your style will change,” she said confidently. “Now what size do you wear in jeans?”
“Um, twenty-eight,” I said.
“You should try the twenty-sevens, just in case,” she said, leaving the twenty-eights on the table and hurrying me into the dressing room.
I barely had time to put on the first sweater before she’d peeled aside the curtain to get a look.
“Perfect,” she said. “We’ll get three.”
I almost choked. They were sixty dollars each.
“I don’t need three,” I said. I didn’t even need one. I had never in my life worn a merino wool cardigan.
“It’s my treat,” my grandmother insisted eagerly. “Now try the jeans.”
They were too small. Of course they were. I couldn’t even get them over my hips.
“I told you, I’m not a twenty-seven,” I said, embarrassed.
“Well, that’s a shame.” Eleanor frowned. “Are you trying to lose weight?”
“No,” I said, puzzled.
“Why not?” she asked, like it was a perfectly reasonable question.
“Um, well . . .” I blinked at her, unsure how to answer. I didn’t have a problem with my weight. But apparently my grandmother did. This whole time I’d been panicking over price tags, but it turned out she’d been obsessing over the sizes.
Thankfully, the sales associate interrupted, asking if she could bring some new sizes, and as she made sympathetic eye contact, I realized that she’d overheard everything.
Even with bags of new clothing, courtesy of my grandmother’s credit card and her philosophy on sensible basics, I still wasn’t ready for school to start. But for some reason, my worry wasn’t audible. If anything, my grandparents read my nervousness as excitement. Or maybe they just saw what they wanted to see, which would explain a lot.
“Big day tomorrow,” my grandfather said at dinner that night. “You must be excited.”
“Yep,” I lied, smiling weakly.
“This is the year that colleges look at the most,” my grandmother added, passing around a Pyrex dish of green beans.
“I know,” I said.
They kept reminding me. Lately, my acceptance into a good college was one of their favorite conversation topics. They fixated on it with a laser focus, and I got that it was something exciting for them, so at first I’d encouraged it.
Maybe it was pathetic of me, but hearing my grandparents give advice about majors and SATs made me feel closer to my mom. I imagined her sitting in the same seat when she was my age, having the same conversation.
My mom was smarter than anyone I knew. Always reading—she was the one who had gotten me into the Lost Generation—and watching old movies, forever talking about long-dead artists and writers as though they were great friends of hers, as though Freddie Mercury or Dorothy Parker or Salvador Dali had sat in her salon chair just that afternoon, getting a trim. She’d gone to Claremont, a fancy private college halfway between Los Angeles and the San Bernardino Valley. She didn’t finish, though. Thanks to my dad, and a course of antibiotics that made her birth control pills totally ineffective.
And now my grandparents had descended on me as though I were her do-over, their second chance to do everything right. As though
, this time, they might actually get an invitation to a college graduation, instead of an insurance bill for an ultrasound scan.
So I smiled and listened as they talked about advanced placement classes and the best times to go on college tours, nodding along and saying yes, sure, that sounded great.
“And of course you already know Cole Edwards,” my grandmother added. “Such a nice boy.”
“A very good family, the Edwardses,” my grandfather added.
“It’s not like I’m marrying him,” I said, resisting the urge to sigh.
“You never know,” my grandfather said cheerfully.
Believe me, I did. I was already preparing to watch him from across the cafeteria, where he probably sat at a table full of intimidating jocks and their equally intimidating girlfriends. I pictured them easily: the type of girls who never got period pimples, and who wore lacy thongs during the mile run in gym, and who were always slathering their legs in seasonally scented lotion.
I zoned out, thinking about those girls, because there were always those girls. And they always seemed to know that I wasn’t like them. I ate some green beans, relieved we weren’t discussing my future anymore. Instead, my grandfather was talking about the new dental hygienist he’d been to see that morning.
“I asked what her husband did for a living,” he said, swallowing a mouthful of veal, “and she said she had a wife.”
My grandmother smiled tensely, sipping at her sugar-free organic iced tea.
“A wife,” my grandfather repeated.
“We heard you, Joel,” my grandmother said.
I slid down in my seat, inwardly cringing.
“I didn’t know what to say, so I just said ‘oh,’” he continued.
“Well, you could have asked what her wife did,” I said.
He stared at me. Blinked. Like the thought hadn’t even occurred to him.
“It’s just a suggestion,” I mumbled.
“I didn’t know she was a lesbian,” my grandfather said, shaking his head.
“So what?” my grandmother said, her expression scathing.
Go Eleanor, I thought. I assumed she was about to tell him not to be so closed-minded, but what she said instead was, “The woman’s a dental hygienist, not our next-door neighbor.”
I pushed some food around on my plate, my appetite gone. Like a lot of older people, my grandparents sometimes said things that were kind of racist. But I’d never heard them say anything outright homophobic before. And while discussing a total stranger, whose life didn’t matter to them. It made me so uncomfortable.
Pearl whined at my feet. I slipped her a green bean, which she rejected, spitting it out on the Persian rug.
“Um, can I be excused?” I asked.
“Sure, sweetheart,” my grandfather said.
I took my plate over to the sink and started rinsing it, out of habit.
“Just put it in the dishwasher,” my grandmother called.
The dishwasher. Right.
I escaped up to not-my-room, trying not to freak out, but freaking out anyway.
I stared at the shopping bags in the corner, full of fresh notebooks and new jeans, everything waiting for tomorrow, when I would make my Baycrest High debut.
Please, I begged the universe, let it go okay.
And then: Please let me be the girl my grandparents think I am, for the next two years at least.
It had all been fine while I was playing Boo Radley in my mom’s childhood bedroom all summer, reading by the pool and talking to no one except Dr. Lisa. But the truth was, I was terrified of what my classmates might see when they looked at me. Terrified that expensive sweaters and a blank slate wouldn’t be enough to prevent a repeat of my catastrophic middle school years.
Back in seventh grade, when Tara was at the peak of her campaign to make my life miserable, she’d told the entire locker room that I’d made a move on her at a sleepover. What had actually happened was our friends dared me to kiss her during a game of Truth, Dare, Double Dare. But she’d left that part out. The part where everyone had giggled and insisted that we absolutely had to. She’d twisted it out of proportion, making me sound like I was so horny that I couldn’t help myself. “And then Sasha lunged at me,” she’d said with relish, as everyone listening gasped.
I hadn’t lunged at her. I’d just crawled across our circle of sleeping bags and gone for it, rushing before I chickened out, or before my nerves overtook me. But it didn’t matter. I wasn’t on trial, I was automatically guilty.
“No wonder her boyfriend dumped her,” Tara said with a smirk, as though daring me to say otherwise.
I didn’t. I let Tara have the first and last word, and everyone took their cues from her.
For the rest of the semester, the other girls in my PE class had run shrieking into the next row of lockers, covering themselves theatrically while I tried not to cry. I’d squeezed my eyes shut and promised that I wasn’t looking while they changed, that I would never, ever look.
Except I did look, sometimes. When our friends had dared me, I’d gotten a secret thrill at seeing what it was like to kiss a girl. Even though it was just a game. Because, honestly, I was curious. And then I’d let the kiss linger a second too long, and Tara had pulled away, and in that moment, I had inadvertently revealed a piece of myself. A piece that she’d seized with glee and used to torment me.
She’d told my boyfriend I didn’t like him. That I was too scared to tell him myself. But I did like him. And that’s what was so confusing.
Kissing Tara had felt no different than kissing a boy. So I’d pushed it down, and tried to forget, because it wasn’t a big deal that I’d been excited to kiss a girl. I thought boys were cute, so I focused on them instead.
Still, the truth would spring up every so often, appearing in my peripheral vision in the form of long, tanned legs, or a laugh that sounded like music, or an actress on TV, or a pretty girl on Instagram. I pretended to be transfixed by their cute dress, or their amazing lip gloss, but just as frequently, I found myself staring at boys, with messy hair and skinny jeans, and it wasn’t because I wanted to know where they shopped.
I never said any of my fears aloud. Because I didn’t want to be that girl again, crying in a toilet stall in the middle school locker room, hearing the taunts and whispers from the other side of the thin metal door. So I put on blinders, and I shoved it down, into the secret parts of myself that I didn’t share with anyone.
It never went away, though. Every time I thought a boy was cute, I was intensely relieved. Liking boys was easy. It was not liking girls that was hard. But I did it.
Still, carrying the truth around was exhausting. At least being invisible was safe. The alternative—being seen—was terrifying. And being seen as a girl who liked other girls? I’d gone through that hell once. I didn’t think I could survive it again. Especially here, with my grandparents sticking their noses into everything. Especially now, with the way things were since last year’s election.
My old town had been conservative, the kind of place that voted overwhelmingly Republican. It was stuffed full of churches we didn’t attend, and while my high school had featured three different religious clubs, there hadn’t been a Gay-Straight Alliance.
Bayport was the same shit, only wealthier. Half the town had voted for President Trump. Maybe they’d done it because he promised to save rich people lots of money. Or maybe they had deeper, moral reasons. But fifty-fifty weren’t odds I wanted to chance. Especially in high school, which is already a uniquely hellish social experiment.
I wasn’t sure how my grandparents would react, and I wasn’t planning on finding out. Not after what I’d just heard at the table. Two years. I could be the granddaughter they wanted for that long.
Chapter 8
BAYCREST HIGH WAS JUST DOWN THE hill from my grandparents’ house, and even though it was close enough to walk, my grandmother insisted on driving me.
We got there early, to meet the principal and make sure there weren�
��t any issues with my schedule. And it felt so strange, walking this campus with my grandmother. I couldn’t stop thinking about my mom, or how all of my firsts would be without her.
Like my first day as a high school junior. Baycrest was a collection of white mission-style buildings, all crushed against the back of the canyon. Palm trees sprouted along the pathways, and bright sprays of bougainvillea scaled the walls. The quad was full of circular café tables, topped with sky-blue umbrellas.
It looked like a resort. Or maybe a country club. Instead of fluorescent hallways, there were stone pathways and courtyards. The classrooms featured tinted windows, just like the luxury cars in the parking lot.
Eleanor dragged me toward a low administrative building with a bronze plate announcing that Baycrest High was a Blue Ribbon School, which made it sound like a prize-winning pie.
As she pulled open the glass doors, I caught my reflection. My flat-ironed hair, my minimal makeup—because I wasn’t sure if the girls here thought it was trashy or try-hard to wear eyeliner. I’d spent an embarrassing amount of time choosing an outfit. I’d wanted something sufficiently neutral, which would neither stand out nor define me as any one particular thing. Finally, I’d gone with my new high-waisted jeans, my Vans, and a slouchy, cream-colored button-down I used to wear to work at the museum. It was boring and basic, but it did the job.
Still, I was convinced I was missing some small sign that would mark me instantly as an outsider. Some glaring error that would make girls scrutinize me in the hallway, cataloging all of the ways I was wrong.
The administrative office was overly air-conditioned, which was a bad omen for the rest of the day. I sat there shivering, wishing I’d brought a sweater while my grandmother filled in about a million forms.
“Mrs. Bloom? I’m Principal Mitchell.”
“So nice to meet you,” my grandmother said, shaking the principal’s hand.
The principal beamed as she ushered us into her office, where a Stanford Alumni travel mug sat on her desk, along with photos of smiling girls in ballet leotards.
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