You Don't Live Here

by Robyn Schneider

  “You lose. Last plane,” Lily called.

  We waited a minute, and then another.

  Lily held up her phone. It was 10:01.

  “I win,” she said, propping herself up on her elbow.

  She was facing me, and she was so close, and so happy, and I don’t know what came over me in that moment, but I leaned toward her and brushed my lips against hers.

  It was the kiss I’d wished for as we danced beneath the stage. It was the kiss that had been threatening to spill out, and now it had, pure and sweet and terrifying.

  I expected the earth to shift, the ocean to rise up, the stars to drop like ripe plums into the soft grass. And for a moment, it felt as though they might. Because Lily was kissing me back. Her warm lips, her wicked tongue, and mine. Oh god. Mine.

  The whole world started to spin, and then Lily pulled away, her face asking a question that I wasn’t ready to answer.

  “That was unexpected,” she whispered.

  “Yeah,” I gasped. “I—sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” Lily said, grabbing the front of my shirt in her fist and pulling me back for another.

  We kissed under the blurred stars, on that cold trampoline. I reached up and ran a hand through her hair, and it was in that moment that I remembered—I was kissing a girl.

  I pulled away. My heart was hammering, and I was the good kind of dizzy, and I didn’t want it to stop, but I needed it to stop.

  Everything was overwhelming all of a sudden, and I realized that I was hyperventilating.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  I hopped off the trampoline and ran through her backyard, toward the safety of my grandparents’ house. Toward the safety of being someone I wasn’t, which of course wasn’t safety at all.

  Chapter 22

  UNTIL THE KISS, THERE HAD BEEN a possibility that I was wrong. That I’d made a mistake, calculating my feelings all wrong. That I had multiplied instead of divided. But now? There was no denying it.

  Kissing Lily was an earthquake, and now I didn’t know how to put everything back, or if I even wanted to. The ground had shifted. Plates had collided. Or maybe that was just our mouths.

  Later that night, I lay across my bed, staring up at the ceiling, my heart racing and my lips tingling.

  Lily, I thought. Lily, Lily, Lily. Her name was a symphony, a novel, a sculpture.

  It was a forbidden thing, off-limits, beyond the path I’d promised myself I’d never stray from, in this house that wasn’t mine, in this town that wasn’t mine, in this life that was never supposed to be mine.

  My mom had died, and my world had shattered, and putting the pieces back together was supposed to be hard. It was supposed to be lonely and miserable. It wasn’t supposed to be Kintsugi, because I wasn’t supposed to be transformed into something more than I’d been. And I definitely wasn’t supposed to burst with happiness as I pressed my lips against another girl’s. As I kissed her, and she kissed me back, revealing the truth I’d tried to push down for so long.

  I was queer. Definitively, for sure, no longer wondering and questioning.

  I’d been convinced I could keep it inside for a while longer, something to deal with when I didn’t live here, in Bayport, with my grandparents. But there was no turning back now. Because that hadn’t been a nothing of a kiss.

  Our kiss had been a masterpiece.

  And I wanted to go on making art with Lily forever, tracing the curves of her hips, sketching my fingers through her hair, painting her lips with mine.

  But I was terrified of what came next. Of my grandparents finding out, which would be a nightmare. They wouldn’t understand. Just like they wouldn’t understand about quitting Mock Trial, or why I’d stopped hanging out with Cole’s crowd.

  For my whole life, I’d thought adults were rational. I’d thought they would understand, and that they could be trusted, my dad notwithstanding. But then they’d started wearing MAGA hats, and actual Nazis were marching in the streets, and grown-ups were screaming at strangers on social media. Give teachers guns. Build a wall. Grab ’em by the pussy. Yes all women. Kids getting shot for wearing hoodies. The active shooter drills we practiced in school. Teen Vogue was reporting politics, and the president was insulting people on Twitter.

  I didn’t know what was safe anymore, or who was safe.

  My mom had been safe. I’d known that, but I hadn’t truly appreciated it. My life with her had been a soft place to land. No matter what, it would all be okay.

  And now I wasn’t sure if it would be. My grandfather had been so surprised that his dental hygienist had a wife. My grandmother kept asking me about Cole with that knowing smile, as though she was already planning our wedding. There was no question in her mind that one day I would marry a man and have kids.

  They had visualized my future a certain way, where any deviation from the path was a failure, not a choice. And they’d done the same thing with my mom.

  I imagined telling them that I was queer, that I liked Lily. But all I could picture was my mom wrapping me in a hug and telling me how much she loved me, no matter what. I couldn’t picture my grandparents reacting the same way.

  So what if she’s a lesbian, my grandmother had said of that dental hygienist. It isn’t as though she lives next door. Next door was the worst place my grandmother could think of.

  Parents sometimes kicked their own children out for being gay. And Eleanor and Joel weren’t even my parents. They were grandparents who barely knew me, who I’d seen twice a year for dinner up until they became my guardians.

  But I wasn’t gay. I might kick up an enormous fuss only to fall madly in love with a boy in ten years and live a life indistinguishable from what they pictured.

  I was Schrödinger’s box, containing two possibilities at once. It was too much, and I didn’t know what to do about any of it. Kissing someone shouldn’t be so stressful, so frantic, so terrifying.

  There weren’t a lot of safe spaces here. There were definitely less now than there had been a year ago. And yet Lily held her chin high every day, with her rainbow pin on her bag, not being loud about it, but not hiding either.

  Were my grandparents safe? I couldn’t tell. They looked at me, and I knew what they saw. A girl who wore makeup and dresses and liked to read books. A girl who did well in school and was shy around boys and had a baby face that inspired strangers to call her sweetheart. I passed the test. And so I didn’t tell anyone that their test was wrong.

  They’d gotten stuck with me, on top of losing their daughter, and I barely knew them, and I wanted them to like me. So I had pretended there was no Schrödinger’s box.

  And now that the box was open, I was all alone, with no one to tell what I’d found inside. I wanted my mom. I needed her, more than ever.

  I looked around at this bedroom that had been hers, at the desk still scuffed with her pen marks, the closet still containing her clothes, at all of the things she’d left behind and had never meant for me to have.

  “Tell me about this girl,” she would have said. Or maybe she’d know Lily. Maybe she would have already guessed.

  But now she’d never know. I’d thought I had the rest of my life to find the courage, but it turned out I only had the rest of hers.

  And now she was gone, and I was alone with my panic and my questions, and downstairs the television was saying trans people shouldn’t serve in the military, and my grandparents were listening as calmly as if it were a traffic report.

  I took out my computer, searching for the video I’d watched far too many times on YouTube. I followed maybe ten beauty and fashion vloggers religiously. Alone in my room, I watched their videos, desperate for girls like that to be my friends, to be as nice to me as they were being when they talked to a camera. Except they never were. And I knew that I wasn’t like them. That something inside me didn’t match.

  I drank in their secrets. What they ate for breakfast. Their morning routines, and where they shopped, and what their bedrooms looked like.
It didn’t help. I still wasn’t like them.

  But then I found one girl who felt different than the rest. I watched her talk frankly about acne and period cramps and dandruff. She joked about being a broke college student and how awkward she was at parties, and it felt so revolutionary. So honest.

  I remembered the day she posted a coming-out video. Remembered sitting in our living room on a Saturday afternoon, my earbuds in, shocked as she explained not about toner or beach waves, but about being bisexual.

  It was a revelation.

  I hadn’t known that queer could look like her. I’d thought girls who liked other girls wore flannel and had short hair. I’d thought that because I loved fashion, because I wore makeup, because I was feminine, I couldn’t be queer. That I was just weird or wrong or my own brand of awkward. I’d watched her coming-out video more times than I cared to admit, looking for clues that would help me solve the mystery of what I was.

  Now, with Lily’s kiss fresh on my lips and my heart beating fast, I watched the video again. It seemed old now. The quality wasn’t great. But the words, the message, they were still the same punch to the gut. The same truth that I’d thought was a broken piece of me, not a shared piece of what it meant to be queer.

  I closed my laptop and climbed into the shower, wishing the hot water would solve all my problems. Except hot water never does. You get about three seconds of clarity, and then it’s just you, naked, with a bunch of slimy plastic bottles at your feet, and instead of working out any answers, you wind up wasting water before you reach guiltily for the shampoo.

  Chapter 23

  WHEN LILY TEXTED ME THE NEXT evening, asking if I could meet her outside, I said yes. I’d been wanting to text her all day, I’d even picked up my phone and started composing my message in notes, so she wouldn’t see the typing dots, but in the end, I hadn’t found the courage.

  I was glad Lily had. Because I didn’t want to face her again for the first time on our Monday carpool, with Adam riding shotgun and me in the back seat, trying not to make it awkward, but inevitably doing that anyway.

  “Where are you going?” my grandmother asked when I came downstairs.

  “Just meeting a friend,” I said.

  “Which one?”

  “Um, Lily Chen.”

  “Oh.” My grandmother sounded disappointed.

  I figured it was easier not to ask why. Once she started on one of her tirades, she kept going, until she had picked apart every speck of a person. I’d heard her do it recently with Marion from her book club, and from the amount of vitriol she was spewing, I was shocked when, two days later, she mentioned their going out for coffee together after yoga.

  “Well, see you,” I said awkwardly.

  “Wait,” my grandmother said, and I turned around, my heart pounding. “When are you going to ask Cole to dinner?”

  Oh god.

  “Um, probably in a few weeks,” I said. “Now isn’t really a good time. Because of soccer.”

  I felt terrible lying to her, but I didn’t want her to say I couldn’t meet Lily.

  “Make sure to find out what he doesn’t eat,” my grandmother said.

  “Will do,” I promised, grabbing my keys.

  Pearl trotted over to the door, looking hopeful, like she might get a walk, even though my grandfather had literally just taken her on one.

  “You can’t come,” I told her, and she huffed before trotting away to play with her green ball.

  Lily was standing at the curb, wearing a sweater and jeans, her hair back in a braid. When I saw her, my heart sped up.

  Lily, Lily, Lily, it sang.

  It was like my blood remembered kissing her. I felt it rush to my cheeks, warming them.

  “Hey,” Lily said. “I thought we might walk down to the beach or something.”

  “Sure,” I said. I was tiptoeing around her, waiting for her to bring up what had happened.

  Except she didn’t, not right away. She started walking, and I followed. The sun was just beginning to set, and the sky glowed pink. Golden hour, it was called. The best lighting for taking photos, because it makes everything appear more perfect than it is.

  I wondered if it would help me. If, when Lily looked at me, I’d appear better.

  “I’ve never been down here before,” I said as Lily led me toward a small private beach at the end of the block.

  “Seriously?” Lily’s eyebrows shot up. “You need to get out more. Go exploring.”

  “I’ll pack a sled with provisions and make Pearl pull it,” I joked. Lily smiled, shaking her head slightly.

  It never failed to shock me how close we were to the ocean here, how just at the end of the block, it was the end of the entire continent. We were standing on the edge of something, always. But how easy it was to forget.

  There was a small kids’ playground down by the water, as though the ocean wasn’t enough.

  “Fake sand,” Lily said, her smile crooked as she stared at the sandbox. “Isn’t that amazing?”

  “Wait,” I said.

  I ran across the short strip of grass to the beach, bending down until my cupped hands were filled with sand, and then I brought it back to the playground, letting it sift through my fingers.

  “Now it’s real sand,” I said.

  “Just tell me,” Lily blurted. “Did last night mean anything to you, or were you just playing around?”

  She winced after she said it, leaning back against the orange plastic of the jungle gym. And I realized that, despite her brave face, she was as rattled as I was by what had happened.

  “Of course I wasn’t playing around,” I said, wondering how she could think that.

  Lily’s shoulders sagged in relief.

  “Okay. Good,” she said. “Because when I told you I was gay—” She stopped, steeling herself. “You acted really cool about it, and really supportive—and really straight.”

  I was going to have to say it.

  But if the first person I told was Lily Chen, here, on this golden beach full of real and fake sand, I thought it could be okay.

  “Well, I’m not,” I whispered, and then I took a deep breath. There was no turning back now. “I’ve never told this to anyone before, but . . . I’m bisexual.”

  I expected silence after I said it. For the world to screech to a stop, but it didn’t even slow down.

  “That’s awesome,” Lily said, relieved.

  “It’s awesome?” I said. I didn’t think I’d heard her correctly.

  “I can’t believe I’m the first person you told,” she said, smiling at me.

  “Also the first girl I ever kissed,” I said, since I was pretty sure middle school games of truth or dare didn’t count.

  “Wow,” Lily said. “Your v-card. I’ll treasure it.”

  “Moderate sunlight,” I instructed. “Water it once a week.”

  “I’ll text you updates,” Lily joked. And then she took a deep breath and admitted, “You have no idea how relieved I am. I mean, that night on the beach when you pulled the spaghetti out of my hair. And at the museum. And last night at the Den. I thought I was looking for something that wasn’t there.”

  “It was there,” I admitted. And then I asked, “Why were you looking?”

  “Because I have the biggest crush on you,” she admitted.

  “Impossible,” I said.

  Lily raised an eyebrow.

  “Because I have the biggest crush on you,” I finished.

  It felt so right, confessing my feelings to Lily. With boys, it always felt so precarious. Like at any moment they might declare that actually, they were just joking, that of course they didn’t like you. With boys, I was always waiting for them to make the first move, to set the tone.

  Here, it was just us. Just Lily and me. And we could be whatever we wanted. It was that easy. And also, that hard.

  “And I’ve never,” I went on. “I mean. It’s all really new.”

  “We’re sixteen,” Lily reminded me gently. “It’s allo
wed to be new.”

  “You’re right,” I said.

  “So, speaking of new things, would you maybe want to go on a date?” Lily asked, her eyes shining. She looked so hopeful and so beautiful in the fading golden light.

  Oh my god, a date.

  Lily Chen had just asked me out.

  “Um, I’d like that,” I said. “A lot.”

  Lily’s smile was luminous in the sunset, and I could feel myself glittering, too.

  But the moment I agreed, the logical part of my brain kicked in, reminding me of the million reasons we couldn’t. The million reasons I couldn’t.

  “Except,” I said, my voice hitching. “I, um, I don’t want to tell my grandparents yet. About being bi. I don’t—I don’t really know how they’ll react.”

  Lily bit her lip, considering.

  “Oh, Sasha,” she said. “I didn’t even think. And I want you to be in a safe space, and to come out if—and when—you’re ready. So if you need it to be a secret date, I understand.”

  “Really?” I said.

  It hadn’t even occurred to me that we could just . . . not tell anyone.

  “Of course,” Lily said seriously. “I’m super lucky with my family. But my grandparents—they’re old-school PRC.”

  “PRC?”

  “People’s Republic of China,” Lily clarified. “My aunt lied to them for years about living with her boyfriend before they got married. It was ridiculous.”

  “So about this secret date,” I reminded her.

  “It would be very secret,” she promised. “We might not even know that we were on it.”

  “As in, we might even be on it now?” I asked.

  “Anything’s possible,” Lily said, smiling.

  And then we climbed up onto the plastic jungle gym and watched the sun set over the ocean. The moon was already out, which my mom always said was a good omen.

  “There’s the rabbit,” Lily said.

  “Where?” I glanced around the grass.

  “In the moon,” Lily said.

  “I thought it was a face,” I said.

  “Rabbit,” Lily said. “With a pestle, mixing the elixir of life.”

  “You’re making that up.”