Begin Reading
Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
Thank you for buying this
Roaring Brook Press ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
For my godmother, Patty Kearney Lister.
Thank you for seeing us as we really are.
1
It was the first day of summer, and it was raining, but not hard enough to keep people out of the pool. We watched them from inside Maritza’s car, parked at the top of the clubhouse parking lot, with the windshield wipers dragging and the engine humming beneath us. JaKory was leaning forward from the back seat, his arm bumping against mine in the passenger’s seat, but I hardly noticed. I was transfixed by the people swimming in the rain.
“Let’s go in, just for a minute,” Maritza said. She was trying to sound bold, but I could hear the strain in her voice.
JaKory inhaled sharply. “No, thanks,” he said, shaking his head. “The rain’s gonna pick up, and there could be lightning. They really shouldn’t be in the water.”
It was a group of kids our age, maybe seven or eight of them. They were splashing each other and cannonballing off the diving board and drifting into the corners to make out. We were parked right by the gate, only a few yards from the pool, close enough to see their grins. I wondered if we knew them, if we went to school with them. I wondered why they scared me so much.
“Do they live in here?” Maritza asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, peering harder at their jubilant faces. “I guess they must.”
It was something I should have known, given that it was my neighborhood pool we were parked in front of, but there were so many houses in my huge, sprawling subdivision that it was hard to keep track of who lived in them.
“They look like they’re having a blast,” Maritza said, her expression hungry.
“What if they get in trouble?” JaKory asked. “What if the lifeguard bans them?”
The lifeguard was blowing his whistle so hard that we could hear it from inside the car, but the kids in the pool ignored him. Beyond them, huddled under the canopy that housed the bathrooms, was the usual pool crowd: moms, little kids, swim coaches. They watched the madness with disbelieving frowns on their faces, their towels wrapped tightly around them.
Maritza looked at me. “What do you wanna do, Codi?”
A crack of thunder sounded above us, but the swimmers were oblivious: They had started a chicken fight, the girls squealing on top of the guys’ shoulders, the rain hitting them at a slant. My stomach felt like it was reaching outward, yearning to be in the water with them, yearning for that raw recklessness. It was a feeling I’d had more and more lately.
“We could wait it out…” I said.
“We’ve been waiting for ten minutes already. It’s time to shit or get off the pot.”
Maritza’s biting tone grated on my nerves, but I’d learned over the years that she was chastising herself more than us. She had always been her own harshest critic.
“Why don’t we just go home and watch a movie?” JaKory suggested. “We can swim tomorrow instead.”
Maritza hesitated, her eyes fixed on the pool. Then she turned off the ignition, reached around JaKory, and grabbed a towel from the back seat.
“Maritza,” JaKory whined.
“What?” she said, her voice high-pitched. “We’ve been dying to swim for weeks. I’m not giving that up just because the weather won’t cooperate. Besides, those kids are swimming, so why can’t we?”
She meant it rhetorically, but it sounded more like a plea. We were silent for a beat, looking at each other. Then Maritza opened the door, covered her frizzy dark hair with her towel, and dashed out into the rain. JaKory and I looked at each other, already knowing how this would play out, before we grabbed our own towels and followed her.
It was pouring. My feet were instantly soaked, and the towel over my head was useless. In a matter of seconds the rain got worse, pounding down on us. We caught up to Maritza as the wind picked up and the trees started dancing. Another crack of thunder shook the sky.
“Maybe this wasn’t my smartest idea!” Maritza shouted.
“You think so?!” JaKory shouted back.
We hovered at the pool gate, gripping the bars. Water was moving across the pool like sea spray, and the guys and girls were howling with delight. One girl was floating on her back with her eyes closed, water hitting her from every direction.
I looked at my two best friends. Their eyes were fixed on the kids in the pool, and they looked as inexplicably scared as I was.
“I’m going back!” JaKory yelled. “Unlock the car!”
Maritza turned with him, her key already pointed toward the car, but I couldn’t tear my gaze away from the pool.
“Codi!” Maritza called. “Come on!”
I took one last look and ran after my friends.
* * *
It hadn’t rained on the first day of summer in years. I knew this because for the last five years in a row, Maritza, JaKory, and I had gone swimming on the first day of summer. It was tradition to meet at my house, pack a cooler full of snacks, and flip-flop our way through the burning late-May sun to the clubhouse at the front of my neighborhood. “Clubhouse” sounds bougie, but all the neighborhoods in the suburbs of Atlanta had clubhouses, and all the clubhouses had pools, and all the pools were filled with toddlers in soggy diapers and kids who’d just finished swim team and brave mothers who’d recently moved down from the Midwest or Northeast and were hoping to make friends in this transient half-southern, half-everything-else place. And then there was us: three teenagers splashing around in the shallow end, totally engrossed in playing a game of Celebrity, or practicing back twists, or guessing what songs JaKory was singing underwater.
We’d started this tradition the day after sixth grade ended. That was the day Maritza and JaKory had shown up at my house with swimsuits, squirt guns, and their summer reading books, and I had been so nervous and excited that I’d painted their portraits as a way of thanking them for coming. Embarrassing, I know, but you have to understand that before that sixth-grade year with Maritza and JaKory, I’d never really had a best friend, at least not the kind who lasted more than a single school year. And I knew it was the same for them, because when I’d gone to their houses a few days later, Maritza had taped her portrait to her mirror and JaKory had tacked his above his favorite bookshelf.
“You made me look so pretty and cool,” Maritza had said, beaming at me.
“My mom said you really captured my essence,” JaKory had said, trying not to look too pleased.
I’d soaked in their compliments without saying anything, but in that moment, I felt like I’d swallowed the sun.
We’d rediscovered those portraits this past Christmas and nearly died laughing. They looked nothing like my friends. Maritza’s likeness should have been gawkier, her eyebrows thicker, her nose more beak-like. JaKory’s should have captured his knobby elbows, ashy legs, and worrywart expression. I’d painted my friends as I saw them instead of how the world saw them, and now I was starting to recognize the difference.
&
nbsp; “You made us look like we were the shit in sixth grade,” Maritza had said, laughing, as we passed the portraits back and forth.
“Blissful ignorance,” JaKory had said, shaking his head in amusement. “Remember when we spent a whole month choreographing dances to that Celine Dion song? We had no idea how uncool we were.”
“Oh god,” Maritza had muttered, going still. “I think we still don’t.”
I thought about that conversation for weeks afterward, wondering if it was true, if that was really how other people saw us. Maybe they did. Maybe to them Maritza was just the gawky, outspoken, frizzy-haired dancer, and JaKory was the skinny, neurotic, Tumblr-obsessed black nerd, and I was nothing but the shy, reclusive, practically invisible artist who never raised her hand. Maybe that was why nothing real ever happened to us.
With our junior year behind us, things were supposed to feel big and important and, as JaKory described it no matter how much Maritza and I begged him not to, “pregnant with potential.” But the thing is, nothing felt big or important or bursting with potential to me. We’d gotten older, and taller, and maybe a little less awkward than we’d been the year before, but I’d come to know adolescence as a rolling stretch of hanging out with my friends the same way we always had, without anything new happening.
You know how adults are always talking about teenagers? When I was in fourth grade, my family drove past a house that had been rolled with toilet paper, and my dad shook his head and chuckled Teenagers under his breath. My mom griped about Teenagers every June, when dark figures hung over the monkey bars of the clubhouse playground long after closing hours, but she never actually seemed mad; she seemed wistful. And then there’s all those shows and movies, the ones where thirty-year-old actors pretend to be high schoolers, and they go on dates and drive their fast cars and dance at crazy house parties where their fellow Teenagers swing from chandeliers and barf into synthetic tree stands. You grow up with these ideas about Teenagers, about their wild, vibrant, dramatic lives of breaking rules and making out and Being Alive, and you know that it’s your destiny to become one of them someday, but suddenly you’re seventeen and you’re watching people cannonball into a swimming pool in the pouring rain, and you realize you still haven’t become a real Teenager, and maybe you never will.
* * *
By two thirty that afternoon, we were dried off and well into our second movie, burrowed down in my basement with a feast of soda, Gushers, and Doritos on the coffee table in front of us. Maritza and I were sharing our Gushers packs because she only liked the red ones and I only liked the blue ones, while JaKory didn’t like them at all because he had “texture issues.”
“Maybe you’ll like them better if you eat them on a Dorito,” Maritza said, shoving one toward him. “Come on, ’Kory, try it.”
“Get behind me, Satan,” JaKory said, flicking her away.
“Aww, come on, JaKory,” I said, offering him a chip and Gusher of my own. “They’re great together. You’ll ‘ship’ them in no time.”
I caught Maritza’s eye, grinning. There was nothing we loved more than teasing JaKory about his obsessive fandom habits.
“Pretty soon you’ll be writing fanfic about them,” Maritza said, her expression mischievous. Oooh, little Gusher guy, you’re so juicy, do that squirty thing for me again.
“Shut your filthy mouth,” JaKory said as I fell back laughing. “You’d be a terrible fic writer.”
Maritza looked genuinely offended. “I’d be a great fic writer.”
“Shouldn’t y’all be focusing on this movie, anyway?” JaKory said. “Or can you finally admit that it’s boring?”
“It’s not boring,” I said, looking at the women on-screen. “Look how beautiful they are.”
“That was literally a shot of her bending over a mailbox,” JaKory said dryly.
“Women look beautiful from an infinite number of angles, JaKory,” Maritza said in her know-it-all voice. “Not that you’d understand.”
“I’m perfectly fine with not understanding that,” JaKory said. “But lesbians or not, this movie is atrocious. Let’s watch something else. How about a gay romance?”
“Ugh,” Maritza and I said together.
“Y’all love to outnumber me on this, but I always watch your stupid girl-meets-girl movies, even the desperate dramas where one of them gets shot or eaten by a sea monster or whatever.”
“This isn’t even a drama,” Maritza said. “It’s a comedy.”
“Yeah, and I’m laughing so hard.”
“Fine,” Maritza said, tossing him the remote. “Pick something else. Give us all the gay.”
* * *
I guess that was the other part of the equation: the queer thing.
Four months ago, on a bitingly cold January night, we’d been watching Netflix in my basement when Maritza started acting all twitchy and nervous, hardly responding to anything we said.
“What’s with you?” I’d finally asked, pausing the movie.
Maritza opened and closed her mouth, seemingly at a loss for words.
“What?” JaKory asked, his brow furrowed. “Did you poop your pants again?”
“Fuck you,” Maritza snapped, smacking him with a pillow. “That happened one time.”
“What is it?” I asked again, pulling the pillow out of JaKory’s hand before he could retaliate.
“Well … okay,” she said in a shaky voice. “So … you know how I have that crush on Branson?”
“Yeah?”
“I really like him. Seriously, I think he’s so hot—”
“How is this news?” JaKory asked.
“Shut up, ass-wad. The thing is … well, I’ve started having a crush on someone else, too, and … um … it’s not a guy.”
I’d never seen Maritza look so vulnerable. JaKory and I stared at her for a long moment, and then we glanced at each other to check we’d understood correctly. Then JaKory clutched his hands together and started saying all these dramatic things like Thank heavens and Praise Jesus and I’m saved, and it wasn’t until Maritza jabbed him in the stomach that he yelled, “I’m gay, too! Like so gay I can’t even handle it!”
“I’m not gay, JaKory, didn’t you hear what I just said?! I like them both!”
“Bisexual! Whatever!”
The two of them fell forward into a sloppy hug, laughing with relief. Maritza actually kissed JaKory’s forehead in delight, and JaKory couldn’t stop wiping his eyes. I could only sit there, stunned, while the two of them calmed down. JaKory wasn’t exactly a surprise—Maritza and I had speculated for years that he might be gay—but Maritza liking girls was definitely a shock.
I knew it was my turn to say something, but the words got caught in my throat. I sat there with a weird sense of wanting to freeze time, to remember every little detail of the moment, from the happy tear tracks on JaKory’s face to the texture of Maritza’s fuzzy orange socks. I could feel my heart banging with the significance of it all.
After a minute, Maritza said, “Well, I guess we can all talk about boys together.”
That’s when I burst out laughing. Maritza and JaKory stared at me, and I shook my head and the words poured out.
“We can’t,” I said, “because it turns out I like girls.”
The three of us laughed so hard we ended up flat on our backs on my basement floor. Maritza kept squeezing our hands and JaKory kept saying, “What are the odds, though?!” When my mom called us upstairs for dinner, we sat around my family’s kitchen table trying to hide our secret smirks until JaKory choked on his water when my dad asked if he wanted a piece of pork sausage.
I guess it was pretty significant that all three of us turned out to be queer. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it further explained why we’d always felt a little different from other kids, and why we’d never clicked with anyone the way we clicked with each other. In any case, it made me even more certain that I would never find anyone who understood me like Maritza and JaKory did.
We still hadn’t t
old our parents. Maritza’s parents were devout Catholics, and JaKory’s mom was burdened with too many nursing shifts, and my own parents thought I was alien enough already, given that I’d inherited none of their perfect, all-American charm. But it went beyond that, too. We hadn’t told anyone else simply because it wasn’t relevant yet. I’d never kissed anyone, and neither had JaKory. Maritza’s only kiss had been last summer in Panama with some boy who hung out with her cousins. In short, we had no experience, so why worry about making an identity claim? Our sexuality—or, as JaKory sometimes called it, our “like-eality”—was something we all knew to be true, but which hadn’t really drawn a breath yet.
The thing is, I wasn’t sure it ever would.
* * *
“God, I want a boyfriend,” JaKory said, staring dazedly up at the movie he’d picked. He hugged a pillow to his chest like that would help.
“Me too,” Maritza said. “Or a girlfriend. Just someone I can send flirty texts to and make out with whenever I want.”
“Yeah, and eventually do more than make out,” JaKory said, wiggling his eyebrows. “But we need to get the first step down before any of that can happen.” He took a long breath and sighed. “Damn, I need to kiss someone so bad. Don’t y’all wanna kiss someone?”
I nestled further into my blanket. The fact that I was seventeen and had never kissed anyone was not something I liked to think about. As much as my friends wanted to talk about it, I never had anything to say. I guess because I knew, somewhere deep down, that simply talking about it would never get me anywhere.
“I’ve already kissed someone,” Maritza said smugly. She liked to remind us of this achievement at least once a week. I caught JaKory’s eye and mimed stabbing myself in the face.
“I can see you, asshole,” Maritza said, tossing a Gusher at me.
“I know,” I said, tossing the Gusher right back. “And by the way, you kissed a boy.”
Late to the Party Page 1
