“Sounds pretty awesome to me,” I say.
“I’m totally blaming you when my mom comes home and loses her shit.”
“Not fair. It was my idea but your decision to do it tonight without asking. We get equal blame for this.”
“Maybe we’ll get grounded together.”
“Sounds fun. I’ve never been grounded before.”
Jamie’s eyebrow raises. “Interesting. Very different parenting styles, our mothers. But, yeah, sure, equal blame. You drill the holes, though.”
I laugh and get started. I’m good at it. I line everything up carefully. We briefly panic when we realize the painting might not fit through Jamie’s doorway, but once we angle it diagonally, we get it through. When it’s time for us to lift the canvas, it rests perfectly on the hardware. We step into the middle of Jamie’s room. Taking it all in is almost impossible—it’s so big for the small space. Jamie backs up onto their bed.
“Every morning I get to wake up to this. In the living room, it was just a decoration. In here, it’s the entire room.” Their eyes fill with wonder.
“Are you happy with it?”
“Yeah,” Jamie says. “It transforms everything. You are a genius.”
“My work here is done, then,” I say.
“No, it isn’t! What should we change next?”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
It’s past three a.m. now. I thought for sure we’d say goodnight. I’d leave Jamie to bask in the glow of their favorite painting while I crawled back into my bed.
“I mean that we can do more,” they say.
But I don’t want to go too far. This place only feels a tiny bit mine. My mother’s money didn’t pay for any of it. “Let’s sleep on it,” I say. “We might wake up in the morning full of regret.”
“It basically is the morning. Okay, look: Nothing else needs to be this extreme. But there are small things we could do. Some of those boxes in the garage have stuff from my old house. I want to find a vase I’ve been missing. And I’m sure you have a secret vision you could fulfill.”
Ultimately, this is what gets me: That Jamie thinks I’m the kind of person with secret visions, that I wait around until the right moment to bring them to fruition. And as soon as I consider it, I realize it might be true. I know exactly what I want to do next in this house.
“Okay,” I say. “If we’ve come this far we might as well see it through.”
Jamie clasps their hands together and pumps them in the air in a silent cheer. “I’ll make coffee,” they say. “Do you like coffee?”
“I like it. Yes.”
“Or do you prefer tea?”
“Either one.”
“A flexible genius. A rebel of décor,” Jamie says on their way to the kitchen.
I eye the driftwood on the floor and stack it in my arms. The living room wall is now bare, save for the holes where the hardware once was. I hold a piece of driftwood up where the painting hung to see how it would look.
“Hey, Jamie. What if we stacked these vertically right here?”
Jamie pops their head out from the kitchen. “It looks pretty good there, actually.”
I agree. They look airy and floaty and calm—and it might be less shocking to our mothers if, when they arrive home, they don’t see an empty wall where the painting used to be. I get to work with the hardware and I’ve already finished hanging the first piece when Jamie comes out with my mug of coffee.
“Want my help?”
“I’m okay,” I say. “Go see about your vase.”
I’ve hung the second piece of driftwood by the time Jamie appears again, holding a box spilling over with objects. “I found a lot,” Jamie said. “Our old salt and pepper shakers. A sculpture I made in eighth grade that I distinctly remember her promising she’d keep on display forever.”
“Let’s see it.”
They hold it up for me.
“Is it a horse? It’s actually pretty good.”
“Yeah. I made it at an art camp. I worked on it for an entire week.”
“It deserves a place of prominence.”
Later, I see they’ve placed it in the center of one of the exposed kitchen shelves, stacks of neutrally toned plates on either side of it, and the sight of it there is so perfect I feel like I could cry. It’s a vignette from a family’s house, and somehow this is my family now, even though it doesn’t feel that way yet.
The clock reads four-fifteen a.m. Along the dining space’s wall is a bank of white shelves and I discover what I want to do next. I choose one of the framed photographs from my room and carry it out there. Heavy art books rest on the shelves in curated stacks. I notice the vase Jamie added, which doesn’t look all that different from a couple of vases the designer chose, but to them it means something. I shift everything over a little bit to make room for the photograph of my mom and me. It was just the two of us for my whole life, at least all of my life that I can remember. Sure, a girlfriend now and then, but mostly just us. In the photograph, we’re standing by the small secret waterfall we often hike to in Mill Valley. I’m probably about six. My pants are soaked to the knee and we’re smiling huge, matching smiles. I want it to be here, in the living room, where everyone will remember. We had a whole life before this one.
Jamie and I move around each other, past each other, placing our old objects on shelves and in corners. Jamie sets a woven basket on the floor. I take my grandmother’s quilt and toss it over an arm of the sofa. I unplug the lamp on my nightstand and turn the knob of Mom and Macey’s door. Their room is really lovely. The same exposed rafter ceilings, the same transom windows, but larger. A handmade wood chair sits in a corner. And flanking the bed are matching lamps atop matching bedside tables. It’s too perfect. I find which side is my mother’s—I can tell by the stack of books waiting to be read—and, gently, I take her lamp off the table and replace it with our old one. When I turn to take a look from the doorway, Jamie joins me.
“Surprisingly, it really works,” Jamie says. And it does. The lights are different but they complement each other, and with so much symmetry this one difference transforms the room. We’re together but we’re not the same, it seems to say. I hope Mom likes it. I carry the other light into my room and plug it in. It’s shinier than our old things, but I feel that it belongs.
We’ve finished. Jamie collapses onto the living room rug. I curl up on the sofa with my grandmother’s quilt over my feet.
“My mom drives me insane. Doesn’t yours?” Jamie asks out of nowhere.
My eyes tear over and I’m too tired to even try holding them back. “No. I really love my mom.”
“I mean, I love mine, too. Now I feel like a terrible person.”
I laugh, wipe my eyes. “No, I get it. I get it. Of course, you love her. I’m the weird one. My mom and me . . . She’s always let me be exactly who I want to be. She’s just special, I guess. But Macey seems great, too. It’s good, I guess, that they found each other.”
It’s Jamie’s turn to laugh. “‘It’s good I guess.’ Such conviction.”
“Whatever. You looked miserable the whole wedding. Or bored.”
“My mom, she just, like, she can’t let anything be about me.”
I’m confused. “I mean, it was their wedding. It wasn’t supposed to be about us.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
I sit back. The driftwood hovers above us and I like the look of it there more and more. “I have time.”
“I don’t really know how to say it. It’s just—I came out, you know, and she was all over-the-top accepting, wanting to go to all these family support meetings, and then just a month later she came home and came out to me. After being married to my dad until just a few years ago and only ever dating men.”
“Wow,” I say. “Yeah. That must have felt weird.” Jamie doesn’t say anythi
ng. “It must have been hard,” I add, wanting more. I’m ready to listen to whatever they say next.
But Jamie squirms. “It’s gotten very late, you know,” they say.
I laugh. “Okay, got it. No more on the subject.” But it really is so late and I’m beginning to feel it in a new way. My scalp tingles; my eyes are heavy. “I’ve never stayed up all night before,” I say.
“I think I’m actually sleeping right now. Right this moment.” Jamie stretches their arms out and yawns, closes their eyes. I smile at the way their short blond hair, carefully styled this afternoon, now sticks up on one side. I want to know more but I guess we have time. A lot of it. I can wait until they know I’m the kind of person who can listen well. Maybe some kind of trust will form between us when we’ve spent more time in this house together than we have as two high school students just passing each other in the halls, hearing snippets of gossip about the other, some surface-level judgments or opinions.
“Do you think we’re ever going to feel like real siblings?” I ask.
It comes out before I can think better of the question. Part of me wishes I could unsay it, but the other part, the up-at-six-in-the-morning part, the all-bets-are-off part, the we-just-tore-apart-the-house part of me lets it hover in the air without apology.
Jamie’s expression changes just the very slightest bit. A softening around their mouth and eyes. I try to breathe through the waiting—this moment of suspension—this fear of did I reveal too much?
They open one eye to peer at me. “Well, I do like you,” they say, with half a smile. “Even though you have shitty taste in art.”
Half shrugs, half smiles. How many more of Jamie’s quirks will I discover? How many little things about me have they noticed without letting on? Maybe one day we’ll talk about tonight, how new we were to each other, and how strange. How much our lives were changing in ways we couldn’t even fathom yet.
“Let’s go to the atrium,” I say suddenly. “I want to be outside.”
We open the sliding door from the living room. I’m still getting used to it, the open sky, surrounded by walls on all sides. We sit out there on the aesthetically perfect patio furniture, wishing it were more comfortable. We’re sitting out there still when the first light touches the sky. And I want to say, “Jamie, the sun is rising on our new house.” I want to say it simply without the ache of memory of soft light through my cabin’s window. I’m not there yet, but I might be, someday. I hope I will be. For now, I’ll leave it at this: We sit outside together, Jamie and me, on the morning after our mothers’ wedding day. We sit without speaking. I am only slightly thinking about the silence and wondering if it means anything. It’s almost comfortable. It’s a start. And the sun rises and warms us.
When You Bring a Dog to Prom
by Anna Meriano
Hour 0: 6 a.m.
Jayla wakes me by calling four times in a row. When I finally answer, she says, “Start your shower, I’ll be at your place in half an hour for mani-pedis.”
I hang up and roll over, only for my phone to buzz thirty seconds later. Jayla has texted.
And don’t you dare go back to bed.
I’m not worried, though, because the one bright side of my ill-conceived haircut is that my showers (like my hair) are eighty percent shorter now. I bury my head under my pillow.
The phone wakes me again.
“No-eh-MI, if you cannot swear to me that you are currently upright, I will seriously disown you.”
“Okay, okay, ya voy, geez.”
Don’t ask me how I can hear Jayla’s smug grin over the phone, but I definitely can when she says, “Thanks bestie. I just want everything to be perfect tonight.”
“Yeah, the Perfect Prom. You may have mentioned something about that eighty-five times a day since January.” Prom has eaten my best friend’s brain, basically. We haven’t been into school dances since freshman year (Jayla has definitely called them “heteronormative bullshit”), so I’m not sure why she’s buying into this one so hard, but I’ve given up trying to resist.
I sit up, wiping sleep out of my eyes, and gain enough consciousness to ask, “Is Jayden coming for mani-pedis too?”
I can’t decide what I want her answer to be, which is just part of the fun roller-coaster ride of being in love with your best friend’s twin, who is also your other best friend. If he comes over for prom prep, I won’t get the chance to wow him with my glamorous transformation that lets him see me in a totally new (make-out worthy) way. But if he isn’t here, I’m going to spend the whole day wondering what he’s up to and why he didn’t come.
“Do not even talk about my brother right now, please.” Jayla sighs in my ear as I shuffle to the bathroom and squeeze out the last dregs of toothpaste. “He would have been invited, but he’s currently dead to me.”
“Just because he didn’t invite someone? You have to let that go. He said he’d pay you back for the unused ticket.” Jayla has been moaning and groaning about Jayden’s lack of prom date for weeks now, saying that it will ruin all the pictures and that he’s doing this just to spite her. I support her sparkly prom dreams, but secretly I love that Jayden has passed on the chance for a romantic night with someone who might try to kiss him or dance on him or who knows what else. He’s such a human cinnamon roll that I’m sure he would give his date his full attention, and I want his attention for myself because I am greedy for his goofy jokes and easy banter and solid taste in memes.
I do have a prom date, but it hardly counts because it’s Austin Kim, my stand partner from orchestra (where we both slack our way through the easier second-violin part), and his parents are making him go with a girl instead of his boyfriend because they are terrible.
“Um, keep up,” Jayla says. “He did ask someone.”
It’s a good thing I’m standing over the sink, because my mouth falls open so fast a stream of toothpaste foam spills out.
So much for the Perfect Prom.
“Who?”
Hour 6: Noon
Dodge Jenkins. The name repeats in my head while Jayla slathers some kind of cream into my wet hair that’s supposed to keep the curls curly instead of Medusa-esque. He invited Dodge Jenkins to prom, and he didn’t even text me about it. Dodge Jenkins, who has blue hair and brings their dog to school and once organized a courtyard lie-in to protest gun violence, who seems to exist on a separate plane from the normal high school bullshit the rest of our five-hundred-person senior class participates in. Confidence (or apathy or something) keeps them above it all. I’m not trying to put people in boxes, but I would’ve pegged them to attend the queer anti-prom instead.
“I think that works!” Jayla declares, spinning me so I can see the effects of the Perfect Curl Styling Cream. Her dark hair is shiny smooth, so the only expertise she has here is all the googling she did to be supportive of the haircut. Baffling as her prom obsession may be, I appreciate the type-A structure she brings to my life, and I know she always has my back.
My hair does not have my back. I should’ve kept my aesthetic experimentation in my pants until college.
Maybe I just need to own the dandelion look. After all, Dodge Jenkins sports what can only be described as a turquoise fluff undercut, and they seem to be doing quite well for themself in terms of date-catching.
We take a break to let my hair dry and pick up lunch from Whataburger. Jayla warns me to fill up because once she applies my makeup, she does not want me ruining it by eating. I obediently dip my chicken fingers in creamy gravy and scowl as Mom bustles in to take another round of preparation photos “for posterity.”
Dodge Jenkins. How does Jayden even know them? Where exactly was I when this friendship was developing? I guess it doesn’t have to be a friendship. I guess people can be interested in people they aren’t friends with (haha, can’t relate).
“Hello, Noemi.” Jayla waves her hand in front of my face.
“Are you listening? We have so many eyeliner decisions to make.”
I blink at her. “Is Dodge going to bring their dog?” We’re all used to the emotional support golden retriever at school. It’s a little weird, but no weirder than Dodge’s whole “Luna Lovegood meets Bilbo Baggins” vibe. But I don’t love dogs, especially big ones. Growing up in a neighborhood that takes leash laws as an unrealistic suggestion will have that effect.
Jayla blows out a long breath. “That’s a good question. That would make a super cute photo op, actually. I might be able to work with that.”
Hour 12: 6 p.m.
Austin Kim is ditching me to take his boyfriend to queer anti-prom.
I would take the news harder, but I already put my dress on, and it turns out my curves look too good in tulle to be disappointed by this development. Also, good for Austin Kim and his boyfriend.
Jayla’s type-A personality didn’t react well.
“We made plans for a reason! How dare he stand up my best friend! Why does everybody think this is like, some casual group hang that you can duck into or out of last minute? I made a playlist curated to the specific members of the group! Why are you not more upset about this?”
I offered to help her rework the playlist, but she basically hissed at me so now I’m hiding in the bathroom admiring myself—from the neck down at least. My hair is still a disaster that I’m only making worse by fiddling with it. We have at least a half hour to kill before Jayla’s date shows up for pictures. And Jayden. And his date, which he has now.
If Austin had bailed twenty-four hours earlier, things could have been different. Twenty-four hours ago, Jayden didn’t have a prom date either. We could have commiserated and made a pact to go alone together. We would have watched Jayla and Roger Donovan exchange their corsage and boutonniere and take photos. And then Mom or Mrs. Dajao would have said we should take a photo together, and Jayden would have positioned his arms around me . . . and then fallen in love with me forever.
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