“This is such bullshit! They didn't care when it was you and Rory.”
“As far as Sol's concerned, they had no idea anything was going on with me and Rory.”
“This is such bullshit! He's just lying!”
Mara shrugs one shoulder. “Once was a fluke. Twice is a pattern. It makes sense.”
“Don't say that. If we were straight he wouldn't have fired you.”
“He probably would have.”
“Well, why is the waitstaff allowed to date us but the entertainment staff isn't?”
“You know why,” she says.
“This is bullshit!”
She sits down on the bed. “I know.”
“I'm sorry, you shouldn't be comforting me, I'm the worst. You're the one who got fired.”
“I have to leave today,” she says.
“What?”
She nods. “He's still giving me my summer bonus and a good recommendation if I leave now without making a fuss.”
“But we were supposed to have another day,” I say.
She wraps my hair around her finger. “I know.”
“I'm sorry, I'm making it about me, I know, it's just...”
“It's okay,” she says.
“I did it for nothing,” I say. “My mom won't even look at me. You still got fired. Rory Richards is threatening me.”
“She's not going to do anything now.”
“It was pointless,” I say.
She takes one of my hands in both of hers.
“Your mother was going to find out eventually,” she says. “She was going to have to deal with this at some time.”
"But I could have done it gently,” I say. “I could have given her time to process it.”
“You stood up for me,” Mara says. “And not just that, you...Sol, and everyone who heard about this, they were going to walk away from this thinking that this lesbian they knew was a sexual predator. And now they won't. I mean sure, they'll think she's kind of a slut who goes for rich girls, but that's...well, maybe not entirely inaccurate, and even if it was it's a whole lot better.”
I wipe my eyes. “Yeah.”
“You stood up for the community,” she says. “Your community. You've been a lesbian for three days and you've already made it better than when you got here. You're amazing.”
“None of this would have happened if not for me,” I say. “You could have found some boy to dance with.”
“But I don't want to dance with some boy,” she says. She hands me a tissue from the night stand and smiles at me. “I guess you shocked everybody, huh?”
I laugh a little.
“Sweet little Sugar, goes off to camp and makes a gal pal.”
“I wasn't expecting you either,” she says.
We lie down together. The wind blows in and rattles the screen in the window and ruffles her hair.
“Do you have to go now?” I ask.
She nods. I nod back at her.
“I'd do it all again,” she says.
“Really?”
“Even that cold lake.”
I put my face in her collarbone. “I wish we were there right now.”
“We are,” she says, and I close my eyes and I swear I can feel the water rising up over my head.
I feel like if I let go of her I'll let go of everything. I'll tell my mom it was just a crush and a one-time thing and I'm still the girl she knows and I'll go to college and smile at boys and marry a male doctor and all the things I was supposed to do. I'm not strong enough to do this on my own. This has always been about how amazing she is. I couldn't just let her be there and this amazing and not be as close to her as I could. And now she's leaving.
This is so stupid. It's just one day earlier.
But who am I going to be without her? I've only been doing this for three days. I don't know how to do it yet. I'm going to mess it up.
I walk her to her car and she's gone in a puff of exhaust and dust. Just like that.
Someone comes up beside me and takes my hand. Tristan, I think at first, before I look, but it's Bekah.
“C'mere,” she says, and I cry into her shoulder for a long time.
Chapter 14
I skip lunch and dinner. Bekah says she'll come up with an excuse for Mom, but I doubt Mom will even have the guts to ask.
I drag the rocking chair from our room out onto the deck at the edge of our building opposite my mom's room, so she won't have to see me and I won't have to see her when she's coming and going. It's colder today, comparatively, so I curl up in with a hoodie and all the books I thought I was going to churn through my first weekend here and try to take my mind off everything.
It's so hard to care about any of these books. Why did I buy all these book about straight people? How did I convince myself that the way I felt about boys was as much as I was supposed to be feeling, and that the way I felt about girls was...I guess I avoided girls, for the most part. I knew I had trouble being friends with them and never knew why. I thought it was because I was too competitive with them, for grades or for boys. Now I think I was too competitive for them for me. They were too incredible and I was just...me.
Tristan shows up during dinner.
“Do you hate me?” I say.
“Nah. C'mere.” He tugs me out of the chair and then settles in it and pulls me down half-next to him, half-on top of him. “Watch the chest.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Pretty good. A little sore. Antsy. Not like my throat is closing up.”
I cuddle into his shoulder.
“Poor kid,” he says.
“You can see the parking lot from here,” I say. “I keep expecting her car to just come back.”
“It's weird being here without her,” he says. “Even for a day. I never have been before.”
“Heh. Me neither.”
He nudges his foot against the railing of the deck to get the chair moving. “I checked my email on my way over here,” he says. “She's at a motel in Virginia for the night.”
I take a slow breath.
“This is ridiculous,” I say. “I knew it was ending this weekend. But I just...I ruined her life.”
“She wasn't going to work here forever,” he says. “And Sol was so relieved she isn't a sex offender, he's gonna write her the most glowing recommendation of all time. She'll be teaching dance in Cancun.”
“I just wanted to be worth it,” I say.
“i don't think she regrets anything. Well, maybe she regrets ever getting involved with Satan Richards.”
“Where is she?”
“Low profile. I think she's leaving late tonight.”
“Fuck her.”
“She fucked over her community,” Tristan says. “That's one of the worst things you can do.”
“And she's just gonna get away with it.”
“Someday she'll come out and want to reach out to Mara. And me. And you. And she'll have no damn luck with that. That's punishment enough. We're pretty great.”
“She is,” I say. “You are.”
“C'mon,” he says.
“I'm not anything,” I say. “I've been a lesbian for three days.”
“You've been a lesbian your entire life,” he says. “You've been in love with Mara for three days. Those aren't the same thing.”
I groan. “God, in love makes it sound so serious.”
“Okay, your highness, define it some other way if you want, but it's just us here, who cares about semantics? I promise I won't put it on your tombstone.”
I say,” Okay fine, I've been in love with Mara for two weeks and it's the best and worst thing to ever happen in my entire life.”
“Yeah, that's how it goes.”
I sniffle into his shirt. “Have you ever been in love?”
“Mmhmm, once. Tom Escovar. Oof. Cutest boy in the fourth grade.”
“Did you kiss him?”
“Sure did.”
“And that's the only time?”
“The onl
y time I've ever kissed someone? Sure.”
I laugh. I can't believe I laughed. “The only time you've ever been in love.”
“Yeah. So far.”
“This was my only time too.” I shift around a little. “Y'know, when I was in fourth grade, I thought I was in love with someone. A boy.”
“Hey, I did not think I was in love with Tom Escovar.”
“No, I'm not saying...did he think you were a girl?”
“He did.”
“Did you think you were a girl, then?”
“I did.”
“So then how does that work?” I say. “You thought you were a girl. I thought I was in love with a guy. How do we deal with those parts of ourselves? I don't want to just cut off seventeen years and start over.”
“Then don't.”
“But it wasn't real,” I say.
“You were always there. You were there the whole time,” he says. “It's real.” He runs his hand through his hair. “People have different ideas about it but...I don't think we should have to forget what happened before we knew, the person we thought we were who all these people around us loved. If we don't want to, I mean. I don't think we shouldn't get to celebrate it...I don't like the idea that being queer means you have to lose any damn thing.”
“What happened with Tom Escovar?”
“Oh, Lord, what didn't happen. School dances. Play dates. Groping each other in tree houses. Those were the days.”
“Did you ever see him again?”
“We're Facebook friends. He liked something of mine a few months ago. He's still in the city. Maybe I'll look him up. See if he wants to come live at a Nashville retirement home.”
“When are you going to see Mara next?” I say.
“I'm going home tomorrow, I'll be in New York for two weeks before the new job starts. I'll see her then.”
“Okay.”
“How about you?”
“I don't know,” I say. “We didn't...”
“Okay,” he says. “Shh. It's okay.”
I say, “What's weird is I've spent hours just sitting here trying not to think about it and doing a really good job. And then you come here and it's like...it's like as soon as I have someone to talk to my brain starts working again.”
“And that's a bad thing?”
“Yeah, because...it's so easy for me to just...not be someone when I'm not around other people. To just turn into a robot and do whatever I'm supposed to do,” I say. “I don't think I know who I am unless I'm being filtered through someone else. I never know what I'm thinking until I start talking, and it's like...I'm always scared I'm just saying what the person I'm talking to wants to hear. Like there's no real me, just this Play-Doh person that gets squished up and molded perfectly for whatever conversation she's in.”
“I hate to break it to you,” he says. “But from my experience some of that's just being seventeen, not being a lesbian.”
“This is going to sound so stupid,” I say.
“Okay, I'm ready.”
“I'm worried I'm not a lesbian when I'm by myself. That I'm just a lesbian when I'm with other people.”
“Okay...hypothetically if that were possible, why would that be so bad?”
“Because then it would mean I could be straight around other people, too,” I say. “And I don't want to be straight.” I breathe out. “Huh.”
“How'd that feel to say?”
“Good. Weird.”
“People who don't want to be straight generally are not,” he says. “Just a thing I've picked up on.”
“I don't want to have to wait for another Mara to come along to feel like I belong somewhere again,” I say. “I don't think there are a whole lot of other Maras out there. I don't...I don't think there are any.”
“Maybe not,” he says. “But there aren't any other Sugars, either.”
I rest my cheek against his arm.
“You are enough,” he says. “Mara is an incredible, earth-shaking girl. But you. You are enough.”
"Can you do me a favor?" I say.
"Yeah, what?"
"Call me Esther. I don't want to be sweet anymore."
Bekah shows up a little after he leaves with two plates of lemon meringue pie.
“I don't think you're supposed to take the silverware out of the dining room,” I say.
She hands me her plate and sits down on the deck. She leans against the railing and digs into her slice without saying anything.
“What, are you pissed at me?” I say.
“No, just didn't think you'd want to talk.”
“Yeah.” So we eat pie in silence for a while, until I finally can't stand it anymore. “So this whole time you knew I was gay?”
“Yep.”
“And you've been stealing guys away from me?”
“Yyyyyep.”
“Just...no big deal, diverting guys from me.”
She shrugs, all cute with her hands up.
“What did I do to deserve a sister like you?” I say.
“Honestly, not a ton.”
“Yeah.”
“You kinda treat me like shit.”
“You're the pretty one,” I say. “You like boys and nail polish and you wear high heels all of the time.”
“So?
“So you're supposed to be a bitch.”
“Oh I am, huh?”
“Mmhmm.”
She laughs. “So you just let, what, society tell you that I was a bitch? When I was living next door and you could actually just talk to me?”
“Yep.”
She takes a bite of pie. “Well, at least you're self-aware, finally.”
“Should I apologize, or would that be like gross.”
“Ew.”
“Good. Felt weird to me too.”
She stretches her legs out. “Y'know, hypothetically, you could also be a bitch.”
“I wear flats. I'm immune.”
“Yeah, but you have that Ivy League Mommy's girl thing going on. Throw on some glasses and you're every mean big sister in every movie.”
“Oh, so you're the main character, then?”
“Obviously. Which is why I can't be a bitch.”
“I've got to try to work things out with Mom,” I say. “I didn't think she was going to be like this. Not that I had any idea I was going to need her to be fine with this, but...I just thought that hypothetically.”
“Yeah, it's weird,” Bekah says. “I think maybe she's taking it like some sort of rejection of her. Subconsciously.”
“Being attracted to women is rejecting her?”
“Nah, but it's like, rejecting these traditional ideas of femininity and shit, right? And since she's our only parent, she's like your only role model, and maybe she feels like you're going, no, the way you love and have sex and, I don't know, express being a woman, isn't enough for me.”
“Are you taking AP Psych next year?”
“No, I'm going to take the AP test without taking the class.”
“That seems about right.”
She licks her fork. “I think maybe that's why you didn't know all this time, either. You were trying to be loyal to Mom.”
“That's so pathetic,” I say.
“Not really. You didn't really need romantic relationships because you got all the validation and support and everything that you needed out of your relationship with Mom. Same reason you never really needed any close friends.”
“How is that not extremely pathetic?” I say.
“Why would it be more pathetic than getting validation and support from a boyfriend?” she says. “You're being jerked around by society again.”
“Ha.”
“I mean, I was always jealous,” she says. “It sucked. But at least I didn't have to worry about disappointing her all the time. I could just be.”
“Mmm.”
“It's not pathetic,” she says. “It just wasn't going to last forever.”
It gets dark, and chilly, and I stay out here on t
he deck, ostensibly reading by the buzzy light on the side of the cabin, actually looking up every time I hear a noise that could possibly be a car growling into the parking lot.
I don't know if Bekah's right, if I avoided girls out of some loyalty to Mom. I don't know if I'm right, and I did it because I was too self-conscious about myself.
I think maybe I was just so afraid of being left. I was so scared of this exact moment that I didn't let myself even figure out how I would possibly feel something.
I always imagined my first break up would be in college when my devastatingly gorgeous boyfriend graduated two years before me and he had to go to California for law school, so we'd promise to stay together but we both knew it was hopeless but we loved each other so much we wanted to pretend for a little longer, and we'd drift further and further apart until we cried on the phone to each other that it wasn't working but we'd always love each other, and then I'd meet a med student and marry him.
But Mara and I didn't even talk about the future, besides that one time when she asked me where Brown was and maybe she was mentally working out the distance between there and New York, or maybe she wasn't.
And also she's a girl, and we were together for three days.
And I honestly didn't know I was capable of feeling anything this strong.t
And she's not driving back. And it's awful.
But I'm doing it.
It's not pathetic. It just wasn't going to last forever.
“You ready?” Bekah says.
I start. “What?”
“The talent show thing.”
“Oh. I'm not going.”
“Sure you are. Come on, I'm doing this group number thing with the girls in the next cabin. It'll be embarrassing. You gotta see it.”
“So you're onstage and I'm just sitting there with Mom with no buffer?”
“It's not like there's gonna be pressure to talk to her. Music! Singing! Dancing!”
Dancing.
I guess they're just gonna cut that closing dance.
“Come on,” she says. “This is part of that being a big sister thing you said you were going to work on.”
“Did I say that?”
“Implicitly.” She tugs on my hand. “Come on. I'll do your makeup. What do you want to wear?”
“My pink dress, I guess. I can do my own makeup.”
“I know you can,” she says.
I let her do my makeup. She loves it.
Sugar Summer Page 13