Girl Crushed

by Katie Heaney

  In the meantime, we texted and slipped notes into each other’s lockers. We wrote about our favorite movies and TV shows and books. We wrote about our families, Jamie’s overbearing parents and my divorced ones. Because Jamie had gone to a different middle school, I filled her in on the first- and second-tier popular kids in our grade, and who was dating whom. One day I opened one of her notes—always neon-blue or purple writing on black paper, folded into a triangle—and read: Who’ve you gone out with?

  I still had the note. It was faded gray, pressed flat between the pages of The Return of the King.

  When I read it, I knew. We’d been dancing around the inevitable for weeks by that point—some abstract point of connection between us, some fundamental recognition that we had something essential and rare in common. Jamie was asking me without asking me if I liked girls. And I was pretty sure that because she was asking, she already knew the answer, because she liked girls too.

  So I came out to her, and she came out to me. We were afraid to put it in writing, so we made plans to meet one Saturday morning, at a coffee shop Jamie had been waiting for a reason to go into: Triple Moon, which I’d seen but never really noticed. We got our moms to drop us off at noon and told them to pick us up at two. At one we texted them to say actually, make it 3:00. At two-thirty we said actually, make it 4:00. Wait—4:30.

  Triple Moon was the first place I ever felt safe being fully myself. It was where I first said the words I’m gay out loud. It was where I found so many books that changed my life: Rubyfruit Jungle, Keeping You a Secret, Summer Sisters, Annie on My Mind, Women, The Miseducation of Cameron Post. The owners, Dee and Gaby, kept two giant mismatched bookshelves crammed full of dog-eared, marked-up LGBTQ books left there by customers. Taped to the top shelf was a handwritten note outlining the books’ honor system: you could borrow whatever you wanted, up to two at a time, so long as you brought them back in readable condition when you were done. And if you bought a new queer book, from their small selection or somewhere else, you were encouraged to leave it on their shelves when you were done, for someone else to discover.

  Triple Moon was also where Jamie and I fell in love, though it took nearly two years for us to notice. Before we were girlfriends we were friends, I reminded myself. Somewhere inside we must still know how.

  On Saturday morning I texted Jamie to ask if she wanted a ride, but she said she wanted to bike, even though the shop was at least five miles away from her house. It stung a little, and I wondered what she thought was going to happen if she got in my truck. Did she think that being side by side in such a confined space would make me cry, or beg for her back? I would have been offended, except I was a little afraid of the same thing. When we were apart I could believe I’d reached acceptance, but my body still reacted to her presence in a way I couldn’t seem to shut off.

  I was too nervous to listen to music on the drive over, so I called Ronni on the speaker’s Bluetooth instead. She answered after three rings.

  “What’s up.”

  “Nothing much,” I said. “Just headed to Triple Moon to meet Jamie.”

  I could pretty much hear Ronni close her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose.

  “I actually think it’ll be really good,” I added.

  “You’re a masochist, you know that?”

  “I don’t know who that is,” I said, only half joking.

  “What are you gonna do?”

  “Homework.” Silence. I strained my ears. “Ronni?”

  “Yeah, I’m gonna give you a chance to come up with something more believable.”

  I laughed. “I’m serious! I brought my books and everything.”

  “Just don’t cry,” said Ronni. “Even I can’t help you come back from that.”

  “I’m not going to cry,” I said, which made me feel a little like crying.

  “Okay, well, I was about to go for a run,” she said. “But you can text me after.”

  “You’re running today? Now I feel guilty.”

  “Just go later.”

  “Okay, I will,” I said. We both knew I wouldn’t.

  “Gotta go.”

  “Okay, byeeeee, I love youuuuuu!” I sang, and Ronni hung up.

  The coffee shop was mostly empty when I arrived, so when I walked in the door Dee saw me right away.

  “Q!” she said, throwing her hands up in the air. “Come here!”

  I grinned and rushed over to give her a hug across the cafe counter.

  “How’ve you been?” I asked.

  “Good, good. Happy to see you.” She gave me a concerned-mom look. I recognized it not from my own mother, who had treated me like an adult since I was six years old, but from TV. “How you holding up?”

  “Much better,” I chirped, lying. “Jamie’s meeting me here.”

  “Oh, girl.” Dee sighed.

  “What? God! We’re just gonna do homework!”

  “All right.” She shook her head. “Just don’t do the endless-processing thing, okay? A dyke can lose years off her life that way.”

  Dyke. I still got a little thrill whenever she said it. To Dee and Gaby, Jamie and I were baby dykes. To us, according to them, they were dusty dykes, old-fashioned and just plain old. To hear them tell it, you’d think no one had ever been gay before their generation showed up. As they often reminded us, they were our foremothers in dismantling the heteropatriarchy, and so they said the word dyke as readily as they said our names, with a kind of defiant urgency. As a word, I liked it so much better than lesbian—the hardness of it, the single middle-finger syllable.

  Of course, it depended who said it. Coming from Dee or Gaby or Jamie, it was like a secret handshake. Coming from that blond girl on the Valhalla soccer team sophomore year, after I stole the ball and she tripped over my leg, it was like being spit at.

  “We’re not processing,” I promised. “It’s over.” A lump formed at the base of my throat, and I thought of Ronni, frowning at me. I had to change the subject fast. “Where’s Gaby?”

  “Hungover,” she said, rolling her eyes. “She’ll be in in a bit.” Gaby was the shop’s co-owner, and also Dee’s ex-girlfriend, though they both cringed if you reminded them. That was two hundred years ago, Dee would say. The queer library had been Gaby’s idea, as was the shop’s early adoption of every new nut- and plant-based milk, and she organized every event they hosted. She was vegan and spacey and liked going to protests and decorating boxes and mirrors with sea glass she plucked off the beach. It was hard to imagine that she’d ever been in love with Dee, and vice versa. Dee loved meat and the WNBA and her dogs and that was about it.

  “Good,” I said. “I want to tell her about this band that wants to play here.”

  Dee adopted Gaby’s airy, earnest tone. “Are they aligned with the queer anti-capitalist intersectional feminist cause?”

  I considered. “I don’t think they’re against it,” I offered.

  “Good luck with that.”

  The bell over the door rang, and I turned to see Jamie walk in, helmet in hand.

  “Jamie!” Dee cried, and the tiniest bit of jealousy prickled the back of my neck.

  Jamie waved and ran a hand through her curls, wild as ever even after her bike ride.

  “Hey, Dee. How’s it going?” she asked. To me, she added, “You have a table?”

  “You pick,” I said.

  Dee gave me a look as Jamie unpacked her bag, and I grinned. “Better get to work, I guess.”

  “What do you guys want to drink?”

  “Two iced vanilla lattes,” I said.

  “Just iced coffee for me,” Jamie interjected.

  “What?” We always got iced vanilla lattes at Triple Moon. They tasted like milkshakes.

  “Sit down, Q. I’ll bring them over.”

  Dee waved away my cash, so I dropped a fiv
e in the tip jar when she wasn’t looking and crossed the room to take the seat across from Jamie’s. In just moments she had the whole spread assembled: laptop open, notebook out, planner with to-do list ready to be crossed off, favorite pen, favorite backup pen. In my bag I had my physics textbook and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, of which I needed to read fifty pages by Wednesday. Still, I hadn’t actually planned to read it now. I sighed and pulled it out of my bag.

  “It’s good,” said Jamie, eyeing the cover.

  “Oh yeah? When’d you read it, fourth grade?”

  She grinned. “Last year.” Jamie was in AP Lit. AP everything, really. AP Dumping. Ha.

  Dee moseyed over with the drinks. “Iced vanilla, iced coffee. Make space, Jame.”

  Jamie reluctantly moved her planner. “Thanks.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Any updates on Gaby’s ETA?” I asked.

  Dee snorted as she walked away.

  “You’re going to ask her about Sweets,” said Jamie. It wasn’t a question; she always, always knew what I was up to. It was incredibly annoying.

  I shrugged. “I thought I might mention it, as long as we’re here.”

  “Right.”

  “Unless you want to? Since it was your idea?”

  “Nah,” said Jamie. “I’m good.”

  “You sure? Am I going to find out you’re mad about this in three to six months?”

  I knew Jamie very well too.

  “I just want Sweets to still exist, as a band,” she said. “I don’t care how that’s accomplished.” She took a sip of her coffee and made a small, almost imperceptible face.

  “Miss the vanilla?”

  “No,” she lied.

  I looked over at Dee behind the counter to find her looking at me. Processing, she mouthed.

  Jamie sat up straight, assuming her Serious Student position, so I opened Frankenstein and started reading:

  I am by birth a Genevese, and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic. My ancestors had been for many years counsellors and syndics, and my father had filled several public situations with honour and reputation. He was respected by all who knew him for his integrity and indefatigable—

  I set the book down. Jamie eyed me over the top of her computer screen.

  “What are you working on?” I asked.

  “A paper.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Frankenstein.”

  “Funny.”

  I opened the book and tried again:

  —indefatigable attention to public business. He passed his younger days perpetually occupied by the affairs of his country; a variety of circumstances had prevented his marrying early, nor was it until the decline of life that he became a husband and the father of a family.

  “Oh my God,” I muttered.

  “It gets better.”

  “It would have to.”

  I thought about trying again, but the bell chimed behind me, and I turned to see Gaby walk in. Her bob, dyed orangey-red, appeared freshly and unevenly cut, and she was missing the usual ring of turquoise eyeliner. She seemed vaguely clammy, and it looked like she’d spent the morning throwing up. Seeing me and Jamie, though, her whole face lit up.

  “Sisters!” she cried.

  “Hey, Gaby.”

  “Finally,” said Dee.

  Gaby’s face fell, and Dee looked instantly regretful. Even when her reasons were entirely legitimate, and her tone light, she hated to make Gaby feel bad. Not for the first time, I wondered how many breakups they’d had before it stuck.

  “I’m sooorryyyy,” Gaby whined. “It’s these drops I’m taking. They’re like tranquilizers.”

  What none of us said, but what we all thought, was Sure, “the drops.” I didn’t know the full extent of Gaby’s drinking, but I knew she drank more when she was stuck on an art project, and I knew from her tortured Instagram posts that she’d been stuck on the latest for weeks.

  I got up from the table to meet Gaby in the office, where she dropped off her bag and threw a stinky tinfoil-wrapped lunch in the tiny refrigerator where they kept bottles of wine cold for events.

  “I have a question for you,” I announced.

  Gaby pulled her blue pencil and a hand mirror out of her bag and began lining her eyes. “What’s that?”

  “What’s the event schedule like over the next few weeks?”

  Gaby paused. “Well, we’ve got the Womyn’s Collective Poetry Series on Sunday evenings, obviously—”

  “Right.”

  “—and on, I think it’s the eighteenth, we have this amazing young performer who does these totally wrenching pieces accompanied by recordings of, like, famous wartime speeches”—I made a mental note not to come to Triple Moon on the eighteenth—“and I want to say there’s a poster-making party on the twenty-fourth for the march next month,” she finished.

  “What march?”

  It was rare for Gaby to make prolonged eye contact with a person, so when she fixed her eyes on you it was deeply unsettling.

  “You baby gays are unbelievable.” Then, just as soon as I’d disappointed her, she was over it. She resumed her eye lining. “Ask Jamie,” she added.

  “I will,” I said. “But the reason I asked is because there’s this band.”

  I told Gaby about Sweets, and how popular they were with people my age in our area. I promised her the band would handle the marketing to make sure people turned up (I assumed this would work itself out) and assured her they could easily charge a five-dollar cover to defray the setup costs. Gaby frowned at the idea of a fee, but I knew Dee could convince her. Probably she’d tell her it was actually feminist for a queer-run organization like theirs to take money from a bunch of straight people, teenagers or not.

  “This is supposed to be a safe space,” said Gaby. “Are all these kids going to honor that?”

  I promised her they would and prayed they’d prove me right.

  “Why don’t you and Jamie do those gay-club meetings here anymore?”

  I sighed. Gaby had asked me this at least once a month for a year.

  “The Westville Gay-Straight Alliance is no more. Still.”

  “Remind me why?”

  (This, the inevitable follow-up. I knew she remembered why. I knew the interrogation was meant mostly to guilt us for insufficient tenacity.)

  “Too many straight people.”

  Toward the end of our freshman year, a few months after Jamie and I came out to each other, and then to our friends, and then, indirectly, to the rest of the school, Jamie decided she wanted to start a club—mainly because it would be good for her college application, which she was already thinking about, even then, but also because being gay was all we could talk or think about, and we wanted as many outlets as possible. And, as the only out queer people in our class, Jamie said, we had a responsibility to be a beacon of kindness and tolerance for our peers. I did anything Jamie wanted me to, so I agreed to be her vice president. We registered our group with Westville’s indifferent administration and put up posters around the school. By then we’d been to Triple Moon enough times to have a new but friendly rapport with Dee and Gaby, and when we asked if we could host our bimonthly club meetings there, they gladly accepted—Dee because it would mean new customers, and Gaby because it would mean being able to witness young queer community organizing.

  Then the day of the first meeting arrived, and Jamie and I presided over a meeting of six straight people. We knew they were straight because whenever they raised their hands to contribute something to our discussion (which, that week, was about a movie about a gay boy played by—you’ll never guess—a straight one), they started all their sentences with “I’m straight, but.” At the next meeting, four of those same straight people showe
d up. At the third, there were three. After each meeting, Jamie and I went home drained and annoyed, feeling more like someone’s pets than anyone’s leaders. So we dissolved the group, telling each other we’d restart it later on in high school, when there were more queer kids around to join us. But as far as we could tell, there were never more than a handful, and the idea of starting a club got less and less appealing as time went on. To start a club as a junior seemed unimaginably embarrassing. And then we were seniors, which was as good as graduated, and there was no point.

  “Well,” said Gaby. “Can’t argue with that.”

  “So will you think about having Sweets?”

  “I’ll think about it,” she agreed.

  “And you’ll talk to Dee, too?”

  “I’ll talk to Dee.”

  “When do you think you might know by?”

  “Quinn.”

  “Okay, okay. Thank you.”

  Gaby shooed me out of the office and I returned to the table, where Jamie was still tapping away at her keyboard. She didn’t ask me what Gaby and I had talked about, which I found infuriating, if unsurprising. Jamie rarely asked for details because she rarely needed to. Usually, details came to her. When she ignored me, I would do almost anything for her attention.

  But Jamie’s attention was something I had to learn to live without. So I picked up Frankenstein and read for as long as I could, and then I got up to look through the bookshelf, hoping to find something I could take home and care for.

  I got my good news a little over a very long week later. I was sitting at the kitchen table in my sweaty soccer practice shorts and a sports bra, eating around the still-semi-frozen center of a chicken pot pie, when my mom abruptly announced that I’d gotten some mail from my dad. She tossed me an envelope, business standard white with my name written in slanty blue ink across the front: Quinn Y. Ryan. He always included that middle initial, Y for Yvette, his mother’s name, a name so preposterously femme it felt incorrect when applied to me. Yvette sounded like roller curls and red lipstick, and the few pictures I’d seen of her as a young woman suggested she fit the name exactly. By the time I met her, just a handful of times when I was a kid, she was old and mean, especially to my mom, who uncharacteristically never talked back, and who told me afterward how hard Yvette’s life had been.