by Katie Heaney
I tamped down my excitement, not wanting my mom to see me open the envelope too eagerly. My dad wrote me letters every few months, and he always sent a few twenty-dollar bills along with them. The first time he sent me money, when I started high school, I made the mistake of telling my mom, and she said, “Oh great, forty dollars. Guess we’re even.” I stopped showing her what he sent me after that. He’d left her ten years ago, when I was eight. Sometimes I wondered how many more decades it would be before she could hear his name or say your dad without the corners of her mouth curling down in disapproval. I was sure she didn’t know she was doing it; she’d always encouraged me to maintain a relationship with him as long as I wanted one, and it was important to her, at least conceptually, that I form my own opinion of him. Which was a weird way to think about your parents.
Anyway, the letter was not the good news. Or it was good news, but the better news was the email I got from Gaby minutes later, arriving in my inbox with a whoosh. I’d kept my phone volume on at home ever since Jamie broke up with me, just in case. I slid my finger across the screen and read:
Sweets OK w/ me & D. Calendar w/ avail dates attached. —Gaby
“YES!” I exclaimed.
“What?”
“Dee and Gaby are gonna let this band I like play at Triple Moon.” Band I like, girl I kinda like, same difference. Did I like Ruby? I didn’t think my heart had relearned that emotion yet, but when I imagined giving Ruby the good news, I felt the faintest stirring where liking someone used to go. And then an even bigger thrill when I imagined Jamie finding out.
“What band?”
“They’re called Sweets?”
“Never heard of them.”
“Well, they’re my age, so.”
“Oh, rock on.”
“Mom.”
She grinned. “What have you got going tonight?”
“Eh, not much,” I said. “A little reading and a little math homework. What about you?”
“Mmm, I’ve gotta file by eleven,” she sighed. My mom was a crime reporter at the Union-Tribune, had been for twenty years, which meant I’d gotten the grisliest details on every murder trial and car wreck that happened in the greater metropolitan area since I was old enough to listen, which by her estimation was second grade. She was my own personal after-school special, warning me against the dangers of drinking and driving, texting and driving, using drugs, and befriending troublemakers. On several occasions she’d half jokingly, maybe quarter jokingly, told me she was glad I was gay if only because it meant no boyfriend or husband of mine would ever murder me. What a relief.
“What’s the story?” I asked.
“Money laundering,” she said. “Totally boring.”
“Good luck,” I said.
“Clean up after yourself, okay?”
“I will.”
She hovered in the doorway.
“What?”
“Are you feeling a little better?”
I knew she was asking about Jamie, and I knew she knew I wasn’t yet good. But I told my mom I felt better, a lot better, in fact, because in that moment, I did. Later, when I was in bed with the lights off and my phone was in my hand and both were slid under the cool side of my pillowcase, I would feel a little worse again. I was always surprised when I felt better, and I was always surprised when it didn’t last.
When I heard the door to my mom’s room close upstairs, I ripped open the letter from my dad. I unfolded the standard sheet of loose-leaf paper and found sixty dollars, which I slipped between my phone and its case.
In my dad’s all-caps handwritten scrawl, the letter, which was really more of a note, read:
HEY QUINNIE [ugh],
I’M WAITING FOR THE PEST CONTROL GUY TO COME TO MY APT. MOTHS ARE BACK IN FULL FORCE—YESTERDAY WHEN I WENT TO MAKE OATMEAL I FOUND THREE MIXED IN WITH THE OATS. PRETTY SICK. THE GUY SAID I CAN’T BE HERE WHEN HE SPRAYS SO I THOUGHT I MIGHT HEAD TO RUDY’S FOR A PANCAKE. NOT AS GOOD AS MANTEQUILLA BUT THEY’RE ALL RIGHT. SPEAKING OF—WAS THINKING I MIGHT COME TO TOWN IN A FEW WEEKS TO VISIT A COUPLE FRIENDS. MAYBE WE CAN DO SUNDAY BREAKFAST. PEST GUY’S HERE SO MORE LATER.
LOVE,
DAD
I had to laugh. My dad always wrote his letters to me mid-errand, or under some arbitrary time constraint, as if he couldn’t just stop writing partway through and return to it later, without my ever knowing he’d paused. It made his letters feel like dispatches, like he was away at sea, when really he was home in Durham with, as far as I knew, a working phone. But I didn’t mind. Letters felt old-fashioned and meaningful. Even the ones that were mostly about moths. They might not have been the most efficient way to communicate, but they did give me something to keep.
And then there was his super-casual suggestion of breakfast, as if we had seen each other more recently than a year and ten months ago (not that I was keeping track). My dad was terrified of flying, though in his words he just really, really hated it. I wondered if he was planning to drive all the way from North Carolina like last time, and if not, which friends were worth getting on an airplane for.
I sent him a text: Got your letter. Thanks for the $. Let me know when you have dates for your trip. Love you too.
* * *
—
I sat on my Triple Moon news for a few days, trying to decide how to deliver it. A text would be easier, for several reasons: one, I wouldn’t be face to face with Ruby, who seemed to get prettier and prettier every time I saw her, even though you’d think that sort of thing would have a ceiling; two, I could fine-tune my wording, thereby avoiding the possibility of sounding like an awkward freak; three, by texting her, I would set a precedent for texting as a thing we did, and maybe eventually we would text about something other than venues for her band.
But one day, at the end of Civil Liberties, just after Jamie had booked it out of the classroom, waving goodbye over her shoulder, I saw Ruby pause in the hallway to look at her phone, and I found myself walking—no, gliding—over to her, and saying her name.
She looked up, and smiled.
“Hey, Quinn,” she said.
“Hey, um,” I said. In my defense, I had not been prepared for her to greet me by name. On top of the smiling it was just too much.
“Hi…”
“Yeah, so, you know that coffee shop I told you about? I told the owners about you and they’d love to have you guys come do a show,” I said. “Or, multiple shows, I think.”
“Really?” She grabbed my arm. “That was so nice of you.”
Keep it together! I screamed in my head. Ignore the electricity coursing into your shoulders!
“Ah, well,” I said. “I’m glad they went for it.”
“Should I email…someone? Should I stop by to meet them?”
Until then, my plan, insofar as I had one, had been to simply send her Gaby’s calendar, and mediate from there until a date was set. But going there in person was a much better idea.
“Yeah, maybe you should meet them and, like, see the space,” I said. “If you want, I could go with you? Just, since I know them.”
“Oh! Sure,” said Ruby. “Yeah, that would be cool.”
It occurred to me then that this was a lot of attention being paid and a lot of effort being put into preserving a band whose music I did not, historically, enjoy. Not that Ruby knew that. But if my sudden enthusiasm felt like it should seem weird to Ruby, it didn’t seem like it actually did. Perhaps she was on the receiving end of this sort of eager desire to help and please all the time. Her life must be so fun.
“Maybe Saturday?” I suggested. “I have soccer tonight, so.”
“I thought you guys played in the winter.”
“We do,” I said, feeling strangely touched she knew. “This is my club team.”
“So you play all the time.”
“Kinda, yeah,” I said. It was true: between club soccer and school soccer, there was virtually no down season, except a week or two here and there for holidays. Soccer was the reason I couldn’t have a part-time job, which meant soccer was keeping me broke until it made me rich.
“Okay, well, let’s do Saturday, then,” said Ruby.
“What time?” I was trying not to sound desperate, but she wasn’t really giving me a lot to work with, detail-wise.
“…Three o’clock?” she guessed.
“Yeah, three works.”
“Well, I’ve gotta get to class.”
We smiled at each other, each of us (I assumed) surprised to have formed an actual plan with the other. “Well,” she went on, “I gotta go meet my ride.”
“I could give you a ride,” I said. For some reason.
Ruby seemed as surprised and confused as I was. But also—maybe—a little charmed.
“Thanks, but—”
“Yeah, that would be rude,” I interjected. She laughed.
“Exactly.”
“You don’t have a car?” I asked. Ruby’s family obviously had money, and in Southern California, no one who had any money didn’t have their own car. I was curious, but more saliently, I was stalling. I didn’t want her to walk away.
“I do, but,” started Ruby, sighing. “My parents have a lot of rules.”
“They’re still together?” I asked. She nodded, and I nodded. “Classic divorce trade-off.”
She laughed. Again my chest twinged with that long-lost crushy feeling. The warning bell rang, and Ruby smiled, and I smiled, and we took off running in opposite directions.
I spent all of soccer practice thinking about Ruby and most of it trying to talk to Ronni about her, running over to fill her in in thirty-second installments every time-out and every water break. After five or six of these she grew exasperated. “Oh my God,” she yelled. “Can this PLEASE wait until after?”
But it honestly didn’t feel like it could. For the first time in ages, I felt something other than heartbroken. When Jamie broke up with me I knew I’d never love anyone like I loved her. Maybe this was true. But other loves were still possible. Or at least other likes. Other girls existed. And that felt revelatory and huge and exciting. I was still very aware that the public record didn’t show much (any) evidence that Ruby had any romantic interest in girls. But the way she smiled at me made me think it was possible. How could I explain all that to Ronni?
Someone was yelling my name. I came out of it just in time to see the ball flying my way. I trapped it, pivoted my body toward the net, and kicked it, hard, just over Halle’s outstretched hands. The rest of my squad cheered. Ronni, even though she was on the other side, ran up and smacked my butt hard. “Lucky shot.”
“I know.” Even though I’d scored, I was embarrassed, having narrowly escaped a whiff. I wished I could turn off my brain to everything but soccer when I got on the field—when girls got in my head, it tended to throw off my game. And if I wanted to play for UNC (and I had to play for UNC), I pretty much had to have a flawless season. I hadn’t heard from their recruiter since last year, and I was starting to get nervous about what that meant. This time last year, I’d been so confident it would come easily, like it always had. For my whole life I’d been great at this one thing, and my biggest fear was that, one day, I’d only be good. And then what?
On Saturday I woke up gasping, my upper body damp with sweat. I flung my comforter to the foot of the bed and pulled up my ratty practice T-shirt to wipe my chest and neck. Like so many nights over the past two months, I’d dreamed about Jamie. We were at some outdoor party, or some unspecified holiday barbecue, and she was wearing a light blue dress. I kept trying to talk to her, but every time I got near her, she’d disappear. Then I’d look around, and she’d be standing twenty feet away, talking to some other girl instead of me. Finally I shouted her name, and everyone turned to look at me but Jamie.
Not very subtle, brain, I thought.
I looked at the clock on my nightstand; it was only 7:46. That meant I had seven hours and fourteen minutes to kill until I could pick up Ruby. I wondered at what time I could reasonably text her for her address without seeming like she was the first thing I’d thought of when I woke up. Noon?
There was a crazy part of me that wanted to text Jamie right now, to describe to her my dream. I wanted her to tell me she’d never ignore me like that. I wanted her to tell me she dreamed about me sometimes too. But Jamie wasn’t the type to make bold, impossible promises, and she definitely wasn’t the type to admit to having feelings. It had taken her months to admit that she liked me as more than a friend.
Things between us changed in the spring of our sophomore year. She was sleeping over at my house, like she did almost every Saturday that year, the way we told ourselves all best friends did. We were watching a movie in the usual position: her lying on the floor beneath me lying on the couch. It hadn’t always been that way. The first few times she came over, she sat on the couch with me, like a normal person, but at some point she started insisting she liked the floor better. That way we could both stretch out. I didn’t protest because I liked taking up the whole couch, but also because I liked the way my elevated position let me look at her without her knowing. At the time, the slight tilting of her head, her hand reaching for the bowl of popcorn, her feet rubbing against each other, one sliding over the other until her socks slipped off—it was enough to keep me occupied during the boring parts of whatever movie she’d picked out for us.
I don’t know what it was about that warm, late-May night that made me do it. I still don’t know what made me so brave. We were watching our favorite Lord of the Rings movie, The Return of the King, for the fifth or maybe the twentieth time. Gandalf had placed the crown on Aragorn’s head, and tears were streaming down my face. And then, before I could think about what it would change between us, I reached down and took Jamie’s hand in mine.
We stayed that way for the rest of the movie, and when it was done, she rolled onto her back to look at me. I could barely make out her face in the dark, but it felt like I could feel her heartbeat in my chest too. I slipped off the couch and onto the floor next to her, and then I kissed her.
She kissed me back for what felt like hours but was probably only thirty seconds before pulling away. She said it was too weird.
I could feel the crush of it even now, reliving it. Kissing Jamie had not been weird for me. It had felt like—finally. It had put me into my body, in control of it, my hips pressed into hers and my hand on her waist. The few times I’d kissed boys, in hallway enclaves outside middle school dances when the chaperones weren’t looking, I’d felt so far away from myself. Even with Brian, the eighth-grade boyfriend who was so cute and so nice and so patient with me, kissing had felt like the warm-up to a game I’d never get good at. There was such an enormous gap between what my friends described kissing boys to be like and what I actually felt when I did it, I wondered for a while if some key sensory ending was missing from my mouth. Even when I knew for sure that I liked girls more than I’d ever like boys, I worried.
Then I kissed Jamie.
And then Jamie told me kissing me was too weird. We hardly spoke that whole summer, and it wasn’t until three months later that I got to kiss her again. But then I got to kiss her for eleven months straight. Even after we started sleeping together, kissing her was still my favorite part. It would have been enough for me if that was all there was. Maybe I knew, from the start, that our time was limited, and that’s why I kissed her every chance I got. It all felt too lucky to last.
It was annoying to me now, how grateful I’d felt. Three months was nothing. I would’ve waited for her forever.
I didn’t say any of this when Jamie came over to my house and broke up with me. I said, Okay. I said, If that’s what you want. I said, If you’re done, I should really
go study. She cried and, for once in my blubbery life, I didn’t. Not until she was gone and I was upstairs, knocking on my mom’s bedroom door because I realized I didn’t know what else to do. The only person I really wanted to talk to about something as monumental as being dumped by Jamie was Jamie.
I needed to be stronger, and thicker-skinned. I remembered the letter from my dad, now stacked atop its predecessors in my old soccer bag in the closet, and I knew what he’d tell me if I saw him next month, when I told him I didn’t have a girlfriend anymore—the same thing he’d said to me anytime I told him I was sick, or had done badly on a test, or lost a soccer game: “Tough times don’t last. Tough people do.” Then he’d tell me the same long story about his war-hero grandfather, my great-grandfather, who, in his telling, was the tallest, strongest man who ever lived to be two hundred years old. (In my mom’s telling, he was just “a grade-A asshole.”) He died well before I was born, but I’d seen pictures of him looking handsome in his uniform, and on my thirteenth birthday my dad gave me his worn silver army bracelet.
I went to my dresser and pulled the bracelet from the velvet-lined box I stored it in, and slipped it onto my wrist. I didn’t know if it was good luck or not, because I’d always been too afraid to wear it out of the house. Today seemed like a good day to change that.
* * *
—
I knew Ruby’s family had money because she’d gone to the most expensive K-8 in the county and had the kind of smooth, shiny hair even good genes can’t account for. But I hadn’t given the amount of money a lot of thought until I found myself on the way to La Jolla to pick her up—and not just La Jolla, but prime, multimillion, oceanfront La Jolla. Like, the part of the neighborhood where there was a house on the bluff with an elevator that descended to the person’s private beach. Where Bruce Wayne would live, if he lived in San Diego.