Girl Crushed

by Katie Heaney

  I took the curving streets slowly the closer I got, not wanting to be too exactly on time, but when I pulled up to Ruby’s house she was sitting on the front step already, waiting. I waved, and she started the long journey down the driveway to my truck.

  “Nice house,” I said when she opened the door.

  “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “I know….”

  She gave me a look. “It was a joke.”

  “Oh. Right. Ha.”

  “Thanks for picking me up.”

  “No problem.”

  We were quiet as we wound our way back to the highway, Ruby looking out the window while I tried my best to look at Ruby and the road at the same time. She was wearing jean shorts and high-top Chucks and a giant Nirvana T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up. If an outfit could have a sexuality, I thought, hers would be bi at least.

  After another five seconds the silence started seeming weird, and ominous, like if I didn’t say something right now she might realize where she was and who she was with and ask me to turn the car around.

  “So how come you’re not playing at your normal place anymore?”

  (I pretended not to know the name.)

  “Because my ex is a baby moron.”

  I laughed in surprise, and after a moment she did too.

  “Is that, like, only slightly a moron?”

  “Major moron, major baby,” she clarified.

  “Got it.” My hands felt sweaty on the steering wheel. I hadn’t expected for us to land on this topic so quickly. I couldn’t blow it. I couldn’t say have you thought about dating a girl instead, for instance. “Is it nosy of me to ask what happened?”

  I looked her way once, and then again. Finally she looked back, eyebrows arched in mock offense taken.

  “It’s super nosy.”

  “Okay, just checking.” I waited a beat. “What happened?”

  Ruby laughed. “I dunno. We were fighting a lot. We’ve broken up, like, six times.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, at least.”

  “Do you think this one’s for good?”

  “Do you care?” she asked.

  I looked at her. She wasn’t mad—she was teasing me. Maybe. I turned up the music a little, worried she could hear my heartbeat. “I’m a concerned citizen.”

  “Right.”

  “You didn’t answer.”

  “Yes, I think it’s really over. I hope so, anyway.”

  “Well, good thing you have a say in the matter.”

  “So people keep telling me.”

  I realized I wasn’t sure who the people she referred to might be. Excluding her three bandmates, Ruby didn’t seem to have a lot of friends, at least not that went to our school. And yet she was considered cool by everyone—even, I was sure, by the also-rich, boring-beautiful, too-tan, water polo–playing popular crowd, though they pretended to be above admiring anyone.

  I was disappointed when, a minute later, Triple Moon came into view through my windshield. Our conversation was just getting somewhere, and I knew it would deflate as soon as we opened the truck’s doors.

  We parked and went inside to find the shop overheated and completely empty except for Dee, who was wearing a bandanna and fanning herself with a newspaper. When she saw me she waved. “AC’s broken,” she explained.

  “It’s like ninety degrees out,” I said.

  “I realize that, thank you.”

  I could see her noticing Ruby behind me, assessing the situation, so I cut her off before she could say something embarrassing.

  “Dee, this is Ruby,” I said. “She’s in that band that’s going to do a show here?”

  “Of course. Nice to meet you. The AC will be fixed by then.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t worried,” said Ruby.

  “I was,” I said. “Can I get an iced…coffee?” Around Ruby, suddenly, a drink with flavored syrup in it seemed childish.

  Dee gave me a look but filled a glass with ice without saying anything about my usual order, thank God. “Ruby, can I get you anything?”

  “Iced tea is great, thank you.”

  I watched Ruby take a lap around the shop, presumably inspecting it for music-person concerns I wouldn’t understand. Dee set our drinks on the counter, and when I picked them up she gave me a look that I knew meant something like You’re in trouble with this one. Which of course I knew.

  Dee yelled for Gaby, and a moment later she emerged from the back.

  “This is Ruby, from Sweets, that band,” I said.

  “Oh, hi! I’m Gaby. I’ll give you a proper tour.”

  I trailed along after them as Gaby showed Ruby where they usually set up the stage, and where they could plug in their amps, and explained how the sound system worked. They talked through Dee’s proposed cover charge, and Ruby agreed that five dollars a head (two for the band and three for the shop) seemed fair. Then Gaby started giving Ruby a mini lecture on women-centered safe spaces, and I started to worry we were losing her. “Our doors are open to all identities at Triple Moon, but cis men are sort of…low on the priority list,” she said. “I hope the young men in your band will be respectful of the fact that they’re only here because you’re here, and because I trust Quinn’s judgment. Their voices are secondary.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” said Ruby. “I never let them forget that.”

  Gaby smiled, which made me beam. I had nothing to worry about. Ruby fit in here, just like I knew she would.

  The show date was set for two Saturdays away, and when Ruby and I got back in my truck we were giddy and triumphant.

  “Two dollars a head!” I exclaimed. “If fifty people come, that’s a hundred bucks!”

  Ruby smiled patiently. “And divide that by four…”

  “Oh, yeah. Well, it’s not about the money, really. Right?”

  “Right,” said Ruby. “That part can wait.”

  Oh no, I worried inwardly. Does she think Sweets is going to, like…make it big?

  “So you think you guys’ll stay together after graduation?”

  She shrugged. “I hope so. I feel like we’ve finally figured out our sound—”

  “Totally.” I nodded.

  “—but David wants to go to school in New York, and Ben thinks we should focus on Portland, so we’ll see.”

  “What about you?”

  She sighed. “Stanford.” She said it so boredly, and definitively, like she was already in.

  “Oh. Wow. Are you…did you…”

  “I’m pretty sure. My parents went there, and they donated, like…a building,” she explained. “Part of a building? I don’t remember.”

  “Oh sure,” I said, like I had also donated several buildings myself. “My friend Ronni is going there too,” I added proudly, a little jealously.

  “Soccer?”

  I nodded. “I heard you got a perfect SAT.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “You heard that? From who?”

  “Alexis,” I said.

  “That bitch knows everything,” she said admiringly.

  “I know.”

  So it was true. Ruby was rich and beautiful and brilliant. And straight. What was I doing here again?

  “You don’t seem very excited,” I said. “You know Stanford is kind of a good school, right?”

  She smirked. “Yeah, I think I’ve heard that. No, I mean. It’ll be fine. I would have preferred to go to school in LA, but my parents pretty much told me I’d ruin their lives if I didn’t go to Stanford, so, whatever. It’s four years.”

  “And it’s Stanford.”

  “You think I’m a brat.”

  “No,” I said. “A little.”

  I looked over to make sure she wasn’t mad at me, once and then again. I could get used to h
er sitting there, I thought. I could survive off the intermittent eye contact alone.

  “Fine,” she said. “Where do you want to go, then?”

  “The University of North Carolina,” I said—definitively, though I still hadn’t heard anything more from their recruiter, and had not yet gotten around to actually applying. But I would, and I had to.

  Ruby’s eyebrow lifted disdainfully. “What’s…there?”

  “Uh, the best women’s soccer program in the country.” I knew I sounded defensive, but I didn’t want her to think UNC was some shitty country-kid school just because it wasn’t an Ivy League, or in a big city. It wasn’t easy to get into, either. Unlike Ruby, I did not have perfect test scores, or even close. Everything I had to show for my academic capability was average. If I didn’t have soccer, I knew, there was no way I’d get in.

  Ruby’s face softened. “Oh right, soccer. Okay. That makes more sense.”

  “Do you know who Tobin Heath is?”

  She stared blankly.

  “Crystal Dunn? Ashlyn Harris? Mia Hamm?”

  “I’m gonna guess…soccer players?”

  “Soccer stars.”

  “My mistake.”

  “Anyway. They all went to UNC, was my point.”

  “You want to play professionally?”

  I nodded. I’d wanted to play for the U.S. women’s national soccer team since I was five. I “tried out” for my first team the next year, not that you could really be cut from a team when you were in kindergarten. My dad drove me to the park where the tryouts were held, having purchased a high-tech collapsible lawn chair with its own canopy just for the occasion. (That way, he explained, he could watch me from the sidelines without having to sit on a hot metal bleacher, or talk to the other parents.) After every drill we ran that first day, I’d look to him for reassurance, and every time I glanced over he’d moved a little closer to the sideline. Eventually he stood up. And then it was clear, by the look on his face: all of a sudden, I was special, in a way I hadn’t been the day before.

  When my parents got divorced, my dad moved to Durham for a job, and he started the hard sell on UNC. Not that I needed much convincing, especially once I got a little older and started following college soccer. UNC was my favorite team to watch, and often the actual best, and playing for them would mean my dad could come to all my games.

  Ruby frowned. “I don’t think I’ve ever actually been to a soccer game. Can that be right?”

  “You should come to one of mine,” I said. I glanced over, and when she looked at me I grinned. “You kind of owe me now.”

  Oh my God, that was flirty, I thought. Right? Hopefully she could tell, unless it didn’t work, in which case I hoped she couldn’t.

  “Oh, I do?”

  (She could tell. It worked.)

  “Yeah, pretty sure you do.”

  We grinned at each other like twin idiots.

  “Okay, maybe I will,” said Ruby. “A high school sporting event. How quaint.”

  My cheeks burned a little. “Okay, I mean, you don’t have to come.”

  “No, I want to. You can’t stop me.”

  “Okay, fine,” I said. My head felt like it was filling up with sparkles. I turned onto Ruby’s street and realized I hadn’t paid any real, conscious attention to the road since I left the Triple Moon parking lot. Somehow we were already there, far too soon. I parked in front of her house and blurted out, “What are you doing now?” Ruby looked at me, seeming surprised, or something. “Just wondering,” I hurriedly added. “I’ve got plans with my friend Jamie?”

  No such plan existed, though now I wished it did.

  “I thought she was your girlfriend,” said Ruby.

  Even though Jamie and I had been very much out as a couple at school, this stunned me. I’d assumed there was a rung on the social ladder above which nobody knew or cared what my relationship status was, and Ruby hovered in the stratosphere above it. But maybe not.

  “She, uh—she was,” I stammered. “We broke up.”

  “Ah. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “We’re friends.”

  Ruby gave me a tight-lipped smile. “Yeah, I know how that goes.”

  “No, it’s—not like that. At all,” I said. Suddenly it was crucial that she know that Jamie and I weren’t like her and Mikey. I didn’t want her to think I was anything but available, and I couldn’t afford to let myself think like that either. “We might not even do anything. We haven’t texted about it,” I added, but I knew it was too late to reverse course.

  “Okay,” said Ruby. “Well, I should probably go practice with the guys, now that we have a show to prepare for.”

  “Right. No time to waste.”

  She smiled at me a little quizzically. “You’re funny. Thanks for doing this.”

  Then she leaned over and hugged me, one-armed, across the console. Her hand on my shoulder blade felt electric, and her hair smelled salty-sweet and expensive. I put my hand on her back and let it slide the tiniest bit lower, not wanting to seem too platonic but not wanting to creep her out, either. Every day at school I watched straight girls cling to their friends like they were long-lost lovers, but I worried those girls thought it was different when I did it.

  Ruby pulled back, opened the door, and hopped out. “This was fun.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “See you Monday?”

  “Don’t remind me.” She waved and then began the long trip back up her driveway, and I fought the urge to honk my horn, just to get her to look at me one more time.

  On Sunday I woke up to the beach calling my name through the window. It was that kind of morning, where you can sense it before your eyes are all the way open, in the way the sunlight filters through the blinds and in the salty-clean smell of the breeze. It was perfect, and I knew that toward the end of September, it would be one of the last (if not the last) tolerable ocean temperature days of the year, sans wet suit. As I lay in bed scrolling through everything that had happened on my phone overnight, I briefly considered asking Ruby to go to the beach with me. But seeing her two days in a row would be pushing it, for someone I had no relationship with until this week. Not that we were in a relationship. Plus, I didn’t want her to think I had no one else to hang out with, even if it was true. Ronni could never hang out on Sundays because of church and the extended family get-togethers that followed, and Alexis didn’t “do” beaches because she didn’t like being hot, sweating, or getting sand in her shoes.

  Technically, this left me with one final option.

  Before I could overthink it, I texted Jamie, because if I pretended to be at the stage at which asking Jamie to hang out was habitual, and emotionally unloaded, maybe I would trick my brain into actually moving into that stage. In fact, I thought, why not go a step further and offer to make us a picnic? Picnics didn’t have to be romantic. Two best friends could share a platonic picnic, no problem.

  It took Jamie seven minutes to respond, during which time I weighed the pros and cons of moving to Romania to start a new life. But then, finally:

  Sure

  I sighed. During our relationship I’d repeatedly begged Jamie to use punctuation—exclamation marks, specifically—in her text messages so I’d know she didn’t hate me. She tried a few times, but soon reverted to habit, and when I brought it up again she said I should know she didn’t hate me because we were girlfriends, and we saw each other every day. Which is exactly what someone who will eventually break up with you would say.

  Friends, fortunately, didn’t care about punctuation. So I got up and got dressed, and walked downstairs to the kitchen, where my mom sat at the table drinking at least her third cup of coffee and reading an Ann Rule book over a box of half- and three-quarters-eaten Sunny Donuts. One might think she’d get sick of crime, given the day job, but in the seventeen years and counting I
’d been around, she hadn’t. Every weekend was the same: on Saturdays she took an eight-mile hike with her middle-aged lady hiking friends, and on Sundays she read about murder. Early on in high school I used to ask her once every few weeks if she had any dates coming up, but eventually she asked me if I really wanted to come downstairs in the morning to find some strange man sitting at the table with her, eating our doughnuts, and I’d been forced to concede she had a point.

  “Good morning,” she said. “Nice day. You should go to the beach.”

  “I’m going to,” I said. “I’m meeting Jamie.”

  My mom peered at me over the rim of her coffee cup and said nothing.

  “What?” I snapped. “We’re friends.”

  She held up a hand in defense. “Okay! It just seems soon.”

  “Well, it’s not,” I said. “I see her every day, and the sooner it’s normal, the better.”

  “If I were you, I’d still be mad,” she said, poking the doughnut carcasses. She picked up a piece of powdered sugar and took a bite, leaving white residue on the corner of her mouth. “The anger stage is the best part of the grief cycle.”

  I brushed the corner of my mouth so my mom would wipe hers. Ten years since the divorce, and you’re still in it, I thought. I felt guilty immediately. “Wouldn’t that be acceptance?”

  My mom scrunched up her face as if thinking it over. “Nah.”

  I laughed, which made her smile. She returned to her book, and I began assembling twin turkey-tomato-mustard-provolone sandwiches. I threw them into a bag with chips and cookies and two giant water bottles left over from soccer seasons past.

  “Okay, Mom,” I said. “I’m headed out.”

  “Hey, Quinn?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Speaking of your dad. You know he’s coming into town, right?”