by Katie Heaney
Finally she spoke.
“Do you think your mom would contact her for us?”
“What?”
“Linda Weller. I think we’re much likelier to get a response if a reporter contacts her.”
“Oh,” I said. For a split second, I’d wondered why Jamie wanted my mom to call Natalie Reid. “I mean, we could ask, but she’s a crime reporter. For a local paper. It’s not like she’s…Rachel Maddow!” After a brief panic in which I’d struggled to remember the name of any political journalist, I was quite pleased with myself for that.
Jamie cocked her head. “Well, no, but it’s an elected office, and your mom is a constituent, which means a lot in itself. Or should mean a lot.”
“Okay, so what do you suggest we do?”
“Write a letter, and have your mom send it on Union-Tribune letterhead.”
“A letter? Why don’t we just send a telegram?”
Jamie cocked her head, exasperated. Sometimes, like now, I said something just to provoke that particular head movement. It made me laugh.
“You’re playing dumb, but I know you know why sending an actual letter is nice.”
“Okay, okay,” I conceded. “So what do we say?”
“I’ll write down some themes,” Jamie said excitedly. She slid off the couch to be closer to the poster board and uncapped a bright red marker. Then she turned to me expectantly.
“Gay rights!” I yelled.
Jamie laughed and wrote it down. She looked at me again.
“Ummmm.”
“Small business owners?” Jamie offered.
“Ooh yeah,” I said. “That’s great.”
We went on from there, Jamie suggesting things and me agreeing with them. My mom came downstairs after a while to get a second or seventh can of Diet Coke, and we told her about our plan. Like I had, she reminded Jamie that she was a crime reporter, and the Union-Tribune a small paper. But she agreed to send our letter when we’d written it. By then it was a quarter past ten, and I was starting to fade, and Jamie’s weekday curfew, the last I’d heard, was ten-thirty.
“Aren’t you going to be late?” I asked. The poster board was full, with various themes and bullet points surrounding Linda Weller’s name in red and orange and green. In the end, the board was rainbow-colored anyway. The Sweets plan, which Jamie kept calling plan B, remained isolated and undeveloped off to the side. I’d wanted us to take it seriously, but Jamie was so excited about her idea, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to ask what we’d do if it didn’t work. It was strange: we’d worked on a project together just weeks earlier, but it felt like much longer ago. Something felt different now, and it wasn’t just that this was a project we really cared about and the other one was homework. Something between us had started to mend. If our breakup had burned our relationship to the ground, it felt like we’d just finished work on our new first floor. It was familiar, and still us, but it was smaller, and more thoughtfully built. I felt more aware of what we were and could be to each other, when for so long I’d taken for granted that we’d always be each other’s everything. It wasn’t that I wasn’t sad (and in fact I was pretty sure I’d cry as soon as Jamie left), but I felt lighter, too.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” said Jamie. “I should go.”
I helped her clean up and took our glasses into the kitchen. She pulled on her jean jacket, and I carried the poster board out to her mom’s car, which she’d borrowed for the night. I slid it gingerly into the back seat under Jamie’s close observation, then stood with her next to the door.
“Okay,” I said.
“I’ll put together a draft and send it to you tomorrow,” she said.
“Okay.”
Tentatively, she raised her arms, and I did the same. We laughed, and stepped together, her arms around my shoulders and mine around the safe middle of her back. Soon I’d throw my arms around her without worrying where exactly they landed. Soon, but not yet.
* * *
—
It figured I would get the email on a Thursday. Historically, I hated Thursdays.
When I didn’t have a girlfriend (which, so far, was approximately 99.5 percent of the time), there was nothing particularly special about Thursdays. Even their proximity to Fridays, and therefore the weekend, was tempered by the usual need to start and finish the homework and studying I’d meant to start earlier in the week, plus the nerves that settled over me the night before a big game. And lately, every game felt like a big game.
I should have been grateful, I guess, that she emailed me after practice, when the other girls were already getting in their cars and driving out of earshot. I wondered if she knew, and was trying to minimize my humiliation, or if it was just coincidence, and I was the last, least important thing on her checklist that day. An unwanted task between her and freedom.
The email read, in full:
Dear QUINN,
We are writing to let you know that all letters of intent for next season’s women’s soccer team have been signed, and the UNC recruitment process is now complete. Thank you for your previous interest in our program, and best of luck in your college career.
Best,
Carla Martinez
Coach, University of North Carolina
Women’s Soccer
It wasn’t even personal. My name was auto-filled by form, just one of who knows how many sad, hopeful seniors hoping to be the exception to the recruitment calendar we’d all had memorized since freshman year. We’d memorized the exceptions, too—the friend’s sister’s friend who got a full ride from Florida on Christmas Eve because a previous recruit decided a lesser offer from Georgetown was worth more if it meant she could stay on the East Coast with her boyfriend, or whatever. It was never a direct connection. I never knew these girls myself. The girls who were seniors when I was a junior all took their first offers and were set on their teams by October. If you had an offer, you could sign your letter of intent to play for that school anytime between mid-November and April of your senior year—the sooner the better, if only for College Day.
The UNC T-shirt my dad had bought for me as a freshman was clean and folded and waiting in my dresser. At the beginning of the year it had been at the top of the pile, but as the months went by it dropped lower and lower, buried beneath the shirts I actually wore. I told myself I still had hope so long as I could see that stripe of Carolina blue when I opened the drawer.
What was I going to tell my dad? I’d been deliberately not in contact, not ready to know yet if he was taking the San Diego job. Neither had he made any effort to update me. Maybe he was going to take the job, and was afraid to tell me he wouldn’t be in North Carolina when I got there. The thought of having to be the disappointer rather than the disappointed was too much for me, and so I said nothing.
My mom, I thought, somewhat bitterly, would be thrilled if it meant I stayed in California. She would, of course, perform the sympathy required by a rejection like this one, but I knew she wanted to be able to drive to see me, and have me be able to drive home every long weekend we got. I wanted to be geographically excused from that responsibility, and guilt. I didn’t want the crutch—if I could go home easily, I feared I always would. It wasn’t that I didn’t think I’d miss her, but that I wanted to be somewhere new long enough to actually miss her.
Technically I could have accepted any number of recruitment offers from D-II schools on the East Coast, or even the Midwest, but then I’d have to tell my team that I was going to play on a division-two team, and they’d feel sorry for me. Even the ones going to D-II or D-III schools themselves. Some of them weren’t as good as I was, or didn’t care as much as I did, and planned to do other things with college life anyway, like join sororities and date frat boys. But soccer was all I had, and I had a sinking feeling that everyone who knew me knew it.
Soccer and Ruby, I reminded myself. She was going to Stanford. A five-hour, forty-three-minute drive from UCLA, without traffic. (Ha.) And I could visit Ronni there too.
If I got off the wait list.
Here was the one good thing about Thursdays, when I had a girlfriend: it was closing day for the Union-Tribune, which meant my mom stayed late at the office, scrambling with the other reporters to get the weekend edition ready for print. So at least when Ruby came over, I knew we’d have until ten at least before I had to worry about my mom waltzing in. I wasn’t sure tonight was the night we’d have sex, but I wanted to, and I was pretty sure Ruby wanted to, too, and now with the news from UNC I was even more eager to focus on something that felt good. Even if it was just my body pressed into hers. Even if she just held me.
* * *
—
We said six-thirty, but my doorbell rang a few minutes after seven, which meant I ate half a bag of chips sitting at the kitchen table, creepily peering through the blinds for Ruby’s car, which I’d learned she wasn’t allowed to drive to school ever since she rear-ended someone in the parking lot junior year, causing fifteen hundred dollars’ worth of damage to the bumper. This regulation didn’t make a lot of sense to me, or to Ruby, who pointed out to her father that she was probably much likelier to get in a car accident outside the school parking lot, where people drove faster than ten miles an hour, but Mr. Ocampo had told her that at least those people weren’t all “sixteen and hormonal.” She had hoped to win her dad over by this point in the year, but so far he’d held steady, leaving her to rely on rides from bandmates or “friends” like me. Not that Ruby had a very difficult time finding someone willing to drive her wherever she wanted.
When Ruby pulled into the driveway I leapt to action, dusting chip crumbs off my pants and sucking salt off my fingers as I rolled up the bag and threw it into the cupboard. I dashed up the stairs, so that when she rang the doorbell, I’d take at least as long to answer the door as it took me to descend them. I checked my teeth and my hair in my bathroom mirror and then waited. And waited. Just as I was starting to worry, because it didn’t seem possible anyone could take that long to get from the car to the front door, the doorbell rang. I casually walked down, made myself count to three, and opened the door.
“Hi,” said Ruby.
“Hi,” I breathed. “Sorry. I was just doing push-ups upstairs.”
Ruby smirked. “Cool.”
“Come in,” I said, and when she stepped through the door I leaned in for a kiss. I felt like a fifties housewife, home all day, and here, at last, was my husband, the rock star. I took her jean jacket and draped it over the banister. “How was your day, sweetheart?”
There was the smirk again.
“I’m kidding. In my head it was like you were coming home after work, and I’ve been here waiting,” I explained.
“Yeah, sorry I’m late,” said Ruby.
“Oh—that’s not what I meant! You’re fine.” I was flailing. I could feel it on my face, which meant she could see it. Why did I have to make everything so awkward? Why had I just told Ruby I was fantasizing about us living together?
Ruby looked around. “Do I get to see upstairs this time?”
“Oh, uh.” I blushed. “Yeah, if you want.”
She looked at me expectantly.
“…Now?” I asked. She laughed and took my hand, and I led her upstairs, naming each room as I went as if it weren’t obvious what each one was for.
“That’s my mom’s room and bathroom. It’s a mess. That’s her office, which is also a mess. This is my bathroom, and this is…my room,” I finished. I flicked on the light, and watched her scan the dresser, the desk, and finally the bed. Her face broke into a grin when she noticed the poster affixed to the ceiling above it, its corners reinforced with layer upon layer of graying tape.
“Is that Justin Bieber?”
“It sure is,” I said. “I was so in love with him.”
Ruby raised an eyebrow. “You were.”
“That, or I wanted to be him,” I said. “Both things, I think.”
Ruby crossed the room to my bed and sat down, looking up. My stomach flipped. “You guys have kind of the same hair,” she said, looking back and forth between us.
“Not a coincidence,” I said, and she laughed.
I joined her on the bed, both of us facing the rest of my room, studying my things.
“So many trophies,” said Ruby.
I beamed.
“There’s a really good energy here,” she continued.
“In my room?”
“The whole house,” she said. “I like it.”
We looked at each other then, our faces just inches apart. Whatever she saw, I wanted to see it, to be it. She didn’t yet know I wasn’t as impressive as all my trophies made me seem. She didn’t yet know how lonely this house could feel with my mom and me both in it. I wanted to be her version of me. I wanted to shrink myself down and curl up in her body. I wanted her mouth on mine. I wanted—everything.
“Kiss me already,” she said, so I did.
* * *
—
Sometime later—twenty minutes or two hours or three days, I would have believed anything—we lay upside down in bed, our feet resting on my pillow, our hands clasped and flopping back and forth in some made-up game only we knew how to play. We looked up at Justin and laughed.
“Look at that smile,” said Ruby. “Perv.”
“He’s seen a lot,” I said. Ruby raised an eyebrow teasingly. “Okay, not that much.”
She laughed. “It’s okay if he has. I don’t mind.”
It wasn’t that I wanted her to be jealous, exactly, but her apparent ambivalence deflated me just slightly. Obviously she knew about Jamie. But did she think I’d hooked up with other girls here too? She was only the second. I wondered what I was to her. Then I immediately felt bad for wondering. It didn’t matter, of course. Intellectually, I knew that. It was just that my brain was unavailable to me at the moment.
“What about…your room?” I said. I pictured waking up there, in my sleeping bag, astonished to be where I was.
“You’ve seen it.” She grinned. “My mom is always just…around, like unnecessarily changing a light bulb in the hallway outside my room or something. Anytime Mikey came over to hang out she made me leave the door open,” she said. “Other people’s houses are better.” I sent a silent thank-you to my mother, and to divorce, for making my modest love life possible.
“Well, you are welcome anytime,” I said. “I only wish this bed was bigger.” I was pressed against the wall so Ruby wouldn’t fall off the edge of my twin, and my free arm was underneath me and starting to go numb.
“Here, follow me,” said Ruby, and rolled onto the floor. I laughed and I followed, letting myself fall right on top of her. That led to some more making out, and I had the thought that if it weren’t for food, or having to go to the bathroom, I could have lived there, on the floor, with Ruby forever. When we came up for air Ruby scanned the vast collection of crap stored under my bed, made plainly visible by the blankets we’d pushed aside.
“I wanna see little Quinn pictures,” she said.
I laughed and reached over her, pointing to the plastic Disneyland album where I kept some, and she slid across the floor so she could reach it. I listened to her rooting around, pushing things out of the way—old cleats, a board game. Incredibly, it never occurred to me she might grab something I didn’t want her to see. The shoebox literally and idiotically labeled BABY PICTURES did not cross my mind. My brain was still sex-fried and hazy and totally useless. I just lay there, waiting, flat on my back, comfortably sleepy and pleased with myself.
“What’s this?” said Ruby, and my heart stopped cold. It was her voice: not teasing, not cooing, but confused. Smiling, but not laughing. I remembered. I sat up.
<
br /> My album of photos, safe and cute, remained under the bed. Next to Ruby’s legs, the shoebox. In her hand, a worn sheet of loose-leaf. I didn’t have to see the front to know which one.
“ ‘Straight Girls We Wish Weren’t,’ ” Ruby read. “ ‘Number one: Ruby Ocampo.’ ”
Slowly, I lifted my eyes to meet hers, and I was surprised and relieved to see that she was smirking, amused.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Jamie and I—we made that list ages ago. It has nothing to do with us. I wasn’t trying to, like, achieve something with you. I swear.”
“I believe you,” she said. She scanned the rest of the list. “Indya Schoenberg? Interesting.”
“Like I said. A long time ago.” Ruby raised an eyebrow. “Not that I wouldn’t still put you in first place,” I added hastily. “I mean, I wouldn’t make this list now, obviously. I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m trying to compliment you, but it’s not coming out right.”
“Try again,” said Ruby. She set down the list and leaned back against my bed frame, arms crossed. My cheeks reddened.
“You’re beautiful,” I said. “Even more now than…back then.” I gestured at the list. I wished I knew magic, so I could blink and the paper would—poof—explode into dust. I tried it anyway. Nothing happened.
“Thank you,” she said. Her arms remained crossed, I noticed.
“Are you mad?”
Ruby shook her head slowly. “No, I’m not mad.” She looked at me steadily. “I just think it’s funny how you guys decided I was straight.”
So she’s a little mad, I thought. Girls didn’t say I just think it’s funny how unless they were at least a little mad.
“Weren’t you?” I said. “At the time?”
“I was, what. Fourteen?”