Girl Crushed
Page 25
I had a sinking feeling Jamie was right. As enormous a sum as two or three thousand dollars seemed to us, two people who had previously had zero, it might be like trying to stop the Titanic from sinking with a cork. For some twisted reason, this mental image made me laugh. Jamie always said I tried to compare too many things to the Titanic.
“What?”
I shook my head. “Can you imagine not having this place?”
Jamie appeared to give it an honest effort before answering. “No. I can’t.”
“What are the gay kids after us going to do?”
“There’s always the internet?” Jamie said, sounding unconvinced.
“I should have come here more,” I said. My voice came out thick and garbled. “I should have been here every day.”
Jamie and I looked at each other, and I knew that she knew it wasn’t just Triple Moon I regretted taking for granted.
Feedback pierced through the speakers, and we winced and turned to the stage.
“Hellooooooo, San Diego!” Ruby cried. We whooped and clapped, and she bent over laughing. “Sorry. Pandering. We don’t even play anywhere else.”
“YET!” yelled someone in the crowd.
Ruby grinned, and everyone else cheered.
“I wanna thank y’all for coming out to support this establishment,” she said. “Most of tonight’s proceeds will go to Triple Moon and its owners, Dee and Gaby, who’ve been extremely cool to us.” She waited while people clapped politely. “I also wanna thank Jamie Rudawski and Quinn Ryan for organizing this thing. Where are they?”
She raised a hand to her brow, as if the crowd went on for acres and not forty or so feet. Half the audience turned to look for the people they were being made to clap for, so I gave a little wave and Jamie followed suit.
“Quinn,” said Ruby. My heart stopped. “This one’s for you.”
The noise was immediate, silence to pop-punk explosion in the blink of an eye. Drums, bass, guitar, and Ruby’s voice, above them, scream-singing about a girl who everyone knew was me. I was so cemented to the spot, trying to make out the lyrics and scanning the audience to see who was looking at me, that I didn’t notice Jamie had slipped away until the chorus.
Ruby, smiling at me, singing: “Big feelings / you’ve got / big feelings / and I’m not / big feelings / but it’s cool.” I smiled back, relief and affection coursing through my veins. It wasn’t a love song, and it wasn’t a fuck-you song either. It was a song about almosts. It was about me, and her, and the unnamed but not unimportant thing we’d been to each other. Standing at the back of the crowd, aware of all the curious, envious looks directed my way, I felt like I’d lived this moment before. Certainly, I’d imagined it. In the fantasy version, though, Ruby sang about how much she loved me. In the fantasy, I loved her too. We left the show together. We became prom queens. We dated throughout my freshman year at UNC. The fantasy got blurry for a bit; I skipped ahead: I became famous and beloved and I married a woman who loved me exactly as much as I loved her. There were no surprises, and I was never wrong.
But I’d been wrong so many times already this year. I’d been wrong and I’d lost and I’d been rejected and dumped. My dreams had been crushed, and my heart broken. I did not particularly recommend either, but I survived both. People had changed, done unexpected things, deviated from the course I imagined for them. I had, too. We were still here. I didn’t know what would happen to me or to any of us, but I knew what I wanted to do now.
I smiled at Ruby, so widely my cheeks hurt. I waited until I was sure she understood everything I was trying to say with that smile. And then I ducked out.
I found her by the dumpsters out back, and when she saw me she lifted her phone to her ear, evidently pretending to be on a call. I laughed, and she scowled.
“Okay, fine.”
“What are you doing out here?”
My heart raced. I knew the answer. She wasn’t waiting for anyone else. I took a step closer.
“Nothing, I just—” She cut herself short. She stared at her feet. “She wrote you a song?” she blurted out.
“Did you listen to it?”
She paused. “She wrote you a song.”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “And I’m out here.”
Jamie blinked at me. “That’s actually a little rude.”
“Very,” I said. Another step.
Jamie wouldn’t look me in the eyes, speaking instead to my right shoulder. “Natalie and I are just friends,” she said hurriedly.
I froze. “Oh?”
“I mean, we sort of hooked up. But then—” Finally she looked me in the eyes.
“What?”
“I cried on her.”
I only barely managed not to laugh out loud, instead making a weird, choking throat noise. “You cried—”
“On her. Yeah.” Jamie’s eyes twinkled. She looked like she could cry or laugh or maybe both. “It was after…” She trailed off. I finished her sentence in my head: After Ruby and I slept together.
Poor Natalie freaking Reid, I thought.
“Blagh,” said Jamie, shaking her curls at the ground. “Sorry. I’m just— I don’t know what my problem is. I’m the one who—”
“Dumped me?”
She looked up and saw me smiling. “Yeah.”
“Maybe I deserved it.” Half a step. Just 7.75 inches between her chest and mine.
Jamie shook her head. “No.” She paused. “Well, kind of.”
“I never pictured us not together,” I said. “For the record.”
“It’s okay if you did,” she said. “I was the first girlfriend you ever had. How often does that work out?”
“Probably not very often,” I said. We stood so close now I could feel her breath on my neck. “But second girlfriends are different.”
Jamie’s face dropped, head sinking into her chest. I hooked a finger under her chin and lifted her back up.
“I mean you, dummy.”
Then we were kissing, and it was just how I remembered it, but better for having thought I’d never get to kiss her again. From now on, I promised myself, I will think about how lucky I am every time we kiss. I will treat every kiss as the possible last. Because someday, if we were together until college or until we graduated or until we grew old together and died, the last kiss would come. Being apart from her had made me understand that in a way I’d only abstractly known before. I understood now that there was a lot about my future and hers I couldn’t predict. Already things were so different than I’d imagined. My year so far had been full of rejection. But I lived. I was still worthy, and good. Kissing Jamie, I still felt like the luckiest girl in the world.
Just then, Jamie pulled back and looked around.
“We’re making out, like, in the garbage,” she said.
“Jamie,” I said. “You’re the love of my life.”
Her eyes grew wide as the moon, but she quickly recovered. “So far,” she said. “We’re seventeen. I’m the love of your life so far.”
I rolled my eyes. “Isn’t that all anyone can say?”
Jamie thought this over. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“I guess we should go back inside.”
I was still afraid. I was afraid our friends would think we were making a mistake. I was afraid the show wouldn’t be enough, and Triple Moon would close. I was afraid we’d go to college and lose touch with Dee and Gaby. I was afraid to leave Ronni and my team and be part of a new one, full of strangers. I was afraid the five-hour-and-forty-eight-minute drive between Jamie’s school and mine (without traffic—ha) would be too much.
But Jamie was right. We couldn’t stay there forever. So I took her hand, and we went forward, together.
Back when writing this book was just a vague idea, Marisa DiNovis, my wonderfu
l editor, emailed me to ask if I’d ever considered writing YA. We exchanged a number of frantic, excited emails in which it soon became clear to me that the book I was starting to work on belonged with her. Marisa, you reached me at a time when I was feeling frustrated and a little lost, and reminded me of what’s important, and what I want to do. Thank you so much for making this book what it is, and thanks to the rest of the wonderful team at Knopf Books for Young Readers for their support and enthusiasm.
Immense thanks to Allison Hunter, my incredible, superstar agent (and part-time therapist). You were the first to see something in my work, and I will never forget that. Thanks also to Clare Mao for her promptness, insights, and honesty. Thank you to Josephine Rais, for creating the beautiful art for this book.
I also want to thank my dear friend Chiara Atik, who tells me what I need to do whenever I feel stuck, which is often just “keep writing.” There’s nobody whose storytelling instincts or taste I trust more.
Thank you to my family, both old and new. Irene, you raised an amazing woman. I didn’t know little fifteen-year-old Lydia, but I would have liked to. Thank you to my wife, Lydia: for loving me, supporting me, and inspiring me. I love you.
Chris Ritter
KATIE HEANEY is the author of the memoirs Never Have I Ever: My Life (So Far) Without a Date and Would You Rather? and the novels Dear Emma and Public Relations. A former editor at BuzzFeed, she is now a senior staff writer at The Cut and lives in Brooklyn with her wife.
KATIEHEANEY.COM
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