We Were Promised Spotlights

by Lindsay Sproul

  I turned to Susan.

  “It’s complicated,” I said, “and also not complicated at all.”

  Susan’s face turned serious, ready. I don’t know what she thought I was going to say—probably something regular: that I liked Scottie instead, that I was too afraid to give up my virginity.

  It was time to tell her the truth. Susan Blackford was my best friend. Even if telling her would mean she thought I was disgusting, or if she didn’t want to hang out with me anymore, being around her was becoming too much, especially since I no longer had Brad as a buffer. Even if Brad was now available, even if Susan might try to date him, I felt like I couldn’t hide any longer.

  “I think I’m a lesbian,” I said, looking around Susan’s living room as if there were an audience who might hear me. “I’m a lesbian.”

  Susan laughed. “You’re not a lesbian.”

  Her face looked malarial in the low glow of the television. I settled my shoulders, thinking it wasn’t fair to hurt Susan like this right after her dad died.

  “I know what we can do,” I said. “Let’s make a blanket fort.”

  “But it’s winter. We can’t go outside.”

  I reached for the afghan at the end of the couch.

  “That’s okay,” I said.

  The Fort

  The fort was a bad idea. I mean, Jesus Christ.

  First of all, we got really drunk, so the fort was lopsided, and it made me dizzy to sit in it. Second of all, we didn’t remember why this used to be so much fun.

  “I don’t remember how to play,” Susan said. “Isn’t that weird?”

  “No, I know,” I said. “When did we forget?”

  Susan thought about it.

  “Seventh grade,” she said.

  “Why was seventh grade different?”

  “Because, like . . .” Susan reached up and touched the ceiling of the fort, thinking. “That’s when we had health class, and they talked about abstinence and all, and we got scared. And Brad and Scottie didn’t seem like our friends anymore. And we started going to the mall.”

  “I hate the mall,” I said.

  Heather gave a kid from Hanover a blow job in the arcade bathroom there. She still had his Red Sox hat.

  “I hate my dad,” Susan said. Then she laughed. “You’re not supposed to hate dead people.”

  “Your dad was . . .” I couldn’t finish the sentence. Whatever he was, he wasn’t that anymore.

  “You tried to protect me,” she continued. “You’re, like . . . I don’t know. You’re so beautiful that it’s hard not to get mad at you. I mean, Brad always liked you best. Everyone likes you best. I just want to be you. And I’ve always just thought that if I was close enough, I might learn how.”

  “Why?”

  This was how I felt about Brad, in a way. If I could spend time around him, I might be able to learn what it was about him that Susan, that every girl, loved.

  “You’re Taylor Garland,” said Susan. “Why did you pick me?”

  I was starting to feel nervous. I looked at my stupid hands. The walls of the fort felt like they were closing in on us, like the air was getting thinner.

  “I love you,” I said.

  Susan leaned over, sloppily, and put her hand on the inside of my thigh.

  “I love you too, Taylor,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “I mean, I love you.”

  We sat there for what seemed like seven billion hours, her hand just sitting there on my thigh, and then—I couldn’t help myself— I put my hand on top of hers. I slid my fingers around hers, covering her hand with my skin. She was wearing a Claddagh ring, which dug into me. I moved her hand, very slowly, underneath my shirt, until her palm was covering one cup of my bra.

  “Is this okay?” I asked her.

  She looked at me, breathing deeply. She didn’t answer, but she didn’t protest either.

  I knew this was probably wrong—I mean, since her dad just died, she wasn’t thinking clearly. But the tension between us had been building for our entire lives, and if we didn’t do something about it, I was sure that one of us would burst into flames.

  She gently tightened her fingers around my breast. I thought this would hurt, like it did when Brad touched me, but it didn’t.

  With her other hand, Susan pushed down on my thigh, through the fabric of my pajamas.

  Slowly, I leaned in close to her, my eyelashes brushing her cheek. The rest of the world dropped away, and I was left only with Susan, with the desire—maybe stronger than any other desire I’d ever had—to lick her face. Even in the moment, I knew this was the kind of thing animals wanted to do, to lick someone else, to taste them.

  “Is this okay?” I whispered again.

  “Yes,” Susan breathed into my mouth, and I felt her muscles relaxing. “I like it.”

  She reached around me and unhooked my bra, then touched my skin. Her palm was sweaty.

  “I like it too,” I said.

  I pressed my lips onto hers, too quickly. Our faces bumped together, and the knock of her jawbone hurt, but I kept going. I couldn’t stop.

  Susan’s mouth didn’t taste anything like I expected. It tasted like beer. But my whole body was in pain. This radiating kind. And then that pain disappeared. I felt her kissing my neck and my ear. Then her palm was on my belly.

  I slid my hand under the elastic band of her white cotton underwear.

  It felt boggy inside the fort we’d made, and the close air made me feel drugged.

  Susan copied me, and though she was sweating, her hand was cold against my skin.

  I put both of my hands on Susan’s shoulders, pulled her on top of me.

  “Is this okay?” I asked one last time.

  “Don’t talk anymore,” said Susan. She yanked off her shirt, which caught on one of her earrings. Then she tugged at the bottom of mine and pulled it over my head.

  “Okay,” she breathed. “Go.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Somehow, I knew exactly what to do in a way I never had with Brad—I knew to go slowly, to be gentle, to keep eye contact the whole time. Her skin was slippery and wet, and I could feel that mine was too.

  When Brad touched me, I always felt hard and papery. Like a prune.

  I looked at her eyes instead of asking her again if this was okay. Her eyes told me yes.

  I moved my fingers up and down, slowly, then faster. Then I pressed.

  Susan leaned back and closed her eyes. She made a noise I’d always wanted to hear her make, and I felt her pulse from the inside, which seemed like the closest you could get to another person.

  I leaned over, my hair spilling onto her chest.

  “You’re perfect,” I said to her.

  I couldn’t read her face. She looked at me differently than she ever had—like I had magical powers. She ran her forefinger over my lips.

  “Let me do you,” she whispered, sitting and pushing me onto my back. Part of her hair was stuck to her cheek, and the rest was sticking up like she’d been living in a jungle for the past month.

  I hesitated.

  Susan hovered over me, her cheeks flushed.

  “I need you,” she said. “Can’t we pretend, just for one night?”

  Maybe she wanted to pretend that her dad wasn’t dead, or that she didn’t hate him, and maybe she needed to put something big in front of it, to bury it.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Slowly, she put her hand inside me. Somehow, she also knew what to do.

  “Susan?”

  She paused, her finger still, her other hand flat against my stomach.

  “What is it?” she whispered, almost impatiently.

  “I’m in love with you,” I said. There it was. I needed her to hear it clearly.

  She sighed, a little sadly. She kissed
my forehead. She began moving her fingers again, and I felt like exploding.

  She looked me straight in the eye and said, “I know.”

  My orgasm was like letting go of Rapunzel’s hair.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, Susan woke and immediately moved away from me. Her hair still stuck up on one side.

  “Oh my God, I feel awful,” she said. She looked me up and down, rubbed her eyes with her palms, and said, “What happened last night?”

  She was a terrible liar.

  “Seriously,” she said, shrugging her shirt over her head. “I don’t remember anything. I was so wasted.”

  I didn’t say anything. I’d never even fallen asleep. The feeling of my hand inside her—and hers inside me—replayed over and over in my head; sometimes it felt really good, and other times it felt dirty or wrong.

  She looked at me and shuddered.

  “I need to take a shower,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, pulling on my clothes as quickly as I could. It wasn’t unusual for Susan to sleep naked, but it was something I never did, and we both refused to acknowledge it.

  “Yeah,” she said, “you should go.” Her shirt was slipping off her shoulder, and she pulled it back up and crossed her arms over her chest, covering it.

  I crawled out of the fort. This was the last fort—the last fort ever. I stood in front of it for a moment before I took off.

  It was just a blanket, hanging crookedly over some chairs, falling in on itself. A mess.

  The Space She Left Behind

  When I got home from Susan’s house, a full week after Susan’s dad died, Sandra was lying on the couch with a floral cocktail napkin over her eyes, an empty bottle of vodka next to her on the floor, and the brown puke bucket. I hated the puke bucket—Sandra had first brought it out when I was a kid and had the stomach flu. It was about seven thousand years old, and we never used it for anything else.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. She could usually hold her liquor. “Red Red Wine” was playing softly, on repeat.

  “He’s gone,” she said, her breath making the fabric of the napkin puff up.

  You should go.

  Susan’s words had echoed in my head all the way home. I wanted more than anything to have a mother in that moment—a mother who wasn’t lying on the couch with the puke bucket next to her, a mother like the kind you see on television, rushing around the kitchen, making breakfast, a mother who would listen to me.

  If I could tell Sandra everything—what I’d done with Susan—maybe she would say I wasn’t bad, that what I’d done was okay. She had sex. She didn’t apologize for it. But she looked so pale that it seemed like one wrong word could send her over the edge.

  If Johnny Moon were here, maybe he would comfort me. From what I read, there was no indication that he was Catholic, or an emotional basket case.

  I sat down next to the couch and put my hand on Sandra’s arm. Then I lifted the napkin off her face. Her eyes were swollen. The skin underneath was thin-looking, like tissue paper.

  “Susan’s dad?” I asked.

  “Richard,” she said, correcting me, “and he’s never coming back.” I saw that her eyes were red-rimmed, bloodshot. She’d been crying, and Sandra didn’t cry.

  “I know,” I said.

  “He was the only one who . . .” She started to say something, but then stopped herself. “Shit,” she said instead.

  “Wait,” I said, taking my hand back. “Were you guys, like, doing it?”

  Sandra took a deep breath and rubbed her temples.

  “Oh my God,” I said. “You were.”

  “Sometimes,” she said, “I thought he was my one true love.”

  Those words sounded ridiculous coming out of Sandra’s mouth.

  “So it wasn’t Mrs. Greenberg?” I said.

  Sandra snorted.

  “I can’t believe I said that,” she said. “My one true love.”

  What Sandra revealed didn’t surprise me. Mrs. Greenberg wasn’t hot like Sandra. Still, I felt bad for her. She looked terrible. Was this how Corvis saw me?

  “Brad dumped me,” I said, changing the subject, maybe trying to relate, “but at least I have Stephanie Tanner. I’ve managed to keep her alive for eight years.”

  “Oh, honey,” said Sandra, “Stephanie Tanner has died at least six times.”

  “Sandra!” I shoved her leg. “What?”

  “I replaced her when you were at school.”

  “Did you just keep flushing her?”

  Sandra wiped the hair out of her eyes, tucked it behind her ear.

  “Actually, no,” she said. “There’s a Stephanie Tanner graveyard in the back, under the maple.”

  “Sandra,” I said. “I can’t believe you.”

  “Well.”

  I pictured her burying all the Stephanies, kneeling over the earth. She was being a mom, at least a kind of mom, whether or not she wanted to admit it.

  I reached over and turned the tape player off.

  “Susan’s dad was an asshole,” I said. “He hit her.”

  She touched my head, curled her manicured fingernails in my hair. Because she never touched me, I felt myself melting a little.

  “He was an asshole,” she said, “but he was gentle underneath.”

  The brown bucket was empty, which was proof that Sandra was all right. She may have thought she wouldn’t be able to handle the vodka, but she could.

  “Sandra, I need to tell you something,” I said. She had secrets too. Maybe she would listen to mine.

  “Oh, Taylor,” she said, massaging her temples. “What?”

  I sat up straighter, looking her in the eye.

  “I’m a lesbian,” I said. “You were right.”

  It seemed best to do it this way—to tell her during a weak moment, so that she didn’t have the energy to scream at me, or to cry.

  She tilted her head, squinting at me.

  “I thought so,” she said absently. “You didn’t react to Brad at all. The way he looked at you—you barely noticed.”

  “So you’re not mad?”

  As I said this, I realized that part of me had hoped she would be mad. It was so difficult to get a reaction out of Sandra.

  “Just keep it to yourself,” she said quickly.

  I didn’t say anything. I wanted her to banish me. I wanted her to slap me. I wanted her to call me a liar, to kick me out onto the street. Anything. Anything was better than nothing.

  “I need to rest now,” Sandra said, dismissing me.

  I watched her back as she went upstairs, gripping the railing, white-knuckled.

  I crawled onto the couch, into the space she left behind, the cushion still warm from her body heat.

  The Haircut

  I don’t know. I guess I realized that I had never been to Provincetown before, and even though it was farther than Boston, it wasn’t actually that far. The people there, maybe they could help me. I’d heard that people went there to be gay.

  So, instead of going to school on Thursday, I just started driving. It only took three hours. I drove all the way down Cape Cod. Then the land thins off and becomes dunes on either side, and I thought I was lost. Even though there’s only one way to go, I thought there couldn’t possibly be a whole town there, but all of a sudden there was.

  Susan came back to school, and she wouldn’t even look at me. I tried to sit with her at lunch, and she got up and left. I sat there by myself for maybe two or three minutes, but then Heather sat with me. Then PJ. Then Scottie.

  “We’re wicked sorry we said that in the bathroom,” PJ said, speaking for Heather too. “You know,” PJ continued. “PMS.”

  Heather didn’t apologize.

  “Susan’s acting weird,” Heather said. We all watched Brad sit with her a
t another table, put his hand on her shoulder. “I know her dad just died, but still. She’s sitting with Brad.”

  “So?” I looked at whatever disgusting casserole was on my tray. I thought of Susan’s refrigerator, full of untouched casseroles just like this.

  “So, you and Brad just broke up,” said Heather. “She doesn’t just get, like, a free pass to be a backstabbing slut.”

  Heather switched alliances quickly, and it was hard to predict which way she would go in a given situation, but today I realized she usually stuck close to me, even when she tried to hurt me. It occurred to me that PJ was the one who started the conversation in the bathroom.

  “Yeah, she kind of does,” I said. “She liked him before I did, after all.”

  I looked over at Susan again, sitting across the cafeteria with Brad. I panicked, for a moment, at the thought of her telling him everything. I remembered what happened to Corvis when we told everyone about her.

  Then I wondered how much I cared. Part of me wanted someone to cut the thread I was hanging on to. Or maybe I just wanted to cut it myself.

  “Whatever,” Heather said. And then, “There’s no way I’m eating this garbage. What is this? I can’t even tell.”

  PJ put down her fork.

  “I think Susan should be prom queen,” I said, even though it wasn’t even Christmas yet. People were already discussing prom like it was the main event of our lives. It was four months away, and everywhere you turned in the hallway, there was another girl describing who she secured as a date, or what her dress looked like. I figured that Susan would go with Brad, and that his tux would match her dress.

  “Please,” said Heather.

  “What?” I said. “Don’t you think she would make a good prom queen?”

  Scottie shrugged.

  “She’s hot,” he said to me, “but not as hot as you.”

  Heather rolled her eyes.

  “Girl, I’m sorry,” she said, “but you’re going to be prom queen, even if you transfer schools. Even if you move to Australia.”