The Inside of Out

by Jenn Marie Thorne

  Dana snorted. “Um, thanks weather girl.”

  “Hang on.” Natalie whirled on me from the front seat, jaw agape. “I remember this. You never liked the beach on sunny days. You always wanted to go when it was raining.”

  And you always hated the beach on sunny days because you had to wear ten gallons of sunscreen to protect your freakishly pale skin. But before I could gather the courage to say it, Natalie whipped back around. I couldn’t see her smirking, but I could feel it.

  “Hannah feels the same way,” I said to her headrest. “You can’t even see the beach when it’s nice weather. It looks like Where’s Waldo. It’s only worth going on gray days, right Han?”

  Natalie raised her eyebrows, turning to her girlfriend for a response.

  Hannah shrugged. “That’s more of a you thing, Daisy. I’m good with the beach either way.”

  I sat back. Rationally, I knew it was utterly stupid to feel betrayed about this, but it felt like a shove. Another “me thing” to add to the list of ways I didn’t know I was different from Hannah. I leaned against the window while Dana jabbered on about plans for tomorrow’s beach party. Which, by the way, I was at no point invited to.

  But it wasn’t until we turned onto my street that I realized what was bothering me most—the overarching bad vibe that had been coloring the entire outing. Hannah was being weird.

  Not weird-weird. Hannah-weird.

  Charming, silly, off-kilter, relaxed. She wasn’t wearing her polite face around Natalie. Not even around Dana. If anything, she was even more herself tonight—Hannah 2.0. And it wasn’t because of some magical ability I had to draw her out. It had nothing to do with me at all.

  When I opened the car door, Natalie said, as if coached, “Bye Daisy. It was good to hang out.”

  Hannah preempted any possible reply on my part by saying, “Call you later!”

  No, you won’t, I thought.

  “Sounds good,” I muttered.

  Mom was asleep already, the first floor dark, but upstairs, I could hear Dad playing Everwander. Rather than sitting on my bed in a fog of self-pity, staring poetically at the blank wall until I passed out from boredom, I crept into Dad’s cave, pulled up a gaming chair, and grabbed a controller. He shot me an appraising glance, then without a word, restarted the game so I could join as Player Two.

  I tried playing a vicious Mohawked dwarf character that Dad had created, but after a few minutes, I asked to swap to the hot elf chick. I knew she was yet another negative, over-sexualized representation of women in video games, but her weapons were better.

  “I’m not sure if the story’s working as well as the first Everwander,” Dad said, squinting at the screen. “Can’t pinpoint why.”

  We played at half volume with a few breaks for Dad to jot notes and me to grab us snacks from the kitchen until, at some point, I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up in the gaming chair with a blanket over me and daylight streaming through the window.

  Dad was still playing. He tossed me a controller.

  “Go again?”

  After a few battles, Dad swiveled his chair to pat me on the shoulder. “It’s nice to have somebody to play with.”

  It was maybe the saddest thing I’d ever heard him say. And what was even sadder was that I agreed.

  15

  GOING LIVE TOMORROW!!

  Adam Cohen {adam.s.cohen@charlestonu.edu}

  to {me}

  DAISY-

  Thanks again for the interview/article fodder. Here’s the piece. Already out to my professor. She passed it off to The Banner (university paper). They’re running with it! On website Monday. Print edition Tuesday. They might want to make this a series of articles so LET’S STAY IN TOUCH!!!

  -A

  ps go Pirates

  “Whoa.” I shook my head to clear it. Between this and French homework, my cerveau was rotario. Or was “rotario” Spanish? I kept getting them mixed up.

  Adam sure seemed excited. I was strangely nervous. Maybe because the last time my name appeared in print, it was in reference to the Stede Bonnet opera.

  “This is different,” I said, warding away visions of a target on my chest. I bit my lip and clicked.

  PALMETTO SCHOOL BOARD CANCELS HOMECOMING DANCE OVER SAME-SEX FLAP

  James Island, SC—On a muggy September evening, in an unassuming government meeting room, the Palmetto School Board holds its first public session of the year—and a high school junior waits to be heard. She sits modestly, her hands smoothing the speech she’s written. Her outfit is muted, a simple gray polo and freshly pressed black trousers, in deference to the crowd she’s preparing to address, but the bottom two inches of her blond hair are dyed robin’s-egg blue. It is the first hint of the defiant spark she’ll show the room moments later.

  When it’s her turn to speak, she does—forcefully and well. She cites the Constitution and the legal precedent for her request. She appeals to the school board’s sense of patriotism and justice. They appear to listen. The gathered crowd is silent as she concludes.

  “On behalf of all of the students of Palmetto High School, I ask you to allow same-sex dates to dances, effective immediately.”

  When she sits again, it’s out of shock. In response to her request for a change to a rule that was first put in place during the Eisenhower administration, School Board President Harold Tompkins has just announced that they’ll be circumventing the topic by canceling the homecoming dance outright.

  “We don’t want our schools to be caught in the middle of a hot-button issue,” Tompkins says. “It would only be a distraction to students and a headache for our community.”

  And that might have been the end of it, a disappointing conclusion to a student’s exercise in free speech. But the student in question is Daisy Beaumont-Smith, 16, the spokesperson for Palmetto High’s LGBTQ Alliance—and she is not accustomed to backing down.

  “It’s about more than gay rights,” Beaumont-Smith later tells me at a local diner near her school’s campus, her blue-blond hair tucked neatly behind her ears. “It’s about the basics of how we treat one another. If you’re telling a certain group of students they don’t have the same rights as all the other students, then you’re creating an unlevel playing field. And that’s not what America is all about.”

  Her hazel eyes sparkle as she talks about her cause, as well as when she mentions fellow junior Hannah von Linden, to whom she is fiercely devoted and with whom she plans to attend college.

  Perhaps, Wednesday night, it was with that very friend in mind that Beaumont-Smith climbed onto her chair, refusing to be quieted, and announced the creation of a competing homecoming event open to students and alumni of any sexual orientation.

  The Palmetto School Board concluded the meeting early and has refused to comment on Beaumont-Smith’s proposed event. In the meantime, plans are moving ahead, says Beaumont-Smith, from planning her homecoming’s football game to nailing down a possible venue.

  “There are a lot of people in the community who would love to shut us down.” Recalling her reception by the school board, Beaumont-Smith falls somber. And then—unbroken—she smiles. “But we’ve got a lot of support behind us too.”

  Was it a million degrees in this room? I pressed my hands against my hot cheeks to squelch my furious blushing. And then I read it again. Giggling.

  It was so complimentary. He’d painted me with heroic strokes. He hadn’t mentioned my fried food obsession, which was charitable. And he called my eyes hazel! Not mucky light brown, no-color. To him they were hazel. And sparkly.

  The third time I read it, my giggles dwindled. Was my memory acting up, or were some of my quotes weirdly out of context? Was that how you wrote articles, by cutting up interviews and piecing bits of them together into a collage?

  I took a breath. Adam was the journalism major. What did I know? And I had said a
ll of those things and meant them. This was a positive slant on our cause. It was perfect.

  It wasn’t until I’d forwarded the article to my Allies, plus Hannah as a bcc, that I realized what was missing.

  Nowhere in the article had Adam said that I was straight.

  He didn’t lie, exactly, didn’t say that I was a gay student, or that I was personally suffering from bullying or discrimination—but he sure did imply it. And that mention of Hannah . . . was I losing my mind, or did it kinda, sorta sound like we were dating?

  “I am fiercely devoted to her,” I muttered, just as a reply came in from the girl herself.

  “Amazing article, Daisy!!!!”

  And then, immediately, a second text. “Any chance you could get my name taken out? Ack! :)”

  I decided to focus on the first text and hope she was kidding about the second.

  On the way to school Monday morning, Mom kept glancing over at me with a hint of a smile. I should never have let her read that article.

  “So this reporter . . .” she said, her voice trailing out musically.

  “Adam.”

  Her eyes brightened. “This is the boy I saw you with.”

  Here we go. “Yep.”

  “He sure seems to think you and Hannah are an item.”

  I turned to stare. Her eyes danced to mine and away again. Knowingly.

  “We’re not. Because I’m straight.” I scowled out the window. “Seriously, Mom, stop theorizing! You’re gonna give me a complex.”

  “Well.” She huffed and tugged on the steering wheel to pull us up in front of the school. “Either way, I’m proud of you.”

  I waved good-bye and marched into school feeling like the girl from the article. Daisy Beaumont-Smith doesn’t back down, so get out of my way!

  The seniors blocking the lobby didn’t get out of my way. Apparently they hadn’t read the article.

  I tried to nudge past. “Excuse me.”

  “Morning, lesbo,” said a voice off to the side. I turned to find Madison peering up the steps at me, arms crossed over a low-cut shirt bearing a huge sparkling cross. She smiled sweetly. “You’re going to hell, you know.”

  “I . . .” My mouth opened and closed like a sock puppet. “. . . have no response to that.”

  “I do.” A wiry arm looped through mine and propelled me through the doorway. “But I doubt she’d understand it. I use a lot of big words.”

  I blinked myself out of my stupor to find that, of all people, Raina Moore had come to my rescue. Even more shocking, as we made our way through the lobby and up to the main school corridor, she began to smile.

  “That article,” she said. “It was good, Daisy. It was what we needed.”

  “You think?” I scanned the buzzing hallway for angry faces, but for once, Raina’s wasn’t one of them.

  “If nothing else, we’ve got that reporter on our side. Better than nobody.” She lingered as we reached my locker. “You heard everybody in our meeting last week. And now you’ve heard”—she nodded to the school entrance, where Madison was still cheerfully blocking traffic—“the other side. You see how important this is.”

  I rested my head against my locker. “Yeah.”

  “It might get worse too, for all of us.” She looked down the hallway, teeming with bodies making their way to homeroom. “But this article. It’ll help.” She raised her fist as she turned, like the Statue of Liberty. “I’ve got a feeling!”

  I tried to mentally bottle her confidence and dab it onto my pulse points like perfume throughout the day. It sort of worked.

  But then, seventh period, disaster.

  “Let’s mix things up, make some new friends,” our AP bio teacher said, clapping her hands as if rearranging lab partners were her favorite hobby. “Miss von Linden? Table eight, please.”

  Hannah’s new spot was the back of the room with a boy she knew from Chess Club, while I was handed over to Steven—not Steve, Steven—who buttoned his shirts to the neck and snorted when people answered questions wrong.

  To make matters worse, AP biology had abruptly stopped making sense to me sometime last week, when we’d started breezing through the curriculum at lightning speed, everyone else nodding along like we were reviewing letters of the alphabet.

  “Is an organelle a cell?” I asked Steven. “A cell inside a cell? Or—”

  He shushed me.

  Craning my neck, I waited until Hannah spotted me, then fluttered my textbook in the air and mouthed “Help!”

  After class, she walked with me to the English wing. “Why are you even taking bio? You hate science.”

  “I do not.”

  “‘It strips life of its magic,’” she quoted.

  “Well, there is that.”

  “So is this for college applications too?” She looked genuinely perplexed. Apparently the idea of signing up for classes to spend more time with your best friend was foreign to her.

  “I guess, yeah,” I lied.

  Her eyes twinkled the way they always did when she’d arrived at an answer. “I’ll help. Dinner tonight? I’ll tell you everything I know about cells—in the most magical way possible.”

  She waggled her fingers.

  “Will there be glitter?”

  Her fingers stopped moving. “I cannot promise that.”

  “I accept anyway.”

  “Meet me after school?” She turned toward her English classroom.

  “In the lot?” I called after her, then added, “Shotgun!” just in case.

  “Just us,” she answered drily. At her glare of warning, I restrained myself from prancing down the hall.

  Tan von Linden was not a chef. I’m not even sure she’d ever taken down the shining pots that hung above her pristine kitchen island. She didn’t need to. She was flirt-friendly with every chef within a one-mile radius of her antiques shop. In a foodie town like Charleston, it had kept her and her daughter well fed for years. And as an honorary member of the household, I got to enjoy the spoils.

  Tonight’s dinner was grilled bacon-wrapped scallops over fresh fettuccini, with a side of spicy fried Brussels sprouts. I was in heaven. But Hannah was barely touching hers. She’d placed her cell phone next to her plate and her eyes drifted to it every thirty seconds like clockwork.

  “We haven’t seen much of you in the last few weeks, Daisy.” Hannah’s mom dabbed the corner of her mouth with a cloth napkin, careful not to muss her lipstick. “Busy year so far?”

  “Not really.” I tried to stare down Hannah, but all I got was the top of her head. “Not for me anyway.”

  Hannah dragged her eyes from the phone. “That’s not true.” She turned to her mother. “Daisy’s joined the LGBTQ Alliance. She’s really involved.”

  Tan rested her chin on her hand, smiling dimly. “The LGBT . . . Q . . . ?”

  “Alliance,” I repeated. Had Hannah not brought up the group before? “We’ve got some big things coming up.”

  “LGT . . . Q . . . is the gay group?” Hannah’s mom squirmed elegantly in her chair. “I’m confused. Hannah said you were still straight, Daisy.”

  Still straight. As if you could switch back and forth. Hannah flushed.

  “I’m asexual,” I said matter-of-factly. “It’s the A in QUILTBAG.”

  Tan and Hannah stared at me like I’d just announced I was a fridge magnet.

  “Anyway, it’s an important cause.”

  Hannah’s phone beeped and I watched her expression calcify in that polite way that meant she’d stopped listening. A half second later, she snuck a look at it. And giggled. I scooped some pasta, resisting the urge to shove my fork through Hannah’s phone and smash it against their reclaimed wood dining table.

  “We’ve been getting a little attention, actually,” I announced, a bit louder than necessary. “There was an article abou
t it. I don’t know if Hannah showed you?”

  Mama Tan shook her head, confused.

  “Did I not?” Hannah glanced up. “I’ll send it to you. Yeah, Daisy’s group is going to throw a competing homecoming as a protest against the school board.”

  That last bite of fettuccini soured in my mouth. Daisy’s group. A protest. Hannah was acting like it had nothing to do with her. Like it bored her.

  “That’s very impressive, Daisy,” Hannah’s mom said.

  “Thank you.” I glared a smile at Hannah, but she wasn’t looking.

  “And there’s an article?”

  “Yes—and Hannah’s mentioned in it!”

  Han opened her mouth as if to retort, but then the phone beeped—again.

  Her mom’s eyes met mine across the table.

  “Be right back.” With no further explanation, Hannah erupted from her chair and bolted into the other room, clutching her phone like an Oscar statuette.

  As soon as Hannah was out of sight, her mom glided from her seat and fetched a porcelain serving plate piled with tiny red velvet cupcakes. I found myself powerless in the face of their cream cheese twirl-topped beauty. And so my mouth was full of not one but two two-bite cupcakes, for a total of four bites, when Mama Tan leaned across the table and whispered, “This lesbian thing? Do you think it’s for real?”

  She smiled wryly. Knowingly.

  It took me an excruciatingly long time to swallow everything in my mouth. “Um. Real, as in . . . ?”

  She shrugged, rustling her crisply bobbed hair—one of few gestures she shared with her daughter. “It just looks to me like something she’s trying out. When I was in college, I experimented with girls. Kissing, fondling, that kind of thing.”

  T to the M to the I.

  “But it never meant anything. I certainly didn’t need to define myself. Maybe it’s generational.” She sighed.

  It hit me, not for the first time, or even the fiftieth, how different Tan and Hannah were. Where Tan had probably kissed a girl in college to test the way the visual effect rippled through a party, Hannah would have never gone to that party in the first place.