by Julie Murphy
“I thought that was Hattie.” She points to my sister, who is loading an extra-large bucket of popcorn (which she has no intention of sharing, I’m sure) with layers of butter from the dispenser next to the condiments. She even goes so far as to take a cup meant for water and fill it with extra butter for the bottom of her bucket. “And I figured you couldn’t be far,” CarrieAnn finishes.
I smile. “You found me.”
The thing with CarrieAnn is that she and I sloppily made out and fooled around a little at a party that Hattie dragged me to in Gulfport when I was in ninth grade and CarrieAnn was in tenth. Since she lived here in Gulfport, we never really saw each other. Different schools, different friends.
Based on all the voice mails and texts I received from CarrieAnn in the following days and weeks, she was having a personal revelation. And she was ready for something major—something I wasn’t sure how to give her at the time. Listen, I was only fifteen and not really emotionally prepared to be her guide through the Gay Mountains.
Her texts started getting pretty intense, so I did what any normal person who is not really an asshole but is acting like an asshole would do: I ignored her. Since then, I’ve done everything in my power to avoid her until she went off to college in Atlanta last year. But I hadn’t exactly factored in summer break.
“Wow,” says CarrieAnn. “You look great.”
I nod. “Thanks. You too. Nice uniform.”
She smiles so wide I can see her gums. “Thanks. So I go back to school in a week, but maybe we could get together.”
“Oh, wow. I go back to school tomorrow, so my week is pretty crazy.”
“Maybe we could see a movie if you have time? I can get free tickets.”
I open my mouth, but she doesn’t even give me time to respond.
“I still have the same number I did in high school, so you can text me. Did your number change?”
I reach for my phone. “Uh—”
“Could I get two cherry slushes and a medium popcorn?” asks Freddie as he slides in beside me. “Ramona, you want any candy?”
CarrieAnn studies the two of us suspiciously.
I shake my head, relief marred with guilt sinking deep into my chest. As Freddie pays for his order, I slink back behind him and Saul.
“You two lovebirds set a wedding date yet?” Saul asks under his breath.
I punch him in the butt cheek.
“Ow!” he groans. “But kind of nice, too.”
After we split ways with Saul, Ruthie, and Hattie, I turn to Freddie as we walk into the last theater at the end of the hallway. “Thanks for stepping in back there.” I sip the slush he bought me.
“Yeah. Wasn’t sure what that was about, but whatever it was, it was awkward.”
We choose middle seats in the third row from the back, and we have the entire theater to ourselves.
“It’s weird,” I say. “She’s kind of, like, obsessed with me.”
He shakes his head, laughing a bit. “Don’t tell me you’ve turned into one of those girls who thinks everyone is obsessed with them. Uggggh,” he mimics, “everyone’s just, like, so obsessed with me.”
“No! Shut up. You know that’s not me.”
He smirks before shoving a fistful of popcorn into his mouth.
“But CarrieAnn really is obsessed with me,” I say.
The screen in front of us plays the same trivia on a loop until the movie starts. The theater is dark and damp, so I take the flannel shirt I’ve got tied around my waist and put it on backward like some sort of blanket-shirt hybrid. We both stuff our faces with popcorn and shout trivia answers back and forth.
And then, out of nowhere, Freddie asks, “So, girls, huh?”
“Yep.” I should say something more, but there’s not much else to say.
“You’ve never dated any guys?”
I shrug. “Haven’t even kissed one.” And then I add, “Well, in recent years.”
“Then how do you know you don’t like guys?”
“I don’t know, Freddie,” I say, trying to hide my irritation. “How many boys did you kiss before you realized you were straight?”
He shakes his head. “That’s not what I meant. You know it.”
“So what did you mean?” The lights dim, and the previews start. Still, it’s only us in the theater.
“I meant that, like, boy-girl is kind of the default that people go for even if it’s not how they were born or whatever.”
“It wasn’t my default. Or whatever.” My voice is sharp.
He doesn’t say anything. Instead, all I hear is the crunching of popcorn.
The movie starts in a French-cooking class, and I immediately decide that the only thing that could make this movie interesting was if smell-o-vision was a real thing, which means not only are we feeling awkward, but we’ll most likely be bored, too.
I don’t get rom-coms. It’s not that I don’t believe in romance or love stories, but for once—just for once!—why can’t the girl sweep the girl off her feet? Or why can’t the fat best friend get the guy? Why can’t two guys get into a pillow fight in their underwear? It’s the same old shit every time.
Freddie turns to me, interrupting the two star-crossed lovers on-screen in the midst of their picnic. “I didn’t mean to sound like a jerk. I’m processing is all.”
“Processing? It’s not like someone died or something.” And then I sort of feel like a jerk, too, for snapping at him. I take a deep breath and decide to give him the benefit of the doubt. After a few moments, I ask, “Am I your only gay friend?”
“I mean . . .” He pauses, and fidgets with his hands, like he would when we were kids and he was in trouble with Agnes for something like sneaking snack cakes before lunch. “I know gay people, but yeah. Basically.”
I guess in most parts of the world, this might come as a shock, but down here, not so much. It’s not that there aren’t any gay people in the South; it’s that our cliques and circles are a little tighter than they might be elsewhere. So it’s not all that weird for a guy like Freddie to not have any gay friends.
I cross my legs toward him and practically turn my back to the movie, which has progressed into the rom-com’s version of a training montage, where the beautiful couple traipse around town and rub their beautiful love in everyone’s faces.
With a mouth full of popcorn, I say, “Tell me about Viv.” I want to prove to him that I am the same Ramona I was last night and the day before and all those years ago. It’s not like I think he’s some bigot. He’s ignorant, and sometimes ignorance is as dangerous as bigotry.
He straightens up a little. “We met on swim team.” He pulls out his phone and scrolls through his pictures to show me one of a black girl with muscular curves and hair cropped short against her angular face. Every inch of her looks deliberate.
“She looks intense,” I say.
“She was. She is.”
“So did you guys click or what?”
He shakes his head. “No way. She transferred to my school in the middle of ninth grade. She hated me at first.” A slow smile spreads across his lips. He’s probably reliving some memory in his head. “Kept calling me smug. I asked her out three times before she said yes, and when I asked her why she’d kept saying no, she said it was ’cause she didn’t like quitters.” He laughs to himself. “You know how some people are easy to be with? Viv was never like that. She made you work for it.”
It was never like that with Grace. Maybe things would have been different if we’d met at school or while she was with friends.
“Me and Viv would always race after practice. I never stood a chance. She loves winning. More than anything. You know how people always tell little girls that if a boy is mean to you, that’s how you know he likes you? Well, that’s how Viv was. She was always name-calling and talking trash and kicking my ass in the pool.” He laughs. “Her own horrible way of flirting.”
“Were you guys on again and off again?”
“A few times. Ther
e were a few times.” His gaze drifts for a moment. “So are you seeing someone now?” he asks hesitantly.
I sigh long and hard. “Grace.” I shake my head. “Everybody down here has summer flings all the time, ya know? Including me. And then I met Grace back in June. So when you like someone, you’ve got the whole ‘Do they like me back?’ thing to contend with, but when you’re gay, you sort of have to also feel out if other people are, too. It’s like a double unknown. And with Grace it was hard to tell. I knew she liked me, but I didn’t know if she liked me.”
“Don’t you have, like, gaydar?”
I laugh. “Well, I mean, sometimes I get vibes, but sometimes girls are just friendly. And I get that I stand out, but I think some people have this idea of what a lesbian looks like, and I don’t always fit that image. But with Grace, God, it was painful for the first few days. We met while I was filling in for a few weeks at Palio’s Bike Rental down on the beach. I’d already seen her around town a few times. I had a big line that day, and everyone was hot and annoyed. This guy got to the front of the line and started mouthing off at me for going too slow, but the paperwork for Palio’s is intense, and they still use only hard copies. So anyway, Grace was standing there in this great swimsuit with the sides cut out and huge sunglasses painted like watermelons.” I know I’m going into way too much detail, but I can’t help myself. “She was taller than average for a girl, but not nearly as tall as me. Anyways, she tapped the guy on the shoulder and pointed over to his kid and was like, ‘Um is that your son trying to eat a live hermit crab?’”
Freddie laughs. “She sounds pretty ballsy.”
“Yeah. Yeah, she is.” I’d never thought of Grace as ballsy, but I guess this whole summer was new territory for her, and sometimes it’s easy to forget that it takes some amount of bravery to live your life one way and then suddenly diverge from that path.
I pull out my phone to take my turn and show him a few pictures. I linger for a moment on one of her and me in her room. Me sitting on the floor with her between my legs, resting against my chest like an armchair. She took the picture without me knowing. It was a reflection of us in the floor-length mirror on the back of her bedroom door. Her soft green gaze was directed at the camera, while my face was nuzzled into her shoulder. Her black hair against my blue waves looked like a day-old bruise.
I’ve always loved this picture, but now, looking back, it sort of makes me uneasy. Me looking at Grace; her looking at our reflection.
I’m being ridiculous, I tell myself. But the seed of a thought still buries itself in a recess of my brain.
“So how did you know she really liked you?” Freddie asks.
“Well, I hung out at her place a few times. Watching TV and stuff. And then I spent the night. I couldn’t fall asleep. I spent the whole night wide-awake as she kind of scooted in closer to me. I guess I started to get the hint. And if I hadn’t by then, the extra-long hug when I left the next morning was a solid clue. I’m talking full-body hug.”
“Man, I wish Gram would’ve let Viv spend the night.”
I grin. On the screen in front of us, the heroine is sobbing into a bowl of popcorn. “There are some benefits,” I admit. “But it can be pretty confusing, too. I don’t get invited to slumber parties or girls’ night outs or anything like that. Or maybe that’s just because I don’t have many friends.”
“But you’ve got Ruth, right?”
I nod. “Well, that’s true.”
“Have you guys ever . . . ya know?”
I practically spit out my slush. “Oh God, no. Yeah, definitely not.”
Freddie waggles his eyebrows. “Well, if you guys ever need my scientific opinion . . .”
“Oh, come on now. Seriously? Could you be any more of a bro?”
He looks sheepish. “Yeah, that was pretty bad, huh?”
“Worse than bad.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry! That was gross. So, anyway, you and Ruth? Nothing there?”
I squint at him for a moment, trying to decide if I’m going to let him get away with that so easily, and decide to count it as strike one. “Right,” I say. “Yeah, it would’ve been hard to not wonder, okay? The only two gay girls in one small town.” I sigh. “But that would’ve been too convenient. Except we did decide that if we’re single and really old, like fifty probably, then we’ll get married and move to Vermont.”
He shakes his head, laughing. “Why Vermont?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. Ruth says she heard it was a really gay place, but for, like, gay old people.”
“Like Florida? But gay?”
I choke on a piece of popcorn. “Oh my God! Yes!”
After we’ve both caught our breath, he asks, “So why don’t you and Grace make plans to go to the same university?”
“Yeah right.”
“What? Viv has partial swim scholarships at LSU and Florida State, but she’s choosing LSU because that’s where I’m going.”
“You honestly think I’m going to college?” I’m glad it’s too dark for him to really see me. I might never have had big plans of college, but I still feel like I’m mourning whatever the future might have held before Hattie got knocked up.
“Come on,” he says. “Don’t be another one of those small-town stereotypes.”
I can’t stop myself from rolling my eyes. “Speak for yourself, Mr. College Fund.”
“Don’t use money as an excuse, okay? There are grants. And loans even. People figure it out.”
“Yeah, people who don’t live in trailer parks. People who don’t work two jobs through high school. All those people have time to figure it out.” I should feel bad, but I don’t. I’ve been getting the college lecture from random strangers for a long time now. It’s almost as common as You’re so tall! You must play basketball!
He’s silent for a minute. “I’m sorry,” he says, apologizing for, like, the fifteenth time today.
I shake my head. With all the differences between us, I almost can’t believe that we were once inseparable for two months every summer. “No, I’m sorry. I have a lot on my mind.” Like Grace and how she’s kidnapped my heart and taken it north up the Mississippi River and Hattie and her belly carrying my niece. Or nephew. And how temporary Tyler is and how much space he’s eating up in our already too small trailer and how Dad’s going to work himself to death, which means at the end of the day, I’m the only hope she’s got. So my escape fund? It will probably end up becoming a diapers and baby formula fund.
Despite all that, we talk for the rest of the movie, and I’m so thankful to have this empty theater to ourselves. I finish my slush and when Freddie doesn’t want the rest of his, I finish that too. We stay until the credits are through. CarrieAnn hovers at the door, waiting for us to clear out so she can clean the theater. As we leave, I give her a quick hug and tell her good luck with school this year. I hope she finds her person.
Outside, the rain has passed, so we ride home with the top down on the Jeep. It’s a day that feels like good-bye. It’s not high school that I’ll miss. It’s my summer breaks. The two months of freedom that almost make me feel like a tourist in my own town. Next summer won’t be any kind of break at all. It’ll be life, and the kind of life I’ve got ahead of me doesn’t include vacation time.
SEPTEMBER
EIGHT
“You should come to the Y with me and Gram,” says Freddie.
I shake my head. “For what?”
We sit on the curb of the alleyway behind Scrub-a-Dub Car Wash, sharing a half-cherry, half-lemon shaved ice while Freddie’s on break. He landed a job spinning signs on the corner here. I don’t think he really needs the job, but without Viv around, I think he has some time to fill. And his newfound friend, Adam Garza, whose family owns not one but two local Scrub-a-Dub locations and two more in Jackson, helped him land the gig.
Adam rolls back and forth in front of us on his electric-blue skateboard covered in band stickers, popping up and down from the curb every few moments. H
e’s quiet, but also the kind of guy who says the funniest things under his breath during class. And he’s cute, too. He’s half Mexican and half Honduran and he has longish brown hair that is always falling into his eyes. I guess I imagined Freddie seamlessly fitting into the fold of jocks or something, but it makes sense he’d gravitate toward the kind of guy who has great hair and is too cool for this town, making him uncool in comparison.
Over the course of a few weeks, Freddie has slipped into my life like he was always meant to be there. We ride our bikes to and from school as far as we can until our roads diverge. Sometimes Adam joins us on his skateboard or Ruth hops on the back of my bike. But I always come over for breakfast a few times a week. We watch movies at each other’s houses on the weekend and spend whatever free afternoons we have on the beach with Ruthie, Saul, and Hattie.
Freddie turns to me. “Gram’s been giving me a hard time about how long it’s been since I was last in the pool. I told her I’d go with her.” He taps the toe of his sneaker against mine. “It’ll be good. Help you clear your head. And pretty soon it’ll be too cold for the beach.”
I am sort of tempted, but the truth is: “I don’t even have time.”
“Last weekend you watched the entire second season of Game of Thrones. You have time.”
“Shut up.” I pass him the shaved ice.
“No spoilers!” shouts Adam.
I roll my eyes and discreetly pull out my phone to check messages.
“That show is way too old for the first two seasons to fall under the spoiler-free umbrella,” Freddie tells Adam.
Adam shrugs. “I’ll be sure to remember you said that, Mr. I’ve-Never-Seen-a-Single-Star-Wars-Movie.”
I turn to Freddie as I slide my phone back into my pocket. “Wait. What?”
“My grandparents never really got into it, I guess? I mean, I know Vader is Luke’s dad. That’s pretty much the gist of it, right?”
I’m not a die-hard Star Wars fan, but Dad loves it. I can’t imagine growing up without it. He even has a tattoo of the rebel symbol on his shoulder, and this is a guy who has zero pain tolerance.