Tell Me How You Really Feel

by Aminah Mae Safi

  Then Rachel’s mind went into overdrive because this was Sana Khan and she wasn’t sure how many opportunities she was going to get like this in her lifetime, but she sure as shit wasn’t going to waste them over the mental poetry of what Sana’s hair smelled like.

  And as soon as Rachel added pressure from her own lips, as soon as she started kissing Sana back, that was when the floodgates really opened. Sana slid further off the console and climbed into Rachel’s lap. Rachel wrapped her arms around Sana, pulling her in closer, needing her still closer. She wanted to run her hands through Sana’s hair, but her ponytail was still wet and slicked back. She took hold of Sana’s face instead, steadying it so their mouths could find a rhythm.

  Sana pulled back suddenly and took a deep breath, as though she were desperate for air. As though she had run a mile and needed to catch her breath. “You’re so soft everywhere.”

  And between the pulling away and the words themselves, Rachel would have flinched had she not heard the wonder and desire licking through Sana’s tone. Had she not felt Sana’s hand—her uninjured hand—dig into the flesh at Rachel’s hips. The tips of her fingers in her casted left arm added a light pressure. A thought nestled deeply and immediately into Rachel’s subconscious, taking root there: She likes this about me.

  It was strange, nearly foreign, to be wanted for what she felt so unloved for most of the time. For what the world so typically resented in her. For what she had told herself over and over hadn’t mattered but nearly always had.

  And then Sana’s mouth was moving along her jawline, down her neck. Oh God, her neck. Rachel would never be able to think about washing behind her ears the same way ever again. Her whole body had become more potent than she ever could have imagined. Because Sana was kissing her in spots that had never felt particularly sexual before, until that girl had set her lips to them. And now everywhere Sana touched was going up in flames like a storehouse of old celluloid did with the flick of a single match.

  Arson had never been so wonderful. So dizzying.

  Eventually the rain stopped. And sometime after that the kissing stopped as well. Rachel pulled off the median, driving Sana back to her house. But the spinning—like watching an action movie that had refused to use a Steadicam for the effects—that didn’t go away for hours.

  April 23

  8 Days Until Deadline

  21

  Take Me by the Heart When You Take Me by the Hand

  Sana

  Sana had never hated cheerleading practice before.

  Then again, she’d never had to stand on the sidelines of practice while everyone else actually did things. Yes, she was correcting form on stunts. She was making sure they went through the proper sequences. But she wasn’t doing anything, not physically. She didn’t do cheer for the opportunity to teach. She did it for the opportunity to use her body, for the ability to flex her muscles and fly.

  Running practice with a foot in a plastic boot and her arm in a plaster cast was the opposite of everything Sana loved about the sport. No, it wasn’t a sport, not technically. It was technically an athletic activity, because she lived in a world where chess players were Olympic athletes and cheerleaders were brain-dead airheads.

  Sometimes sexism really sucked.

  Sana was watching practice, vibrating with energy and inaction. She couldn’t even go on her regular runs. She’d never realized before how much she relied on them to stay calm, to stay sane. To help her focus and get through the day. She’d never felt their absence before.

  She’d been lucky to have been running and cheering for as long as she had without any incident or injury. Because now, now that she was sidelined by her sprained ankle, she felt like a racehorse put out to pasture. Testy, snippy, shuddering with the force of a body at rest. Three weeks without running. Three weeks without flying, without stunts, without choreography. She was bursting at the seams.

  Sana tapped her uninjured foot. “No, no. Do it again. You have to keep your arms locked, Alexis. Locked.”

  Alexis looked ready to break into tears. Sana ought to have waited, let Maddie correct Alexis. But Sana’s whole body was waiting, waiting, waiting. She had to do something, for goodness’ sake. “Alexis? If you don’t lock your arms, your flyer could wobble. She wobbles, the base falters. Base falters, and she falls. Do you get it?”

  Alexis sniffed. A single tear streaked down her cheek. But she still didn’t nod.

  “Alexis. I don’t need you to cry. In fact, I’d prefer if you didn’t. I need you to acknowledge that you understand. And then I need to see you do it right. Or I swear, I will pull you from this stunt. You get it?”

  Alexis’s eyes went wide like saucers. The entirety of the squad stopped what they were doing to stare. Sana didn’t look away. Didn’t see what looks she was getting from the rest of her team. She needed Alexis to listen. Finally, Alexis nodded, ever so slightly.

  “Good. Run it again.” Sana turned, finally registered the rest of the squad’s notice. “What are the rest of your standing around for? Do you already have the stunt perfect?”

  The girls shuffled into position. Even T didn’t bother to give an eye roll or throw a look of disdain Sana’s way.

  Maddie waited until everyone was busy practicing before she tugged on Sana’s arm. She spoke quietly, though with her usual authority. “Look, I’m as mad at Alexis for dropping you as anybody. But making her cry won’t help.”

  Sana pulled her arm away, slowly but with intention. She kept watching Alexis run the stunt. “She’s gonna drop someone else if she doesn’t pay attention to her stunts.”

  Maddie rolled her lips in, clamping down on them with her teeth briefly before releasing the expression. “Shame isn’t gonna fix that.”

  Sana straightened her stance. “Somebody has to teach her.”

  Maddie called for a boom pyramid. Sana was usually the peak. But Maddie made Alexis take the top position, to teach her to trust her teammates, to understand what it was to be reliant on them. It was a better strategy than Sana’s, to be sure.

  Sana watched them build the pyramid, watched as each level of girls used the rhythm of the chant to boost, step, position themselves. Watched as the whole pyramid came together from an assembly of girls in a series of lines to a pile of girls in a rigidly geometric formation.

  And then it came crashing perfectly and spectacularly back down. Just as they had all wanted it to.

  Sana had wanted to be captain of the squad since she’d started cheering in the eighth grade. Back then, she had been too quiet, too new. But she’d worked hard toward the goal. She knew she could be in charge, knew she’d be good at it.

  And she had been.

  So why was it all falling apart now?

  Sana blew her whistle every minute, calling out everything everyone was doing wrong.

  The squad didn’t stand a chance.

  The boom pyramid, one of the most fail-safe of all the stunts that they could do, didn’t stay up more than three counts.

  It took at least eight to build a decent one.

  All this work and it ends here.

  The boom pyramid came crashing down on count two—Sana was clapping the counts out now so that the squad would get the rhythm.

  Alexis and T were glaring Sana’s way. Sana called for the pyramid to go back up again. The squad groaned in unison.

  Alexis, her frustration having finally overcome her shame, looked right at Sana as she faux-whispered. “She doesn’t even do anything anymore. I wouldn’t mind the injury if she wasn’t using it as an excuse to slack off and get famous.”

  Then T did her signature smirk in response.

  “You think this is funny?” Sana stared T down. “I can name at least fifty reasons why this isn’t a joke. Starting with your attitude.”

  “Whatever,” answered Alexis. “You’re the one who’s in charge with a bad attitude in the first place. If you can’t keep it tight, why should we? You went soft, Khan.”

  The squad all stared
pointedly away from Sana.

  Coach K, who had taken a pretty laissez-faire approach thus far, blew her whistle. “If you girls cannot get it together, I am canceling the next pep rally on the grounds of disarray and ill-discipline.”

  Alexis raised an eyebrow at Sana. “That’s true for one member of the squad.”

  T snickered.

  “Okay, that is it.” Sana threw her clipboard down.

  Alexis looked startled. T looked away, since she was rarely the one brave enough to say her undercutting thoughts out loud. And Maddie, Maddie could only stare.

  “I get it, I’m the injured screw-up. But before I was the injured screw-up, I was the horrible, insufferable kiss-ass. So which do you want? The girl who goes one hundred, or the one who phones it in?”

  T sputtered. “You, you said ass.”

  “Yeah. Ass. The one you dropped me on in the middle of a stunt, which you wouldn’t have done had you been paying attention at all during practice. But instead you were snickering with Alexis and making jokes and rolling your eyes. And because you were too busy with your judgmental social schedule, she dropped me on my ass on the hard gym floor. So yeah. Kiss my freaking ass, T.”

  Coach K blew her whistle. Maddie sucked in a breath. Alexis’s jaw hung, swaying in the air-conditioned breeze of the gym.

  “Khan. Language.”

  But Sana was just getting started; she ignored the warning. “I’m handing the squad over to one of you two next year—you’re the only juniors left—and neither one of you can keep it together for a whole practice. You could step up to the plate. You could give Maddie a break. You could call a stunt. Show some initiative. But no, you’d rather whisper and talk shit.”

  Coach K blew her whistle again. “Khan. Language. This is your last warning.”

  Sana looked Coach in the eye. She’d had it. With all of it. She’d had it with watching practice and barely cheering. She’d had it with working so hard to climb up something without any idea of what happened once she got there. She’d been living her life like a boom pyramid, climbing to the top only to come crashing back down. All for no apparent reason other than the entertainment and pleasure of others.

  Sana smiled, bright, pretty—her signature Sana Khan smile. Alexis and T relaxed slightly, thinking the fight was over. But Maddie watched her with narrowed eyes. Because Maddie saw the storm beneath the calm. She saw what nobody else saw, what no one, not even Coach K, knew was coming.

  Sana held up both middle fingers. Dragged them along Alexis and T’s line of sight. “Fuck. You. Both.”

  Then Sana didn’t wait. She walked over to her bag, grabbed it, and left the gym. Even the boys’ basketball team watched her exit.

  Rachel

  Rachel was standing on set, talking over script changes with Ryan. She had expected Sana to go into hiding after that kiss. It must have been a one-off. An aberration. An intrusion into an otherwise ordered and tidy life. But instead Sana had walked onto set and given Rachel a public wink. She’d even leaned over her, grazing her shoulder as Rachel went through script changes with her.

  If Rachel had done half of the things—touch an arm, swish her hair, bat her eyes—that Sana was doing, everybody would have known she was at least attempting to flirt. But when Sana did those exact same things, people assumed she was just friendly. It was like eyes glazed over her and everyone filled in a totally different story.

  Sana had come out, must have been ages ago. But nobody remembered. Not on a day-to-day basis.

  And then there was Sana’s frustration. Rachel could see it. See it when people dismissed what she was doing as some kind of normal girly behavior. Some kind of regular girly-girl dance. Sana hid her frustrations behind a mask—the good girl on the surface—but now that Rachel had seen what lay beneath, Rachel couldn’t unsee any of it—the frustration, the flashes of anger, the desire, and so, so much hurt.

  Maybe it was because Sana was clearly more frustrated in general, so that the low-lying, deep-seated version she always held on to was coming to the surface more quickly.

  Sana caught Rachel looking at her and she gave one of her signature megawatt grins.

  Rakish. Sana Khan had a rakish grin.

  The girl opposite Sana—Lacey—caught the direction of Sana’s gaze, looked back at Sana, and rolled her eyes at the girl. Trying to win favor with the cheerleader by undercutting the power figure, aka the director, aka Rachel.

  Sana ignored this and headed directly for Rachel. A strange, determined expression lighting her eyes.

  Holy shit.

  Before Sana could do something truly exposing, Rachel had to do something. What if Sana eventually changed her mind?

  “Do you remember your mark from last time?”

  Disappointment flashed over Sana’s face, then was gone. She shrugged. “Sure.”

  “Okay, I’m gonna need you to run through your blocking with Lacey. Lacey, get over here. Mostly I just need you two to face off in this. It’s not complicated blocking. Do you got it?”

  That smirk. That Natalie Dormer–level smirk popped up across Sana’s face. She winked again, like she got that Rachel wanted this to be between them only for now. “Aye, aye, captain.”

  Rachel went back, fiddling with the camera. Figuring out the angles. She did it longer than she needed to. Because Sana Khan moved through this world trying to tell everyone in tiny, everyday ways that she was attracted to girls and nobody registered any of them. Flirt, touch, wink, bat her eyelashes. Kiss girls, hold hands. Brush up her insane body against Rachel’s. Be obvious in the way everyone could see but that nobody seemed to care about. Not if you looked like Sana.

  Sana wasn’t trapped in a closet. Other people just kept building one around her. And as she kept walking out of them, they kept building new ones around her. Sana, the girl who could say she loved Joan Jett and simply get an ironic giggle in return. Like the listener thought she didn’t get what she was saying.

  You have now crossed over into the Twilight Zone.

  This truly was a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity.

  The day’s shoot went by quickly. They had been flying through her shooting scripts and her sheets ever since Sana had taken over as the lead. Douga hardly paid attention, which was a miracle in and of itself. She trusted Rachel now. Trusted her to keep set moving like a well-oiled machine. Trusted her to take Sana’s acting work and turn it against everything Sana had thought she had signed up for the project to be. And Rachel did keep it moving. In a way she hadn’t, not before Sana.

  Rachel was relieved when filming was over. It was a dance, filming Sana while hiding that the overall goal of the film would have to change. A strange, horrible dance that a better person might have called a lie. Especially when Sana registered that she didn’t have any lines in this take—confusion had washed over her face, but Rachel had covered the moment by calling action and moving through the last of the close-ups.

  She’s going to hate me.

  Of that, Rachel was certain. But Rachel kept going. Until she’d shot the last of the footage that she needed. She hadn’t gotten this far only to trip at the finish line. She didn’t care who she’d been kissing. “Okay, everyone, that’s a wrap. We did it.”

  A few whoops and hollers emerged from the crew. Nobody thought they’d get to the end of filming on this project, least of all Rachel. And yet, here they were.

  Everyone packed up the equipment and took it into the film lab. Rachel’s days of hauling the cameras and lenses and lights by herself were over. Her days of doing anything totally by herself were over. She thought she would have felt weak or unbalanced, but instead she felt this immense sense of relief. This was what she had been missing while making films for the past four years. Camaraderie. She had that because of a girl the world refused to see beyond the scope of their own limited imagination. A girl she herself had refused to see.

  A girl she was lying to.

  The thought was haunting. Kissing Sana was one thing. S
eeing her, really seeing her, was something else altogether. Rachel was packing the last lens back into the bag for the camera when she heard the squeak of Sana’s shoes.

  Rachel got up, grabbing the camera bag. “I gotta drop this back off in the lab. Do you need a ride?”

  “Sure do,” said Sana, linking her arm through Rachel’s.

  It was a relaxed and easy move. Rachel’s shoulders tensed and she pressed her lips together until her mouth formed a straight line.

  “You okay?” asked Sana.

  “Oh.” Don’t say fine. She’ll know something’s wrong if you say fine. “I’m alright.”

  But Sana saw through the alright, just like if Rachel had said fine. “Don’t worry. Here, I can help by distracting you.”

  “And how would you, like, distract me?” Rachel hadn’t meant any innuendo at all. Hadn’t planned on the deep raspiness in her voice. It had just happened.

  Sana’s eyes went wide for a moment. But then Sana recovered, the right side of her mouth twitching.

  Oh God, she’s going to kiss me in the school hallway.

  Rachel couldn’t tell if she needed Sana to kiss her in the school hallway or she needed Sana to never kiss her in the school hallway.

  If she kisses me here there’s no going back. And the way forward had to be heartbreak. Has to be. Because Rachel was going to use Sana to get ahead in her future, just like every horrible person in Hollywood who had ever succeeded.

  But Sana, ever attuned, sensed Rachel’s hesitancy. She gave a quick peck on Rachel’s cheek, then skipped out of reach. “That wasn’t quite my idea, though I do like it. I had something else in mind.”