What did I have to do to prove I was good?
Oma sighed. “I’m sorry,” she said.
I looked up.
“You’re seventeen,” she said evenly, “and no matter what you did to get here, you deserve a new start. So yes, you can go. But if I hear about any kind of trouble—anything—the rest of your semester will be rather unpleasant.”
Later, when I was telling Jess all this, I described Oma’s look at that moment as petrifying. But that was an understatement. I hadn’t been lying to her: all I wanted from the sleepover was to talk and listen to music and get sick on candy. If I had been planning some kind of mischief, though, that look would’ve knocked it right out of me.
Now, in Kitty’s room, it felt like all the hassle had been worth it. I was happier than I had been in ages. Even if we were out of things to do at 11:00 p.m.
“We could watch another movie,” Kitty proposed.
“Not enough time. I have to leave in an hour,” Claire reminded her.
I stayed quiet. Generally at this point in my and Jess’s sleepovers, we would be drunk or getting there, but that was not an option. Even if I’d had some way of getting booze or felt I could break Oma’s trust—which I didn’t—I doubted these two girls would be interested. For the entire month I’d known them, neither of them had ever talked about drinking, and every time I brought it up, they changed the subject.
“Maybe cards?” Kitty asked hopefully. I had gathered that a lot of the girls here played rummy 500 or poker in the evenings, and Kitty was supposedly quite good.
“I don’t want to play cards,” Claire said—Kitty’s shoulders drooped in disappointment—“but we should play a game.”
“What kind of game?” I asked.
“Truth or dare.”
“Really?” Kitty rolled her eyes.
“I’ll do that,” I said. I settled back onto the bed. Before Kitty could say anything, I said, “Kitty, truth or dare?”
She looked exasperated. “This is the stupidest game. It’s such a cliché.”
“It’s not cliché, it’s classic,” Claire said, grinning. “But I won’t make you go first. June, truth or dare?”
I wasn’t about to admit it, but I had never played truth or dare. My friends in middle school had been really into board games, so that was all we did when we had sleepovers—endless games of Scrabble, Monopoly, and Ticket to Ride. And with Jess, the game had been unnecessary. Every conversation we had was truth. Everything we did was dare. When she wanted to do something foolhardy, she did it, and she never had to ask me to join her. I followed, without question, every time.
I opened my mouth to say “dare,” then closed it again. Claire and Kitty were not rule breakers. Claire would probably dare me to do something silly like send an unintelligible text to Sam or eat all the rest of the cookies. But there was a small chance she’d give me something that would constitute a real risk. And after that, there was a small chance I’d be caught. Oma’s severe face appeared in my head, followed shortly by my parents’ and the residential director’s. I didn’t want to go through all those meetings again, like I had after the dance. I couldn’t.
“Truth,” I said.
Claire wrinkled her nose in concentration. “Huh. I don’t have any questions ready.”
“That is the whole point of the game,” Kitty said.
“Let me think.”
“I have one,” Kitty said, her eyes fixed on me. “If you’ll allow me to jump in.”
“Yeah, go for it.”
“That time at the dance, was that the first time you ever drank?”
I laughed; I couldn’t help it. The question was so ludicrous. “No, absolutely not. We drank all the time.”
“Okay, follow-up.”
I looked at Claire. “Is this allowed?”
She shrugged.
“Indulge me,” Kitty pressed. “That wasn’t my real question, anyway. My real question is, why did you used to drink so much?”
I could feel her gaze hold on me, waiting for my answer.
“It was fun,” I said. My eyes slipped away from hers.
“Okay,” she said.
I glanced at Claire, who shifted next to Kitty, looking both uncomfortable and intensely curious.
“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to,” Claire said.
Kitty’s eyes still held that challenge, though, and I sat back, trying to figure out if I wanted to answer with the truth.
The truth was, I drank because Jess did, and she drank because she was—we were—bored. Because it was explicitly forbidden and therefore it felt to her—to us—exciting. Because her parents were at least tipsy half the nights of the week anyway, and because it was convenient: her mother’s wine, her father’s whiskey, Patrick’s inexplicable ability to show up to a party with something. Because she and Patrick and most everyone around us were doing it, and if you had asked me that old cliché—would you jump off a bridge if—my answer would have been yes, of course I would, if she were holding my hand.
But all of that was why Jess drank, not why I did, not exactly, and I closed my eyes. It didn’t make sense, but I wanted to answer Kitty’s question right. It felt like a test.
“I liked the feeling of being drunk,” I said slowly, opening my eyes and staring at my hands.
“Alone?” Kitty asked. Her voice changed slightly, getting more guarded. “Wait, are you still drinking here?”
The questions behind the question, of course, were, Are you drunk now? Are you going to get us into trouble? I should have known better—they would never dare me to break a rule. I would be shocked if Kitty had ever even been called to the principal’s office.
“No. Oma doesn’t drink, so logistically…” I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. No, there’s no point by myself. I liked it with Jess specifically. When we were drunk together and no one else was around, it was like…”
I remembered the bathroom stall. The giddy giggles bursting from our chests.
“It was like we were the same person. We were so close.”
In every way. Holding hands, touching hips, her warm, sour breath on my neck.
“We were always focused on each other. Like…like our edges were bleeding into one another.”
I exhaled and finally looked back up at my friends just soon enough to catch them exchanging a glance. “I’m sorry. I know that doesn’t make any sense.”
“It does,” Kitty said, and I couldn’t read her tone.
“Anyway, Kitty, truth or dare?” I asked with some relief.
“Dare,” she answered.
“Okay, I dare you to text someone from your middle school at least a hundred characters of gibberish.”
“Great dare,” Claire complimented me as Kitty scrolled through her phone.
Over the next forty-five minutes, we talked and laughed and finished all the cookies on the plate. I asked Kitty who her first kiss was. (Grayson Meadows, sixth grade, at the school dance he asked her to.) Kitty asked Claire if she would rather have to play the piano for five hours a day or never play the piano again. (Five hours a day, easy, but—“Forever? I’d never have time for anything else,” Claire moaned.) I asked both of them if either of their roommates had ever walked in on them hooking up, and dissolving in laughter, they told me yes.
“I think it was the first time Penny saw my boobs,” Kitty said, her face buried in her blanket in mortification. “Which was a blessing for her, obviously, but not what I intended for that Tuesday.”
“She shrieked like she had seen a spider,” Claire said, shaking her head and grinning.
Every time it got to me, I chose dare. I had to attempt a handstand, allow Claire to draw a temporary tattoo on my ankle in permanent marker, and sing a minute of improvised karaoke from the country radio station. They were all unmitigated disasters, but I
didn’t mind. I liked making them laugh, even at the cost of getting an enormous, poorly rendered drawing of a bird imprinted on my calf.
And it was better than thinking about that question or others like it.
Finally, fifteen minutes before the Friday midnight curfew, Claire reluctantly said, “I should go.”
I left the room to brush my teeth and lingered in the bathroom for a while, absentmindedly imagining myself living here, showering in these small communal stalls, washing my face at the long row of white sinks. I knew, though neither Claire nor Kitty had said it, that by being here, I was taking up time they could have spent alone in a bed together. I didn’t feel guilty; they had invited me, and besides, boarding school had to give them plenty of opportunities for privacy. But I wanted to at least let them say good night.
When I came back, Claire had left, and Kitty went to the bathroom to get ready for bed. I cleaned up candy wrappers and cookie crumbs, changed into my sleep clothes. I felt suddenly self-conscious. This was the first sleepover I had attended without Jess since middle school.
I climbed up into Penny’s bed and checked my phone, which was serenely empty of texts or notifications. Jess had a mild cold and had gone to bed early. I both wanted to talk to her and was grateful that I wouldn’t have to do so. I plugged in the phone and was stretching out when Kitty returned to the room and jumped into her own bed. She switched off the light.
“I’m not tired yet,” she said after a moment. “I just hate those fluorescents.”
“Me too,” I said. “I like the streetlamps.” The velvet gold of them spilled through the window blinds and onto the floor.
“Me too.”
I looked at her across the room, both of us horizontal. Her hair fell into her face, and in the half-light, my vision wouldn’t stop adjusting: she was lost in the darkness one moment, illuminated clearly the next. I wanted to find my camera in my bag and capture her like this, but we were holding something precious between us in the silence, and it would crack if I stirred.
“Thanks again for having me,” I said softly. “Sometimes I feel awkward about being a third wheel with you and Claire, so…”
“You shouldn’t. Honestly, things have been better with her this last month since you’ve been around.”
I recognized the shift in tone, the turn toward the confessional. “Were they bad before?”
“Not bad, exactly. We weren’t on the verge of breaking up. But we’ve been together for a year and a half now, and before you came, we only had each other. So whenever one of us was in a bad mood or we had a fight, there was no one else to go to.”
“But Claire has Sam.”
Kitty sighed. “That’s true. And Sam is really great. But he’s not around all the time. And it used to be less. You know that he’s been hanging out with us a lot more since you got here?” Kitty looked at me for a reaction, and I tried not to show one, though I felt something—a shiver, a warmth. “Besides, I love Sam, but he’s her friend first. I don’t have anyone to talk to if things get weird between me and Claire. Or I didn’t.”
“No friends at home?”
“Not really. I have an older sister, but we’re not close. My friend group from Montessori kind of drifted apart. Here, I have my Spanish study group, and I’ve gotten dinner with some of the girls in this hall a few times. Everyone’s nice. They’re just not my friends.”
I stayed quiet for a minute while she stared at the ceiling. “I’m sorry,” I said finally, and she turned back to face me, smiling.
“Don’t be,” she said. “Because you’re my friend now, and I’m happy for that.”
“I am, too.”
Quiet. She shifted in her bed, rustling the sheets. Somewhere down the hall, a girl laughed, a door slammed, and then silence again.
“So,” she said, “how are things with you and Jess?”
I glanced instinctively at my phone, dark and still, on the dresser beside me.
“I miss her. A lot. We text a bunch, and we talk four or five times a week. But it’s not the same.”
The truth was, I felt further and further away from her. When I first got here, the only people she talked about were Patrick and Ethan, with Patrick’s other friends and their girlfriends orbiting in and out of her sphere. But recently she mentioned hanging out with Ashleigh King, lunches at school and going to parties together. Sometimes without Patrick and Ethan at all. Ashleigh had been new at our school last semester and fell in with a small group of girls who wore black and stage-managed the school plays. I knew nothing about her except that she was exceptionally pretty and she was now, apparently, Jess’s friend.
Kitty was lying there, waiting for me to say more. “We were inseparable,” I said at last.
She was quiet, looking at the ceiling, and even as I appreciated the grace she was giving me, I could feel the question hanging in the air. The thing that had been coming since she asked about drinking.
She delivered it as a statement. “Maybe I’m way out of my lane here, but the way you talk about Jess, it’s not just as a friend.”
There.
No one had ever said it to me out loud before, and I weighed the words in the air, how they could be so tentative and yet so clear. I wasn’t wholly surprised. I had a measure of self-awareness, after all. I heard myself say her name and I knew how it sounded, heavy with love. How many times had I looked at her and thought—what if?
But. “I don’t think I’m gay,” I said to Kitty, and this time, I was surprised at how quiet and scared I sounded. I had never talked to anyone about this before, ever. But it was cold outside and warm in here, and everyone around us was asleep, and she was a new friend, so why not start off new myself? “I’ve had crushes on guys before. I had a boyfriend one summer. I didn’t like him all that much, but still.”
Kitty rustled the bedcovers again and turned to face me. “Bisexual people exist,” she said. “Claire is bisexual. I am not, but I thought for a while I might be. In fact, I assume that everyone is bisexual until proven otherwise.”
I smiled. “Valid approach.”
I turned and stared at the ceiling tiles, counting the squares. And I did what I had never, despite everything, allowed myself to do. I imagined kissing Jess.
Back in the bathroom stall before everything fell apart. I’d lean against her like I did, but this time, in this universe, the lock on the door would hold. Instead of straightening, I’d turn my head and pull back the tiniest bit, and her face would be there, and her lips would be so close to my lips, and—
“It’s not platonic,” I said slowly to the ceiling. “So I guess maybe I am bisexual.”
Across the room, Kitty said nothing.
“But with Jess, it’s also not… She’s my best friend. She’s my favorite, favorite person. But I don’t think—okay, freshman year, I was obsessed with this guy Lucas in my history class, and every time I saw him, all I could think about was sex. I’ve never even had sex, and I couldn’t look at him without thinking about it. That’s not how I feel about her.”
Kitty laughed a little. “I think every relationship is different, personally. I think you can like somebody without constantly thinking about hooking up with them.”
“Yeah, but what if it’s not a difference between platonic or not platonic? What if it’s something in between?”
I turned back to look at her. She looked happy and sad.
“Then I guess you need to figure out what you want from her,” she said.
She kept looking at me, but I didn’t know what to say, didn’t know even where to begin, and I stayed quiet. Eventually, she closed her eyes, and I turned over onto my side, facing the cinder-block wall. Minutes passed. Her breathing evened out into a light, intermittent snore. I reached out to touch the wall. It was cold, the white paint thick.
The question was impossible to answer. As much as I tried, I couldn�
��t imagine being with Jess the way Kitty was with Claire: holding hands all the time, light kisses in quiet moments, the particular way they got irritated with one another. I couldn’t really imagine anything more physical with her, either. Setting aside that the furthest I’d ever gone was second base, the idea of being naked with her was foreign, unreal. I thought about calling her my girlfriend and envisioned the word stuck in my throat like a seed, not entirely wrong but not quite right.
It was possible that all that was what I wanted, and I just didn’t know it yet.
More likely, there was nothing going on in my subconscious, and our friendship was exactly as it should be. I looked at Kitty asleep across the room, her face tight in concentration on some dream, and I thought, you’re wrong.
Try as I might, though, I couldn’t fall asleep.
Because the question was impossible, but it was easy, too. I wanted more. More time in her car, the music so loud it swelled like an ocean around us. More of her jokes, more of her laughing at mine. More drunk sleepovers, just the two of us, and McDonald’s hangover mornings. More pollen-soaked picnics in spring, more turquoise-bright pool days in summer, more costume parties in autumn, more popcorn and movies in winter. More teasing. More secrets. Of her, I always, always wanted more.
Eleven
When I awoke in Kitty’s room, the blinds were up and the sun was bright in my eyes. I squeezed them shut, my neck hurting from the unfamiliar pillows, disoriented from more than the new bed.
“Good morning, friend,” Kitty said cheerfully from the other end of the room. I peeked at her: she was dressed, face washed, eyes alert. “It’s a new day.”
We picked up Claire from her dorm and went to a late brunch at Harold’s. It was equally as good this time as it had been that first week, and I had four or five refills of perfect coffee. After brunch, Claire and Kitty returned to school, Claire off to practice the piano and Kitty citing homework. I stayed in town to photograph.
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