Kitty furrowed her brow. “So she’s kissed multiple girls, and that means she’s straight?”
“It doesn’t mean anything. That’s what she said.”
Kitty shook her head. “Well, okay, I guess we can set that aside. But she’s still definitely the reason you’re realizing this?”
“Arguably, you’re the reason I’m realizing this,” I said as I took a spoon of soup, and when I looked up, I saw alarm in her eyes that nearly made me spit out my food. “No, God, not what I meant. I just mean you’re the first person who talked to me about it.”
“Oh,” she said, her shoulders slumping. “Thank goodness. I don’t know what I would’ve done if you were trying to involve me in a love triangle. Probably just thrown myself into the river headfirst.”
“No, to answer your original question,” I said, wiping my face to make sure no stray soup had found its way onto my cheeks, “Jess is the reason. But also…”
Kitty arched her eyebrows. “Yes?”
I lost all the bravery I had summoned for this conversation. I didn’t even know what I wanted out of it, anyway. “Never mind. It’s nothing.”
“Were you going to tell me you’re into Sam?”
I looked at her, feeling a guilt I wasn’t sure I’d earned, and she laughed.
“It is obvious,” she said. “It is in fact the most obvious thing I have ever seen. Closely followed by how obvious it was that you were into Jess when I first met you. You are not a closed book, June.”
“I don’t—I just—ugh,” I finished. I tried again. “I don’t want to be a cliché.”
“It’s no different than if you were straight and into two guys.” Kitty shrugged. “Except maybe some assholes will look at you differently. But you don’t want to hear from them anyway. And besides, I don’t think you’re planning on trying to date both of them at once, right? It’d be fine if all three of you were into it, but…”
I shuddered at the thought. If anything could make this whole situation more confusing, it would be that. “No. Also, I’m currently not dating either of them. Jess both has a boyfriend and is straight as far as I know, and Sam…”
“Sam what?”
“Don’t you think Claire would be mad?” It had been weighing on me for weeks. Sam was her cousin, her family, her best friend in the world—as close to a brother as she had. I was pretty sure it was a friendship rule that you weren’t supposed to date your friends’ brothers.
Kitty looked like she was trying very hard not to laugh. “Are you kidding me? Absolutely not. She’d probably throw a parade.”
I shifted in my seat. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. One hundred percent. She’s seen the way you two are together.”
“Have you talked about it?”
“No,” Kitty admitted, “but she’s not blind. I promise you, she’d be fine with it.”
I nodded. I felt a little better. But… “I shouldn’t just be with him because he’s here and single and Jess isn’t. That’s not right.”
At that, Kitty nodded. “No. That’s not fair.”
I looked down at my plate, feeling nothing short of miserable. Kitty’s hand reached through the maze of plates and cups and came into my field of view. I grabbed it briefly and squeezed. Across the table from me, her eyes were gentle.
“You’re doing fine. You know that? You’re doing great.”
“We’re doing fine,” I corrected. “We’re both doing great. You and Claire will figure it out.” A shadow passed over her face again. “And if you don’t, you’ll still be okay.”
She sighed and withdrew her hand. “You’re right,” she said. “But it can still suck, right?”
“Yes. It can still suck.”
We ordered lemon meringue pie to split for dessert, and when it came, the lemon portion was as thick as my forearm, the meringue as tall as my head. Kitty played hide-and-seek behind it, ducking her head out from behind the mountain of meringue, and she granted me an exception to take one more picture of her eyes peeking over the top of the pie.
We ate it all, every flake of crust and sticky glob of Day-Glo lemon. In the end, the only thing left separating us was the clean and shining dish.
Eighteen
The first two weeks of May passed in a haze of standardized testing. The first Saturday was the SAT, which was held at the public school where Sam went; Oma dropped me off with Claire and Kitty in the morning and took us all to lunch after. I had Sunday to study for my AP Spanish exam on Monday, and then a few days until AP U.S. History. The following week was AP English, which by that time felt like a nice break in the action, and then finally AP Econ. When I closed my eyes, I saw empty ovals of questions waiting to be answered.
The world narrowed: study, sleep, eat, take test, discuss test, repeat. My AP teachers offered early-morning study sessions with coffee-and-donut bribes, and girls showed up in their pajamas, yawning and hauling backpacks full of notes. My non-AP teachers relaxed their homework demands. Oma upped her cooking game and made bracing dinners each night: chicken piccata, sweet potato chili, steak and potatoes. Fortunately, with each test, another class period opened up to become a study hall. By the time the tests were done, my only remaining classes would be precalc, physics, and photography.
Despite the grueling schedule, I felt pretty good. The entire eleventh grade was singularly focused on the same tests, and that helped, along with the consistent routine Oma made sure I kept. My conversations with my siblings were a welcome break as well—Candace’s musical had been the night of the SAT, so I hadn’t been able to go, but she showed me about a hundred videos, all of which I watched and rewatched when I was stressed. But there was one other thing that made it bearable, easier, that propelled me forward through each study period and multihour test. The weekend after my tests were complete, Jess would visit me.
When I got the text, I yelped so loudly that Oma and Ellie both ran into my room. As Oma asked if I was all right, I showed her the phone, wordless. COMING YOUR WAY MAY 18 BABYYYY, read the message from Jess, to which I had already responded with a billion exclamation points.
I had never expected a visit. Jess had her license and her own car, but her parents never would’ve allowed her to take such a road trip by herself. But her mom was going to DC for a weekend conference, and Jess had convinced her to drop her off with me on the way.
She had not, of course, cleared this with Oma. That was up to me. It took most of a day—cajoling, pleading, promising, calling my parents and passing the phone back and forth between me and Oma—for us to finally settle on a plan. Jess would be allowed to visit. She would sleep on the pullout couch in the living room. We would not leave the condo after she arrived on Friday night, and on Saturday, if we went out, we would be back by nine. We would not be loud or rude or cause any kind of trouble. We would not sneak out. We would not drink.
It was easy to agree to these rules; they were obvious and straightforward. Besides, it wasn’t like we would have myriad opportunities to misbehave. In Virginia, I had never been invited to a party like the ones Jess and I went to back home. (I’m sure they existed somewhere, but I didn’t know who hosted them or where they would be.) There was no alcohol in Oma’s house, and Sam, Kitty, and Claire weren’t exactly delinquents.
When I called Jess to tell her yes, I could hear her beaming over the phone. “I never doubted you, my love,” she said. I felt sunbeams shining in my rib cage, threatening to split me apart with their light.
* * *
My last test was on Thursday. On Friday, I spent most of the day lounging on the lawn with Claire and Kitty, ostensibly finishing my math and physics homework.
“Jess will probably want to sleep in on Saturday,” I said as I scribbled an answer to a word problem, “so I don’t think we should meet at Harold’s until 12:30. That’s still okay with y’all?”
“For the hundr
edth time, yes,” Kitty said, not unkindly.
“I’m just making sure.” I took a deep breath. “And then we can walk around town a little, maybe?”
“Still sounds good to me,” Claire said.
“Okay. Cool. And then we can play it by ear until dinner. I just have to find some time in there to take Jess’s portrait—”
“Too much uncertainty for me, sorry,” Kitty chimed in.
“Really? Because I could plan something more structured, I just thought…” I trailed off when I saw her grinning.
“I am kidding, June. It’s just a weekend. Relax.”
“I just want to make the most of it, that’s all,” I said. I looked at the worksheet in front of me and shook my head, shoving it back into my backpack. I lay back instead, looking up at the crisp blue sky, white clouds bursting like flowers. “I wasn’t expecting her to visit. I want to make sure she has a good time.”
“It’s just a weekend,” Kitty repeated.
“I’m excited to meet her,” Claire said. She set aside her physics book and lay down beside me, settling in the grass. “I’ve heard so much about her, I feel like I know her already.”
“She’s excited to meet you, too,” I said, though I was not entirely sure if this was true. I talked to Jess about my friends all the time, but she rarely asked about them. And when I tried to line them up next to each other, it was hard to find similarities. They shared some qualities: smart, funny, prone to quick excitement. But Jess’s humor had a bitter edge to it, and she scorned rules in a way I knew my friends here did not understand. These differences were the real reason I was anxious—all the planning in the world wouldn’t help if Jess hated my friends or if they hated her.
And then, of course, there was the fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about kissing her.
“You have to chill,” Kitty said, joining me and Claire on the grass.
“Yeah,” Claire said. “She’s your best friend. It’s going to be great.”
I sat up enough to take another gulp of my coffee, watered down with melted ice cubes. She was my best friend. That made it harder.
“Overthinking never helped anyone,” Kitty said.
It’s going to be great. It’s just a weekend. You have to chill.
I repeated their words to myself as I watched Jess’s mom’s car pull into the parking lot a few hours later. Jess was in the passenger seat, waving wildly.
She jumped out of the car before her mom had turned it off. “We made it!” she shrieked. “God, what a drive.”
“Welcome to Virginia!” I ran over, threw my arms around her. I breathed her in, her familiar smell, and while part of me stayed just as nervous as before—maybe more so—the rest of me calmed down. This was not some strange and unknowable goddess. This was Jess, my Jess, only Jess.
Her mom got out of the car on the other side and stretched as we separated. I helped Jess grab her multiple weekend bags from the back seat, and her mom and Oma greeted each other with a businesslike handshake. They were just starting to make small talk when Jess interrupted.
“Have a good time in DC, Mom,” she said, giving her mother a one-armed hug, a duffel bag slung around her other shoulder.
“It’s not going to be fun. It’s work,” Mrs. Finn said. She looked back at Oma. “It’s our annual conference, and I’ve been helping organize—”
“Okay, well, I want to go set down my stuff, so I’ll see you Sunday,” Jess interrupted again.
“See you. Be safe. Love you.” Mrs. Finn raised a hand but didn’t really look at Jess, and as she resumed talking to Oma, I led Jess toward the gates. Oma caught my eye with a look that said she’d better not interrupt me that way, and I made an expression that I hope said she won’t, and then Jess and I were through the gates and traipsing across the courtyard, and she was sighing happily.
“This is cool,” she said, looking around the courtyard and up at the balconies. “Is it all old people or what?”
“Mostly. I think there are one or two families with kids. No one my age. But school is right back there.”
Jess stopped in her tracks and turned around. From this angle, we could only see the edge of campus. No one was out, but a few girls had their window shades open to show us glimpses of their dorm rooms.
“Wow,” she said reverently. “Like college. I’m jealous.”
“Well, I live here, with the old people,” I said, feeling like I had to defend myself, though I didn’t know from what. Jess started walking toward the doors again. “And the dorms have pretty strict rules. I practically had to write a petition to go to a sleepover.”
Over her shoulder, Jess tossed me a look, an irreverent, biting glance I knew well. It said, Fuck the rules. We’re beyond the rules. It was sexy and familiar and impossibly cool and completely unnecessary. I didn’t know how to tell her that things worked differently here.
In Oma’s condo, Jess dropped her things beside my bed and looked around my room as I stood in the doorway, picking at the hem of my shirt and waiting for her reaction. Her gaze traveled past the books she had lent me, only half of which I had read, to my pictures. As I had done more work in the darkroom, I had started to hang up discarded prints here, ones that were too dark or too bright or crooked on the page. There was a copy of the picture of Oma and Ellie I had printed before spring break, a few snapshots of my friends, a poorly composed image of the twins, and a blurry picture of Jess from that day at Ethan’s house. She didn’t acknowledge them.
“This is nice,” she said finally. “Smaller than your old room, but nice.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I like it.”
In the living room, she stepped onto the balcony and looked out at the river, resplendent in the sun.
“Wow,” she breathed.
Her hands curled around the wrought-iron railing, her chest leaned over it a little, her hair floated around her face, her lips parted, and she looked like a sparrow, ready to burst forth into the air. Like she was meant for nothing less than flight.
* * *
Oma made pesto pasta and chicken for dinner while Jess and I sat on the balcony, our legs between the bars, dangling off the edge into the emptiness below. We talked for an hour, until Oma called, “Girls, dinner!”
I was expecting some conflict. When Jess was present for meals with my family, there was a tacit agreement that we would all focus on the twins; Jess and my parents barely spoke. But the twins weren’t here. I could feel the tension vibrating off me as we sat down, me and Jess on one side, Oma on the other.
Oma served herself some salad from the bowl in the middle. “So, Jess,” she said pleasantly, “how did the SAT go for you?”
“Good,” she said. “At least I think. There was a math question that really threw me off. It was the word problem about the laundromat…”
“I had trouble with that one, too!” I had specifically called it out to Oma, and I looked at her to see if she remembered; she nodded.
“Must’ve been a doozy,” she said. “How about APs, Jess? When was your last one?”
I’d had more than enough test talk over the last three weeks, but I didn’t mind one last conversation if it would get us through dinner. Maybe it would even show Oma that Jess was serious about school, and Oma could tell my parents.
We sat at the table for longer than I would have expected. After we had said all you could say about standardized tests, we discussed the classes Jess was taking this year and the ones Oma was teaching. Jess asked thoughtful questions. If she was a little more stiff and polite than usual, Oma probably couldn’t tell. I was so relieved by the time we had finished eating that I offered to do the dishes without Oma having to remind me.
“I’m assuming you don’t want to watch TV with me tonight?” Oma asked as I picked up her plate.
“Nah, if it’s okay with you, I think Jess and I are just gonna hang o
ut in my room.”
“As long as you don’t mind if I watch the next episode without you.”
“Yeah, I’ll catch up later.”
“Okay. I’ll make up Jess’s bed.”
Oma made her way into the living room and turned on Murder at the Manor, and I heard the creak of the futon opening up. I started rinsing plates and loading the dishwasher. Jess joined me in the kitchen, hopping up on the counter next to the sink. She kicked her heels against the cabinets like a little kid.
“Jesus, I thought that dinner would never end,” she said under her breath.
I looked up at her, startled. “What?” The water and the dishes in the sink, the genteel British tones filtering in from the living room—I must have misunderstood her.
“I said dinner took forever,” she said, a little louder, and I let a handful of forks drop and clang, hoping against hope that Oma hadn’t heard her.
“I thought it was fine,” I said.
“Yeah, it was fine. That’s just way more conversation than I expected to have to have with your grandma.”
I focused on scrubbing a stubborn piece of pasta off a plate. I liked dinner with Oma. I liked talking to her. But I didn’t want to argue with Jess.
“Anyway,” she continued, unbothered, “when are we going out? Does your grandma go to bed early?”
My hands stilled in the sink. The water was so hot it burned. “Jess, I told you, we can’t go out.”
“Then what are we going to do?” She sounded impatient, but I had told her this already. I didn’t know why she was acting surprised.
“I thought we would just talk. And watch TV or whatever. At home, it’s not like we were going out every night. This isn’t that different?” The questioning tone came up unbidden. I didn’t mean to ask her approval.
As she stayed silent, I felt my resolve weakening; a rusty part of my brain started spinning, figuring out how we could sneak out and back in. If we waited until very late, and if we took off our shoes to be soft on the wooden floor, and if we took the stairs instead of the elevator…
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