I knew that I was in love with Stevie.
I'd known I loved her from the very first moment I saw her, but I didn't understand what that meant. At sixteen, though, with a sixteen-year-old's perception of the world, with hormones raging through me, I understood, and deeply, exactly what this could do to the two of us if I told her how I felt.
The hardest part of all of this was that there had been no indication that Stevie was like me. I was attracted to girls, and that made me a lesbian. I knew the word lesbian because of how the kids threw it around at school—always as an insult—and I knew that word related to me. I was a lesbian because I liked girls...but what was Stevie?
It was true: Stevie had never been on a date with a guy, had never made out with any of the guys at school, had never really been seen with any of the guys, and she certainly didn't seem to like any of them. But I wasn't sure what that meant. Stevie was her own person, and she was a little quirky. Her lack of interest in boys didn't mean she was gay.
Stevie was, and had always been, unique. She was wild, and everyone knew that. Not in the binge-drinking, partying way that a lot of the other kids around Kankakee were wild.
No. Stevie was really and truly wild.
She would wake up in the middle of the night, sneak past her sleeping grandparents and her evil little brother snoring in his little bed, and she would close the door of her trailer silently behind her, sprinting across the trailer park to my window. She would knock on it gently, tapping three times so I knew it was her, and I'd wake right up, or maybe I'd already been awake, waiting for her, and I'd get out of bed, my heart racing as I snuck out of my trailer. My dad was a fast sleeper, and my kid sister slept like the dead, so it wasn't really a James Bond mission or anything, but I'd feel the thrill of it all the same.
Because once out of the trailer, I'd fall into Stevie's arms, embracing her in the moonlight, our arms wrapping around each other so tightly that it felt, in those moments, like we would never let go.
Stevie wasn't afraid of anything. She'd take my hand, and the two of us would run together, run until we couldn't breathe anymore, and then keep running, taking in great big lungfuls of air as we laughed, sprinting across the train tracks until we were actually outside of Kankakee, the wind rustling through the corn stalks, a whole wash of stars and the moon overhead, lighting the way.
And then we'd keep running, running through the cow fields, running together hand in hand until we reached the bend in the river. The bend in the river that was ours.
It wasn't really ours, obviously. We didn't own that spot of land; a cow farmer did. But we'd claimed it, anyway. We'd rigged up a sort of house out of debris that had conveniently landed close by from one of the last big tornadoes: a swatch of siding that had probably been taken from somebody's trailer, hurled apart and broken into manageable bits by the storm. This siding was about eight feet by eight feet, and it was enough of a wall for us, so that's what we used it for.
We'd leaned the bit of siding against the only tree at that bend in the river, a scraggly, stunted thing that somehow survived the terrible storms and tornadoes to keep standing. After laying the siding against it, we'd grabbed some other boards from Dumpsters in Kankakee and a sort of garbage pit that had been set up in one of the fields, and we had rigged up a second side of this shack, the third side being the trunk of the tree and the fourth being the wide open air. It was jury-rigged and would probably fall over during the next big windstorm, but for that entire month, the little shed remained steady, in place.
Stevie pulled me into the makeshift shed gently, tugging at my arm with her smile curving upward like a crescent moon, and it was there that we kissed each other in the moonlight filtering down through the branches, there that we tasted every inch of one another's skin. And I knew, in those moments, that there was nothing more that I wanted than to be with her.
To be with her. In Chicago. Just the two of us, completely free.
“We can go together,” I'd tell her, over and over. And though Stevie was wild and adventurous in all other ways...for some reason that I didn't understand, she was reticent about this. She didn't want to go, and I just couldn't understand that.
“But why don't you want to go?” I'd ask her in exasperation, my heart aching inside of me as I gripped her arms, holding her gaze. “We...we could be together, Stevie, and we could be out,” I told her, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “We wouldn't have to hide anymore, and then we could build our lives together, and we'd be happy, Stevie,” I'd tell her, holding her hands tightly in my own, as if I could squeeze the knowledge into her.
“But we are happy, Amber,” she told me gently, searching my eyes. And then her jaw clenched, and she sighed, looking away. “You know I can't leave my family,” she said, her words so soft that I would have to strain to hear them.
And that's something I couldn't make sense of. Because I had a happy family life, for the most part, but Stevie's home life was awful. Her grandparents hated her and her brother, her brother hated her, and the whole lot of them were so contentious and miserable. Stevie was the only one who held them together with her kindness, her big heart... She was the glue that made their lives somewhat bearable.
But that was, in my mind, a better reason to leave them. They used her; they were horrific to her. There was, in my mind, absolutely no reason to stay.
Now I know that family matters aren't so simple. But I was sixteen years old then, about to turn seventeen. I didn't fully understand that some acts can be irreversible, and that people can leave your life forever because of your words or your actions. I didn't understand because, in a lot of ways, I was still a kid.
But I think Stevie knew. And she wasn't ready to face that yet.
Stevie told me that she couldn't leave her family...and though she was gentle and kind in her telling me no, it was an absolute, immovable no. There was seemingly no way to convince her to change her mind, and I did my best to respect that.
I would occasionally bring the subject up, but I tried not to press her. Every day at home, I was worried. Worried that, somehow, my father would find out about Stevie and me. Worried that, somehow, he would notice that I didn't bring guys around, not like the other girls in the trailer park, that he would see through my weak excuses of “too much schoolwork!” and “too busy with after-school activities!” But he worked through his shifts and came home exhausted, so he didn't notice much. Still, I worried. I was afraid.
But, finally, when we were in our senior year...everything changed.
Stevie and I were sitting at the bend in our river. Many months ago, another tornado had ripped through and taken the bits of siding that we kept propping up against the tree, so we no longer had our little shack. It was a cold, rainy March night, but we were bundled up together, wrapped so tightly in one another that I didn't know where I ended and she began, and I loved it that way. I loved it when we were wrapped up so tightly that we were, essentially, inseparable.
“Let's go,” she whispered in my ear, her arms holding me close.
The rain was pouring down steadily, and it pockmarked the surface of the river so that it looked like the surface of the moon. I remember that, remember it as clearly as if it just happened. Because my heart began to rise within me.
I knew she wasn't talking about heading home.
I knew she was talking about Chicago.
“Really?” I asked her, looking back. Her jaw was clenched, and she was staring out at the river, but then she fixed her beautiful brown eyes on me, and she nodded once, twice.
“I want to go with you,” she said, squeezing me gently. “There's nothing for me here anymore. I know that now,” she whispered. “This isn't my home,” she told me, gazing deeply into my eyes. “You are.”
Though I could feel her sincerity—and it thrilled me, utterly—there was something wrong in all of this, something just the tiniest bit off... Unlike me, Stevie never talked in this way about her family, about Kankakee. Why now? Wh
y today? What had happened?
I looked at her, straightening, holding her gaze. My heart was soaring inside of me—she'd just called me, us, her home. But...
“What's wrong?” I asked her quietly.
She looked away, her jaw clenching even tighter. “Things are all right,” she said, the words sounding forced, coming out between her clenched teeth in a growl. She didn't sound as if she were telling me the whole truth, but she kept talking. “I...I just don't belong here anymore. I don't think I belonged here from the start. But I'm glad that I came here. That I met you,” she whispered, brushing her warm, full lips over the end of my nose in a chaste kiss... And then she captured my mouth with her own, and she kissed me with enough passion to make me forget what she'd just said about her family...
But I didn't let it go. I backed away, held her gaze again.
“Stevie, what's wrong?” I asked, my heart beating faster in my chest.
But she wouldn't tell me.
I soon forgot the details of that night, forgot everything except for Stevie telling me that we were going to go to Chicago together. My greatest dream was coming true. Soon, we'd be free to be together openly. Soon, I wouldn't have to hide who I was. It was exhilarating, that thought, though the exhilaration came from naivete. Still, those were some of the happiest months of my life.
Because we had to plan for months to get it all right. And this is what we'd come up with: the night of our high school graduation, we would both be eighteen (Stevie had turned a few months earlier, and me a few weeks earlier), so we could go and do anything we wanted—as long as we could afford it. We were going to take that freedom and run with it, run away.
We'd been saving up for months from our jobs as gas station attendants, and we'd already bought one-way Greyhound tickets to Chicago. We were going to ride into the city. We had enough money for a motel that first night, then three months' worth of rent each for a cheap apartment. We'd planned out everything, right down to how we were going to sneak out of the party after graduation and race to the bus station together, meeting up there and then heading out that night for Chicago.
The day of our high school graduation was a whirlwind. My father was so proud of me, and my stomach was in knots every time he patted me on the back and told me that the cap and gown looked good on me, his jaw clenched as he tried to hold back the tears in his eyes. I knew that he was proud of me; that much was obvious. For a guy with few emotions and even fewer words, this was a huge deal, his telling me that he was proud.
And that realization led, of course, to completely miserable thoughts. Thoughts like, how could I possibly leave him? How could I leave my little sister? I felt terrible, but I figured they would both be all right without me. And I was eighteen, after all, and I didn't realize that the things we do can hurt someone irrevocably. Forever.
But I was about to learn that lesson for good.
I watched Stevie accept her diploma, watched her dark brown gaze catch mine and hold it as she held the diploma aloft, her smile huge and triumphant. That day was the culmination: we had both, together, survived high school, and we thought that meant we could survive anything.
I was supposed to meet her in the afternoon at her grandparents' trailer, and we were supposed to go over the plan one more time before the party that night, go over our packing lists to make certain we hadn't missed anything.
So after the ceremony, my father took me and my sister out for celebratory ice cream, and then we drove back to the trailer park, and I was heading toward Stevie's trailer, hands deep in my jeans pockets, humming something happily as my sneakers crossed the well-worn path to Stevie's door.
But there was shouting coming from the trailer.
And the sound of an animal snarling. But Stevie's family didn't have a dog; they didn't have any animals, and certainly none that could make a sound like that.
Honestly?
It sounded like a wolf.
I didn't know what was happening, and I would never know, because Stevie came running out of the trailer, slamming the door shut behind her, tears streaming down her cheeks as she raked the back of her hand over her face, dashing the tears away. Her hair was disheveled, and—what was very odd—there was a scratch in her jeans, a six-inch-long scratch that had actually torn the fabric of the denim. Beneath the torn fabric, blood was seeping through. I stared at the cut in horror, then looked up into her eyes questioningly.
“I cut myself on the corner of the table... It's fine. You have to get out of here,” said Stevie shortly, her mouth in a down-turned line. I held her gaze for a long moment as she breathed out and then gathered me close, as she pressed her nose into my hair, just as she had that first day that we met.
My skin pricked with discomfort. We always held off from embracing in public because we didn't want anyone to suspect anything, and here we were, hugging in the trailer park, in the sunshine, no less, right by the highway where anyone and everyone could see us.
I'm ashamed to say that my very first reaction was to disentangle myself from her. “Stevie,” I whispered into her ear, my cheeks burning hotly. “Don't.”
She backed away a step, tears shining in her eyes. She looked as deeply pained as if I'd slapped her. But I didn't want anyone to find out about us; I didn't want anything to go wrong before we left Kankakee. Didn't she know that, once we were in Chicago, we could be ourselves? Didn't she realize that?
“Are you ashamed of me?” Stevie asked me quietly, holding my gaze.
“Baby, no,” I whispered, tears springing to my eyes, too. “I just don't want anything to stop us from going,” I told her, taking a step forward and curling my fingers around her elbow. “I love you,” I whispered to her fiercely.
“Do you love me...” she whispered, licking her lips, suddenly looking afraid. Stevie never looked afraid, and I felt my stomach drop away from me. “Do you love me no matter what I am? Who I am?” she whispered, holding my gaze.
“Of course I do,” I told her, without skipping a beat.
Stevie picked at the strands of fabric at the tear in her jeans. She tore her gaze from mine, and she looked past me, toward the train tracks and the cow fields and corn fields beyond them.
“I'll see you tonight,” she told me, taking a step forward and placing a gentle, soft kiss against my cheek. Then she turned away from me, and she ran past her trailer, past the trailer park itself. She ran, alone.
I believed her. I believed that she would come. I believed with my whole heart.
And that night, I sneaked out of the party that our friend Mary was hosting for graduation. I left through the back door, and no one noticed, and I grabbed my bag from where I'd stowed it under Mary's deck. I took the bag, and I ran across the front lawn and down the street, toward the bus station. I didn't look back.
And when I got to the station, I glanced around, looking everywhere for Stevie. I thought, for some reason, that she'd already be there. She hadn't shown up to the party that night, and that had struck me as worrisome, odd.
True, it wasn't exactly strange for Stevie to skip a party. She was wild, and she did what she wanted. If she didn't want to go to the party, there was nothing on heaven or earth that could compel her to go. But uneasiness was churning in my stomach, because we'd planned for this. Not going to the party would look suspicious, we'd reasoned, so we would both go, and it would give us a convenient place to exit from.
But despite all that planning...Stevie hadn't shown up.
And she wasn't waiting for me at the bus station, either.
I tried to calm my racing heart, tried and failed. Already, I felt that something was wrong. Something was very wrong. But I tried to reason with myself as I sat down on the bench outside of the closed station. The bus that would come through tonight was after hours, and the station was always closed for after-hour buses. You had to have a ticket, or you weren't going to get on that bus. And I had a ticket. We both had tickets...
I tried to convince myself that Stevie had just b
een detained, and just for a little while. That she would arrive very, very soon, with plenty of time for the two of us to sit together and talk before the bus arrived, holding hands tightly as the thrill of our impending freedom ran through us.
But as the large clock bolted to the wall outside the station turned its hands, as it kept ticking away...
Stevie did not arrive.
Now it was getting dangerously close to the time that the bus was supposed to show up. I still, naively, believed that she was going to appear, with minutes to spare. I gripped the edge of the bench as tightly as I could, I took deep breaths, and I stared at the clock, willing it to slow down. Willing Stevie to show up, coming out of the gathering gloom of night surrounding the bus station with her bag slung over her shoulder, a happy, triumphant smile painting her features. “I'm sorry,” she'd tell me, drawing me close and kissing me fiercely. “I'm sorry I'm late. It was all just a misunderstanding. But I'm here now.”
And then it was time for the bus to arrive.
And Stevie was still missing.
My heart was in my throat, my blood pounding through my body as if in expectation of something terrible. My body knew already, but my mind was slow to catch up because I still believed, utterly, in Stevie. In us. I believed, and that meant that Stevie was going to come.
But she didn't.
The bus arrived. It pulled up, creaking and settling to a stop, in front of my bench, and a few tired, weary-looking people disembarked, taking their luggage from the doors on the side of the bus as the driver lugged them off, looking bored and unhappy.
The bus door stood open for me, but Stevie wasn't here yet. How could I get onto the bus without her?
The minutes ticked by, and I was getting so desperate, so panicked, that I could hardly breathe. “I'm sorry,” I told the bus driver, fear making my words slur together, “but can you wait around for just a little while? Just a few more minutes?”
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