by Arin Andrews
Her response: I know exactly what you mean.
• • •
We continued to text over the next few days, and agreed that we needed to see each other again as soon as possible. About a week after the cruise, we got our chance—a huge heavy metal festival rolled into town. It was one of those mega tours, with eight different bands playing, like Disturbed, Avenged Sevenfold, and Halestorm. Darian was a lot more familiar with the music than I was, but the performances were hardly the point of going. I needed to see her.
Mom agreed to let me go, and even drove Darian and me to the Bank of Oklahoma Center, a huge stadium where all the major headline bands play. The line to get in seemed to stretch forever, and the crowd was packed with dudes with chains flapping from the belt loops on their black jeans. Spiky Mohawks sifted through the throngs like shark fins, and skinheads with tattooed faces openly smoked joints and scowled. The sounds of beer bottles smashing and people shouting or chanting lyrics surrounded us, but Darian and I were in our own private bubble, just talking and staring into each other’s eyes. We stood in that line for almost three hours before the doors finally opened and the crowd spilled inside. Angry mosh pits formed out of nowhere, like fire ants swarming up from their underground nests, and we moved off to the side to avoid elbows to the face. But it wasn’t scary—it was alive. We nodded our heads along with the music—timidly, compared to the furiously bobbing necks around us, but still inhaled every bit of energy in the arena. I felt like I had a contact high from the scent of weed in the air. Lights flashed, blinding us, and underneath the smoke it smelled like sweat and booze and heaven.
Our shoulders and elbows were pressed tight together, and every few minutes Darian and I would look at each other and hold the gaze. She was wearing a small, heart-shaped necklace that she’d chew on before letting it drop back down to her neck, and it would wet her lips slightly as it glided out of her mouth.
I’d never seen that look before, the one that meant, I want to kiss you. But I still recognized it in her eyes. I wanted to kiss her, too—it felt like the intimacy we’d shared on the boat, but amplified a million times, and the surreal environment only made it stronger. Both of us held back, though. We were still too scared, despite all the wild abandon surrounding us. But I think it was the peace we felt with each other in the midst of all that chaos that cemented us.
“I like you,” I finally said. “I mean, I like like you.”
“I do too,” she said.
We pressed our shoulders even closer and slipped our hands together while they were sandwiched between our sides, so that no one could see. Not that anyone would have cared, but this was dangerous new territory for me, something to be kept hidden. I didn’t yet feel the injustice of that necessity to hide—it was all still too new in my own brain. I needed to process my own reaction to these feelings before I could worry about how the rest of the world would respond.
By the time the concert ended, I was near deaf from the blasting speakers, and had to squint my eyes against the sudden brightness of the room after the lights went up. We reluctantly stepped away from each other, the spell momentarily broken as we made our way out to the parking lot and Mom’s waiting car.
When we dropped her off, Darian nudged me with her knee. “Bye,” she said. And then just sat there, not moving, staring at me.
“Yeah, okay, bye,” I said. I wanted to kiss her so bad. She continued to stare for a few more moments before getting out and closing the door.
“That was weird,” Mom muttered.
From that point forward it was on. We decided that the night of the concert was our anniversary. But since neither of us had a driver’s license, and she lived on the other side of Tulsa, getting to actually see each other presented a problem. There was dance class twice a week, but it hardly gave us any sort of privacy. We went old-school and wrote each other letters talking about how much we liked each other, and we’d surreptitiously pass them off during class. Seeing her and not being able to stand too close to her or hold her hand was agony.
One night Andi caught me slipping a letter to Darian. “What’s that all about?” she asked, sounding slightly hurt.
“Oh,” I said, trying to think fast. “We spent a lot of time together on that cruise and she’s, um, having some boyfriend troubles. I’m just trying to cheer her up.”
“She seems like she can handle herself,” Andi mumbled as we packed up our bags. I let the comment slide, too nervous to say anything else in case Andi heard something in my voice that would betray my real feelings about Darian. I wanted to talk to Andi about what was going on so badly, but she was way too religious. I knew she’d never accept the idea of Darian and me as a couple, and I didn’t want to lose her as my best friend. It didn’t occur to me at all that a real best friend would never do that.
Dividing lines were rapidly forming in the relationships with all the people in my life, though. I felt like I was a different person for everyone—the perfect child for Mom; the God-loving student at Lincoln; the dutiful dance student at Moore’s; Andi’s innocent best friend; and suddenly and most important, Darian’s . . . girlfriend? But I hated that word because it had the word “girl” in it, and so I refused to use it. Luckily it was enough for her that we were secretly together. She was mature enough to not need that label to prove that we were in love.
At first all of these different roles were easy for me to juggle. I was caught up in the newness of it, and for a little while I got good at swapping them out like Halloween masks. The feeling wouldn’t last long, though.
A few weeks after the cruise, we had an evening performance in front of an audience in Claremore, a small town about thirty minutes away from my house but kind of close to Aunt Susan’s place and Papa and Gigi’s farm. It gave me the perfect opportunity to invite Darian to spend the night at Susan’s with the rest of my cousins. I didn’t mention the sleepover to Andi.
After the show, Darian and I headed to Susan’s and tore through the house with my cousins, gorged on snacks, had pillow fights, and played hide-and-seek in the backyard. Late at night Cheyenne, Darian, and I all piled onto Amanda’s bed with her to watch Pirates of the Caribbean. Cheyenne eventually stumbled off to her room, rubbing her eyes. On the other side of the bed, Amanda started breathing deeply as she fell asleep.
Darian and I stared at each other. It was the closest we’d been to being alone together since our nights on the cruise ship’s deck. I wanted so bad to lean in and kiss her, but I was still too scared. Instead I gently placed the back of my hand against her mouth. I had no idea what I was doing. It was instinct, almost as if there were this one last barrier that I needed to put up between us. I needed some sort of symbolic permission from her that it was safe to finally break open this part of me.
She began to kiss my hand, and I melted.
We made out, gently and quietly. We moved to the floor so we wouldn’t disturb Amanda, and kept our hands on top of our clothes. I didn’t want her going anywhere near my breasts, and I maneuvered her away every time she tried to touch them. It kept taking me out of the moment and made it hard to concentrate on the fact that I was making out with someone for the first time in my life. But I finally relaxed into it when she got the message that I was much more interested in exploring her body than having her discover mine.
I spent the next few days in a haze, grinning all the time. Mom even commented on how happy I seemed, and while part of me really wanted to tell her the reason why, I couldn’t do it. How could she understand what was going on, when I hardly understood it myself? I couldn’t tell her that I was gay, because I didn’t feel gay. But making out with a girl and loving it made me gay. I kept going around in circles in my brain and couldn’t land on an answer, an identity.
All I did know was that I couldn’t wait to see Darian again at our next dance class. I started arriving fifteen minutes early to class, as she was finishing up with the younger kids, so we could steal a little bit of time together before my class started.
One night, when no one was looking, she grabbed my hand and led me to the back, into a small cinder block room that housed the building’s only water fountain. She pushed me up against the wall and kissed me. I was shocked by how brazen she was—anybody could have walked in at any second—but it didn’t matter. I’d never given up control like that to another person in my life, and it felt so weirdly freeing.
We heard someone coming down the hallway, and quickly pulled apart, taking turns at the fountain as if nothing had happened. I was lighter on my feet that night than ever before.
We knew that the water fountain room was far too risky for clandestine make-out sessions, so we’d sneak around to the back of the building. It faced an empty parking lot and a green garbage Dumpster, and there was a small indentation in the wall where all the electrical, gas, and water piping that led inside was housed. We’d press up against that small corner, out of sight from anyone, and go at it.
We managed to get away with it for about two weeks. I got Mom to drive me to class earlier and earlier every Tuesday and Thursday, telling her that I wanted to hang out with a friend. When we’d come back inside after fooling around, we’d still be grinning and flirting with each other. There was obvious sexual tension between us, and everyone must have felt or seen it. And since Darian was already sort of out as bi, she had a few friends in Shockwave who knew exactly what was going on—despite the fact that Darian had promised me she wouldn’t tell anyone about us. The fact that she eventually did ended up being a blessing, though.
One night when we were outside as usual, we heard a voice whisper, “Someone’s coming!” I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was one of Darian’s friends trying to warn us. We pulled away fast, and Darian went pale. We were furiously trying to wipe off our faces when my dance instructor came flying around the corner of the building. She looked pissed.
“You guys can’t hang out back here,” she snapped. She was looking us up and down with disgust, and even though we hadn’t technically been caught together, I knew that she knew. And I knew that I was screwed.
7
I stumbled my way through dance class, totally unable to keep up. Andi kept shooting me concerned glances. I knew she could tell something was going on, and I avoided her eyes, pretending instead to concentrate on my feet, but I might as well have been clogging on a floor covered with marbles, for all the skill I was demonstrating.
I tried to avoid eye contact with Darian when she and the rest of her troupe filed in for the last half hour of my class. A couple of her friends were staring at me with worried looks. They must have heard what had happened, and I panicked that the news would start circulating, even though I knew that Darian wouldn’t be friends with anyone she couldn’t trust. I didn’t say good-bye to either her or Andi once we were done, and hightailed it out the door. Mom was waiting in the car right outside, and she didn’t say a word the entire ride home. I kept my mouth shut too. She was acting so weird that I knew she had to know what had happened. Did the studio call her? I wondered. I wasn’t about to ask.
She barely spoke during dinner. Wes was acting like his normal, loud, oblivious self, singing random songs he made up about the broccoli we were eating, which helped ease the tension a little. I went up to my room after we ate and sat on my bed, debating how I should handle the situation.
I went downstairs to her room and sat on her bed while she rustled around in her bathroom, getting ready to go to sleep.
“Just wanted to say good night,” I called out to her. Her phone was on her nightstand, and it was still lit up from a recent text. I rolled over and picked it up to read it, and saw that it was from Kelli, Andi’s mom.
It said: She’s not gonna go and say outright that your child is gay.
Mom came out of the bathroom and saw the phone in my hand. I started to ask her what the text meant, and that was when she exploded.
“Everyone is going around saying that you and Darian were kissing out behind the dance studio!” she shrieked. “The studio owner called Kelli at her house to gossip about it, because she didn’t want to tell me herself. What is going on?”
I hadn’t expected this to go well, but the wrath in her voice terrified me. I had hoped that maybe it was something we could talk honestly about, but I realized in that instant that anything I said was going to fall on totally deaf ears. She was livid.
So I denied it.
“What?” I asked, all innocent-like. “We were just hanging out!”
“No one would just make something like that up,” she yelled. “And everyone knows Darian is a lesbian. She’s, what, two years older than you? Did she force you to do this?”
“Nothing happened! She’s just a friend and we were talking!”
“About what?” she demanded.
Damn. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. “Dance stuff,” I blurted out. “She was, uh, helping me out with my moves.”
That came out wrong.
Mom narrowed her eyes. “Why can’t you do that in the studio?”
“I don’t know! Mom, it’s no big deal!”
“Oh, it’s a big deal. They all think you’re a lesbian now. I know you’re not, but they might believe you are.”
That stopped me cold. I knew for sure by that point that I had to be gay or bi, because I loved kissing Darian, but a lesbian? That meant a gay woman, and that felt utterly wrong. I was more like . . . a gay tomboy or something. Like a tomgay.
I started to feel really dizzy and weird. I couldn’t wrap my brain around what I was feeling.
“I’m not a lesbian, Mom,” I said. “And I can’t believe you’d listen to a bunch of dumbass dance instructors over me.”
“You’re grounded,” she shouted as I stormed out. “And I’m coming to every single one of your classes from now on to make sure you go to class and stay inside!”
• • •
She kept her promise, and created an entire narrative in her mind to explain what must have happened—that Darian was a seductress, a horny older woman desperate to get into my chaste, virginal pants. The whole thing was even more infuriating because I knew that Darian had told her mom about us from the very beginning, and Darian’s mom was completely cool with it.
Mom needed to sit in on the classes for only about a week before the instructors set down an edict that no student was allowed to come to classes early or to stay late. It felt like everyone’s eyes were constantly on us, and not being able to speak to her was torture. But it was comforting to know that she must have been feeling the exact same way I was.
Being at home or in the car with Mom was agonizing. She’d give me death stares, trying to make me confess. But I kept up my innocent act. Andi had asked me right away if what her mom had heard was true, and even though she was my best friend, I couldn’t confess the truth. But I could tell that she didn’t believe my protests, and she began to act wary and distant whenever I saw her at the studio. Worse, she started sending me texts of Bible verses:
Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.
For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature.
Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind.
I could hardly be accused of being effeminate.
None of these passages were new to me—Lincoln had made sure of that. I didn’t need reminders sent to my phone telling me that the Bible thought I was evil; it had been drummed into my head already at school. And sometimes I wondered if maybe I should break things off with Darian. Maybe I was going to go to hell. But at the same time I couldn’t understand how something as incredible as loving someone could be a bad thing. It didn’t make sense. But then guilt would creep back in and I’d consider dumping her. And an hour later I’d be missing Darian so much, it would make me physically ache. I was
a wreck.
About ten days after Darian and I got busted, Wes and I went to Susan’s after school to visit our cousins. Susan was still at work, so I sat down at her desk and started scribbling a letter to Darian.
I miss you so much, I wrote. It’s killing me that we can’t be together. I just want to be able to kiss you, and I don’t know what to do.
I was sticking it inside an envelope when Cheyenne suddenly burst into the room, followed by Dewayne, chasing her. I shoved the letter under a stack of other papers to hide it, planning to pick it up later, and took off after them into the backyard to join the race and play around.
Mom and Susan came home from work as the sun was setting. I stayed in the backyard with the rest of the kids until I heard Mom’s car horn honking from the driveway. I called shotgun and climbed into the passenger seat while Wes muttered and grumbled about being stuck in the back. As Mom reversed slowly out into the road, I glanced down and saw a pile of papers shoved down between the seats.
The corner of my letter to Darian was sticking out.
While she was still stretching her head over her shoulder checking for cars, I snatched the letter and shoved it into my pocket. I panicked the entire ride home. Susan must have seen it, read it, and then given it to Mom. I cursed myself for being stupid enough to forget it, and cursed Susan for narcing on me.
When we got home, I ran inside. Mom followed with the stack of papers and was rifling through them anxiously.
“Did you see an envelope anywhere?” she asked. “I’m missing one.”
“Nope,” I said as innocently as I could. I could feel the tension in the room building as she glared at me.
“Are you sure? It was right here with the rest, next to you,” she said.
And just like that, I realized I couldn’t keep it up anymore. I was exhausted, tired of lying, and furious that we were having this standoff when we each knew exactly what was going on but neither would say it. I was done playing games.