“What?” I ask.
“Are you mad at me or something?”
Am I?
It’s not her fault a bunch of assholes decided to try to dance with her. It’s not her fault she lost her mother. It’s not her fault I can sense my own mother latching on to her, pulling her in as her new pet tragedy.
“No,” I say quietly, still trying to convince myself. “No, I’m not mad. You were just dancing.”
She visibly relaxes and runs her hands over her hair. The motion smooths down her locks until she lets go, and then all her curls pop up again. “I wouldn’t call that dancing.”
“What would you call it?”
She shrugs. “Faking it.” She exhales as she sinks down into the sand. Ahead of us, the sea slams against the shore, high tide on its way. She looks so small, all the jokes and fearlessness that led me to the top of the lighthouse stripped away.
Except the lonely. The lonely is still all over her.
I sit down next to her and open her water, nudging her arm until she takes it and sips.
“Thanks for helping me,” she says. “Really.”
“No problem.” I say that, but I know I’m lying. I can feel a ball of anger—a problem—coil together in my chest. Not at Eva, but at my mother, who’s slowly turning me into something inhuman. Unfeeling and cold.
“Hey.” She touches my arm, and I lift my eyes to hers, which are a little bleary-looking. “I’m serious. I haven’t been to many parties, and you were a total badass back there.”
I’ve had a lot of practice, I want to say. But I don’t. I can’t. That’ll lead to questions. And questions will lead to me explaining my mother, my life, and that’s something I’ve vowed not to do with anyone except for Luca, and even sharing it with him sometimes is hard enough. Talking about Mom feels like a betrayal. It all sounds so tragic, almost cliché, like something out of a Lifetime movie. And my mom . . . well, she’s my mother. And things aren’t that bad. They’re not that bad.
“Okay,” I say instead. Profound, I know.
“You know that one guy? Jay?”
I snort. “Yeah. You could say that.”
“He smelled like roast chicken.”
I laugh. “Oh my god, that’s right. He always smells like that when he drinks and gets wild. It’s like he sweats out all the meat he eats. It’s totally bizarre.”
“And totally disgusting.”
“And that.”
“He called me exotic. I really hate that.”
I tilt my head at her. “Why?”
She shakes her head. “You’d think having a white dad and a black mom means I have three legs and feathers. I’m biracial, not some rarely spotted species from some barely populated island.”
“Well, Jay’s an idiot. So he might literally believe you’re a rarely spotted species from some barely populated island.”
Eva snort-laughs, choking a little on her water. “Or he’s an entitled white asshat in America and he’s horny.”
“Oh, that’s a given.”
We laugh a little more, drink a little more, watch the ocean roll over itself a little more. I’m not sure how much time passes before I fill the silence with a whole bunch of stupid.
“So, you’ve really never met your father?”
She sucks in a breath.
“Sorry,” I say. “I shouldn’t have asked that.”
“No. No, it’s fine. Just surprised me is all. I didn’t know you knew that.”
“Luca told me.”
“Right.” She lifts the water bottle to her mouth, gulping until it’s empty. “And no, I haven’t.”
“You don’t even know who he is?”
“I know his name, a white dude my mom toured with when she was performing with a ballet company in Philadelphia.”
“Oh. Mine too,” I say. “I mean, my dad was some white dude, not that he was a dancer. And he wasn’t just some dude. I mean, my mom was married to him. God, sorry. I shouldn’t have brought this up.”
She laughs a little at my babbling. “It’s fine. And yeah, I figured your dad was a white dude.” She gestures to my pale-as-hell arms. “Anyway, my parents weren’t married and he didn’t want to be involved, I guess, so my mom didn’t put his name on the birth certificate. She only told me his name last year.”
“That must’ve been so hard on her, doing it all alone.”
“We did okay, but back then it was, I think. And then her company was all pissed that she got pregnant and fired her.”
“Really? Can they do that?”
She shrugs. “They did it anyway. I mean, from the start she wasn’t a favorite. Had to pretty much claw her way into the company, even though she was one of the best dancers.”
“Why?”
She gives me an Oh, come on look and presses her fingertips onto my wrist, her skin even darker against all my pale.
“Oh,” I say softly.
She waves a hand and then wraps her arms around her knees. “She had me and opened up a studio with a couple of friends of hers from college. It’s just been me and her ever since. I think meeting my dad now would just confuse me.”
“How do you mean?”
“I don’t know. I mean, he’s white. He’s a man. He may be a stellar human being, but how would I know? I’m curious, sure. I think about him a lot and maybe someday I’ll look him up, but I think he’d just . . . complicate how I see myself. It’s already hard enough.”
“What’s hard? I mean, about how you see yourself?”
She smiles, but there’s no mirth in it. “Other people’s voices can get really loud. When I was a kid, hardly anyone looked like me and I’d spit back stuff I heard people say at school and at dance. My mom would get so mad. She was really good about building me up, pointing out all the great things about being who I am, about being myself. And it worked. I like myself, I do. But I’m still—” She presses her lips flat and looks away. “It’s just hard sometimes, that’s all. I get really anxious, like there’re too many things in my head, too much to feel. I’ve always been like that, even before Mom . . . anyway. You wouldn’t really understand.”
I frown because I want to understand. No, I’m not a black girl and my mom’s not dead and I have no idea what that’s like, but I feel this weird tug in my chest, a hook pulling me toward her. Like some foundational part of me, while different from Eva’s experience, does understand. Needs to.
“That’s why I like to color,” she says. “Chills me out, slows down my thoughts, and makes everything make sense. Colors, lines, patterns. No matter how intricate, it’s still ordered, you know?”
“Piano does that for me.”
She nods. “Ballet used to. I loved the method to it, you know? Choreography, positions, technique, the beats of the music. But how I still had all this freedom to—”
“Make it your own.”
She smiles at me. “Exactly.”
“And ballet doesn’t do that anymore?”
She shrugs and looks away. “There’s a lot of freedom in coloring, too.”
Her answer reeks of bullshit, but I don’t push her. “Sounds like I need to try it out.”
“You do. Preferably on a windy day at the beach.”
“With some peanut butter.”
“Always with peanut butter.” She smiles and rests her cheek on her knee, watching me. “So what about you? Where’s your dad?”
“Oh. He died in Afghanistan.”
Her eyes widen. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I was two. I don’t really remember him.”
She nods and we fall silent. I’m sure she’s thinking about her mom. I want to ask more, ask if she’s okay, ask what I can do, but it all sounds so formulaic. Besides, I’ve been trying to help my mom through her grief for years. You don’t get it, Grace. You don’t understand, she’d always say when she was really struggling. And maybe I don’t. Maybe I can’t. There’s a huge chasm of difference between losing someone you never really knew and losi
ng someone who encompassed your entire world.
“Why doesn’t Luca have a chance with you?” I finally ask. Apparently, when silence gets too oppressive, I like to vomit up some awkward-as-ass questions.
Her eyes widen in surprise, but one corner of her mouth ticks up in a little smile. “He told you that?”
“Yep.”
“Damn. Boy is ruining my mystique.”
She laughs and I laugh, but she won’t look at me. Instead, she trains her gaze on the water. A yellow-orange ray from the lighthouse’s beam a few miles away swings over the waves and she follows it.
Up, over, away.
Up, over, away.
I hear her take a few breaths, the inhale before speaking, but the words never come.
Until they do.
“I like girls, Grace.”
Her words seem to flutter on the wind, tossed this way and that until they land between us.
Chapter Eleven
I LIKE GIRLS, GRACE.
Well, sure, who doesn’t? I think at first. Because that’s exactly what my mother said to me once, her oh-so-maternal retort to a very similar confession.
I like girls, Grace.
I look at Eva, the way she chews at her bottom lip and focuses on the swirls she’s drawing in the sand, nervousness cascading off her in waves. Still, her mouth bends into the tiniest of smiles.
My mind slows and retreats to three years ago and Natalie Fitzgerald, the sixteen-year-old lifeguard at the cape’s community pool. All the boys fawned over her, brought her sodas, and offered to slather her back with SPF 40. Girls got to the pool early so they could see her arrive and catch a glimpse of what en vogue outfit she had on over her red one-piece.
Me? I was somewhere in between. Always had been with girls. For a long time, when I was a little younger, I thought that was how every girl saw other girls—this mix between beauty and awe and curiosity, a thin layer of lust just underneath. Took until I was fourteen to realize that no, the way I thought about other girls was a little different.
Natalie’s long dark hair tumbled down her back. She always wore it loose, even when she was on duty, and her tanned body was smooth and lean from years of swim team. I couldn’t help but watch her every time she got out of her chair to check the pool’s chemical levels, every time she dove into the water during adult swim. If she was moving, I was watching, something stirring low in my stomach. The same kind of feeling I knew was flaring in Luca’s gut as well. His mouth practically hung wide open for that entire summer.
I didn’t tell him the thoughts swirling around my head about Natalie, not even when the three of us struck up a pool-only friendship, but he asked anyway. That’s how Luca was and is and always will be.
“So, you like Natalie, right?” he had asked one hot day. I’d just flopped back on the towel after Natalie had called me over to her chair to make me listen to some new singer she liked on her phone.
“What do you mean?” I’d asked back.
He tilted his head at me. “Natalie. You like her.”
“Um . . .” I thought about denying it, only because I wasn’t sure what I felt exactly. But then his question Ping-Ponged around in my head as I caught a glimpse of Natalie pulling up her perpetually slipping bathing-suit strap. My mouth went dry and my heart felt too heavy in my chest.
“Yeah. I think I do,” I’d said quietly.
Luca nodded and smiled, like it was the most natural thing in the world. And for me, I guess it was.
Later that fall, he was pretty baffled when I started dating and messing around with guys, but I liked them, too. It took several conversations with Luca, both of us sitting cross-legged on his Star Wars bedspread, for him to get it. For me to get it.
“Is Grace only kissing guys because she thinks she should?” he’d asked a Magic 8 Ball, shaking it so vigorously, the whole bed vibrated. We were fifteen and I’d just made out with Nate Landau at a party the previous weekend. Luca made a face at the ball’s answer, then presented it to me.
My sources say no.
I’d laughed and grabbed the 8 Ball out of his hands. “Does Luca still suck his thumb in his sleep?”
Without a doubt.
Luca fake-gasped and knocked the 8 Ball out of my hands. He grinned, but it melted quickly. “Seriously, Grace. Help me understand this.”
I huffed loudly, lying back on the bed and staring at the ceiling so I didn’t have to look at Luca’s earnest gaze. “I like kissing guys, all right?” And I did. I still do.
“So you’re not gay?” Luca asked.
I remember blinking about a million times, the ridges in the ceiling’s plaster flashing in and out of my vision. I rolled the word and all that it entailed around in my head a few times. It didn’t fit. It wasn’t me and I said as much.
“Okay,” Luca said. “But would you have kissed Natalie? I mean, if she’d wanted to?”
God, the thought alone made my arms break out in goose bumps. All that softness. Sameness. “Yeah. Yeah, I definitely would have.”
His eyes narrowed on me. It wasn’t a judgmental look, only curious and just . . . Luca. He watched me for a few seconds before he broke into a grin, tapping his finger on his chin. “You know, I think there’s a word for this.”
I looked away from him and my cheeks flamed up—not from embarrassment, but from knowing. From realization, because I was pretty sure there was a word for it too.
“You’re a little baby bisexual.” And even though my stomach flipped over, a little rhythmical yes humming through my veins, I laughed at the way Luca was trying to make sure I felt okay about it all, slipping something lighthearted into the middle of a large truth. He reached out and patted my shoulder, but I arced out of his reach and snapped my teeth at him.
“Bad bisexual,” he said.
The conversation devolved into laughter and noogies, but then that was that. Luca never made me feel weird about it. Never questioned when I dated guys. Never cocked a suspicious brow when I looked a little too long at some pretty girl. He let me be. And I knew the word fit me. It felt right. Not as a label, really, but more as a way to simply understand myself.
Still, I’d never dated a girl. I’d never even kissed a girl. Before and after Natalie, there had been a few on the cape and at school who made me feel the same way she did, at least physically, inspiring daydreams during school and those quiet moments alone in bed, my body pulled taut with thoughts that felt so easy and natural to give myself over to.
With the few girls I’ve been attracted to, there was always this guessing game attached to it. And I’d never gotten more than a friendship vibe from any of them. Hell, I barely got that. As Eva said yesterday, I can be a little prickly. I am my mother’s daughter, after all. Either way, there sure as shit hasn’t been any love, with anyone. Jay used to turn me into a puddle just by smiling at me from across the cafeteria, but I wasn’t in love with him. I’m not even sure I can fall in love. All I do know is that there has never been a person who intrigued me enough to find out. Not since Natalie.
Until now.
I mean . . . maybe?
God, I’m dizzy, because like I said, it can be a guessing game with girls. A constant push and pull of hope and crushing that hope so you’re not disappointed. Maybe it’s just me.
I press my fingertips to my forehead to try to get my brain back in place and think of some brilliant, affirming response to Eva’s confession.
Instead, “Oh” is the eloquent retort that comes out of my mouth.
Eva tenses next to me. “Does that . . . bother you?”
“No!” We both startle at how loud my damn voice is. “I mean, no. Of course not. I . . . it’s fine.”
A silence settles over us—a hovering sort of quiet that’s waiting for me to fill it with more words, more truths. But I can’t get it out. It’s not that I’m ashamed. It’s just so damn new, this flesh-and-blood possibility sitting right next to me, the heady jasmine scent coming off her skin and mingling with the salt
y air and sand.
Eva offers a little laugh, leaning back on her hands and stretching out her legs. “Well, I’m glad it’s fine.”
“I didn’t mean that you needed my approval.”
“No, I know. But you never know how someone will react. Took my mom a couple weeks to get her thoughts around it all when I told her.”
“But she was cool with it?”
“Yeah.” She looks down, picking at a loose thread on her shirt. “She loves me no matter what. Loved me. God, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to this past-tense way of thinking.” Sighing loudly, she rubs at her forehead.
“Eva—”
“So what about you?” she asks.
I watch her, feeling again like I should say something comforting. Feeling again like she doesn’t want me to. “Um. What about me?”
“You and Luca? Have you and he ever—”
“Oh my god, no.”
“Why not?”
“He’s like my brother. No, he is my brother.” I cringe for effect and Eva laughs.
“But you and Jay?”
I breathe out a long breath. “Yeah, me and Jay. Unfortunately. But that’s over. Way over. So over.”
“So you’re over?”
I splash some sand onto her feet, and she kicks it onto my legs.
“Are you dating at all right now?” she asks.
My gaze drifts to hers, a slow crawl. “Nope.”
She nods and looks away. “I’ve never even kissed anyone.”
“Are you serious?”
She winces a little, and I feel like a total jerk.
“Sorry,” I say, then put on a fake British accent. It’s really awful. “What I meant was, How very demure of you.”
It does the trick. She laughs. “Trust me it has nothing to do with being demure. I only just came out about a year ago. I mean, I’ve had crushes on a few girls, but they were all straight. Let me tell you how fun that was.”
Natalie’s pitying smile at the end of that summer flashes into my mind. Her soft hand on my shoulder as she turns me around and points out her college boyfriend waiting for her by his black Beamer.
Oh, I think I have a pretty good idea.
How to Make a Wish Page 8