All Girls

by Emily Layden

  “I’m not saying she’s not smart,” Olivia had said. “I just think even smart people engage in self-preservation.”

  “Do you mean you think it’s not possible for them to have fallen in love in 1978?” Emma had asked, genuinely curious.

  “No,” Olivia sighed, exasperated. “Or, I don’t know. I think that part of the conversation this year has been about power dynamics. Think about the Jamison Jennings interviews and the girls who said they fucked their teachers. They didn’t say they were raped. I bet some of them were eighteen, just like Karen was. But the idea is that the relationship was inherently imbalanced, right?”

  “But Brodie was a grad student at the time, not a high school senior,” Emma said. It was strange to think of themselves in this category, that of the potentially-taken-advantage-of.

  Olivia shrugged. “I’m not sure it matters. Teachers have influence and power by nature of their position. If Brodie accepts that basic principle, she calls into question her own agency in 1978.” At Atwater, a student learns that words like “agency” have sociological definitions. But it’s in Northern California, in a house where the New Yorker comes every week, that a girl learns how to use them in regular conversation.

  Now Collier frowns into her drink. “The whole thing just felt like a cheap shot.”

  “Agreed,” Priya says.

  “I mean, sure—” she adds, “the first time I saw Mr. Rhodes when I was a freshman, I thought, whoa, he’s, like, a lot older than her.”

  In spite of herself, Emma nods. It was noteworthy.

  “But, like,” Addie jumps in, “not every relationship with an age gap is inherently fucked-up, you know? My point is, love is love is love, or whatever, even if it doesn’t always look the way we expect.”

  Olivia wraps an arm around Emma’s waist, curving her fingertips around the place where her torso narrows. “That’s what I always say,” she says, and then she pulls one hand to the side of Emma’s face—careful not to disrupt the hair she sculpted into the perfect messy bun—and brings them together. Her kiss is not indulgent—their tongues barely meet, their lips open for just a moment.

  “Ugh, you guys are adorable,” Collier says thickly.

  “But also so basic,” Karla says, making a blech sound.

  Addie starts laughing. “It’s true! Like, in this room, you are the only two going to prom with a date. Ugh, how mainstream.”

  When the Supreme Court made its decision last summer, Olivia sent Emma pictures from San Francisco: pride flags draped outside city hall, rainbows saturated in the California light. In Ohio, the yard signs and window placards would linger for months: EVERY CHILD DESERVES A MOM AND DAD; MARRIAGE IS BETWEEN A MAN AND A WOMAN. None of them will ever fully understand Emma because her life outside Atwater is like science fiction to them; her hometown is full of aliens. Her girlfriend is pressed into her still, their hip bones stuck together, yet Emma feels anxiety balloon at the top of her sternum, in the little hollow of her clavicle. Her friends think they sidestepped a hard and confusing conversation by walking into an easier one about social norms, because in this corner of Connecticut—and in the places the five of them grew up, Silicon Valley and Brentwood and Washington, DC—it really is as simple as you love who you love. But of course it has never been that simple or easy for Emma at all.

  “All right, all right,” Olivia says. “You think we’re basic? How about this: never have I ever … had a Pinterest account.”

  “Fuck you.” Collier laughs, taking a drink.

  “I can do this all day,” Olivia smirks. “Never have I ever had a Pinterest fail.”

  “Okay, okay, you’ve made your point!”

  Karla makes a mock pouting face. “Pinterest can be very useful when you’re redecorating! Plus, that’s two turns in a row.”

  “I still think Coll should drink, though,” Addison says.

  Priya sets down her glass with a dramatic gulp. She wipes her lips with the middle part of her index finger, tapping at any liquid caught in the hairs above her lip. “All right, I’ve got one,” she begins. “Never had I ever”—and here Emma can’t be sure, she’ll replay the moment over and over in the weeks to come, but she swears that Priya looks directly at her—“had a Tumblr.”

  “Oh, why, because Tumblr is for lesbians?” Olivia emphasizes the z sound at the end of the first syllable.

  “Hey!” Priya shouts, pulling an arm from her side and extending a long manicured pointed finger at Emma. “Knew it!”

  Olivia rotates her shoulders, drops her chin, and raises her eyebrows. Emma does not entirely meet her gaze; she looks at her girlfriend, then back at Priya, then down quickly into the depths of her cup, where the liquid swirls in a viscous circle.

  “You didn’t know about this, did you?”

  “I did not,” Olivia says, and her voice is light, teasing, as though she’s waiting for the punch line.

  “Show us!” Collier whips out her phone and starts tapping.

  “Oh, no, no, no, it’s stupid—” The same mild drunkenness that gave Emma the courage and false sense of camaraderie to lower her finger now causes her to sweat, to swing from insouciance to paranoia.

  “Wait a minute,” Priya says, “this isn’t like a past tense thing, like you had a Tumblr? You have a Tumblr? You didn’t delete it?”

  It takes Emma a beat to process, to realize what Priya means, the fact unraveling before her quickly—and she is struck with the familiar shame of being not quite savvy enough.

  “What’s your handle?”

  Emma looks at Olivia, eyes wide, pleading, willing her girlfriend to understand—but of course Olivia thinks it’s a joke, a relic from middle school. She has no idea.

  “Don’t look at me like that!” Olivia throws her hands up. “You think I’m not just as curious about the angst-ridden blog posts of a curious and questioning preteen Emma?”

  Emma had a friend in elementary school who had the remarkable ability to make herself vomit on command. It was a stunt she saw her pull more than once: in the hallway after morning snack, because she wanted to go home; on the playground during recess, because Mrs. Mooney was yelling at her for throwing the four-square ball directly in Jackson Plowman’s face, knocking his glasses off and causing them to crack against the blacktop, and she didn’t want to get in trouble. Puking is a great elicitor of sympathy.

  She sighs.

  “Ryderdietownie, with a y and an e, like Winona Ryder.”

  Olivia raises her eyebrows. “Winona Ryder?

  This is not close to the worst of it. “I had just seen that movie The Private Lives of Pippa Lee,” she offers. “I was obsessed with it. With Robin Wright and Julianne Moore and Blake Lively?”

  “And you didn’t know you were gay?”

  “I had a hunch.”

  “Aha! Got it!” Collier shouts. “Ooh, boy.”

  All five of the girls crowd around Collier, who holds her phone out from her body far enough for everyone to have a view. Emma does not join them. She knows what they see.

  “Wait—”

  “Scroll up,” Addison says. “You updated this today!”

  Emma thinks of the photo of the gold necklace: Two linked Venus symbols, the circle at the top of each transformed into a heart. The pendant falls against the wearer’s baby pink T-shirt. She remembers, with a hot flush of fresh humiliation, the meme about the Disney character from the nineties: it’s a kind of meter, placing her character in various stages on a scale from femme to butch. At the time, she thought it was funny.

  “Old habits die hard,” Emma says.

  Addison hoots. “I thought this was, like, some embarrassing middle school secret!”

  “It was,” Emma says. “It is.”

  Collier and Karla pull away from the phone. Karla leans toward the mirror anchored on Collier’s closet door, tilting her face slowly from side to side, confirming that she looks as pretty as she suspects she does. Collier finds her own phone, scrolling mindlessly while she finishes her dr
ink. That their attention is short-lived does not surprise Emma, not really, but now that the group has begun to move on she does feel a vague kind of disappointment, the same feeling she’d have at a birthday party when a friend would open her gift—a gift Emma had selected painstakingly, the gift that was the perfect combination of the friend’s desires and their shared inside jokes—and nonetheless move on to the next present. The party was supposed to stop; she could not be outdone.

  “We’ve gotta go. The bus leaves in five,” Addison says suddenly.

  “I’ve gotta pee first,” Priya says.

  “Me too,” Emma agrees, if for no other reason than to reassert herself into the normalcy of the conversation, to not let on that anything at all is wrong.

  * * *

  In the darkness of a rural Connecticut 8:00 P.M., the estate that hosts Atwater’s prom glows, sending an aura into the night sky. It announces its existence before the bus has even turned down the half-mile private road, buffered by split-rail fencing on either side, an incongruous nod to the home’s nineteenth-century establishment. The alumna who owns the house is a hotel heiress, although since she served as the treasury secretary to a Republican president some administrations ago it is more polite to refer to her by her own accomplishments, rather than the fortune that was bequeathed to her.

  Access to the main house is limited to the catering crew and event staff and Atwater faculty; students are limited to the tent, the gardens, the pool, and the high-end “luxury portable bathrooms” that Atwater rents for tens of thousands of dollars and furnishes with designer hand soaps and little bottles of mouthwash and tampons. (This expense, too, is made possible by the property owner, who was perfectly fine with Atwater students using the house bathrooms despite Atwater’s misgivings about letting its students have the run of an empty seven-thousand-square-foot house.) Last year, both literally drunk and a little bit punch-drunk, giddy with the openness of their romance, Emma and Olivia had wandered from the tent Atwater pitches on the long expanse of flat and golf course–perfect lawn that extends from the back of the main house and explored the property. They counted three additional houses, not including the pool house or the (empty) stables.

  On the ride to the estate, Olivia was quiet. Emma tried once or twice to chatter about the game—Actually I wouldn’t put it past Priya to have slept with, like, somebody’s dad—or their destination—Do you think they’ll have avocado fries again this year?—but Olivia’s answers were monosyllabic. As the bus grinds to a halt now and opens its doors with a mechanical exhale, the music inside the cabin mingles momentarily with the music that thumps from the party itself, filtering through the clear spring night, over the chimneys and peaked windows of the Georgian mansion that towers before them. It presents as a backbeat to the central notes: heels crunching against the gravel of the driveway; the clang and clatter of chefs and cater waiters moving between the main house and the tent; the shouts of their classmates from the dance floor and garden beyond. The excitement is enough to ensure that no one notices the way Olivia does not reach behind her to help Emma down the bus stairs, or the way she keeps a half step in front of her as they make their way across the driveway and through the gardens along the side of the house, canopied by century-old willow trees, or the way she does not ask Emma for her opinion before choosing a seat at a table near the edge of the tent.

  There are always twice as many girls as boys at Atwater dances, but for some reason the ratio always stands out more at prom, perhaps because of its more traditional trappings. Other “dances” are really more like the local YMCA’s Kids’ Night Out: there’s dancing but also activities both structured and unstructured (air hockey in the student lounge; poker tables at Casino Night) and fried food served from under the fluorescent lighting of the Lathrop Snack Shack. On those nights, Emma’s classmates huddle and hunt in packs, removing themselves from coed scenarios conspiratorially, plotting next steps and next texts in an effort to secure a hookup before the night ends and the visiting buses depart. Over the years—particularly since they started hosting it here, at an estate that might as well be Litchfield County’s Versailles—prom has become for Atwater students something like Ringing or Vespers: something just for them.

  “Guys!” Karla gasps from two tables away, clutching a cocktail napkin in one hand. “They did the avocado fries again! With the aioli!” She takes a bite and makes an exaggerated groan, a food-induced orgasm.

  “You know that aioli is just a fancy word for mayonnaise, right?” Priya snarks.

  “The French are better at everything,” Karla says. She turns on her heels and snakes through the tables back to where the cater waiters enter the tent.

  “I think Priya gets bitchier when she drinks,” Emma says, leaning her head toward Olivia.

  “Mmm.” Olivia makes a noncommittal mumble and nods her chin once.

  “Liv. Can we talk?”

  “We are talking.” It’s a petty, childish answer that is so atypical for Olivia that Emma feels as though the earth beneath them is suddenly molten.

  “Liv. Please.”

  “This is not the right time,” Olivia says, and for the first time since standing in Collier’s dorm room Olivia looks Emma directly in the eyes.

  “It’s never the right time!” Emma hisses, and the words escape her lips before she is sure what she means by them.

  Olivia tilts her head slightly.

  Emma looks at her feet, feeling the way the edges of her sandals press into the curve of her outermost metatarsal. “I just—I mean that we—” She pauses, searching: “I mean that you don’t like people to know that we ever fight. We always, like, put on a little bit of an act when we’re in a crowd.”

  It’s the first time Emma has ever seen Olivia’s jaw do anything that resembles dropping. Her lips part slightly, her eyes widen—but it’s the tiniest flash, only the briefest loss of control. Olivia swallows, purses her lips, and then says, very evenly: “I can’t believe you would have the nerve to say that to me right now.”

  And suddenly Emma remembers: her phone, facedown on Collier’s desk, left behind when she went to the bathroom. “Liv—” she begins.

  Olivia shakes her head, the smallest one-two, and turns and makes her way out from under the tent and into the gardens. Emma follows her, her heels sinking into the soft and still-wet spring earth. Of all the New England seasons, spring is her least favorite for the way it’s so unsure of itself: it lacks the conviction of summer or winter, ferocious in their extremes; nor is it fall’s mirror image, because fall is perhaps Connecticut’s best-defined season, with its leaf peeping and carved pumpkins and corn mazes and mornings marked by frost melting on the grass. Spring’s defining characteristic seems to be that it comes and goes before you can be sure you’re inside it.

  They wander past the gardens to the pool area beyond, which is sanctioned off by a double layer of intruder protection: hedges manicured at right angles stand in front of iron fencing, whose arrow-like tips barely peek above the boxwood. The pool is still covered—a disappointment every year, when someone suggests as the party winds to a close that they should all jump in, gowns and hair and makeup and all, only to discover that no one in Connecticut opens their pool before Memorial Day—but the caretakers light the patio for the evening, likely to prevent anyone from accidentally falling onto the blue tarp that stretches across the pit. The patio is bordered on three of its four sides with slate benches built into a small rock wall; it’s the kind of decorative touch only incredibly rich people would consider, like refrigerators built to blend into the surrounding cabinetry. Olivia takes a seat facing away from the main house, her back to the tent and her classmates. Emma joins her, but is careful not to slide so close to her that even the excess fabric from their gowns might touch. For a little while, they don’t say anything: they try to decipher the music as it evaporates into the air; watch as their classmates wander in pairs and quartets across the lawn to their right, either not noticing Olivia and Emma or sensing,
even through the giddy veil of a pleasant drunkenness, that they do not want to be bothered.

  When she cannot stand the quiet between them any longer, Emma says, “I’m sorry.” It seems like a safe bet, a way in.

  “What are you sorry for?” Olivia directs her words out toward the tarp-topped crater ahead of them rather than at Emma.

  “Keeping the Tumblr a secret. I don’t want to keep secrets from you.”

  Next to her, Olivia rubs her temples, her head in her hands, propped up by her elbows against her thighs. “I just want to know,” she says, “is it just an online thing? Or have you, like, met in real life, too?”

  The dread descends thick and heavy like childhood fears of monsters and murderers at night. Terror mushrooms inside her. In the darkness Emma feels her face flush from her nose to the tips of her ears, all the way to the helix piercing Olivia gave her sophomore spring, the two of them up late on an April night, looking for excuses to extend their minutes together. Olivia had held an ice cube to Emma’s ear, catching the melt in the palm of her hand. Again: the image of her phone, facedown on Collier’s desk corner. She sighs through her nose. “When I went to the bathroom, right?”

  “What?”

  “You kept looking at my Tumblr when I went to the bathroom.”

  “Seriously? That’s the approach you’re going to take here? I was snooping?”

  “No—” Emma pauses. She really didn’t mean it that way; she was just curious. Later, she’d want to be able to explain how it all happened.

  “So who is she?”

  From under the wisteria-cloaked willow across the lawn, her classmates giggle, high-pitched and bubbling. Above them, Emma finds Orion, first by the three stars that mark his belt. It’s the only constellation she can reliably pinpoint, easier even than the Dippers. She decides to start at the beginning, with middle school and the bus and Laurie. The internet was her safe space, she explains, it helped her discover who she was—to name the things she could not yet name—and then it gave her a place to be that person before she was ready to be that person in front of everybody else. It was like a virtual dress-up bin: she logged on and became Emma, Lesbian, like how politicians on television have their party affiliation next to their name. If it didn’t work out—if she was wrong about being gay—she could just delete it, disappear Lesbian Emma with a few clicks.