“I’m so glad I’ll see you tomorrow night for the show,” she says.
And I don’t trust myself to speak, so I just nod, certain that my face conveys more than enough of my own gladness.
She says goodbye, and I lift my hand in a wave, and on the way back to my car I think of her kiss. I touch my fingers to my lips. I am tingling; I am love-drunk. On the road I hear her voice playing back all the incredible things she said tonight.
I want to tell Mark what happened.
I want to know what it would feel like to say the words, Violet kissed me.
I want to tell Lehna, too, but I don’t know how I’d begin. And I don’t know why she felt she had to lie to us about each other when the real Violet is everything I could wish for. As I pull onto my street, dread creeps in. I’m going to have to talk to Lehna sometime. Soon. But not tonight.
I turn into my driveway and cut off the Jeep’s engine.
Just a few blocks away, Lehna is probably at her dinner table with her parents and her brother, oblivious to the fact that I’ve spent the evening with her cousin. Or maybe not. Maybe Violet is telling her right now. Maybe Lehna is checking to make sure she didn’t miss a text from me, wondering why I didn’t tell her first.
The night is dark now, the windows shining bright. My mom is in the kitchen washing dishes. She waves at me. I pretend not to see her.
I don’t want to walk into my house. I don’t want to walk into my room. I want to go back to Fillmore Street, to the sensation of Violet’s body pressed close, to the sounds of celebration.
When I step out of the Jeep, the warmth of the night startles me. We said goodbye only an hour ago. We stood kissing only thirty miles from here. But now the air doesn’t even feel the same. The old anxieties rush back. I shouldn’t have gotten into UCLA’s art program. I shouldn’t have gotten into the AntlerThorn show. All of my Instagram followers are the result of one very strange and fleeting night, and when Violet finds out who I really am—how normal I am, how unexciting—she’ll be so disappointed.
The truth settles, heavy in my stomach.
Violet kissed me.
But my life is still my life.
11
MARK
I take the train back from the city and walk from the station to Ryan’s house. Exactly what we’d planned to do on Saturday night, before it got hijacked.
I’ve tried to text him to get some sense of what he wants. But he’s not saying. I wonder if it’s possible that my message actually got through. I wonder if it’s possible that we’re really going to have this conversation. I’ve gotten so used to being on the edge of it that I forgot there might be another side.
The closest I ever came was after we watched Milk about a month ago. He smuggled it onto his computer like it was porn. We had to wait until a night when his parents were out in order to watch it. Which was laughable—I really don’t think they would care. But he did. He does.
We had done so many things together by that point, but we’d never wept. Not like that. Not for all the things that could go wrong. Not for all of the good things that could come out of it anyway. When the movie was done, I wanted to take on the world. And there was a strong voice in my head saying, How can you take on the world if you can’t tell him how you feel?
The words were right there. The words are always right there, only an inch away from being said. But he was at a slightly further distance than usual, lost in his reaction to the movie. So instead of talking about us, we talked about history, and about how this year we would get to Pride one way or another.
Now that week is here, and not in the way I thought it would be. I get to his front door and ring the bell even though I don’t have to—I’ve walked in plenty of times without ringing first. But at this moment I want to be announced.
When Ryan opens the door, he’s beaming. Openly giddy.
“Took you long enough!” he says. Then, without another word, he bounds off to his room. I call out a hello to his mom. She doesn’t answer, so I guess she’s not home.
We have the place to ourselves.
Still, Ryan closes the bedroom door behind me. He puts some indie band on the speakers and makes sure the song is wrapping around us. I kick off my shoes and sit on his bed, because that’s what I always do.
“I have so much to tell you,” he says. “So so much.”
He can’t stand still. He’s changing the song. He’s lining up my shoes. He’s fiddling with a tennis racket that for some reason is on his desk.
“Okay,” he says. “Where do I start?”
I see how happy he is. I see how eager he is to talk to me. And I realize with a painful clarity that comes from years of studying his face: This has nothing to do with my message. This has nothing at all to do with us.
He doesn’t sit down next to me. He stays by the desk, fiddling with the racket.
“So the thing is, Taylor is throwing a party tonight and he really, really, really wants me to come. It’s not like a rager or anything—it’s just a Pride thing his friends do. Watching movies and hanging out. It sounds so awesome. I mean, we’ve been texting so much it’s like I already know most of the people who are going to be there. He’s friends with so many artists—there’s this one girl who’s a puppeteer. Like, that’s her life’s work. How cool is that? And Taylor’s cooking—did I tell you he cooks? He’s not braggy about it or anything, but I have this sense that he’s awesome at it, too. I mean, you don’t make the food for your own party unless you’re good, right?”