“Ice cream? Is that really part of the coming-out process?”
“Hells yes. Ben and Jerry have lasted so long together—they’re our role models.”
“And then…?”
“And then we might invite Taylor over. So I can get to know him, since it looks like he’s my best friend’s boyfriend.”
I try to say this casually, but I stumble a little. After all, it’s the first time I’ve ever had to say it.
“Oh, Mark,” Katie says, concerned. “Is that really smart? You don’t have to do that.”
“No, it’s okay. I’m told that if you’re going to fall in love with someone, it’s always best to fall for someone who’s going to love you back. That’s never going to happen with Ryan, and I am strangely okay with it. At least for now.”
“The heart is a treacherous beast.”
“But it means well.”
Katie smiles. “Yes—the heart is a treacherous beast, but it means well. That just about sums it up.”
“What they never tell you is that it’s actually the friendship part that’s harder. Kissing is easy. Kissing has its own politics, but at the end of the day, it’s kissing. It’s the real stuff—the being-part-of-each-other’s-lives piece of it—”
“—being close to twins without being twins—”
“Yes! That is both the challenge and the reward.”
I look at Katie and know that sometimes it isn’t all that hard, that sometimes you can just fall into step with someone and keep pace for a good long time. Again, it amazes me that a week ago we barely knew each other’s names. Now we’re on this journey together. I know I can only help her so much and she can only help me so much—ultimately, we have to solve our own problems. But it helps to have someone else in step. It helps to have someone to talk to when it’s time to take a break from solving everything.
“So,” I say, “do you think you’ll be talking to Lehna today?” It was obvious last night from her shell-shocked reaction to Lehna’s poem that Katie needs to resolve some of the sentences they’ve left dangling.
“I will,” she says. And then she says it again, as if the first time wasn’t certain enough. “I’ve already talked to my parents about taking a break from the whole college plot. And I still need to talk to Violet about where the hell we go from here. I’ve loved her wandering heart for so long … but I have no idea what all that wandering means for her and me. I feel the urge for going, but I have no idea if it’s meant to be a solo exploration or not.”
“You’ll figure it out,” I say. Not because it’s this vacuous space-filler of a thing to say, but because I genuinely believe it. Katie is going to figure it out. She has enough of the world in her hands to do that.
“Thank you,” she says. Then she leans over and gives me a kiss on the cheek. “Now go help that boy find his way. And remember—as supportive as you want to be, if he and Taylor start being all boyfriendly, you have every right to leave the room and get some space. Empathy is wonderful, but you can still overdose on it if you try too much too fast. Noted?”
“Noted.”
“And while I will turn a blind eye to your willful disregard of your educational responsibilities today, I shall fully expect to be seeing you tomorrow for the grand finale, and again for the full host of Pride Weekend activities, not the least of which is the parade on Sunday. For all her worldliness, Violet’s never seen a pride parade, and I swear by Tegan, Sara, and the Holy Ghost that we’ll be showing her the best one ever.”
“It will be Ryan’s first as well.”
“How lucky they are to have us!” Katie says.
I kiss her back on the cheek and say, “How lucky indeed.”
20
Kate
Making my way toward Lehna at lunch, I feel the closest I’ve ever felt to being one of those lonely freshmen in the first days of school. The unfortunate boys and girls whose families have uprooted them just in time for high school, or the quirky, formerly homeschooled kids, or the kids who live in nearby, more dangerous towns and have found their way, through lottery luck or parental cunning, to our suburban haven of a school.
Lehna and I use to say blessings for them. Let purple backpack kid with the scarf find his people. Pigtailed girl with brand-new white Converse, head north to the circle of girls with their Sharpies out and make those shoes your own.
Eventually, unless they were very unlucky, each of them would find somewhere to belong, but for those first self-conscious, wandering days when they nibbled their sandwiches with their heads down, Lehna and I agonized on their behalf. We had arrived at school hand in hand, both of us newly out to the world with a summer’s worth of scavenged rainbow paraphernalia gracing our backpacks. Rainbow friendship bracelets, Legalize Gay T-shirts, the paper bag covers for our textbooks emblazoned with all the Tegan and Sara songs we knew by heart, which was every one of them.
We were beacons to the other queer kids. We got the hard part over with in eighth grade. No awkward boys asking us to Homecoming, thankyouverymuch. June and Uma, then strangers to us and each other, found us by the rainbow glow of our backpacks. A boy named Hank found us, too, and for six months he filled our lives with comic books and Frank Ocean. And then he started dating Quinn and his parents found out, and he began his slow fade from our school and, eventually, from our lives altogether.