You can date whoever you want, Jamie wrote.
“Oh, reallyyyyy?” I said in a high-pitched whine. I was furiously typing a reply when she texted again.
Sorry. Patronizing. I meant, you don’t have to explain yourself to me.
A pause, and then: But she is straight.
Ugh. As if I needed reminding.
Yeah, as of two years ago, I wrote.
Lol, she replied.
Was that the last time she registered?
I accidentally laughed, even though I was furious.
That’s when we made the list.
I know. I was jk
Well— I started.
Look, she wrote.
We both waited. I watched her bubble flash and disappear four times at least.
It’s none of my business, she wrote finally. That’s it? I thought.
There were a dozen angry texts I wanted to sling at Jamie like arrows. I typed and deleted I get to decide if it’s your business or not, which I wasn’t even sure made sense. Telling Jamie I’d gotten Ruby’s number hadn’t felt as good as I’d expected, but I also hadn’t really thought it through. What else was there for her to say at this point? I had a hot (straight) girl’s phone number, but I hadn’t done anything with it. Jamie clearly didn’t believe in me. So maybe I’d have to make her.
But in the meantime, I wanted peace, and I needed a friend. Specifically, my gay friend, still the only one I knew. God bless Ronni and Alexis, truly the two best straight people I knew after my mom, but there were things they’d never understand the way Jamie did. She wasn’t my girlfriend anymore, but what if I still needed her to be everything else?
Evidently I’d waited too long to compose a reply because Jamie texted again.
Is this always going to be weird?
It was like she’d been reading my mind long-distance. Only it was different coming from the person who’d made it weird by doing the dumping.
You don’t get to ask me that.
OK. That’s fair.
I blinked back surprise tears and took a deep breath. I didn’t want things between us to be weird forever, either. So I offered her an out. I wrote: Sorry. You know how emotional first days make me.
Haha. I do.
I remembered our first day of sophomore year, when Jamie’s mom dropped us off outside, and how I’d teared up on the curb, thinking about how serious life was about to become now that we were no longer freshmen. We didn’t even have drivers’ licenses yet, but we still felt so grown up. Everything up until that point had just been practice; sophomore year was when high school really began. Jamie had had to pull me toward the door by the arm. Somehow I knew she was picturing the same first day I was. I felt my heart grow two degrees warmer. Maybe we really would be okay.
Do you wanna go to Triple Moon on Saturday? Do homework? I wrote, surprising myself.
Are you sure?
Yeah, I texted. Gotta start somewhere.
It wouldn’t be easy, I knew, to go back there. Triple Moon had been our place. But Triple Moon was also my favorite place in the world, and I couldn’t stay away forever. Two weeks earlier I’d gotten a concerned email from Dee asking where we’d been, and I’d had to tell her that Jamie and I broke up. Her reply was brief, but so gentle and kind it made me cry. I wanted to see her again, and Gaby, too. And as much as it might hurt to go back there with Jamie, I couldn’t imagine being there without her.
* * *
—
Jamie was the one who found Triple Moon, obviously. When she told me about it freshman year, I didn’t know this would become our dynamic: Jamie told me what we should do, or where we should go, and I followed.
We met in Algebra I, though we only sat next to each other for a week and a half before it became clear to our teacher that Jamie did not belong there. He arranged to transfer her to Algebra 2/Trigonometry, the students of which called it “Squeeze” for short, because as geniuses, they were far too busy to say the whole name. Jamie and I were devastated. We acted like she’d been conscripted into the army. I had other friends, from soccer and middle school, but the thought of getting through the day without seeing this girl I’d only just met was unbearable. Jamie told me she’d flunk out on purpose, that she’d be back in Algebra I in no time. I held out hope until the semester ended.
In the meantime, we texted and slipped notes into each other’s lockers. We wrote about our favorite movies and TV shows and books. We wrote about our families, Jamie’s overbearing parents and my divorced ones. Because Jamie had gone to a different middle school, I filled her in on the first- and second-tier popular kids in our grade, and who was dating whom. One day I opened one of her notes—always neon-blue or purple writing on black paper, folded into a triangle—and read: Who’ve you gone out with?
I still had the note. It was faded gray, pressed flat between the pages of The Return of the King.
When I read it, I knew. We’d been dancing around the inevitable for weeks by that point—some abstract point of connection between us, some fundamental recognition that we had something essential and rare in common. Jamie was asking me without asking me if I liked girls. And I was pretty sure that because she was asking, she already knew the answer, because she liked girls too.
So I came out to her, and she came out to me. We were afraid to put it in writing, so we made plans to meet one Saturday morning, at a coffee shop Jamie had been waiting for a reason to go into: Triple Moon, which I’d seen but never really noticed. We got our moms to drop us off at noon and told them to pick us up at two. At one we texted them to say actually, make it 3:00. At two-thirty we said actually, make it 4:00. Wait—4:30.
Triple Moon was the first place I ever felt safe being fully myself. It was where I first said the words I’m gay out loud. It was where I found so many books that changed my life: Rubyfruit Jungle, Keeping You a Secret, Summer Sisters, Annie on My Mind, Women, The Miseducation of Cameron Post. The owners, Dee and Gaby, kept two giant mismatched bookshelves crammed full of dog-eared, marked-up LGBTQ books left there by customers. Taped to the top shelf was a handwritten note outlining the books’ honor system: you could borrow whatever you wanted, up to two at a time, so long as you brought them back in readable condition when you were done. And if you bought a new queer book, from their small selection or somewhere else, you were encouraged to leave it on their shelves when you were done, for someone else to discover.
Triple Moon was also where Jamie and I fell in love, though it took nearly two years for us to notice. Before we were girlfriends we were friends, I reminded myself. Somewhere inside we must still know how.