Jamie reluctantly moved her planner. “Thanks.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Any updates on Gaby’s ETA?” I asked.
Dee snorted as she walked away.
“You’re going to ask her about Sweets,” said Jamie. It wasn’t a question; she always, always knew what I was up to. It was incredibly annoying.
I shrugged. “I thought I might mention it, as long as we’re here.”
“Right.”
“Unless you want to? Since it was your idea?”
“Nah,” said Jamie. “I’m good.”
“You sure? Am I going to find out you’re mad about this in three to six months?”
I knew Jamie very well too.
“I just want Sweets to still exist, as a band,” she said. “I don’t care how that’s accomplished.” She took a sip of her coffee and made a small, almost imperceptible face.
“Miss the vanilla?”
“No,” she lied.
I looked over at Dee behind the counter to find her looking at me. Processing, she mouthed.
Jamie sat up straight, assuming her Serious Student position, so I opened Frankenstein and started reading:
I am by birth a Genevese, and my family is one of the most distinguished of that republic. My ancestors had been for many years counsellors and syndics, and my father had filled several public situations with honour and reputation. He was respected by all who knew him for his integrity and indefatigable—
I set the book down. Jamie eyed me over the top of her computer screen.
“What are you working on?” I asked.
“A paper.”
“What’s it about?”
“Frankenstein.”
“Funny.”
I opened the book and tried again:
—indefatigable attention to public business. He passed his younger days perpetually occupied by the affairs of his country; a variety of circumstances had prevented his marrying early, nor was it until the decline of life that he became a husband and the father of a family.
“Oh my God,” I muttered.
“It gets better.”
“It would have to.”
I thought about trying again, but the bell chimed behind me, and I turned to see Gaby walk in. Her bob, dyed orangey-red, appeared freshly and unevenly cut, and she was missing the usual ring of turquoise eyeliner. She seemed vaguely clammy, and it looked like she’d spent the morning throwing up. Seeing me and Jamie, though, her whole face lit up.
“Sisters!” she cried.
“Hey, Gaby.”
“Finally,” said Dee.
Gaby’s face fell, and Dee looked instantly regretful. Even when her reasons were entirely legitimate, and her tone light, she hated to make Gaby feel bad. Not for the first time, I wondered how many breakups they’d had before it stuck.
“I’m sooorryyyy,” Gaby whined. “It’s these drops I’m taking. They’re like tranquilizers.”
What none of us said, but what we all thought, was Sure, “the drops.” I didn’t know the full extent of Gaby’s drinking, but I knew she drank more when she was stuck on an art project, and I knew from her tortured Instagram posts that she’d been stuck on the latest for weeks.
I got up from the table to meet Gaby in the office, where she dropped off her bag and threw a stinky tinfoil-wrapped lunch in the tiny refrigerator where they kept bottles of wine cold for events.
“I have a question for you,” I announced.
Gaby pulled her blue pencil and a hand mirror out of her bag and began lining her eyes. “What’s that?”
“What’s the event schedule like over the next few weeks?”
Gaby paused. “Well, we’ve got the Womyn’s Collective Poetry Series on Sunday evenings, obviously—”
“Right.”
“—and on, I think it’s the eighteenth, we have this amazing young performer who does these totally wrenching pieces accompanied by recordings of, like, famous wartime speeches”—I made a mental note not to come to Triple Moon on the eighteenth—“and I want to say there’s a poster-making party on the twenty-fourth for the march next month,” she finished.
“What march?”
It was rare for Gaby to make prolonged eye contact with a person, so when she fixed her eyes on you it was deeply unsettling.
“You baby gays are unbelievable.” Then, just as soon as I’d disappointed her, she was over it. She resumed her eye lining. “Ask Jamie,” she added.
“I will,” I said. “But the reason I asked is because there’s this band.”
I told Gaby about Sweets, and how popular they were with people my age in our area. I promised her the band would handle the marketing to make sure people turned up (I assumed this would work itself out) and assured her they could easily charge a five-dollar cover to defray the setup costs. Gaby frowned at the idea of a fee, but I knew Dee could convince her. Probably she’d tell her it was actually feminist for a queer-run organization like theirs to take money from a bunch of straight people, teenagers or not.
“This is supposed to be a safe space,” said Gaby. “Are all these kids going to honor that?”
I promised her they would and prayed they’d prove me right.
“Why don’t you and Jamie do those gay-club meetings here anymore?”
I sighed. Gaby had asked me this at least once a month for a year.
“The Westville Gay-Straight Alliance is no more. Still.”
“Remind me why?”
(This, the inevitable follow-up. I knew she remembered why. I knew the interrogation was meant mostly to guilt us for insufficient tenacity.)
“Too many straight people.”
Toward the end of our freshman year, a few months after Jamie and I came out to each other, and then to our friends, and then, indirectly, to the rest of the school, Jamie decided she wanted to start a club—mainly because it would be good for her college application, which she was already thinking about, even then, but also because being gay was all we could talk or think about, and we wanted as many outlets as possible. And, as the only out queer people in our class, Jamie said, we had a responsibility to be a beacon of kindness and tolerance for our peers. I did anything Jamie wanted me to, so I agreed to be her vice president. We registered our group with Westville’s indifferent administration and put up posters around the school. By then we’d been to Triple Moon enough times to have a new but friendly rapport with Dee and Gaby, and when we asked if we could host our bimonthly club meetings there, they gladly accepted—Dee because it would mean new customers, and Gaby because it would mean being able to witness young queer community organizing.