Then the day of the first meeting arrived, and Jamie and I presided over a meeting of six straight people. We knew they were straight because whenever they raised their hands to contribute something to our discussion (which, that week, was about a movie about a gay boy played by—you’ll never guess—a straight one), they started all their sentences with “I’m straight, but.” At the next meeting, four of those same straight people showed up. At the third, there were three. After each meeting, Jamie and I went home drained and annoyed, feeling more like someone’s pets than anyone’s leaders. So we dissolved the group, telling each other we’d restart it later on in high school, when there were more queer kids around to join us. But as far as we could tell, there were never more than a handful, and the idea of starting a club got less and less appealing as time went on. To start a club as a junior seemed unimaginably embarrassing. And then we were seniors, which was as good as graduated, and there was no point.
“Well,” said Gaby. “Can’t argue with that.”
“So will you think about having Sweets?”
“I’ll think about it,” she agreed.
“And you’ll talk to Dee, too?”
“I’ll talk to Dee.”
“When do you think you might know by?”
“Quinn.”
“Okay, okay. Thank you.”
Gaby shooed me out of the office and I returned to the table, where Jamie was still tapping away at her keyboard. She didn’t ask me what Gaby and I had talked about, which I found infuriating, if unsurprising. Jamie rarely asked for details because she rarely needed to. Usually, details came to her. When she ignored me, I would do almost anything for her attention.
But Jamie’s attention was something I had to learn to live without. So I picked up Frankenstein and read for as long as I could, and then I got up to look through the bookshelf, hoping to find something I could take home and care for.
I got my good news a little over a very long week later. I was sitting at the kitchen table in my sweaty soccer practice shorts and a sports bra, eating around the still-semi-frozen center of a chicken pot pie, when my mom abruptly announced that I’d gotten some mail from my dad. She tossed me an envelope, business standard white with my name written in slanty blue ink across the front: Quinn Y. Ryan. He always included that middle initial, Y for Yvette, his mother’s name, a name so preposterously femme it felt incorrect when applied to me. Yvette sounded like roller curls and red lipstick, and the few pictures I’d seen of her as a young woman suggested she fit the name exactly. By the time I met her, just a handful of times when I was a kid, she was old and mean, especially to my mom, who uncharacteristically never talked back, and who told me afterward how hard Yvette’s life had been.
I tamped down my excitement, not wanting my mom to see me open the envelope too eagerly. My dad wrote me letters every few months, and he always sent a few twenty-dollar bills along with them. The first time he sent me money, when I started high school, I made the mistake of telling my mom, and she said, “Oh great, forty dollars. Guess we’re even.” I stopped showing her what he sent me after that. He’d left her ten years ago, when I was eight. Sometimes I wondered how many more decades it would be before she could hear his name or say your dad without the corners of her mouth curling down in disapproval. I was sure she didn’t know she was doing it; she’d always encouraged me to maintain a relationship with him as long as I wanted one, and it was important to her, at least conceptually, that I form my own opinion of him. Which was a weird way to think about your parents.
Anyway, the letter was not the good news. Or it was good news, but the better news was the email I got from Gaby minutes later, arriving in my inbox with a whoosh. I’d kept my phone volume on at home ever since Jamie broke up with me, just in case. I slid my finger across the screen and read:
Sweets OK w/ me & D. Calendar w/ avail dates attached. —Gaby
“YES!” I exclaimed.
“What?”
“Dee and Gaby are gonna let this band I like play at Triple Moon.” Band I like, girl I kinda like, same difference. Did I like Ruby? I didn’t think my heart had relearned that emotion yet, but when I imagined giving Ruby the good news, I felt the faintest stirring where liking someone used to go. And then an even bigger thrill when I imagined Jamie finding out.
“What band?”
“They’re called Sweets?”
“Never heard of them.”
“Well, they’re my age, so.”
“Oh, rock on.”
“Mom.”
She grinned. “What have you got going tonight?”
“Eh, not much,” I said. “A little reading and a little math homework. What about you?”
“Mmm, I’ve gotta file by eleven,” she sighed. My mom was a crime reporter at the Union-Tribune, had been for twenty years, which meant I’d gotten the grisliest details on every murder trial and car wreck that happened in the greater metropolitan area since I was old enough to listen, which by her estimation was second grade. She was my own personal after-school special, warning me against the dangers of drinking and driving, texting and driving, using drugs, and befriending troublemakers. On several occasions she’d half jokingly, maybe quarter jokingly, told me she was glad I was gay if only because it meant no boyfriend or husband of mine would ever murder me. What a relief.
“What’s the story?” I asked.
“Money laundering,” she said. “Totally boring.”
“Good luck,” I said.
“Clean up after yourself, okay?”
“I will.”
She hovered in the doorway.
“What?”
“Are you feeling a little better?”
I knew she was asking about Jamie, and I knew she knew I wasn’t yet good. But I told my mom I felt better, a lot better, in fact, because in that moment, I did. Later, when I was in bed with the lights off and my phone was in my hand and both were slid under the cool side of my pillowcase, I would feel a little worse again. I was always surprised when I felt better, and I was always surprised when it didn’t last.
When I heard the door to my mom’s room close upstairs, I ripped open the letter from my dad. I unfolded the standard sheet of loose-leaf paper and found sixty dollars, which I slipped between my phone and its case.
In my dad’s all-caps handwritten scrawl, the letter, which was really more of a note, read:
HEY QUINNIE [ugh],
I’M WAITING FOR THE PEST CONTROL GUY TO COME TO MY APT. MOTHS ARE BACK IN FULL FORCE—YESTERDAY WHEN I WENT TO MAKE OATMEAL I FOUND THREE MIXED IN WITH THE OATS. PRETTY SICK. THE GUY SAID I CAN’T BE HERE WHEN HE SPRAYS SO I THOUGHT I MIGHT HEAD TO RUDY’S FOR A PANCAKE. NOT AS GOOD AS MANTEQUILLA BUT THEY’RE ALL RIGHT. SPEAKING OF—WAS THINKING I MIGHT COME TO TOWN IN A FEW WEEKS TO VISIT A COUPLE FRIENDS. MAYBE WE CAN DO SUNDAY BREAKFAST. PEST GUY’S HERE SO MORE LATER.