Yet somehow, this fall, we are going to different schools. Me to Columbia in New York City. Saz to Northwestern in Chicago. We’ve agreed not to talk about it until the end of summer because the thought of being separated is unbearable.
Saz pulls a bottle of vodka out of her bag. She passes it to me and I drink, hating the taste. What I do like is the warm, burning feeling I get in my chest as soon as I swallow. Like there’s a little furnace deep inside. We sit, staring out over the city. Since sophomore year, this is where we come when we don’t want to talk but need to feel better. We think of it as our Art Institute, the way we think of I-70 as our highway, and Mary Grove as our town, even if we don’t fit in.
I pass the bottle back to Saz, but she shakes her head. “Driving.”
I take a drink for her.
“Hen,” she says, “I have something to tell you.” She’s been calling me Hen, short for Henry, short for Claudine Henry, since we were ten years old. Lew, I want to say. Call me Lew instead. I’m Claudine Llewelyn now.
I have something to tell you, too.
She breathes out as if she’s been holding her breath for a long time. “I slept with Yvonne.” Before I can say, But we just saw her with Leah last night—or was it days ago? she says, “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you when it happened.”
I say the first thing that comes to mind: “But she’s got a girlfriend.”
“They’ve been off and on for a while.”
“When did you sleep with her?”
“Three weeks ago. Remember when Mara and I went to Adam Katz’s? That weekend you were hanging out with Shane? It happened then.”
I say, “Oh.”
Three weeks ago.
“I know we were supposed to wait to fall in love and have sex so we could do it at the same time, but we were ten when we made that pledge, Hen. You know I’ve dated. Maybe not a lot. Not as much as Alannis.”
“No one dates as much as Alannis.”
“Right? But, I don’t know, no one’s ever really mattered before. Like this. I mean, they mattered, but they didn’t get in there. As in right here.” She rubs at the area over her heart and then thumps it twice. “I didn’t see it coming. I didn’t see her coming. I guess you’re not supposed to.” And she smiles, lost in the memory of Yvonne.
For some reason, this news hits me almost as hard as the news about my parents, because here is another secret someone was keeping from me. I am a person other people feel the need to keep things from, and all the things I thought were truths aren’t actually truths. I can feel my lungs give out. I stare down at the concrete steps, but they’re no longer there. There’s only all this air between my feet and the ground.
I clear my throat, which has suddenly gone completely dry. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I don’t know. I should have told you. I just wasn’t sure what it was, what we were, Yvonne and me. I guess I wanted to figure that out first.”
“And did you? Figure it out?”
“Not completely, not yet. But I didn’t want to not tell you about it any longer.”
“You mean you didn’t want to keep it a secret any longer.”
“Yeah.”
Even as I sit there guarding my own secret, hers stings like an open wound. I want her to take it all back and rebuild the stairs so we can sit on them together, side by side, just like always.
“Did Yvonne make you swear you wouldn’t say anything? Because she was still with Leah?”
“No. The fact that I didn’t tell you, that’s on me. Besides, virginity is so fucking subjective, Hen. It’s like something made up by the old, straight, white men who run this country, or whoever their equivalent was back in ancient times, to make you feel left out and less than and somehow incomplete. It doesn’t actually mean anything, not to me.”
“But your first time with Yvonne meant something.”
“Yeah. It meant everything.” And her voice cracks—like, actually cracks, as if it can’t begin to hold all the emotion she’s carrying.
I should put my hurt and anger aside and ask Saz what it was like, how she’s feeling, what this means for her and Yvonne. I should ask her something about her because this is momentous and big and, like it or not, Yvonne is happening. But when I open my mouth, the only thing I’m capable of saying is that I might be pregnant with Shane Waller’s baby.
“You know it’s not the 1950s, right? Like, you have other options if you somehow are pregnant, which by the way you aren’t.”
“He thinks I’m a series of boxes, and every time he opens one, there’s another one inside.” I look down, past the place where the steps used to be, and the ground has disappeared too.
She says, “I think we both know there’s only one box he wants to get into.”
* * *
—
It’s thirty-five miles to Mary Grove. Instead of talking, we blast the music so loud that I can feel it entering my bloodstream, taking root in my bones. Saz drives with one arm out the window. She takes a corner too fast and we’re yelling along with the song, and I pull my hair back because it’s blowing and blowing and if I don’t hold it back I’ll swallow it whole. With my free hand I grab the vodka bottle and drink, and the burning and the bone-vibrating music make me feel alive. We reach Mary Grove in twenty minutes because Saz drives faster than anyone I know, even my dad.
In the glow of the dashboard, I study the inside of my arm, where the bruises are. The little bruises from the little pinches I gave myself sometime between this morning and right now, just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming this.
We turn into my neighborhood, following the curve and slope of the road.
I can still tell her.
We go down one hill.
I can tell her now.
Round a bend. Another.
I can open my mouth and let the words come out, and then she will know and she can help me make sense of this and I won’t be alone, and then it will all be real.
The car rolls to a stop in front of my house. We sit there a moment, the music still playing. I don’t want to go inside. I don’t want to see my parents.
But I can’t sit here forever, because Saz will want to know what’s going on, so I start to get out of the car. She leans over the seat and lays a hand on my arm, stopping me. “You realize this isn’t the end of us, right? Not just you going to New York and me to Chicago, but Yvonne and me? Falling in love wasn’t about you, Hen, or all the plans we had. It’s about this girl I really like and the right, I don’t know, moment. But there’ll never be an end of us.”