Chapter 1
2216 Words
Chapter One
Nobody greeted me at the door, but that was nothing new.
I had grown up to empty houses, just another latchkey kid. It didn’t bother me all that much, though. I can’t say I even really cared about it, anymore.
But it is something I always noticed.
It’s the sort of thing you never stop noticing.
“I’m home,” I called again, wondering if perhaps my Mom was just doing the laundry, or having an afternoon nap. “Mom?”
Silence.
Oh well, I expected as much. I didn’t mind having the house to myself, truth be told. It’s can sometimes be really nice to have the whole place to yourself… to do whatever you want, without judgment or comment.
I shut the door behind me and locked it, and whispered to myself, “Rough day, Kathy.”
It had been a rough day… perhaps one of the roughest in my life. At least, that I could remember.
It wasn’t the kind of rough day that was long or exhausting… it was the kind of rough day that was terrifying and heartbreaking.
I didn’t know how I was going to deal with what had happened… what I was going to do about it.
Instead, I decided it would be better just to try to forget about it. Hey, everything was about to change, anyway. My whole life was about to change.
Maybe… just maybe what had happened today wouldn’t matter.
I mean, it was a moment that was inevitable, anyway, right?
I couldn’t keep pretending forever, right?
With a heavy sigh, I kicked off my shoes, began to walk toward the kitchen where I expected to find a note Mom left, but then thought better of it and put my shoes in the cabinet first.
Mom could get real conniptions about that.
Just as I suspected, there was a hastily scrawled note on the kitchen counter: ‘Out for the evening. Don’t wait up. Love, Mom.’
Usually I was pretty okay with spending time alone, but as the events of the day permeated my thoughts and worries like ink in water, tonight was one of the nights where I actually wanted to have some company at home.
Even if it was just my Mom.
No matter, I thought to myself. The best way to turn an unwanted situation around is to find something to want in it.
Not exactly some profound philosophical thought, I know. Nobody will be quoting my clumsy language in two thousand years, but I figured I was right.
So, nobody home meant I had the house to myself.
The house to myself meant I had total, unfettered freedom.
I slipped my bag off my shoulder, put it on the counter, and then flung the fridge door wide open and retrieved myself a beer.
“Hey, I’m eighteen,” I say to myself with a sly grin. “It’s legal in other countries.”
The top twisted off with surprising ease – it wasn’t my first beer, but I can’t say that I was well experienced.
My Mom’s voice sounded in my mind, an aural apparition: “When I’m not home, check the messages when you get in.”
So, basically, every single day.
I thought about it for a second, but after taking a long swig from the frosty beer, I decided to be rebellious.
Fuck.
That.
Her damn messages could wait. They were never for me, anyway.
Who the hell even still used an answering machine in this day and age?
Or a landline, for that matter?
I rolled my eyes, only distantly aware of how petulant I must seem. But hey, I was a teenager, and this was how I was meant to behave, wasn’t it?
With little delay, I headed downstairs to my room in the basement. I know, the basement? Surely that’s more of a boy thing.
You always hear about it, the stereotypical thirty-something man-child still living in his parents’ basement, sporting a grody beard and a reeking room.
Well, I was about as different from that image as you can be. I wouldn’t call myself a goody-two-shoes, but I was an overachiever at school, had only a few friends, had read more books than my old high school library held – hopefully it would be better at college! – and definitely didn’t have a beard.
I wouldn’t consider myself too different from most people at my old high school, though. I mean, most of us graduated. Some of us had better grades, other had better ‘life experiences’, but we all evened out in the end, a big amorphous blob of youth.
From afar I’m sure we all looked the same to anyone else.
Sounded the same.
Were treated the same.
No… that last one isn’t true. The pretty girls were treated better. The jocks were practically small-town heroes.
The gay and lesbian students, or the ones who identified differently from how they were born… well, those who had come out – or, sadly, were forced out – they weren’t treated too well.
What’s new, right? Kids are cruel.
And I guess that wraps back around to me. For a long time, I’d suspected. But it was only this year I became sure.
Half the time, I didn’t even want to believe it. I know, even I sound like some kind of stereotype.
I’ve even got the cherry to put on top of it all…
…I was in love with my best friend.
God, what a cliché.
Gay girl falls for straight best friend.
It’s the summer before college.
I learned today she was going to the other side of the country to me.
I drained the bottle of beer right outside of the door to my bedroom, turned around, and marched right back up the stairs to get another bottle.
Privacy was a big thing for me, as I’m sure you can imagine.
Never mind that I’m a teenage girl all of eighteen years old, and I can speak on behalf of all teenage girls the world over that, yes, privacy is a big freaking deal.
But, on top of that, not having officially come out yet to anyone… yeah, privacy is a real big one.
Something I can’t compromise on. I knew that very early on… some kids push, their parents push back harder, and they wilt.
It was different from me. I never gave in. In a weird way, it was something I prided myself on, as though a principled rebellion made it somehow noble.
Mom had understood… you’d think mothers should, having once been teenage girls themselves. You’d think… but I’d heard horror stories from classmates at school.
Maybe if I ever have a child one day, I’ll understand what it’s like from their point of view.
But that’s why the basement worked for me. It was large, spacious, I could lock the door, and it was just far enough away for Mom to not be bothered to bother me.
When you’ve got to walk down from upstairs, and then down again, sometimes, you might just not bother, right?
At least, that’s how I figured it.
But to say there was no compromise on my part would be inaccurate. The tree that doesn’t bend, breaks, right?
In exchange for the much larger room in a more secluded place of the house, I had to pay Mom a little rent. Worked for me, since I had a part-time job anyway working at the community center, anyway, and had been working part time jobs since I was fifteen.
I understood early on the power in earning my own money, and being able to spend it guilt-free, how I saw fit. On top of that, I had saved up as much money as possible, an emergency fund.
One day, a boy at school just stopped showing up. Turns out, he’d been kicked out of home because his parents couldn’t handle that he was gay… in this day and age.
So I had an emergency fund. I didn’t think it would happen to me – Mom wasn’t like that – but you never know, right?
And besides, the money would come in handy later, anyway. One day, I was going to leave this town in the dust, and for good. After college – I wasn’t going far – is when it would happen.
I’d pack my things. Bye Mom, I’d say, and walk out the door.
Good riddance, I’d say to the town, and flip it the bird on the bus to the airport.
I’d go to a big city, maybe on the west coast.
I’d fall in love.
I’d feel… welcomed. I’d feel modernity.
Oh, sure, I’d return home now and again to see Mom. I’d call her once a week, we’d even video chat since she was pretty damn savvy on a smartphone.
I took another swig from my beer. “Or maybe not,” I mumbled to myself.
Maybe it’s just as bad out there as it is here. Maybe people are just fundamentally assholes.
My best friend, Jettie, didn’t really factor into my future plans.
I mean, we were going our separate ways.
She liked boys.
It just wasn’t meant to be.
Once again, the events of today flashed into memory, like the flare up when you squirt lighter fluid onto a dying fire.
I hadn’t officially come out, yet.
But… but today she found out.
I took another long sip from my bottle of beer.
It would not be an exaggeration if I said that whenever I wasn’t with Jettie, I was thinking about her.
Knots tightened in my stomach. My heart raced in my chest. I felt as if my whole world was crashing down, even though I knew it wasn’t.
It was just one person.
My best friend.
She was going to find out sooner or later.
But I had wanted it to be on my terms.
Tonight, I didn’t want Jettie to be my best friend. Tonight, beer would be.
I wanted to get her out of my mind, get what happened today out of my mind.
One thing I’d heard the boys talking about at school was ‘shower beer’. They swore up and down that it was the best thing.
What the hell, I thought to myself. I stripped, put on my robe, and headed upstairs to the bathroom, sweating beer in hand.
On the way through the living room, I knocked into a set of drawers, and sent a photograph careening to the floor.
The glass shattered, and I swore, rubbing my knee, and then scooped up the bits of glass and put them back of the drawers.
Then I picked up the photo, wondering which one I’d broken. Mom liked to keep photos of me here when I was younger.
In fact, the most recent photo she had here of me was the one where Jettie and I went to the beach together.
It was the one I’d broken.
There we were, in the sun, grinning like idiots. This was earlier this year, before school had finished. We were celebrating our eighteenth birthdays. Jettie had turned eighteen just a few days before I did.
We always did our birthdays together on my cake day. Jettie was kind that way.
There we were, sun at our backs slightly silhouetting us, water in the background, sand between our toes. She had her arm over my shoulder, and our heads were touching.
I could conjure up a vivid image as if it were a reflex.
The memories of that day – months ago – were as if it happened yesterday.
It was a surge of memories, of feelings, emotions… the smell… of her hair. Of the ocean. Of the sun on her skin.
That was the day I… that was the day I became sure of what I was.
Jettie was the kind of girl who could look good in anything. I mean, just absolutely radiant. That day she was wearing a simple white tank-top and denim shorts over her bathing suit.
Simple… yet stunning.
Her hair was an auburn, and it flowed and bobbed, as though trying to match her bubbly personality.
Her smile was generous and infectious. Every time she grinned or laughed, I felt more buoyant, like I was floating.
When she told a dirty joke, the wry smirk that pulled her lips more to one side than the other, made me burst out laughing, and want to touch my head to her shoulder.
And her eyes… every time I met them, I felt like I was falling into them. I just got tunnel vision.
I couldn’t break that gaze.
She sucked me right into her.
Those big, beautiful, hazel eyes.
That day I became sure. Well, I don’t know if you can ever be one-hundred percent sure, so maybe I should say that day I became surer than I’d ever been before.
I was in love with my best friend.
I wasn’t a normal girl.
It kind of… made a lot of things make sense. Things in the past I hadn’t been aware of.
Then a very specific memory came back to me of that day, something I’d suppressed out of sheer mortification.
That day, she’d accidentally made me moan…
- Writer
