She runs her hands over her thighs. “Her name was Victoria, but Dani and I called her Tori. Actually, Dani called us her papas.” She snorts and smiles wider when she sees my confused expression. “It’s silly. I’m Ta-lia and she was To-ri, so we were Ta-To. Like po-Ta-To. Papas, potatoes.” She laughs even harder, and I’m torn between feeling grateful I get to see her this happy and feeling like I’m third wheeling with her and her memories.
“Anyway,” she continues, laughter settling, “we did everything together. Dani was older, so she was like our ringleader, but when she got busy with high school, Tori and I started hanging out just us two.” She hesitates, watching the family as one of the kids scores a goal and the father hoists her onto his shoulders. “We got … close.”
“Close how?”
“We shared clothes, slept in the same bed at sleepovers, had secret matching rings we didn’t tell Dani about. We’d sneak over to each other’s houses when we had nightmares and pierced each other’s noses.” She touches her nose ring almost subconsciously, fingers barely grazing the metal. “She started off as Dani’s friend, but in the end, she was more mine than Dani’s.”
“I’m guessing Dani didn’t like that,” I say.
“No.” Talia smiles again, but sadly. Her lips look torn between turning up or down. “Dani really didn’t like that.”
“So what happened? With Tori, I mean. Did you stop being friends just because Dani was jealous?”
“Not exactly.” She sighs, knee bouncing. In a moment of adrenaline, I reach my hand out to touch hers on the bench, barely skimming the tips of her fingers before nodding her on.
“Tori’s mom got a better job offer in another town. They were set to move about a month before we started high school. At that point, Dani was always busy with her new, older friends, so I didn’t expect her to show up the day that Tori was leaving.” Talia looks down at her hands and picks at a layer of her vibrant nail polish. “You know, Dani was the one who bought me this nail polish color. When our abuela passed away, she left us each a brooch shaped like a rose.” I perk at the mention of roses, and Talia’s quick smile tells me she noticed. “The first time you told me about your roses, I immediately thought of our brooches. Dani’s is blue and silver, and mine is red and gold, so Dani bought us matching sparkly nail polish in the same colors. I hardly even know where the brooch is anymore, but the nail polish stuck for some reason.” She peels off the entire coat of red polish on her pointer finger, letting it flutter away in the breeze. “Isn’t it funny how some things become routine like that?”
I think of my clothes. My roses. My friends. My crushes. “Yeah.”
Talia exhales, seeming to come to some conclusion. “Dani walked in on Tori kissing me goodbye.”
“Oh.” My stomach drops. Here it is, the story she began all those months ago.
“Someone let her in hoping to surprise Tori before she left. We didn’t hear her coming, even after she opened the door. We just heard it slam shut and saw her racing down their front yard from the window.”
Talia looks at me, eyebrows turned up in question. Her knee is bouncing faster, and she’s already peeled off another two nails’ worth of polish. I stare back, unsure what she’s waiting for, my heartbeat pounding faster as I feel myself lean forward.
My reaction, I realize, freezing. She doesn’t know how I’ll feel about her having kissed another girl.
Which means she doesn’t remember Lindsay’s party like I do.
“What did Dani do?” I ask, hiding my disappointment because I don’t want her to perceive it as discomfort.
She stares at me for a second longer before looking away again. “Tori and I never finished our goodbye. I knew Dani and our family, and knew she wouldn’t keep the kiss a secret. By the time I got home, my dad and tía already knew. Dani’s mom stopped letting her come around, not that Dani seemed to want anything to do with me anymore. My dad never talked to me about it, but I could feel him watching me around the house. It was like he wasn’t sure who I was anymore.”
“I’m so sorry,” I say, because what else can I. This explains Dani’s thinly veiled callousness, her curiosity toward what Talia and I were doing together when we ran into her, the way Talia and her dad spoke when we were leaving.
“It’s okay,” she says, like she knows it isn’t but accepted it long ago. “My dad stopped being weird about it after a while, and we were never close to start with. I just lived with him because I didn’t want to move to Seattle with my mom after the divorce and leave my family behind.” She laughs a little bitterly. “Lot of good that did me.”
“Does your mom know about Tori and your family?”
“She does, but she didn’t care the way the people in my dad’s family did. She was actually pretty cool about it, and so were my grandma and grandpa on her side when they heard. They had it pretty rough as an interracial couple back in the day. Knowing that and that the people who stopped wanting me around after finding out about Tori were the same ones vocally opposed to my dad marrying a Black woman when they were still together, my mom said she’d never want to put me or my future partners through the same bullshit.” She lets out a long, slow exhale. “I apologized to Dani so many times for what happened with Tori. But it was just one kiss when I was fourteen. I never apologized for kissing boys. I shouldn’t have had to apologize just because she and her mom and whoever else decided somewhere along the way that I wasn’t the type of girl to kiss another girl. That photo you found of me and her at Noche Buena? It was still on my wall for the longest time because I kept thinking maybe one of these days Dani and I would go back to how we used to be. I took it down after we ran into her last weekend.”
“Do you and Tori still talk?” I ask. Talia stands to stretch her legs, and I mirror her, feeling stiff while her movements look effortless.
“We send each other birthday messages, and I texted her a while back to see what her college plans are, but it was hard for us to keep in touch after she moved. Her parents heard about the kiss from mine but didn’t even bat an eye. She actually has a girlfriend now.” She looks away as she says this, like despite their distance now, emotionally and physically, it still wounds her to know Tori’s with someone else. “I keep that photo of us on my wall, even though Dani is in it, because our friendship meant a lot to me. But we both moved on.”
“Good for her,” I say, but my sincerity falls flat.
“Well, now that I’ve definitely overshared”—she laughs nervously, and it makes me wonder how long it’s been since she was able to talk to someone like this, about this—“want to keep going?”