We had nothing in common, really, but we liked each other’s company and filled that best-friend-shaped space that everyone seems to have. And then I got used to her, and I loved her. Ruthie was an only child, and I was an only child most of the time, so maybe that had a lot to do with it. Whatever kept us together, it was strong. We did everything together. We tried to get classes together, we had lockers beside each other, and we ate lunch together in the loser corner every day. On weekends I would go to her house and sketch while she built tiny models of robots and airplanes, delicate and perfect despite her beefy hands. Or she would come over and read me weird science articles while I drew, or she’d follow me around the garden and tell me that 93 percent of gardeners grew tomatoes, or that the biggest tomato ever grown weighed seven pounds, or that Japanese scientists were studying mosquitoes to help them design a painless needle.
Mostly these articles came from Scientific American, which her dad subscribed to, and which for some reason never stopped coming after he died. One day at lunch she was reading to me about how developing brains fold like crumpled paper to get their convolutions. Which is where Jessica found us after I saw her tattoo in the locker room. She sat beside us, as if that were an acceptable thing to do—join us at our table in the corner. On purpose.
“What are you doing?” Ruthie held the magazine to her chest, as if it were secret.
“I’m Jessica. I met Maeve in the locker room. She was looking at my ass. And you are…?”
“I wasn’t looking at your—” I felt my cheeks heat up. “I wasn’t l-l-looking at you.”
“You were so.” Jessica grinned. “It’s okay. I don’t mind.”
“I wasn’t.”
Jessica stared at me, eyebrows raised. Ruthie stared at Jessica, mouth agape.
I looked from one to the other, not sure what to say, so I introduced Ruthie.
“Nice to meet you.” Jessica flicked a piece of popcorn into Ruthie’s mouth, which was still hanging open. Ruthie gagged and spat it out. It landed on Jessica’s tray. She flicked it off with a finger and thumb and offered Ruthie the bag of popcorn instead. “Your mouth was open, so I went with it.”
—
But before that. The spring before, when we were waiting for my mom to pick us up in Seattle after watching a roller-derby match between the Rat City Roller Girls and the Bellingham Betties, Ruthie stood there beside a bus stop full of graffiti and garbage and mumbled something about the match and the Betties’ jammer and then she kept mumbling and it sounded like she said she liked girls.
“What?” My mom’s car was at the intersection. She honked her horn and waved.
“I like girls,” Ruthie repeated.
Three little words. And I knew exactly what she meant. Because I did too. But I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to say it out loud. And I’d never thought that Ruthie was gay. Not in a million years. I’d thought of her as one of the weird science nerds who would one day find another weird science nerd and have a few weird-science-nerd babies.
But then I thought, Who says that the weird science nerd has to be a man?
Whatever. I was already dealing with my own confusing thoughts about girls; I was not ready to deal with Ruthie’s, too. I pretended that I didn’t hear her, and I waved frantically at my mom as she pulled in. And then it occurred to me. What if Ruthie thought of me that way? As a girl girl.
No.
I was not a weird science nerd. I was her type just as much as she was mine, which was not at all.
She was not cute. And she was not interesting. Well, not in that way. Not to me. She was interesting, sure. But she’d be more interesting to the weird science nerd who would fall in love with her and want to read tedious articles from Scientific American together. And cute was not a word that I would use to describe Ruthie. Someone would. She would find her weird-science-nerd match, I was sure.
Mom pulled up, and Ruthie got in the front, because there was more room for her. It wasn’t that she was fat—not at all—but she couldn’t pull herself together to fit into anything. Clothes, groups, backseats. Ruthie always seemed to spill over.
Ruthie avoided me for a while after that. She hid in the science lab at lunch and after school and during every second of her free periods. When I ran into her in the bathroom one day, she blushed and finished washing her hands and walked straight out, not bothering to dry them. I followed her into the hall.
“Ruthie! Where have you been?” I wanted to tell her that I’d heard what she said by the bus stop. I wanted to tell her that it was okay with me. I wanted to tell her that I was too. Me too, Ruthie! But none of that came out.
“I’ve been working on the molds,” she said. “The ones for the state science fair. That’s all.”
And then I didn’t see her for another two weeks. Not until after the science fair, which I was supposed to go to with her, but when she didn’t call and she didn’t text and she didn’t email, I figured that was her way of uninviting me.
“I won,” she announced the Monday after the fair. She sat across from me at lunch and lined up her yogurt and her sandwich just so, and arranged her carrots into a hexagon shape on a piece of paper towel. As if nothing had ever happened. Which it kind of hadn’t. But it kind of had, too. Had she been ignoring me? Or had it really been about the molds? The half conversation in the parking lot seemed so fuzzy now. Had I heard her? Had she said that? She slid her medal across the table. “First prize.”
“That’s great,” I said. “Congratulations, geek.”
“Thanks, freak.”
And things went back to normal. Sort of.
—
Jessica laughed at Ruthie’s carrot-stick hexagon when she sat with us for the first time the next spring. She helped herself to one while Ruthie looked on, horrified.
“That was mine.”
“You can spare one.” Jessica’s hair was shorter than Ruthie’s, but it looked much better. Ruthie’s hair was choppy, a fuzzy helmet that stuck out about an inch all the way around and didn’t look any better when it was long. Cursed and damned in that department, she sometimes said. Not Jessica, though. Her sleek black hair was choppy in all the right places, a pixie cut that looked expensive, with long, dyed-pink bangs that were definitely expensive.
I wondered if Jessica was gay, but I didn’t outright ask her. And then I didn’t have to, because she came to school one day about a week later wearing a T-shirt with two woman-figure symbols like the ones on bathroom doors, side by side, holding hands—or handless arms—with the words SORRY, GUYS underneath. We were standing outside before the first bell, and it was cold, but optimistically spring cold, so no one was wearing jackets or coats, except Ruthie. Ruthie and I stared at Jessica’s shirt (which essentially meant that we were also staring at her breasts), both of us blushing. Ruthie stammered and swallowed and garbled something about petri dishes and extra credit and fled to the science lab.
“I can tell so much about you when you stare at me.” Jessica pushed her bangs out of her face. And then: “Don’t tell me that you didn’t know that I’m a dyke. I’ve been dropping hints from the moment I met you.”
And then she grabbed my hand and held on to it, pulling me into the school as if it were no big deal at all.
—
Ruthie scowled when Jessica asked to be the third in our group for the end-of-term biology project later that day.
“It’s worth thirty percent of our grade,” Jessica said. “Of course I want to be in Dr. Ruth’s group.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Come on, it’s a compliment.”
“She can join us,” I said. “Right, Ruthie?”
“You want her to?”
“Sure.”
“Fine.” Ruthie stacked her textbooks and binder to make room.