I sat up and kissed him long and hard, to tell him everything I couldn’t articulate—that for a guy who’d rarely received better than a C in school, for someone who thought the most value he brought was knocking guys over on a football field, he was one of the smartest people I had ever met.
I lay back down against him and we listened to the party go on without us, our breaths syncing. As I felt Grant’s heart beat in his chest, a thought that both thrilled and terrified me snaked its way from my stomach to the tips of my fingers: I was falling in love with him.
19
“Sorry for skipping out on you last week,” I said, tying my hair up against the wind as I mounted the warped old plantation steps. Bee glanced up at me before returning her gaze to her camera’s viewfinder.
“S’fine,” she said, scooting over to make room for me on the step. I brushed the papery leaves away and sat down. “I know how it goes.”
“Yeah. How are you holding up, by the way?” I said as I dropped my backpack between my knees and pulled out my chemistry homework.
“Fine,” Bee said, giving me a strange look when she finally noticed the note of concern in my voice. “Why?”
“Well, you and Chloe were a pretty big deal, weren’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Bee said, twisting a knob and pointing the lens out at the horizon. “Hey, I don’t have any portraits in my portfolio yet.” She lowered the camera again and looked at me. “Mind if I take your picture?”
“I guess not,” I said, tapping a pencil against my notepad and looking down at the grass. “Chloe seemed to think y’all were pretty serious.”
“Yeah,” Bee said, scratching her temple. “That was the problem. She thought things were more serious than I did. If she were a guy I’d have bailed as soon as I realized she wanted more from me than sex and the occasional hangout.”
“How did her being a girl make it different?”
Bee looked up from her work to stare into the middle distance. “The first time we ever kissed she cried in my arms, because she’d spent her whole life trying to pretend those feelings weren’t real. She told me she couldn’t decide if she was disgusted with herself or proud that she’d finally had the strength to do what she wanted. She said she thought she was the only one.”
“That’s so sad,” I said, trying to imagine Chloe crying.
“But obviously that just isn’t true,” Bee went on. She pulled out her phone and looked at it for a moment before continuing. “So there’s about seven thousand, four hundred people in Lambertville, and queer people represent about ten percent of the population. That’s, what, seven hundred and forty people right there. Let’s assume women are an even half of that, and you can assume there are three hundred ninety bisexual or lesbian women in this town.”
“That seems high,” I said, though I couldn’t help wondering whether any other people like me lived here in secret as well.
“It seems high because queer people in the South are addicted to the closet,” she said, furrowing her brow and digging in her camera bag for a different lens. “Hell, even the straight people have enough skeletons in their closet to fill a tomb. Everybody’s too afraid of going to hell or getting made fun of to be honest about what they want and who they are, so they can’t even really admit what they want to themselves. It’s sad.”
“Yeah.” I was nodding, but I wondered what Bee would say if I told her the truth—that I was one of those people who wasn’t being honest. It struck me, in a way it hadn’t before, that Bee was pretty brave, just for being herself.
“But anyway, I realized I was with her out of obligation, and that is absolutely not something I do, so I broke up with her.”
“But you must’ve realized that a while ago … you were together a long time, right? So why now?” I folded and unfolded a page in my textbook. “Was there somebody else?”
“Different subject?” Bee said, looking exhausted. “I know I hurt her, but she was gonna get hurt one way or the other. Just drop it, okay?”
“Sure,” I said, biting my thumbnail. “Sorry.”
“Make it up to me by sitting up straight and looking at that weird-looking tree,” she said, pointing across the clearing.
“That’s a Bradford pear,” I said, squaring my shoulders. The camera stayed silent. “They’re bred to have this beautiful vertical branch pattern, but trees aren’t supposed to grow that way, which is why they look the way they do. They grow fast though, so real estate agents like to plant them to sell properties quick and then the trunks don’t start twisting up and dying like that until a few years after.”
“Where the hell’d you learn that?” Bee said as the camera clicked away.
“My mom’s a real estate agent.”
Bee smiled. “All right,” she said. “At first you looked like a robot, but I got some good shots there at the end.”
“I look like a robot?” I said, frowning.
“Not you, just that face. Try smiling.” I smiled. “Okay, wow, you look like somebody’s got a gun on you just outside the frame. You’re one of those people.”