Every time one of them meets my eyes, the knowledge about Juniper yells out in the back of my head so loudly, I’m sure people can hear it. Guilt fills me up, rising like mercury in a thermometer, but I don’t know what I feel guilty for. Staying quiet? I would probably feel guilty if I told the administration about García, too.
I grew up feeling guilty. Given my parents’ altruism, growing up to realize I’m a selfish person was tough. I think back on elementary school, the times I hoarded crayons inside my desk or didn’t share my food when other kids asked, and I remember overwhelming guilt. These days, I’m better at managing it, but it still springs up fast. I’m always apologizing. I’m always wondering what I did—I can look at one angry face and feel I’ve ruined everything, that I’m responsible for war and disaster and every tiny evil.
So, of course, I descend into panic when Claire finds me at my locker during the break between first and second period.
In the aftermath of Saturday night, Claire’s finding out I’m not straight faded into the background, but now the accompanying anxiety revs back up full force. I knew this confrontation was coming the moment Matt apologized to me. I should have saved up my energy, instead of staying out so late last night, driving, laughing, learning about Valentine.
Thinking about him makes me fidget. I’m too interested in him. I want to talk to him and only him. I want to win his laughs, and I want to pick up every word he says and paste it between the pages of my journal. He’s an equation I never want to solve.
“Hey,” Claire says. “We need to talk.”
I catalog Claire. Her voice is clipped, her gaze blistering. She wears green eyeliner today, with the usual thick mascara and glittering eye shadow—a hypnotically weird combination with her pale blue irises. She’s zany in her own rigid, dogmatic way. After we broke up, life was too mellow for a while.
She frog-marches me away. We end up in a stairwell in the old wing, beneath the stairs. Gray light echoes through a dirty window. The bad signs check themselves off in my head: ? Claire’s arms, folded—heralding a yell.
? That twitch at the side of her nose—she’s trying for control.
? My attention scattering—I can’t defend myself like this.
Claire dives in with no prelude. She’s efficient that way. “How long have you known?”
“Since, um, eighth grade.”
Her eyelids press tightly shut, showing off ridges of glitter that have built up in the creases. She takes a deep breath, then one more. “How’d you find out?”
“I mean, I had my first crush on a guy when I was maybe nine, but I didn’t really put the pieces together for a bit. Eighth grade, I heard about pansexuality, and it made more sense than anyth—”
“What did you—pansexual?”
“It means I could be attracted to someone of any gender.”
“So you’re bi.”
“It’s not quite the same. I . . . so, basically, there’s not just male and female. Some people identify with other genders. And yep, now you look like I’m telling you that aliens have landed.”
“What are you talking about, other genders?”
“Well, gender’s something society made up. I don’t mean, like, biological sex—that’s a different thing. But gender—so people think women are one way and men are this other way, but if you’re a blend between the two, for example, then neither gender’s a good description, so—”
“Lucas.”
“—pansexuals can be attracted to any gender, a boy or a girl or somebody off the binary, which, I mean, you can read about this stuff if you—”
“Lucas.”
“What? What is it?”
“I don’t understand anything you’re saying,” she says. “Would you hold on for a minute? Let’s just . . . I’m not gonna bite, okay?”
There’s a moment of quiet. Claire ties up her hair. It’s brushfire orange, crackling with static electricity in the dry air. In my gut, I have this feeling that none of this is real. Talking to her about this is unimaginably weird.
She fixes me with a skeptical look. “Okay. So. How do you know you’re not bi? Have you met anyone who thinks they’re not—you know, not a—a girl or a boy?”
I shrug. “How do you know you haven’t?”
“I . . .”
“It’s not like they’d be super public about it. Even gayness still has people being all, ‘Whoa, now, don’t get so political; this is an awful lot to deal with.’?”
“Hmm,” she says. Not much of a concession, even by Claire standards.
It’s not as if she would care less if I were bi. She just wants to be right.
I abruptly remember how little I miss arguing with her. Memories of our fights snap out of my mind, bite-size pieces of discomfort scribbling themselves down.
? “I hate when you get like this—”
? “Shut up and listen—”
? Her gimlet eyes.
? My endless apologies.
Here I go, doing it again. “Look, I’m sorry, okay?”
“I mean, yes, I think you should be. You could have brought it up so many times. Even if you’d copped out and told me through a text, or, for God’s sake, on Facebook, it still would’ve been better th—”
“Claire, look. It was . . . easier, okay? It was easier not to.”