“I’m sure not all Catholics are so closed minded.”
Rosina shrugs. They are still standing in the same spot with their coats and bags on. “Do you want to watch TV or something?”
“Can I see your room?” Melissa says.
Rosina almost chokes. “Sure,” she says. “Yeah.”
She is leading the most beautiful girl in the world to her room. Rosina should be giddy, excited, all those cliché teenage romantic feelings, but as they climb the narrow stairway to the second floor, her nervous joy is interrupted by thoughts of Erin, how she didn’t raise her hand at the meeting where Grace asked who the virgins were, how she looked so scared, how she shut down, how she keeps shutting down, how she’s full of a pain she refuses to share, how Rosina can’t fix it, how Erin won’t even let her try. And Erin made Rosina ashamed of that, as if wanting to help her was somehow wrong. Rosina would do anything for Erin. Why is that bad?
Is this what Mami wants Rosina to feel about the family? The kind of selflessness that would make her do anything for them? Can love be the same as duty and obligation, words that make Rosina bristle and want to fight?
Can love be forced? Can someone be shamed into it? Is it still love if it suffocates you? Is this what Rosina’s doing to Erin? Is she suffocating Erin with her love the way Mami and Rosina’s family suffocate her with theirs? Is that why Erin pushed her away?
“Wow,” Melissa says. “Your room is so cool.”
“Thanks,” Rosina says, using every bit of strength to pull herself back into the moment.
I don’t deserve her, she thinks. I don’t deserve this perfect girl.
“What are all these bands?” Melissa says. “I don’t recognize any of them.”
“These are all vintage posters I found at this record store in Eugene,” Rosina says. “Most of these bands don’t exist anymore. They were around in the nineties. This is Bikini Kill. Heavens to Betsy. L7. The Gits. Sleater-Kinney is the best one. I have all their albums. They’re still around too. They didn’t just have the attitude, they’re also really talented musicians.”
“They all look so . . . fierce,” Melissa says.
“They are.”
“Like you.”
Rosina opens her mouth but no words come out. Melissa smiles.
“You play guitar?” Melissa’s fingers brush the strings of Rosina’s acoustic leaning against her bed.
“Yeah,” Rosina says, hoping Melissa didn’t notice her shiver. “I sing, too. I write songs.”
“I had no idea!”
“I don’t exactly talk about it all the time.”
“Why not? It’s so cool.”
“It’s kind of personal, I guess,” Rosina says.
Melissa takes off her coat and shoes and sits cross-legged on Rosina’s bed. Rosina says a second silent Thank you, Jesus that she made her bed this morning.
“Will you play one for me?” Melissa says. “One of your songs?”
“No,” Rosina says immediately.
“Why not?”
“I’ve never played them for anyone.”
“There’s a first for everything,” Melissa says. “You want to play them for people eventually, right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Really? You write songs just to play for yourself?”
Rosina smiles. Of course not. She writes them to sing at the top of her lungs on a stage in front of an audience of people who adore her.
“Okay,” Rosina says. “But you have to be nice.”
“I’m always nice,” Melissa says. Which is true.
Rosina takes a deep breath, picks up her guitar, and sits on the bed next to Melissa. She starts the quiet fingerpicking of her most recent song. Her whispery vocals come in, with a melody like a lullaby crossed with a funeral dirge, pretty yet heavy, with lyrics alluding to a bird trapped, caged. The single guitar notes slowly build to strumming, Rosina’s voice breaking into a full-bodied wail. Her dark thoughts are released—Mami and Erin, gone. She sings of escape, of flight. The music vibrates inside her. It shakes the room. Her voice, her words, are her wings.
When she is done, she puts her guitar down and slowly lifts her eyes to Melissa. There is the look she’s imagined while writing her songs in secret. There is the audience she’s dreamed of every night singing to herself. There is the love, the adoration. In front of her is someone moved to tears.
“Say something,” Rosina says.
“I can’t.”
“It was that bad?”
“Oh my God, no.” Melissa takes Rosina’s hands in hers. “That was quite possibly the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”
Rosina looks away. Her smile takes up the whole room.
“Why don’t you perform?” Melissa asks. “Why don’t you have a band?”
Rosina shrugs.
“That’s crazy. You have to let people hear you. They need to hear you.”
“Maybe someday,” Rosina says.
“Someday soon,” Melissa says. “Please.”
“Okay.”
Their smiles cannot get any bigger. Melissa’s eyes cannot get any deeper. The space between them shrinks as the rest of the room falls away, until all that exists is this twin bed and these two girls and their strong hearts pounding beautiful in their chests, willing their bodies closer so they can catch each other’s rhythm, so they can beat together, so they can make music.
Rosina suddenly realizes they’ve been holding hands this whole time, and looks down to see the entwined lattice of their fingers. She thinks this is where she’d normally say something sarcastic, something to diffuse the intensity of the moment, to make Melissa think she doesn’t care, to make her think she’s not quickly turning to jelly, starting where her fingertips rest soft in the palm of Melissa’s hand, up her arm, her chest, her heart, aching a beautiful ache that could turn ugly at any moment. The yearning is so close to pain. It could turn into a monster, a great clawed thing, and jump out of Rosina’s chest, so desperate to hold every piece of this beautiful girl only inches away.
But Rosina stays silent. She lets the moment last. But she does not look up, cannot look Melissa in the eyes, cannot let her see the blinking neon in her own eyes that will tell her everything Rosina’s too scared to let her know.
But then a soft touch on Rosina’s chin, a gentle lifting. And then two eyes bright with the same yearning, two lips soft and open, and suddenly the world is too beautiful for Rosina to feel scared.
GRACE.
Grace wonders if this is kind of what it feels like to be on a date—nervous and excited, hopeful but slightly wary of the night not living up to her expectations. As she and her mom drive to dinner, thoughts of Jesse Camp creep into her head, how easy and pleasant it was to talk to him that first time at church, then the strangely overblown feeling when she saw him sitting with Ennis Calhoun at lunch, as if he had personally betrayed her, how both feelings tug inside her every time she sees him. Grace wonders how it would feel to go on a date with him, if it was Jesse in the passenger’s seat instead of her mom.
“So your friend’s family owns this restaurant we’re going to?” Mom says.