I take it all in. The world, from this vantage point, is crazybeautiful. I look around the crowd and see all these people enjoying themselves—having fun with me or making fun of me or imagining having fun with me. Pairs of guys and pairs of women. Young skateboarders and men who look like bank presidents on their day off. People from all over the Bay Area patchwork, many of them dancing along, some of them starting to throw money my way. Clark Kent’s in the crowd, looking me over. When I see him, I swear he winks.
I feel my gaze pulling itself back to Ryan. I feel myself coming back to him. But along the way, someone else catches my eye. Before I can return to Ryan—while I’m still up there in my underwear, thinking he’s the only person in this whole place who knows who I am—I see another face I know. It’s like the song stops for a second, and I’m thrown. Because, yes, it has to be her. Here, in this gay bar, watching me dance near naked over a carpet of dollar bills.
Katie Cleary.
The senior I sit next to in Calculus.
2
Kate
“Tell me about her again,” I say.
I change lanes on the top deck of the Bay Bridge so that we get the best view of the city lights, even though June and Uma are kissing in the backseat, oblivious to the scenery, and Lehna is busy scrolling through her phone for the next song we should listen to.
She laughs. “I don’t know if there’s anything left to tell.”
“It’s okay if I’ve heard it before.”
The first chords of “Divided” by Tegan and Sara start to play, and for a moment I remember what it felt like for Lehna and me to stand in the sea of girl-loving girls at their concert when we were in eighth grade, how I felt something deep in the core of my heart and my stomach that told me yes.
“She got home on Tuesday,” Lehna says. “And she was pretty jet-lagged, but she told me she was used to traveling, not getting much sleep, keeping weird hours in general. When I talked to her on the phone she was sewing sequins onto a scarf. She says she likes to sparkle at Pride.”
“Do I look too plain tonight? I am the opposite of sparkling.”
I began worrying about what to wear several weeks ago, but that didn’t make me any closer to a solution by the time today got here. I ended up choosing what I hoped would look a little bohemian, effortless but still put together. A soft, light chambray button-up tucked into darker jeans. A brown belt with a turquoise buckle. High-heeled boots. Long, diamond-shaped bronze earrings and bright red lipstick. I put my hair into a loose side braid that falls over my shoulder. In between moments of almost-paralyzing self-doubt, I looked in the mirror and thought, for about half a second, that I looked like the kind of person I might like to know if I didn’t know myself already.
“You look great!” June calls from the backseat.
“I would totally fall in love with you,” Uma says.
Lehna says, “Yeah. You look European, which Violet will appreciate. And after the performers she’s been hanging out with, you’ll probably seem refreshingly normal.”
That word—normal—it fills me with panic.
“Make sure to remember to reapply your lipstick. It brings out the green in your eyes.”
I nod. I will. I turn up the music and try to calm myself down. Out the window, the lights of the city spread before us, full of so much promise. People in the cars around us are smiling or nodding their heads to music. We are all on our way to the same party even if it’s taking place in hundreds of different bars and living rooms. We are going out to celebrate ourselves and one another. To fall in love or to remind ourselves of all the people we’ve loved in the past. For me that would be a very short list. Which is part of why tonight scares me so much.
Lehna and I have been friends since we were six, so I’ve known about her cousin Violet for years. The daughter of Lehna’s photojournalist aunt, Violet has never lived in one place for more than a year, has never attended a traditional school, and has been traveling across Europe for the past twenty months, studying with trapeze artists while her mother documents circus life. Violet’s always been a source of fascination. Even more so when, last year, she wrote to Lehna from Prague and told her she’d fallen in love with a girl. Violet described it in a way that no one living a normal life in a California suburb could explain it. She used words like passionate and phrases like love affair. The girl was from the Swiss Alps and her name was Mathilde and it began and ended over the span of two weeks, from the moment the circus got to town to the moment it packed up and left.
And then, a couple months later, Violet wrote again to say that she was going to move back to San Francisco. Her mother was continuing the circus project, but Violet was turning eighteen and wanted to make her own life. I want to know how it feels to stay in one place for a little while, she wrote. So I’m coming home, even though I don’t even remember what the seasons feel like there. When Lehna exclaimed late one night that she should set Violet and me up, I pretended that the thought hadn’t occurred to me, when really it was all I’d been thinking about for months.
“Remember to call me Kate in front of her,” I say.
“Got it. Kate-not-Katie.”