“Let me guess. You and Mark are getting married.”
“Come on, Lehna,” June says, and we all turn to her, surprised. “What? Things feel normal for the first time in a week. Let’s just try to stay positive, okay?”
“Well, okay,” Lehna says. “Sorry, everyone. Kate, go ahead.”
“I’m going to take a gap year.”
“Seriously?” Uma says. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“But where did this come from?” June asks. “You never even mentioned it. Like, not even as an idea.”
“I know,” I say. “It just kind of came to me.”
“But aren’t you excited about college?” Uma asks.
“Only in a distant-future kind of way.” I feel Lehna looking at me, not critically, but like she’s really listening. I see my opening. I take it: “Distant, like the way I think of my wedding day with Mark.”
“Right,” Lehna says. “You in your white veil, him in his black tux.”
“I know it will happen, but I have to sow my oats first.”
“Work your way through the rest of the baseball players.”
“Only the Varsity team.”
“All those muscles. Those skintight pants, that sexy bulge—”
“Excuse me, but this is actually pretty serious,” June says.
“Is it?” I ask. “I don’t know.”
“Um, yeah. We’re talking about your future. We all worked hard to get into our colleges.”
“And I’m still going to go to college. It’s just…” I wrack my brain for a good reason to give them, and then I give up and just say what’s true. “I want to let things be messy. I want to be free, but only as free as feels right in the moment. And,” I say, “I want to be with Violet.”
“Oh,” June breathes.
“Oh,” Uma echoes.
“Love,” they say.
“Maybe,” I say, because it’s more prudent than yes, because it’s been less than a week since our first kiss, fewer than twenty-four hours since I asked her to trust me. I say maybe because when you’re a teenager there’s this rule: You aren’t supposed to make decisions based on love. You are supposed to tell your heart that it’s an immature and fickle thing. You’re supposed to remind yourself of Romeo and Juliet and how badly it turned out for them.
Your poor teenage heart. It isn’t equipped for decisions like this.
Except maybe. Maybe. It is.
*
I still need to talk to Lehna.
Lunch ends and we head to our lockers together.
“What are you doing after school?” I ask her.
“Going over to Shelbie’s. Candace is going to be there, so we’re all going to grab some dinner.”
“Want to get coffee first? I’m heading over there, too.”
“To see Violet?”
“Yeah, and I have to stop by AntlerThorn. I got a message from Brad. Something about the auction.”
“Oh yeah. Congrats on that, by the way.”
“On what?”
“Your painting.”
“What about it?”
“The bidding had just ended when we left the show that night. Yours sold for a lot.”
“Really?”
She laughs, amazed that I don’t know this already.
“Yeah. Like, thousands. I was too pissed for it to totally register, but I know it raised more money than any of the others. Anyway,” she says. “Yeah. I can do coffee.”
*
It’s four hours later, and we’re across from each other at a café table in the Mission, identical foam ferns gracing the tops of our cappuccinos. I see the way they match and I just say it.
“Twins.”
She shrugs.
“It was a great poem. Everyone thought so,” I say.
I think about it now, all the ways we had been twin-like, with our identical taste in books and music, our simultaneous realizations that we liked girls, the way we never even entertained the thought of us fooling around because sisters just don’t do that. We even came out together, gathering both pairs of parents in Lehna’s living room as though we were all one family.
“We’re lesbians,” we said in unison, our sweaty, fourteen-year-old hands clasped.
“Are you a couple?” my dad asked.
We turned to each other, surprise at the suggestion momentarily wiping out our nervousness, and cracked up laughing.
I’m crying now. I didn’t see it coming, but here are tears down my cheeks, and then Lehna is crying, too. This café is full of the young and queer and beautiful. Everyone’s slightly older than we are; everyone has lived through something like this already. But still. I know that I’ve ruined something between us. I know that I stopped feeling like Lehna’s twin a long time ago, and it’s a terrible thing to be the one who walks away.
But it’s Lehna who says, “Look. I need to apologize.”
“What for?”
“All that bullshit with Violet. Like telling you to reapply your lipstick, and saying you looked normal, and making you come up with a fake gallery show as if who you are isn’t good enough.”