1.
She asked me to pull a key from the butt pocket of her jeans, and I got flustered, but I did. We can be friends, she said before dark. This meant we could cuddle and rough-house at first, dance around to her music once, and leave sticky notes for each other on the mirror throughout the school year. But if I wanted something more or else or less that would be a betrayal. I would be as bad as the boys.
2.
Most pictures of myself at seventeen still hurt my feelings. But in one I am wearing my roommate’s Carhartt jacket. The silhouette of the boys I was running from first, who I didn’t know because we weren’t in the same classes, who called me names and threw small objects. When she wore the jacket, she looked the part of someone’s tough girlfriend, like she might carry a knife. Whereas with my clipper cut I looked like a young something she’d call me later, the shell barely containing my pleasure. I wanted to borrow her clothes again. To belong somewhere insulated. To find in one of the pockets a trinket I could keep—a wad of paper, a dead battery. I thought she liked me and just didn’t know it yet. I wanted to keep stealing her fries. I wanted to kiss her, not only on the forehead, not when her boyfriend tried to push her face to mine, not just pursing our lips for a photo, frozen in time.
3.
The fact is that it was my room too. There I kept a food diary, shaved my legs badly, bleached my hair in January. There I browsed expensive lingerie online, trying to understand tab by tab what I might or might not like to wear and why, only for a close-up of picture three to arouse me so much I lost my train of thought. Well, okay then. I could accept the mundane as truth. Before, I knew only embarrassing things about myself: how I missed my stop last summer, the blogs I read, which indie band on my mood board I hadn’t actually listened to. (When I found out Chris wasn’t a guy, I just left their photo up.) After, something settled, something restless. I read my way to new-to-me insecurities: lesbian or bisexual, butch or femme, GGG or—much meaning to make from so little.
4.
Seeing her naked was an accident. As I opened the door to our room, she startled and dropped her towel. And I stood at the threshold, out of breath.
In Celine Sciamma’s Waterlilies, there’s a locker room scene sort of like this. In the film, the audience expects a lesbian story from the lesbian director, and she delivers. Yet in her work the surprised viewer is a boy. He is searching for one girl but finds another, and they regard each other wordlessly before he closes the door.
I don’t want to write this part, but I think I have to. The issue is not of what is perfectly honest or ethical but who is allowed to remember their youth.
In the doorway, another ending was possible. Another roommate might have laughed or drawn out the “ward” of “awkward,” allowing me to pass. Another self might’ve covered their eyes or craned their neck to the floor. But in the second before she yelled, Leave, I looked at her as though I could choose nothing else.
5.
She carried notebooks everywhere. Of course, she didn’t share them. I respected the need for privacy as much as I could. I didn’t tell anyone the things she told me. Lesbians can’t really have sex, she said one day, unprompted. I didn’t argue with her. I wrote it down. You look like a man, she said another month, and we bickered about my shape. Later, she refined her point, You look like a fat dyke in those pants. In a way, those words were already the end. By the time she said, If you don’t do the dishes, I’ll cut out your tongue and stick it up your pussy, there wasn’t much time left. What did I do? I rewrote this threat so many times I’m no longer sure precisely how she said it. Unpoetic, I thought. It didn’t sound like natural speech. Outside, the dogwoods were blooming, a rotten sweet. I would graduate soon. When I found a spiral-bound notebook of hers in my luggage, I hesitated. Then I read through every flimsy page. There was nothing about me. No secrets, calligraphy—her name over and over in widening loops.
