Almost Perfect (21 page)

Mom came back into the trailer, pausing to make sure I was off the phone.

“Everything okay?”

I sat down in front of the Scrabble board. “Yeah, she just wanted to make sure we were still on for tomorrow.”

“Hmm.” Mom obviously had reservations about me leaving town with Sage. I’d considered not telling her who my ride was, but that would involve a lot of lying and
getting either Jack or Tim to pretend to be going with me. In the end, I just emphasized that I’d be sleeping in another room.

I looked down at my letters. S, Q, P, P, T, B, and the blank. I shuffled my tiles, still thinking of Sage. She was beautiful and my friend, and obviously nuts about me. If the world made sense, this afternoon would have been the greatest experience of my life. Instead, it was just confusing and scary. Why couldn’t Sage just be a normal girl?

She probably was asking herself that same question.

I
CRAMMED
the clothes I needed for the weekend in a canvas Houston Oilers bag I found in the shed. It had probably belonged to my father. Every so often, I’d come across something Mom hadn’t thrown away: a soldering iron, some fishing tackle, a catcher’s mitt.

Dad, if you were still here, would I be such a romantic screwup? Maybe you of all people could have convinced me to get over Brenda sooner. Then I never would have known Sage. At least, not like I do now
.

Then again, the only advice Dad would probably give was to run away when things got too difficult.

Sage was picking me up shortly. Mom was in the kitchen, busy packing me a lunch. Apparently, there was no food in Columbia.

“Logan, are you sure you have enough money? You guys might want to go out, and things are a lot more expensive than in Boyer.”

“I’m fine, Mom.” I had forty bucks, the last of my snow-shoveling cash. I hoped Laura didn’t want to go anywhere too fancy.

“How about a jacket? I know it’s warm, but the weatherman says—”

“I’ll be fine, Mom.” I think if I’d been going on an expedition to the Sahara, she’d want me to take a jacket.

Mom joined me on the sofa. “Be sure and see how Laura’s doing. She won’t take any money from me, and I worry she’s doing okay.”

“I’m sure she’s good.” Actually, Laura had told me that her job paid really well. Barring unexpected expenses, she was planning on sending money home next semester.

Mom started to get up, then sat down. She picked up a gossip magazine and nervously flipped through it.

“Is something wrong, Mom?”

She frowned. “Logan, you’ll be spending the weekend with Sage.”

I manned the defenses. “We’ve been over this! Sage will be staying with Laura, and I’ll be with some friends of hers.” I prayed that Laura really had found me a bed in another dorm. It would be difficult to explain why I was sleeping in the hall, otherwise.

Mom cocked a knowing eyebrow. “I was young once, too, you know.” She held up a hand to stop my protests. “Let me finish. You keep telling me Sage is just a friend, though I think you should give her a second look. My point is, if you should find yourselves—”

“Please don’t say it!” God, not the sex talk. Where the hell was Sage?

Mom plowed on. “Logan, just in case. You’re old enough now that I can’t stop you. But please, promise me you’ll take precautions. Will you do that?”

My thoughts briefly blinked to an image of Sage opening her robe. Too humiliated to speak, I just nodded.

“I’m not trying to embarrass you, sweetie. But you’re about to go off on a great adventure this fall. If Sage ended up pregnant, that would be the end of that.”

I wanted to protest that there was no way I was going to sleep with Sage, but I kept my mouth shut. If I argued too much, Mom might start to wonder just why I wasn’t attracted to her.

“Mom, you have nothing to worry about.” If Sage got pregnant, I’d be on the lookout for three wise men from the East.

There was a shy knock at the door. Sage stuck her head in.

“Hello?”

“Come in!” Mom was already standing to invite her in, to fix her a snack, to grill her about what we’d be doing this weekend. No way.

I grabbed my bag, and with a quick peck on Mom’s cheek, I was gone. I didn’t realize until later that I’d forgotten the lunch she’d made me.

I didn’t want to give Sage a chance to ask to use the bathroom, so I nearly broke my best sprinting time dashing to her car. It was the family sedan this time. I guess her parents didn’t want her taking the cranky truck out of town.

I’d thrown my bag in the back by the time Sage folded herself into the driver’s seat. She was wearing jeans and a
T-shirt. Her hair was tied up in a scarf, and she wore sunglasses. I think this was the most conservatively I’d seen her dressed. For a moment, I remembered that there was no padding under her top; it was all Sage. Then I realized I was staring.

Sage smiled at me. Was she going to bring up what had happened in her bedroom or wait for me to say something? Could we just laugh it off as a mistake, or did we need to have a long, serious talk? And maybe she didn’t even think what we’d done was wrong! For all I knew, she was planning on getting me alone this weekend and showing me just how much of a woman she was.

This was stupid. I shouldn’t have come. I waited for her to make some mention of what we’d done. How I’d touched her. How I’d almost done more.

Silence. After a while, she instructed me to pick out a CD for us to listen to. Her window was rolled down. She had one elbow on the door, the other arm casually on the wheel. A few strands of hair tickled her forehead from under her headscarf. She looked like a confident, attractive girl, off to conquer a new town. A girl who was going to arrive at college and
own
it. And who didn’t even care that she’d reduced her only friend to a miserable pile of jelly.

I jammed a random CD into the slot and stared out the window.

Sage drove maddeningly slow. I remembered how she’d mentioned her fear of getting a speeding ticket. The half-hour drive to Columbia was going to take nearly twice that. After fifteen minutes of silence, she finally spoke.

“We don’t have to do this. I can take you back home if you want.”

I knew I should say yes, but I kept my mouth shut. When I didn’t answer, she spoke again.

“Logan, remember the night you met my dad?”

I snorted. “Vividly.” Why was she bringing that up?

She removed her sunglasses. With her wide, sad eyes, she looked much less confident. “When we got to my house and he was standing there, I expected you to bolt. I wouldn’t have blamed you at all. But you stayed and let him yell at you, even though you were still uncomfortable around me. That was the nicest, bravest thing anyone has ever done for me.” Judging by her tone alone, you’d think I’d slayed a dragon or two.

“That night, I promised myself that I’d never do anything to hurt a friendship that special. You don’t know how great it was to finally be able to talk to someone about everything in my life. But the other day, when I saw you checking me out at the pool … I think I let us both down.” She massaged the bridge of her nose, then gripped the steering wheel with both hands.

“Sage, it’s not like that.”

“Logan, you’re my best friend. I need that more than anything else. And trying to take advantage of you the other day, I almost ruined it. Can we just forget about that? Are we still cool?” She was breathing hard, and her steering had become slightly erratic.

“Yeah, we’re cool,” I said bluntly. There. We’d talked and put it behind us. Things could go back to “normal.”

Only I didn’t want to drop it. My best friend had allowed
me to see her bare body and now was apologizing to
me
. I couldn’t let her sit there feeling ashamed of her beautiful, though highly inappropriate, gesture. But how could I put my feelings into words when I couldn’t even define them? There was only one thing I could say.

“Sage?”

“Yes?”

I waited till she turned and looked at me. Then I winked. “Wow.”

She rapidly looked back at the windshield, her eyes wide, blushing under her freckles. I rolled down my window and leaned back in my seat.

Everything was going to be okay. We’d experimented but backed off before we crossed the line. We could now go off to college as friends, instead of whatever horrible, awkward relationship we almost had.

As I half dozed for the rest of the trip, my thoughts floated back to Sage’s room. She’d never be a real woman to me. But damn, seeing her without her robe … that had been a definite wow moment.

If parking was bad downtown, it was awful on campus. The lot Laura had directed me to was full, and every other space had ominous warning signs about towing and impounding. Eventually, we parked on the roof of a parking garage about three blocks from Laura’s dorm.

I grabbed my bag from the backseat. I was going to take Sage’s, but she had already hefted her two suitcases with no effort. We started down the stairs to street level.

“So, tell me about your sister, Logan.”

“Well, she’s a year older than me, though sometimes it seems like twenty.”

Sage laughed. “C’mon. I talked to her on the phone. She didn’t seem old or boring at all.”

“It’s not that.” I paused to tie my shoe. “When Dad left … I was about four. Anyway, things were kind of rough. Mom was working double shifts, and then when she was home, she had two little kids to take care of. Not a lot of time to read bedtime stories or play catch.” I stood up, remembering.

“At any rate, Laura really mothered me. Told me stories, played with me, made sure I did my homework. She helped me stay out of trouble, at least until high school.”

We’d exited the garage and were trekking across a parking lot. I could tell we were on a college campus just by the bumper stickers:
YOU CAN’T HUG YOUR CHILDREN
WITH NUCLEAR ARMS. U.S. OUT OF ____. FLIP THE BIRD
(a dig at the Kansas University Jayhawks).

I continued my story. “Things got a little better in the past few years, moneywise. But Laura still ran our household. Trailerhold. She made sure the bills got paid, went grocery shopping, took care of things. When she left … well, here Mom and I are, and we don’t have a lot to say to each other. It’s not that we’re distant, it’s just that … I dunno, we’ve just been living separate lives for so long. And I worry about what she’s going to do with herself when I leave.” Would Mom suffer from empty trailer syndrome? Would she finally start taking time for herself? Would she—I could hardly imagine it—go on dates?

Sage rumpled my hair. “Believe it or not, I know where
you’re coming from. The whole time I was homeschooled, Tammi really stood up for me. When I first started to transition—” She suddenly stopped talking and walking. “Sorry.”

“Sage, it’s okay to talk about that.” Previously, Sage’s gender issues were the last thing I wanted to discuss. But maybe if she told me about her life as a boy, it would help remind me she wasn’t totally a girl.

Sage glanced around for eavesdroppers, and then we sat on a bench. “When I finally told everyone that I was a girl inside … there was talk of having me institutionalized.”

I had been staring at the observatory on top of the physics building, but her comment jolted me back to attention. “Like, the nuthouse?”

“Yeah. Mom and Dad didn’t know how to deal with me and decided I needed to be sent away for a cure. I’m not sure if they thought that was the best thing for me or if they were just that humiliated. But Tammi threw a fit. I mean, screaming, hollering, kicking the walls. She refused to let them send me away. Eleven years old. She knew what an embarrassment I’d be to the family, but she didn’t care.”

Sage seemed to be collapsing into herself. Knowing better, I draped an arm around her back. She laid her head on my shoulder. Well, technically, due to our height difference, my head was on her shoulder.

“So Tammi kept me out of the asylum. I spent four years almost never leaving our house, getting taught by my mother. Mom’s ashamed of what I’m doing, but she tries to make me happy. And you know how Dad feels.

“Tammi … she looked out for me. Before I was allowed to wear women’s clothes full-time, she’d buy me clothes and hide them in her closet. She’d help me with my makeup and tell me I was pretty. She was the only one who knew when I started on hormones. Now that I’m a full-time girl, she spies on me. She doesn’t want me to do anything reckless. That’s why she wouldn’t let us be alone at the park that one time.”

I smiled, remembering. It all made sense now.

Sage continued. “Tammi never once said I was being weird or strange. Sometimes that was the only reason I knew I could become a real woman. If it wasn’t for her, I’d have probably given up and stayed a guy.”

Gingerly, I untangled myself from Sage. “You’d have been miserable that way.”

“I’d be dead.”

I remembered Sage’s attempt at suicide. We needed to change the subject. I’d brought Sage here to show her how much fun she could have away from home, not to remind her of her difficult life choices.

Looking down at my watch, I realized I wasn’t wearing it. “I think Laura’s expecting us.”

Sage led the way even though neither of us really knew where we were going. As we passed a group of male pedestrians, one of them turned to watch her pass. I don’t think it was her height he was noticing.

S
AGE AND
I
WANDERED
around for about twenty minutes looking for Gillett Hall. Finally, we realized it was actually part of a larger complex, a group of white brick towers that surrounded a central dining hall.

Laura lived on the first floor. As soon as we left the lobby, the low
thunk, thunk
of someone’s stereo assaulted us from an upper story. The corridor was empty, but each door gave a glimpse of the residents inside: film posters, more anti-Kansas bumper stickers, fliers for peace marches, little whiteboards for leaving messages.

I knew more about these strangers than I did about some of my neighbors in Boyer. I’d be moving into a dorm in the fall. What would I hang on my door?