Not Otherwise Specified (6 page)

“Not friends anymore?”

I shrug. “It's complicated.”

He doesn't push. “I think people overthink things,” he says. “I think
stopping being friends
is a really weird concept. Why is it something you'd give that much thought to? I don't even understand breaking up with boyfriends. How do you wake up in the morning and just analyze something to the point where you decide it's over?”

“Well, sometimes people treat you like shit, I guess.”

“Like your friends did.” Apparently he is pushing.

“Complicated. In their opinion I hurt them first. Vomited on their belief or whatever.”

“I thought you were against vomiting!”

I finish my beer. “Yeah, well, maybe that's why we're not friends anymore.”

“You miss them?” he asks.

“I miss being part of something.”

“Well.” He looks out at Bianca and Mason. Mason is putting her down. She's blowing on her hands and complaining that she wants coffee. “Maybe now you are,” he says.

THE BOYS AREN'T INTERESTED IN
coffee, so they drop me and Bianca off with my car and we go together. She was thinking Starbucks or something, but come on, sweetie, hasn't she heard of the only cool place in all of Schuyler? It's this retro little coffeehouse, so of course the Dykes loved it even though it isn't technically seventies, just some hodgepodge of decades with fifties music and neon chairs. It's always loud and full of the fifteen people in the town who have piercings. Bianca, for all her quiet good-girlness, curls up in a chair like a cat and cups her coffee to her chest and looks comfortable.

“Did you have fun?” she asks, which is so cute, like it was a little night planned for my benefit. I hope it wasn't. I hope we can do that a lot.

“I really completely did.”

“Yay!” God, she's a baby.

“How's the coffee, you warming up?”

“Mmm-hmm. It's good. Starbucks always burns mine.”

“What the hell, Starbucks, what good are you. Uh . . . that's okay, right?”

“Insulting Starbucks? It's kind of like insulting my third parent, but I think I'll recover.”

“Ha. ‘Hell.' ”

“Oh, yeah, of course. I don't mind what you say. I just try not to.”

“You don't think I'm going to hell?”

“I make it a rule not to decide who's going to hell. I think if I were God I'd have a cool beard or something.”

“You're cute.”

She smiles.

“Not sure how cute you'd be with a beard, though.”

She closes her eyes and hums a few measures of “Unchained Melody” with the jukebox. (Not even fifties, why does this place even try, so adorable.) Then Bianca opens her eyes and says, “I love that there are so many snow globes here! I love snow globes. And I love this song.”

“Me too. My mom sings it while she bakes.”

“I wish my mom baked. Etta. Etta. What are you singing for your audition?”

“Uh, shit, I don't know. You're doing ‘Let's Hear It for the Boy'?”

“Uh-huh. I've done it every audition since I was, like, sentient. I don't even like
Footloose
.”

“Yeah, who does.”

“Right? Just that song.”

“That's how I feel about— Okay, I don't want your look of horror, so brace yourself.”

She grips the armrests.

“That's how I feel about
Wicked
.”

“What? No. No!”

“It's so overrated. I'm sorry. It's not
bad
, it's just so incredibly overhyped.”

“Noooo.”

“I'm forgiving for musicals too, I swear! I like
Avenue Q
even though it's stupid as hell. I like
Rent
even though it's a white construction.”

“What's your favorite?”

“
Billy Elliot
, maybe.”

She groans.

“Yeah, I know, not much in it for a singer. Plus . . . Wait, have you seen it?”

“No, just heard the sound track.”

“Oh, yeah, the sound track is so shitty. You have to see it in person. It's all about the dancing.”

She shrugs. “I don't really
get
dancing, I guess. I mean, I want to . . .”

“Ever seen a ballet?”

She shakes her head.

“Ohhh God, okay, we need to table this discussion. I will accept your dismissal of
Billy Elliot
after you've seen a better dancing show. Right now it's winning its category just by, like, default.”

“I like
My Fair Lady
.”

“Boooring. Just choose
Sound of Music
, why don't you.”

She laughs with her head tipped back. It's pretty and so much older than she is. Rachel laughs like that.

“Did you always love ballet?” she says.

“Yeah, ever since I was tiny. I was this little overachiever in my class, it was ridiculous. But I ended up changing ballet schools all the time, following different teachers.”

“Stage mom?”

“Oh, hell no, just an indulgent one, I guess. By the time I was like eight she was letting me tell her what the best programs were and just following my lead. You?”

“I don't know,” she says. “I guess. My parents never performed or anything, but my mom has this really nice voice, so I guess they pour it all into us.”

“Gotta love that non-pressure.”

“Right? So . . . you quit because they told you to lose weight? They shouldn't have done that.”

“It's not like it was this constant spoken thing, you know, everyone telling me to lose weight or whatever. It wasn't like that. My teacher said something this one time and I went
crying to Rachel about it and . . . I don't know, we talked about it, and she was right, it wasn't just this one teacher saying something. It was the whole system of ballet, the . . . I mean, the
discipline
of it. I didn't fit. Depressingly literally.”

“So . . . you quit because Rachel told you to.”

“It's that obvious, huh?”

She smiles. “Maybe a little.”

I don't know how I'm thinking about this girl. Bianca. I'm not sure why I can't stop watching her and I'm not sure any of the possibilities are okay, because there's no answer that makes her not a severely eating-disordered straight
fourteen-year-old
, so I smile at her a little and then look away and sip my coffee.

She says, “So, um,” and she doesn't even need to say anything else before I know she's doing some mind reading of my creepy half-lesbian brain, and shit, shit, she knows I was looking. “You, uh, are attracted to girls?”

Damn. I really wasn't looking at her like that, I swear. “Yeah. And boys too.”

“So I guess it's hard from both sides.”

She's the only person who's ever figured that out on her own. I put my cup down.

“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah. I'm never gay enough and never straight enough.”

“Sounds scary.”

“Just lonely, really.”

“So do you, like . . . How did you
know
?”

“
It was finding out that everyone else
wasn't
bisexual that was the shock, honestly. I thought it was like . . . you know, how some guys like blondes better. I thought that some people like girls better but that everyone likes both to
some
degree, you know? And I guess I thought people just usually married the other one because it was easier. And you know what?”

“What.”

“I kind of thought that maybe a bunch of them were cowards who just didn't want to tell their parents. I guess I knew it was something my parents would disapprove of before I knew it was a
thing
.”

“It's been hard? With your parents?”

The truth is I feel shitty about complaining because I know so many people have it much worse. My mom hasn't kicked me out. She hasn't told me she disapproves. No, she told me she loved me and accepted me and of course it's okay with her, nothing would ever make her less proud of me. Yeah, well, talk is cheap, and apparently . . . Apparently when you're sitting on the couch trying to talk about your new girlfriend and you just get these averted eyes and cleared throats and changed topics, when you invite the girl over for dinner like she
told
you you were allowed to and she spends the entire time talking around both of you and giving you the occasional awkward smile while she directs every single comment to your sister instead . . . well, apparently silence is cheap too.

“Yeah,” I say. “It's been rough.”

She stirs her coffee idly with her pinky finger. She says, “I don't think my parents would be okay with it.”

“They're religious, yeah?”

“Uh-huh. Not as much as me in actual . . . thought, I don't think, but they're so ingrained in that church culture and everything. I don't even like church all that much. I like the singing and the stained-glass, but mostly . . . mostly I just like, you know, me and God, at the end of the day. None of the middlemen or whatever. But I don't . . . I mean, you understand. I don't think you're bad or anything.”

“I like you,” I say.

“I like you, too.”

“My mom isn't religious. She votes Democrat. She loves gay people until there's one sitting at her dinner table.” I wave my hand a little. “I'm not gay.”

“If James ever told my parents . . .”

“Oh, whoa, okay. You . . . I mean, you think James is . . .”

“Come on,” she says. “Obviously James is.”

“And that's . . . I mean, you're okay with it?”

The pause is too long.

I say, “I'm not . . . It is different. When it's sitting at your dinner table. I'm not judging. It's allowed to be hard for you.”

“It'd be easier if he'd just
tell
me,” Bianca says. “If he'd trust me with it.”

“How sure are you that he's gay?” I'm just testing the waters, I think. It is not my place to give him away.

“Twenty thousand percent. Or, like, . . . sixty. I don't know.” She plays with her hair, and I see some fall out in her hand. Baby.

“He loves you,” I say.

“I know. Of course.”

“He's just trying to protect you.”

“Maybe if he didn't . . . didn't act like it was something I'm supposed to be protected from . . .”

“You're a smart girl, y'know that?”

“Yeah. Perfectionist, hypercritical, anorexic. I'm so not interesting.”

I try to do this sympathetic little nod, but the truth is that my brain is
stuck
on the word “anorexic” because Jesus Christ, the size of this girl, she's got to fit all those stupid little criteria. This girl is actually
anorexic
, and we're sitting here discussing musicals and gay boys like we're normal people, when all I want to be doing—God, all I
should want to be doing
—is grabbing her by the skinny damn wrists and begging her to tell me all her secrets. Why is it that no matter what way I look at this eating disorder thing, I'm always doing it wrong?

“Maybe he needs some gay friends,” Bianca says, in this measured, neutral little voice that makes me smile. “I have Bible friends.”

“Everyone needs some gay friends, but it's not . . . I don't know. I guess I'm questioning that habit of segregating. And
come on, you do musical theater. You can't tell me you don't know gay people.”

“No, of course we do. We just . . . I mean, we don't, I mean
James
doesn't have a group of just people like that.”

“Like I did.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I . . . I don't know. I really only ever liked one person in my little group.” It's not that simple, though. Like, no shit, Rachel and I were the closest, but it's not like I didn't ever do phone calls with Titania or go over to Isabel's house just us. Natasha and I were into old sitcoms in a way the others totally weren't, so we'd bond over that, and when Isabel's parrot died, I was the one who was all over that shit, and while the others were going,
I don't get it it's just a bird,
I was designing floral arrangements. I was good at being a friend. I was just really good at it. But the thing is that they were
too
. If there had been some prior hint of it, some time now where I could look back and be like,
Well they'd always been dropping clues they'd someday turn on me and treat me like shit
, maybe this would be easier. But that's not what happened. We fought like normal friends, and there was always a little tension between me and Natasha just because we were these girls who probably wouldn't have been friends without the gay thing who were pushed together and learned to love each other maybe without learning to like each other, whatever, but we were close. We were best friends for all of high school.
And now all of a sudden I'm dropped, and I don't care how much bullshit you hear all the time about
some girls are just bitches
, because, you know, no, they are not
just bitches
, they were my best friends for three years and this doesn't make
sense
, and yeah, a part of me still thinks Rachel is going to pick up the phone.

“I don't miss them because I miss gay friends, you know?” I say. “I don't even miss them because I miss
friends
. I miss them because I miss . . .”

“Them.”

She's good at filling in sentences. People sit around talking for her when really she could be filling in all our sentences.

“Yeah,” I say. “I miss them. Or I miss her.”

And then I take a sip of my coffee and the bell on the door chimes and the song switches and I look up and who just walked in, who the hell could have
just walked in
, but Rachel.