Authors: David Levithan
“Do you need anything else?” he asks.
I feel enough time has passed for my tea to get cold. But it hasn’t.
I shake my head. I’m out of words until some more appear on my phone.
“Ryan could be busy,” Katie says once the waiter’s gone. “His phone could be off.”
But my words will still be waiting for him.
And if he’s half as into Taylor as he seemed to be, his phone is going to be within reaching distance and the ringer will be set loud enough to wake the dead.
Unless he’s with Taylor right now.
Katie is reaching for my hand, but it’s Violet’s hand she should be reaching for. Here they are, together for the first time, and I’ve turned them into minor characters in my own soap opera.
“I always wonder what it would be like to meet him now, as a stranger,” I find myself saying. “This is my game within our game—to try to come up with the scenario in which it would work out better. Maybe if I met him now. Maybe if I met him in college. After college. Once he’s comfortable with who he is. But every time I do this, I feel awful. Because I’m sacrificing our history. I don’t love him for who he is now. I wouldn’t love him for who he is two years from now. I love him for all the hims he’s already been with me. I guess that’s the contradiction. I want a fresh start. I would fight for that fresh start. But I also want it to be a continuation.”
Violet smiles. Not a happy smile—a melancholy smile.
“It’s actually not a contradiction at all,” she says. “You want the continuation that feels like a start.”
At that moment, my phone vibrates on the table.
I’m afraid to look.
It’s Katie who picks it up. Who reads the screen. Who says, “Oh.”
“Is that a good ‘oh’ or a bad ‘oh’?” I ask.
She holds up the phone so I can see it.
I’m glad you have my back.
I check the time he sent his message against the time I sent mine.
There’s a six minute, forty second difference.
It took him six minutes and forty seconds to type:
I’m glad you have my back.
I start to compose my next line.
I’m glad you’re glad.
No.
Any time.
No.
Don’t you know what I mean when I say I’ll fight for you?
No.
“Put down the phone,” Violet insists.
“I wasn’t going to—”
“I’m serious—put down the phone. Now. I know about these things. He’s not done. He just needs to realize he’s not done. And if you respond, you will prevent him from realizing that.”
“How do you ‘know about these things’?” Katie asks.
“Songs of innocence, songs of experience,” Violet replies.
I can tell Katie is not entirely satisfied with this answer. She’s about to say something, but she’s interrupted by the phone vibrating again.
I need you,
it says.
More typing. And then:
Come over?
I look at Katie and Violet. They look at me.
We all know what I’m going to do.
Kate
Now there are two of us at a table set for three.
And I guess the reality that Violet is here is finally settling in, after the humiliation of Brad and Audra and my paintings. After the giddy high of Violet’s purchase, and the bravery of Mark’s text, and the dreadful anticipation of Ryan’s response.
Now it’s just Violet and me, and I’m searching for something to say.
“So tell me about the trapeze. Is it scary?”
“It must be terrifying. I’ve only been on one a couple times, though, and only when it was very close to the ground.”
“Your scar, though. I thought…”
“This?” She touches her eye. “I got this by falling off a skateboard when I was eight.”
“Fucking
Lehna,
” I mutter.
“What?”
“Nothing. So you weren’t actually studying the trapeze, then?”
She laughs. “No. I did a lot of watching. It’s so captivating. But it takes years to learn. Mostly, I was doing homework packets. Homeschool curriculum is … not the most stimulating unless you have parents who make it fun by, like, doing art projects and going on field trips and dissecting artichokes to discover they’re flowers—”
“Artichokes are
not
flowers.”
“Oh yes,” she says, pointing her chopsticks at me. “They are.” She pops an edamame bean into her mouth and grins. “I learned it from a packet.”
I grin back at her. She’s so confident, so effortlessly funny and smart.
“What about you, though? UCLA, right? So you must be into school.”
I shrug. “I guess so. Mostly, I just really like art.”
“It’s crazy, isn’t it?” she asks.
I cock my head.
“Finally meeting each other.”
“Yes,” I say.
“I only wish it wasn’t so late. So close to when you’ll leave, I mean.”
I don’t want to think about leaving for college. But now the thought is here, all around me, the heaviness of it, the way it pulls me under. I want to lose myself in Violet, but she’s right across the table, not in a faraway place I can only reach in daydreams.
I feel panic rising, and I need to turn away from it.
“I got your rose,” I say.
Surprise flashes across her face.
“How did you know about that?”
It feels so long ago now, even though it’s only been a couple days. I call it all back: the way it felt to hang out with Mark that first night, how I discovered a new way friendship could feel. The song “Umbrella,” my icy glass, the relief on Mark’s face when I asked him to be my friend.
“I did go back to Shelbie’s house that night. I was just too late. And Lehna told me that you had brought me a flower.”
“But, still…?”
“And June told me that you had left to see the sea lions, so Mark and I went to track you down. We thought we could catch you. We went to the pier and we walked all over, but no one was there. But then, there was a rose.”
“Amazing,” she says. “Talk about putting things out into the world.”
“I’m sorry about that night.”
She shrugs.
“Things happen,” she says. But she sounds hurt, so I go on.
“I wanted to meet you so badly. And I got so nervous.”
“What happens when you get nervous?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I want to know everything I can about you. I’ve been waiting and wondering for so long.”
I try to think of a good answer, one worthy of so much patience. But all I can think of is the truth.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I guess I run away.”
She locks eyes with me. A smile tugs at her mouth.
“I hope you aren’t nervous now,” she says.
* * *
Back outside, the fog is coming in and it feels less like summer.
“What now?” I ask her.
“I have to go to work.”
I pull out my phone. It’s almost seven.
“Your work starts now?”
“Yeah. Shelbie’s mom got me a job with this woman she knows. She’s divorced, has two kids, lives in a huge Pac Heights house. I go over after her kids finish dinner to help her do stuff.”
“Like what?”
“Organize her receipts, place online orders, that kind of thing. She does a
lot
of shopping.”
“I could walk with you?” I offer.
She smiles.
“I’d like that,” she says.
She takes off her scarf. It glitters in the lowering sun. When she puts it back on, she wraps it in this elaborate way that covers most of her hair and sticks out, messily, on one side. She looks elegant and fearless.
“This way,” she says, and leads us up a couple blocks before turning right on Fillmore.
“What are you going to do with all the paintings?” I ask her.
“I’ll hang them up, of course! I have this tiny studio with bare walls.”
“They aren’t even very good.”
“Oh, please.”
“No, really. I thought they were okay before. But seeing them on the table like that, and then listening to Audra and Brad—”
“Fuck Audra and Brad. I’ve never encountered such ridiculous humans.”
I laugh without thinking. Without meaning to. It comes out loud and sudden enough to make the people around us on the sidewalk glance in my direction. It feels so good, and Violet’s so joyful, and I find myself wishing I could keep this moment forever—never go home, never back to school, never have to think about Lehna or worry about the future—just stay on this posh street with this brilliant, ravishing girl.
“Here’s the thing about art, though,” she says. “This may be an unpopular opinion, but it’s what I came to believe after traveling for years with incredible artists who risk their lives to perform for audiences who don’t care about who they are seeing, only that they are seeing a good show. True art is about creation. What’s left after the creating is over is secondary. I checked your Instagram on my phone all the time when we were on the road. I saw the circus scenes and the stars. And yes, they were skillful, and the colors were amazing. But I loved them because they proved you were thinking of me.”
She stops mid-block and grabs my hand.
“I didn’t buy them because they were paintings, even though they
are
beautiful paintings,” she says. “I bought them because, like Lars with his spray paint, you’ve been writing me love letters.”
And then she is kissing me, right here on the sidewalk on a foggy summer night. Violet is kissing me, and everything is perfect. The kiss doesn’t end. We are not two girls on a polite first date, bestowing a customary goodnight peck.
No.
We are kissing like girls who have ached for each other for years. Who never even spoke but somehow exchanged
I love you
s anyway. Who pored over photographs and gazed into computer screens and dreamed, over and over again, of this moment.
A clap begins; a whoop follows. More cheers, more applause.
“Happy Pride!” a voice yells, and then more voices join in.
If it were up to us, we’d keep kissing forever. But eventually, we have to let go. The strangers are kind; they don’t stick around to make us self-conscious when it’s over.
“I’m so glad I’ll see you tomorrow night for the show,” she says.
And I don’t trust myself to speak, so I just nod, certain that my face conveys more than enough of my own gladness.
She says goodbye, and I lift my hand in a wave, and on the way back to my car I think of her kiss. I touch my fingers to my lips. I am tingling; I am love-drunk. On the road I hear her voice playing back all the incredible things she said tonight.
I want to tell Mark what happened.
I want to know what it would feel like to say the words,
Violet kissed me
.
I want to tell Lehna, too, but I don’t know how I’d begin. And I don’t know why she felt she had to lie to us about each other when the real Violet is everything I could wish for. As I pull onto my street, dread creeps in. I’m going to have to talk to Lehna sometime. Soon. But not tonight.
I turn into my driveway and cut off the Jeep’s engine.
Just a few blocks away, Lehna is probably at her dinner table with her parents and her brother, oblivious to the fact that I’ve spent the evening with her cousin. Or maybe not. Maybe Violet is telling her right now. Maybe Lehna is checking to make sure she didn’t miss a text from me, wondering why I didn’t tell her first.
The night is dark now, the windows shining bright. My mom is in the kitchen washing dishes. She waves at me. I pretend not to see her.
I don’t want to walk into my house. I don’t want to walk into my room. I want to go back to Fillmore Street, to the sensation of Violet’s body pressed close, to the sounds of celebration.
When I step out of the Jeep, the warmth of the night startles me. We said goodbye only an hour ago. We stood kissing only thirty miles from here. But now the air doesn’t even feel the same. The old anxieties rush back. I shouldn’t have gotten into UCLA’s art program. I shouldn’t have gotten into the AntlerThorn show. All of my Instagram followers are the result of one very strange and fleeting night, and when Violet finds out who I really am—how normal I am, how unexciting—she’ll be so disappointed.
The truth settles, heavy in my stomach.
Violet kissed me.
But my life is still my life.
MARK
I take the train back from the city and walk from the station to Ryan’s house. Exactly what we’d planned to do on Saturday night, before it got hijacked.
I’ve tried to text him to get some sense of what he wants. But he’s not saying. I wonder if it’s possible that my message actually got through. I wonder if it’s possible that we’re really going to have this conversation. I’ve gotten so used to being on the edge of it that I forgot there might be another side.
The closest I ever came was after we watched
Milk
about a month ago. He smuggled it onto his computer like it was porn. We had to wait until a night when his parents were out in order to watch it. Which was laughable—I really don’t think they would care. But he did. He does.
We had done so many things together by that point, but we’d never wept. Not like that. Not for all the things that could go wrong. Not for all of the good things that could come out of it anyway. When the movie was done, I wanted to take on the world. And there was a strong voice in my head saying,
How can you take on the world if you can’t tell him how you feel?
The words were right there. The words are always right there, only an inch away from being said. But he was at a slightly further distance than usual, lost in his reaction to the movie. So instead of talking about us, we talked about history, and about how this year we would get to Pride one way or another.
Now that week is here, and not in the way I thought it would be. I get to his front door and ring the bell even though I don’t have to—I’ve walked in plenty of times without ringing first. But at this moment I want to be announced.
When Ryan opens the door, he’s beaming. Openly giddy.
“Took you long enough!” he says. Then, without another word, he bounds off to his room. I call out a hello to his mom. She doesn’t answer, so I guess she’s not home.