I’D GOTTEN MYSELF PUMPED UP the whole way to his house. I was ready to be honest and sit him down and tell him everything—that I’m not the artsy photographer I’m pretty sure he’s falling for, that I know that he’s transgender and he doesn’t have to try to hide it from me, that I really like him—but now that I was sitting here and he was over there, all the courage I had worked up inside me was just coursing through my veins, making me jumpy and twitchy.
His question still lingered in the air. It was simple enough, but my thoughts were racing.
“I don’t know,” I finally answered—because what I had planned on saying sounded weird as I rehearsed it in my mind:
Chris, we need to talk.
No, that was after-school-special speak.
That would not work.
“What were you doing before I got here?” I said instead, stalling the inevitable, buying myself a little more time. “Prior to trying to decapitate yourself with the ceiling fan, I mean,” I said, looking up at the ceiling.
His smile eased my nerves.
“What, that doesn’t sound like a fun Friday night to you?” He picked up the notebook that was sitting next to him, and said, “I was just scribbling—doing nothing, really.”
I had an idea—a clear, nonmuddled idea that might just work. I pulled Mallory’s sketchbook from my bag, the one I’d found in her things, where I had started making my list of her photographs and their corresponding locations.
“Doing nothing is my favorite,” I told him. I opened the sketchbook to where I had dog-eared a corner, and flipped to a clean page. “We could sit here and do nothing together?”
“Okay.” He nodded in agreement and opened his notebook in his lap.
I promised myself I would not let one more day pass with all these secrets between us—I’d have to explain the whole story and I’d have to get it just right or he’d never understand why it started, or how me being outside his window that day was not even about him, that I was never trying to intrude upon him. Maybe if I could write it down in a letter, without the chances for miscommunication that would come with trying to say it all out loud, I could somehow make the whole thing make sense, at least enough sense for him to not hate me.
I began: Dear Chris,
I drew a line through it and started over with a simple Chris, but then I couldn’t decide where the actual beginning of this story was. As I pressed pen to paper, the only words that came were the ones that had been spray-painted on the wall at the gas station.
I traced the words, inking the letters over and over again.
I looked up at Chris. He was watching me, but he quickly looked down at his notebook once more, the scratching of his pen loud in the quietness that had fallen over us.
A realization hit me.
I wondered if part of the reason I was feeling so good about him and me and our time together was because he’s the only person I’ve ever known who didn’t automatically know already, not only about Mallory’s life and her death, but about me. Everyone in Carson knows who I am, or rather, who I’ve been. Sometimes living here felt like I had signed some sort of contract, agreeing to have a certain personality for the rest of my life, and that made it hard to change.
But with Chris, I had no such arrangement. I was allowed to tell him the things I wanted him to know, on my terms, in my time.
There’s something to that.
No, I decided, I wouldn’t tell him that I knew his secret. Who was I to take that from him?
I would, however, still tell him about the camera and the pictures and what I was really doing. I felt my head nodding, agreeing to the plan I was formulating. When I looked up again, his eyes darted back down to his notebook. He was keeping the pages tilted toward him, like it was a test and he didn’t want me to see his answers. Maybe every secret needs to be told on its own terms.