Tucker
I slunk back to my dorm room wanting to pound my head against the wall. Made myself lie down instead. The headache from that morning was back, double strength. I hazed out for a while, slipping from hating Summer to hating myself to dozing and then back into the hate cycle.
Knocking woke me. I jumped up in case it was Nico coming back to let me apologize. My brain slammed into the front of my head with blurring pain, but I made it to the door and pulled it open.
It was Quin, grim-faced.
“Hey,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
I lowered myself into my desk chair, leaving the door open. She shut it behind her and sat on the side of the bed, elbows on knees.
“We got played,” she said.
“Summer told you?”
Quin shook her head. “Nah, I’d have wondered about that. Gal on the soccer team asked if I was with you. I said kind of, because, you know, she might have been asking for Katee, the hot forward and I didn’t know what we were. That night and then dinner, we didn’t talk about it, but it felt like dating, you know.”
I nodded because it had. Because before I heard about Nico’s surgery, before we started talking again, I had been thinking about dating Quin.
She went on, “So this girl says how she heard you were away for the weekend with your boyfriend and did I know about that. And I was like: no way because that night when we had breakfast you said guys are gross. But she’d seen a pic of you with this cute guy.”
Plausible. There were plenty of pics of me and Nico from over the winter. In some, Nico appeared fairly guy-ish. If you were expecting to see me with a guy in the photo, that’s what you’d see.
I didn’t know how to explain that to Quin. She stretched up, blew out her breath, put her hands on her knees.
“I figured I should ask about us,” she said. “I’m really sorry about when I asked.”
“Yeah, that’s not on you. That’s on Summer. I’m sure she set that girl up to ask you about the boyfriend thing.” A long pause. “And it’s on me. You didn’t know Nico was there. I did.”
“I should’ve waited until we were alone,” Quin said. “I just was looking forward to the weekend and seeing you. Then you blew me off and you really were out of town, so that part of the story was true. The more I thought about it…you know, when we hooked up, you never let me touch you.”
“I did…” I started to protest but turned it into a question, “I didn’t?”
“Tucker, you didn’t even take off your boxers. I figured it was a butch thing. But then the dating a guy story got me worried. Though if you weren’t really into girls, I figured you’d let me do you, not the other way around.”
My head was filling with pressure and heat. Face burning.
I used to…
Back with Lindy, I used to like…
I pushed off the chair and stood up. Stared at the door to the bathroom, wishing I could see through it into Ella’s room, and that she’d be there and tell me what to do.
“I am a lesbian,” I said. “And I like you. I thought Nico was blowing me off. I thought…but yo wasn’t and then I wanted that. I want that. I thought you and me we were rebounding, not really dating yet.”
“Could’ve been,” Quin said.
I didn’t have an answer for her.
She stood up and walked to the door, then asked, “You still tabling with me at the gym?”
I’d agreed to sit at the Black Lives Matter info table with her before the basketball game.
“You’re sure you want a white girl sitting there?”
She shook her head at me. “When it’s all black folks we get written off much faster.”
“Oh, shit. Yeah, of course, I’ll be there. Quin I’m sorry about everything. I—”
She cut me off with an impatient wave. “I’ll see you Thursday.”
She shut the door hard behind her.
I took some ibuprofen and ate part of an expired protein bar I’d bought on sale at the gas station. It tasted like packing peanuts, minus the peanut. My brain kept circling around to Nico and then looping back in time toward everything I didn’t want to remember.
When the headache got less blinding, I went to the gym and hit the heavy bag until my arms were ready to fall off.