My new normal was actually really weird. As I sat at lunch, with Kate next to me and Marie across from me, I had a hard time reconciling how fast things had changed. Kate going from a crush to something more (too early to call her my girlfriend) in such a short time had my head reeling. What was tripping me up even more was the fourth member of our new lunch crew: Jenny Jeffries.
The girl who had belittled and provoked me for years, who’d turned out to be the lifelong friend of my dream girl, had unpacked a huge sub, a salad, a tub full of fruit, and one single chocolate pudding pack and plopped herself right next to Marie. She immediately joined in the conversation, and it was clear that I was the only one who objected to her sitting with us. Both Kate and Marie were laughing at whatever Jenny was saying while I sat bewildered.
“So we were on the treadmills, and when I sped up a notch, I saw Kate do the same thing. So of course I had to go up one more. After a few minutes, we were both sprinting at full speed because neither one of us would back down. Just as I thought I was going to face-plant because the machine was going so fast, I saw Kate's arms and legs flailing right before she managed to press the emergency stop button. I then pressed my button because I was laughing too hard. I will never forget the sight of her losing her balance on that machine and the way her arms just sort of went crazy,” Jenny said, moving her arms like wet noodles in imitation of Kate. Marie was laughing and Kate was cringing.
“Not my best moment, I'll admit. But I can still outrun you when we're not on some stupid machine,” Kate defended, spearing some of her salad with her fork.
“And I can still bench press two of you,” Jenny responded, flexing her admittedly muscular arms. Jenny's words over the years had been so cutting that the fact she was also pretty ripped had been a secondary concern of mine. It was like she’d been made in a lab to be the perfect bully. One whose biceps my best friend was playfully squeezing, much to my chagrin.
While having Jenny sit with me at lunch was not doing much for my digestion, having Kate next to me was worth suffering through the bully's presence. And it was interesting to see this different side of Jenny. I had to admit to myself that she was funny and definitely knew how to tell a story well. Plus, she was totally ignoring me, which was a big plus from my perspective.
“Haley and Kate,” Marie said as she pointed to each of us in turn, “Jenny and I are going to the mall after school today. My brother has science club tonight, so I have a couple of hours of freedom before I have to pick him up. Interested in tagging along with us?” she asked.
“I can't,” Kate replied before I had even thought about it. “Cheer practice after school. But you should totally go, Haley, and hang out with the girls.”
I glanced at Jenny, and the look she was giving me did not communicate a desire to hang out with me. “I have homework tonight, so I have to pass too. Thanks for the invitation, though,” I told Marie, while very consciously keeping my eyes away from Jenny. She might have been cool with my friends, but years of animosity between us wouldn't disappear in a few days.
As Marie and Jenny dug into their meals, I felt something brush against my knee. When I looked down, I saw Kate's hand resting there, her fingers lightly curled around my kneecap and her thumb brushing against the side. I immediately glanced around, afraid someone had seen this show of intimacy. Kate snatched her hand back, and I felt like an idiot. Kate started talking to Jenny about meeting up for a workout session soon, leaving me to stew in my own thoughts.
An awesome, beautiful, intelligent girl wanted to show me affection, and all I could think about was if anyone had witnessed it. My nervousness around Kate had morphed from worrying about interacting with her to worrying about how others saw us interacting with each other. Even though everyone knew I was a lesbian, I still had hang-ups about being affectionate with another girl. Intellectually, that was ridiculous. But my emotions were currently overriding my brain. I had to get a handle on this before I did something stupid, which was a very real possibility for me.
Marie, in all her best friend glory, brought me out of my funk.
“How did dinner with Kate's parents go last night?” she asked. “You never responded to any of my texts, so I've been dying with curiosity for hours,” she added with a dramatic flair.
Kate and I let out simultaneous groans.
My first meeting with Mr. and Mrs. Monroe had probably been one of the more embarrassing situations I had ever been in, which was saying a lot. They were perfectly nice people who, on the night I’d met them, had fallen into the category of “trying too hard.”
Before I met them, Kate had explained to me that she had never brought a girl home to meet her parents before, because the two times she had been previously involved with a girl had been at cheerleading camp. After crushing my initial excitement at hearing this (“That happens at cheerleading camp? I thought that sort of stuff only happened in movies.” “What types of movies are you watching?”), she’d revealed that she had only come out to her parents after our first date, and while they had been supportive when they’d heard the news, they were not 100 percent comfortable yet.
That had worried me a little, but it was understandable. So when I had gone over to their house for dinner the week after our date at the movies, I’d been ready for some awkwardness, maybe even a little veiled (or not so veiled) hostility. What I had not been ready for was the virtual pride parade that had greeted me when I stepped through their front door. The first thing I’d seen was a huge rainbow flag draped over the railing of the upstairs landing, lightly fluttering from whatever breeze had been present in the house.
The second thing I’d seen was Kate standing underneath the flag, staring up at it with a look of mortification on her face. Trying to ignore the multicolored metaphorical cloud hanging over us, I’d thanked Kate’s parents for inviting me for dinner. I’d also seen for the first time since they had opened the door that they were wearing matching shirts with the words “I support my gay daughter” written prominently on the fronts. They each had had big smiles on their faces as they’d greeted me with hugs and exclamations of how happy they were to meet me.
As I had been led through the house to the dining room, I’d noticed smaller pride flags and the logo of the Human Rights Campaign sprinkled liberally throughout. Kate had apologized in a whisper, telling me that she had been up in her room most of the day and had no idea that her parents had redecorated in such a colorful way. I’d whispered back that it was fine, and I had meant it. I would’ve rather been awkwardly embraced than scorned as I had feared.
Kate’s parents, Mark and Julia, were both engineers, and freely admitted that they were more comfortable with numbers than people. But there was no doubt that they loved their daughter. I could tell by the looks on their faces when they talked about Kate or when Kate was saying something that she meant the world to them.
Kate had inherited the best physical features of both her parents so that their unassuming individual looks had come together to form a very pretty daughter. There had been a fond exasperation in the way Kate had talked with her parents, as if she had wanted to be mad at them for going overboard with the pride paraphernalia but could not quite muster up the needed emotion.
The high point (or low point, depending on your perspective) had been when we were all sitting around the table about halfway through dinner. The conversation had turned to our first date, despite Kate’s attempts to steer it to less personal matters, when Mr. Monroe had said with a laugh, “At least I don’t have to worry now about becoming a grandfather anytime soon!” Mrs. Monroe had scolded him with a sharp “Mark!” while Kate had chimed in with her own “Dad!” I had just smiled uneasily, at a loss for what else to do or say.
The rest of the night had gone much smoother, and I’d left feeling wholeheartedly, if a bit overenthusiastically, embraced by them.
“It went fine,” I vaguely said to Marie, not wanting to get into all the embarrassment from last night while at lunch. Or ever, really. Kate concurred, and before Marie could grill us on our nonanswers, the chime signaling the end of lunch went off. Thankful to escape an interrogation, I quickly gathered my things and got up to leave. After nodding halfheartedly at Marie's threat of calling me later, I awkwardly stood, facing Kate as the rest of the students filed out of the cafeteria.
“I'll text you later?” she said quietly as she fiddled with a strap on her backpack.
“Yeah, I'll look forward to hearing from you,” I said, wincing as I realized too late how desperate that sounded. Trying to shrug off my mistake, I added, “Have a great time at practice today.”
Kate smiled and I melted. If she hadn't turned to leave after thanking me, she would have witnessed me slumping back down to the table in bliss.
The next two weeks went by in a rainbow-hued flash. Eddy had won the race for student class representative, so she was even more insufferable than usual. Kate and I went on a few more dates, some more successful than others. My parents absolutely adored Kate, which didn’t seem like it would be a problem, but definitely was. They always wanted me to bring her over to the house so they could feed her, and my dad kept on asking if everything was going well with her, as if he were worried I would mess things up. It was a bit insulting. The worst was when my mom sat me down and started a sex talk. I covered my ears and immediately fled. Parents shouldn’t give sex talks anymore. We had the Internet for that now.
And I did not want to find out what my straight mom would say in her presumably lesbian sex talk. We’d had the traditional sex talk when I was eleven, right when I was beginning to realize that I maybe looked at girls the same way my friends looked at boys. I had not mentioned anything to my mom about not liking boys enough to let one do what she had been describing to me at the time. Instead, I’d sat there silently and tried to keep the growing disgust off my face, because even at that age I’d known that wasn't the “normal” reaction to the thought of having sex with boys.
Sex with girls, though, was entirely more appealing to me.
It was confirmed one afternoon when Kate had come over to study. In contrast to our first study session, where the bed had been avoided at all costs, we were now lying on top of the bedspread, furiously dragging our mouths against each other. What had started out as an innocent make-out session as we sat on the edge of my bed—leisurely exploring each others’ mouths with our tongues and teeth, our fingers slowly caressing backs and shoulders and necks—had evolved into Kate pressing me into the pillows as my hands slid against the smooth skin of her lower back. They had somehow wandered under her shirt. My fingers and palms reveled in her warm skin, igniting my nerve endings.
There was an urgency in our kisses and touches that had been hinted at but never before fully unleashed. Her mouth wandered from my lips to my cheek to my neck, alternating between sucks and bites that had me gasping. I tried to return the favor by nuzzling the spot right underneath her jaw that made her eyes flutter in pleasure. I hoped I was making her feel just as good as she was making me feel.
Kate shifted over me so that more of her weight was resting against my chest. I liked it, so I pulled her closer, my hand drifting higher so that my fingertips brushed against the back of her bra. Just as I was wondering if I should slip my fingers under that strip of cloth so I could feel even more soft skin, Kate maneuvered her left leg between my thighs, and when she gently rocked into me, it felt so good I let out a whispered expletive.
She pulled away from me slightly, and I immediately missed her warmth. “Are you okay?” she whispered, out of breath.
“Yeah,” I responded in between gasps of my own, staring up at her swollen lips and tangled hair. I brought my hands to the sides of her face, and she gave my right palm a quick kiss before she slipped off of me and rested against my side on the bed. Instead of gentle blue eyes, I was now looking at the white of my bedroom ceiling. I took a deep breath in an effort to calm my pounding heart.
“Sorry about that,” she whispered into my shoulder. Her hands were tucked up underneath her chin, and when I looked down at her, all I could see was the top of her head.
“There's nothing to be sorry for,” I said, turning over onto my side and sliding down so that our faces were level. “That was great. Probably a bit too great, but nothing to apologize for.” I hoped the smile in my voice matched the one on my face. Just thinking about the last few minutes had me suppressing a shiver of pleasure.
Kate was still for a few seconds before she unfurled one of her arms and pulled me closer to her body. I, of course, willingly went. I was beginning to suspect I would go anywhere she led me.
“I got a little carried away,” she admitted when I was finally able to cajole her into meeting my eyes. With a little smile, she said mischievously, “But since I never hear you curse, I guess I did something right.”
Now it was my turn to hide my face. We giggled on the bed, lying next to each other and exchanging chaste kisses. We could not stop touching each other, whether it was me tucking a lock of loose hair behind Kate’s ear and taking the opportunity to ghost my fingers over her cheek, or Kate running her hand up and down my exposed side, investigating all the ridges and flats of my body. We talked some, but not much, mostly focusing on how cute we thought the other was. If I’d been an outsider looking at us, I would have been sickened by the sappiness we were displaying.
After some time, I stretched and rolled over onto my back. Kate sat up and looked down at me, a line forming over her furrowed eyebrows.
“Are you sure your parents are okay with us being in your room together. Alone?” she asked worriedly. This topic had come up before, and I reassured her just as I had previously.
“Stop worrying. They aren’t going to knock the door down and barge in here demanding that you stop corrupting their daughter.” I was pretty sure my parents knew we were not really studying up here, but I would rather not get into a discussion with them about what exactly we were doing. We were only making out, but as demonstrated, lately things had been getting more heated between Kate and me. I knew we should probably talk about that soon, but I pushed that thought to the side and focused instead on enjoying my time with the girl on my bed.
“I know that. It’s just sort of weird that your parents are so cool about us. I don’t know, I guess I expected a more parent-like reaction from them,” she said as she shrugged.
I gave her a disbelieving look. “Do you want them to act more like your parents did the first time I came over to your house?” I asked archly.
“Oh god no!” she exclaimed.
“I'd much rather not discuss either of our parental units,” I said.
She poked me in the side. “Yeah, don’t ever mention my parents whenever we are alone on a bed together.” We burst into fits of laughter.
“Well you’re the one who brought up the subject of parents in the first place.” I was rewarded with her tongue stuck out at me. It was somewhat arousing.
After calling a truce, we lay side by side on my bed, staring at the ceiling and just enjoying each other’s presence. Kate broke the silence after a few minutes.
“So,” she started hesitantly, “prom is coming up in a couple of weeks.”
She left the statement hanging, and I wasn't sure what to say. I had of course been aware that prom was coming up—it was hard to ignore all the posters up at school, in addition to Marie dragging me to stores in the search of the “perfect dress.” She had been asked by a boy from one of her classes and was excited to be going to dinner and sharing a limo with a group from school.
Marie had actually brought up the prom last week. She’d asked if Kate and I were going and if we wanted to go with the group she had set up, or if we were doing something on our own. I told her truthfully that Kate and I had not talked about the prom and that we probably were not going.
Now that Kate was bringing it up, though, I was second-guessing the way I’d dismissed it with Marie. Did Kate want to go to prom? With me?
Kate was even more hesitant after my lack of response. “Have you thought about going? To prom? I know we haven't talked about it, but I thought it might be fun. Jenny told me Marie is going, and Jenny is planning a group thing with a couple other girls who don't have dates, so if we don't want go with them, we could do our own thing. If you want to go.”
That was something else that had happened over the past couple of weeks. Marie and Jenny Jeffries, my best friend and my worst enemy, were basically friends now. I had let my feelings of betrayal be known, but Marie had brushed them aside and pointed out that as long as I was going out with Kate, then Jenny, as Kate's best friend, was going to be around, so why shouldn't she be friends with her?
She ignored all of my very well-thought-out reasons why.
Kate paused for a few seconds before adding, “I'd like to go with you. It might be fun.”
That snapped me out of my stupor. “Oh. That's interesting. I didn't know you wanted to go.” The way her face fell after I said that had me hurriedly trying to fix the mistake I had made. “But that's okay! Just because we haven’t talked about it before doesn’t mean we can’t talk about it now. We can go to prom. You’re right, it could be fun.” I smiled, trying to show some enthusiasm. I didn’t think I was very successful, because she didn’t look any happier.
“No, I don’t want to make you do something you don’t want to,” Kate said. “I should have mentioned it earlier. But we only started dating, so I didn’t want to ask you too early, but it’s gotten closer to prom, and if we’re going to go, we would have to make plans, like getting dresses or whatever formal wear you’d want to wear, or if we wanted to do anything before or after, so I thought I should ask, so I did,” she ended with a shrug.
“Hey, you aren’t making me do anything I don’t want to,” I said in what I hoped was a soothing voice as I moved forward to envelop her in my arms. I was being a jerk, and she was getting upset, and I really had to fix this. Like now.
She was stiff at first, but then I felt her relax against me, and I relaxed as well. I had not realized how nervous I was at the possibility of Kate being mad or, most likely, disappointed with me. I wanted to be the person in her life who made her happy, not the person who let her down. I guess this was what being in a relationship was about: thinking of the other person first and compromising if it would make her happy.
Because going to prom would definitely be a compromise. I honestly had little desire to get dressed up in a constricting, usually itchy dress and try to dance in a way that did not look like I was having a seizure. All done in front of gossiping classmates, though with graduation right around the corner, I thankfully would not have to deal with high school pettiness for much longer.
As if she had been reading my mind, Kate said against my shoulder, “Are you nervous about being with me in front of people?” She moved back to look me in the eye. “Because I’ve noticed that you won’t hold my hand or give me a hug if there are other people around.”
I looked back at her beautiful face and decided right there that I would take a page out of Marie’s book and never lie to the girl in front of me. “I’m not very comfortable with public displays of affection,” I admitted. “I’m not sure how to explain what I feel when we’re together and there’s a possibility of someone seeing us being more than just friends. Even that’s a little weird. We were never really friends.” She furrowed her eybrows at me, and I continued trying to explain to Kate what I was having trouble understanding myself. “I don’t like when people notice me. My sister calls me boring, like it’s a bad thing, but I don’t see it that way. The attention of others makes me nervous, so I try not to do or say anything that would make me stand out. There have been flaws to this approach,” I conceded, thinking specifically of my accidental public self-outing in particular.
Kate was patiently looking at me, letting me talk. I wished she would interrupt me so I wouldn’t have to continue, but she stayed silent. “I’m nervous about what other people would say if they saw us together or if they knew we were going out. Not in an ashamed way,” I hastened to add, not wanting her to think I was insulting her.
Kate frowned. “It sounds like you still aren’t comfortable with being out,” she said. She paused, refusing to look at me, but instead concentrating on my bedroom carpet. “So maybe we’re moving too fast.” She began nodding like she was talking herself into something. She finally looked up at me. “I think you need some space to get comfortable with yourself first before you can be comfortable with someone else. You shouldn’t feel nervous when you’re around me. I’m happy when I’m with you, and I don’t want to hide that feeling, my feelings. So it’s probably best that we take a time out or a break or something like that from each other. We can take that time to figure things out.” Her forced certainty had my heart pounding in panic.
I was losing her just as I was realizing how much I had with her. “No, we don’t have to do that,” I tried to persuade her in desperation, but she was already moving, grabbing her things from around my room and making her way to the bedroom door. “This is just a stupid hang-up I have that I’ll get over soon enough. I’m being an idiot. There’s no reason for you to leave,” I said, but it was like she didn’t hear me. Maybe she hadn’t. She was so focused on leaving, I could have just been background noise.
I followed Kate down the stairs, not wanting to continue our conversation in front of any of my family members who might be within hearing range, but knowing that I had to try to convince her not to leave. Not with how things stood.
I had gone from being scared to utter any words in her presence to wanting desperately to sit her down and talk for hours so she knew how much I liked her, and how I wanted to be more self-confident and not give a fuck about what others might say about me or us. But we had gone from cuddling to breaking up so fast that I was afraid I would never get that chance.
When she opened the front door, my stomach dropped. Was this it? Was I only going to have two weeks with the girl of my dreams before I messed it all up?
“Kate,” I said in a broken voice that made her turn around. I cringed when I saw the wetness in her eyes. “Please, let’s talk about this. It’s not fair, I was trying to be honest. I didn’t think you’d go away; I wanted to be truthful with you.” The words tumbled out, and I wasn’t really sure what I was saying. I was making a total mess of everything.
Kate sent me a fleeting smile that was a poor imitation of her usual one. “Haley, we both have a lot to think about. I’ll talk to you in a few days. There’s too much going on right now. I’ve got to process what you’ve told me, and I need some space to do that. Please give me that,” she pleaded.
She must have taken my drooping shoulders for acquiescence, because she drove away in her car without another word or backward glance. I felt like I was going to throw up.
“You messed up, didn’t you?” I heard from behind me. It was my sister. All I could do in response was shut my eyes and crouch down until I was sitting on the floor, no longer having the strength to hold myself upright.
Yeah, I messed up big time.