Avery woke to the sound of something slamming into the bottom of her bedroom door. To her trained ear, it sounded like a Tonka pickup truck, thrown the length of the hallway as part of her brothers’ “Is it really indestructible?” game. She then heard her mother yelling that they had better stop throwing that truck around or they would never see high school. A minute later Eric opened her door.
“Do you have batteries?” he asked hurriedly. Her brothers knew all about the Billy Bass thing, but they weren’t foolish enough to search through Avery’s things to look for the battery stash.
“What did I tell you about knocking?” she said, brushing her hair from her eyes.
“Do you?”
She didn’t feel like arguing with her brother about batteries. She had a full-scale disaster on her hands.
“Here,” she said, reaching over and opening a drawer in her bedside stand. She reached around and found the batteries and rolled them across her floor.
So now she was wide awake, which kind of sucked. She’d been hoping to sleep a little longer. Until she was thirty would have been nice.
She hadn’t meant for this to happen. The kiss with Gaz hadn’t been planned. Hareth had bailed on rehearsal, so they’d decided to go over to the hayride. In the car Gaz made a joke about the whole hayroll thing, and much to Avery’s surprise, he started flirting with her. And she liked it.
She’d only wanted to test it out, just to see how it made her feel. The way she saw it, her whole relationship with Mel was one big experiment, so the rules didn’t always apply. She wasn’t cheating—she was checking her homosexuality quotient.
It had been … different from what she’d experienced with Mel. Something had definitely stirred in her that didn’t seem to happen while she was kissing Mel. But there was a lot missing, too. Being with Mel was warm and cozy and … complete. Being with Gaz was fun, but in the end she was just messing around with some guy in a car. Overall, kind of disappointing. Maybe a four out of ten.
Which kind of meant that she was right back where she started with the whole issue. And, as much as she questioned her lesbianity, there was definitely lots of evidence to support the idea.
One: She’d dated a girl for almost four months. She referred to this girl as her girlfriend. Not in public, but certainly in her own head and to the girl herself.
Two: She’d done things with aforementioned girlfriend that went well beyond kissing, things that might still be illegal in some of the more backward states.
Three: Mel beat Gaz’s scores in all aspects of the event.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, verdict?
Gay. Gay as the day is long.
Except that she wasn’t. Despite all the evidence, she was not gay. She knew it. Because gay women don’t have sudden, overwhelming, and (she had to admit it now) constant urges to make out with guys.
Did they?
And now she had Nina to deal with. Not only had Nina caught her and looked at her with a dislike that Avery had never seen before—if Nina decided that she couldn’t keep this a secret, everything was going to go boom.
The suckitude level, as Margo would say, was very high.
When Avery arrived, Nina was sitting in front of her computer with a physics book open beside her. She was fully dressed in jeans and the Little Miss Felon T-shirt Avery had given her for her birthday last year. Avery wondered if this gesture had some meaning—if she had worn the shirt to deliver a message. Just the fact that Nina was awake, showered (her hair was still damp), dressed, and doing physics at ten on a Saturday morning added to Avery’s current low opinion of herself. If her brothers hadn’t woken her, she’d still be in bed, drooling on herself and dreaming that she was grocery shopping with Jack Black.
“Can I talk to you?” Avery asked.
“I guess.”
She sat down on Nina’s plump cream-colored comforter. (Nina made her bed, too. She even tucked her pillows under the comforter and then pressed in the edge so that they were in a perfect little envelope, just like they did in ads for white sales.)
“You’re mad,” she said.
Nina didn’t answer. She looked down at her long nail beds and massaged a cuticle.
“I’m really confused, Neen.”
“About what?”
“About me.”
“Oh, that’s not too vague,” Nina said.
Avery sighed. Before, when they only used to talk about guys, it had been easy to pour out details. Now she was loaded down with shame—about her behavior, her mysterious sexuality, that she wasn’t showered and doing physics problems.
“I’m not sure if I’m gay, or straight, or bi, or what,” she said.
“Maybe you should have thought that one through before you started dating Mel.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Why not?”
“I definitely like Mel. I like … the things that go along with dating. I mean, I have those feelings. But I think it might just be Mel that I like. That way.”
“You like guys too?” Nina asked.
Avery felt her skin flushing. Something about that question made her feel like … a glutton. Like she wanted everyone. Guys, girls, dogs, cats, populations of whole cities.
“I was sitting with Gaz, and I realized I kind of like him,” Avery tried to explain. “I felt something. I wanted to see why. I wanted to see what happened. I needed to check.”
“So?” Nina asked. “What did you find out?”
“It was okay.”
“What does that mean?” Nina asked.
“I have no clue,” Avery said.
“Does Mel feel … like that? Confused?”
“No,” Avery said, pulling up the little silver chain she wore around her neck and chewing on it. “I don’t think so. Mel’s pretty sure about herself.”
“That’s she’s a lesbian.”
“Yeah.”
Nina tucked her legs up on the chair and rested her face on her knees. It looked like she was folding in on herself, creating a little temple where she could ask the gods for advice on this perplexing matter.
“If she finds out, she’s going to get really upset,” Avery said.
“No kidding,” Nina mumbled.
While Nina thought, Avery got up and paced around the room, looking at Nina’s pristine desk, with her little silver Apple notebook sitting perfectly in the center and the row of books lined up along the wall in order of height. Nina’s bureau was completely stocked with makeup and lotions, yet wasn’t overcrowded. Avery knew that none of the lipsticks had gotten all over the silver-twisty part or had their tips broken off by accident in the cap. Her perfumes and lotions were used to a respectable halfway point. Unlike Avery, Nina didn’t keep piles of empty bottles because she was convinced that if she held them upside down or scooped her finger inside, she might be able to draw out just one more drop of shampoo or cream or whatever it was.
“I don’t want to mess things up between you,” Nina said, finally lifting her face from her knees.
Avery didn’t know if she should say “thanks” or just “oh” or “okay.” She nodded instead.
“It can’t happen again,” Nina said sternly. “It can’t.”
Avery resented the parental tone Nina was taking, but she couldn’t really argue.
“I know,” Avery said. “I promise.”
Avery started across the room to give Nina the hug that always came at this point, but Nina turned away and looked at her book, scrunching up her forehead as if the whole time she’d really just been doing some complex problem in her head about what happens to a bicycle moving along at the speed of light.
Avery stopped and put her hands in her pockets.
“Thanks,” she said before walking out the door.