Everything changed when grade twelve started. First, Alex told me she was going to go to university abroad. All of a sudden we realized we had only one year left together. We committed to making the most of the time we had, promising to spend every second we could together before the year ended and she abandoned me to go away to school. The imminent threat of being apart dominated every conversation, influenced every plan we made, and crowded every room we were in together. We became inseparable, codependent, bound together like chain. And everyone noticed.
“Why don’t you girls get up and get some air?” Alex’s mom suggested nervously from the doorway to Alex’s room one Sunday. It was midafternoon, and we were still shoulder to shoulder in Alex’s single bed.
“Haven’t seen Christina or any of the girls around here recently,” Mom commented one afternoon after Alex had left to go home after a weekend at our house.
“You guys are so gay,” Sara scoffed on another afternoon when she’d grabbed something from my room while Alex and I were studying on the bed together, our textbooks and binders spread between us. I’d bristled when she said it, worried Alex would feel uncomfortable, that it would cause her not to want to be close to me. But Alex hadn’t said anything, hadn’t seemed hurt or disgusted.
On another night when Alex was studying at Naomi’s, she called me. We were on the hundredth “No, you hang up first,” “No, you hang up first” when Naomi yelled, “Say goodnight to your girlfriend already!”
“Goodnight, girlfriend.”
Every hair on my arms had stood up when Alex said it. I knew she was joking; she always took the teasing and taunting in stride. But afterward, I sat for a long time, blushing and bathing in the feeling it had generated in me to hear her say it.
Even Spencer seemed to notice. One night I asked him for a cigarette at Grace’s birthday, and Alex told him not to give it to me.
“She can decide what she wants for herself.”
“Yeah.” I smiled, a cigarette dangling from my lips as I did.
Alex had stormed off after he leaned into me to light it.
“Better go find your girlfriend and apologize,” he’d quipped, a little hurt showing behind his eyes.
When I asked Alex to explain what made her feel so upset in these moments, she would cry, become frustrated, admit she wasn’t sure. “I just feel so crazy sometimes. I know I overreact. He just . . . makes me feel jealous. I don’t know why.”
I would try to console her, to be patient. Though I’d kept it to myself, I’d struggled with the same kind of irrational emotion.
When Alex had gotten a boyfriend over the summer while she was at camp, I’d felt sick with jealousy when she told me—and then fat with relief when she called crying a few weeks later, telling me they had broken up. But even after they broke up, it still bothered me that he’d been worthy of her tears. I’d felt like the most important person to her, and it nagged at me that she’d let a boy close to her heart. When she showed me photos of him when she got home, I’d felt a rising pressure in my chest; the sight of him with his arms around her in her bathing suit made me feel displaced, as if I didn’t belong anywhere, not even in my own body. When she cried about Spencer or acted jealous, I felt like I understood the feeling, even if I didn’t understand where it came from or what it meant. I tried to find the words to tell her all this, but they always seemed to fall short of making her feel better.
But the biggest shift between us came one afternoon in late fall. Alex changed in front of me in her room, and I accidentally glanced at her at the moment her shirt was off, and then our eyes met. I blushed and looked away. I felt crushing embarrassment and fear. It had been an accident, but I felt sick because maybe she’d think otherwise. But she just laughed and said, “Whoops.” We never mentioned it again. Still, I couldn’t forget what I’d seen. That night on the phone as she rambled on about something, almost without thinking I found myself writing to her about it in the journal we shared. I wanted to go back to that moment and not look away, not let her pull her shirt down and cover herself. In our journal, I wrote out what I had become consumed by: her. Printing the words felt exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. I grew convinced that what I felt wasn’t just inside me. I was sure I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. She must, too. It explained so much: the jealousy between us, the fact that we’d only grown more interested in each other, not less, as our friendship had developed over the last two years. I wanted desperately to rip the page out later but forced myself not to. I wasn’t going to mess this up like I had with Emma and all the other girls I had become close to. This time was going to be different.
Later that week as we waited for Alex’s mom to come pick her up after a weekend together, she went to the bathroom and I grabbed the book from the bench seat in my room where I’d hidden it. I opened it to the page where I’d confessed how I felt about her. Dragging my finger along the words, I felt sure I was going to faint. When I heard Alex come out of the bathroom, I ripped the page out and shoved it in my back pocket, snapping the book closed just as she walked through my open bedroom door.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Nothing, just . . . grabbing the book. I actually forgot to write in it. I started but messed up. I owe you twice as much next week.” I was talking too quickly. Acting too nervous.
“Oh, want me to throw it out for you?” she asked, extending her hand toward me, a smile sneaking out as she did.
I smiled back. “No.”
We both started to laugh at the same time. Then, she lunged at me. I darted around her, dropping the book, and tripped toward my bed. I landed hard on my mattress and flipped onto my back, putting my body between Alex and the note as she pinned me down.
“What are you hiding?” she asked.
“I’m not hiding anything.” I giggled, twisting and squealing, already out of breath.
“Really? You’re putting up a big fight over nothing.”
Sitting astride my hips, her fingers pecked at my sides. The more I laughed, the weaker I got. She managed to wedge her knees into the soft part of the underside of my upper arms, pinning me to the bed. I bucked; hysterical laughter scored our struggle. We kept it up for a full minute and then she stopped, sat up, and stared down at me.
“What did you rip out of the book?”
“Nothing.”
“What does the note say, Tegan?”
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
“Tell me what it says.”
“It’s nothing.”
“If it’s nothing, show me.”
“No.”
She stared at me without saying anything. Then without warning, she leaned down and kissed me. She held her lips to mine for no more than six seconds, but those six seconds rearranged me, completely.
“Tell me what it says,” she said, a smile spreading across her face as she sat up.
“No.”
“Tell me.”
“No.” I grabbed her sweater and pulled her toward me so I could kiss her again.
When Alex’s ride arrived, she left me with the note and a hickey the size of a nickel. I gasped when I saw it in the mirror of the plywood changing room at Value Village an hour later. Pressing my finger into the bruised skin, I leaned in, immediately paranoid someone had seen it. How would I explain a hickey after a weekend alone with Alex? My fingers drifted back and forth over the misshapen purple spot; I imagined Alex’s mouth where my fingers were. I leaned against the cheap wood and raced through excuses I could give if Mom or Sara mentioned it.
“You done in there?” Mom called from outside.
“Almost,” I said.
I locked eyes with myself in the mirror, tugged my hoodie up, and felt relieved to see it mostly covered the hickey. I knew I’d have to figure out how to cover up the bruise when I got home. But for a minute, I let the hickey, and what it meant, sink in. She liked me. She kissed me. She hadn’t seen the note. She had no idea how I felt about her, and yet she knew, had likely known all along. I placed my palm over the mark, let myself feel Alex’s mouth one more time before I unlatched the door. Smiling at myself in the mirror, I felt the happiest I ever had in my entire life.