BLUISH MORNING LIGHT splays across my face. I reach out my hand, hoping for something warm and soft, but I find only a handful of wrinkled sheets.
I sit up alone in my bed, tank top damp against my skin, and try to press the disappointment that Charlie didn’t sleep over away from my eyes. Of course she didn’t. After we started dating, our parents put a stop to sleepovers pretty quickly, but we’d push our curfews to the limit and send gooey good-morning texts as soon as the sun split the dark.
It took forever for me to fall asleep last night, half terrified I’d dream about Owen and Hannah and something I didn’t want to see. I don’t remember dreaming at all, but the ache in the center of my chest is still thin and sharp.
Tossing my covers back, I throw on a pair of leggings and the first tunic dress I wrap my hands around in my closet. It’s still early, the sun low and winking through my window, and the house is quiet as I tiptoe downstairs. Too quiet. I stand in the kitchen, the coffeemaker still idle, everything in its place.
And nothing in its place. Nothing like my house should feel.
I shiver, finding my school bag in the hall, my keys, my jacket. I take Owen’s and my car and drive to school an hour before I’m supposed to be there. Mom texts me not long after and I tell her I have a project to finish up.
I don’t think she buys it.
is the only response I get.
I cut the engine but leave the music blaring, some female songwriter Charlie introduced me to, with a smooth voice and a name I can’t remember right now. “She’s the perfect blend of gloom and pop,” Charlie had said a few months ago. We had just decided to try dating, and even though we’d been best friends for almost three years, everything was new and stomach-fluttering and wild.
I lean my head against the seat and close my eyes, trying not to think about her. But every time I succeed, my mind goes places that are dark and covered up and knotted instead. Not exactly what I was going for.
I’d rather have the Charlie thoughts. I’d always rather have Charlie. Best friends forever, after all.
Owen used to say Charlie and I were always going to end up as more than friends. He’d been saying it for close to three years, even before I’d really claimed the word bisexual. Charlie had known she liked girls since she was twelve, so that was no secret. And I knew I did as well, but I liked boys, too, and it took me a while to figure out I could like both in different ways and for different reasons and that was actually a thing.
The year I met Charlie, I was nowhere near ready to own that. I’d just had the worst summer of my life, eight weeks stuck in a barely air-conditioned classroom repeating prealgebra because I failed the class the last semester of eighth grade.
Only I didn’t fail the class. My teacher, Mr. Knoll, failed me.
Regardless, I was in summer school, my parents completely shocked and disappointed that I had earned an F. Consequently, during the hours I wasn’t suffering through material I already knew, I was grounded. I would close myself in my bedroom, mulling over that rainy day in Mr. Knoll’s classroom at Butler Middle School, reliving the scene over and over. How quiet the room was. The smell of the dry-erase markers and teenage sweat. The summer weeks passed slowly, a heart-shrinking routine. My parents assumed I was just being petulant. Owen knew better. Nearly every day, he tried coaxing me onto the roof, promising stories, but nothing really helped change my mood.
Everything I knew seemed to change after that last day of eighth grade. I changed. Mr. Knoll, looking at me with that smirk on his face, stripped me of my choices, my control, the safety of school and teachers and my own body.
By the time I started ninth grade at Pebblebrook, the mirror always reflected limp hair, purple crescents under my eyes, a blank stare and a flat-lined mouth.
On the first day of school, I met Charlie in American Lit. She sat behind me, told me her name and how much she liked my hair. Asked if she could braid it. I’ll never forget how shocked I was by her question, almost scandalized. I turned in my seat, my eyes searching hers, and she just grinned. She seemed so sure of herself. Still, there was a weariness to her smile and I clung to it, pulled it into my own emotional exhaustion.
Charlie was wearing a plaid shirt with a lace-trimmed tank top peeking out from the bottom and skinny jeans. Her legs were splayed wide under the desk. “Knock yourself out,” I’d said, and my permission shocked me too. I hadn’t let anyone touch me all summer. My mom would squeeze my arm or try to hug me good night and I’d stiffen, all my senses instantly on alert. I knew it hurt her, but I couldn’t tell her why. Not even Owen’s playful shoulder bumps when we passed in the hall were allowed. I’d arc away from everyone. My dad didn’t even try, but the sad look on his face every time I shrank away from him was clear.
But when Charlie started lacing her fingers through my hair, I instantly relaxed. Breathed easier. I still don’t really understand why. Later, Charlie and I laughed over our first meeting, joking about what a creeper she was.
“I like hair, okay?” she’d said, twisting a lock of mine around her finger. “Yours in particular.”
“So you have a hair fetish. That’s what you’re saying, right?”
She’d laughed and tugged the lock gently, but something serious spilled into her eyes.
Almost a year later, when our friendship had blossomed into something neither of us could live without, lying together in my bed, limbs entangled and still under the guise of just friends, she’d confessed that she hated her own long hair.
“I don’t know what it is about it,” she’d whispered in the dark of my bedroom. We spent at least one weekend night together at one of our houses, binging on pizza and watching eighties movies. “When I look in the mirror, it just doesn’t look like me.”
“I think you look beautiful.”
She’d smiled, but it was a sad sort of smile.
“If you don’t like it,” I said, “you should cut it.”
“I don’t know if my mom would let me. I want it really short.”
“Have you asked her?”
She pressed her lips flat and shook her head softly, looking away from me.
“I’ll cut it for you,” I said. I just wanted her to smile again.
She’d laughed. “Really?”
“Sure—how hard can it be?”
She smiled, her foot brushing up against my calf. A week later, I totally butchered her hair.
Slowly, I slipped into my own skin again. Slowly, the memory of Mr. Knoll faded to a dull buzz in the back of my head. Slowly, I started to need more. Do more. Fight more. I’d spent months feeling small and inconsequential. I won’t say that Charlie was completely responsible for the change, but she definitely helped. She made me feel safe, like it was okay to be whoever or whatever I needed to be. Charlie dealt with so much inside her head, hid so much from her parents, but she never hid herself from me. She let me see just how hard life hit her, just how confusing it was sometimes for her. All of the assholes in our school who’d bump into her in the halls, wondering aloud and obnoxiously if she was a girl or a guy. Every time her mom wanted to take her dress shopping. Every time her dad pulled her into his arms and whispered how thankful he was for his beautiful daughter. She wore it all with a lifted chin and steely eyes, with a grace I envied. I still kept so much from her at that time, but she made me feel like, someday, I wouldn’t anymore—she made me feel so many somedays.
Empower was my idea, but Charlie and I really started it together. A place to talk about the shit that girls and queer kids deal with every day. A medium to write about it. We got school approval and convinced our chorus teacher, Ms. Rodriguez, to be our faculty advisor, and for the first time in months I felt as if I was holding the reins on my own life. Steering it the way I wanted it to go. There was no topic I’d shy away from, and I quickly became known as Queen Bitch at school, which just fueled every flame I had in me. I devoted an entire article to why I found the term delightfully empowering, and the piece ended up being a pretty hilarious and scathing commentary, one of my favorites I’ve ever written. I remember typing it up furiously on my laptop in Charlie’s room. She sat on her bed, ankles crossed lazily as she attempted to knit a Ravenclaw beanie hat out of blue and gray yarn, which I knew was for me because she was a Gryffindor through and through. Every now and then the clack of her needles would still and our gazes would snag. Her proud grin was like kindling for my fingers.
Near the end of junior year, we had just put the finishing touches on a kick-ass issue tackling the double standard when it comes to sex: guys were sex-crazed animals; girls just did it for an emotional connection. We interviewed a ton of students—all genders, all orientations, different races and ethnicities. Some owned being virgins; some talked proudly about one-night hookups; some discussed how much the idea of sex stressed them out; some confessed a total lack of interest in sex. It was the best issue all year and I knew people would talk about it for months. Principal Carr got sort of pissed when he read the draft for approval and almost didn’t let us put the issue out, but Ms. Rodriguez calmed him down. I don’t know what she said to him, but I felt almost high that day in her choir room as I hit print.
“This is really amazing,” Charlie had said as she read over the articles on the computer. We’d done a chat piece together, where she and I discussed her liking girls and me being bi and our general thoughts about sex. I wanted to add in some stuff about Charlie’s gender identity, but she hadn’t wanted to get into it publicly. Unless she brought it up, we rarely talked about it, even though I knew it was something she dealt with every day.
“I think so too,” I’d said. “Thanks for your help.” I beamed at her, adrenaline flooding my veins, the paper in my hands still warm from the printer. She peered at me over the laptop, her hair almost impossibly tall.
“Your cheeks are flushed.” She got up and made her way toward me, glancing toward Ms. Rodriquez’s empty office as she crossed the room.
I laughed. “It just feels good.”
“What does?”
“Doing something. Anything.”
She’d looked at me, a question in her eyes, but it didn’t make its way to her mouth. Instead, she reached out her hand to cup my chin. “I’m really proud of you.”
Such a simple statement. But something in those words pulled me over the slowly blurring line in our relationship. Maybe it was the adrenaline. Maybe it was the fact that we’d created something powerful and beautiful, said something important, and we’d done it together. Maybe it was always going to happen, like Owen said.
Whatever it was, the distance between us kept shrinking, smaller and smaller, until our lips met. Immediately, she smiled against my mouth and hooked her arm around my waist, her other hand soft on my cheek. My own hands were more unsure. She was only the second girl I’d ever kissed. The first girl was a one-time thing at a party near the end of sophomore year, and even then it was anxiety-laced. With that girl, I faked a headache and proceeded to have a panic attack in the bathroom that lasted fifteen minutes. I wasn’t sure I could ever kiss anyone again. It was supposed to be so fun and it ended up being so terrifying.
But with Charlie, it was different. When I finally registered what was happening, I locked up and she pulled back, worried eyes searching mine. I was dizzy and nervous, but I also felt safe and turned on as hell. So I smiled at her and my fingers found their way to her slim hips and I pulled her back to me, deepening the kiss. She tasted like cinnamon gum, her lips soft against mine, tongue gentle and slow, seeking and finding mine over and over. For the first time in a long time—maybe ever—I really wanted someone.
And that was the beginning, such a natural transition from what we had been to what we were always becoming. For a while it was good. So good. I was shocked by how good it was. And then my mom kept casting us worried glances and Owen would crack a joke about how the world would theoretically end if we ever broke up. But the real problem wasn’t that our friendship was changing. Not really. Charlie was absolutely fine with whatever we did or didn’t do physically, but I know she must have wondered why I never let her hands wander below my waist and why I never touched her like that either. I couldn’t be her girlfriend the way I wanted to be. The way she deserved. I felt my control slipping, the worry that I’d ruin everything a palpable weight on my chest.
Because who was I without Charlie? Who was she? How did we get so entangled that I couldn’t imagine a life without her? And how fair was it to her that I couldn’t touch her, couldn’t be touched?
Three weeks ago, the ship went down, and I’m the one who blew a hole in the port side.
We were eating tacos at my house, the evening light fading from a vibrant orange to a delicate lavender, the night growing soft around the edges. Mom and Dad were on an overnight trip to Chattanooga, hoping to descend upon some estate sale at the crack of dawn and acquire yet another four-poster bed or antique desk for their furniture shop. Owen was probably at the lake with Hannah, soaking in the last of the warm sun. I don’t even remember now. I do remember glancing up at Charlie, her pretty pale skin almost violet in the twilight, and all of those worries finally overflowed.
So I told her I missed my best friend.
She said the same, even though she had to know there was more to it.
But I miss her even more now.
Pebblebrook is a big school, but in our tiny little program full of dramatic artistes, it doesn’t take long for a whisper to snake through the halls, eating everything in its path until it’s a shout. I’m halfway through a notation in second-period music theory when the murmuring starts.
I spent the first ninety minutes of school forcing my eyes straight ahead in the halls and on my own papers in class. I’m on a different schedule than both Owen and Hannah, so I don’t know if either of them came to school. I’m not sure what I’d do with that information even if I did know.
Now Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” plays gloomily through Dr. Baylor’s sound system while I scribble on my composition paper, straining to catch every chord and quarter rest. I’ve just added a crescendo symbol when I hear them.
Voices, whispering.
“For real?”
“That’s what I heard.”
“What a bitch.”
I turn my head toward the hissing. A group of orchestra kids huddle over their desks, heads bent together, notation paper forgotten between them. All of them are wearing matching disgusted expressions, a tinge of hunger underneath.
“This morning, Owen told me they had a fight after they . . . you know,” Jaden Abbot says, waggling his eyebrows. I want to rip them off. “Then he told her maybe they should take a break. Just a breather, you know? She freaked and now she’s crying rape.”
My heart stutters and my eyes instinctively look for Charlie. She’s a few rows over, already staring at me, her mouth a little circle of shock.
“No way,” Rachel Nix says. “They’ve been together for months. You’re telling me they haven’t already done it?”
Jaden grins. “That’s exactly what I’m not telling you.”
“There’s no way he hasn’t already been in her very tiny skirt,” says Peter Muldano.
“Multiple times,” Jaden adds, and the group devolves into laughter.
“Enough,” Dr. Baylor snaps as she circles the room. “This assignment is due at the end of class. I suggest you listen and write.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Peter says, saluting like the ass hat he is.
Dr. Baylor rolls her eyes and I catch her as she comes up my row.
“May I have a bathroom pass?” I whisper.
She leans toward me, her glasses slipping down her nose. “I’m sorry, what?”
I clear my throat, swallow, try to force some audibility into my voice. “Um . . . the bathroom? Please?”
“Make it fast.” She glances at my half-completed paper while waving me toward the classroom door.
The classroom door all the way on the other side of the room.
I slide out of my desk, feeling Jaden’s and his crew’s eyes slide over me like curious fingers for the entire trek across the shiny tiled floor.
“She must hate Hannah,” Rachel whispers to Peter as I pass. The words are a firework in my ears, and my feet nearly tangle together. I brace one hand on a desk near the exit—I don’t even know whose—and then all but fling myself into the quiet hallway.
I take off running. Lockers blur in my periphery, a teacher on his planning period calls out to me from down the hall, but I don’t stop until I’m in the restroom, my gasps for breath fogging up the mirror above the sinks.
“Are you okay, Mara?”
I startle, but more from the syrupy tone of the voice than the voice itself. Greta stands two sinks down from me, calmly drying her hands on a brown paper towel.
“Fine,” I say, and run the water in my own sink.
“You don’t have to pretend with me.”
“I’m not doing anything with you, Greta. I’m washing my damn hands.”
“Okay. But we need to figure out how we’re going to handle this at the Empower meeting tomorrow.”
I just stare at her, fighting to keep my expression blank, but something like panic begins a slow crawl up my throat.
“Handle . . . what?”
She lifts her perfectly defined eyebrows. “Interesting.”
“What’s interesting?” I snap off the faucet, my fingers dripping water onto the floor.
She puts up her palms. “I know this has to be really weird for you.”
“Oh my god, Greta, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“One of us sure as hell doesn’t.”
“Look, I don’t—”
The main restroom door squeaks open, shutting me up. Charlie stands in the entryway, long legs in gray jeans. Her eyes dart between Greta and me.
“Everything good in here?” she asks.
“I was just leaving,” Greta says, catching my eye once more in the mirror. “See you girls in chorus.”
Charlie winces but manages a smile as Greta leaves.
When she disappears into the hallway, my knees buckle. I let myself go down, squatting so my feet are still on the floor and wrapping my arms around my legs. My hands are still wet, slippery hooks on my elbows.
“Shit,” I hear Charlie mutter. Then she’s in front of me, her hands on my shoulders as I gasp for breath again.
“Is it . . . is it true?” I ask. “Did Owen really try to break up with Hannah? He told me they fought. I mean . . . he said they didn’t, but then he said they did, and I don’t . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Hey, hey, just breathe.” Charlie pulls me back against a wall, forcing me to sit on my butt. She settles on the other side of me, her legs blocking the restroom door. She rubs circles on my back, pulls her hands through my hair before moving to my back again. “Breathe.”
So I do. Over and over, measured and steady, until my fingertips are no longer tingling, until the waves of nausea pass. “Is it true?” I ask again.
“Mara. You know the answer to that.”
“I don’t. Maybe something happened at the party. Something we don’t know about.”
Charlie shifts so she’s facing me. “Owen isn’t telling the truth. How can you not see that? Hannah told me what happened: They were messing around on the trail. It got pretty heavy. She changed her mind. He didn’t let her. End of story.”
“But they’ve . . . they’ve had sex before.”
Charlie doesn’t have to say it for me to hear how ridiculous I sound. How unlike myself. How full of excuses and provisos. But they’re not excuses to me. This is my brother we’re talking about.
“This doesn’t make any sense. This isn’t . . .” This isn’t my brother, I want to say. He would never have hurt Hannah. But that would make Hannah a liar and that’s not her, either. I know her. Sat beside her during Empower meetings, listened to her talk about getting boobs in the fourth grade and how it made her feel self-conscious and foreign in her own body. How the first time she got her period, she figured it out all by herself because her mom hadn’t told her about it yet. I remember nodding in reluctant agreement when she told me to be patient with Greta, even when Greta acted like a power-hungry harpy.
“It’s us against the world, Mara,” Hannah said one time. “If we’re not on each other’s side, who will be?”
“I can’t believe it,” I say to Charlie, locked-up tears strangling my voice. “I physically can’t. How can I believe either one of them? How can I not believe them?”
“I don’t know,” Charlie says softly, her hands on my back stilling. “He’s your brother, I get that. But I . . .” She breathes out heavily, her cinnamon breath fanning into the space between us. “I need you to know that I do believe Hannah. And it sucks. Everything about this is shitty. I mean, I loved Owen too.”
Loved. Past tense. Charlie’s made up her mind, picked a side and marched onward, and I’m still trying to wake up from a nightmare.
“I’ll help you work through this,” she says. “I’ll do whatever I can, Mara. Just . . .”
“Just what?”
“Don’t forget about Hannah. Okay? She’s totally devastated.”
“She loved Owen,” I whisper, and Charlie nods. Her hands slide to the back of my neck, thumb right on a pulse point. I can feel my blood pounding against her skin. Hannah did love my brother. He loved her too.
“I can’t be here today,” I say, moving Charlie’s hands away and pulling myself to my feet.
“Where will you go?”
“I don’t know . . . I just can’t.”
“I’ll come with you. I don’t want you to be alone.”
“No. No, I need to be.”
“Mara—”
But I nudge her legs out of the way and open the door. Instantly, I’m swept into a throng of students in the middle of a class change, Hannah’s name a constant whisper in the air.