16

“Can you pick me up?”

There was absolutely no scenario in which I would ask my mother to drive me downtown to meet Don’t Know Him From Adam for coffee. It would fill her brain with all sorts of wrong certainties about my nonexistent love life.

“From school?” Adam sounded surprised.

“That’s where I am.” It was two o’clock on a Wednesday. Where else would I be?

“Um, yeah, sure.” Adam covered the phone and coughed. “You can’t meet me? Do you not have a car? You drive, right?”

Intrusive questions alert. I flushed, then remembered he was a reporter and therefore socially inappropriate.

“You’re sixteen, right?” He really wasn’t letting this go.

“Yeah.” I felt a spike of indignation at the question. “How old are you?”

“Eighteen. What time do you get out?”

He pulled up forty minutes later in a black Toyota with a yellow stripe painted down the side, like he was planning to go drag racing in his sensible sedan.

“I know,” he groaned when I sat down, even though I hadn’t said anything. “I’m getting it repainted. I’ve only had it for two months.”

“The car or the need for speed?”

“The car.”

“Would you say that you’re more fast or furious?”

He adjusted the rearview mirror. “Fast. I have my temper pretty well in check. Although I could probably jog faster than this car.”

I laughed, relaxing. “So are you a freshman?”

He nodded. “Do you not drive?”

He sure had the dogged-pursuit-of-truth part of journalism down.

“No,” I admitted, fastening my seat belt with all the dignity a passenger could muster. “I tried. It didn’t take.”

“Kinda hard to avoid driving in this part of the world. Back in New York, I was the only one of my friends with a license.”

He put the car into gear. I watched in envy at his mastery of the stick shift. Bizarrely, Adam seemed more comfortable behind the wheel than I’d ever seen him outside of a car.

“My best friend usually drives me,” I said, leaving out the part where she’d ordered me to stop mooching rides.

“The one you told me about? Who just came out?”

“Yeah.” I smiled. “She’s awesome. She’s why I’m doing all this.”

“I thought so.” We’d hit a stoplight, and Adam was staring at me with a funny expression. “Sounds like she’s pretty important to you.”

“She’s everything,” I said, but my voice came out weird and hollow, like I was reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Adam was quiet until we pulled up to the restaurant. Honestly, when he’d called about a follow-up interview, I wasn’t sure I had much of an update to give him, aside from the fact that I was having random attacks of vertigo every time I remembered that my name was all over the Internet—but then he’d suggested Chez Panisse and visions of éclairs started nomming in my head. It was a nice courtyard restaurant in downtown Charleston, the kind of place that had a long wait during tourist season, even for coffee. But Adam had made a reservation.

He pulled a chair out for me and I had to press my lips shut to keep from grinning like an idiot.

“I’ve gotten a lot of requests for your contact information,” he said as he settled into the seat opposite me. “From reporters. Real ones.”

“You’re a real reporter,” I said.

His eyes lit up.

“No,” he said, burying his smile. “I mean from national publications. Some news stations. CNN, ABC.”

“What? Really?” Legitimate news sources? Not just blogs?

He squinted at me. “You don’t go online much, do you?”

“Mostly just to look stuff up,” I said, opting not to tell him that I’d googled my name every five minutes until falling asleep at two a.m. the night before. “I don’t do social networking. I don’t really network. Or socialize.”

“You might want to start.” Adam pulled a page up on his phone. “Get a Facebook profile at least. Look at this.”

This was new since last night. On Facebook, someone—a total stranger, living in New Hampshire—had started a fund for the “Palmetto Alternative Homecoming.” They already had more than $16,000 raised.

“What.” I grabbed Adam’s phone. “I’ve raised fifty bucks. From my dad!”

“You should link up with these people. They want to help.”

“Thanks to you!” That was corny. “Your article, I mean.” Stop talking.

He cleared his throat. “I’m just pointing it out. You do what you want with the information.” He took his phone back, eyes drifting to the next table. “It’s important for a reporter to maintain a critical distance from his subject. I can’t advocate one way or the other.”

“You can’t get too involved.”

“Exactly.”

“Is that why—?” I bit the words back.

Is that why you buried the fact that I was straight? Is that the “critical distance” you’re talking about?

I wanted an answer, but I couldn’t think of a way to ask that wouldn’t spoil the moment—the jasmine-scented breeze, the bright chatter around us, the pretense of having this boy as a friend.

He had his eyebrows raised, waiting for the rest of my question.

“Is that why you took me to coffee at Chez Panisse, Mr. Fancy Pants?” I fluttered my eyelashes at him over the menu. “I’m ordering pastries, by the way.”

He grinned, frowned, then shoved his glasses back into place, a gesture I now recognized as flustered, all in the space of a second. “So should I pass them your contact info?”

“The reporters?” I shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

Adam asked a few questions about the event and jotted down my answers, but when I got bored of talking about myself, I said, “Let’s do you now,” half expecting him to cite the aforementioned Journalistic Distance Clause. But:

“I’m from Brooklyn. That’s a borough of New York Cit—”

I blinked duh at him. “I think I’ve heard of it.”

“I was born there. Grew up there. Had enough of there. Applied to every college with a strong journalism program outside a two-hundred-mile radius. Got into . . .” He counted off on his fingers. “UCLA. Northwestern. Bristol University in England. Waitlisted at Stanford . . .”

“But you picked . . . Charleston.”

“Yeah.” He laughed, like he couldn’t believe it either. “CU offered me a scholarship, which I needed. And I wanted to see what the South was like.”

He said “South” like other people would say “Camelot.”

“Is it living up to your expectations?” I asked wryly.

“It’s . . . different than I’d thought,” he admitted. “But like I said, the accents are pretty great.”

“You keep going on about that.” I leaned back, arms crossed. “I don’t even have an accent.”

“You are mistaken.”

It was an accusation, but something about the way Adam said it, his dark eyes glowing and shy, his voice low and warm and flat-voweled, made me feel like grabbing a hoop skirt and parasol and Scarlett O’Hara–ing it up.

He drove me home, and bless everything that can be blessed above, my mother’s car wasn’t in the driveway when we pulled up.

“Thanks for the éclairs,” I said. “They were magnifique.”

Instead of “You’re welcome,” Adam said, “I could teach you to drive stick shift.”

I stared back, stone-faced, in case he was mocking me.

“Seriously,” he said. “I taught a bunch of my cousins back in New York. And if you can learn in the city, you can learn here.”

I cocked an eyebrow. “This is a city.”

“Of course it is.” He smiled, running his hands over the curve of the steering wheel. “Think about it.”

I did think about it. And his hands. All night and into the next day.

Then the reporters started calling.

The real ones.

“This is a message for Daisy Beaumont-Smith. I’m a reporter with the Chicago Sun-Times . . .”

“Daisy! Hello! My name’s Mindy Taylor? And I’m a producer for the Today Show?”

“Erm, good afternoon. Or I suppose it’s morning where you are. I’m a columnist with the Guardian, here in the UK, and I saw the story about your plans for an, erm, LGBTQ homecoming . . .”

“Ooohhh, British,” Jack said, swiveling in his chair with a lewd grin.

Sophie prettily rolled her eyes. “He’s probably fifty.”

“Shhht!” Raina raised a hand, silencing the table so we could hear the rest of the message playing from my phone.

“. . . I realize you’ve spoken one-on-one with a local chap there, but I was hoping you might grant me an exclusive as a follow-up . . .”

Raina wrote down his number and email on the bottom of her full legal pad page. “Any more?”

“Next. Message,” voicemail voice said. “Heya Daisy, this is Mr. Murphy over at the rec center—”

I hit .

“That’s it. But I’ve got like twelve email requests,” I said, so jittery in my chair that I had to hold on to the table to keep from swiveling away. “Or I did this morning. There might be more by now. I sort of had to hide my phone in my locker for a while. It kept . . . vibrating.”

And bzzzz! went my phone, as if to show off. I dropped it on the desk with a clatter and sat on my still-shaking hands.

“Okay,” Raina said to her legal pad. “So far, we’ve got an invitation to write a Huffington Post column. The Today Show. Three local news stations that want interviews. I counted four bloggers, three print publications . . .”

My phone rang—again—yet another number I didn’t recognize. Raina paused as I jumped to silence it, then said, “Plus whoever that was.”

“Ladies and gentlemen?” Sean rose from his chair, arms extended. “This is officially crazy.”

He fell sitting again, tipsy with excitement.

“Agreed.” Raina pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose, like she’d passed from tipsy to hungover several hours ago.

“So!” My attempt to keep the sound of panic from my voice was unsuccessful. “Where do we start?”

“Good question,” Raina said, flipping to a new page where I prayed she’d already written the answer. “Given the immensity of what Daisy’s gotten us into, we’ll need to meet every day after school to coordinate. I’ve booked out the room until after homecoming.”

Kyle raised his hand. “I’ve got lacrosse practice?”

“That’s okay,” Raina said, her voice brightening into something approaching pleasant. “Just help out when you can.”

“Music Man rehearsals start next week,” Sean said. “But I can sneak out. This is more important.” He grinned. “And let’s be real, I’ve had the role memorized since I was eleven.”

“Anybody else?” Raina looked around the table. We shook our heads. “Good. Then we’ll expect you here, rain or shine. Especially you, Daisy.”

What, did she think I was going to run out on them? I hadn’t yet, had I?

“This is a good time to divide up responsibilities,” Raina went on. “I’m happy to handle our legal and political strategy.”

We all exhaled at that one.

“My dad’s a lawyer,” Raina said, and her entire existence suddenly made sense. “He’s busy, but he’ll help. Sophie—given your mom’s connection to the land acquisition project, maybe you can be our site supervisor?”

Sophie nodded, jotting the title down in her little pink notepad. I felt a prick of jealousy at not having gotten that job myself, since I was the one who came up with the idea and was going to have to volunteer gardening hours for the rest of my life in repayment.

“You’ll also be in charge of managing the vendors and our budget.”

That sounded like a ton of work. I shot Sophie a thumbs-up in congratulations.

Jack volunteered to lead our social media efforts before Raina even assigned it to him.

“No offense,” he said, looking around the table. “But y’all are hopeless.”

“Make sure you coordinate with the people raising money on our behalf,” Raina suggested, just as I was about to shout the same idea. “And work with Sean on fund-raising. He’s been great at raising money for the theater program.”

“I’m always happy to work with Sean,” Jack cooed.

Sean balled up a piece of paper and threw it at his head, and with that, everybody started laughing and talking, like the meeting was breaking.

I raised my hand. “What about me?”

Raina looked confused. “You’ll continue to be our spokesperson.”

“But . . .” I looked around at the others as they fell silent. “I’m straight. Asexual, I mean.”

“Nobody knows that but us,” Raina said slowly. “And I think maybe it should stay that way.”

Everyone’s eyes were on me, unsurprised, expectant. They’d talked about this in advance.

I swallowed dry. “What are you saying?”

“In the parlance of our people,” Jack said brightly, like a museum tour guide, “I believe it’s called ‘staying in the closet.’”

“Our homecoming is a month away,” Raina said, pointedly ignoring him. “After that, you can be as straight as you want. But we can’t let anything derail this. If this event doesn’t happen or it’s embarrassing in any way, we’re a laughingstock. A headache. They’ll use it as an excuse to bury us again. You get that, right?”

I nodded. “Of course.”

“Good.” Raina stared at me, unblinking. “Because it sure didn’t seem like you got it when you stood up on a chair at the school board meeting.”

Sophie cleared her throat. “This is Daisy’s decision. If she doesn’t feel comfortable . . .”

“It’s kind of the group’s decision,” Sean argued, turning to me with an apologetic smile. “I mean, it impacts us all.”

“Why don’t we vote?” Kyle rolled back as we all swiveled to look at him. “That’s, um, how we settle things in my family. Or . . . yeah.”

“Not a bad idea.” Raina knocked on the desk. “I vote for Daisy to stay in the closet. Sean?”

“Closet,” he said, pointing at me with both hands. “It’s just acting, remember? You were so good in Carousel!”

Liar.

“Sophie?” Raina nodded down the table.

She sighed. “I vote for the truth. I think forcing her to hide who she is kind of misses the point of what we’re doing here.”

Raina didn’t react. “Jack?”

“Closet.”

I blinked at Jack, surprised.

“I lie every time I step into my house.” He shrugged. “It’s easier than you’d think.”

His smile didn’t reach his eyes, making me suspect otherwise.

“Kyle?” Raina went on.

“Truth,” Kyle voted. “Honestas ante honores.” He glanced up, eyes wide, like he hadn’t meant to say that out loud. “Sorry. Last period was Latin. It means, um—”

“‘Honesty before glory,’” Raina translated. Then her head snapped up. “That’s two for truth, three for the closet. We need a majority, Daisy. How do you vote?”

I stared at the Alliance, saw the hope in their eyes, registered the weight of the fact that they’d even given me a vote at this table.

“Closet,” I said.

Raina stood as the bell rang.

“That’s settled then. For the next thirty days, Daisy is a lesbian.”