Carolyn reaches down to help me up. My scraped-up hand stings as it comes into contact with hers, and I wince.
“Oh my God, your hands!” Carolyn says, noticing my injury. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” I brush my palms together to show that it’s just a surface wound. “I can’t believe Matthew!”
“I know! Why would he do that?”
I try to keep my face neutral. “No idea.”
“Me either.” She shakes her head, baffled. “So what do you think? Should we wait here for Kaylee to come back for us, or should we get on the next train and meet them at the zoo?”
I don’t know where it comes from, but before I know it, I’m saying, “Or we could take advantage of this opportunity away from everyone.”
She stares at me, as though she’s not sure what I’m getting at. “What do you mean?”
“Um…I mean we could go do our own thing. See the city on our own and then later say we tried to find them but we got lost or something. We know where and when to meet everyone, so it’s not like we’ll be stranded forever.”
Suddenly her face brightens. “We could go to the Smithsonian! We could see Kermit the Frog and Dorothy’s ruby slippers!” She does a cute little excited jig.
I look at her smile, and suddenly I don’t want to kill Matthew quite so much anymore.
“Sounds fun,” I say.
Carolyn buys some Band-Aids and first aid ointment at a pharmacy, and her hands move delicately across mine as she fixes up my cuts.
“Okay,” she says once I’m all bandaged up. “So how do we get there?”
“I have no clue. I was relying on Daniel to tell us where to go. Guess that was poor planning.”
“Lexi, neither of us could have predicted that Matthew would pull a stunt like that.”
“I should have,” I mutter under my breath.
Carolyn asks someone on the street where the museum is. It’s actually not that far, and in less than ten minutes, we’re staring up at a giant sign that says The National Treasures of Popular Culture gallery is CLOSED for renovations. We apologize for any inconvenience!
Carolyn looks crestfallen. “I’m sorry,” I say.
She shrugs. “It’s okay. At least we tried.”
“So what should we do now?” I ask. Then I begrudgingly add, “We can go to the zoo to try to find the guys if you want.”
Carolyn nods. “Yeah, we should probably do that.”
My heart sinks. We walk back to the Metro, and just as we’re about to go down into the station, a guy hands us a flyer. “Free concert today at Dupont Circle,” he says. “Just two stops away on the red line.”
The flyer lists a bunch of bands I’ve never heard of, but that doesn’t matter. Wherever this Dupont Circle place is, I suddenly desperately want to be there. I look at Carolyn. “I haven’t been to a concert since before my dad died.”
“Do you want to go?” she asks.
“Yeah, kinda,” I admit. “But we don’t have to—”
“Let’s go,” she says decidedly.
I smile. “Really?”
“Why not? We probably won’t be able to find Matthew and Daniel and Kaylee anyway, and this is important to you.”
It turns out Dupont Circle is a really cute area with restaurants and coffee shops and stuff. A bluegrass band is playing on a small stage set up in the middle of the circle.
“This is amazing!” Carolyn says.
She’s right. The band is really good—a girl in a cute floral-print dress and cowboy boots is singing and people are dancing. A group of little kids has joined hands and is skipping around in a big circle. I’d actually forgotten how much joy there really is in the world.
“You hungry?” I ask Carolyn as we pass a sidewalk café within hearing range of the concert.
“Famished,” she says, and we get a table.
While we wait for our burgers, Carolyn raises her water glass. “To new friends.”
“And a whole afternoon without chaperones,” I say.
Carolyn laughs, and we clink classes. “You mean you don’t miss Brianna?” she says, mock shocked.
“Not even a little bit.” I can’t even joke about it. “Do you ever wonder why she’s here? I mean at New Horizons?”
“I don’t know.” Carolyn looks thoughtful. “She didn’t go through the program, right? Just Kaylee, Deb, and John?”
“Right. So we know she doesn’t have SSA. But then why isn’t she off doing her womanly duty and popping out kids?” It was meant to be a joke, but I immediately realize how judge-y that sounded. “Sorry. I didn’t mean…obviously there’s nothing wrong with having kids. Or…you know, not having kids.”
Carolyn laughs and says, “No, I knew what you meant. Maybe she’s here out of some sort of religious duty.”
I shrug. “Maybe. But she’s so hardcore about the whole thing. Like, she won’t even call me Lexi, you know? There’s got to be more to her story than she’s letting on.”
Carolyn’s smile fades away. “Not everyone has to share their entire life story with the whole world, Lexi.” A biting tone has entered her voice.
Heat rushes to my face, and I instantly feel like a total jerk. Carolyn’s been just as secretive about her past as Brianna has. Of course she would take my comment personally.
I open my mouth to say something, but then the waitress shows up with our food and I close it again.
“Can I get you ladies anything else?” the waitress asks.
We both just shake our heads.
When the waitress finally leaves, I quickly say, “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“No,” she cuts me off. “You didn’t say anything wrong.” She hangs her head and whispers into her food. “I really should be over it by now.”
Over it? Over what? I wait for her to say more, but she doesn’t.
I take a couple of bites of my burger, but eventually the suspense gets to be too much. And she wouldn’t have said that if she didn’t want me to ask, right? “You should be over what by now?” I say.
Carolyn looks up at me, her face weary. “My ex. Natalie.”
I stare at her. Her ex? As in ex-girlfriend? I try to keep my composure. “Natalie?”
“Yeah.” There’s another long pause, and then she says, “We were together for over a year. Thirteen months and eleven days, to be exact.”
I’m floored. I don’t know why I never considered that Carolyn would have had a girlfriend before. I guess I just assumed she was like me: closeted and utterly inexperienced.
“So what happened?” I ask. Then I add, “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
She sighs. “No, it’s all right. But just keep it between us, okay?”
“Of course.”
She stabs a French fry with her fork. “You remember how when you were a freshman, everything was kinda scary? Like, you were at a new school and there were so many people and so many hallways that looked the same and so many intimidating older kids?”
I don’t exactly remember that. My school is so small it’s almost nonexistent, and most of us have known each other since kindergarten, maybe even before. But I just nod.
“Well, Natalie saved me from all that. She was a junior when we met. We were on the varsity cross-country team together, and she and her friends accepted me into their group, and suddenly I went from being the nobody freshman to the cool freshman who was hanging out with the juniors and seniors. It was great. And Natalie and I started spending more and more time together and…Well, you know. It became more.”
Carolyn glances up at me, but I don’t say anything. “She was a lot more experienced than I was,” she says. “She’d been out since middle school. She helped me come out to my parents and friends.”
“Wait,” I say, confused. “I thought you said no one knew about your SSA.”
She blinks. “When did I say that?”
“On the first day of camp, when we were telling everyone why we were here. I said almost nobody back home knew about me and you said you didn’t tell anyone either.”
“No, I said I didn’t tell them about New Horizons.” She looks at me like she doesn’t see why this is important. I’m not sure why it is—maybe because I thought it was something else we had in common.
“So how did they handle the news?” I ask to get the conversation back on track.
She looks off into space. “They were amazing. My parents didn’t care at all. They said they just wanted me to be happy. And they loved Natalie, so that helped. And my friends were her friends, and they obviously already knew she was gay, so this was barely even news to them.”
Carolyn absentmindedly picks the sesame seeds off the bun of her untouched cheeseburger. “I loved her so much, Lexi,” she says quietly. “She was my whole life. She told me she wanted to marry me someday. I actually started keeping a wedding planning book.” She shakes her head, embarrassed. “I really do want to get married, you know. I wasn’t making that up. But Matthew’s right—I never really had a problem imagining two white dresses in that scenario.” She laughs, just a little.
Hmm. “So then why…” I want to ask why she said she wanted to marry a man if she really doesn’t. I want to ask—if that whole story was a lie—why she’s really here at New Horizons. But I know Carolyn well enough by now to know that sometimes staying quiet is the best way to get her to open up.
“She ate dinner with my family most nights after practice and she even slept over sometimes. My parents joked that they had another daughter now.”
“Slept over?” I say almost before I realize I’m speaking. “Like, in your room?”
She raises an eyebrow. “Like, in my bed.”
“Oh. Right. Sorry, I’m stupid.” Okay, envy just got upgraded to full-on, green-eyed jealousy.
“No, actually I am,” she mumbles.
“Huh?”
She rubs the back of her neck. “I was so in love with her that I couldn’t see what was right in front of my face.”
“I don’t understand.”
“After a few months, she started acting different. She wouldn’t come over as much or she would come over for dinner and then have some reason why she couldn’t sleep over. A few times I asked her if anything was wrong, but she would say, ‘Of course not, baby, why would you even say that?’ and smile and kiss me, and I would forget about everything except the way she made me feel. Even after I started hearing the rumors…” She trails off, but I can’t let her stop talking now. I need to know.
“Rumors?”
“Yeah. The problem with being friends with Natalie’s friends was that they would sometimes say things around me when Natalie wasn’t around, almost as if they forgot I was her girlfriend.”
“What kind of things?”
“Like, things about her going to the city on the weekends to hook up with other girls.” Her voice trembles.
“Oh, Carolyn…”
“But I refused to believe it. She loved me. She cried when I told her about Kenny, and she helped me understand that it wasn’t my fault. She told me she loved my family and couldn’t wait to officially be a part of it. We went to visit colleges together, but only ones that were close enough for me to visit her every weekend. I never doubted for a second that she was as committed to me as I was to her.” She’s starting to tear up. I hand her my napkin. “Thanks.” She blots her eyes.
“If this is too hard for you to talk about—”
“No, it’s okay. It actually kinda feels good to get it out.”
I understand that. “So what happened?” I ask.
“I borrowed her phone one day at practice and saw text messages from a girl at another school.” Carolyn’s expression is fragile, like she’s just seconds away from crumbling into sobs. “When I asked her about it, she broke down and admitted everything. She said she’d been hooking up with other people—but only because she loved me so much that it scared her and made her do things she didn’t really want to do.”
I reach a hand across the table. She holds on.
“And the thing was, I stayed with her. Even though I was totally destroyed inside. She promised she wouldn’t do it anymore, and I was so obsessed with her that I actually believed her. She’d admitted to being with other girls but still somehow made me feel like I was the only girl in the world.”
Her bleary gaze drifts across the street to where the bluegrass band is playing their instruments and stomping their feet. The happy music clashes harshly with the tone surrounding our table.
“It happened again a couple of months later. And I forgave her again. It wasn’t until it happened for a third time—the third time that I knew of, at least—that I finally forced myself to admit that I couldn’t stay with her. I loved her so desperately, but I wasn’t in control of my own life anymore. I felt like a puppet.”
I squeeze her hand tightly. I don’t care that it hurts the scrapes.
“Breaking up with Natalie was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. She was sobbing, apologizing, begging me to forgive her. And I wanted to. But I couldn’t.”
Carolyn takes a deep breath and looks straight at me. “Lexi, if I had to go through something like that again, I don’t think I would survive.” She lets go of my hand. “If I’m with a boy, then it will never be this bad again. I’ll be the one in charge of how things go.”
There it is. That’s why she’s here. That’s why she wants to change so badly.
“But what makes you think it will be any different with a guy?” I ask. “Have you ever had a boyfriend?”
“No.” She thinks for a minute. “I just know it would though. I see my friends with their boyfriends, and yeah, they have their problems, but it’s different. Guys are different. They don’t get as emotional. There’s only one set of stupidly overactive teenage girl hormones in the relationship, not two. It’s just easier.”
She straightens up and shakes her head quickly as if to shake the sadness away. “Anyway. All that stuff with Natalie is in the past now.”
But I don’t think it is in the past at all. I think it’s very much in her present. “Is that what you think about when you get all distant?” I ask.
She blushes. “I didn’t realize I was being so obvious about it.”
“You’re not,” I say. “I just happen to have a lot of experience in spotting that kind of thing, you know? So I noticed that sometimes you aren’t entirely here.”
“I guess it’s just that every time something happens at New Horizons that makes me feel uncomfortable or makes me second-guess my reasons for being here, I think about Natalie and what she put me through. It helps me stay determined.” She looks at me. “You do that sometimes too, don’t you?”
I blink. “I do?”
“Yeah, like with your mom?”
“Oh. Yeah.” I wonder how she knew that.
We pay the check and step back out to the sidewalk, trying to figure out which way to go. But this whole conversation has my head spinning. Every time Carolyn’s lost in her thoughts, she’s thinking about another girl. Natalie. A girl she loved and shared her bed with and surely did stuff with that I’ve only ever read about. I’m so jealous I can barely even see straight.
The band switches to a bluegrass-y cover of a song that I know I know but can’t place at first. Then the singer comes in, and I’ve got it: “We Will Become Silhouettes” by The Postal Service. It was one of my dad’s favorite songs—some sort of sign, maybe?—and this bluegrass version is so weird and unexpected that I’m suddenly inspired to do something else weird and unexpected. I grab Carolyn’s sleeve and pull her across the street to the center of the circle. Then I jump into the cluster of kids and join them in their goofy, wiggly dancing.
Carolyn stands just outside the crowd, laughing.
“Come on!” I call to her.
She shakes her head.
“Yes!” I jump around to the beat of the music.
She just watches me, chewing on her lip, her arms crossed over her chest, debating.
I watch her right back, still dancing but looking only at her. I want so badly to go up to her and gently uncross her arms and hold her hands in mine. I want to smooth away the place where her teeth are worrying her lip and share my lip balm by brushing my mouth against hers. I want her to forget all about Natalie and everything bad that’s ever happened ever. I want to dance with her.
I skip over to the edge of the circle, clapping my hands to the song along with the rest of the crowd. I stand right in front of Carolyn. Our toes are touching.
I hold my hand out, waiting. “Have fun. Just for today. You can go back to being sulky tomorrow, I promise.”
She hesitates for a moment more, and then a grin begins to tug at her lips. “It would be a shame to waste this…” She looks around us, taking it all in. Her eyes flicker with the movements of the people dancing and the cars passing by and the wind blowing through the leaves of the trees. And finally, she gives in.
She grabs my hands, and suddenly she’s the one pulling me into the circle, and we dance around together, making up our own doofy square dance moves. It’s all I can do to try to appreciate every single second—and pray my palms don’t get sweaty.
We probably look ridiculous, but nobody seems to care. No one seems to care that we’re two girls, holding hands, dancing together either.
Four songs later, we’re still not tired. Somehow, this strange, accidental day has become one of the best of my life.
When the band goes on break, we resume our walk.
“Feeling better?” I ask, trying to catch my breath.
She smiles as she pulls her hair back into a ponytail. “Much. Thanks, Lexi.”
“Anytime.”
We wander into a few stores. I run my fingers over the beautiful clothes hanging from the racks. Carolyn tries on a really cute purple rhinestone headband, but she doesn’t have enough money for it, so I give her the rest of my field-trip allowance from Kaylee, which she finally takes after a lot of convincing.
After a while, we stop to rest in a park. The bench we sit on has a little plaque on it that says For Julie. There’s no other person I’d rather share a pizza with. Love, Marco. It’s in the shade and about ten degrees cooler here than it is in the sun.
“So now that you know my whole miserable history,” Carolyn says, “I feel like I can ask. Whatever happened with you and Zoë?”
Hearing Zoë’s name from Carolyn’s lips is just too weird. “What do you mean?”
“After that day in her room. Did anything else ever happen with you two?”
“Nope.” I sigh. “That was it. We didn’t even speak to each other after that.” I think for a second. “Actually, that’s not true. She did tell me how sorry she was when my dad died. But so did everyone else, so I don’t really count that.” I shrug. “At least she kept my secret, as far as I can tell. That’s something, I guess.”
Carolyn turns sideways to face me and rests her temple—the one with the birthmark—on the back of the bench. “You must miss him.”
“My dad? You have no idea.”
“That thing that Mr. Martin made you do during your Father Wound session was pretty messed up,” she says. “I don’t know how you got through it.”
“I just made myself say whatever I needed to say to get out of there.” I fidget with my bracelet. “It didn’t work anyway. My last memory of my dad is still intact.” I look at Carolyn and she’s just watching me, waiting for me to continue. “The real last time I saw my dad was the day before Thanksgiving. He was in a hospice. That’s a place where they, um, send people to die.” Carolyn nods. “My mom picked me up from school in the middle of the day. He knew he didn’t have much time left, and he told her to get me. I don’t know how he knew, but he did. I guess it’s just one of those things that you don’t really understand until it happens to you.
“When I got there, he asked my mom to give us a few minutes alone and then he said, ‘Lexi, you are the best thing I ever did in my life.’ I’ll never forget that. He said it right away, like he was worried if he didn’t say it right then, he would never get the chance. And then he smiled this huge smile that I didn’t understand—he should have been sad. Or scared. He was about to die, but he looked happy. But I think now I get that he wasn’t thinking about what was about to happen; he was thinking about what had already happened in his life. And he was proud.” I take a breath. “And I almost told him right then, Carolyn. The truth. About me. I’d tried to tell him before and always chickened out, but this time I thought I was really going to do it. Use one of the last moments I had with him to be completely honest. I sat there, the room closing in on me as I concentrated on building up the courage to do it. And then he said, ‘Promise me you’ll take care of your mother,’ and the moment was gone.”
“I’m so sorry, Lexi,” Carolyn says.
I shake my head. “It’s okay. It’s actually better. After how my mom reacted when she found out, I’m glad I didn’t tell him. I don’t know what I would have done if he reacted the same way.”
“Do you really think he would have?”
“I don’t know.”
She looks down at her lap. “I guess I have the opposite problem. My parents have been so cool with it that they refuse to even try to understand why I wanted to come here. They’ve been really down on me about this whole camp thing.”
“Yeah.” I want to tell her that she doesn’t know how lucky she is, that almost any of us at New Horizons would trade places with her in a heartbeat if we could, but I don’t. I understand, maybe better than anyone in the whole world, why she’s here. She’s trying to move past the hurt. “Did they give you the money for the camp?” I ask.
She nods. “They never said I couldn’t come; they just asked me to reconsider about a hundred times.”
We sit there in silence for a while, watching the people go by, and I try to reason through my thoughts. Eventually I break the silence. “Since we’re being honest…”
“Yeah?”
“I think Zoë was part of the reason I came here. It wasn’t just about my mom. I mean, it was mostly about my mom, but…I think I also thought that if New Horizons could help me get Zoë out of my head once and for all, everything would be better.”
Carolyn looks at me with those big blue eyes. “Did it work?”
“Well, I have been thinking about her a lot less than I used to…” I drift off.
“That’s good!” she says.
But the rest of my unfinished sentence is that I’ve been thinking about Zoë a lot less than I used to because I’ve been thinking about Carolyn instead. And I can’t exactly tell her that.
We walk back to the Capitol to meet the bus and face the music.
And it’s the funniest thing: I know I can’t tell Carolyn the truth, but in this moment, I can’t remember why.
It’s like the rule my parents drilled into my brain a long time ago: don’t talk to strangers. Don’t do it, Lexi. It’s the worst possible thing you can do. Bad things will happen if you try. It was a certainty in my life—no matter what, I could never, should never, would never talk to strangers. But then I grew up. Things changed—the world changed—and suddenly, somehow, I knew that I was supposed to talk to strangers. That’s how you meet people. That’s how you make new friends.
This is the same thing: don’t tell Carolyn how you feel. It was the one thing I knew for sure—until it wasn’t.
Carolyn and I just spent this amazing, magical day together. We clearly have a connection. We’ve shared some moments. And up until Natalie broke her heart, she was fine with being gay. More than fine—she was out and happy. She doesn’t have a moral or religious objection to it, and her parents are totally cool with it. So maybe…maybe she doesn’t really want to become straight. Maybe she just needs to be in love again. Maybe she just needs someone who will treat her the way she deserves to be treated.
Matthew was right: I’ll never know for sure until I try.
I decide to test the waters. “Have you been thinking about Natalie less since you’ve been at New Horizons?”
She smiles. “Yeah, actually. I have.”
What does that smile mean? Could she be trying to say that I’m the reason she hasn’t been thinking about Natalie as much? What if the only thing that’s standing between us right now is our fear?
Oh God, I want to tell her.
It’s an hour walk back to the Capitol, every step a huge effort through the thick, sticky heat, and I war with myself the whole time. Tell her. Don’t tell her. Tell her. Don’t.
And then the Capitol dome lies ahead, and it’s almost six o’clock, and I’m out of time. If I don’t tell her now, that’s it. We’ll be thrown back into the world of watching eyes and prying ears, and I’ll never get another chance.
Mr. Martin said I have to make a choice. And I’m finally choosing—I’m choosing my own gray area. Why can’t I be both a Christian and gay? What would be so wrong about that? And instead of working so hard to be something I’m not for Mom, why can’t I put all that energy into talking to her, helping her to understand me? I haven’t even really tried that yet. Maybe, someday, I can have both a girlfriend and my family. Carolyn came to New Horizons even though she’s an atheist, even though her parents didn’t want her to, simply because that was what she wanted—proof positive that there are no rules. We make our own destinies.
Screw utopia.
“Hey, Carolyn,” I say. “Hold back a second?”