TEN
March 13, Eighteen Days to Deadline
I think trying to find queer love in Texas is weird. It’s like a massive small town. Everyone knows each other, or at least, of each other. Like, somebody can pull up a queer person on Instagram from three cities away and you already have seven mutual followers and three of them are your ex-girlfriends. It’s kind of awful. Anyway, I like love, I like hearing about love. I’ll read any book about love. It doesn’t have to be queer, or even realistic. It could be about a flower and a bee who are deeply involved. I’m weak for any story about yearning. Wanting.
I have a crush right now. I think it’s sweet to want someone you don’t really know yet. Crushes are nice because they make life interesting. You can get through a single day just thinking about crushes. You can have your crush from the bus, crush from fourth-period Biology, crush from the soccer team. Maybe that’s just me though. It’s like writing a story about a made-up person. Loving someone is trickier. You can see all the mistakes they make. You can see how ordinarily fucked up they are just like you and everyone else you’ve ever known deeply. But I guess the knowing is a kind of love as well.
Georgia watched as her mother tied her hair up in the reflection of their small bathroom mirror. Frankie was wearing a simple A-line dress, the yellow of it radiating through the space. Her makeup was light and hinted at an unspoken effort. Georgia spotted herself in the mirror as her mother’s eyes caught her in the reflection. She grabbed a small pin from the counter and placed it in Frankie’s hair. Her mother lifted her hand and gently rested it upon her head where the pin was placed.
“Is this trying too hard?” Frankie asked.
Georgia firmly shook her head and thought of all the ways her mother’s beauty was different from her own.
Their noses were just the same, two soft question marks curving down to meet their lips. Georgia’s lips went up softly at the ends like ocean meeting mountainside. Frankie’s naturally downturned lips sang sad songs without even opening, and Georgia had spent her life trying to pull their edges upward with every bad joke she could muster.
Her mother’s cream skin folded tight around her eyelids and made her look too young for children or anything else she’d endured in the past thirty-five years. Frankie had given birth to Georgia at eighteen and had accidentally created her twin, a twoness they both delighted in even when silently moving around each other in their home. Georgia called her mother Frankie because they were best friends, two women for whom nothing and no one else mattered.
When high school came and other girls began to boldly whisper their hatred for their mothers, Georgia struggled to understand. She examined Frankie closely during those days, watched her buzz around the house filling vases with flowers she’d stolen from neighborhood parks, listened to her hum the same Nirvana songs over and over again in the kitchen as she shoved one onion pancake after another into her eager mouth, followed her mother’s hands as she typed up words on her computer then deleted them, editing papers and essays and articles for anyone who needed it and would pay enough so she could cover the bills. She couldn’t see anything in her mother to hate or even dislike. She just saw Frankie.
“Thank you,” Frankie said turning away from the mirror. “You’re going to like him. I already know it.”
“We don’t fight,” joked Georgia.
“We make nice.” They both said, laughing.
“That’s my girl. We don’t fight. We make nice.” It was something Frankie used to say to Georgia when she was in elementary school. Sometime around second grade, she started scuffling with some of the other kids at school who made fun of her for her lunches. Her mother didn’t know how to cook much, most of her lunches containing anchovies straight from the can and leftovers from the two Korean restaurants her mother liked in the strip mall next to their house. The kids would laugh as she pulled out the takeout containers while they grabbed for their Tupperware and thermoses of perfectly squared sandwiches and cut fruit.
Every day before her mother dropped her off at the front gates, she would pull the rearview mirror down to look at Georgia in the backseat and say We don’t fight. Georgia would reply We make nice. Georgia didn’t like being difficult. She saw the way her mother tried so hard.
We don’t fight. We make nice. Georgia never asked how it started or where her mother had heard it. Sometimes they still said it to calm each other down.
The doorbell rang and all the lightness drained from her mother’s eyes and was swiftly replaced with panic. Georgia watched as Frankie attempted to bounce lightly from the kitchen to the front door but her knees wouldn’t let her be graceful.
Frankie cracked the door and revealed a man too tall to fit under its frame.
Simone was a skyscraper of a middle-aged man with sunken eyes hidden behind thick, blue-rimmed glasses. Georgia immediately associated his look with that of a mildly successful writer from the sixties. He wore gray, pleated pants, and a lime-green knitted pullover. He fingered a book in one hand and lilies in the other.
He leaned across the mantle to kiss Frankie on the cheek and accidentally dropped the book at Georgia’s feet. They both bent to pick it up, but his hands met it before hers could. He stuffed the book under his already sweat-stained pits.
“You must be Georgia.” He reached his hand towards her, but his height forced his hand to angle down towards hers awkwardly so that their fingers touched rather than their palms.
“These are for you.” He stretched the lilies towards Frankie, and Georgia could see the nervous energy seeping down his neck, up his wrist, and straight into the noisy crinkled plastic of the bouquet.
“Thank you. Come in, come in. I’m going to put these in some water.” Frankie left them to stare at each other like two cowboys facing off in a Western, both ready to win or lose something, though it was unclear exactly what.
“Frank told me you like writing. I got you this.” He pulled the book from under his arm and offered it. Georgia eyed the cover. It was someone she’d never heard of before. She quickly turned it over to read the backside. Two of her favorite poets had written reviews. Simone’s approval rating was inching up.
“I have a project coming up on contemporary poetry, so this’ll be good to use.” She let a smile slip. He wasn’t the worst, so far.
“I have some more books you could borrow if you want. I mean, this one is a gift, but, you can borrow others.” He pushed his toes into the doormat as he spoke. “I’m not sure they’re what you’re looking for. Do you know Hull?”
She nodded her head. Of course, she knew Lynda Hull. She was one of her favorite poets. She had two of her books on her bedside table in that exact moment.
“What’s your favorite?”
“I memorized a lot of poems from Star Ledger a long time ago, so that’s probably my favorite.”
“Huh. Well, you know if you like her, Nikky Finney is really good. Or, you wouldn’t happen to like Siken, would you? I mean, none of them are very similar, actually, but I just thought—”
Georgia watched as his heavy tongue pushed his words up against his bottom teeth as they spilled out so that everything he said felt rushed and excitable.
Georgia hesitated to like him, then decided he was okay. Not many men came through the front door expecting a date with her mother. Maybe two or three over the last eighteen years of her life. She wanted her mother to be happy, to laugh in a way she couldn’t with her, romantically, sweetly.
Simone was passing the test, so far. He was kind and read good poetry. She started in on another question but was cut off.
Frankie rounded the corner, fresh gloss glistening on her heart-shaped lips.
“You kids don’t have too much fun,” Georgia joked towards her mother.
Frankie flashed her a smile as they slipped out the door.
“You either, missy,” her mother retorted, the night wind catching her words as the door shut.
Georgia squished her feet into the cool tile of the entrance as her mind wandered away from her mother. The sudden emptiness of the space scared her into a quiet anxiety.
The final days of college acceptances and rejections were around the corner and she couldn’t keep herself from using every spare moment to think about how much of a failure she’d been throughout high school. She never made good grades or ran any clubs or tried very hard in anything. She just kept showing up and now it was senior year and she was belly up, gutted again and again by every university she liked.
She stood in the kitchen until hunger pushed her to make a snack. She grabbed a bag of popcorn from the pantry and watched it spin around in the orange microwave light as her head clouded more and more with each kernel pop.
Georgia’s mother never pressured her to do well in school and rarely asked about her grades. Now that she thought about it, she hadn’t brought home a report card in years. Grades were an unspoken occurrence, maybe because Frankie assumed she was doing well.
She snatched the hot bag by the corners and wandered into her bedroom, the butter dripping down the paper and onto the hallway carpet as she walked. She settled into her bed and opened her laptop to a series of opened tabs she’d never closed but also never looked at. Poems Dawn had sent her, a scathing review of a pho place she loved, and illegal links to every episode of a TV show she thought she might have wanted to watch several months ago. She minimized the window with all the tabs and opened a completely new one to create a false sense of newness and organization. She typed in her email and opened the folder she’d titled College Stuff to view the messages from all the schools she applied to.
She looked at all the decision emails and individual pages with their apologies and regrets and encouragements. There they were one after the other laughing at her with their lack of animated confetti and congratulations.
She opened a new tab with her Kenyon College waitlist. The page was simple enough, a letter letting her know she was waitlisted and a link where she could upload additional material.
She’d really wanted to get into Kenyon. She’d applied for the English program because she’d heard it had a creative writing emphasis and regularly brought really talented writers to campus to give talks and teach workshops.
She clicked to the section where she could upload additional materials. She hadn’t really looked before because she was so sad about not getting in. She guessed the section was available to waitlisted applicants in case they’d achieved something acceptance-worthy since turning in the application and wanted to let the university know. Reading through the short list of guidelines, she saw that she could upload creative writing samples.
She quickly opened up a folder of her computer stuffed with writing snippets from different projects over the years and tried to think of what showed off her skills the best. The deadline to upload materials was about to pass, but she decided she would try anyway. Imagining herself sitting in lush green grass poring over a new book of poetry on Kenyon’s campus, she sifted through project after project.
A ten-minute play she’d written last year followed three girls as they prepared for prom night. The characters were based off of Edie, Dawn, and herself. When she showed it to them last summer, they both told her she should apply to creative writing programs for college, they told her she was meant to be a writer. By the time deadlines came around, she hadn’t applied to any. English, sure, but no creative writing programs. She was too nervous. She’d only ever let Edie and Dawn read her words as well as the one English teacher. She wasn’t she sure she had the talent to exist in rooms with real writers, people who published their work online and won awards like Scholastic and YoungArts. She was a closet poet, a covert playwright.
This was her last chance, though. Being shy hadn’t worked. She needed to put her writing forward just to see what could happen. She uploaded the short play into the supplemental materials section and pressed submit before she could regret it. She opened up another window to her email.
Tell me what you think, babe. Sent this to Kenyon to see if it helps me get off the waitlist. Putting my best writerly foot forward. xxGeo
She shot off the email to Jill.
Closing out both tabs, Georgia picked up the book Simone had brought her.
Hours later, Georgia heard the garage mechanically straining to come up and then a car door open and shut again in the front of the house. Her mother’s muffled voice mingled with someone else’s—Simone. The noise kept getting closer and closer until the back door creaked, signaling their entrance.
She kicked the blankets off her feet and moved her laptop to the side, but then changed her mind and settled back into the warmth. She liked knowing the sound of her own home, so familiar with it she could feel its every movement.
She slowed her breathing and stopped squirming to listen to her mother’s voice against Simone’s.
“Which door did you say?” Simone’s voice echoed down the hallway towards her room.
“Second on the right.” Her mother’s sound ghosted around the house as Georgia listened to Simone’s footsteps approach. Georgia could tell he went too far for the bathroom when the tile went silent and the sounds of his footsteps changed to scuffling across carpet. The sound of her bedroom doorknob turning startled her out of the thought. Simone opened the door.
“Hey there, Georgie.” Simone faltered against her door frame. He’d removed his lime-green knitted pullover and now bore only a disheveled white button-up. His pleated pants were unbuttoned at the top as if after dinner he’d been so full he needed to let his belly air out and forgotten to close it back in. His glasses were smudged with fingerprints. Georgia felt nervous at his drunkenness. He seemed so different from the man she’d met just hours earlier.
“Hey, Simone. How was the dinner?” She didn’t know what else to ask him. She thought she might yell for her mother but waited for him to move from his swaying position at her door.
His left hand slid up her door frame as he leaned his weight against it for support. The moment felt strange, but Georgia couldn’t get herself to move. His eyes refused to focus on her as he moved further into the room, stumbling over his own heft.
“Georgie Porgie, it was blue. Your mother is blue.” He dropped his voice to a whisper as a glowing yellow light ran past her window, a neighbor’s passing car. “Shhhh, don’t tell Frankie. I think I had a better time talking to you about books than I had with her all night.”
Georgia’s laugh went up and down like a child’s windup toy, artificial, uncomfortable. Simone walked towards the bed and lodged his knee onto her blankets. Each movement he made suddenly felt like cockroaches congregating over every inch of her exposed skin.
He pointed to a book on her bedside table. It was the one he gave her. “Oh man, she’s good.” His breath reeked of cheap alcohol. Something she would have blindly tasted at a party sophomore year.
“I know, you told me.” She whispered, surprised at her own quietness.
“My favorite is “Jackson Hotel.” Do you know that one?” He leaned in as he said this and ruined everything and made her feel dumb and still and unable to push him away. Nothing bad was happening but still she didn’t like his unnecessary closeness.
“Yeah. I like that one a lot, actually.” Her breath slowed and slowed as she watched his mouth move sloppily, delayed.
“I watch her fade down the street until she is a smudge, violent in the circle of my breath. A figure so small I could cup her in my hands,” he recited, his eyes trying hard to focus on Georgia’s. He reached out his hand to her. “Do you like me?”
The right words caught themselves on the way up her throat. She could only muster up the first thing that came to mind. “I don’t like anyone.”
“Well that’s too bad because I think I really like you.”
Georgia soaked in quiet embarrassment.
“Simone? Are you okay?” Her mother’s voice drifted in from the hallway, startling them both like a sudden earthquake.
“Be there in a second, Frank.” He smiled at her as he said it. He let his outstretched hand drop to his side.
Simone stared into Georgia. With his eyes, he slipped under her tank top and laid bare his wants across her stomach, warm and flat. He wanted her and she wanted to evaporate into nothing. He lifted his knee so that the bed squeaked of relief from his weight. And then he was gone.
Georgia caught her breath as the door closed behind him and listened to muffled goodbyes and kisses at the front of the house. Her mother’s footsteps trailed back into the hallway until she heard a light knocking on her door.
Her heart pounded against her shirt, some huge unbearable drum. She caught hold of the blankets on her bed and then let go again. Georgia swallowed the previous moment like a bitter pill and told her mother to come in.
Frankie glided across the carpeting and splayed her body dramatically across the foot of Georgia’s bed, a renaissance Venus. Her cheeks warmed up red before she’d even said a word.
“What did you think?” She was like a schoolgirl asking her friends about a new love interest, waiting and overly in need of approval. She looked happy, the real kind. It took Georgia about two seconds to decide what she was going to say. She gave Frankie what she wanted, what Georgia thought she deserved.
“He seems great,” she mustered. She tried not to let her voice flatten out like dough under a pressing palm the way it wanted to.
Her mother’s impatient energy turned to excitement. “Really? Great?” Georgia could tell her mother couldn’t help from jumping up a little at the words.
“You seem good together.” Frankie was practically dancing. Calming after a moment, she turned away with a smile.
“Thanks, my little button. Come on and help get me out of this thing.” Frankie gestured blindly behind her back towards her dress zipper as she sat up on the bed.
Georgia moved to help her out of her summer dress. They both caught sight of themselves on the bed in the full-length mirror shoved in the corner of the room and Georgia saw two people trying to help each other as best as they could.