May 24, 1 Day to Graduation
Georgia’s house was yellow with warmth and good news. Cars were lined down the street blocking neighbors’ driveways, their bumpers just kissing.
The lights were on out front and the window shades were pulled all the way up so that even from the street you could see that something lovely and fun was going on inside. Music spilled out of the front door like an open invitation.
Frankie decorated like it was the last party the girls were ever going to have. Streamers hung from every surface strong enough to hold them, making the ceiling look like a rainbow spiderweb.
Ben and Edie arrived together, and Georgia hugged them both as they stepped through the front door.
“Hello! Congratulations!” shrieked Edie. A graduation card from her parents weighed down her hand awkwardly as she threw her arms up into the air in celebration. She handed the card to Georgia quickly, and Ben’s arm snaked around her waist.
“Thank you.” Georgia bowed ceremoniously towards the couple. “Everyone’s in the living room playing board games.”
She was wearing a plain, light blue dress that stopped suddenly above her ankle in a perfect line. It was her mother’s, something she’d lovingly pulled out from the back of her closet.
“Please tell them I said thanks.” Georgia waved the card in the air and it shook with the sound of a few dollar bills.
Edie and Ben walked into the living room to find Frankie judiciously watching over a deeply involved game of Sorry! Some of their friends from school were bent over the board while others talked on the couch, by the stereo, on the floor. A few of their parents also stood at the periphery.
“Finally, the happy couple has arrived,” announced Frankie. They laughed and she kissed them both on the cheek like they were in a foreign country and not a Texas suburb.
“Come here.” She gestured to a table in the corner. “I’m about the start a card game before I get Georgia’s cake out of the fridge. Try to get people to join in.”
Edie bent to sit at the table and Ben plopped beside her, kissing her sloppily on the cheek. They smiled into each other and shuffled the cards out of the pack. They began to play and tried to pull Jill in from the corner where she was staring at childhood photos of Georgia hung on the wall.
Georgia retreated to her room and sat on her bed holding the card and staring at the landscape of her room. She scanned the messy surfaces in her room for every detail of her childhood. The worn pages of her middle school notebooks. A picture of her and Frankie many years before at the rodeo was pinned to the wall. It all seemed so recent, so fresh in her memory. Somehow, it was all going to be behind her soon. She could see her life going forward. Her friendships were loose soil in a tight fist, the fragments of earth dropping out between dirty fingers. She smiled to herself as Frankie edged open the door.
“Geo, we’re doing the cake,” she whispered with a smile.
“Okay. I’m coming.”
Georgia stood up from the bed and looked at one of the pictures tacked to her wall. She brought her finger to it.
“I think that was taken when you were seven,” her mom insisted. “I looked good. So skinny.”
In the picture, her mother stood in a pale red button-up top in the front lawn of a house. Georgia was standing balanced on Frankie’s feet, just barely reaching her waist, bundled up in a pullover and overalls of the same color. Frankie must have made the outfit; she’d always been good at sewing. The picture was faded, but Georgia could just spot the front door of her house, familiar and a dusted gray in the photo rather than its current bright yellow.
Georgia observed her own face, focused, joyful. Her mother’s smile was bright, a woman alone in her singular home with her singular child, the daughter she held everything within. A neighbor or maybe Frankie’s sister must have taken it.
“I think that’s exactly what I’ll look like.” Georgia kept looking at the photo.
“If you’re lucky.”
“I’m sorry about Simone, Mama.” Georgia took a sharp breath in, nervous at having brought him up not just in a letter but to her face.
“It’s okay. He always smelled like market fish.” Georgia could see her mother’s sadness clearly—it flickered, the slight downturn of her lips pulling so that small creases formed at the edges of her eyes. It flashed on her face only for a moment. Georgia wouldn’t have caught it on anyone else. It turned into a smile as she grabbed Georgia’s hand. Her grasp was strong, a mirror to the softness of her skin.
“You are the most important thing to me in this world.” She didn’t let go as she said this, squeezing Georgia’s hand once, twice, as though she needed Georgia to see and feel the truth of the statement. She could feel in her palm that they were one and two, Georgia and Frankie.
Georgia nodded.
“Come one, all your friends are waiting with the cake.”
Georgia settled onto the couch next to Jill as the party continued on around her. Jill grabbed her hand and squeezed and squeezed.
“You are so wonderful,” whispered Jill. “Everyone here thinks you are wonderful. I love you.”
Georgia smiled at the admission. She beamed and said it back, her heart flipping in her chest as the house buzzed quietly around them.
Her mother gathered people from every room, the small vanilla-iced cake cradled in her hands. Slowly, the party moved into the living room, an organism of conversations. Frankie settled the cake into Georgia’s lap and excitedly yelled the word cake! high above the collective muttering. Her balance wavered as she tried to stuff candles into the cake with her left hand and light them with her right. Georgia reached out with a laugh to set her upright again.
Edie squeezed in next to her on the other side of the couch as everyone started singing “for she’s a jolly good fellow.” The flame from the candles warmed up Georgia’s face, her cheeks taking on a deep red from all the attention. Dawn pushed through to the couch everyone was crowded around as the song gained momentum, Collin trailing closely behind her. All the notes were wrong, and nobody cared.
Georgia never knew what to do when people sang to her—well, at her. Appreciation for her friends filled her. Here was a room of every person who ever cared about her. The song ended and she was stuck thinking of a wish.
“You guys should blow them out with me.” She turned her head to Edie then Dawn. Dawn’s hand was intertwined with Collin’s, but she let go and leaned into the cake just as Edie did too. Georgia counted down to three and they all puffed up their cheeks to blow the flaming candles to smoke. Georgia hoped they’d all wished for the same thing.
“I have a surprise for you, Geo. We can cut the cake after.” Dawn knowingly nodded at Collin and excitedly grabbed Georgia’s hand. “It’s outside.”
Everyone shuffled out into the warm early spring night. The wind was blowing hot over the stars. Orange and yellow front porch lights glimmered up and down the street. Lightning bugs swirled around people’s lawns, flickering off and on in an illuminated dance.
Georgia and Frankie’s garage was completely covered with two white sheets sewn together into one large one and duct-taped to the metal. Dawn had propped up a table with a mini projector connected to her computer. The projector glittered bright onto the sheet. Dawn leaned towards her computer screen and pulled up a file. A still image of Georgia with a play symbol over her face popped up onto the projector.
“Collin sent me the final version of the documentary you all worked on. I wanted to show it to all of you guys. I think it’s actually about all of us. I mean, it’s about love, but, really, it’s about our love for each other.”
She pressed play. Georgia appeared on the screen and began to speak.
I think love is impossible. It’s like the Earth spinning. Like, you know that it’s happening all the time, but you don’t remember or recognize it until somebody brings it up and you’re like, oh yeah, this incredible, unexplainable science is going on all around me.
The words THE QUEER GIRL IS GOING TO BE OKAY flashed across the screen in red letters on a black background.
Suddenly, there was Dawn, her hair pulled back tight into a high ponytail on top of her head, little ringlets falling into her eyes.
I want to be in love. I want the impossible. I would wait a million years for it. So, what is it? What is queer love?
There were quick snippets of kids from their school, phone videos sent in from Dawn’s friends from her online film forums, Georgia, Edie, Ben.
Images from every day of their lives: two boys holding hands in the hallway of Alsbury, Georgia laughing as she drove down 59 and sang to a Robyn song, a boy winking as he slipped a note into a locker covered in hearts, two girls running down a parking garage decline holding hands in the middle of the night somewhere in the city, Ben and Edie kissing each other lightly in some crowded living room. These were snippets of their love, their friendships with each other.
It’s a marshmallow sucked in slow between a boy’s lips at summer camp.
It’s resistance.
Your best friend in the entire world telling you something at 3:00 a.m. Something they’ve never said out loud before.
Yearning, dude, Just yearning.
It’s loud and angry and in your fucking face.
It’s their pajamas cool against your skin under the covers. It’s their nose just grazing your cheek.
It’s sweetness, sweet things. Sending a letter through the mail when you’re in the same city.
People think it’s the same. They want to say we’re just like everyone else, but we’re not. Queerness is itself. Queer longing is specific.
Everyone was drawn to the bright light across the garage and settled into watching. Edie, Georgia, and Dawn sat down in the driveway and leaned against each other as the clips kept coming. The film played across their backs and made their skin and clothes glow with the past and the present and even the future of their loves. They had each other. They had love and life stretched out in front of them in a thousand different directions. They held on tight to each other’s waists, long after the credits rolled to black.