The suspicion that I was queer had been creeping up on me since fifth grade; but going into eighth grade, I was certain that I was bisexual, and I was realizing, the more the realization weighed on me, that it would not be something I could ignore forever— though I was hoping to ignore it indefinitely. Being in South Carolina (The Coastal South, but still The South), coming out did not feel like a viable option. That being said, the gay-dar on my middle school bullies was apparently apt, as within the first week of school that year they coined the ever so creative nickname— “F*g-weed”. It didn’t help that my best friend, Annapolis Maryland, and I were hardly ever seen apart or that we rode around on one bike because she lived off-island and didn’t usually have one with her— but that was all beside the point. The risk of losing my friends and becoming the ultimate social outcast did not seem worth it to me in exchange for being my out-and-proud-true-self.
Besides, it wasn’t like I liked any girls at school…right?
Liking girls, as a young girl, is interesting.
Boys are exotic and novel, this makes them exciting. Getting to be around them unsupervised elicits a rush.
But with girls… They are beautiful in a way that is admirable and then enviable, They invite you over and braid your hair and do your make-up and touch you. You share a bed. And it’s almost impossible to see it when it’s happening, and then once it’s happened— it’s too late. You become exactly what you feared. The predatory gay-girl in-love with one of her friends.
My friend Lily-Joy Delacroix had me under her spell.
Lily-Joy was a gifted artist with beautiful penmanship. She loved One Direction. She was tall, with olive skin and long, wild brown hair. She had a wide, beautiful smile, though I never could quite understand what it meant when I saw it. She had seven siblings and a house with three floors. She always wore the kind of too-bright colors that I knew, even then, made me look washed out; seemed to highlight everything wonderful about her.
While Annapolis was my best friend; attached at the hip; throughout 7th and 8th grade, Lily-Joy was always a part of our group. We ate lunch together every day, we were at the same slumber parties, we were planning out matching group halloween costumes, and, in eighth grade, she and I were in all the same classes. What was interesting about Lily-Joy was that she did not have a best friend of her own at school. Instead she had countless best friends, all of whom she only saw during the summer at camp and on vacation. During the year, she would regale Annapolis and me with countless stories about these friends; their adventures, antics, and inside jokes (all funnier than any of the jokes we could come up with on our own, because Lily-Joy was the funniest person in the grade).
Lily-Joy’s life was rich with anecdotes and secrets that all originated outside the walls of the school. To me, this meant that it was full of depth and allure beyond my comprehension. I wanted so badly to know more, more, more. Any time the opportunity presented itself, I would pester her to give me more stories, more quips, more details, so that I could remember them later and laugh to myself. I was, in many ways, obsessed with her, but it wasn’t until after eighth grade and after Lily-Joy and I had already gone our separate ways, that I realized the true weight of what I’d been feeling for so long.
Because I realized this crush was a crush retroactively, I can’t really qualify in list form what specifically drew me to her in the same way that I could for Jake or Fernando or Blaize. I couldn’t have known what I was looking for, because I didn’t know I was looking at all. If I could have made a list, I think it would have looked like:
a.) Her sense of humor
b.) Her talents.
c.) Her aptitude (we were very competitive in class)
d.) Her storytelling
e.) Her effortless-beauty.
I tried to progress our friendship further than just in-group/in-school friends. I would invite her over almost daily, but every time she was busy. The truth was, the inside jokes we shared and the notes we passed probably meant a lot more to me than they ever did to her. Maybe I was the weird gay friend that liked my friend more than she liked me, but at the end of the day nobody got hurt. So it was all okay.
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