I wanted to stay in South Carolina.
To my mom, it didn’t make sense. I’d been complaining about life with my dad for years, and suddenly (apparently out of nowhere) I’d had a change of heart.
I told her it was because I was established at my school and I didn’t want to move districts again. I didn’t want to go through all the trouble of making new friends and developing a new identity. It could take a lot out of a person.
All of that was true enough, but in the past, it hadn’t seemed like much of an issue when compared to everything else that was going on. Apparently, it only took about a month of my dad being nice for me to almost forget how scary he could be.
Almost.
Nothing could make me completely forget. I started having nightmares as soon as I landed in Colorado. What my conscience was starting to suppress, my subconscious was overcompensating for.
All of them were essentially the same: My father and I in an enclosed space, like a car or a house. My father would be talking to me normally, and then I would say something that would set him off. I could never hear my own voice in the dreams— I was always mumbling too low— this made it even scarier when he would start to scream. As he would scream, his face would get red, and his voice would rise in octaves, and he would appear to grow. He would stomp towards me, squealing like a kettle. I would turn and run away from him as if he were a monster.
But those were just dreams, and still I protested.
When I refused to budge, and my mother was at a loss, she brought out the only thing that could convince me: the file of evidence she and Melissa had compiled against my father.
Even in my state of denial, I thought I had a good idea of what my father was capable of. I thought I had a firm understanding of what kind of person he was. I didn’t think he was necessarily a bad person. I thought he was a complicated person. I thought he was a person who didn’t love being a father all of the time. I thought he was a person who struggled in society. Nothing could have prepared me for what was in the file.
First, printouts of his profile from fetlife.com: AniMil85. Then Kendras: _KittyKendra_. Both profiles contained detailed lists of their specific sado-masochistic interests and kinks. The screenshots of the profiles and the messages exchanged between my dad and Kendra were jarring, but nothing I wasn’t expecting.
What followed the profiles took me back. It hit me like a sudden and terrible loss. Something that can’t be taken back, something so final in its awfulness. Pictures of bruises. All sorts of pictures of all sorts of bruises. Bruises on arms and legs. Bruises on necks. Bruises in the shapes of hand-prints.
Objects slamming. I was remembering all the times I’d heard the sound of objects slamming around behind closed doors. I was thinking about how many times I tried to picture what they were. The objects. The objects.
Then there was written testimony from Melissa. She detailed how my father was rough with her. How he would grab her and throw her around, into the furniture and the walls. Then she talked about Kendra…finding Kendra in a catatonic state after fighting with my dad.
Objects slamming.
My mom wasn’t supposed to show me the file— my parents weren’t supposed to discuss anything about court with me unless absolutely necessary— but what else was she supposed to do? My father was an abuser, that was true, and I was sitting there telling her I wanted to walk right back into his house and live with him.
I was her baby, and he was a threat to my safety. Unfortunately, in a case like ours, if I’d said to any judge that I wanted to stay with my father, it wouldn’t have mattered how much evidence was stacked against him. He had the upper hand. If my mom was going to protect me, I was going to have to work with her. She did what she needed to do to make that happen.
I empathize with her, as much as I wish I could have protected my younger self from what was in that file.
I was convinced. I knew what I was looking at, and I knew there was no way around it. No gray area. I broke down, but then I accepted it and told my mom I would do what she needed me to do.
My mom sprang into action. She filed for an emergency protection order to be put in place so that I would not have to go back to South Carolina. Then she got the ball moving on a custody case of her own.
An illusionist and an escape artist— my father had been successfully dodging service for over a month. If he was going to get served, my mom and Melissa were going to have to do it themselves. Out of necessity, but also in honor of their newfound and rapidly developing friendship, the two of them started planning out a cross-country road trip for the start of July.
The thought of my mother and stepmother (not gay) driving across the country together to get my dad to take some papers was bizarre on top of everything else— but I was truly a little too preoccupied in my 9th-grade drama to really appreciate what was going on in my personal life.
I was texting Solaria all throughout June like it was my full-time job. I had to because she was my best friend and I was obsessed with her. Even after everything that had happened between us in the spring, she was still my favorite person, and certainly one of the parts of South Carolina I was going to miss the most. I was having a hard time accepting that our friendship wouldn’t be the same, but texting her gave me some ease.
I had hobbies; I was maintaining multiple tumblr accounts, I was writing a lot of free-verse poetry, and I was buying a lot of black clothing at the Goodwill down the street from my mom’s apartment complex. As far as my social life went, by daylight, I would sometimes go to the pool and performatively read Emily Dickinson in a futile effort to gain the attention of some of the neighbor boys. At night, there were plenty of horror movie nights with Callie. When we wanted to make things interesting, we would hang out with her brother, Chris, and his friends.
Usually, it was just Kyle. Kyle was beautiful when we were younger, and he remained beautiful when we were teenagers. He didn’t look goofy or awkward at any point. Counterintuitively, his personality instead got goofier as we aged. No matter what he said, I could never take him seriously.
Goofy as he was, he was one of the only viable options for boys to flirt with in the complex. Callie and I would sometimes play truth-or-dare and spin-the-bottle with Kyle (two games I was totally chill with playing that summer after having gained kissing experience over the school year). We would take turns kissing him and kissing each other when the rules said we had to (something we were also both totally chill with because we were both bi).
The games, I thought, were good practice for casual intimacy, which the media told me was going to one day take up a large portion of my free time. However, any time I kissed one of my friends, I felt a twinge of guilt.
Solaria’s relationship with Sid had gone to the rocks when summer break started. He was hard to get a hold of, and she had a suspicion that he was cheating. They broke up less than three weeks into vacation.
Following the split, our text conversations began to once again take on a distinctly flirty tone. At least, I felt like they did. There was also the constant feeling that it was all in my head. And finally, the fact that I was moving back across the country, so any potential romances didn’t really matter anyway. Then I would get melancholy. A cycle.
I had to see Solaria before I moved away for good, I knew that much. I asked my mom if I could go with her and Melissa on their trip so that I could say goodbye. My mom conceded, since my plans involved me being mostly out of the way, and my presence would be mildly helpful for a few things anyway.
We worked it out so that I would be able to stay with Solaria for the five days. One last hoorah.
***
We left on the fifth of July fifth and we were in South Carolina by the evening of the 6th. Melissa and my mom dropped me off at Solaria’s after dark before going off to check into their motel. Solaria and Grandma Weathervien came out to greet us.
Solaria said hi to Melissa, then she grabbed my suitcase and turned to my mom.
“Are you Didi’s mom?” she asked.
My mom said yes, then Solaria said: “You’re legendary.” She meant it.
“Legendary?” my mom was asking with raised eyebrows.
I was already scuttling behind Solaria into the house. Before settling in, I wished Melissa and my mom a good night and waved them off.
On the first night, Solaria and I stayed up late just talking in her bed. The lights were off aside from a reading light clipped to her bedside. We both took off our shirts because it was too hot. We spent hours in our bras and gym shorts catching up, trying not to talk too loud, taking dumb pictures of each other, and posting them to our spam accounts. We must have had to force ourselves to go to sleep.
The next day, we walked three miles in the scorching, humid heat just to get some curly fries from the “nearby” Hardee’s. The curly fries were worth it. We got two larges and ate them out of the bag on the walk home. Solaria blasted MCR out of her phone speaker as we schlepped along. We wondered why anyone would ever choose a normal fry over a curly fry, and we declared that Danger Days was secretly the best MCR album.
When we got back, Solaria showed me her shower. She had two different kinds of body wash. One sparkly pink one from Bath and Body Works that smelled like tropical fruits, and one musky bottle of Irish Spring filled with tiny plastic exfoliating beads.
She held the bottle of Irish Spring up to my nose.
“This one smells really good,” she said.
I used the Irish Spring.
That night we watched Igor on the TV in her room. Solaria fell asleep before the credits.
On my second day in South Carolina, I went to my dad’s house with Melissa and my mom. He wasn’t there. I was just there to pick up some of my things…and my pet cat. Then it was off to talk to another court-appointed social worker.
I was eager to get back to Solaria when it was all over, so I could relax. We watched Warm Bodies and ate pizza together. Afterwards, we were still full of energy.
We sat up in her bed just like we did the first night, with our shirts off, buzzing around. It was silly, but it still felt incredibly intimate. I wondered if Solaria felt the same. I thought I could see it. The same little flickers of hope in her eyes. The same nervousness in her smile.
When we started to tire of goofing around, we started really talking, and the room was still.
We were lying next to each other. We were close, our bare shoulders were touching, and I was acutely aware of the sensation of our skin meeting. We were just breathing. Staring at the ceiling together.
“I have a crush on someone,” said the one serial lover-girl to the other.
“Who?” I asked.
“It’s one of my friends…”
“Again?”
Solaria laugh-sighed. “Again.”
“Have you told them?”
“I’ve told them before… but it was a while ago, and I don’t know if they know that I still feel it.”
I hesitated. “Do you think you will tell them…again?”
She sighed again, this one truly sorrowful, “It might not be worth it.”
“Why not?” I asked. I was working hard to keep my voice even and cool. I was much better at playing calm over text.
“They are moving to a different state.”
We let the near confession hang in the air between us. We watched it float through the dim, white beam of the reading light. We felt it cover the both of us. Was it warm or cold? Somehow both.
“What do you think I should do?” she asked.
The power was in my hands. She was giving me a piece of our fate. Either way, I was moving away. I could move away, leaving it where it was. I could move away, and Solaria could remain my best friend from 9th grade, and that would be beautiful in itself. Maybe if that was that, I would forget that I ever felt anything else, and when we drifted apart, I wouldn’t feel any sort of specific way about it at all.
Or we could open the can. We could find out what it would be like. We could feel the feelings and know forever what they felt like. The prospect of feeling any new feeling when you are a teenager is dreadfully appealing.
This is what I said:
“My advice is always the same. You should always tell the other person how you feel. If you don’t, you might live with that feeling of ‘what if?’ forever,” it was straight out of a romcom.
“And if they don’t feel the same?”
“Has that ever been a problem for you?”
Solaria wasn’t amused.
I went on, “If they don’t feel the same way, at least you know. It could suck, but hopefully you can still be friends. And if they don’t want to be friends after…they were probably lame to begin with.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Yes,” I said, “I do.”
She turned on her side, and I turned on my side to face her. She cupped my face in her hands. Her hands were so much more delicate than a boy’s hands.
The moment went on to infinity, it was like John Green had written. Somewhere it is still going on, for someone else. It is like my Daridian Pasture between gay and not quite gay. Schrodinger’s Fruit. Both at once and nothing and everything.
I took in all her features as if it were the first time. My first time seeing green eyes. My first time seeing a nose full of freckles. My first time seeing peachy pink lips.
We pulled at each other and found each other and collided in a kiss.
The kiss.
It was the kiss I’d been waiting for. An electric kiss. A kiss that stopped the world, a kiss that left us suspended alone in time and space. A kiss without doubt or guilt. Behind my eyelids, there were golden fireworks, and my skin was alive with crackling, buzzing warmth.
A voice in my head screamed (quietly), “I’m so gay. This is so gay. I’m so gay.”
We kissed, and we kept kissing until we couldn’t anymore, because we were asleep.
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