Page 63 of Catch and Cradle
“Guess we’ll be sticking to Jane doing our hair on game days.”
She laughs. “Yeah, Jane is the braid master.”
Something shifts between us. A tension slips into the room as I turn myself around so we’re face to face. There’s no sound in the house, but it suddenly feels like we aren’t as alone as before.
There’s a world out there, a world we’re part of.
A world with rules and expectations.
A world where I have a past and we both have futures.
We don’t just live in a perfect little box made of her and me and my bed, no matter how much I wish that were true.
“I should probably go home, right?” she murmurs. “I should probably get there before anyone wakes up?”
This is what I wanted to avoid: the sneaking around, the lying, the risk.
The pain.
I feel panic start to loop around my chest and squeeze me so tight my lungs burn for air.
“I know the team is important to you.” She slides her hand closer to mine, but then she hesitates. Our pinkies are an inch apart on the quilt. “I’m not going to do anything to mess that up. It’s important to me too.”
I want to tell her she’s important. I want to tell her tonight wasn’t some distraction or fluke. I want to grab her hand and place it over my heart and tell her she’s already got a piece of it, no matter how crazy that sounds.
She deserves all that and more, but instead I just sit there like a statue, pulling further and further into myself to keep from spinning out.
I can still see Lisa, her face twisted into something I didn’t recognize as she threw the photos of Kala and I down on the floor of the locker room. The whole team went silent. Her shouts echoed off the walls and filled the room. The old stack of disposable camera shots I kept in my dresser scattered at her feet. I still don’t know when she took them, whether she hunted around for something to use against me while I was sleeping or snuck into my room when I wasn’t there.
Most of the photos were completely innocent, just out of focus shots of the U19 team or typical high school girl group mirror selfies and failed artistic depictions of feet. There were a lot of Kala and I, some with her arm slung around me while we smiled in our lacrosse uniforms, some of her making dumb faces at the camera in our school cafeteria.
They all confirmed exactly what I told Lisa: that Kala and I came out around the same time, dated for a few months because it seemed like the obvious next step to two teenagers who didn’t know any other queer people, and then ended things and went right back to being best friends when we realized that’s all we were meant to be.
I didn’t know how to make Lisa understand when she seemed so bent on doing the opposite. I really didn’t know how to make her understand why there were a few blurry selfies of Kala and I kissing. I didn’t keep them because I still had feelings for her; I kept them because they were a reminder of that rare, brief innocence when fear and wonder were all wrapped up in one, when a new world was opening up in front of me—a new way of being myself, of being whole and complete and defiant in the face of anyone who told me what made me me was wrong.
Lisa could never see it that way. She was always suspicious, even at the beginning when things were good between us. After she proved to the entire team that I had photos of teenage Kala and I kissing stashed in my drawer along with a whole stack of pictures of us hanging out, a lot of them got suspicious too.
That’s when we started losing games. That’s also when I started losing Kala’s friendship. She had her own stuff going on, and I let it all get pulled into my mess. It felt like the situation was getting doused with splash after splash of gasoline, and when the match finally dropped a few weeks later, everything exploded.
“Becca?” I look up from where I’ve been staring down at the cardigan still draped over my lap and find Hope blinking at me from behind her glasses, two creases deepening between her eyebrows. “Is something wrong?”
“I, um...” I have to stop and clear my throat. “Sorry. I think I’m just tired.”
I see the hurt flash across her face before she turns away to hide it.
“Right. Of course.” She gets up off the bed and starts pulling the rest of her clothes on. “It’s late.”
I need to say something. I need her to know that being with her took me somewhere I’ve never been before, that even now, I haven’t quite come back. I don’t know if I will come back.
Maybe there’s no coming back from her.
“Okay, I guess I’ll just...go now?” She’s dressed now, her hood thrown over her head and her hands tucked into her pockets as she hovers beside the door.
I still can’t move. I can’t get any words out. She stares at me, searching, and then I see her eyes start to get watery. She turns around. Her shoulders are set in a tight line as she reaches for the handle.
“Hope, wait!”
I can’t let her cry. I can’t let her walk out of here crying, not after what we did. Not after what we shared together.