Not Otherwise Specified (7 page)

•  •  •

Rachel.

Beach vacations with our moms, swimmer's ear, snow cones.

Broken hearts, chipped nail polish.

Making out against mango stands when there were straight people around.

Practicing sex positions.

Always coming back to her.

She was never my girlfriend. She was never my sister. I
say she was my best friend because there is no word for
every
.
damn
.
thing
.

There's no word for a girl you've seen almost every day for fourteen years who still makes your heart race every time she walks into a room.

•  •  •

I don't even know if I say anything to Bianca. I just know that I'm standing here at the counter while Rachel waits for her drink. I always feel like such a little kid next to her. She has eight inches on me and hair that hangs flat and perfect down to my eyes. I could hide behind her like it was nothing. But she never let me.
You're a star, Ett,
she'd say.
And this is not an eclipse.
I didn't tell her eclipses don't have anything to do with stars. I never listened very hard to the words when she talked, not really. When you're friends with someone that long, you don't have to.

“Rachel?”

It's such a
word
. It's so
sharp
. It never really felt like a name that fit her, and that always made me love it so much more.

I didn't know if she was pretending to ignore me, but when her head snaps up and she looks at me, I know immediately that she really didn't know I was there.

I know a few other things too.

I know that I've been bouncing around waiting for her for months. I know we haven't had a single conversation since that night I met Ben at Cupcake, just a few
Rachels?
from me
cut off by a load of
just leave her alone, Etta, okay?
s from the Dykes. I know that I've just been on pins and damn needles ready to find out if she's the leader of all of this, if she's the head bitch in charge of ruining my life, or if she's—please, please—letting them run the show right now, letting them make all the decisions to freeze me out. Maybe she was even a little mad at me at first but she isn't anymore. Rachel's either going to be the angriest of the whole group or not angry at all, and how have I been sitting around with no idea how this person, this person I know every single damn inch of, is feeling about me?

Especially when now she's looking at me and the answer is so obvious.

I hurt her.

I fucking hurt her.

And the fact that I hurt her—look, I'm not forgetting this, not even ignoring it—is stupid, because I
didn't do anything wrong
. But oh my God this is Rachel and who cares if it was a mistake or it wasn't a mistake, because it shouldn't have had to have been a mistake because I didn't do anything
wrong
, and who cares if this betrayal is in her head or if it's legitimate and standing right the hell in front of her, here I am, here I am, and I hurt my best friend.

And I've been lying around feeling like the only damn victim here.

God, this sucks.

“Hey, Etta,” she says.

I haven't heard her this quiet since she had laryngitis in ninth grade.

I have no idea what to say.

“Caramel apple latte?” I say.

She just looks at me.

“I didn't hear,” I said. “I just, you know, guessed. They're only here for another couple of weeks.” Rachel's diabetic, but she'll always take an extra shot for the caramel apple lattes.

“Right.”

The punch line of this conversation is that we both got A's in public speaking.

“I heard you were sick,” I say.

She shrugs her hair over her shoulder. “I'm not, really. I'm better practically. I just couldn't really deal with school right now.”

“Because of me?”

She sighs, but it doesn't sound sarcastic. It really doesn't. “Why would it be you, Etta? Nothing's changed in months.”

“Then why does it sound like it's me?”

“Because I'm working through it. I'm trying to get over it, okay?”

“You mean get over me.”

“No, Ett, I don't.”

If I could see over her shoulder, I'm sure I could see Bianca watching us. God, I wonder what she's thinking. I wonder if
she thinks I'm completely losing at this conversation.

Jesus, I'm talking about winning a conversation? This isn't public speaking. This is my
best friend
.

Rachel shoves her hands into the pockets of her parka. “Do you have any idea what the past few months have been like for me?”

“You haven't exactly been cluing me in, no.”

“My parents are asking me,
so are you going to date a boy now
, all hopeful and shit. The Dykes can't look at this as anything but some big political whateverthehell and God, they're . . . and I am still trying to deal with the fact that maybe me and my best friend and our wives aren't going to grow old together, okay? Don't laugh at me.”

“I'm not.” I'm not.

“I don't . . . You didn't do anything wrong,” she says, and despite everything, I still want to pick these words up and frame them. “But this isn't . . . I didn't . . .” She shakes her head fast and shoves her hair behind her ears. “It's not what you did, and I don't blame you, it's just I had this picture in my head of who you were and what our lives were going to be like, and now maybe it's not going to be like that and maybe I'm being stupid but I just . . . I need
time
, okay? I know you think this is stupid, but I'm fucking
shattered
.”

“Ben and I broke up, though. It wasn't even
anything
.”

“But that's just one guy. How am I supposed to know this was just a onetime thing?”

And what am I supposed to say here? Because I'm not going to tell her I'm not going to date guys ever again. I'm not going to tell her this is some phase. He was the first guy I slept with. I liked it. I always knew I would. I'm not going to pretend the reason Ben and I weren't anything is because he was a guy. It was just because my particular relationship with that guy didn't particularly turn out to be anything.

I'm not going to lie to her. She's my best friend, and I was making out with a guy all of an hour and a half ago.

But if I did lie to her, if I just
could
, then maybe there wouldn't be any more ranch-dressing condoms in my locker, you know?

But no. No. “You always knew this,” I say. “I always told all of you that I was bi, and you all just ignored it.” (Natasha used to say shit she thought was so funny,
die-sexual, one foot in the grave
.)

Rachel says, “God, I must sound like a fucking . . .”

“Heterophobe? Yeah, you do, and it's not really cute and alternative when you're pointing it at me.”

“Don't you miss us, though?”

“We should still be able to goddamn be friends.”

“Not us. Not the Dykes. The . . . community. Look, you and I both know that you didn't just stop going to Pride because you didn't fit in anymore. How can you really be part of this if you're dating a guy?”

“Yeah, well, how can Pride really be Pride when they send
me passive-aggressive emails about
why don't you stop coming
, that's the freaking reason, Rachel.”

“They shouldn't have done that,” she says quietly.

“Yeah, well.”

“Straight people have still given us more shit than Pride ever could.”

I heard a bitch in my gym class today mumbling to some other bitch in my gym class that
good
thing Etta's ugly, since she's apparently sleeping with guys now
. Rachel really doesn't need to remind me that there's not a single group that likes me.

She says, “But that's kind of what I'm talking about, y'know? The community is never going to think of straight people the same way—”

“Bisexual, Rachel, I'm bisexual, it's a fucking
word
.”

“But the whole world isn't going to see you like that. They're going to see you as gay or they're going to see you as straight, depending on who's holding your hand, so can you just . . .”

Can you hold my hand.

She doesn't have to say it.

She'll never be my girlfriend. It's not like that.

But we were supposed to grow old together.

She thought she knew me.

“At some point you're going to make a choice,” Rachel says. “And whatever that choice is, you're going to lose one half
of this bi thing, and you've already come out, okay, and you have the whole community on our side and we'll get you back in there and you have us, okay, you have me, we can take on anything, right? You and me. And you guys broke up, so good, that's done, so we can . . . we can rebuild from here, okay?”

“Ray . . .”

“I need some air.” She's breathing hard. She does this sometimes.

Her drink comes up, and I hand it to her. It's hot chocolate. Oh.

“I need to go outside,” she says. “Can you come?”

“I'm with a friend,” I say. “Sit with us?”

She turns around. “Who is she?”

“Bianca. She's . . .” I don't feel right about saying Bianca's in my group, not without her permission. “. . . auditioning for something with me.”

“Yeah? You're doing an audition?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That's . . . that's great, Etta. Not ballet, right?”

Rachel was the one who helped me bury my toe shoes in the backyard. Rachel said ballet was a symbol of everything that's holding me back and tying me down and telling me that I have to look and be a certain way. She said ballet was making me miserable and I need to be triumphant and throw it away and that that means I will triumph over it instead of it triumphing over me. She said the tenets of ballet are discipline
and poise and body control and
that's not you, Etta, you should never be restrained like this.

Probably right, you know?

“No,” I say. “No, not ballet.”

“I don't want to interrupt. . . .”

“It's okay, just . . .”

She shakes her head and says, “I'm a mess,” and yeah, she kind of is. She dabs her eyes on the cuff of her glove and says, “I'll see you, Etta.”

“Can I call you?”

“I don't know.”

“Right.”

“I'll see you.”

•  •  •

“Etta?”

“Not now, Kristina.” I'm busy kicking my boots off into the corner and hating everything. I managed to act normal and bubbly through dropping Bianca off, but I'm tired and I'm not normal and bubbly and all I want to do is eat an entire box of Oreos and shove my hand down my throat so yeah, not at my damn best right now, I love you, little sis, but ten minutes, maybe? (Not to binge-purge, just to calm myself down. Promise.)

“Okay, but can I just ask you one thing, though?” She's standing there in the doorway of my room, all nervous. Kristina's taller and bigger than me, but there's something
about her that's really small, something that I want to take and fold into my shirt and keep safe, and I need to remember that that still exists even when I'm wishing that everything else in the world didn't.

I sit down on my bed. “Heavily” is just so the right word right now. “Yeah.”

“Am I ugly?”

“What? Come here.”

She's on the bed in a second, all squished into my side. “I really thought this boy from Saint Anthony's liked me, and then no, he's dating
Claire Bowman
all of a sudden, and he was not dating her last week, and guess who he was IMing with four nights out of last week, uh, hint, not Claire Bowman.”

“Messed up.”

“Guys always like you.” It's so weird, all the different things people in my life tell me about me.

“You should try pushing your boobs in their face. They like that.”

“Huh. Yeah.”

I rest my head on her shoulder. “I'm building on this theory that Saint Em's is actually a torture chamber that they built for young female delinquents and that you and I did something very horrible when we were children that we don't remember. And now we're being punished. Intensely.”

She laughs a little. “You can't blame Em's for everything.”

“I think probably I can. No, but seriously, you can't tell me
that girls who aren't stuck in a tube for eight hours a day with
just
other girls, all of whom have the money for whatever the hell plastic surgery and designer whateverthehell it could take to make them look a hundred times better than any fifteen-year-old is supposed to, are having as rough a time with this shit as we are.”

“I'm just bitching.” She buries her face in my side. “I'm okay.”

God, I wish I were just bitching. I wish I were okay. Talking to Rachel has brought this all to this gross peak in my head, and I'm turning all the little bits of shit I've faced lately—and let's not even pretend most of it isn't these pointed silent treatments punctuated by unpredictable verbal jabs from the Dykes—into this pattern, into this big overarching comment on my current existence.

I hate Nebraska because Nebraska is where I am.

But there's more important shit going on. I say, “You're freaking beautiful is what you are, okay?”

“How come I can't get a boyfriend?”

“Because boyfriends are stupid.”

“Shitty answer.”

“Yeah, I know. It'll happen.”

“You smell like smoke.”

“I should smell like smoke, bike exhaust, and coffee.”

“Why is your life so much cooler than mine?”