The Bermudez Triangle (11 page)

No one said anything for about a minute.

“Nothing,” Avery finally said, stuffing her hands into her pockets. Mel just looked at Nina, met her square in the eye.

“Okay. I’ll be out here when you’re …”

She dropped the curtain and stepped back a few feet. Inside, Mel and Avery were mumbling and gathering up their things.

Nina sat down on a bench at the entrance of the dressing room, on a pile of discarded summer clearance dresses, the ones with the hideous patterns that no one will ever buy, even if they are marked down to $9.99.

Many things occurred to her at once.

One, this explained a lot of what she’d felt since she’d been back from California. The constant feeling of being out of the loop. The in-jokes she couldn’t understand. Of course … Every bit of it made sense.

Two,
of course
they hadn’t told her anything about the summer.

Three, they’d probably asked to go to another store
on purpose.
Now Nina was someone to be escaped from, like an annoying parent or a chaperone.

She could change that last one. She would show them, right now, in the first moments of discovery, just how fine she was with it. Because she was. She wasn’t homophobic. Homophobic—did that term apply only to lesbians and gay men? No, it had to apply to bisexuals as well. Were they bisexual, or were they lesbians? Should she ask? Did it matter? It wasn’t supposed to matter. Better not to ask.

Had
they been joking?

Maybe this was a long setup for a prank. It didn’t look like a joke. But then, wasn’t that the sign of a well-executed joke? It looked so real….

No. That
was
real. And they still hadn’t come out.

Come out. Very funny.

“Um,” a voice said, “you can’t sit
there
.”

Nina looked up. It was the salesgirl again.

“Why not?” Nina asked.

“You can’t sit there,” the girl repeated.

“Why?”

“Um, that’s the clothes bench?”

Nina saw an empty rack not four feet away.

“What about that? That’s a
rack.
It’s for clothes.”

“You can’t sit here,
okay?
” the girl said, adjusting her pants on her nonexistent hips. “You’re going to have to move,
okay?
”

With a sigh, Nina gave up the bench and slid down in front of the trifold mirror, the dressing room’s one luxury item. The salesgirl flounced away with a snort.

To Nina’s horror, she found that her eyes were tearing up and there was a heaving sigh building deep in her solar plexus—all part of a prelude to a sob, which she couldn’t release here or now. Not in front of Mel, or Avery, and certainly not in front of that thing that had just tossed her off the clearance bench. Not under the fluorescent lights of the dressing room. Not sitting on the floor of an outlet mall, with all the discarded numbers and tags and crap.

She clamped it down and closed her eyes.

“We’ll be right out,” Mel called through the curtain.

“Okay!” Nina called back cheerfully. “I’m just going to wait outside.”

Nina stepped back into the store. Everything had a strange pallor—the pinks and oranges and yellows were so garish they seemed to vibrate. The bins of excess flip-flops and sun hats had a sad significance that she couldn’t quite pinpoint, and she was sure people were deliberately choking up the aisles so that she couldn’t get back out into the main concourse.

She forced her way out and sat on a bench in front of the store. She looked up at the fronds of a huge potted plant. Celine Dion screeched about love over the sound system.

It took Mel and Avery almost five minutes to emerge. Mel came right to Nina. Avery hung a few steps back.

“I’m sorry,” Mel said softly. “We were going to tell you. We were just trying to find a good time.”

Nina knew this was the moment she was supposed to say something wonderful. This was when she lived up to her beliefs in equality, her conviction that homosexuality was completely normal and wonderful. Except—she couldn’t seem to speak. “I need to get some air,” she managed to say.

Nina was in a trance now. She got up and went back the way she had come, past Burberry, back through the maze of tables and people buying food in the food court, to the set of doors that led to the parking lot where they’d left her car just forty-five minutes before. It felt like her head was plugged up with something cottony
that muffled the noises of the other conversations, the music, the mall. She stepped outside into the muggy afternoon.

The first thing she did was stretch a smile across her face. It took a great deal of effort.

Of course
it was okay. She had no problems with this stuff. She was planning on having the council do stuff with the gay-straight alliance. She had no issues with this at all. So, she’d been surprised. That was okay. They’d understand that. The surprise would wear off. She just needed to turn around and show them it was all going to be fine.

Her knees were a little wobbly. She laughed at nothing in particular and turned to go back inside.

Nina guessed correctly that Mel and Avery would be waiting for her in the food court near the Orange Julius. She had a kind of natural GPS when it came to the Triangle. She fixed a smile on her face and sat down with them. They’d both gotten drinks and had one sitting and waiting for her.

“I was surprised,” she said. “Sorry.”

Possibly the understatement of a lifetime.

They sucked on Orange Juliuses for a minute. No one seemed to know where to start.

“So,” Nina said, “how long have you … ?”

She left the definition open.

“Since July,” Mel replied. “July Fourth.”

“July Fourth?”

Nina slowly counted back in her mind, even though she knew that July Fourth was almost two months ago. She needed this
time to be shorter—a week, maybe two, something passing. But it was about the same amount of time that she’d spent with Steve, and in her mind, that meant that the whole thing had been set in cement.

“How did this start?” Nina said.

“It just kind of happened,” Avery said.

“But you never said—I mean, you’ve both dated guys. I know that doesn’t matter. I mean, I know things can happen, but … you never said anything about girls.”

“I knew,” Mel said, shredding a napkin. “It was in my mind, but I didn’t know if it was real. Then one day, I just knew it was.”

Nina looked to Avery, but Avery just watched Mel destroy the napkin.

“Oh,” Nina said. “Well, it’s great that you’ve come out….”

“We haven’t told anyone,” Avery said. There was something in her tone that told Nina that they didn’t want her to say anything either.

“Or whatever,” Nina added quickly. “That you know. I don’t want you guys to act differently around me. Don’t feel like you can’t do things because I’m there.”

This was a lie. Nina knew deep down that if she saw another one of those kisses right now, she was pretty sure she would have to be medicated.

“It won’t change anything,” Mel said. “It’s really not that different.”

Nina was pretty sure this wasn’t true either, but she appreciated Mel’s saying it anyway. She started talking quickly. She tried to spit out all the things she knew she believed—that it
was wonderful, that it was all going to be fine, that they could be honest with her. It was like she was reading verbatim from a brochure called “My Friends Are Gay! Now What?”

Talking fast helped. It was just like swallowing cough syrup. Don’t avoid it—just do it. Gulp it all. Mel was nodding away, agreeing with everything, but Avery seemed lost, her brow furrowed.

“So, should we keep shopping?” Nina said, as brightly as she could.

They made the rounds again, but it soon became obvious that no one was actually going to buy anything. They were just dragging themselves from store to store, sticking tightly together, as if trying to prevent anything bad from happening again. The only thing Nina could think about was that she was walking along with a couple. Mel and Avery were a
couple.
They gave up after a half hour, and Nina dropped them both at Mel’s house.

Nina raced up to her room the second she got home. She needed Steve. She tried calling, but no one picked up. She turned on her computer and opened up an e-mail.

Steve
,

Where to start?

I don’t even know where to begin.

Okay. Inhale, then exhale.

I’m going to say a lot really fast because I’m still kind of shaking.

Since I’ve been home, Mel and Avery have been a little weird. I know why now. We went out shopping today, and they asked to split
up. I found them in the dressing room of a store when they weren’t expecting me, and they were kissing. Like really, really deeply kissing. We sat down and talked and Mel said she had kind of known for a long time that she was attracted to girls but didn’t really know what to do about it. (I guess she figured it out.) Avery didn’t really say anything except that no one else knows and that they want to keep it a secret.

What were the chances that both of my best friends would be gay?

This was a good point. After all, didn’t that say something about her? And she was part of a
triangle.
Hello!

She was so gay.

No, she wasn’t. She had a boyfriend. She was writing to him now to get advice about her gay friends.

A boyfriend who lived three thousand miles away. How convenient! Unconsciously she had been setting herself up for this all along because she must have known that deep down, she was
a total and complete lesbian
, part of a lifelong lesbian trio.

Focus.

She had to put her head down against the edge of her desk and count backward from twenty and then again from twenty-five before she could continue typing.

I know there’s nothing to do, and I really am okay with it in the sense that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. But I’m totally in shock and I need help and please can you call me or IM me or something as soon as you get this because school starts tomorrow and I am pretty sure that I will burst some kind of v. important-blood vessel in my head between now and then. I don’t mean to sound selfish, but
I am starting my job tomorrow as president of the council and I have to give a speech in front of the entire school. I was fine with that until about two hours ago, and now
—

A speech she still had to polish. She still kept screwing up that one part.

I am a mess. Cannot Dr. Phil this one away. Need help. I’ll be here, trying to learn this speech and probably just pacing around.

God, I wish you were here. I miss you so much I seriously can’t stand it, and there is no way that I will actually survive until next September, or the summer, or whenever. I need to be there with you NOW, or you have to come here. We have to do something.

Anyway, please, please, please get in touch with me.

—
Nina

Nina sent the note.

She had no idea what to do now. Normally when she was stressed, she called Mel and Avery. She would have to fall back on her secondary activity—organizing. She got up and tore into her closet, pulling down everything, emptying boxes, dumping out containers of papers and photos. She piled clothes by season, shoes by color. She fixed her attention on anything that could be sorted or filed or repacked. There were at least a dozen more important things she needed to do, but they would all have to wait. Everything was going to have to wait.

A few hours later, as Nina was creating labels for an expanding file of papers and notes she’d saved for the last three years, she heard the tiny
pong
she had been waiting for.

Neen
,

Sorry it took me so long. I was camping with some people from school. It rained and about twelve of us ended up in the one tent that stayed up. It leaked. We all slept in about a half inch of water. I probably caught the flu. Or gangrene.

So, I wish I had been here instead when you wrote, for lots of reasons.

I don’t want to say that I know exactly what you’re going through, but I definitely know this feeling of surprise and confusion. I remember when I found out that my friend Paul (the guy in the picture who was on the tire swing—the one who looked kind of like he was going to crash into the tree and die) had kissed another guy. I remember having no idea what to think at first. Granted, I was fourteen at the time and didn’t know what I thought about a lot of stuff. I even thought I had to be gay if I had gay friends. I thought he was going to want to kiss me too. So much stuff was running through my head.

I barely even notice it now. It seems like at least a quarter of my school is openly gay, and I kind of assume that another quarter is probably gay. Maybe more than that. In fact, I feel like one of the only really straight people I know. (Believe it or not, where I come from, I’m really conventional and even seem kind of Republican or something.)

But I know this has got to be hard. Call me later tonight, around eleven your time, and I promise I will be here waiting.

Love, Steve

Nina read those last two words over and over.

Mr. Zimm only
had one lung. Everybody knew this. No one knew how they knew it, because obviously no one could check, and no one had ever gone up and asked, “Hey, Zimm? One lung or two?” But there was something in the way that he held on to the middle of sentences, turned just slightly purple, and leaned against his desk that screamed
one lung.

The rest of this apocryphal tale was that he lost the lung after being stabbed in the chest with a broadsword during a medieval battle reenactment. There were confirmed sightings of him buying chain mail at the Renaissance Faire, which seemed to give this story some credence. It was probably bullshit, but most people wanted to believe it, so most people did. What else was there to think about a forty-year-old single guy with a snowy white beard who obsessed over the English library and displayed his own decorative dragon bookends on his desk? Since he was also a notorious droner, there were always bets going that one day he would just try to keep talking and would die right in the middle of some interminable explanation of “what Tolkien was
really
trying to accomplish.”