Chapter 11 Possibility
POSSIBILITY
Hannah stays in bed for as long as she can on Sunday morning. She blinks at the sunlight streaming through her crimson curtains, but all she sees is Baker on the bathroom floor, vomit in her hair.
Hannah, she’s my girlfriend, okay, I can handle this.
“Hannah?” Joanie calls through the door. “Can I come in?”
Hannah hides her face in her covers, but Joanie enters the room anyway. Hannah hears her set something on the dresser. Then she feels Joanie’s weight settle onto the bed, right over her feet.
“You should probably get up,” Joanie says. “It’s past noon.”
“So what.”
“So you’re being a total lard-ass.”
Hannah doesn’t respond. A heavy silence falls over them, a silence that Hannah feels wrapped all around her.
“Han?” Joanie says, her voice fragile. Hannah can imagine her sister’s face, sad and anxious like the time Hannah fell off her bike and sprained her wrist when they were in elementary school. “Is there anything I can do to make you feel better?”
Hannah breathes into her pillow. Unexpected tears spring into her throat. “No.”
Joanie shifts her weight on the bed, and Hannah feels a lighter pressure on her foot, the pressure of Joanie’s hand.
“Han?” Joanie’s voice is so, so fragile. “Is there something you want to talk about?”
Hannah breathes, and her heart sprints away like it knows what’s coming before she does. “Where are Mom and Dad?”
“At Home Depot.”
Hannah feels relief. If she’s going to do this, she needs to know her parents are far away.
“Hannah?” Joanie prompts. “What’s going on with you?”
Hannah sits up and wipes her eyes. She can’t bear to look Joanie in the face. The air vent hums above her, filling the silence.
“I—” she says.
“Yeah?”
“I—I don’t know how to say it.”
Joanie waits. “Does it have something to do with Baker and Clay?”
Hannah swallows. “Yeah.”
Joanie studies her for a moment, and Hannah keeps her head down, bracing for the question that might come.
“Okay,” Joanie says, and her voice sounds nervous all of a sudden. Hannah glances at her. There is something fearful and expectant in her eyes. “What is it?”
The question hangs between them. Hannah searches Joanie’s expression, looking for signs that Joanie already knows what she needs to say. Joanie stares back with her jaw set.
Hannah’s face sears with heat. Her whole body revs up for danger, her primal instincts kicking in like those of a trapped animal. She can hear her heart pounding in her head.
“I have—feelings,” Hannah says carefully, her voice shaking. “Feelings for—for—”
“For Clay?” Joanie suggests, her eyes too hopeful.
They look at each other for a long second. Hannah considers capitulating to the lie Joanie has handed her. Joanie looks scared, yet defiant.
“No,” Hannah says finally, the word wrestling its way out of her throat. She takes a breath. “For Baker.”
Silence.
Joanie stares at her. She blinks once, twice. The entire moment feels surreal, like they’re playacting the way they used to as children.
“Okay,” Joanie says finally.
“Okay?”
“Yeah.” Joanie nods. “That makes sense. I mean, I always wondered if maybe—” She nods again. “Okay. I’m glad you told me.”
“You’re not—it’s not weird?”
“Why would it be weird?” Joanie says hastily, and her tone is so affectedly defiant—overly earnest, and borne out of her desire to protect her sister’s feelings—that Hannah starts to sob.
And is she crying because the truth is finally out there?
Is she crying because Joanie has put on a brave face?
Is she crying because this is the first real thing she has said to her sister in years, and it’s only now that she understands why she put those walls up in the first place?
All she knows is that she can’t stop, that her body is calling the shots in a way that both terrifies and relieves her, that these guttural sounds being ripped from her throat sound like they’re coming from far away.
Then she feels Joanie’s weight on her body, feels Joanie hugging her through the duvet cover, hears Joanie whispering to her that it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.
She shakes and sobs and hears Baker asking, It’s just us, right?
and she thinks of Baker losing control, sabotaging her own body, poisoning and exorcising, and how are they supposed to know which is which?
“It’s okay,” Joanie says again, voice raspy, holding Hannah through the covers as she cries and cries and cries. “It’s okay.”
Then Hannah’s last sob sputters out, and her body feels looser than it has in months. She relaxes her eyelids, breathes into her wet pillowcase, draws comfort from the familiar laundry detergent scent. Her ears are clogged, but she can still hear the air vent humming above her.
“Here,” Joanie says, proffering a tissue box. “You have disgusting snot all over your face.”
Hannah laughs, short and hiccup-like, into her tissue. She feels the sweet relief of finding the shore after the storm, of tethering herself to something she knows.
“Better?” Joanie asks.
“Yeah,” Hannah breathes.
“Sit up. I brought you some Sprite.”
She feeds the glass into Hannah’s hand, and Hannah gulps down the soda, imagines it flooding her empty body and fizzing away all the bad things.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Joanie asks. Her eyes are large and pained and bluer than usual.
“How could I have?” Hannah says.
“Hannah, I’m your sister. You can tell me these things. You can tell me how you feel.”
“I didn’t know how.”
Joanie picks at a snag on the covers. “Um.” She lifts her eyes carefully to Hannah’s. “Do you like other girls, too? Or is it just Baker?”
Hannah drops her eyes to the floral pattern on her duvet. The question hangs between her sister and herself, delicate and important like the threads they used to swing their stuffed animals on when they were younger.
“I think,” Hannah says evenly, tasting the words, “that I like girls in general. I think I always have.”
Joanie nods. “How long have you known?”
Hannah has been asking herself that same question lately. “I don’t know—I mean, it’s like, how long have you known your own name?”
“Yeah.” Joanie pauses, and somehow Hannah knows what she’s going to ask next. “Do you think Baker feels the same way?”
Hannah glances around her bedroom—at the clothes on the floor, the hairbrush on the dresser.
Her eyes settle on a framed picture of Baker and herself from last summer.
They’re sitting on the back porch at Wally’s house—Hannah on Baker’s lap, Baker’s arms clasped around Hannah’s waist—while Joanie and Luke photobomb behind them.
Baker’s mouth is open midlaugh, her eyes dark and happy, a piece of gum visible on her back teeth.
They had been drinking Bud Light and eating Doritos on the porch that night, while Wally’s mom was away with his two younger brothers, and it had started to rain, one of those light, humid rains that turned the backyard into a sauna, and they had stood up to go inside until Baker had said, in a voice full of wonder, “Wait—why don’t we just stay here and experience it?
” So they had all stayed on the porch, yelling at each other about how they were dumbasses, watching the rain drip down their wrists and slide down their noses, until they were all wearing the rainwater like another layer of clothing.
That was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done, Hannah had laughed later.
Don’t knock it, we had fun, Clay had said.
She’s not, Baker had said, her eyes lighting on Hannah. That’s just Hannah-speak for loving something.
“What are you thinking, Han?” Joanie asks.
“Just remembering something.”
“About Baker?”
“Yeah.”
“What happened at the beach?”
Hannah looks at her, surprised.
“It felt like a turning point,” Joanie says, undeterred. “Everything was all fine and great while we were there, but then it went to shit when we came back. What happened?”
“I don’t know, we just…”
Joanie’s eyes bore into hers until Hannah has to look away.
“You hooked up,” Joanie says. It’s not a question. “And was it—like—did she know it meant something to you?”
Hannah feels dazed. Hooked up is so reductive, but what words does she have to truly explain?
“If she’s just toying with you, I swear I’ll kill her,” Joanie continues in a hard voice.
Baker’s eyes in the moonlight. A flicker of passion, a flicker of shame.
“She’s not,” Hannah says.
“So it’s—I mean, she has feelings for you, too?”
It’s just us, right?
Hannah hesitates. “It’s hard to explain. I think—I think she’s not allowing herself to feel the same way.”
Joanie frowns, not convinced. “I’ll still kill her.”
Hannah says nothing.
“Han?”
“Yeah?”
“What about Wally?”
Hannah’s heart drops. “I love him, too,” she says sadly, “but it’s not the same.”
Joanie swallows. “I worry that he really loves you.”
“I do, too.”
“Han—I’m sorry that I didn’t talk to you for so long. Especially when you were going through this.”
“Don’t be sorry. I deserved it. Especially after how I treated you.”
Joanie wilts. She fiddles with the duvet snag again. “I didn’t understand.”
“I didn’t know how to explain.”
They lapse into silence, until Hannah starts to blow bubbles in her Sprite glass.
Hannah stares at her phone for a long time that afternoon, until her fingers can no longer stay still.
How are you feeling?
Baker doesn’t reply.
School is better and worse on Monday. Better because Joanie is talking to Hannah again, worse because Baker is not.
“She could at least, like, acknowledge that you took care of her on Saturday night,” Joanie says at lunch. “A simple ‘Hey, Han, thanks for wiping all that vom off my face’ would suffice.”
Hannah, Joanie, and Wally gaze in the direction of Baker’s lunch table.
She sits in her usual place in the middle of the group, leaning into Clay’s side, his letterman’s jacket creasing when he squeezes his arm around her.
Baker looks thin and sallow; her hair is less shiny and she has dark rings under her eyes.
“Exactly how sick was she?” Wally asks.