Chapter 25
When Friday morning comes, I wake up early and lie there staring at the ceiling.
I’ve been thinking about everything my friends said since yesterday, and I’m no closer to a decision.
Part of me wants to talk to Forrest so badly.
I play out all the scenarios where it ends exactly the way I hope, but I can also see all the ones where it ends in catastrophe.
In the darkness, Brekky resettles himself on my feet, and I keep still so I won’t disturb him.
I haven’t missed a Queer Alliance meeting since I started going, and now I’ve missed one last week and potentially another.
The idea of staying home today feels weird.
Especially because yesterday was Trans Day of Remembrance, the end of Trans Awareness Week.
I should have been at school, leading the event the way I’m supposed to as co-president.
My alarm beeps, and I blow out a heavy sigh.
“I can do this,” I say into the room, and sit up. “I just have to go to school. That’s all I’m doing.”
Brekky protests as I move my feet out from under him.
I flip on my lamp and squint in the sudden light.
At my closet, I throw on black sweats and a T-shirt, with a hoodie over it.
In the bathroom, I brush my hair and teeth, and clean my glasses.
There’s still a faint pink hue from Anna’s hair dye around the mouth of the drain.
“Sidney!” Mom says when I walk into the kitchen. “You’re up.”
“I want to go to school today,” I say.
“Are you sure?” she asks.
I nod.
“Then let me drive you,” she says.
“OK,” I say.
I text my friends in the car to let them know I’m on my way.
The sky is just starting to lighten as Mom and I take the freeway over Lake Union toward the school, and it seems like it’s going to be a clear day, just a few clouds dotting the pink horizon as it blends into a blue sky above us.
I twist in my seat to look back, and I can see her: the mountain, watching me go.
After almost a week at home, the school is loud and bright. I keep my head down, heading straight for my locker. When I reach it, all my friends are standing there, and they hug me in turn.
“I’m really glad you’re here,” Makayla says.
“You can totally do this,” Jayden says.
“I’ll meet you outside your fourth period and walk you to Queer Alliance,” Anna adds. The ends of her hair are a perfect bright magenta, clashing gloriously with her orange sweater.
“I wish you could come to my first period too,” I say, leaning my head into her shoulder.
“Forrest is in that class with you, right?” Makayla asks.
“And his friends.” I blow out a breath.
When the bell rings, they all walk me there, and Ms. Lundahl smiles at me when I step into the classroom. She was the first teacher to email my mom back and grant an extension. “Just have them turn in the rough draft by Thanksgiving break,” she’d said.
I head straight to my seat, keeping my eyes on my desk, scrolling on my phone.
I hear Forrest when he comes in, chattering away to Stef and Alexander, and a second later they all go silent.
They’ve seen me, and I feel them looking at me; I can even see them in my periphery, stopped just inside the doorway, but I don’t move.
As more students push in behind them, they finally head for their desks.
As class starts, I peek at Forrest out of the corner of my eye, and slowly turn my head to look at him.
He’s staring at his desk, hands fidgeting in his lap.
I’ve never seen him this subdued before, and my heart aches.
This is my fault. I need to talk to him, to explain somehow, and if he still likes me like Jayden thinks he does, maybe there’s a chance for us.
As the clock moves closer to lunchtime, my stomach feels worse, and the voices get louder.
I guess they’re not really voices, because they’re inside me, but they’re still impossible to ignore: telling me to run, that this is a mistake, it’s going to end terribly, here are all the ways it could end and destroy my whole life—
That’s not real. It’s not happening, I tell myself.
That’s not real. It’s not happening.
That’s not real. It’s not happening.
It’s hard to just let the thoughts be there without reacting to them. Tracy made it sound so easy.
“If you weren’t here, I’d be hiding in the bathroom right now,” I mutter to Anna as she walks me to the Queer Alliance meeting. She laughs, pulling me in with the arm she’s linked through mine, and squeezes my bicep with her other hand.
“You could totally do it on your own,” she says. “But I’m happy to help.”
We round the corner, into the short hall that leads to Mr. Harrison’s classroom, and manage to stay linked as we squish together through the doorway.
Makayla is scooting chairs into place, and Jayden is standing with the back of a chair in his hands, talking to Alexander, both of them blushing furiously.
“They’re so cuuuuute,” I say in Anna’s ear, and she nods vigorously.
“Hey,” a voice says behind us, and we both turn. Forrest stands there, hands in his pocket, hoodie up. His eyes search my face, and he looks like he wants to ask me a question but doesn’t know where to start.
“Hi,” I say.
Before we can say anything else, more people appear behind him and we split apart, me and my friends on one side of the circle of chairs, Forrest and his friends across from us. It’s like the beginning of the year, only instead of annoying each other, we’re pining for each other.
At least, I am.
“Welcome, welcome, welcome,” Mr. Harrison says, appearing from his doorway. His eyes land on me. “Sidney, we are so glad you’re back.”
“We missed you,” Riley says, and I smile at them. They blow me a kiss with freshly bejeweled nails.
“So, I know we were going to have a reelection at the start of the new quarter,” Mr. Harrison says. “Now that both our presidents are here, we can proceed—”
“Mr. Harrison?” Nyx says quietly, and then again, louder. Mr. Harrison stops and holds out a hand for them to continue. They shrink a little, glancing around the room, but Mercury grabs their hand and they straighten up in their chair. “While Sidney was gone, the rest of us have been talking.”
I clasp my hands, squeezing until my knuckles turn white. I can guess what I’m about to hear, and I want to accept it with grace, not wild sobbing.
“I know that having two presidents is out of the norm for Queer Alliance,” they continue.
“Well, I don’t know, because this is my first year, but some of the rest of you know, and, um, anyway, it’s been a different approach.
At first, things were a little . . .” They look from me to Forrest. “Tense. But since then, both Forrest and Sidney have been really great leaders in different ways. So we’ve all talked in the past week or so outside of Queer Alliance, and we decided we don’t need to do a reelection. We want to keep them both.”
My mouth drops open. Nyx is smiling at me, and at Forrest, and the rest of the club is nodding in agreement.
I’m not losing the presidency.
And neither is Forrest.
At the beginning of the year, I thought the world had ended when we tied.
I was so attached to being the president, the only president.
And now I don’t want to be. I can’t imagine being president without Forrest, and it’s strange to think about how much he annoyed me before.
I know him now: his sense of humor, his family life, his fears, his ideas.
He’s not out to ruin the Queer Alliance. He never was.
Anna squeezes my arm. I hadn’t noticed we were still linked, but the realization warms my heart. She’s right here, like she always has been, along with Jayden and Makayla.
In that moment, a golden bubble expands inside me, out of me, around all my friends and this room and all the people in it.
I picture Shar on her job site hammering away, and Mom at her desk, and Dad in an AA meeting, and Brekky and Earl Grey curled together on the couch, and Forrest kissing me in the kitchen.
I want to kiss him again. I want to hold his hand, and make him laugh, and talk about everything and nothing, and watch that show he introduced me to, and—
My eyes are stinging, and I blink back the tears. I’m going to do it. I’m going to talk to him. I’m not going to let the fear of what might happen keep me from what I want right now.
“I accept,” I say, and across the circle, Forrest smiles at me, slowly, hesitantly.
“I do too,” he says.
In sixth period, I pull out my phone under my desk and open my text thread with Forrest.
Can we talk after school? I type and send it before I can think twice.
He doesn’t respond during class. When the bell rings, I head to my locker and take my time, gathering the crumpled papers and candy wrappers from the bottom and throwing them in the trash, tidying up the magnets and pictures I’ve stuck on the inside, slowly putting the things I need into my backpack.
Every few seconds, I glance down the hall, but he doesn’t come to his locker.
By the time the hall is mostly cleared out, I’ve run out of ways to stall. I shut the locker and close the combination lock, spinning it a few times, then pull out my phone to check my texts one more time.
Nothing.
I blow out a heavy sigh. My eyes are stinging. This is what happens when I put myself out there. I should have known better. Forrest doesn’t want me. He hates me now, and he’s right to, because I’m—
“Sidney!”
My head jerks up and there he is, walking toward me.
“Hey!” I croak out, my voice breathy. Oh god, don’t cry in front of him. I was already awkward once, I can’t make it awkward again.
He stops a few feet away, hands curled around the straps of his backpack. “It was good to see you in Queer Alliance today.”
“Yeah. I. Um. I wanted to come back.”
“Are you OK?” he asks. “You’ve been out all week, and you seemed really upset on Tuesday . . .” He trails off, biting his lip. Everything he isn’t saying about what happened last week looms over us in that word. Tuesday. The day I freaked out.
No. I didn’t freak out. Tracy said there’s nothing wrong with having a mental illness.
“I have OCD,” I blurt. “I see all these things in my head—well, I don’t SEE them, exactly, they’re not hallucinations, they’re just, like, mental images, about bad things happening to me, to other people, people I love, or my relationships, and they were getting really bad, and I do these things, these rituals to stop them, like saying phrases, but it wasn’t working anymore, and I really like you, and I was scared that it would all end badly, like really badly, with you hating me and all my friendships falling apart and I couldn’t risk that, and that’s why I was so weird last week, and I’m really, really sorry.
I really like you. And I want to date you too. ”
He stares at me, eyes wide. The hallway is utterly quiet, and somewhere in the school a door slams. I clasp my hands together tightly as I watch his face.
“You have OCD,” he says.
I nod.
“My cousin has that,” he says.
“They do?”
“Yeah. She has the stuff about germs—”
“Contamination OCD,” I say, remembering what Tracy said.
“But you have a different kind?” he asks.
“Yeah. I just started seeing a therapist for it.”
“Wow.”
The silence stretches, and I get that itching sensation in my chest, in my head, and I need to ask him—
“Are we OK?” I say. “I’m really sorry. Like, so sorry.”
“I don’t know,” he says, and it’s like an arrow to my heart. “I mean. When we kissed, I was stoked. I’ve had a crush on you for ages.”
“You have?” I don’t know what he means by that. How long is ages? This year, or even longer? Have I been missing more than I thought, this whole time?
“But you told me to leave you alone last week, Sidney. You walked away from me. You seemed really upset, and I didn’t call or text you because I didn’t want to upset you more or ignore what you asked for, but I was worried.
” His voice cracks again, but this time tears follow it, streaking down his face.
He wipes them away with a sleeve. “I was afraid you were gonna, like . . . and then you were out of school, but your friends were here, and Alexander told me that Jayden told him you were having a hard time but you were OK, and I was so relieved, but it also . . . really . . . hurt.” He pushes the last words out, like they’re hard to say, and every one hits me in the stomach.
I hurt Forrest. I thought I was avoiding hurting him by walking away, and instead I did even more damage, maybe, than I would have otherwise.
“So I don’t know.” He shrugs. “I think I need some time.”
“OK,” I say in a tiny voice.
“I just need some time,” he repeats. “I’m gonna go.”
And this time he’s the one to turn and walk away, and I just watch him leave.