68
Lillian
For some unsettling reason, that question makes Sasha laugh.
“Define dated,” they say.
No one could miss that evasiveness. It’s fully obvious in their words, but not in their manner. They don’t seem like they’re pulling away from me or lying. At least I don’t think. My analysis of these things tends to be fear based. In cold air at night, I know this. But that was very dodgy.
They pause for too long, but then say.
“You’re my first kiss and first real date. I have a really close friend from where I grew up that I used to fake-date as a popularity move. We looked good together, prince and princess sort of vibe, and beauty is power. That’s what the 2000s high school movies say, and surely they wouldn’t lie to us.”
My doubts rose up too quickly. There’s no trick from Sasha.
“I was only asking for my own protection,”
I say.
“I want to make sure no gorgeous, angry person with perfect teeth who surfs and has strong arms is going to sweep in from the west coast to hunt me down.”
“Do you want to have a threesome with the imaginary ex you’ve created for me?”
Sasha, they make my face ache from happiness. I want to be laughing and flirting on this river from here on out. I don’t want to go back.
“Do your parents care?”
I ask.
“About her or me or that you’re in a lightly angry band with queer friends? That should make any parents’ blood run cold. We might turn you into an anarchist.”
Sasha’s quietness stretches out for too many moments. I consider adding that we can talk about something else. Or suggest we turn around. Maybe pretend to crash on the ice. I’m about to try the last option when they start talking.
“My dad would care in his own way. He’s gone all the time now, but when he was around more, he maybe would have sat me down and asked a bunch of questions about the music. He loves music. Or he used to have moments where I could see he used to love it. He’d want all the numbers, the sales, the audience engagement.”
“Sounds like he’d adore Cyprus. They could talk marketing strategies.”
“He’d be over the moon. Otherwise, it’s … hard to tell with him. But I think he was most interested in the fake-dating thing once he knew it was fake. With you, he’d be worried about how it affected the band. And he’s sort of fine with all the queerness. Except he’d be sure to say that it doesn’t make me special. He says it’s what you do that counts. And he definitely wouldn’t count everything I do as important.”
“And your mom? When you get dropped off late at night by some girl who looks like a punk to her and your lipstick’s all smeared.”
“I’ve got my own entrance to avoid any and all questions tonight.”
“But let’s say you couldn’t.”
We keep skating farther out. I sense that the moment we turn around, this conversation will be over. This is all so new. I want to cup the whole thing in my hands and press it close to my chest. Sasha and I.
All Sasha says is.
“I like to think she’s glad that I’m choosing how I live for myself.”
We’ve hit what amounts to the end of the skating path. I hold Sasha’s hand as high as I can and spin them around a couple of times, trying to catch their face as it goes past, wondering how I ever thought I was anything other than infatuated with them.
On the way back, I tell Sasha about working at the drop-in rec center where we started skating. I tell them about how I became friends with the meanest, strangest, angriest, scariest, snarkiest kids and probably made them even snarkier and stranger. I sing Sasha bits of the first songs I ever wrote.
I suppose this means I’d rather hear them laugh than hold on to my pride.
I remember this feeling. I’ve missed it so damn much.
Sasha tells me their older sister, whose name I’m embarrassed to have forgotten, is always in trouble. The getting-arrested sort of trouble. The kind that can’t be ignored. So Sasha always has to seem okay. Someone’s got to be the easy child.
“Do you think Jasper feels like that?”
I ask. Shit. Hearing about Sasha’s sister made me furious at her. What if Jasper hates me for all the space I take up? For the years when my panic attacks were more frequent, more immobilizing, preoccupying our mom.
“Like he’s got to be perfect to make up for me?”
“Let me assure you, you’ve got nothing on my sister.”
“I’m serious.”
“Say Jasper stopped communicating with you, full radio silence, how long before you’d kick down his door? Or give him a call?”
“I want to say two weeks. Honestly though, a couple of days? He’s the same with me. When he’s at camp, he texts me all the time. Ridiculous stuff, not a word on how he feels or what he’s doing. If I don’t respond, he starts leaving me pretend-sad voice messages saying he feels like we never talk anymore.”
“And if Jasper told you something personal or secret, you’d listen?”
“We’re averaging once every five years for that. But yes.”
“And if he disappeared and left you no way to contact him, you’d talk to Jasper’s friends and try to make sure he was alright?”
“They’re so sporty and intimidating though.”
“But you would?”
“Of course.”
“Listen, you’re a great sister. Basically an angel.”
“If you ever call me an angel again, I will kill you.”
That night, I don’t have a hope of sleeping after the last of the late-night texts are sent. I zoom in close on pictures of us, and I can see what had our friends mocking us and people asking if we were together. We’re perpetually angled toward each other with our eyes and attention.
All the best pictures are with Wavelength, since Sasha typically doesn’t like having a camera pointed at them. It was like that for me too when I first came out.
Not that they necessarily just came out. I don’t know that whole story for Sasha, but I do know that they seem to have been discovering themselves very quickly over the past few months. I never like a lens aimed at me when I’m trying something new.
So next time I see them, I’ll tell them it’s all a beautiful wonder. The elegant and the sexy and the clothes they haven’t figured out how to wear yet. The lace peeking out, the heels they have to concentrate to walk in.
I lie there imagining Sasha’s breath slowing to a steady rhythm, their eyes shutting. When I first met them, I thought they were shy, someone who glances away from intensity. Now they can look right at me, unwavering.
I would skate backwards from here until the ice ran out to keep looking into those eyes. I could read everything, steady and expressive. There was desire, play, joy, surprise, tenderness, and something else that terrified me.
The look that said they trust me completely.
The look that said I won’t hurt them.
The look of following me to whatever end.
Adoration.
Then we kissed again and I wonder why on earth we ever stopped.
It’s six times we’ve kissed now, or seven, running off of one hand and across the other toward a number I forget, where times stack up until some disappear, even some of these first ones. I’ll remember a few forever.
At Cyprus’s. Reverberating inside me for days.
In the car. Fire in my body.
On the frozen river. Ice in Sasha’s eyelashes.
I’ve done this before. And it goes …
The first: fourteen years old, late fall, too cold to have a picnic.
Emelia and I were out there anyway, lying on a blanket with as much of it folded over and wrapped around us as we could. We’d been to a coffee shop, and another time we went to a movie, and those felt like dates. That day, she’d dragged me into a deep corner of the park where no one could see us.
We were on our stomachs, shoulder to shoulder, silently taking turns writing words in a notebook. A game of bad songs, one fragment at a time. Me putting a melody to it at first, lost in the music until I saw where the rhyme scheme was going.
L — so
E — I
L — was
E — wondering
L — how
E — to
L — tell
E — if
L — you
E — want
L — me
E — too
L — I
E — was
L — wondering
E — if
L — I
E — could
L — kiss
E — you
E — Lillian?
E — Lil?
E — can I kiss you?
In the hundreds: backstage at Initialism.
We’d just finished our first ever set there, which was also our first set with Emelia. We were so young and playing to the scattered people who were there early before the proper bands arrived.
We were really too young to play there at all, but I’d asked Christensen and given him the demos and he’d given us a shot. He said I burned too damn bright to be anywhere but on a stage.
I remember Cyprus and Emelia hugging and all of us jumping up and down and talking at the same time. Given the choice, I would have stayed out there and played until I dropped dead of exhaustion, even if it was only for my mom and a few friends and a dozen random people half-listening.
Then Emelia kissed me hard, right in front of Cyprus and Quinn and the band that was moving their gear onstage. Hand in the back pocket of my jeans hard. She didn’t like to kiss when there were people around, full stop.
We always argued about it. I used to think it was all flirty bickering, but it was really that we were no good at fighting. So it was arguing. I knew she wanted me and loved being with me, but sometimes it felt emotionally restrained. Like she was holding something back. She said she wasn’t. Whatever idea I had of what she was holding back, I’ve never seen from her.
Or it was like I was too much. With the spikes and opinions and breakdowns and my will to light the world on fire. My need to be desired without caution. To have her declare us fated and challenge my hatred of clichés by kissing me like no one’s watching.
I never managed to tell Emelia about it that way. It just didn’t seem like how I should feel.
The thousandth or millionth: in Emelia’s bed.
Sometimes I forgot how remarkable it was that she was mine and next to me every day. I don’t recall the day or month or even the season, just that it was morning and we hadn’t closed the blinds and there was sun on her face while she slept.
I’d woken up early. Early morning is usually my darkest time because I know what I need to do is get out of bed and get moving, but I can’t. The hour pins my body down. It requires necessity to throw the covers aside. I can’t seem to teach myself that getting out of bed is a necessity.
I was thinking about time with this huge, pressing fear that I might waste it all, or that I already was. My brain was scrambling through decades toward my deathbed. Imagining lying there, an emptiness creeping up on me. Looking back and crying inside, No no no, what have I done? Let me try again. Please, reincarnate me as me. Please.
But as much as I want to, I don’t believe in that sort of thing.
Then I saw Emelia’s face in the sun. I knew I’d made it past sunrise again.
I kissed her awake, and she curled her back into me. I buried my face in her hair.
How could this be a waste?
Our last: outside the drop-in center.
A Friday morning in August. The center opened in the morning, but it was always dead for the first few hours. I wrote songs and did yesterday’s cleaning and played arcade games. Sometimes alone, sometimes with Emelia.
That day she had a shift, but there was time to walk me to work. She said she’d pick me up later, and we’d go spend Friday night at my place like we always did.
It could be like this and be alright, I thought. It could be enough. If this girl walked me to work, I think I could set aside the dream of rooms full of people singing along to my voice. I saw the next decades and for once, I didn’t feel the rush to the end.
I kissed her outside the doors, because we had made begrudging progress on that. It was a quick kiss, light, a see-you-after-work kiss. I thought I’d save all the deep, long ones for later. She must have seen in me that adoration I saw from Sasha today. She put in her earbuds as she walked away.
What song was that? It bothers me all the time, because if it were a movie, it would have played over it all.
I don’t see Emelia online. Ever. To Cyprus’s disappointment, I have no digital influence. Everything gets downloaded then deleted in cycles on my phone.
I say it makes me an enigma.
She says it makes me irrelevant.
So it’s deliberate to seek out Emelia’s face. Redownload an app, watch it refuse my face ID, reset a forgotten password, log back in.
She hasn’t done anything to stop me from seeing this. There are photos of her in Cyprus’s pool that I want to go past quickly instead of lingering on. The lingering wins. Digitally, her whole presence is careful and curated, nothing left in view she might regret. No moment of video that’s truly candid. None of her goofiness and grinning and ridiculous dancing is on display.
She’s making something timeless and with an interest in framing that’s improved in the past few months. Look at her, being all productive and learning photography and giving off this air of undamaged calm.
I’m scared it’s all true.
Further back, there’s a series of pictures from the show at the Pilgrim. The hands of the crowd reaching up in front of her camera as she stretches to capture the moment. A shot through the throngs of feet, focused on a bottle lying on the concrete floor. The garbage swept up to the stage after the show.
TJ with his shaggy hair and Jemma with her another-era bangs up on his shoulders. Margot and Emelia wearing matching pins in support of something I care about too. The first band onstage, the last band leaving.
And one picture of me. Tucked in the post at second last.
It’s taken from a low angle, up close, so she must have snuck near to take it. She let the bodies hide her, because I didn’t see her face until we were in the lobby afterwards.
I’ve got my guitar slung around my back, headstock pointed at the floor, microphone off the stand, feet planted wide, chin up. I can hear that picture.
I stop there. I don’t go farther back to see whether she’s scrubbed me from every corner of her gallery of self.
I wish I’d glanced down to see her.