I Have Come Home by Carla Bruce #2
“Ha! Dabbling, yes. Exactly.” She holds up both books she’d brought to the table, weighty tomes, by the look of them. “In some light physics and statistics. Anyway, I’m talking your ear off while you’re trying to study, I’m sorry.”
“No apology needed,” Neese says. “You’re much more interesting than all, um, of this.
” Audrey glances up from flipping through her statistics book, making no secret of catching Neese’s fumble, her gaze both sly and warm.
Diffusing the awkwardness the only way she knows how—poorly—Neese clears her throat and refocuses on her half page of scribbled notes.
“But I guess I’ll get back to it.” When Audrey says nothing, Neese chances to look upward, and finds her bent over her book. Stop staring.
Despite the distraction of Audrey’s presence, Neese is soon able to fall back into her rhythm, and some time later she’s coming to the end of her third overdue writing assignment.
Relieved and giddy with triumph, she looks over at Audrey on instinct, wanting to steal another moment of reveling in having her this close, her heart tripping a step when she finds Audrey looking at her already.
“What is it?” Neese asks, but Audrey brushes smoothly past, giving Neese no choice but to follow.
“What did you think of that”—her voice lowers just an iota, a symbolic nod to subterfuge, Neese assumes, as there are few potential eavesdroppers in their vicinity—“meeting? Do you think you’ll go back?”
Neese had never felt before what she felt in that room.
The novelty goes deeper than the endless succession of novelties that characterize her college experience at large—there was a shared sacredness among other people like her, because what is your deepest secret if not sacred ?
She nods confidently, the truth prompting a physicality her mind still struggles to verbalize.
Another novelty. “Yeah. It was something I needed, I think.” Is that too honest?
She’s said it. God, this is their first real conversation.
“It felt good. Cyrus and Blue are something else.”
Audrey, too, is nodding before Neese is finished speaking. “I know exactly what you mean.” She pauses and draws a breath, her mouth tense with a thought. “My family, if they knew…”
Neese waits, not wanting to rush clarification, though the long stretch of silence itches. She wonders what Audrey’s mother’s name is, what her childhood bedroom looked like.
“My parents encouraged me to get out of my dorm, be social, you know, find my people. I’m pretty sure this isn’t really what they had in mind.”
“So they don’t know that you’re—”
“No way. Do yours?”
“I don’t think so,” Neese says. “If they do, they haven’t shared that with me.”
And so, now there is Audrey.
It’s so new, all of it: Somehow, Neese has stumbled into a budding friendship that excites and challenges her, rooted in mutual understanding and a larger sense of purpose.
Audrey is quick and clever, her mind ever churning with ideas that her expressive face can barely conceal.
It’s Neese’s secret pleasure to watch her surreptitiously during group conversations, to see how this statement or that one will land, to catch the minute shifting reactions that speak to an emotional vulnerability and depth of consciousness that awakens an almost painful ache within her.
Sometimes, Audrey catches her at this and shoots Neese a rapid wink that makes the ache grow wings. Not so surreptitious, then.
Romantically, Neese has no clue what she’s doing.
Nothing in her life has prepared her for this.
Past crushes on unattainable girls were just that: distant, impossible, and thus a pleasurable scab to pick in the sanctuary of her own mind.
Audrey likes girls, and knows Neese likes girls, and this presents a dizzying new plateau that has Neese teetering over an abyss of opportunity every time their eyes meet:
In class, where they’ve become quiet confidantes, having shifted their seating so as to remain close.
Neese sometimes finds herself idly flipping through her notebook, smiling at the tiny doodles and conversational snippets Audrey will take the liberty of inscribing when their professor’s back is turned.
In the sprawling grassy quad, where they go for a stroll and chat, if weather and their respective homework burdens allow.
Audrey has an easy physicality that often manifests in an emphatic hand shaking Neese’s shoulder or arm to drive home a salient point, a full-torso nudge to direct Neese’s attention to a specific area, seemingly unaware of the effect her closeness has, or perhaps just aware and indifferent.
Life takes on a new sheen, a new warmth pulsing at the center, countering winter’s chill.
Fewer people are in the Douglass basement room the following week, which is troubling to Neese, though it doesn’t seem to bother Blue or Cyrus at all.
“The people who need this space know that it’s here.” The shadows beneath Blue’s penetrating eyes have deepened, though her energy feels as electric and welcoming as before. “There will come a time for all of us to hold the center for each other.”
Hold the center. Neese likes how that sounds, even if she isn’t exactly sure what it means.
She wants to turn and look at Audrey, see how those words landed with her, but feels less inclined to do so around CeCe, who Neese has since learned lives on the same floor as Audrey and shares her hometown.
She isn’t unfriendly, but the two are clearly close, and Neese sometimes struggles to find her place within a preexisting friendship bond absent an enthusiastic welcome from all parties.
“You okay?” Audrey whispers to Neese. She’s leaned in close, and Neese catches a whiff of cocoa butter and something else sweet, like vanilla or coconut. Neese nods, mouth dry, and isn’t sure where to look.
“All good.”
“My fellow gays,” Cyrus trills, calling everyone to attention. “Does anyone have a question, complaint, or just any thoughts to share before we dive in?” Cyrus looks impatiently around the haphazard circle of chairs they’d formed. “No? Great. Blue?”
“Y’all,” Blue begins, reaching over to grip Cyrus’s thigh and shake it while looking over at another junior, Diamond, who nods back with a conspiratorial air. “We gotta tell y’all about the march.”
“Ooh!” Aja straightens up, face aglow. “So you did go!”
“I wish the timing had been better, we all could have really made a plan and showed out,” Blue says regretfully. “But listen—I have never seen anything like it. In my life!”
“Oh, wait, hold up,” Audrey says, with an air of dawning realization.
“I did hear about this. Remember when all the traffic was backed up on the fourteenth, a few weeks back? I was telling you how it took me almost an hour to get to the engineering building! Some big demonstration?” she says to CeCe.
“The first national march for lesbian and gay rights,” Diamond says. She speaks with a smoker’s rasp, her presence demure but undeniable. “They’re saying over one hundred thousand people turned up, from all over the country.”
“Y’all remember what they did to Harvey Milk,” Cyrus says, looking around as people nod and tsk. “That shit cannot stand. The people learned that day!”
One hundred thousand people? Neese can scarcely imagine a mass like that, moving through the wide streets of D.C.
, demanding—what? Recognition? Respect? Whatever it is, she is now sad to not have been a part of it, though it’s equally difficult to picture herself within the chanting, passionate throng.
“We met some bomb people there,” Blue continues. “People from all walks of life, every age, color, belief system, you name it. But finding other Black people was our main mission.” A few noises of appreciation, understanding. “This movement has to be bigger. It has to be.”
“So? Did you?” Audrey asks eagerly.
“We did.” Cyrus frowns, looking over at Blue. “And it showed us that we need to get organized here.”
“I know,” Blue agrees. “We do. But yes, we’re out here, and things are shifting. Slow as hell, but it’s happening. And we’re gonna stay connected and see how we can build. For now, I want to see what we can build right here, on Howard’s campus.”
“With—” Aja pauses, looks around the room to take a brief, silent inventory. “All nine of us?”
“Yes!” Blue urges. “It starts with nine. We’ll grow. But we have to let people know we’re here.”
Slow fear like bile rises in the back of Neese’s throat, even as the hairs on her arms stand at attention.
The room goes silent as everyone digests Blue’s emphatic words, the truth ringing beneath them.
Without forward momentum, Lambda is merely a biweekly social gathering.
Which is, apparently, inadequate. But—“Is that safe?” she can’t help but ask, and is heartened to hear one or two murmurs of agreement.
“Safe?” Cyrus snorts. “Probably not. But what does safe even mean for people like us, if no one stands up? Invisible?”
“What are you proposing, though?” Aja asks, cocking an eyebrow. “What exactly ?”
“Well, we don’t know what, exactly. ” Blue chews the corner of her lip, pensive.
“There’s still so much we need to learn about how to properly organize.
But we wouldn’t be the first to do it, even if we’re the first to do it here.
And I want to be a part of that. Figuring out what can happen here to make life better and safer for all the little gays coming up after us.
” She looks around at each of them, and Neese can feel it, the sea change, a collective inhale as they are all tacitly inducted into something larger than themselves. “Don’t you?”
Audrey’s knee bumps against hers, a deliberate press. Clamping down a giddy smile, Neese nudges back.
“I’m a little nervous,” she hears herself say, a multilayered truth she can’t take back, once uttered. “But yeah. I want to.”