We weave in and out of rooms, searching for a corner to claim. Everyone in the living room is grinding their baby-makers together, while the dining room is reserved for drinking games, and all the people on the patio are either passing around blunts or gathering around tall bongs.
I reach for Grace’s hand as we head into the kitchen, but her fingers slip straight through mine. Ever since we moved past the foyer, I’ve felt her pulling away from me. I know she’s shy and isn’t one for crowds. But no one knows us here. We’re strangers. So I can only assume this has nothing to do with her being shy.
The counters are lined with coolers of beer and bottles of liquor. I grab us each a beer and we head out past the patio to the pool, where couples are gathering on lawn chairs. It seems to be the most chill place to hang out, with some people making out and others just talking.
We sit together on the edge of the pool, and Grace opens her purse to show me tons of mini bottles of horrible-flavored liquors. “My dad used to travel for work,” she says. “And he always saved the mini liquor bottles from the hotels.”
“Whoa.” I didn’t see Grace drink at all over the summer. Not even once.
She shrugs. “A little liquid courage, I guess.”
“I think I’ll stick to beer,” I tell her.
“More for me.” She opens one of her mini bottles and downs it in two shots.
The moonlight highlights her cheekbones and the tip of her narrow nose. In another world, this could be our life. Both of us in the same town, being together whenever we want.
She reaches for another mini bottle. “Freddie seems nice.”
I let my hand fall to her thigh, running my fingers up her leg as I trace constellations onto her skin. “He’s a good guy.”
She finishes off her second bottle in two gulps.
“Maybe take it easy on the booze, ya know?”
She faces me, clearly annoyed. “It’s a party, isn’t it?”
“You’re right,” I say. I don’t want to argue about something stupid, so instead I lean into her and push the hair off her neck before gently kissing the soft spot behind her ear. She turns to me and laces her fingers through my hair.
“I missed your hair.” She closes her eyes and lets it tickle her nose. “You’re impossible to forget. Do you know that? I almost hate you for it.”
And then I kiss her before she can say another word.
“I’m still with him,” she says, her lips moving against mine.
“I don’t care,” I lie.
She responds, parting my lips with hers and not being at all shy with her tongue.
She is here. She’s here with me. In my arms. Not his.
Each of our hands roams, pressing hard against the other’s skin, as if the clothing separating us might somehow dissolve with every—
Grace pulls back, out of breath.
“Andrew,” she breathes. “I can’t keep hurting him. I can’t lie to him like this.”
“What about me?” I ask. I don’t mean to say it out loud, but I do. “Have you ever thought that you’re hurting me as much as you’re hurting him? And did you ever think that maybe it’s yourself you’re lying to?”
But she doesn’t hear me. She shakes her head vigorously and stands up, pulling her feet out of the pool. “I knew I shouldn’t have come here this weekend.” She walks off, leaving wet footprints on the concrete.
“Grace! Wait!”
A pothead in a Hawaiian shirt mimics me. “Grace! Wait!”
“Fuck off!” I shout.
I take my feet out of the water and grab her purse, flip-flops, and my boots. Dodging in and out of the crowd, I follow her path to the side of the house and through the back gate.
And there she is. Grace sits on the curb by the mailbox. I guess she realized she could only get so far without shoes and a phone.
She stands, steadying herself on the mailbox. “You can’t kiss me like that,” she says. “In front of people.”
I drop our shoes and her purse in the grass. “Grace, no one even knows you here. And it’s not like I have anything to hide,” I spit out. “What’s the big deal?”
“I don’t know how to make this any more obvious for you!” Her voice grows louder with each syllable.
There are two sides to every story and two versions of every person. The version of Grace speaking now is the doubter. She’s the same person who wouldn’t come out to her parents and would only hold my hand if no one was looking.
She shakes her head back and forth, and her lower lip trembles. “Sometimes I feel like you’re trying to make me into this person—this person that I’m not. You keep talking about me being in the closet like it’s some sin to not know who I am yet! I’m just as confused about Andrew as I am about you.” She pauses. “I’m going through something here, Ramona, and that doesn’t mean I’m hiding. It means I’m learning, and I get to do that, don’t I?”
I take a step back instinctively. I’ve always known that whatever we were, it wasn’t perfect and it could never quite be defined. But I feel . . . led on. Her phone calls. Her texts. All she had to do was cut me off. Let our physical distance fade into emotional distance.
Red, searing anger settles in my chest. “Listen,” I say finally, my words clipped. “I’m not making you do anything or be anyone. It’s not like I forced you to make out with me back there.”
She plucks her purse up off the grass and clumsily puts her flip-flops back on. I can see the two mini bottles of liquor taking an effect now. “It’s all black and white for you. I’m gay or I’m not. I’m with you or I’m not. That’s not real, Ramona. Real life is messy and complicated. I have a whole world—an entire existence—that you’re not a part of.”
I cross my arms over my chest. “Well, I’m sorry if I’ve complicated things for you.”
“I can’t give you what you want.” Her voice is firm and completely sober for a moment.
I shake my head furiously. “Maybe I tried to make us something more, okay?” My voice is desperate in a way I barely recognize. “I’ll admit that. But it wasn’t just me in this, okay, Grace?” There are only so many more words I can get out without breaking down. “Every . . . every time I kissed you, you kissed me back.”
“I liked kissing you!” she shouts, reminding me that she’s had too much to drink, too quickly. “It was fun. But Christ, Ramona, the summer is over. Maybe in your world summer lasts forever, but not for me. You know, it’s like you get to live in that little town and work your little jobs and never really grow up. You don’t have to face the future in the same way I do.” She turns and stomps down to the bottom of the hill.
“My little town? My little jobs?” I shout at her, but she doesn’t turn around. She leaves me up here to bleed out.
I lie down in the soft grass of a yard belonging to a girl I’ve just met as my whole body fluctuates between rage and despair, skipping up and down like a heart monitor.
After a few moments, I hear steps in the grass and Freddie plops down next to me.
“Hey, where’s Viv?”
“Inside,” he says as he rips up little fistfuls of grass.
“How’d she like her present?”
“She liked it.” He sighs. “But she didn’t want to keep it.”
“That sucks.”
He lies down next to me. “She thinks we should just be friends. And according to her, friends don’t give each other outrageously expensive headphones.”
“Oh.” I loop my arm through his. “I’m so sorry, Freddie.”
“Everyone else saw it coming. In fact, I saw everyone watch it coming. Even Gram said that maybe we should take a break. See where things are after graduation. And it’s not like Viv didn’t give me plenty of hints. I didn’t want to see it, so I ignored it.”
“I think I know how you feel,” I tell him.
“Can I tell you something?” he asks. “Something I didn’t tell anyone else. Well, not any of my friends.”
“Of course.”
“Gram gave me the option of us waiting to move until after I graduated.”
“Wait.” I try not to sound as shocked as I am, but based on everything I know about Freddie, I just can’t fathom this. “Why wouldn’t you just tell her you wanted to wait?”
“For selfish, stupid reasons,” he says. “I was tired of watching everyone succeed without me. Blame it on ego. I thought whatever I had with Viv was strong enough to survive a year spent a few hours apart. We could pick up right where we left off in college. Maybe I’d find something new to be good at. Something that could make me extraordinary like swimming does for her and our other friends.”
“Wow.” I don’t even know what to say.
“What about you?” he asks. “Where’s Grace?”
“It’s over.” The words fall out of my mouth like two drops in a bucket. “Is it bad that I was hoping it’d work out for you and Viv, because if it worked out for y’all it might work out for me and Grace?”
“If it is, I’m guilty of the same.” He shakes his head. “The universe is such an asshole. Or maybe we just have really shitty luck.” After a minute, he says, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry if bringing you both here triggered it in some way.”
“Was bound to happen,” I tell him. “I guess it was good to get it over with at least.”
“Freddie?”
We both sit up and turn around.
Viv hovers behind us, a few feet away. “You can still stay here tonight if you want.” She looks at me and smiles. “And your friends, too.”
He looks to me briefly. “Nah. We better not.”
“Um.” I shouldn’t interject myself, but if we don’t stay here, where are we going to go?
She nods quietly. “Be careful.”
As she walks back inside, and only loud enough for me to hear, Freddie mumbles, “Happy birthday.”
We walk to the car in silence. I glance at the time on my phone. It’s past one in the morning and Freddie and I are both exhausted. Driving home tonight is not in the cards—not to mention that Agnes would kill Freddie for driving home so late. I’m trying to map out in my head what we’ll do for the night. Maybe we can find a cheap hotel or hang out in a diner.
Grace is waiting for us.
Freddie sees her sitting on the curb beside the car with half the contents of her purse spilled out on the pavement, including ChapStick, tampons, her phone, loose dollar bills, and a handful of emptied mini liquor bottles. He turns to me. “I guess neither of our nights went as planned.”
I walk around to the front seat and slam the door shut behind me.
“Grace, we gotta get you in the car,” I hear Freddie say.
I watch in the side mirror as she puts her purse back together one piece at a time. He reaches down to help her up. The minute he closes the back door behind her, she’s snoring.
Freddie sighs and leans his head against the steering wheel after pulling his door shut.
“Thanks for that,” I whisper.
“Yup.”
“Um, I hate to bring this up, but if we’re not staying with Viv, where are we staying?”
“Well, I hadn’t really gotten that far.” He sits up and reaches for his wallet in his back pocket. After flipping through his cash, he says, “I’ve got sixty bucks and Gram’s emergency credit card. Which I’d rather not use.”
I open the center console, where I’d stowed away my wallet, which is actually just a Lisa Frank pencil bag. “I’ve got eighty.” Eighty dollars that I didn’t intend to spend and only brought for serious emergencies. I don’t think Freddie understands what a sacrifice it is for me to fork over this wad of cash, but I don’t think I have much of a choice at this point. Between hotel, food, and gas, what we have won’t get us far.
Vacancies aren’t easy to come by on a Friday night. We end up at a motel in a room with two double beds and a broken hot-pink Jacuzzi. Like, it’s just sitting there in the middle of the room next to the television, which might be older than me and Freddie combined.
Freddie helps Grace into the room and forces her to drink an entire bottle of water before going to bed, while I bring our bags in.
She plops back on the bed. “You’re cute,” she says to Freddie, in between sips. “Can I tell you something?”
“Do what you gotta do,” Freddie says as he helps her pull the blankets back.
“I’ve never dated a black guy. Does that make me racist?”
Freddie looks at me, and I shrug and shake my head. He laughs, because I think it’s all he can do, but I can see the clear discomfort in the way his posture goes rigid. “Not last I checked.”
It’s a gross thing to say, and I would tell her so if I thought she would even remember it in the morning, but instead I roll my eyes in Freddie’s direction.
His lips spread into a thin smile.
“It’s not that I wouldn’t,” Grace says. “Just that the opportunity never presented itself.”
“Okay,” he says. “Bedtime.”
Grace spreads out like a starfish and gets as far as unbuttoning her shorts before passing out again. Freddie turns her on her side, and when he sees my questioning look, he explains, “Don’t want her to choke on her own puke or something.”
“Sure, don’t want that,” I murmur sarcastically as I lock the door—three deadbolts and a chain.
“I can sleep in the Jacuzzi,” he volunteers.
“That thing looks like a giant bowl of herpes.” I shake my head. “Besides, if I’m getting bedbugs, so are you.”
He cracks a smile, but just for a second.
I take the bathroom first, but the grimy floors and rusting sink have me moving quicker than normal. I hover above the toilet to pee and am careful not to swallow any water when I brush my teeth. I bet people might walk into my trailer and be as grossed out as I am by this hotel room, but I guess at home at least I know whose butt has been where. If anything, this gross room is a distraction from the elephant in the room. The very drunk elephant.
While Freddie takes his turn in the bathroom, I slip into a pair of old boxer shorts and one of Dad’s old undershirts. I take one last look at Grace and pull the blanket at the foot of her bed up to her chest.
This is not how I expected tonight to go. Every time I close my eyes, all I see is Grace leaving me there at that pool. Her voice rings in my ears, telling me I’m just a phase. I try to block it all out, but even when I force my head to bite back the memories of tonight, I can hear her breathing. Right here. Less than three feet away from me. I force myself to breathe through the tears.
By the time Freddie comes out, I’ve turned off all the lights and have decided to play Russian roulette with the bedbugs by sleeping underneath the covers.
“Fuck,” whispers Freddie as he stubs his toe on the corner of the bed.
“Are you okay?” I whisper back. “Sorry, I should have waited to turn the lights off.”
“It’s fine.”
“Follow my voice.”
His silhouette shuffles along the side of the bed, careful of his other nine toes. “I can sleep on top of the blankets if you want.”
“Scared you’re gonna get me pregnant or something? Come on. Get in.”
He does, and I immediately realize how small a double bed actually is. And how weird it is to sleep next to someone with hairy legs.
“I have to tell you something,” I say.
“Okay.” His voice is slow with hesitation.
“I’ve never dated a black guy either.”
“Har, har,” he says.
“I’m sorry about tonight,” I tell him.
His breath is warm and minty. “Yeah, I guess we both had high hopes.”
I feel tears rolling down my face and onto the pillow. But it’s so dark that I don’t care, and I hope that Freddie feels like he can cry, too. I can feel the pain we both share like a cloud hovering over us.
I wonder, for a moment, what it would be like if we could take these feelings we have for other people and pour them into each other, like that could in some way fill the empty space eating the both of us up. It’s not that easy, though.
It’s in that moment, in that moldy, decrepit motel room, that I realize how much we have in common. We are both so much in love . . . or lust or infatuation—whatever you want to call it. And it doesn’t matter how much either of us wants to make it work. We have to be wanted back, because this shit is a two-way street.
Sleeping in the same room with Grace but not in the same bed is a stark realization. It’s like hearing someone has passed away, but not being able to believe it until you see their body for yourself. This is the moment when I know once and for all that I’m searching for something—something I can’t even articulate. The only thing I can say without a doubt is that whatever I need, it’s nothing Grace Scott can give me.
I fall asleep with my knees tucked into my chest and Freddie only inches away.