Coach Pru makes a schedule for me. After spring break, we start meeting after school before I go to work. I’ve made it totally clear that I have no immediate plans for college or anything like that, but I like pushing my body further when I’m in the pool, and she likes having someone to push. So I guess we’re sort of both fulfilling a need for each other.
She likes that I ride my bike for the paper route, but she wants me to start running and lifting, too. Since the thing that I like most about swimming is, well, swimming, I compromise and run twice a week after my route and lift with her at the Y every Tuesday and Thursday after I swim. She has me concentrating on my turns between laps and my dives. She says that’s where most swimmers lose the most time. She drills me on technique and has me doing all kinds of things like counting strokes and swimming with tennis balls in my fists. It’s hard, grueling work, but nothing has ever made me feel so in control of my own life.
Tyler and Hattie start attending parenting classes, and even though he’s still technically living back home with his mom, he crashes at our place at least four nights a week. He’s still an idiot, but he’s trying. Like, the other day he voluntarily did the dishes. For no reason. I thought I was having an out-of-body experience.
Seeing Freddie is less and less horrible. We don’t really talk, but there’s none of that awkward eye contact anymore. Instead, we wave and move on.
I ran into him outside the school library the other day. Like, literally, he was reading something on his phone, my head was somewhere else, and our bodies collided.
“Hi,” I blurted. It wasn’t like I could get away without saying something after a head-on collision like that.
He paused for a beat, his forehead creasing. “Hey.”
I felt words piling up in my chest and in my throat, like I was about to vomit all my feelings everywhere. Homesickness racked my bones, and all I wanted was to be able to joke around like we used to, and maybe kiss him, too. Mostly, I missed being his friend. But I couldn’t make myself regret a single minute of our relationship, because I didn’t. Not even a little bit. “How are you doing?” I finally asked.
He slid his phone into his backpack and shoved his fists into his pockets and nodded. “Good. Good. I signed up for freshman weekend at LSU. Swim team tryouts are this summer. I haven’t decided if I’m going to give it another go. I’m pretty out of shape.”
“You should do it,” I told him. “You’ll regret it if you don’t.”
He smiled, but it was nothing like the toothy gap smile I love. “I gotta go to class.”
“Right. Better keep those grades up, so they don’t take away that acceptance letter.” What a dumb thing to say.
He nodded again. “It was good to see you.”
“You too,” I whispered. But he was already halfway down the hall. I wondered what would happen if I caught up to him and just forced him to be with me. As his friend or his girlfriend. Or however he would have me. But I hurt him. When I was hurting the most, I turned around and cut off the person who’d been there for me more than anyone.
One night at the end of our shift, Ruth and I pile into the booth nearest the kitchen to refill all the salt and pepper shakers, hot sauce, and ketchup.
“Hey,” says Ruthie. “Do you need all your graduation tickets?”
I shrug. “Probably not. How many do we get?”
“Something like ten.”
“Uh, yeah.” I laugh. “I just need two. Maybe three.”
She glances up at me. “You need three,” she tells me. “Have you even seen your mom since Hattie’s shower?”
I shake my head. “She’s called a few times and texted us both, but I don’t know. I mean, I’m not even mad at her, really. She’ll always be this way. I think I’ve come to terms with that. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be selective about how often and when I see her.”
Ruthie sticks a funnel into a hot sauce bottle and carefully begins to pour. “I wish I could choose when I have to see my family.” She sighs heavily. “My mom won’t shut up about prom. Saul didn’t go to his, and it’s like I’m somehow depriving her if I don’t give her this. She keeps saying it’s a young woman’s rite of passage. I don’t even think she cares if I actually go. She just wants the picture to put on her mantelpiece.”
“Oh God. I haven’t even thought about prom. I’ve never been to a dance.”
“I haven’t been to one since freshman year,” she says.
And something about this makes me wonder if we’ll someday regret not going. “So you don’t want to go to prom?” I ask.
She shrugs. “I think I’d want to if she wasn’t breathing down my neck. Like, I guess it is a sort of big deal, ya know?”
Saul slides into the booth beside me and lays a big, fat, wet kiss on my cheek. “What’s a big deal?”
“Prom,” says Ruthie. “Mom won’t back off about it and you’re not around to distract her.”
He lays his server apron down on the table and begins to count out his tips. “Think of this as the final gauntlet.” Looking up for a moment, he adds, “And maybe you should go, Ruthie. You might even have fun.”
She scoffs.
I can’t help but think that maybe we should go. There have been so many things over the last few years that Ruthie and I never did. Things that felt totally hetero and outside of what two gay girls in a small town should get to do, and school dances are definitely number one on that list. We always joke about Vermont, but maybe we don’t have to wait until we’re old ladies with fifty cats, making maple syrup.
I lean across the table. “Ruthie, go with me. Be my date to prom.”
She shakes her head even as I’m still talking. “No way.”
I grab her hand, forcing her to look at me. “What? We’re already rejects, right? Why not give these people a real thrill?”
Saul holds a fluttering hand to his chest. “Nothing would excite me more.”
Ruthie turns to her brother, and he reaches for her other hand, so that she’s stretched across the table holding both of our hands. “Ruthie, you’ll have fun and give Mom what she wants on pure technicality, which is basically the exact opposite of what she wants. It’s perfect.”
I feel myself smiling, because with Saul’s insistence, she can only say yes. Using my pointer fingers, I draw a heart in the air around my face. “Ruth, will you be my super-platonic gay date to prom?”
She shakes her head again, but her lips say, “Fine. Yes, I’ll go with you, but only because two small-town lesbos at prom completely undermines the hetero bullshit that is our high school’s prom.”
I grin. “Or just a yes would have been good.”