“Holy fucking shit,” he said, processing with a rapid flutter of his surfer eyes. “Does Ashcraft know?”
“No one does. I don’t think Lisa’s ever told anyone.”
He’d always had this habit of removing everything from his pockets when he sat down. His wallet, phone, keys, and a small notebook lay on the table in a neat pile. The notebook was creased and handled to the point where duct tape held the binding together. He swallowed air trying to say something.
“Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, but…” While his friends had a way of keeping their inner selves ensconced under layers of jock masculine subterfuge, Ben had always been without guile. Quick to laugh and quick to cry. Sensitive in a way that would have left him exposed and vulnerable if he’d been anyone else in their school. When he left for college, he wept openly even though he was the one breaking up with her, and Stacey had to bite the inside of her cheek to get her eyes a bit misty so he wouldn’t think her heartless. “I heard from her a while back. Or I guess I didn’t hear from her, but she friended me on that thing—MySpace or whatever. Her profile said she was in Vietnam…”
“Sure. I heard something like that.”
“But that doesn’t make it any less fucked. She’ll be back at some point.”
Stacey shook her head. “I don’t think she’s ever coming back. And I don’t care if she does.” She twisted a napkin so she’d have something to do with her hands. She blurted out, “I told my family.”
“And?” he asked, after she said nothing further. “I wouldn’t even believe it if you told me your mom and dad don’t support you.”
“You know—Patrick, though.”
“He’ll come around.”
She laughed without meaning to. “Yeah, it’s just—”
At that point, she’d had what she now considered the hardest year of her life. She’d left for Wittenberg with this shock, this anger at the person she cared for most in the world. It made her feel the blood in her brain. She hadn’t been able to understand that she was 1) depressed and 2) gay. That sounded absurd, but there it was. She’d spent a year with Lisa, and still she tried to date men when she got to college. Still she clung to this idea that Lisa had been a special situation, a fluke, a temptation now removed. Simultaneously, she was “losing her faith,” not even realizing it was happening until she was deep within the throes of an antireligious conversion, understanding the infantile reasoning behind the fairy tales that girded the dogma of her ancestors. It created a sense of such loss, of mourning a thing she cherished, of flailing for something prescriptive to hold on to. When she stopped going to church there was a hole in every Sunday, and a tide of anxiety would come rolling in. So she sat around her freshman year feeling sad more or less all the time, getting a reputation as an ice queen, ignored by her roommate and uninterested in anything but old pictures of the people she missed. She spent one tortured spring day deleting Lisa from her life. Deleting her from AOL Instant Messenger, deleting the pictures of them from her computer, shredding the hard copies. All that stuff she should have been too old for.
She wrung the napkin and looked to Ben, wondering if she could trust him with this. “When I told my mom, we were sitting on the couch folding laundry. She was going on about something, and I was sitting there—” Do not cry in Friendly’s. “Thinking about how I would wait until I got back to Wittenberg in the fall, and if I still felt this way. If I still felt like…” She swallowed her tears, but it did no good. “If I still felt like killing myself, I would be allowed to go ahead and do it.” Ben didn’t flinch at this; he held the blond stubble of his jaw and listened. “And then I was holding a pair of Matt’s shorts and just thought, ‘Are you kidding me, Stacey? Just tell her. If you’re making a promise to yourself like that, you at least have to try to tell her.’ So I did. I just said, ‘Mom, I think I’m gay.’ ” She laughed and wiped at tears. “And then I corrected myself and said, ‘I mean, I know I am.’ ”
Ben waited. “She didn’t take it well.”
“No, she did—I… There was this moment when I saw in her face—like she was trying to make a decision. And she could’ve gone either way, I’m sure of it.”
Telling Ben this, she was basically right back in the moment. Dizzy and so short of breath that her apologies emerged in dry little heaves, like she’d just finished a sprint.
“I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry,” she kept saying to her mother.
When her mom started crying, tears pretty much exploding out of her eyes, Stacey truly felt like she might pass out. Why had she thought it would be a good idea to tell her? She should not have done that. It would destroy everything she had left. She would never be able to come home without this hanging between them. Her mom would never see her the same way, would never again be her best friend. And Lisa was gone. And now she had no one.
“How long?” Her mom wiped spastically at her eyes, open wounds that kept refilling. “How long have you thought this?”
“I don’t know. A long time now. Years, I guess.” For some reason, Stacey remembered camping and the time she fell into her own patch of pee. How hard they’d both laughed. She mourned to go back to that moment. She couldn’t think of anything else to say, so she kept apologizing.
Finally, her mom’s arm slid under hers, and she gripped Stacey’s hand with the strength of a fever.
“No. Don’t be sorry. I just can’t believe you didn’t tell me.” She took Stacey’s chin and pulled her face up so they were eye to eye. She’d never seen her mother so distraught, so sorrowful. Her bright blue irises, which she’d always thought of as a configuration of home, bore into her own. “I just wish you’d have known you could tell me.” She palmed Stacey’s skull, then her cheek. “You’re my love, Stacey. And that love has no conditions, no exceptions, no matter what. Do you understand? I would die before I’d stop loving you.”
There’s something about hugging your mom that sends you back in time. Something about the detergent smell of her shoulder and the clean shampoo scent of her hair that reminded Stacey she had a long life ahead. So many things to do and see. She couldn’t believe that all this time she’d let the dark gods of her neurons guide her so wrong. When Matt and her dad got home, she told them, and then they sat around on the couch for a while, teary and alive, laughing about how much they all loved one another.
“So it sounds like it worked out,” Ben said very carefully. She reminded herself she was nineteen years old. There was so much more left to see.
“It did, but…” She shook her head because he wasn’t getting it. She pointed to the table, jabbed her index finger to gain focus and control. “Lisa didn’t do this to me. This is who I am and who I’ve always been, but I cared about her. And let me tell you, I could fucking kill her if I saw her right now. Because she left. I faced this down alone. I didn’t run away. I didn’t hide. Even though it terrified me to do it, I did it. And now everyone talks about how much courage Lisa had to go running off to the other side of the world? Fuck her. I had fucking courage. I had courage.”
She retracted her finger and folded her arms. Ben sat back in the booth and looked out the window, glum on his pretty face like mud. “I realize…” He hesitated. To think about what would happen to him. To think of him then: so beautiful and alive and her friend. “I realize this may not be helpful, but you’ve got… a good thing.” He spoke each word deliberately.