Thirteen My Room

I wish we could have gone to Beckett’s house this time, but she doesn’t seem interested in inviting me there. Maybe she’s afraid of what her parents might think if she rolled in with someone like me. It’s obvious how they feel about queer people, especially after what I heard at Grace Redeemer on Sunday. Maybe they think being gay is like being a vampire, and once you invite it into your home, it will never leave.

I forage for snacks before she gets here, but all I find is a half-empty bag of pretzel sticks and four cans of off-brand diet cola that have been rolling around the vegetable bin of our fridge forever. There’s also a bunch of Joanna’s mineral waters, but I don’t know anyone besides her who likes mineral water, so I’ll just have to make this work. For a split second, I think about running down to the QT at the end of the street to buy some microwave popcorn or something, but just as I reach for my bag, the doorbell rings and I’m an adrenaline bomb all over again.

I smooth down my hair and try to French tuck the front of my shirt, still messing with it as I open the door. Beckett’s standing on the other side, smiling in living color.

I step aside so she can come in.

“Okay, so I brought provisions this time,” she says, holding up the bag. “Two kinds of licorice, because I wasn’t sure if you liked red or black. And some Cokes—sorry, but if you’re Team Pepsi, we probably can’t be friends.”

“No, that’s perfect,” I say, spinning a little. “All I could find were some grossly stale pretzels and a few diet colas that may or may not be left over from my middle school graduation party. If you could call that pathetic gathering we had a party.”

She makes face and we laugh, and she goes, “That’s just sad.”

“I know, right? Anyway. Joanna only drinks mineral water, and I don’t do diet-anything, so.”

“Yeah.”

When we get to my room, I close the door and take the grocery bag from her.

She went to Fool City.

“You’re not wearing your Ask Me About Pure Prom shirt,” I say, sneaking a peek at her as I set the licorice and Cokes out on my desk.

“Neither are you,” she says.

I smile again. “Touché.”

“I went home and changed first.” Her face skews pink as she says this.

I nod casually, like it doesn’t mean anything that she came to my house looking fly as hell instead of like a walking billboard for purity.

I pick up a Sharpie from my desk and spin it between my fingers so I have something to do with my nervous hands.

She settles onto my bed, up near my pillow, and pulls her backpack onto her lap.

“So, Joanna,” she says, digging out her notebook. “Is that your sister?”

She doesn’t know—how could she?

I go, “No, actually. Joanna’s my mother.”

“She lets you call her by her first name?”

“She doesn’t know I call her by her first name.”

“Oh.”

“That’s a not-in-her-presence situation.”

She slow-nods, makes a gotcha sound.

“She must’ve done something pretty bad to get stripped of her mom status,” Beckett says.

My hand goes to the scar on my cheek, but then I push it the rest of the way into my hair so she doesn’t notice. It’s not about the haircut—it was never just about the haircut, or even the scar. It’s about the lie she told my dad about what happened. It’s about something between us that got lost that day.

Beckett tracks the movement of my hand, so I pick up the Sharpie and start spinning it again.

She goes, “Did I say something wrong?”

“No, it’s just... after my dad left, she really struggled. She’s fine. I mean, she’s been working on herself, it’s just...”

I fumble the Sharpie, bend down to pick it up. It’s weird to talk about this. I’ve never told anyone but Stella about what happened with my mom, or about which of my dad’s sins hit her the hardest: rejecting God or rejecting her.

“I don’t usually talk about any of this because... it was all she talked about for a really long time. And then one day she just... stopped.”

I lock the Sharpie between my laced fingers and glance up at Beckett. I’d swear there’s a bubble of safety and protection around us. We’re untouchable in here. I feel like I can say anything.

“I always wondered where all her hurt and anger went—there’s no on/off switch for that, y’know? Hurt feelings don’t just go away. Anger doesn’t just go away.”

“When did they split up?” Beckett asks.

“When I was seven.” My throat tightens around the words.

She goes, “I can’t imagine what that would be like,” and I don’t have a response to that, because she’s right. She can’t imagine, not from the filter of her perfect life.

“I think she thinks those bad feelings have been healed, especially now that she—” I stop myself before saying now that she goes to Grace Redeemer. For a nanosecond, I’d let myself forget about Beckett’s connection to that church. I don’t want to shit on her experience, but I’m pretty sure Grace Redeemer hasn’t taken any of that away from Joanna. Not when it drips into the space between us nearly every day.

I use the capped Sharpie to trace the overlapping circles I drew on my shoes during third period. She reaches out, slips it from me, uncaps it, and adds a couple more to the chain. When she gives it back to me, I continue the trajectory of circles up the leg of my jeans.

Beckett sticks her arm out, pushes up her sleeve, exposes the freckled skin of her forearm. I’m not sure why, until she takes the Sharpie again and draws a circle just below the bend in her elbow, then hands it back to me.

“You can’t repeat a shape,” she says. “And they have to have at least one point of contact.”

I stare at her for a second before breaking into a slow smile.

“Okay,” I say.

The triangle I draw pushes just inside her circle.

“You’d probably never have a reason to secretly call your mom by her first name,” I say, handing her the pen.

She goes, “Yeah, I don’t know,” but then she drifts away again, like she did at the meeting this morning, and at the coffee shop yesterday afternoon. I want to say something else, something to fill the silence, but sometimes you need to give a thought room to breathe.

She adds a square that touches corner to corner with my triangle before finally, quietly adding, “It’s complicated.”

Our fingers touch when she hands the pen back, and the sensation fires off bottle rockets inside me.

I wait for her to explain, but she doesn’t, so I ask, “What’s complicated?”

“My mom. Me and my mom.”

“In what way?”

I fill her square with an infinity symbol made up of tiny dots.

“Well, for starters, she’s obsessed with my virginity.”

The answer comes out quick and sharp. I look up at her, still loosely holding her wrist to keep it steady.

“Your... what?”

She pushes her hair behind her ear. “You know how, in the old days, a family would trade their daughter for cows or goats in exchange for her hand in marriage? That’s what it feels like. Even just the word purity... It’s like my virginity is some kind of... I don’t know, like... commodity to them. Beckett’s purity—now trading on the New York Stock Exchange.”

Since my mouth is already hanging open, I ask, “Why would your virginity be the topic of conversation in any context?”

“That’s all we ever talk about, especially at Great Wait. We even had to make a purity promise.” She holds up her hand. “I have the ring to prove it.”

“Wow,” I say, shaking my head in disbelief, the Sharpie hovering over my unfinished infinity symbol on her arm. “So, is it cool that I’m, like... holding your hand right now, or...?”

We laugh uncomfortably because we both know I’m not really holding her hand. Except that I know I totally am.

She goes, “My turn.”

The way she slides the Sharpie from my grasp this time... there’s a linger to it.

She draws a circle with a line through it around my infinity symbol.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“The universal no,” she tells me.

“I thought you said no repeats.”

“It’s a different symbol.”

“But it’s the same shape.”

We lock eyes. No one blinks or looks away. It’s a game of chicken that feels like a lit match—too close to being a flame.

I’m going to have to take one for the team.

I disconnect my gaze from hers, let my fingers slip from around her wrist.

“We’ll have to agree to disagree,” I tell her, hoping she can’t hear the pulse and shake in my voice.

Her smile still has heat behind it, like she’s still in the game.

“Okay,” she says.

I go, “I just need to know one thing.”

“Yes?”

“Are you team red? Or team black?” I ask as I reach over and pull the two boxes of licorice off my desk and wiggle them at her.

She leans back and studies me.

“I guess that depends,” she finally says.

I open the packs, take out one of each, and offer them to Beckett. She slips the black one from between my fingers and bites into it.

I tell her, “You know, most people are rabidly pro one or the other.”

“Is that right?” she says.

“That’s right,” I say. “Black licorice is a polarizing taste. It’s highly unusual for someone to like both.”

Beckett chews slowly. She watches me like she knows I’m making shit up, finishes chewing and swallows, but she doesn’t stop staring.

“What?” I ask.

“It’s not that unusual,” she says. “To like both.”

Beckett Wild speaks in puzzles. She is a puzzle. A million-piece puzzle with no clear picture on it—just a landscape of disorienting and beautiful colors.

She holds the black licorice in front of my mouth and goes, “See for yourself.”

I lean in. Take a bite. I don’t tell her I’ve only ever liked the black kind.

“God, Daya,” she says, and her smile evaporates into the thick air of my room. “Is it wrong that I really want to kiss you?”

My thoughts fly apart in a tornado-spin of sounds and letters with no sense or meaning to them.

“Can I?” she whispers.

I can’t speak. I can barely breathe. All I can do is nod as Beckett leans in and her lips open just a bit, and right as they touch mine, I feel her smile into our kiss. And then I smile too, and since we’re both smiling and kissing, our teeth click together, and I pull back thinking that’s probably not supposed to happen.

We giggle, and then we stop giggling, and she eases back in. I lift my hands, stroke her hair, brush her cheeks. Of all the girls she could have picked to kiss for the first time, she chose me, and I’m too crush-drunk to process it. I open my eyes to make sure any of this is real.

Beckett is doing the same.

We laugh again softly, and I pull away shy and slow. And then we’re in a free fall, like a shooting star full of galaxy dust and black licorice tongues and graffiti murals and rebellion.

“Is this okay?” she asks, pulling back to look at me.

I nod. It is. It’s more than okay. It’s a kaleidoscope of strange and confusing and, like, pure bliss. She presses in again, but just barely, traces my lips with her tongue. We’re weaving a cocoon around us, and all I can hope for is that when we emerge, we’ll be something different. Something fully formed, and beautiful.

My lips are humming by the time we finally come up for air. My whole body feels like it’s found its own frequency.

She picks up my hand, studies my fingers, strokes them lightly between hers. Then she slips the promise ring off her finger and pushes it onto mine.

“It doesn’t fit,” she says.

“I have big knuckles.”

“No, I mean...” She traces the outside of the gold band. “That whole idea of purity. It just... it doesn’t fit—”

“...Daya?”

Beckett and I snap away from each other as Joanna’s slender frame fills the doorway.

I shove the ring back into Beckett’s hand and inch off the bed. “Mom. This is—”

“What’s going on?” she says.

“This is Beckett,” I say. “From church. I... we’re working on a Spanish project.”

I pray she can’t see the trail of Beckett’s lips all over my face and neck as she scans the room like a forensic detective in one of her murder shows, looking for evidence of a crime.

She finally lands on Beckett.

“I think it’s time for you to leave.”

Beckett slides off the bed, throwing her backpack over her shoulder.

“See you tomorrow, Daya,” she tells me.

I’m floored by her boldness, by the way she walks by my mom with her head all the way up on her way out.

Joanna doesn’t move, not even as she tracks Beckett squeezing past her. The front door closes, and my pulse is frantic as she turns her confused eyes to me.

“What were you doing?”

“She’s from church—”

Her face shifts from confusion to anger.

“What have I told you, Daya?”

“You’ve told me a million things—”

“I don’t want you having people over when I’m not home.”

Her words ring through my room with a note of panic.

“We have this huge project that we have to work on outside of class,” I tell her. “What was I supposed to do?”

“Study at the library,” she bites back. “Somewhere with other people around.”

“What difference does it make?”

“People will talk.”

The truth reverberates, coming back to me again and again in crushing waves. She can’t let it go. She can’t walk away from what happened at St. John’s, no matter what other church she goes to.

“They already talk about me,” I say. “All the time. That’s what people do here.”

I don’t say it because I think she doesn’t know. She knows—I see the memory of it in her flinch. The things they said. The ugly rumors. About my father. About her. And now... about me.

“This... is not about what happened back then,” she says, pointing to my bed. “It’s not about me.”

“No, you’re right. It’s about me. It’s about what people say about me. It’s about what you hear them say. About me.”

“They call you a dyke.”

“I am a dyke.”

My words shock her into silence. It’s the first time she’s heard them from me. It’s the first time I’ve said them to her. Dust particles float in the air between us, backlit by the late day sun coming through my window. Hard, shallow breath labors in and out through her nose, full of something that can’t be trusted.

“Why would you say that to me?” she whispers.

“Because it’s true.”

“It’s not—”

“You and Dad used to talk about it—you even fought about it sometimes. I heard you. You’ve always known.”

“I don’t accept you that way. You need to find your way back to God—”

“No, I need you to hear me—”

“God won’t accept a lesbian into His arms, Daya!”

There it is. The unspoken line we’ve never crossed with each other.

God won’t accept an adulterer into His kingdom, she screamed at him. On her knees. Please come back. Tears streaming down her face. Come back to church. Seven-year-old Daya crouched behind the door, watching, praying to the God she always knew would love her exactly as she was, confused about why her mom couldn’t seem to do the same. Find your way back to Him, Jon, I’m begging you.

“You won’t accept a lesbian into your arms,” I say. “It has nothing to do with God.”

I grab my bag off the floor and push past her the same way Beckett did.

I have no idea where I’m going.

Only that I can’t be here.