ravana1sunary ravana1sunary v ravana1sunary ravana1sunary I don’t really know how to tell this story. For a start, there are some logistical difficulties – I’ll get to those later – but even without those, I don’t know how to explain it all. I guess I’ll start when we saw each other at the club after four years apart. That night, my head was pounding with noise and my heart was burning with hurt, and I’d come to the club alone – a stupid move for a girl, some part of me still said, though I hadn’t looked like a girl in public for over a year. I threw myself into the sweaty, rainbow-hued crowd prepared to try to lose my mind. I couldn’t have ever anticipated the direction my night was going to go.
Was I surprised to see him at that club, his bronze hair grown out to shoulder-length since high school, a rainbow stick-on tattoo smeared across his cheek? No, of course not. And he couldn’t have been surprised to see me in a black button-down shirt, open over nothing but a pink-and-orange chest binder, my hair shorn into a buzz cut. But the second we saw each other, we burst out laughing.
“Oli Hansen,” I shouted hoarsely. “Well, so, how have you been?”
“Addy!” He was shoved from behind by a careless dancer, and he stumbled into me, letting me catch him by the wrists. “You’re in town!”
“For two weeks. Then I’m fucking off to grad school.” I’d always been the one who dreamed of escaping this town; he’d been the one to dream of things changing here. It didn’t seem like they had, given the drab concrete street outside, the black walls masking the sprays of rainbow light within, but maybe he was still dreaming. “Are you still local?”
“Yep. Just finished community college.” He tucked a strand of hair behind his ear. He was taller than he’d been in high school, thinner; his long-lashed eyes were more prominent in his face. “Now I’m working for the public library.”
“Oh, man, that’s awesome.” We’d always taken refuge together in the public library when we were kids, when the pavement outside got too hot, or the world too much.
“They’re cool over there. They’ve put some pride flag stickers on the windows since you’ve been gone. And they ordered the suite of Heartstopper comics after about a million requests for them, so, steps forward.”
I chuckled. Seeing Oli was the biggest relief I’d felt since coming back to town. It drove back the ache that had set in earlier, when I’d try to go out for drinks with Natalie and Charlotte, girls I’d shared lunch tables and study sessions with in high school. They’d started throwing back glasses of fancy wine like their lives depended on it and plunged straight into complaining about their boyfriends, telling me I was so lucky to be a lesbian, saying I didn’t understand how terrible men were, and half an hour in they were ignoring me entirely to talk to each other. I’d slipped out after using the bathroom and they hadn’t even noticed.
Somehow, after four years away struggling to find myself, I’d thought coming back here would feel like coming home.
I Will Survive came on.
Oli squeezed my hands. “Want to dance?”
Without a word, I pulled him out onto the floor.
I have to tell you about how Oli and I grew up, of course. He was the kind of friend you can only have in a small town where no one is different but you. In summertime we avoided the sun, mostly as a way of avoiding the other kids. We didn’t want to join their games of Do What the Grown-Ups Do: playing business meeting, playing city council campaign debate, playing cook and vacuum and fight with your husband. Oli and I spent our days finding overgrown driveways and alleys and digging up tiny wild onions. We built castles out of sticks and acorns and stuck worms in them, pretending they were royalty. I liked telling him stories about faraway lands and monsters and magic; he liked spinning ideas for machines and societies that would exist in the far future.
The other kids weren’t cruel. They knew we were different, but in a town like ours, different just meant we were trying to be normal and failing, so we were met with sympathy more than ridicule. We were always invited back to Do What the Grown-Ups Do, and sometimes we went, but it always felt empty.
Shame is a funny thing. It’ll get to you, even if everyone is nice, even if no one ever shouts at you that you’re sick. Shame creeps inside and chokes out your voice. When I felt that strange shivering warmth as I watched Leila Joyce win the public speaking contest back in eighth grade, it didn’t matter that no one had ever called me a nasty name; just imagining the cold reactions I might meet, if I told anyone about it – God forbid if I told Leila – was enough to make me pray for the feeling to go away.
“So,” I said, swaying next to Oli as the music played. “How’s the love life?”
His smile slipped. I thought his face grew paler, the rainbow paint stark against his skin.
“Sorry,” I said quickly. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“It’s still hard here,” he said. “Being out, I mean. The guys who are like me – well, I don’t know if they really are like me, to be honest.”
“What do you mean?” I thought I knew, a little, but I wanted to hear him say it.
His gaze lowered to the floor as the song died away. “I don’t know. It’s a lot of older guys. Some of them have girlfriends they don’t tell you about. And if they meet you at a club or on an app, if they ask to take you home, it’s like they’re scared the whole time.”
“Scared of what?”
