S K Y L A R
The months had gone by like crossing items off a to-do list, with the satisfying sense of accomplishment of having made it through the passing of time, of having moved forward with it, instead of being left behind, too sluggish and unconcerned to keep up. Apathy had kept its grip on me for years, like a caterpillar's cocoon, keeping me dormant. I had spent my days in a stage of complete lethargy.
It was Spring and I had metamorphosed. Kylie was throwing a party at her house, a Victorian construction in the suburbs that looked too much like a doll's house not to have been inspired by one. There was expensive art on the walls, big chandeliers, bigger Persian rugs, a fairy tale garden in the back. I couldn't believe her parents had agreed to have a bunch of sticky raunchy teenagers over, but according to her, they had, on the condition that most of the rooms were kept out of limits, and that everything looked like they had left it when they came back from their weekend retreat.
I was sitting on the bathtub, feeling too dizzy to stand, watching Allora retouch her makeup in front of the mirror, and Kylie was sitting next to me, a bottle of wine against her lips, her head on my shoulder. It felt like we had been in the bathroom for hours.
Kylie passed me the bottle and said, "I'm fucked up."
I took a sip. My head felt too heavy on my shoulders, my cheeks too warm, my hands too cold against the bottle, almost empty already. The loud music playing everywhere downstairs made it only faintly into the bathroom, but Allora sang along to it nonetheless, completely out of tune, leaning closer to finish her eyeliner.
When she was done, she turned around, and smirked, "We should play fuck, marry, kill."
Kylie rolled her eyes next to me, "We've played that so many times â"
"Not with Sky, we haven't," she protested, coming to sit with us inside the bathtub.
I opened my mouth to say it was fine, that I didn't really want to play it anyway, mostly because I didn't know how to, but Kylie was faster.
"Fuck, you're right!"
"I know!" Allora smiled, "Let me think."
I took another sip of wine and waited.
"Oh, I know!" Kylie said. "Do Edward, Isaac, and Ethan. Fuck, marry, kill. Go."
"Aren't Edward and Isaac dating?" I asked. I didn't like this game.
"So?" Kylie said, taking the bottle back from my hands to finish it.
"So I don't really see them as possible sexual partners," I explained.
They both groaned, and said, "They could be bisexual, Sky. Just do it."
"I don't know," I said. "Aren't we sexualizing them â"
"What is wrong with you?" Kylie stopped me. "Stop overthinking this."
"Right, right, I'll go," Allora said, a pretty smile on her lips. "I would marry Ethan, fuck Isaac, and kill Edward."
"You would kill Edward?" Kylie asked, leaning closer to me so she could look confused at Allora. She smelled like perfume and wine.
"I said what I said." She shrugged, "Your turn, Kylie. Fuck, marry, kill. Tristan, Luke, and Liam Chan. Go."
"I would kill them all."
I laughed. Allora rolled her eyes, "You can't do that."
"Kill myself?"
This time I didn't laugh, but Allora did roll her eyes again, "Can't do that either."
"Right, I would fuck Liam Chan, kill Tristan, and marry Luke, so I could frame him for murder. Happy?"
"Very happy," Allora said, finally smiling, and reaching for her own bottle of wine to hand over to me. "Your turn, Sky, come on."
I took the bottle in my hands, but didn't take a sip, passing it over to Kylie instead, who said, "I'm thinking Luke again, cause you're friends with him, Mr. Wyatt, cause the man's a sex scandal waiting to happen, and I don't know, Jacob?"
I leaned my head back and thought about it.
"Right," I said after a while. "I would kill Jacob, and marry Mr. Wyatt, I guess, if I was older, and also attracted to him â"
"You would fuck Luke!" Kylie stopped me, an impossible smile on her lips. "Say it!"
I felt my face burning up, "I would rather not. I don't even like this game. Mr. Wyatt's our teacher â"
"We're obviously doing some hard hypothetical thinking here," Allora said before I could go on. "I think we all know how fucked up it would be to marry your middle-aged high school teacher, Skylar."
"He's not middle-aged," Kylie said. "He's probably thirty."
"And you're seventeen," I said, frowning.
She shrugged and said, "Don't look at me like that. I can be attracted to him. It's only problematic if he's attracted to me."
Allora pushed herself off the bathtub and back on feet, "Right, let's go dance."
Kylie pretended to pass out on my lap and dragged her voice out to say no, but Allora was already opening the door and dancing to the loud music coming from downstairs. When I didn't move either, Allora shrugged.
"Fine, I'll go by myself. You know why?"
On my lap, Kylie said, "Cause you're a strong independent woman."
"Cause I'm a strong independent woman!"
And just like that, she was gone, the door closing behind her, muffling the music like a pillow over our heads. Kylie took another sip of wine and turned to me.
"So you would kill Jacob," she said.
My face was on fire, and I was trying to smile it off, "I thought we were just doing some hard hypothetical thinking."
She ignored it, "You don't like him, do you?"
I shrugged, "I don't know him."
I knew he had been back to school for months, but not yet back to himself, or at least the self he had spent years fabricating for the public eye. He was still the captain of the football team, still the other half of the hearts drawn on the toilet stalls at school, but there were rumors he was sick with something. He fell asleep in class, or spent them in the nurse's office with a headache, and he didn't touch his food at lunch, or made it through practice at the end of the day, or to any party ever.
Rumor had it he had been offered a scholarship at the worst-ranked college in the whole state. Everyone thought he could do better, but he had refused to wait for any more offers and signed the contract as soon as he could. No one knew why. Except, of course, Kylie, who I suspected knew everything.
She passed me the bottle, "He's just like us."
I took a sip and frowned, "What do you mean?"
She wrapped her arms around her legs and laid her head on top of her knees. She was wearing a skin-tight dress, high-heeled boots, and shiny red lip gloss that made her lips look wet, and she was telling me something about Jacob, and I wasn't listening to a word. Instead, I was thinking why they hadn't included girls in their game, thinking I might have known how to play it better if they had.
"Do you like him?" The question came out like a tipsy hiccup.
She shrugged, "I care about him."
I smiled, "You care about everyone. I asked if you like him, like, like-like him."
She leaned her head back to laugh and say, "Like-like? Are we in middle school again?"
I shook my head and didn't ask again, not because I didn't think she wouldn't understand my question this time, but because I knew she would, and she would probably answer me too, and I wasn't sure I actually wanted to know what it was, a yes, or a no.
"Are you excited about college?" I asked instead. After Harvard's rejection, I had gotten accepted at more than half of the colleges I had applied to. Some of them had even offered me a scholarship. I still hadn't decided which one I was going to.
Kylie smiled, "Oh yeah, aren't you? I can't wait to be done with high school."
"Yeah, me too," I lied. I had a crippling fear that going off to college on my own would be like going back to my cocoon, a reversed metamorphosis. I would go back to being no one anyone knew, no one anyone cared to know.
"Do you know what you're going to study?"
I had been thinking about it for a while, but I hadn't told anyone yet, mostly because I thought it would be like telling people I wanted to be a princess when I grew up, like I thought maybe we really did live in a fairy tale world.
But I was drunk, and she was smiling at me, and it was magical, and so I told her, "Maybe creative writing, or psychology, or gender studies, I don't know."
"Those are a lot of words just to say you're a lesbian."
My whole body was on fire, not just my face this time, and it was hard to breathe, let alone talk, so I just drank some more wine, and waited for her to change the conversation. She didn't. Instead, she laid her head on my shoulder again, and closed her eyes, and after a while, she fell asleep. The party kept going outside the bathroom and inside of it Kylie went on sleeping and I went on thinking, and it was like going way over the speed limit on the highway, except I was drunk in a car with no breaks.
When it finally stopped, I said, to no one but myself, "I think I am a lesbian."
No one answered, but when I looked at the mirror across the room, there I was, looking back at myself, smiling, and feeling an immeasurable relief. It was like getting home after being away for too long, like throwing my keys on the table, taking off my shoes and jacket at the door, and taking a deep, deep breath, finally.