Sally was the first girl I fell for. We’d been friends since fifth grade, but it wasn’t until seventh grade that I noticed her. She had wavy dyed red hair down to her lower back, Mexican gold skin and round lips that were usually chapped, and she talked a lot about boys and fantasy books and the five pet chickens – which were slowly killed off by coyotes – that she kept at her grandmother’s house. Her laugh was shrill, and she acted like she knew everything.
Sally and I joked about getting together someday. If we turned thirty and were still single, we said, we would try our hand at lesbian. By the end of seventh grade, when I found myself looking at girls much more than boys, the joke began to seem less funny. Instead, it served as a reminder that she would never take me seriously, that she didn’t see me the way I saw her.
Then one night – we were in eighth grade then, on the fringe of becoming high schoolers – she told me that she really thought she was bisexual. I felt so relieved, and I told her all about the girl in Home Ec who had started it for me, about her soft hands clasping a studded leather bracelet onto my wrist, telling me she never wore it, that I could have it. I told her how I wore the bracelet until last summer, when I’d been forced by the oppressive Texas heat to take it off. I told her how I’d started thinking that the way I looked at Seventeen was different than the way most girls did.
A week after our talk, Sally got herself a new boyfriend, and she wanted me to go with them to the movies.
I don’t remember the movie, but I remember Sally’s legs, exposed in a jean miniskirt, and I remember the hand that was not mine resting against her skin. I remember the smack of their lips as they leaned across the cup holder, and I remember riding home in her grandfather’s station wagon, listening to her gush about her first experience making out. I had never been kissed.
Her grandfather dropped us off at my house, and we crawled into the garage attic, which I had made my own by laying slabs of wood across the ceiling beams. Three black bean bags served as seating, and my father had installed a black light above so that when we smiled, our teeth glowed green. We lay with our heads on the bean bags, t.A.T.u. crooning through the speakers of my CD player; their phony Sapphic songs had served as my soundtrack since unrequited love had snuck under my skin. Sally brought my parents’ phone with her into the attic, so she could call her boyfriend. I brought a pen and several sheets of paper, so I could write more poems about her.
I expected our conversation to revolve around the boyfriend, the sordid movie theater experience she was one step ahead of me in. Instead we talked about writing. We were both going to be novelists when we grew up.
“I’m never going to write anything happy until I solve all my problems,” I said. I was thirteen, and I knew everything.
“I know what you mean,” she said.
“What’s the main thing on your mind?”
“Well, it’s a crush.” She shrugged, and I felt the familiar lurch of my stomach I’d recently diagnosed as lovesickness.
“Oh, yeah?” I said. “Boy or girl?”
“It’s a girl.”
This could be it, I thought, but I couldn’t get my hopes up. I continued to question her, asking about hair color: blonde. Eye color: blue. Height: medium. Did I know her? Yes, Sally said. You know her well.
I didn’t know how to say it. My hands were sweating.
“You should know this,” she said, sighing.
“Sally, do you have a crush on me?” I asked. Silence stretched between us, and then the yes slipped from her so soft I wasn’t quite sure I had heard it.
That night, as we lay in bed together, my mind raced. She had a boyfriend. I wanted her, and I wasn’t sure of what exactly I wanted, but I knew that I couldn’t have it. I knew that I wanted to hold her hand as we fell asleep. Then her hand found mine beneath the blankets. “I got your hand,” she said. “It’s my hand now.”
In the week that followed, Sally broke up with her boyfriend to be my girlfriend. We weren’t secretive about it; we held hands as we walked down the hallway, and soon everyone knew. I couldn’t enter a classroom without a swarm of eighth graders circling me, tossing question after question my way. “What’s it like to kiss a girl?” they’d ask. “What do you do together, when you’re alone?”
The truth was, we didn’t do much. We held hands and hugged, and on Sally’s thirteenth birthday, our friends – who didn’t believe that we were really girlfriends – dared us to kiss. The room was dark, and our backs were leaning against the columns of her bottom bunk. We tilted forward and kissed. Her warm breath tasted like piña colada wine cooler; her mother had bought us two six packs, enough for each of us to drink two, and we thought we were wasted.
What I didn’t yet know was that Sally sought attention, any way she could get it. I didn’t know that while I was exasperated with the crowd of questions, she lapped it up like milk. She broke up with me a week after our kiss, because she’d heard that some boy thought we’d looked hot dancing together at the school dance, and she wanted to be his girlfriend instead.
I cried over her and wrote entry after entry in my diary about how she was the love of my life. I wrote more poetry, rhyming heartbreak and ache, a true master of the craft. A week afterwards, I decided we could still be friends. I invited her to ride home with me from school.
When we climbed into my mom’s Blazer, Mom’s lips were pursed into a line across the bottom half of her face. She glared into the rearview mirror as Sally and I giggled in the backseat, and I couldn’t help but notice how stiff the silence radiating from the front was. When we got home and Sally and I grabbed a bag of chips from the pantry and yelled to my mom that we were going to the attic, my mom told me to hold on a second. Sally went on, and my mom put her hand on her hip. “I wouldn’t let you take a boy into that attic,” she said.
“What?” I asked.
“The school nurse called me and said you and Sally were in a lesbian relationship. I wouldn’t let you take a boy up there.”
“We’re just friends,” I said, choked up. “That’s just a rumor, Mom. Sally and I are just friends.”
“Who would say that about you?” she asked.
When she finally let me go I ran to the attic and cried. Sally put her arm around me, and I wished that she would just kiss my tears away.
A little over two years later, I met another girl. Her name was also Sally, and she was wonderful. The funniest person I had ever met. A week after I met her, she asked me to dinner. I told her I wasn’t out, that I would have to sneak behind my mother’s back, and she groaned.
“You didn’t tell me your parents don’t know,” she said.
I apologized and concocted a story to tell my mom, about joining her for her aunt’s birthday, because that sounded more like a friendly duty than a date.
My mother was in the bathtub. I knocked on the bathroom door, and she told me to come in. She dipped her washcloth into the water and spread it out over her stomach; the water lapped around her body, and her long blonde hair was pinned back with a clip, so only the tips of a few stray tendrils were wet. I sat on the shag rug beside the bathtub and asked her if I could go the next night. She asked me if that girl she saw me with the other night at the movies was a lesbian. I told her yes.
“Bonnie, is Sally your girlfriend?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “But I like her.”
My mom paused. “Okay,” she said. “I guess you can go.”
We went to this hole-in-the-wall Asian food restaurant, and I couldn’t eat all my lo mein so I got a to-go box. Once we were in the parking lot, I realized that I couldn’t bring home a to-go box from a different restaurant than the one I told my mom I’d be at, so I left the box in her car.
It was the last time I ever felt like hiding.
Written by: Bon Bon on October 19, 2010.
Katelyn
Thanks so much for posting this! I loved it and this is a story that I will show my friends. I would like to read more of your story’s if you have any, thanks!