“We’re really together.” Saying it out loud, I felt both regret and relief that I had a cover. I turned the idea over and over in my mind, trying to find a version of my life with Brad that felt okay, but all I came up with was a house with electric heat, and possibly a baby pretty enough for Sandra to love.
Sandra adjusted her sunglasses, checked herself in the rearview mirror. Satisfied with her own face, she glanced at the reflection of mine.
“Sometimes,” she said, “I wondered if you were . . . Never mind.”
I swallowed. “Wondered if I were what?” We passed the old drive-in hamburger joint where the waitresses used to wear roller skates to deliver food to the cars, before it closed down. We passed the depressed downtown of Hopuonk, mostly boarded-up, and a middle-aged Irish couple walking into the drugstore, their matching bright-red hair blowing in the wind.
“If you were a lesbian,” she finally said.
My eyes went wide at the thought that she noticed me enough to catch on.
“Well, Brad’s my boyfriend,” I said.
I thought of the eggs hitting Corvis’s house.
I’d heard lots of lesbians lived in California. The problem was, I didn’t have an escape plan. I’d saved all of my money from Emmylou’s, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I had a car, but I didn’t know where to go in it. An anchor was tied to my ankle, and I gripped the box of birth control like a parachute.
If I stayed in my Hopuonk snow globe, maybe it wouldn’t be that bad, I thought, trying to convince myself. Sandra would be proud of me, and Brad was a good person. We could swim in the ocean and have salty threesomes with Susan. Who else would she marry? Mostly, Brad would watch. I knew she wanted him and not me, but maybe she would take me along with him. Gradually, he could become like the gardener, or a beloved grandfather clock, a permanent but forgotten fixture in the living room—comforting, useless, and pretty.
“I’m going to be so terrible at being a dental hygienist,” I said. “I’m failing algebra. And biology.” I wanted Sandra to know that just because I got queen, things weren’t solved.
Mr. Sheehan pulled me aside after class the other day, a concerned-teacher expression on his face. He told me I probably needed summer school if I wanted to graduate, and he wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“Oh, I failed algebra too,” Sandra said.
I wanted her to sound more worried. I wanted her to punish me.
“Honey, I’ve heard you getting sick in the bathroom,” Sandra said, staring at the broken stoplight on Main Street, which stayed red for at least ten minutes at a time.
I was ashamed—it was disgusting, how I got sick all the time.
“You’re not already pregnant, are you?” Sandra asked. “Because if you are, we can . . . take care of it.”
“No,” I said. “I just . . . sometimes when I’m really nervous, it makes me sick.”
Sandra’s shoulders settled, and she loosened her grip on the steering wheel.
“Don’t be embarrassed,” she said. “It’s okay to do that sometimes. You know, when you’ve overeaten. Just don’t do it too much, okay?”
Oh. That’s what she thought.
“Okay, Sandra,” I said. The magnitude of what she didn’t understand was so big that I couldn’t say anything else.
* * *
—
The thing about it was, Brad wasn’t as bad as I thought he would be. Especially if I imagined us both becoming landscapers.
The first time we hung out alone, Brad and I were lying in his bed, and I let him hold my hand. That part, I didn’t mind so much. I held his back, the birth control swirling around in my body somewhere, protecting me. He had small, delicate hands, and womanish lips.
Both of us had decided to pretend that what happened in Scottie’s bedroom didn’t happen, in the interest of protecting our dignity. I could hear Sandra’s words—if you’re not careful, you’ll lose him—and I desperately wanted to like him back.
“You can hold my hand in school, too, if you want,” I said.
“Okay,” he said.
His comforter was Eddie Bauer plaid, his sheets matching. His closet overflowed with lacrosse equipment.
I was wearing the helmet, as both a joke and a barrier.
“I’m failing biology,” I said, trying this fact out on him. “I don’t get what a spleen even does.”
He said, “I know, right?”
“And I don’t want to know, like, at all,” I said. The helmet muffled my voice.
He squeezed my hand. I didn’t hate it.
“I don’t think of myself as a person who really even has a spleen. Or a pancreas,” he said.
A moment passed, and in that moment, I imagined myself without skin, without a body, as only a spine with wings attached, bleached white, beating above the clouds. If that were true, I would not be Taylor Garland. My name would be made of syllables only the wind could pronounce.
“I don’t think I’m going to graduate,” I said, “which means I won’t get into Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, which means I’m literally a moron.”
“It’s okay to be afraid,” he said, and I wondered what his biggest fear was. “I have a D in biology.”
I adjusted the helmet and sat up, facing him.
“I am a Soviet pilot,” I said.
He shoved me.
“I am a deep-sea welder,” I said. “My name is Walter Bronstein. I only eat raw eggs.”
He pinched my waist, and I shoved him away, laughing.
“I am an astronaut,” I said in a serious voice. “My name is Frances Star. My pee floats.”
He yanked the helmet off, and my hair cracked with static. I wanted to grab his lacrosse stick and pretend it was a double-edged sword, but he kissed me. The helmet, along with my fantasies of greatness, rolled under his bed.
I’m a lacrosse player, I imagined saying to Susan. I have a penis. Let me drape my letterman jacket over your shoulders. Let me unzip your spine.
I’m a movie star’s daughter, I imagined next. Let me take you into the greenroom, whatever that is. Let me take you to the top of a sparkling mountain. Let me take you underneath the hot lights. They will photograph us kissing and make a billboard out of it. Which do you like better?
I imagined myself in both places and wondered if my choice to stay or go would affect my spleen or my pancreas. I wanted to put the helmet back on.