Malinda Lo

and tearing the article out beneath the table as quietly as possible. She knew she shouldn’t, but she had needed to have the picture in a way she didn’t consciously understand.

She couldn’t put into words why she had gathered these photos together, but she could feel it in her bones: a hot and restless urge to look—and, by looking, to know.

He realized, slowly, that he hadn’t truly looked at Grace tonight until this moment. He’d catalogued the silk flowers in her hair (slightly crooked now due to their earlier encounter with his face), the V-neck dress she wore, her new pumps, but he hadn’t seen past the surface. Sometimes he felt as if he never saw past the surface anymore; it was safer to look at the world with a detached, clinical eye.

She was both the same girl he’d met a decade ago and undeniably changed, and for the first time in a long time he felt a kind of ache for her. It wasn’t the yearning he would have felt as a young man long separated from his lover. It wasn’t a simple physical desire. It was thoroughly unscientific, this feeling that was overtaking him, as if his body was belatedly acknowledging how far apart they had been for so long, and his mind was finally catching up.

He had missed her.

The men seemed to be having a good time, applauding and grinning, giving each other approving glances as if to congratulate themselves on their adventurousness. The wives and girlfriends were more mixed in their expressions. One looked absolutely mortified and could barely keep her eyes on the stage; one leaned forward with a broad smile, occasionally giving her husband a smirk. The smirk was so thick with suggestion that it made Lily queasy, even though she didn’t understand what it meant. The not knowing made it worse; it opened a Pandora’s box of implication, and yet she was painfully aware of her own naïveté. She couldn’t even imagine what that woman wanted, but she was certain it was shameful.

“The first time I went,” Kath said, “I was a little . . . overwhelmed, I guess. Jean told me it was the same with her. It’s like you’ve been told about chocolate your entire life but you’ve never tried any, and then all of a sudden someone gives you an entire box, and you end up
eating all of it, and you feel sick.” Kath shot her a quick glance. “You just have to get used to it—to having chocolate more often.”

They had arrived at the bottom of the steps, and Kath fell silent as they both started climbing. That morning when Lily got dressed she had come across the blouse she had worn to the Telegraph Club, folded in her bottom dresser drawer. When she started to move it out of the way she caught the faint odor of cigarette smoke, and then something else. She pulled it out and pressed her nose to the cloth, where she smelled the bar itself—a stale, boozy scent. (Standing against the wall of the club, plucking the fabric of her blouse away from the sweat on her back, the air thick with the exhalations of all those women.) She should wash the blouse before her mother discovered it, but she couldn’t bring herself to put it in the laundry basket. She wanted to preserve it like a piece of evidence.

It wasn’t like chocolate, Lily thought. It was like finding water after a drought. She couldn’t drink enough, and her thirst made her ashamed, and the shame made her angry.

The first time she’d been forced to endure an air-raid drill had been in first grade; she still remembered because it had frightened her so badly. Their teacher had told them they had to practice hiding in case the Japanese attacked, and she remembered trembling beneath her desk at Commodore Stockton while several of her classmates cried for their mothers. She’d had nightmares afterward, but she didn’t remember the details, only her mother waking her up in the middle of the night and saying, You’re dreaming, you’re dreaming. The drills continued year after year, although the enemy who might attack them changed. Japan was vanquished but Korea and China might invade, and now it was the Soviets who could drop atomic bombs. She had secretly welcomed their potential Soviet invaders, because at least she’d never be mistaken for a Russian.

“I heard that the Five Twenty-Nine Club might be starting up a Saturday night show with a new male impersonator,” Sally said. “Have you ever been there?”

“I heard it’s all hookers and dykes, and you can get bennies there under the table,” Jean said with a grin.

The words shocked Lily, but Jean said them as casually as one might say girl or boy or aspirin. She fought the urge to look over her shoulder.

A couple of boys in the row ahead of Lily whistled and hooted, and when a teacher came down the aisle to shush them, Lily dropped her gaze to her knees as if she had been admonished herself. There was a difference between those boys’ whistles and what she had been thinking, but she wasn’t sure why or how. She
only knew she felt caught, and her face flushed. She was glad the auditorium was dark.

She missed Kath. She missed having Kath to talk to, yes, but she also missed having Kath listen to her. Rockets to the moon didn’t seem so far-fetched when Kath listened to her. She made previously unimaginable things seem possible.