Emily M. Danforth

We leaned up against the crates and passed the now-warm root beer back and forth. “But we are supposed to be older,” Irene said. “I mean, to act older. It is junior high school.” Then she took a long swallow, her seriousness reminding me of an after-school special.

There’s nothing to know about a kiss like that before you do it. It was all action and reaction, the way her lips were salty and she tasted like root beer. The way I felt sort of dizzy the whole time

after that kiss, as we leaned against the crates, a yellow jacket swooping and arcing over some spilled pop, Irene kissed me again. And I hadn’t dared her to do it, but I was glad that she did.

guys and girls. Anything else was something weird. And even though I’d seen girls our age hold hands or walk arm in arm, and probably some of those girls had practiced kissing on each other, I knew that what we had done in the barn was something different. Something more serious, grown-up, like Irene had said. We hadn’t kissed each other just to practice. Not really. At least I didn’t think so. But I didn’t tell any of that to Irene. She knew it too.

Most of the girls on my team had a crush on Ted. I wanted to be like him,

The last time it had been just our mouths. This time we remembered that we had hands, though neither of us was sure what to do with them. We came inside for the night, drunk on our day together, our secrets. We were still telling those secrets when we heard Irene’s parents in the kitchen,

“If I could take you to Pride, like in a perfect world, if I could private-plane us to Seattle, would you want to go with me?” Lindsey asked, still holding my arm tight.

“Well, is there cotton candy?”

“Personal Best is good, but you need to rent Desert Hearts,” she told me.

“I’m pretty sure they won’t have that at Video ’n’ Go,” I told her back after she explained the plot.

“It is PG,” I lied, knowing that Ruth could (and in fact did) check the marquee as she drove past the theater on her way home. But by then she’d think we were already inside and watching the very R-rated Thelma & Louise, and would talk with me about that lie later, which was a talk I deserved, I suppose, because even though Lindsey and I didn’t go to see Thelma & Louise that night, it was a movie I rented and rented and rented once it came out.

With Lindsey, everything was. She started me in on the language of gay; she sometimes talked about how liking girls is political and revolutionary and counter-cultural, all these names and terms that I didn’t even know that I was supposed to know, and a bunch of other things I didn’t really understand and I’m not sure that she did then, either—though she’d never have let on. I hadn’t ever really thought about any of that stuff. I just liked girls because I couldn’t help not to.