Ana Yankowski, Laurel, Montana, November 22nd, 2018
Her smile faltered.
The person at the door was not Ana's father.
For a full three seconds, Ana's brain refused to process it. She had mounted it on her face the way you mount a storm shutter, and now it hung there, useless, in front of a girl in a denim jacket with a healing scar on her cheek and snow melting in her blonde hair.
"Your sister let me in," Jess said. "Side door. She's in the driveway yelling at her phone."
"Of course she is."
"Can I come in?"
With a sigh, Ana stepped back and let Jess through the door. She crossed to the closet without a word and grabbed the jacket hanging on the inside hook, Dani's leather jacket, the one Dani had let her keep, in the freezing rain back in October and never asked to have back. Her cigarettes lived in the inner pocket now, because nobody in this house would ever touch that jacket; it was too ugly, too cheap, too obviously not theirs.
She motioned to the balcony with her chin. Then, on her way past the desk, she woke her phone and turned on the Bluetooth speaker, thumbing the volume up until it filled the room, a habit the result of nosy parents.
Spotify picked up wherever it had died last, midway through her unorganized playlist. The Cure came on. "Just Like Heaven."
Because the world had a cruel sense of irony. She opened the door and let the brisk cold air envelop the room.
Jess stepped out onto the balcony wordlessly. Ana followed, pulling Dani's jacket tight over the cream dress she hadn't changed out of since dinner. The leather still smelled like her, vanilla and cigarette smoke and something herbal, definitely weed. Ana had noticed, weeks ago, that she breathed differently when she wore it. She'd tried throwing it out a few times seeing it as a weird keepsake. Yet here she was, still hiding her cigarettes in Dani's jacket pocket.
The cold creeped into her bones and she hadn't even gotten to start smoking yet. Because there was no version of this conversation that didn't require nicotine. Twelve degrees and falling. The sky had that scoured late-November clarity, no clouds, the stars sparkling and close, and below them the valley ran black and silver out to the mountains, which stood against the horizon like a dome covering the whole town from the outside, patterned intermittently by the lights of the town.
Ana lit her cigarette. The flame trembled once and then caught. She took a long drag and whispered in a voice a little too hoarse, "Is Laurel okay?"
Jess nodded. "Dani took her home."
"And you're here." It wasn't a question. Ana kept her eyes on the mountains, on the stars glittering above them, because it was so much easier than the alternative. Jess hadn't taken her eyes off Ana since the door. She could feel it, that attention, standing too close.
"I was worried about—" Jess began.
"I used to think that once I left here, I could truly be myself." Ana heard herself interrupt and didn't stop. The words had been pressurized for hours and maybe the seal had finally stripped. "That was the whole architecture. Survive until graduation. Get out. Become a person somewhere with less ties to my name, but I realized I'm still going to be beholden to them. My mother chose my major. Political science, communications, double major she filled in the application boxes herself, did you know that? She sat at the kitchen island with a glass of Chardonnay and decided for me. They're paying for all of it. Tuition, housing, the meal plan, it's a leash. I'm stuck. Eighteen doesn't cut a leash made of money because I'll have to keep up appearances to keep them happy. My entire escape plan…"
She mimed an explosion with her hands, cigarette tracing an orange arc through the dark. Boom.
Jess gave a small, sad smile back to her. She didn't argue. That was one of the things about Jess that Ana had never had the vocabulary to appreciate at fourteen. She didn't rush in to fix things that couldn't be fixed, not unless she could throw herself in front of them. In a family of people who managed, spun, and reframed, being witnessed was so foreign it was almost unbearable.
"And I used to think Lis was an idiot," Ana went on. The cigarette shook again. Not the cold this time, and she knew it. "For years. For doing all that stuff to piss off Mom, the hair, her stupid taste in boys, the vodka, the walking disaster routine and then jumping into the first net that wasn't this one. Jake. A twenty-two-year-old with an apartment that smelled like weed and a dog and a pulse. I used to sit in this room and think, God, Lis, you had the same training I did, how are you this stupid, how did you trade one cage for a smaller one." She exhaled smoke and it dissipated outward towards the stars. "I don't think that anymore."
"No?"
"No. I… I think she looked at this house and understood there was no winning it, and she took the first door that opened, and the door was bad, but it was a door. I stayed. I told myself staying was strength. I told myself I was playing the long game." Ana laughed, one soft, ugly note that the wind took. "The long game. I'm eighteen years old and I've been playing a long game since I was old enough to realize there was even a game to be won. Do you know what that does to a person? There's no me under the game anymore, Jess. She's not real, she probably never was."
Jess reached out and touched Ana's hand where it rested on the balcony railing.
Ana flinched.
It was involuntary and total, a full-body recoil that started somewhere in her spine, and she hated it, hated it more than almost anything, because Jess's hand was warm and small and had never once in its life touched her with intent to take, Ana made herself stay. Made her hand stay under Jess's. Slowly, degree by degree, the way you lower yourself into water that's too hot, she accepted the touch.
Jess had noticed the flinch. Ana could see her filing it, that quiet cataloguing thing she did, the same look she'd had in this room three weeks ago listening to Felisity cry through a closet door. She didn't comment. She left her hand where it was.
"I think I'm the idiot, Jess." Ana watched the ember of her cigarette eat toward her fingers. "I played both my parents' little games. Mom's game, where I'm a campaign asset with a GPA. Dad's game, where I'm a thing to be used." the word snagged, and her voice was working hard to not waver, "—where I'm his. And I got so good at both. I'm the best there's ever been. And somewhere in there, doing all the bullshit I do just to please them, the layers stopped being layers. I don't know who's under them. I genuinely don't. I've tried to check. There's just more performance, all the way down."
"Ana, why are you telling me this instead of—"
"Because I don't want to hold it in anymore." Ana took another drag. Her voice had gone very quiet. "Because I did the math tonight, standing at that dinner table, and holding it in has only caused me more pain. So."
The wind moved through the bare trees below the balcony. Somewhere down in the dark, faint and furious, they could hear Felisity's voice rising and falling.
"Lis was Mom's favorite growing up," Ana said. "Did you know that? People assume it was me. The grades, the cheer, the little blazers at press events. But there was—" she paused, and chose the family's word, the smooth stone of a word they'd handed her, "—an accident. At least that's what I was told, I asked about it when I was little and that's the word they used for it. I… can't have kids. There was some… complications when I was born.”
Jess's hand had gone rigid on top of hers.
"And I think that… that, plus Lis being her first is why my mother just used to tell me Lis was her favorite. Constantly. Out loud. More than once. Because what's the point of a daughter who can't continue the line? My mother thinks in legacy. I was the defective unit that presented well. Lis was the real one." The cigarette had burned to the filter; she crushed it out on the railing with more force than it needed. "So when Lis started to rebel against her, I was mad at Lis for the longest time. Genuinely furious. Because I had wanted my mom's affection the entire time. I would have done anything, I did do everything and Lis had it for free and she was setting it on fire. I said a lot of bad stuff about my sister. Behind her back, to her face, to Mom, when it bought me an inch of warmth. And she's no saint, but…" Ana's throat did something she didn't authorize. "I miss her. She's twenty feet below me screaming at a man, and I miss her like she's already gone."
She made herself do it then. She turned her head and looked at Jess properly, for the first time since she'd arrived. The porch light from the patio below caught the edge of Jess's face. The faint pinkish white line on her cheek where Sarah's ring had opened her, healed now into a scar she'd carry for defending a girl who had ruined her life.
"I miss you, too," Ana said.
"Ana... I..." Jess exhaled, and her breath plumed white toward the stars. "I don't know what to say."
The warmth of Jess's hand on hers made Ana's skin rise into goosebumps under the leather sleeve, all the way up her arm, and it was not the cold, and she was too tired to pretend to herself that it was.
"God, please say something. Anything."
"I just—" Jess sighed. Her jaw worked, and Ana watched her fight with herself the way Jess always fought with herself, compassion and self-preservation going to war behind her blue eyes. "Part of me wants to forgive you. Part of me has wanted to since we had that talk in your bedroom. Part of me wants to just… Put all the stuff you put me through in the past, wrap it up, call it survivable, because carrying it is heavy, Ana, and I'm tired too."
"But..." Ana preemptively supplied.
"But it was never just a single moment." Jess's voice didn't rise. That was the worst part. It stayed level and careful and true. "It was never just you outing me. If it had been one panicked lie on one terrible day, I think I could maybe, I don't know. But it wasn't. It was a conscious decision, every single day, for years. You harassed me. You harassed every queer kid in that school, or kid you decided seemed queer, after you outed me. You built it."
Ana said nothing. The music drifted out through the balcony door, thin in the cold.
"Do you remember Toby Ferro or Clayton Phillips? or Mackenzie Rivers? or—" Jess asked.
"I know them.”
Jess stared at her.
"You want more? I remember all of them," Ana said. "Every one. You think I don't know? I know exactly what I've done, Jess. There's a girl in our grade who I am ninety percent sure will not come out until she is twenty-five years old and four states away, and it's because she had a front-row seat to what I did to you. I did that. That's mine. I own it."
"Owning it isn't the same as being sorry for it."
"I know."
"Do you even—" Jess stopped. When she spoke again it was quieter. "Why the queer kids, Ana? I've turned it over for three years. The outing, fine, I understand the outing now, it was you or me and you did the math. But afterward. All the hate. Nobody made you do that. Nobody was watching you that closely. Why?"
Ana looked out at the mountains. This one she had never said out loud.
"Because every queer kid I made an example of was a flare I fired away from myself," she said. "You want to know how you avoid being hunted? You hunt. Loudly. You make yourself the least plausible suspect in the county. My mother built a Senate career on the same move; I learned it at the dinner table." A pause. "And because—" this part came slower, dragged up from somewhere with hooks in it, "—because every single one of them was braver than me. Every awkward kid who kept showing up anyway. You, walking back into that school with your head up after what I did. You were all walking around being the thing I wasn't allowed to be, surviving it, and I couldn't stand it. So I punished my own reflection everywhere I found it." Her mouth curved, humorless.
Jess was quiet for a long moment. The song changed, something with more distortion, Felisity's influence buried in the playlist like a fingerprint.
"And tonight you kissed her," Jess said. "Again. Without asking. You promised her, Ana. Not unless you want one, she told us what you said. She believed you. I believed you."
"I know."
"That's it? I know?"
"What would you like instead?" Ana asked, and there was no fight in it, which seemed to unsettle Jess more than fighting would have. "A defense? There isn't one. She was sitting on my bed being kind to me and I was drowning, and the only way I've ever known how to ask to be held is to offer something. So I offered. It's the only currency I've ever been offered. She said no, and she was right to, and then I set the whole bridge on fire on her way out because being seen wanting something and not getting it is the single most unsurvivable thing I can possibly do here. There. Are you happy?."
"I drove here ready to hit you for real," Jess said.
"You should."
"Stop." Jess turned to face her fully, and now there was heat. "Stop doing that. Stop offering yourself up like a—like penance. You did it in your bedroom three weeks ago and you're doing it now. I'm not going to hit you, Ana, I'm never going to hit you again, and every time you ask, all I can think is who taught you that, who taught you that the way you settle accounts is with your body—"
“I screwed everything up.” Ana said sharply, leading Jess back inside. “It's what I know best."You should go home," She said finally. "Gina will worry. It's a holiday."
"I texted her earlier. She thinks I'm at Dani's." Jess pulled her knees up. "Which reminds me that I'm done lying to people I love, so I'm going to have to fix that tomorrow. But I'm not leaving yet." She turned her head. "Because you said something out there, and then put it away, and I watched you put it away, and I'm not letting you bury it. You said there were complications when you were born. You said "accident."
Ana looked at the dark rectangle of the balcony door for a long time.
The manager ran the numbers one last time, out of habit, out of loyalty to eleven years of survival.
And Ana, for the first time in her life, overruled her.
"When I was nine," she said, "I was snooping in my mother's office. My mother was in Helena. So I went in, which I was not allowed to do, and I opened the file drawer, which I was really not allowed to do. And in the bottom drawer, there was an accordion file. Brown. Rubber band around it. It said ANASTASIA MEDICAL SLC on the tab, in her handwriting."
"SLC?"
"Salt Lake City." Ana's voice had gone very level, very quiet, the register of a girl reading from a document she had memorized so thoroughly she no longer needed the pages. "I was a nosy kid and it had my name on it, so I opened it. And most of it I couldn't read. It was lab reports and referral letters and words with way, way too many syllables. But some words you don't need a medical degree for. Some words have a shape." She pulled one knee up and wrapped her arms around it. "Karyotype: 46,XY. That was the first one. And then, further down, on a letter from an endocrinologist: complete androgen insensitivity syndrome."
Jess reached back for Ana's hand and Ana gave her a soft smile and their fingers laced.
"I didn't know what any of it meant. So I did what any well-raised child of a public family does with a question she can't ask at home." A ghost of the performance smile, aimed at nothing. "I rode my bike to the public library, and I used their computer, not my laptop, not our wifi, because even as a kid, I already knew that anything I searched in this house belonged to my mother. And I typed it in. And I sat in the young adult section, next to a poster of a cartoon owl telling me that ‘reading is a hoot’, and I found out what I am."
"Ana—"
"XY," Ana said. "Chromosomally. Genetically. Whatever word you want. My body can't respond to androgens— I was never wired to receive them so it built itself the only other way it knew how. Which is why I look like this. Which is why nobody, ever, at any pool or any sleepover or any locker room in my entire life, has ever once looked twice." She said it without vanity, a technician describing a machine. "No uterus. Nothing to have periods with. And the gonads—" she sneered at the words. "—they took those out.. There's a scar. It's small. They told me it was a hernia repair. They bought me ice cream after.”
Jess made a sound low in her throat. Ana didn't stop. Stopping was no longer possible; the seal had stripped entirely, and eleven years were coming out at pressure.
"That's why Salt Lake City matters. Every appointment, every specialist, every lab, six hundred miles away, out of state, paid however things get paid when you don't want them findable. Nothing local. No pediatrician in Laurel or Billings has ever seen that file. My own doctor here thinks the pills I take every morning are for anemia, and I've learned to lie at the doctor's office. My mother calls them vitamins when there's staff in the kitchen. There is an entire version of me that exists only hidden away. “My mom had me start taking the meds but I didn't realize what they were for until I got older.”
"The accident," Jess whispered.
"That's the family word. My grandmother's word originally, I think, they didn't want her to be embarrassed about me. There was an accident when Anastasia was born. Like I fell off a bike. My mother talked to me exactly one time, when I tried to ask a question at fourteen one question and she put down her fork and she said, 'We don't discuss your condition, Anastasia,' and the word condition came out of her mouth like she was handling it with tongs, and then she picked her fork back up and asked Lis about midterms." Ana's arms tightened around her knee. "That's the entire conversation my family has ever had with me about my own body. Six words. I've gotten longer speeches about thank-you notes."
Jess had turned fully toward her on the carpet now, and there were tears on her face, and she was making no attempt to do anything about them, and somehow that, the undramatic, unhidden fact of them was easier for Ana to bear than sympathy would have been.
"Sixth grade," Jess said slowly. She was somewhere else; Ana could see her rifling backward through years. "You started carrying that little zipper pouch. You had supplies for the whole squad, always, you were like—" she stopped.
Ana's mouth curved, joyless and precise. "Mom bought me them, made sure I kept up appearances and I understood from that point. I kept a calendar. I complained on schedule. I synced my performance to Madison's actual cycle for two years because she was loud about hers and it gave me a script. I did the whole show. I researched it like a role, because it is one, because if fifteen girls in a locker room all belong to a club and one of them doesn't, that one had better be the club treasurer." She exhaled. "I've been method since I was eleven. You want to know why I'm the best liar in this county? That's why. I wasn't practicing on you people. You were the easy crowd. I lie to myself in the mirror every morning before I've brushed my teeth."
"Who knows?"
"My parents. A clinic in Utah. Assorted lawyers, presumably—my mother doesn't let anything exist without lawyers." Ana turned her head and looked at Jess, and her eyes, for once, had nobody managing them. "And now you."
The size of it landed on Jess visibly. "Not Lis?"
"Not Lis." Something moved through Ana's face, fast, and was gone. "Lis has enough of my bullshit as it is. And Lis leaks. Not from malice—from Jake, from wine, from wanting one true thing to give someone. I couldn't. I can't."
"So why me?" Jess's voice cracked. "Ana, three weeks ago you told me you're not sorry for what you did to me. You stood in this room and said you'd do it all again. Why would you hand me—" she gestured, helpless, at the air where the confession hung, "—this. You know what this is. Your mother is—Ana, your mother co-sponsored—"
"I know. I've read it. I've proofread it, actually; she leaves drafts on the kitchen island like a normal parent leaves grocery lists." And here Ana laughed, one note. "'Sex shall be defined for all state purposes by an individual's chromosomal composition at birth.' My mother wrote a legal definition of female, Jess, and her own daughter doesn't meet it. Under my mother's law, on my mother's paper, I'm not a girl, and thankfully, it didn't pass. I've watched her stand at podiums defending that language, in a blazer I helped her pick out, and I've stood behind her, on camera, being the daughter, being the visual aid, and I've thought: if any journalist or researcher or whatever ever pulls one loose thread in Salt Lake City, my whole family detonates, and I'm the bomb. I've been the bomb since I was born. They've just been managing my fuse."
She was shaking now. Not crying—the crying, whatever was left of it, was spent, was in the walls of this room, was years deep in the carpet but shaking, finely, all through her shoulders and hands, the tremor of a structure under a load it was never rated to carry.
"You asked me on the balcony why the queer kids," Ana said. "And I gave you a true answer. The flares. Hunting so I wouldn't be hunted. Punishing my own reflection. All true. But here's the floor under it, the one I've never said out loud." She had to stop and breathe, and Jess waited, and the house ticked. "I watched Laurel walk into that school every single day in a body the whole world told her was wrong, and decide it was hers anyway. She had it beaten out of her, attempted to legislate out of her, prayed out of her in some facility in Newport, and she came back and started again to take her own body back. And I looked at that, Jess, and I wanted to burn it down and I wanted to kneel in front of it, both, at full volume, at the same time, because I have never once been allowed to know my body. Other people hold the paperwork on it. They cut parts of it out of me under anesthesia when I was stupidly young and impressionable." Her voice finally broke, one clean fracture, and she rode over it. "She fought the entire world for hers. I never even got to meet mine. That's who I've been throwing rocks at for three years. People who got introduced to themselves."
Jess moved.
It was not soft. It was not cinematic. Ana sat rigid inside the arm around her like a girl in a crash brace, and breathed, and did not go up to the ceiling. That was the whole event. That was all this was. She stayed in her body, in the room, on the floor, next to the only person alive who now held the complete file on her, and the house did not fall down, and the world did not end, and nobody came to collect.
"What are you thinking about," Jess murmured, after a long time.
"I'm always just in my head."
"What's this one saying?"
"I'm trying to figure out what I've just handed you. In real terms." Ana's voice was wrung out, sanded down to plain grain. "Because part of me did it on purpose, Jess, and you should know that about me even now, especially now. Some animal part of me thinks: give her the gun. Owe her your entire life. Make the debt so big she becomes structural. That's the closest thing to trust I've ever been taught to build, mutually assured destruction, but cozier, I guess."
Jess was quiet for a moment. Then: "I'm not holding a gun."
"Jess."
"I'm not holding a gun, Ana. I'm holding your hand. I need you to learn the difference, and I think it's going to take years, and I think you should probably talk to an actual professional whose office is not in this house or in Utah, and I'm going to keep saying that until you hate me for it." She tightened her arm, once, deliberate. "But tonight, for the record, so it's said out loud in this room where everything else finally got said: I will never tell anyone. Not Dani, not Laurel unless you say so, not anyone, not ever, no matter what happens between us, even if you go back to being a nightmare on Monday. That's not a trade. It's not a debt. It's just true."
Ana looked down at Jess's hand.
"Laurel," she said, slowly, "can know. Someday. Not yet. But— she of all people. She'd understand the part about the paperwork." A beat. "God. I kissed her tonight and told her to forget I exist. I have to fix that. I don't know how to fix things like that."
"You start with 'I'm sorry' and you don't attach a ton of caveats to it."
"Barbaric," Ana said faintly, and Jess laughed, wet and cracked and real.
The laugh hurt more than crying.
But Jess laughing beside her on the floor, with her hand still wrapped around Ana’s, was so familiar that for a second Ana forgot there were three years between them.
Then Jess shifted, and the scar on her cheek caught the lamplight.
There they were.
All three years.
Ana looked down.
“I need to say something else,” Jess said.
Ana’s stomach tightened. Of course. There would be conditions. There should be conditions. She had confessed enough tonight to fill a locked filing cabinet, but confession wasn’t the same as—
“Stop doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Looking like I’m about to read your sentence.”
Ana attempted a smile. It failed.
Jess loosened her arm from Ana’s shoulders. Not abruptly. Just enough to sit back against the bed, giving them both room. Her knee stayed beside Ana’s.
“I don’t know if I’m ever going to forgive you.”
And there it was.
Ana nodded once. Efficiently. A motion appropriate to receiving disappointing but unsurprising news.
“Okay.”
“No, let me finish.”
“I said okay.”
“Ana you said okay like you were agreeing to your own execution. It’s different.”
Ana picked at the cuff of Dani’s jacket. A thread had worked loose from the lining, black against the pale inside of her wrist. She wound it around her finger until the tip went white.
Jess noticed. Jess noticed everything tonight, apparently.
“I mean it,” Jess continued. “I might get there. I might not. There are things you did that I still think about when I walk into certain rooms. And knowing what happened to you doesn’t make those things disappear.”
“I… I know.”
“But I don’t want to keep doing this.”
Ana lifted her head.
“This.” Jess gestured between them. “Every conversation becoming the same conversation. Every time you do something decent, me standing there with a list of reasons it doesn’t count. Every time I see you, I'm fourteen again before I’ve even opened my mouth.”
Ana’s finger had begun to hurt. She unwound the thread.
“I’m tired,” Jess said. “And I have things in my life that I actually want to be present for.”
Laurel. Dani.
Ana looked toward the balcony door.
“So I’m not going to hold it over your head anymore,” Jess said. “I’m not going to make you spend every conversation proving you know what you did. I know you know.”
“Knowing hasn’t exactly improved my behavior.”
“No. It hasn’t.”
The agreement was immediate, almost comforting.
“But that’s your job,” Jess said. “Changing it. Not mine. I can’t stand next to you for the rest of your life and stop you from saying the worst possible thing every time you get scared.”
“I’d need to pay you.”
“You couldn’t afford me.”
Ana breathed out through her nose. Almost a laugh.
Jess watched her for a moment, then looked at their hands.
“I want to move on, Ana.”
The words should have sounded like leaving. Ana had heard enough variations to recognize the shape. Move on. Move forward. It’s for the best. Language adults used when they wanted the person being abandoned to participate politely.
But Jess was still here.
“What does that mean?” Ana asked.
“It means I’m not promising we go back to what we were. We can’t. And I’m not promising I won’t get angry sometimes.”
“Right.”
“It means if we talk tomorrow, we can talk about tomorrow.”
Ana stared at her.
The room was warm. The music had moved on to something she couldn’t identify, though she barely heard it.
Tomorrow.
Such an ordinary thing to offer someone.
“What if I screw it up?”
“Then I decide what I want to do about that. And you don’t get to tell me I was stupid for giving you a chance.”
Ana closed her mouth.
Jess’s expression sharpened.
“You were about to.”
“Possibly.”
“Yeah. Don’t.”
For a moment neither of them spoke.
Then Ana said, “I’m sorry.”
Jess went still.
Ana made herself continue before the familiar machinery could supply a qualification.
“For… The stuff afterward. Making school somewhere you had to brace yourself to go.” Her throat tightened. “I knew you’d still be there anyway. I used that.”
Jess looked at the carpet.
“And I’m sorry I kept telling you that having your mom made it less bad,” Ana said. “It meant you had someone to go home to. It didn’t mean I hadn’t hurt you.”
The words sounded embarrassingly plain. No argument. No clever construction that allowed her to retain a corner of the room.
Just something true, left out where it could be rejected.
Jess rubbed her thumb across the seam of her jeans.
“Thank you,” she said.
Ana waited for more.
There wasn’t more.
She had apologized, and Jess had heard her, and nobody had turned it into a verdict. The simplicity left Ana oddly unsteady.
After a while, Jess reached for her phone.
“I should text my mom.”
Ana’s head came up too quickly.
“About—”
“Where I am,” Jess said. “Not what you told me.”
“Right. Sorry.”
Jess typed with both thumbs. Ana looked away, deliberately, giving her the privacy she had never been allowed to assume for herself.
The response arrived almost immediately.
Jess read it and closed her eyes.
“What?”
“She says, ‘I know.’”
Ana blinked.
“W… what?”
“Dani called to ask if I was home yet, which I would have anticipated if I had thought for five consecutive seconds.’”
Despite herself, Ana laughed.
Jess kept reading. Her face softened.
“What else?”
“She says to tell her when I’m leaving.”
Nothing about Ana. Nothing about coming to retrieve her daughter from the house of the girl who had hurt her.
Ana could not decide whether that was kindness or an absence of information.
Possibly both.
“I should text Laurel,” she said.
“Yeah.”
Ana retrieved her phone from the carpet beside her. The screen lit her fingers blue.
Laurel’s conversation was still near the top.
The last message was from before dinner.
She opened the keyboard.
I’m sorry tonight got so out of hand.
She stared at the sentence.
Tonight hadn’t done anything. Tonight hadn’t put a hand on Laurel’s face or opened the bedroom door and told her to get out.
Ana deleted it.
Typed again.
Jess did not look over her shoulder.
That helped.
Finally, Ana wrote:
I’m sorry for what happened tonight. I kissed you after promising I would ask, and then I said cruel things because you told me no. You didn’t do anything wrong.
Her thumb hovered.
She added:
I’ll call you in the morning to talk, if that’s okay. You don’t have to answer tonight.
She read it four times, looking for the hidden request. The little hook beneath the apology that said reassure me, tell me I’m not awful, come back.
She couldn’t find one.
She sent it before she could add one.
The message appeared in the conversation, small and irreversible.
Ana set the phone facedown.
“Done.”
“Okay.”
“You’re not going to inspect it?”
“No.”
“I could have written something terrible.”
“You could have,” Jess said. “But I don’t think you did.”
Ana looked at her.
Jess was sitting on her bedroom floor with one leg stretched out now, rubbing a crease out of her sock. Her denim jacket had ridden up awkwardly against the bed frame. There was a faint smear of mascara beneath one eye.
And suddenly, with a force entirely disproportionate to the observation, Ana realized they were alone.
Not on the balcony having a confrontation. Not surrounded by everything she had just said, not for one brief, disorienting second.
Alone in her bedroom.
Jess was here.
The girl who used to sit in this exact spot and complain about the heat. The girl Ana had leaned against without asking because there had been a time when closeness felt like something she could have before she learned to ruin it.
She remembered the weight of Jess’s arm around her middle. The way Jess used to say her name when she was being impossible, stretching it into three exhausted syllables. The ridiculous concentration on her face when she painted Ana’s nails with her nondominant hand.
Ana wanted to cross the six inches between them.
The wanting was immediate and humiliating.
Not just to be comforted. That would have been easier to admit. She wanted Jess to look at her and forget, briefly, about anyone else. She wanted to rest her head on Jess’s shoulder and feel Jess turn toward her. She wanted a kiss she hadn’t engineered. Affection that arrived without needing to be cornered into the room.
And beneath that was something lonelier.
She wanted to ask if Jess had ever missed her at all.
The question pushed against her teeth.
Ana kept it there.
Because Jess had just offered her a future in which they could speak without fighting, and already some hungry, frightened part of her was trying to turn it into more.
More time. More closeness. Proof.
She felt ashamed of how quickly it happened.
“What?” Jess asked.
“Nothing.”
Jess raised an eyebrow.
Ana looked down at the jacket around her shoulders.
Dani’s jacket. Laurel’s message on her phone. Jess on her floor.
She had been holding pieces of all three of them and mistaking the collection for a claim.
The thought made her stomach turn.
“I’m trying not to make this something it isn’t,” she said.
Jess’s expression changed. Not alarm. Something quieter.
“Okay.”
“You don’t have to respond to that.”
“I know.”
Ana nodded, staring hard at the loose thread.
For years, she had treated wanting as a problem that could be solved by making herself necessary. Be useful enough. Pretty enough. Frightening enough. Buy the right things. Say the right thing before anyone else thought of it. Become so essential that leaving would create more trouble than staying.
It had never occurred to her that someone could understand every terrible thing that had happened to her and still not want to kiss her.
Or that they could care about her without handing over the particular kind of love she wanted.
Laurel hadn’t owed her a place between Jess and Dani because Ana was lonely. Dani hadn’t promised anything by leaving her a jacket. Jess coming here tonight wasn’t a delayed answer to a question Ana had asked with her mouth three years ago.
None of them owed her that.
The realization hurt.
It also left her with nothing to bargain over, which was a kind of relief she didn’t know how to use yet.
“I don’t think I know how to have people without trying to keep them,” Ana said.
Jess leaned her head against the mattress.
“You could start by letting me go home when I need to.”
Ana’s chest tightened.
Then she nodded.
“Yeah.”
“Not because I hate you.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
Ana considered lying.
“Not automatically.”
“Okay,” Jess said. “Then I’m telling you.”
The phone buzzed against the carpet.
Ana turned it over.
LaurelLore: morning is okay. please text before you call.
A second message appeared.
LaurelLore: i’m still upset. but i’m home and safe.
Ana read both messages until the words stopped shifting.
Home. Safe. Upset.
All of them allowed to be true.
I will. I’m glad you’re safe.
She sent that. Nothing else.
Jess checked the time.
“I need to head out.”
Ana stood before she could turn the words into an injury. Her knees objected to the time on the floor, and she caught the edge of the desk.
Jess got up more slowly, stretching one leg.
“Your carpet is decorative,” she complained.
“It’s imported.”
“So is tile. Doesn’t mean I want to sit on it for an hour.”
Ana smiled. Small. Real enough to feel strange.
At the door, Jess paused.
“Can I hug you?”
The question hit Ana somewhere beneath thought.
She nodded, then remembered Laurel and all the things a person could mean by a movement made while scared.
“Yes,” she said.
Jess hugged her.
Ana kept both feet on the floor. Her cheek rested against cold denim, and for a few seconds she allowed herself the simple, unbearable fact of being held by someone who had asked first.
Then Jess loosened her arms.
Ana let go.
Daniela Rivera, Laurel, Montana, December 3rd, 2018
December arrived without improving Montana’s personality.
The cold got sharper. The daylight got stingier. Someone hung silver bells in Marlene’s front window, where they rattled every time the door opened, which meant Dani spent six hours a day being cheerfully notified that another person had arrived to complain about the weather.
By the time she took her break, she smelled like coffee, fryer oil, and the syrup a child at table four had poured directly into her apron pocket.
Not spilled.
Poured.
She stood in the alley behind the diner, holding a cigarette she hadn’t lit.
Her phone rang.
Sofia.
Dani answered with her shoulder pressed to the brick wall.
“If you’re calling to ask whether I’ve bought a winter coat, I have a winter coat.”
“Hello to you too. Are you outside?”
“No, I'm doing cartwheels.”
“Dani.”
“I’m on break.”
Sofia went quiet for a second. Dani could hear traffic on her end, a distant horn, the soft thump of a door closing.
“Do you have a few minutes?”
Something in her sister’s voice straightened Dani’s spine and made the hair on the back of her neck stand at attention.
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened. I have an update.”
“About?”
“The people I’ve been trying to reach. About Wholeness Ministries.”
The cigarette stopped halfway to Dani’s mouth.
The alley seemed to narrow around her. Her vision lingering on the dirty surroundings. Dumpster. Delivery entrance. A strip of dirt covered ice along the opposite wall.
“Okay,” she said.
“I spoke to someone yesterday. We talked again this morning.”
Dani pushed away from the wall.
“Someone who worked there?”
“No. Someone who was sent there.”
For a second, Dani couldn’t feel the cold.
She had spent weeks trying not to get her hopes up every time Sofia said she was waiting on an email. Laurel had agreed, after their conversation in November, that Sofia could look for people. Quietly. Without posting Laurel’s name or handing strangers the details of her life.
It had sounded sensible then.
In practice, it had meant a month of Dani checking her phone like good news might arrive if she willed it to.
“An actual person?” Dani asked.
“No Dani, a fake person.”
“Sof.”
“Yes. An actual person.”
“And she was there? At the same place?”
“Wholeness Ministries Youth Wellness Center. Newport, Washington. She described it and it lined up with what Laurel had told us.”
Dani swallowed.
“How did you find her?”
“Through someone who moderates a survivor group. They passed my message along. She decided to contact me.”
“Does she know Laurel?”
“I haven’t given her Laurel’s name.”
Right.
Of course.
Dani rubbed her forehead with the heel of her hand.
“What did she say?”
“Enough for me to think a conversation might be worth offering. But I’m not going to send you someone else’s whole history over the phone.”
“I wasn’t asking for—”
“You were about to.”
She had been and the recognition irritated her mostly because it was accurate.
Sofia’s voice softened.
“She’s willing to do a video call. With Laurel. If Laurel wants to, and if she feels ready.”
Dani’s mind was already moving. The apartment. Sam could take the late shift. Jess could come over. They could use the laptop instead of a phone, make tea, make the room—
She stopped.
Laurel hadn’t agreed yet.
“Okay,” Dani said more carefully.
“No surprises,” Sofia added.
“I know.”
“I’m serious.”
“I said I know.”
She hadn’t forgotten the library. The sight of Laurel across the street, the instant recognition followed by an expression Dani still sometimes saw when she shut her eyes.
A year of looking, and they had made being found another thing Laurel needed to survive.
Never again.
“I’ll ask her,” Dani said. “When we’re alone. I won’t make it sound like she has to.”
“Thank you.”
“Does she have to talk about what happened?”
“No. And neither does the other person. It could just be introductions. They could exchange a message first. Or Laurel can say not now.”
The delivery door opened.
Marlene leaned halfway out, an empty milk crate braced against her hip.
“You planning on staying out here all day?”
“Phone call.”
“I gathered that.”
Dani covered the microphone.
“My sister.”
Marlene looked at her face. Whatever she saw there changed her expression.
“Five more minutes,” she said.
“Thanks.”
“And put the damn hood up it's starting to snow.”
The door shut.
Dani put the hood up.
Sofia made a quiet, amused sound.
“I like her.”
“You like all the women who bully me. It’s a conspiracy.”
“Have you eaten? or called Bree? or—”
“Sofia.”
“Fine.”
Dani stared toward the mouth of the alley, where cars passed beyond a ridge of plowed snow.
A person who had been there.
Someone who knew the hallways Laurel couldn’t describe without losing track of where she was. Someone who might remember a room, a voice, some ordinary detail that could stand beside Laurel’s memory and say yes.
Yes, that existed.
Yes, you were there.
For all the people who believed Laurel, none of them had been able to give her that.
“What’s her name?” Dani asked.
There was a small pause.
“She said I could share that with you.”
“Okay. So?”
“Lily. Lily Wolf.”
Dani waited.
She wasn’t sure what she was waiting for. Recognition, maybe. The click of a name finding its place among the fragments Laurel had managed to give them.
Nothing clicked.
“Lily?”
“Yes.”
“Wolf?”
“Yes, Dani.”
Dani looked at the brick beneath her free hand.
“Oh.”
The disappointment arrived before she could stop it, and immediately made her feel like an asshole.
“What?” Sofia asked.
“Nothing. It’s just—Laurel’s never mentioned a Lily.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
“I know.”
She had hoped for a familiar name. Someone Laurel had already spoken about. Someone whose existence wouldn’t require another cautious introduction, another uncertain decision about whether to trust.
She had hoped she could walk into the apartment and offer Laurel something recognizable.
Not another stranger.
“I thought maybe it would be someone she knew,” Dani admitted.
“It still might be.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
“And if it isn’t, that doesn’t mean they won’t have something worth saying to each other.”
Dani shut her eyes.
“I know. Sorry. I just got ahead of myself.”
“I noticed.”
“Can you be less older-sister about it for thirty seconds?”
“I’ve been doing this a long time. The habits are established.”
Dani finally put the cigarette back in the pack.
“Don’t schedule anything yet,” she said. “I’ll talk to Laurel. Then we can figure out a time if she wants one.”
“Exactly.”
“And tell—” She stopped, trying the unfamiliar name again. “Tell Lily thanks. For being willing.”
“I will.”
Then Dani hung up.
She stood in the alley until the screen went dark.
Lily Wolf.
Not a name Laurel had given her.
Still, a person.
Dani tucked the phone into the dry pocket of her apron and went back inside.
Laurel Melody Parker, Laurel, Montana, December 3rd, 2018
The flag bag was trying to kill her.
Not dramatically. Not in one decisive event. It had chosen a slower method, sliding off her shoulder every eleven steps and forcing her to hitch it back up while the strap of her backpack cut into the exact same muscle.
Her rifle bag kept banging against her thigh.
The school was still two blocks away, Derrick was unwilling to drive.
Winter Guard had finally arrived, and apparently the price of admission was a minor orthopedic inconvenience.
Laurel stopped at the corner and redistributed everything.
Backpack higher. Rifle case across her body. Flag bag on the other shoulder.
Better.
For approximately eleven steps.
“Jesus Christ,” she muttered.
Her breath clouded the air in front of her glasses.
The afternoon had gone that peculiar December color, pale light thinning over snow, the sky already preparing to give up. Christmas lights blinked in a front window across the street.
She had missed this.
That was the stupid part.
She had missed the bags and how the tape on her flagpole felt in her hands. She had missed having a specific place to go where someone would tell her what to do with her hands and mean something as simple as turn the pole, open your palm, catch. She missed the simple art of performance. Well, a performance she actually didn't mind.
Her phone buzzed in her coat pocket.
She stopped again, wedging the flag bag against her hip while she fished it out.
CaptainJessSparrow: west entrance. main gym. bring water and whatever remains of your work ethic.
A second message followed.
CaptainJessSparrow: vick says anyone who “forgot” to stretch over break is about to be fun to watch.
Laurel smiled.
LaurelLore: i’m carrying everything on the walk over there.
CaptainJessSparrow: cardio isn’t flexibility, babe.
Babe.
Still new enough that Laurel read it twice. She smiled ear to ear.
She put the phone away before her hands got too cold.
Miss Vick had sent the show announcement the night before. A PDF, three paragraphs of expectations, and a music link. Jess had immediately followed it with messages about rehearsal etiquette, because apparently falling in love had not made her less of a management problem.
CHRYSALIS.
Florence + The Machine.
“Shake It Out.”
Laurel had stared at the title for a long time.
Then she had put her headphones on.
She hadn’t decided how she felt about the theme yet. Part of her wanted to roll her eyes at the obviousness of it. Change. Emergence. Something beautiful happening where nobody could see.
People loved that kind of story.
They loved the part where the difficult thing turned out to have been necessary.
Laurel wasn’t willing to give them that. There were things that had happened to her that would never become worthwhile just because she survived them.
The school came into view, brown walls and glass stairwells, cars shining dully in the lot. Through one high window she could see movement, someone crossing the gym with a rolled mat balanced against their shoulder.
Her stomach fluttered.
Not fear exactly.
Or not only fear.
She had spent so much of the fall trying to get through the next hour that wanting a whole season felt reckless.
January was coming. California was still there, somewhere beyond the mountains and all the things they hadn’t worked out. She didn’t know how many rehearsals she would get. She didn’t know whether she would be here for the first competition.
But she had packed her equipment anyway.
Ahead, the west door swung open. Chase backed through it carrying a speaker, nearly collided with Drake, and said something Laurel couldn’t hear that made both of them laugh.
From inside came Jess’s voice, calling for someone to stop dragging the equipment, it was scuffing the floor.
Laurel hitched the flag bag higher, adjusted the rifle case against her hip, and lugged the whole awkward weight toward the open door.