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“It was alright, I guess.” She takes a sip before continuing, “My best friend was the queen bee, and I was always at parties and all. But I felt so alone. I was timid, and people who didn’t know me assumed that I had great grades. I didn’t, I’m a little stupid and graduated with terrible grades.”
“You’re not stupid.” My voice comes out harshly, scolding her for being so hard on herself. “School doesn’t determine one’s intelligence. It only tells you if you’re good at academic stuff.”
She traces her finger along the white tablecloth and drops her gaze. “Well, I wasn’t good at academic stuff, and now I’ve applied to zero colleges, and there’s not much I can do.”
I grab her hand in mine. “There’s plenty of time to figure out what you really want to do.”
She peers up and smiles at me. “I guess.” And then she looks around us. “My favorite thing about this place was Rose. No matter how toxic our relationship was, I only truly felt like myself when I was with her.”
Letting go of her hand, I sit back and take a sip of the overly sweet drink. The music is shouting through the speaker, but my focus is entirely on Rachel. “How did you two meet?”
“Just through friends. I was a Freshman when she and Jake moved here, and they were in eighth grade. We would see them quite often because Chris was their foster brother and he was in my year. Stoneview’s middle school is just on the other side of the road.”
She smiles and looks straight in my eyes. “Then my friend Camila decided Jake would become her boyfriend. And so he did. Fairly quickly. I know few men who can resist Camila’s charm. From then, wherever I was, Rose was too.”
“But you didn’t start dating right away, did you?”
She shakes her head and takes a long sip of her drink. “Oh no. We were just in the same friend group. Rose would get hit on all the time, anyway. I knew I didn’t stand a chance.”
Her chair scrapes against the floor as she slides closer to me.
“At the beginning of sophomore year, when the twins were freshmen, we were all at a party at Camila’s. I remember someone put on that two thousand’s song, ‘Stacy’s Mom’.
“Stacy’s mom has got it going on,” I attempt to sing.
“Exactly.” She starts chuckling to herself, remembering that night clearly. “We were all playing a stupid game of cards, and during the chorus Rose just said: ‘Yeah, I could fuck Stacy’s mom.’” She cackles louder but stops instantly when she sees I don’t get it.
“Sorry! I should have mentioned that we had a friend called Stacy, and her mom was absolutely gorgeous. Most importantly, Stacy was there with us.”
A soft laugh leaves me. I can see Rose doing that so vividly.
“She was so unapologetic about it. And she must have seen it in me that night, that I thought Stacy’s mom was hot too, because when her gaze clashed with mine…ugh…” She lets her head fall back. “She has that thing. You see it too, right? She just…knows. And fuck, she knew then that I was into girls and hadn’t told anyone. That I was just barely understanding myself, why I had never been interested in having a boyfriend. She glanced at me and had already figured me out more than I had ever done myself.”
I chuckle to myself. “Yeah, I see what you mean.”
“She kissed me that night. She followed me to the bathroom when I went. I let her walk in behind me. I let her lock the door. And I let her kiss me. You know, that kind of kiss. The ones when you feel your feet lift off the floor and your mind is in the clouds even after it ends. And that was it, she’d gotten me. I was hers.” She shrugs. “I never kissed anyone else, and I never slept with anyone else. It was just Rose. AlwaysRose.”
There’s a long silence.
“Wow,” I scoff. “And I thought I had it bad.”
She bursts out laughing. “You know, at first, she wanted a normal relationship. We were young, and we’d never dated anyone. She’d lost her virginity to Luke Baker because they were best friends and they both wanted to get it over with. But us two were discovering what dating girls was like. We were both the first girl we’d ever slept with. We were uncovering that thing people always talked about…love.”
She takes a deep breath, regret settling in her gaze. “But I was scared,” she admits. “As much as my friends were understanding and didn’t care, my parents were a different deal. They’re so homophobic. They’re so traditional, Stoneview. I never told them because I already knew what their reaction would be. It wasn’t just that she was a girl. She was an orphan, and they couldn’t know if she was from a good family. Not like Conor.”
My eyes dart to the three scars she has on her face. They’re white now and will forever be there, a reminder of how violent Conor indeed was and how I should have gotten her out sooner. The highest one crosses her eyebrow and the corner of her eye, while the other two are on her cheek. What kind of man smashes a whiskey glass on a woman?
My hand automatically tightens around my glass. It’s about to shatter when Rachel puts her soft skin on mine. “Don’t be angry,” she whispers. “He’s not worth it.”
We share a meaningful look before I calm down.
“Anyway,” she shakes her head. “I told her I wanted to keep it a secret.”
I chuckle before she even says the rest of her sentence.
“She did not take it well. With time, she needed to do her own thing. She didn’t want to wait for me.”
“That’s shit,” I simply say.
