Out of Order (13 page)

“I feel like that’s going to be a thing from now on,” I remarked to Jessa, pointing out Robert and Ricky’s slightly awkward shuffling. “She deserves someone nice like Robert, after Mike.”

Jessa sipped from a glass of punch and hummed in agreement, her eyes on Brandon and Kate. “Brandon’s been acting a little strangely,” she said, “Have you noticed?”

He was swinging Kate around merrily while she laughed at his abysmal dancing. Granted, he tried harder to be good when he was dancing with Jessa, but they looked like they were having fun nevertheless.

“I haven’t noticed anything strange,” I told her. Jessa began to tap on her glass anxiously, a nervous habit she’d picked up from her boyfriend. He did the same thing, drumming his fingers when he was worried, upset, or even just bored. It was the habit of a drummer in the marching band, having hands that never quieted.

“He keeps putting his hand in his pocket.” She noticed her own tapping and stopped deliberately, putting down her half-empty punch glass. “It’s always the same hand, his right one. And he got weird when I was holding him close on the dance floor. He moved away and missed a step. It’s like he’s trying to hide something from me.”

I stopped to think about it, and then nearly rolled my eyes when realization struck. “He could be just—you know.” Jessa shook her head, and I coughed awkwardly. “Adjusting himself?” I made a motion with my hand to illustrate my point.

Jessa rarely looked embarrassed and never blushed, but she did glance away from me. “I’m sure it isn’t
that
. Perhaps he has a gift for me.”

“
Sure
he does,” I said, trying to keep the sarcasm from my voice. Jessa stared into the distance a little dreamily, as though imagining what Brandon might’ve bought for her.

Kate returned with Brandon and he once again swept Jessa onto the dance floor, twirling her around and laughing joyously. Brandon was one of those people with natural rhythm, and so it didn’t matter that his dancing experience was lacking—he moved how he wanted, and it always fit the music, even when it looked a little bizarre.

“Oh man, I love this song,” Kate said as the DJ transitioned from a slow song into a faster one. “Someone come ask me to dance now, please and thank you!”

I laughed a little. “I’ll dance with you, if you don’t want to go out there alone!” Kate looked down at her shoes uneasily and didn’t respond. “Lots of girls are dancing with their friends to the fast songs.”

Kate glanced out at the mass of writhing bodies and quirked her lips up in a forced smile. “Okay.”

We danced together through not only that song, but the next three, and with every passing minute Kate got more comfortable. She’d always been a great dancer, and she took my breath away. The way her body moved was hypnotizing; she danced and I followed, so caught up in the moment that everyone else fell away, leaving just the two of us in the starlight.

The music slid effortlessly into a slower song, one of those sappy ones that Ricky loved to sing along to in the car. Kate’s dancing turned sensual, a swing of her hips that kept me mesmerized. I pulled her closer to me, one hand on her waist. She smiled at me lazily, her lips pink and shiny with lip gloss.

I wanted to kiss her, but I didn’t. She wasn’t ready for people to know she liked girls and that was okay. I was almost ready—I’d almost told people so many times, “Oh, and I’m bisexual,” as an aside, as if it weren’t the biggest secret of my life. I would tell my parents eventually, maybe when Kate was ready for people to know. We could do it together.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned to them, annoyed. It was Luke Turnbull from the track team. An awful thought occurred to me: Hadn’t Kate expressed an interest in him?

“Mind if I cut in?” he asked with a broad smile, as if I was going to facilitate his stealing Kate from me.

I pulled Kate closer to me, so that our bodies were nearly flush. She was taller than me in her higher heels, and I tucked my head under her chin and gave Luke my best glare. “No.” I could’ve hissed at him, I was so fired up. I didn’t know I had a jealous streak, but it came out just then.

“Fine,” Luke said, looking at Kate. “It’s hotter to watch you girls dance anyway.”

I could tell he felt embarrassed as he slunk away through the other people dancing. Kate pulled away from me, looking hurt. “What was that for?” she asked, and I opened my mouth and then closed it like a fish gasping for air.

“
We
were dancing! How rude was it of him to—?”

“Rude?
You
were the one who was rude!”

I gaped at her, completely aghast. People danced around us, oblivious to the sudden tension.

“He thought he could just saunter up and cut into our dance? How was that not rude and presumptuous and—” Kate stomped her foot, and I stopped, looking at her. “He interrupted us!”

“So that gives you the right to grab at me all possessive like we’re
dating
?”

Kate seemed to notice all at once that having a loud conversation while standing in the middle of a dance floor, not dancing, was rather conspicuous, and began to make her way out of the crowd. I followed close behind her, trying in vain to grab her hand to slow her.

“Kate!”

“Where are you two off to?” Jessa yelled after us, pulling Brandon off the dance floor to follow us when she realized we were leaving.

“Bathroom break!” Kate called over her shoulder,
deliberately moving her hand away from my searching fingers.

I followed Kate out of the ballroom and through the corridor that led to the washrooms, everything done in gold leaf and or gilded to look fancier than it really was. Kate shushed me when I tried to say something, instead heading straight to the ladies’ room. Just as she was about to open the door, it opened in front of her and Celeste Hatfield and Janet Morrison came out of it, laughing lightly.

“Oh, hi, Kate,” said Celeste, smiling winsomely. “Enjoying yourself?”

“Oh yeah, it’s great,” Kate answered, sounding forced. “I’m just going out for some air. It’s so stuffy.”

Janet heaved an exaggerated sigh that made her breasts nearly pop out of her strapless gold dress; it wasn’t fitting her correctly. “I
know
, right? I wanted to rent out a bigger space but there are
regulations
about how far away from the school we’re allowed to
hold
the prom, you know? So that people can still ride their
tractors
here or whatever. It’s such a
joke
.”

There were three or four big tractors parked outside, testifying to the fact that while she wasn’t wrong, she was awfully rude.

“Well, see you,” Kate said, continuing past the bathroom toward the emergency exit. She glanced over her shoulder to make sure the other girls had left before making a sharp left and storming into a random door. The door was marked with a little gold plaque that read EMPLOYEES ONLY: COATROOM.

And so we ended up standing in a dimly lit closet. I had Kate cornered.

“What the hell was that about?” I demanded.

“I told you I wasn’t ready! I told you!” Kate stomped her foot. “I told you and you
pushed
.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“It’s
everything
,” Kate continued, waving one hand through the air. “All the dancing, the touches, you trying to hold my hand. I can’t do that, okay? I can’t. I’m not ready for any of that.”

I wrapped my arms around myself. “I was trying to be subtle,” I said quietly, suddenly feeling less conversational. If the closet felt like an interrogation room before, suddenly I was the one being interrogated. “I’m sorry.”

“Corey, I like you,” Kate said, her face screwed up like she was fighting back tears. “Trust me, I do. But it’s never going to work.”

“Why not?” I asked. “Why can’t it work? You like me and I like you—”

“Except this isn’t an episode of
Barney
! This is high school.”

“Only for a few more days, and then we graduate. What’s stopping us, then? We’ll have the whole summer for just us, if we want to.”

“And then what?” Kate demanded. “Then we go off to separate colleges, and you’re surrounded by pretty girls who aren’t total
sluts
”—I tried to cut her off and tell her that it wasn’t true, but she plowed on, oblivious—“and you find someone smarter and less damaged than me and you break it off via Skype or text message or e-mail! And then we come home for Christmas and you can’t even look at me and we won’t even be friends anymore—”

“We will
always
be friends!” I yelled, and she finally stopped, biting down on her bottom lip hard. “Even if all that happens, we will
always
be friends.”

Kate looked like she wanted to interject, but I shook my head.

“No. Here’s what’s going to happen: we’ll hang out this summer, maybe you’ll let me take you on a real date some day and maybe not, and then we’ll go off to college, and we’ll make plans to see each other every weekend. I’ll take a bus for two hours one weekend, and the next you’ll come see me. Sometimes we’ll meet up with Jessa and Ricky, and sometimes it’ll just be us. Maybe you’ll let me call you my girlfriend, and maybe we’ll decide we work better as friends and call it off. But we
won’t
end up hating each other. We will
not
let that happen. Because I like you too much to let you go, and I know you feel the same way.”

“I don’t know how I feel,” Kate said.

“That’s okay—”

Kate shook her head, and I fell silent, sensing that there was more to it than that. “I’m so messed up, Cor. I act all confident, and like it doesn’t bother me, but it
does
.”

“Like what doesn’t bother you?” I asked tentatively.

“The rumors. The… reputation.” She swallowed hard and blinked a few times, obviously trying to hold back tears now. “Do you remember when we were in the ninth grade, and Sean Dobson’s older brother threw those big parties? Sean invited me to one of them, and I went and got… trashed. I’d never drank before, and I didn’t know my limits. That’s the night I lost my virginity, and I don’t even remember it.”

“You never told me that,” I said, stunned.

“I started sleeping around after that with guys I didn’t even like all that much because I thought… I thought if I did it enough, if everyone liked me, that I’d stop hating myself. But then everyone hated me, and I just hated myself
more
.” Her lower lip was trembling. “So I do stupid shit like cocaine, and drink too much, and act like this person that I’m not. I hate this person. I hate who I’ve become and I can’t undo it.”

I took a step forward and touched her face with my fingertips, gently wiping the tears from under her eyes before they could smudge her perfect makeup. The mascara was waterproof, but the rest of it wasn’t. Hands still on her face, I looked her in the eyes.

“Please don’t hate yourself. You’re wonderful. You’re smart and funny and beautiful. I don’t care who you’ve slept with, you’re perfect to me. You’re my best friend.”

Kate leaned into my touch and closed her eyes. She really had done her makeup perfectly. “I just don’t want people to think that this is just another phase of that. That I’ve become such a slut that I don’t care what gender I’m sleeping with. I don’t want that reputation to rub off on you too.”

“Don’t worry about my reputation. I’ve never much cared what other people think about me.” It wasn’t quite true; I cared what certain people thought. My friends, my family, the admissions board at the colleges I’d applied to. But not about this. If it was what Kate wanted, I’d shout it from the rooftops: I like girls, and I am not ashamed of that!

Kate opened her eyes, leaned in, and kissed me. My hands were still on her face, my thumbs beneath her eyes to catch any falling tears. Kate slid an arm around my back and pulled me closer to her, so that I was tucked against her body, closer than we’d been on the dance floor.

Our last few kisses had been brief, barely a glance of lips off lips; the ones before that lazy, lying on my bathroom floor. This kiss was different. Kate’s hand on my chin to tilt it up, our bodies pressed tightly together, the slick press of her mouth over mine, tasting and teasing. The sweet taste of her lip gloss quickly dissipated until all I could taste was her mouth. Her tongue against my teeth, her breath mingling with my breath; it was exquisite.

It seemed to last forever and all together not long enough. I was the one who pulled back, noticing how long we’d been missing from prom. Kate’s hand had ended up on my breast and mine squarely on her bottom, all without me realizing it.

I blushed, laughing softly against Kate’s mouth. “We should get back before someone gets worried and comes looking for us,” I said.

Kate nodded, moved away and straightened her dress, smoothing out imaginary wrinkles. “We should stop off in the bathroom and fix our makeup,” she said breathlessly.

“I’m not wearing any makeup,” I reminded her, and she touched my lips with her fingertips, her smile broad and crooked.

“You are
now
!”