The Inside of Out (14 page)

Tan and Hannah stared at me like I'd just announced I was a fridge magnet.

“Anyway, it's an important cause.”

Hannah's phone beeped and I watched her expression calcify in that polite way that meant she'd stopped listening. A half second later, she snuck a look at it. And giggled. I scooped some pasta, resisting the urge to shove my fork through Hannah's phone and smash it against their reclaimed wood dining table.

“We've been getting a little attention, actually,” I announced, a bit louder than necessary. “There was an article about it. I don't know if Hannah showed you?”

Mama Tan shook her head, confused.

“Did I not?” Hannah glanced up. “I'll send it to you. Yeah, Daisy's group is going to throw a competing homecoming as a protest against the school board.”

That last bite of fettuccini soured in my mouth.
Daisy's
group. A protest.
Hannah was acting like it had nothing to do with her. Like it
bored
her.

“That's very impressive, Daisy,” Hannah's mom said.

“
Thank
you.” I glared a smile at Hannah, but she wasn't looking.

“And there's an article?”

“Yes—and Hannah's
mentioned
in it!”

Han opened her mouth as if to retort, but then the phone beeped—
again.

Her mom's eyes met mine across the table.

“Be right back.” With no further explanation, Hannah erupted from her chair and bolted into the other room, clutching her phone like an Oscar statuette.

As soon as Hannah was out of sight, her mom glided from her seat and fetched a porcelain serving plate piled with tiny red velvet cupcakes. I found myself powerless in the face of their cream cheese twirl-topped beauty. And so my mouth was full of not one but two two-bite cupcakes, for a total of four bites, when Mama Tan leaned across the table and whispered, “This lesbian thing? Do you think it's for real?”

She smiled wryly. Knowingly.

It took me an excruciatingly long time to swallow everything in my mouth. “Um. Real, as in . . . ?”

She shrugged, rustling her crisply bobbed hair—one of few gestures she shared with her daughter. “It just looks to me like something she's trying out. When I was in college, I experimented with girls. Kissing, fondling, that kind of thing.”

T to the M to the I.

“But it never
meant
anything. I certainly didn't need to define myself. Maybe it's generational.” She sighed.

It hit me, not for the first time, or even the fiftieth, how different Tan and Hannah were. Where Tan had probably kissed a girl in college to test the way the visual effect rippled through a party, Hannah would have never gone to that party in the first place.

“I think it's different for Hannah. I mean, she has a girlfriend.”

“Right.
Natalie
.”

Judging by her tone, she didn't seem to like the Beck much either.

“She's a
pretty
girl.” Tan said it with a skeptical squint, as if “pretty” were a discarded fashion trend from two seasons ago. “I'd have thought if Hannah were
actually
gay, she'd go for someone . . . more like you.”

It took me an embarrassingly long time to stop smiling and realize that it wasn't a compliment.

She leaned in. “Were you two ever . . . ?”

I cocked my head as if confused.

Tan waved her hand around. “
You
know.”

“Me and
Daisy
?” Hannah's laugh resounded in the hallway as she galloped back into the room, allowing my heart to fall back into its usual rhythm. “God, Mom. No! Daisy's straight, remember? Besides, she's
so
not my type.”

I scowled, Tan's “pretty” comment ringing in my ears. “Why not? Exactly?”

Now Hannah's mouth was full of cupcake, but any answer
she could have given was interrupted by the sound of another text.

I groaned. But this time it was my phone beeping.

The text was from my mom: “
CALL WHEN YOU GET THIS YOU ARE ON THE INTERNET.
”

Hannah rested her chin on my shoulder, squinting at my screen. “Does she mean the article?”

I frowned, shrugging, and pushed
CALL
.

“I don't have time for this, Mom,” I started. “I have to learn about cells.”

“You're on the
Internet,
” Mom said. “Your name and your face!”

The mania in her voice made me snort. This was too good not to speakerphone. Hannah huddled closer, grinning, biting her lip to keep quiet.

“You mean . . . the article?” I coaxed. “I already know about that, Mom. It's up on the college—”

“It's been shared on Facebook one thousand seven hundred and twenty-two times.”

I stopped breathing. Hannah made a choking sound. Then Mom said, “Oh shoot, no, that's likes. Shared eight hundred and
sixty
.” She sounded disappointed.

My first of many stunned questions was: “How do you know this?”

“Cousin Erica messaged me.”

“From
Alaska
?”

“Yes, Daisy, they have the Internet in Alaska.”

“What's in the comments? What are people saying?”

Tan murmured something and Hannah wandered over to her.

Mom was huffing, overwhelmed. “Lots of things.”

I shook the phone. “Read it, read it!”

“There are too many, Daisy. Seventy-eight comments on this one post alone. Why don't you get your own profile, anyway? I'm on Facebook and so are all
my
friends.”

“You just answered your own question. Come
on,
Mom, just read the top one—”

Hannah's voice rang out across the room. “Gay student Daisy Beaumont-Smith fights for equal rights.”

She was holding her mother's phone, both of them staring at it, Tan's eyes gleaming with amusement while Hannah's dimmed more with every blink.

“Gay student,” Hannah repeated, looking up at me.

I gaped back. “But I'm
not
gay.”

She shrugged, pressed her lips together, held out the phone so I could see for myself.

One account had posted an illustration of a girl who looked a lot like me wearing a superhero costume. “Gay Hero of the Day: 16-year-old Daisy Beaumont-Smith.”

I was an illustration. A superhero.

“Gotta go,” I said, hanging up.

Hannah's phone beeped from the dining room table, but her eyes didn't veer from mine. “Wow. Daisy. You're an Internet celebrity.”

At the word “celebrity,” I started laughing, my skin prickling hot as if there were actual hordes of people in the apartment angling for a look at me.

“What's the expression?” Mama Tan asked, then smiled, remembering. “You've gone
viral
.”

“I guess so!” I giggled again, frantically scanning the screen, and Hannah laughed too—a taut, nervous laugh. A fake one. I glanced up to see her inching away as if “viral” were something she didn't want to catch.

The phone suddenly felt like a lab sample. I handed it to Tan, then turned to Hannah with as convincing a shrug as I could conjure.

“Anyway.
Cells
. Explain them, please.”

“Can you pick me up?”

There was absolutely no scenario in which I would ask my mother to drive me downtown to meet Don't Know Him From Adam for coffee. It would fill her brain with all sorts of wrong certainties about my nonexistent love life.

“From school?” Adam sounded surprised.

“That's where I am.” It was two o'clock on a Wednesday. Where else would I be?

“Um, yeah, sure.” Adam covered the phone and coughed. “You can't meet me? Do you not have a car? You drive, right?”

Intrusive questions alert
. I flushed, then remembered he was a reporter and therefore socially inappropriate.

“You're sixteen, right?” He really wasn't letting this go.

“Yeah.” I felt a spike of indignation at the question. “How old are
you
?”

“Eighteen. What time do you get out?”

He pulled up forty minutes later in a black Toyota with a yellow stripe painted down the side, like he was planning to go drag racing in his sensible sedan.

“I know,” he groaned when I sat down, even though I hadn't said anything. “I'm getting it repainted. I've only had it for two months.”

“The car or the need for speed?”

“The car.”

“Would you say that you're more
fast
or
furious
?”

He adjusted the rearview mirror. “Fast. I have my temper pretty well in check. Although I could probably jog faster than this car.”

I laughed, relaxing. “So are you a freshman?”

He nodded. “Do you not drive?”

He sure had the dogged-pursuit-of-truth part of journalism down.

“No,” I admitted, fastening my seat belt with all the dignity a passenger could muster. “I tried. It didn't take.”

“Kinda hard to avoid driving in this part of the world. Back in New York, I was the only one of my friends with a license.”

He put the car into gear. I watched in envy at his mastery of the stick shift. Bizarrely, Adam seemed more comfortable behind the wheel than I'd ever seen him outside of a car.

“My best friend usually drives me,” I said, leaving out the part where she'd ordered me to stop mooching rides.

“The one you told me about? Who just came out?”

“Yeah.” I smiled. “She's awesome. She's why I'm doing all this.”

“I thought so.” We'd hit a stoplight, and Adam was staring at me with a funny expression. “Sounds like she's pretty important to you.”

“She's everything,” I said, but my voice came out weird and hollow, like I was reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Adam was quiet until we pulled up to the restaurant. Honestly, when he'd called about a follow-up interview, I wasn't
sure I had much of an update to give him, aside from the fact that I was having random attacks of vertigo every time I remembered that my name was all over the Internet—but then he'd suggested Chez Panisse and visions of éclairs started nomming in my head. It was a nice courtyard restaurant in downtown Charleston, the kind of place that had a long wait during tourist season, even for coffee. But Adam had made a reservation.

He pulled a chair out for me and I had to press my lips shut to keep from grinning like an idiot.

“I've gotten a lot of requests for your contact information,” he said as he settled into the seat opposite me. “From reporters. Real ones.”

“
You're
a real reporter,” I said.

His eyes lit up.

“No,” he said, burying his smile. “I mean from national publications. Some news stations. CNN, ABC.”

“
What?
Really?”
Legitimate news sources? Not just blogs?

He squinted at me. “You don't go online much, do you?”

“Mostly just to look stuff up,” I said, opting not to tell him that I'd googled my name every five minutes until falling asleep at two a.m. the night before. “I don't do social networking. I don't really network. Or socialize.”

“You might want to start.” Adam pulled a page up on his phone. “Get a Facebook profile at least. Look at this.”

This was new since last night. On Facebook, someone—a total stranger, living in New Hampshire—had started a fund for the “Palmetto Alternative Homecoming.” They already had more than $16,000 raised.

“
What.
” I grabbed Adam's phone. “I've raised fifty bucks. From my dad!”

“You should link up with these people. They want to help.”

“Thanks to you!”
That was corny.
“Your article, I mean.”
Stop talking.

He cleared his throat. “I'm just pointing it out. You do what you want with the information.” He took his phone back, eyes drifting to the next table. “It's important for a reporter to maintain a critical distance from his subject. I can't advocate one way or the other.”

“You can't get too involved.”

“Exactly.”

“Is that why—?” I bit the words back.

Is that why you buried the fact that I was straight? Is that the “critical distance” you're talking about?

I wanted an answer, but I couldn't think of a way to ask that wouldn't spoil the moment—the jasmine-scented breeze, the bright chatter around us, the pretense of having this boy as a friend.

He had his eyebrows raised, waiting for the rest of my question.

“Is that why you took me to coffee at Chez Panisse, Mr. Fancy Pants?” I fluttered my eyelashes at him over the menu. “I'm ordering pastries, by the way.”

He grinned, frowned, then shoved his glasses back into place, a gesture I now recognized as flustered, all in the space of a second. “So should I pass them your contact info?”

“The reporters?” I shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

Adam asked a few questions about the event and jotted
down my answers, but when I got bored of talking about myself, I said, “Let's do you now,” half expecting him to cite the aforementioned Journalistic Distance Clause. But:

“I'm from Brooklyn. That's a borough of New York Cit—”

I blinked
duh
at him. “I think I've heard of it.”

“I was born there. Grew up there. Had enough of there. Applied to every college with a strong journalism program outside a two-hundred-mile radius. Got into . . .” He counted off on his fingers. “UCLA. Northwestern. Bristol University in England. Waitlisted at Stanford . . .”

“But you picked . . .
Charleston
.”

“Yeah.” He laughed, like he couldn't believe it either. “CU offered me a scholarship, which I needed. And I wanted to see what the South was like.”

He said “South” like other people would say “Camelot.”

“Is it living up to your expectations?” I asked wryly.

“It's . . . different than I'd thought,” he admitted. “But like I said, the accents are pretty great.”

“You keep going on about that.” I leaned back, arms crossed. “I don't even have an accent.”

“You are mistaken.”

It was an accusation, but something about the way Adam said it, his dark eyes glowing and shy, his voice low and warm and flat-voweled, made me feel like grabbing a hoop skirt and parasol and Scarlett O'Hara–ing it up.

He drove me home, and bless everything that can be blessed above, my mother's car wasn't in the driveway when we pulled up.

“Thanks for the éclairs,” I said. “They were
magnifique
.”

Instead of “You're welcome,” Adam said, “I could teach you to drive stick shift.”

I stared back, stone-faced, in case he was mocking me.

“Seriously,” he said. “I taught a bunch of my cousins back in New York. And if you can learn in the city, you can learn here.”

I cocked an eyebrow. “This
is
a city.”

“Of course it is.” He smiled, running his hands over the curve of the steering wheel. “Think about it.”

I did think about it. And his hands. All night and into the next day.

Then the reporters started calling.

The real ones.

“This is a message for Daisy Beaumont-Smith. I'm a reporter with the
Chicago Sun-Times . . .”

“Daisy! Hello! My name's Mindy Taylor? And I'm a producer for the
Today Show
?”

“Erm, good afternoon. Or I suppose it's morning where you are. I'm a columnist with the
Guardian,
here in the UK, and I saw the story about your plans for an, erm, LGBTQ homecoming . . .”

“Ooohhh, British,” Jack said, swiveling in his chair with a lewd grin.

Sophie prettily rolled her eyes. “He's probably fifty.”

“Shhht!” Raina raised a hand, silencing the table so we could hear the rest of the message playing from my phone.

“. . . I realize you've spoken one-on-one with a local chap there, but I was hoping you might grant me an exclusive as a follow-up . . .”

Raina wrote down his number and email on the bottom of her full legal pad page. “Any more?”

“Next. Message,”
voicemail voice said.
“Heya Daisy, this is Mr. Murphy over at the rec center—”

I hit .

“That's it. But I've got like twelve email requests,” I said, so jittery in my chair that I had to hold on to the table to keep from swiveling away. “Or I did this morning. There might be more by now. I sort of had to hide my phone in my locker for a while. It kept . . . vibrating.”

And
bzzzz!
went my phone, as if to show off. I dropped it on the desk with a clatter and sat on my still-shaking hands.

“Okay,” Raina said to her legal pad. “So far, we've got an invitation to write a Huffington Post column.
The Today Show.
Three local news stations that want interviews. I counted four bloggers, three print publications . . .”

My phone rang—again—yet another number I didn't recognize. Raina paused as I jumped to silence it, then said, “Plus whoever that was.”

“Ladies and gentlemen?” Sean rose from his chair, arms extended. “This is officially
crazy
.”

He fell sitting again, tipsy with excitement.

“Agreed.” Raina pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose, like she'd passed from tipsy to hungover several hours ago.

“So!” My attempt to keep the sound of panic from my voice was unsuccessful. “Where do we start?”

“Good question,” Raina said, flipping to a new page where
I prayed she'd already written the answer. “Given the immensity of what Daisy's gotten us into, we'll need to meet every day after school to coordinate. I've booked out the room until after homecoming.”

Kyle raised his hand. “I've got lacrosse practice?”

“That's okay,” Raina said, her voice brightening into something approaching pleasant. “Just help out when you can.”

“
Music Man
rehearsals start next week,” Sean said. “But I can sneak out. This is more important.” He grinned. “And let's be real, I've had the role memorized since I was eleven.”

“Anybody else?” Raina looked around the table. We shook our heads. “Good. Then we'll expect you here, rain or shine. Especially you, Daisy.”

What, did she think I was going to run out on them? I hadn't yet, had I?

“This is a good time to divide up responsibilities,” Raina went on. “I'm happy to handle our legal and political strategy.”

We all exhaled at that one.

“My dad's a lawyer,” Raina said, and her entire existence suddenly made sense. “He's busy, but he'll help. Sophie—given your mom's connection to the land acquisition project, maybe you can be our site supervisor?”

Sophie nodded, jotting the title down in her little pink notepad. I felt a prick of jealousy at not having gotten that job myself, since I was the one who came up with the idea and was going to have to volunteer gardening hours for the rest of my life in repayment.

“You'll also be in charge of managing the vendors and our budget.”

That sounded like a ton of work. I shot Sophie a thumbs-up in congratulations.

Jack volunteered to lead our social media efforts before Raina even assigned it to him.

“No offense,” he said, looking around the table. “But y'all are hopeless.”

“Make sure you coordinate with the people raising money on our behalf,” Raina suggested, just as I was about to shout the same idea. “And work with Sean on fund-raising. He's been great at raising money for the theater program.”

“I'm
always
happy to work with Sean,” Jack cooed.

Sean balled up a piece of paper and threw it at his head, and with that, everybody started laughing and talking, like the meeting was breaking.

I raised my hand. “What about me?”

Raina looked confused. “You'll continue to be our spokesperson.”

“But . . .” I looked around at the others as they fell silent. “I'm straight.
Asexual,
I mean.”