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[juliebeanbook]

Julie may be on a hiatus right now, but if you're enjoying it, get excited for my upcoming project, Little Harbor! For more information, follow my personal blog at @isobelfree.

Introducing my newest project: Little Harbor

In a last-ditch effort to get her older sister on the straight-and-narrow, Amy Mortimer’s parents cart the four of them down to the beachside town of Little Harbor, Connecticut the summer Amy turns sixteen. True to her form, Natalie doesn’t take long to find a new crowd to run with, and Amy tags along; really, there isn’t much else to do in Little Harbor. Natalie’s new friends are a good time, and though some of what they do is a little illegal, it’s all fairly harmless. That is, until a murder shocks the town and Natalie, the newcomer with a bad reputation, is suddenly under the spotlight. As the allegations around her older sister begin to build up, Amy has to decide: does she accept the terrible thing Natalie may have done, or does she try to clear her name? Amy suspects that the town’s delinquents are hiding something dark, and armed with an arsenal of mystery novels and a love of map-making, she decides to investigate; together with the enigmatic Thea, a quiet but daring girl whose parents own the pizza place in town, she sets out to uncover the truth. The Mortimers are only in Little Harbor for a few months, but one thing is for certain: the place they leave once the summer ends won’t be the same place it was when they arrived.

[juliebeanbook]

fourteen: we’re just lonely, you know

“Kathleen is being a problem.”

Emmy sighed as she glided on her favourite light red lipstick – along with her new short haircut, she thought it made her look more punk-rock. “Again?” she said, smacking her lips together to spread around the bright colour.

“More like still.” I climbed up onto the bathroom counter.

“Jules, you’re blocking the mirror.”

I swung my legs back and forth as I scrolled through my texts, not moving. Emmy pushed me slightly to the side and leaned around me to see her reflection.

“So how is my lovely sister being a problem?” she said, capping her lipstick with a loud click.

“Apparently she’s on and on again about Jonah,” I said, handing Emmy my phone. “Jamie says that she keeps calling and messaging them, trying to see him more. I think she wants partial custody.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Emmy said, looking through my conversation with Jamie. “Does she really think she’s in a position right now to take care of a kid?”

“I have no idea,” I said, taking my phone back and pressing the heels of my hands against my eyes. “I think she’s delusional, Em. She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

Emmy groaned and rested her head against the counter. “Awesome. A delusional sister is exactly what I need right now.”

“Well, I doubt she knows how the legal system works at all,” I said. “So Jamie probably isn’t getting into a custody battle anytime soon.”

Emmy chuckled. “Yeah, that’s comforting. I guess I’ll call her after the show and talk some sense into her.”

I jumped off the counter and peeked into the mirror, running my hands a couple times through my hair to tame it. “Good. Hurry up, Lipstick Lesbian, we’re on in twenty.”

I was rewarded with a bright red smirk in the mirror.

The show tonight – our last show of the tour – was at a hipster hole-in-the-wall pub with weird collage art on the walls and twenty-three different craft beers on tap. I’d tried to tell Emmy that punk-rock wasn’t really the right look for this venue, but once she had decided on lipstick there was no talking her down from it. I had decided that I at least needed to look the part, so I’d thrown on an oversized T-shirt with the phases of the moon on it and borrowed a pair of Emmy’s old high tops. I ordered a bizarro beer made with chocolate and coffee while I waited for showtime and felt like I fit in.

The audience turned out to be so hip and cool that they thought we were lame; at least, that was the impression we were getting after three songs. “Do you think they would notice if I low-key made fun of them?” Emmy whispered to me out of the corner of her mouth as we finished a song, switching our capos. “Like, if I point out their boringness, but in, like, a subtle way?”

“How would you do that?” I asked her, quietly running my pick over my strings to test the starting D minor chord.

“Hey, how’s everyone feeling tonight?” she asked with excitement, and dramatically paused into the ensuing silence. “Wow, really? Awesome! Me too! Love the enthusiasm here, it’s really contagious.”

“Em!” I whisper-screamed, elbowing her. She ignored me and started into “Cinnamon.” Despite Emmy’s best efforts, the enthusiasm in the room remained at a staggeringly low level throughout the rest of the show, making for an entirely anticlimactic end to The Entertainment’s first tour. The crowd left pretty fast when we were done, leaving us sitting on the edge of the stage, a little at a loss.

“There was someone sleeping,” Dex said after a long silence. “There was literally a chick sleeping at the front of the room.”

We all nodded, commiserating.

“Is this how low we’ve come?” Cal wondered. “We’re actually, physically putting people to sleep with our music? That’s a level I didn’t think we’d reach, guys, I’m gonna be honest here.”

Emmy just shook her head. “You know what? Those fucking hipsters can fuck right off, cuz our music kicks ass. It kicks ass, and they were the reason that show bombed, not us.”

“Well, it was a little bit us,” Dex said.

“Maybe like forty percent us,” I estimated.

“Okay, well, all I’m saying is that it wasn’t totally our fault,” Emmy said. “We’re used to playing for excited hipsters, not boring as fuck hipsters. Super big difference.”

We allowed for that at least.

Still quiet, mulling over the details of the concert that had fallen flat, we packed up and brought our stuff out to The Bus. We all piled in and Emmy took the wheel, cranking some Bon Iver to match our dispassionate moods.

Suddenly I felt the van swerve. “Where are you going, Em?” I asked her, getting up and peeking through the window we’d punched through the van wall separating the back from the front. Emmy was exiting the highway.

“On an adventure,” she replied. The road she was now on was dark, no streetlights. She giggled.

“You’re freaking me out right now,” Dex said. “Where are you taking us?”

“Is this the part of the horror movie when we find out you’re actually a serial killer and you’re taking us out to some abandoned field where no one will find our bodies?” I asked.

“Just relax,” Emmy said. “I had an idea, and I decided to act on it. So sue me.”

Cal cocked his head at her, his face suspicious. Dex just shook his head and sat back down in his seat, throwing his hands up as if in surrender. I stood and watched over Emmy’s shoulder as she turned onto a bumpy gravel road that emptied out onto sand.

“Emmy, are we at a beach right now?” I asked her, squinting into the dark.

“No, we’re in the fucking Arctic right now,” she said. I pulled open the big back door of The Bus and climbed out, tugging off Emmy’s Converse and gasping as my toes sunk into cold sand.

Dex jumped out and kicked off his shoes, running with childlike joy down to the water. Cal laughed at him, but with a moment’s consideration, left his shoes in a neat pair next to Dex’s and went to join him. Emmy got out of the driver’s seat and came over to stand next to me, the two of us watching the fully-grown men we called our best friends regress to prepubescence. “It’s sort of amazing,” I observed. “It’s like they’re actually nine years old, but they’re just really good at pretending they’re twenty-two.”

“That’s what the beach does to guys,” she said. “Something about the water wears away at their manliness.”

“Yeah, because you’re such a guy expert?”

“Hey, for a brief period in my life, I actually dated guys,” she laughed. “I wouldn’t call myself an expert, but I have a bit of a track record.”

I sat down in the sand, digging my toes in, feeling the cold sliding around them. Emmy sat down next to me, rolling up the cuffs of her jeans so they wouldn’t get too sandy. “How brief was that period in your life?” I asked her.

“Very,” she said. “I figured out pretty quickly that I wasn’t really into it.”

I waited for the story I knew was coming. Dex scooped his hands through the water and splashed Cal, who screeched like a bird of prey.

“I went to this camp,” she said. “You know, one of those places with cabins and tie-dye and yarn crafts and shit?” I nodded. “Well, there was this one girl, the summer I turned thirteen. Amy.”

She got quiet then, pulling her knees in and hugging her arms around them.

“The one from the song,” I realized.

“The very same.”

“So she’s not –”

“A psycho ex?” Emmy laughed. “Not at all. Well, if by psycho you mean straight and by ex you mean ‘girl I used to make out with on hikes’, then yeah.”

I watched as Cal bent down in the sand, picking up shells and inspecting them by the blue light of his phone’s screen. He went through a routine with each one: pick it up, hold the light up, turn it over and over to inspect every face before throwing it back where he found it.

“It was just that kind of time, I guess,” she said. “Like, people were getting their periods for the first time, some kids were getting braces, some girls were wearing bras and some weren’t yet. Everyone was confused and awkward. It just sort of happened, like one day we were on a geocaching trail together and she wanted to try kissing, and guess what? So did I.” She laughed, but without any humour.

“Did it happen a lot?” I asked her. “Or just once?”

“A lot of the time when we were alone, we would try it,” she said. “It was really PG though, like it was probably the lamest kissing you’ve ever seen. No tongue or anything.”

I lay back on the sand and stared at the stars. Most of them were obscured by clouds, but a few shone through, bright and small and insignificant. I turned to Emmy. She was wiping tears off of her face. I hadn’t heard her crying.

“The next year, when we came back, she told everyone,” she said, voice thin. “Said I made her do it. Called me a disgusting dyke.”

“Oh, Em.” I sat up and reached for her hand. She took it without looking, pressing her palm against mine for stability.

“The worst part was,” she said, “she had said she loved me the summer before. And I had loved her. Then when I asked her that next summer if she still loved me, she said love meant a different thing to her now.” She sniffed hard. “But the thing is, it always meant the same thing to me.”

I leaned her head onto my shoulder and we leaned against each other as we sat in cold sand. The guys ran back and forth in the black waves, and I watched them absently, my fingers playing with Emmy’s short soft hair. At one point we lay back in the sand, her head resting in the curve of my neck, chill air off the water making goosebumps rise on my arms. We listened to Cal and Dex call to each other in breathless exhilaration, and birds cawing at each other overhead, and the waves cresting and crashing, repetitive and soothing like a chorus on repeat.

//

We weren’t even home for five minutes before Kathleen invited herself over.

To be fair, she didn’t live very far now, ever since moving in with her new boyfriend, Sif (a displaced surfer who was clearly very lost) – the two of them had a place in a complex two streets over from our apartment building. Naturally, we got quite a lot of visits from Emmy’s little sister, most of them unannounced, many of them unwanted.

“Hey, how was the tour?” she cried, running over to hug me. She startled me with her thinness as her arms came around me. It was because of her job, she swore to me every time I brought it up; working at a burger joint had made her swear off the sugar and grease.

“It was…okay,” I said, breaking away from her to lug my suitcase into my room. Kathleen sat on the couch – or rather, in the couch. We called it the sinking sand couch, as its cushions were abundantly soft and yielding.

“The shows went fine but our venues were shit,” Emmy said; I could hear her from the living room as I started to unpack my clothes. “The first one was this cruddy man bar.”

“And the second one was basically a strip club, but no one warned us,” I shouted into the living room. “Someone tried to give a lap dance to Emmy.”

“Not that I minded,” Em said.

“Eww!” said Kathleen. “Don’t be gross.”

“Oh, and the third one was this swanky place in the Heights full of fucking rich people, and there I was in my ripped jeans and a sweater with only one sleeve,” Emmy said, and I burst out laughing.

“Oh, Emmy, no,” Kathleen said. “Not the one-armed sweater. What have I told you about the one-armed sweater?”

“I know, I know, I have two arms and they deserve equal warmth,” Emmy said, repeating the words like she was reciting something in school.

“What was the fourth place?”

“Well, it was actually a kind of cool hipster beer place,” I said, coming back to the living room and starting the kettle for tea. “But people fell asleep.”

“Like, as we were playing,” Emmy said.

“As in, they were not sleeping before the show, but our music caused them to sleep,” I clarified.

Kathleen winced. “Ouch. Well, I’m glad you’re back. It’s been boring as fuck here all week. Sif’s gone again with his surfing friends.”

I listened to the kettle sing, waiting for the water to bubble, hot enough to pour. “How long does he usually leave you for?” Emmy asked, taking out some bread and peanut butter to make sandwiches.

Kathleen shrugged. “A week, couple weeks sometimes. It’s not that bad. He Skypes me. Sometimes one of his friends will videotape him surfing. He’s really good.”

I poured the boiling water into three mugs. Picked out each of our favourite teas – black for me, green for Emmy, lemon honey for Kathleen – and dropped the bags in, watching the colour seep into the water. Emmy spread blueberry jam onto a piece of bread and slapped it onto the other slice with more force than necessary. Her lips were pressed together solid and hard.

We all sat on the sinking sand couch (a bit of a tight fit for three, but we hadn’t saved up enough for another one yet) and I turned on Food Network. My phone rang as Emmy cranked the volume to an obnoxious level, one of her annoying habits that I had grown used to.

It was Jamie on the phone, dying to know how the tour went and equally dying to tell me all the new things Jonah had learned how to do in the eight days we’d been gone. “He knows how to use my iPhone!” she told me. “Two year old kid, knows how to use a fucking touch screen. He’s a boy genius, I swear to you. Oh honey, don’t do that, that’s hot. Hurt your fingers.”

I smiled at that, the way she talked to him, as I went out into the hall. Jamie had slipped into motherhood like walking into a warm pool – effortless, smooth, no shock to her system.

She told me about the restaurant where she had started worked as a line cook, a nice place downtown with forty-dollar steaks and fancy old wines. She worked all night till she could see the start of the sun, she ate cold dinners rushed and standing up at ten p.m., she worked for a tyrant head cook with the voice of a bullhorn. She was in love. I think we were both a little surprised that between the two of us, she was the one who had ended up successful, while I floundered around like a flopping fish, trying to make something out of my clusterfuck of a life.

“Hey, listen, I’ve got to go soon,” I said, pacing along the hallway outside the kitchen. “Kathleen’s over.”

“Ahh.” Jamie’s voice took on an edge. “Has she said anything about…?”

“Not yet. What do you want me to say?”

She sighed, loud, into the phone. “You know what? Don’t worry about it, Jules. Just tell her to talk to me about it. This is something I have to deal with.”

“You don’t have to, Jamie.” I glanced into the living room, where Kathleen was giggling over some dramatic story her older sister was telling her. Knowing Emmy, it was probably not nearly as funny as Kathleen was letting on, but Kathleen laughed at everybody’s jokes no matter what. “I don’t mind helping out. She’s my family too.”

“I know, but this is my mess. Just humour her for now, I’ll do damage control later.”

“Gotcha. Love you.”

“Love you too. See you Sunday for dinner?”

“I’ll be there. Make your mac and cheese, alright?”

“Only the best for my dork sister.”

I smiled as I ended the call and went back to where Kathleen and Emmy were caught up in an episode of Cutthroat Kitchen. “Julie, check this out,” Kathleen said, moving over to make room for me on the sinking sand couch. “This girl has to chip out all her cooking utensils out of a block of fucking ice.”

The onscreen cook was hacking away at the ice, trying to get to spoons and knives, as the other contestants fried and chopped and sautéed around her. It all seemed very unnecessary and unfair.

“Who was that?” Emmy asked, licking peanut butter off her fingers.

“Um, Jamie.”

Kathleen turned towards me; I could feel her leg tense, pressed up against mine. “What did she want?” she asked me, the words strangely strung-out and slow, fitting together like a kid sliding letter magnets across a fridge.

“Not much,” I said, focusing on the cook trying to break through the ice. She had finally managed to get a big knife out of it; I cheered her on in my head. “Apparently Jonah knows how to use an iPhone.”

Emmy laughed. Kathleen beamed. “He’s so smart,” she said, her voice big with pride. “I’ve always known that about him.”

“How well do you know him?” Emmy said, her voice quiet and dry. I glared at her for feeding a fire neither of us wanted to deal with.

“I know him really well!” Kathleen cried. “I’ve been there for both his birthdays. And his first word. And he knows me. For sure. I know he does.” Her voice trembled close to tears. “Right?” She looked at me, dark eyes wide like a wild animal pleading from a trap.

“Right,” I said. Emmy gave me a look, but I shut her down silently, end of conversation. She turned up the volume even further, so that our neighbours could probably all hear the plight of the chef, trying her best to get at the frozen utensils.

Kathleen eventually fell asleep on my shoulder, and Emmy and I threw a blanket over her. We left the kitchen light on when we left the room, Emmy pausing in the doorway before going to her bedroom. Standing there, heavy against the doorframe in her exhaustion, she looked the part of the older sibling – watching over her little sister, forever babysitting. I left her standing there when I went to my room. She looked like she’d stay there forever.

[juliebeanbook]

and you run, that’s all you’ve ever done

Close your eyes. Smell the forest, earthy and raw and pungent but fresh, too. It’s night; the forest smells different at night somehow, darker and deeper. You feel different at night too, because you’re not supposed to be out here. You know that and yet you’re out here anyway, and that sends tingles down your spine. You wonder if that’s what it feels like to be drunk. Are you drunk? Who knows. Not you, you’re eleven.

You’re with Mia, who probably knows what being drunk feels like, although she’d never tell you. You sometimes have to pry information and secrets out of Mia, but she’s got a ton of them, so it’s worth it.

She pans the flashlight back and forth, sweeping across the forest floor in front of you like she’s searching for something. You follow after her a little ways back, glancing over your shoulder every few minutes, though you’re not sure what you think you’ll see. Mia walks confidently, not seeming to be worried about what might be lurking in dark corners and behind trees.

“Um, Mia?” you call, and she shushes you. “Do you actually know where we’re going?”

“Yes, of course,” she says, walking without watching her feet; you’re constantly scanning yours, making sure you don’t trip over rocks or roots. “I’ve been here a thousand times. See, there it is!”

You can see it through a break in the trees when Mia shines her flashlight up – can see the shutters, the old greying wood, the ancient branches clinging, holding it up. The treehouse isn’t big but it’s high off the ground, somewhere you could imagine being a kid and pretending to be a princess in a tower. Mia runs to the tree and jumps up, tugging down a rope ladder from a low-hanging branch. “Watch out for one of these rungs,” she says as she starts to climb. “It’s broken. I forget which one though.”

You climb carefully, suspending yourself by the ropes each time you take a step, so that your feet don’t falter on the broken rung.

Inside the treehouse is surprisingly bright – Mia has set the flashlight up so that it points upward towards the ceiling, the light bouncing off the roof and walls just enough so that its light touches all four corners of the room. She’s sitting cross-legged beside the flashlight, taking things out of her backpack (mostly stolen things, you assume) – a pack of Oreos, a jar of peanut butter, a butter knife, a couple candles, a lighter. You sit on the other side of the flashlight; it’s acting as almost an odd sort of centerpiece for your midnight feast.

You watch Mia’s rituals with interest – first she lights both candles, one after another. They smell like pumpkin pie and apple cider, respectively (they’re from her mom’s autumn collection). Then she takes an Oreo from the package, splits it in half, spreads peanut butter on the cookie side, and puts the whole thing back together, filling and peanut butter mingling together. She does this all slowly, with great care. She hands you her concoction and you bite down. Your teeth hurt from all the sweetness, yet you crave more.

“So why did we have to come here so late?” you wonder, looking up at the beams of the old fort. “I bet this place is still cool during the day.”

“Yeah, it is, but it’s way cooler at night,” Mia says. “That way, there’s a bunch of things you can’t see, which makes it more fun.”

You think personally that that would detract from the fun, but you don’t say so.

“I’m moving away,” Mia says, with no preamble, no preface.

You jerk your head up from your second peanut butter Oreo. “What?” you say; it’s the most intelligible thing you can make come out of your mouth. “Why? You just moved here last year!”

“I know,” she says, “but my dad’s in the military. He has to go somewhere else now, and we have to come with him. I don’t really understand it but I know we’re leaving.”

“Oh.” You force down the tears that are rising; you know it isn’t the time or the place. “I’m…I’m gonna miss you.”

“I’m gonna miss you too.” Mia sighs, looks down at her knees. “Can I tell you something? A secret?”

“Yeah, sure. Anything.”

Mia’s face is only half-visible in the light from the flashlight and candles; it all flickers and dances, reflecting in her eyes. “I don’t know if this is really awkward but…I think I have a crush on you, Julie.”

Your eyes go wide. Your heart thuds. “What do you mean? I’m a girl.”

“I know!” Mia says, looking down at her hands, like she’s looking for answers. “I don’t get it. But I feel the same way about you as I did about Joshua. Even more maybe.”

“Oh,” you say again, because your brain is worrying more about processing this news than it is about making you sound intelligent.

“Is this awkward?” Mia cries. “I’m really sorry. I knew it would be awkward! I just really wanted to tell you before I left. If I didn’t tell you now, I never would.”

You can’t think of anything to say back, except that maybe Mia might be the first crush you’ve ever had, but you could never ever say it out loud, and even back then, when emotions were simple and nothing was complicated yet, this was something you could barely get a grasp on. So you don’t say anything at all to her.

What you can see of Mia’s face looks strained, like she’s hoping against hope to hear something from you. “Julie?” she says, her voice smaller than you’ve ever heard it. “Please say something.”

It’s like there’s a hand reaching around covering your mouth, because no matter how much you want to reply, no matter how much you want to lean over the flashlight and kiss her again like you did in the park in August, you can’t. You just look at her, stricken, your lip quivering, threatening to cry.

Mia is crying now, although she’s wiping away all the tears, hoping you don’t see them. “Fine, forget it,” she says, snuffing the candles with the palm of her hand and stuffing them and the Oreos back in her bag. “Just forget I said anything. It was stupid.”

“Mia, I’m sorry…”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” she says, climbing out backwards down the ladder. “You don’t have anything to be sorry for. I’ll see you later, Jules.”

(You don’t see her later, though. The next time you see her will be the day she moves away; you’ll sit on her porch with her and not talk about anything at all, and she’ll drive away leaving you feeling interrupted.)

Mia climbs down the ladder, taking the flashlight with her, and you’re left alone in a treehouse in the middle of the woods, sitting in the dark and wondering how you’re ever going to find your way home.

[juliebeanbook]

thirteen: you’ll heat up every corner of the world

Calling it a tour bus was being extremely generous and smacked of wishful thinking on our part.  

The Bus was, in fact, not even a bus, but an old catering truck, the logo on the side half-worn off but still bearing the name “Paula” and a clip-art depiction of a sandwich. Inside, we had shoved in two metal bunk beds, leaving just enough room for our equipment and instruments, some suitcases (which we shoved under the beds) and a small Ikea futon, which we pushed up against the inside of the door and bungeed like a seatbelted child when it was closed.

Right now I was on the couch, my legs propped up against an amp. Emmy sat beside me, scribbling in her Moleskine and looking vaguely pissed-off. Dex was lying on his bottom bunk, despite our insistence that the bunk beds weren’t that secure while The Bus was moving, and besides, there were no restraints for him – if Cal made a sudden turn (or rather, when), Dex would probably go flying.

Cal was currently detailing to us the official rules of our tour. (Another generous name; we were only playing four gigs.) Either he was reading off of a sheet of paper, making his already frightening driving even more dangerous, or he had the rules memorized; both seemed equally likely, knowing Cal.

“Rule number seven: no sex on The Bus. Ever. On any tour.”

Rule number seven elicited an eye roll from me, a groan from Emmy, and a “Seriously, Cal?” from Dex.

“Yes, seriously! This is important. Our bus is sacred –”

“Like fuck it’s sacred, I think there’s a puke stain over there.”

“Is making love not sacred?”

“This isn’t even an actual bus.”

“Maybe if we were on a real tour bus, I would –”

“This is non-negotiable, guys. If I find so much as a single condom wrapper or a pair of panties –”

“Two of us wear panties, Cal.”

“What, are you the panty police now?”

“Are you just going to go on, like, a panty witch hunt?”

Cal sighed. “Whatever. Just keep it clean, okay, guys?”

We all begrudgingly agreed to at least “be respectful” of The Bus, because it was “our haven” and “a sign of how far we’ve come as a band.” And as much as I hated to agree with Cal on anything, we’d come a long way, and The Bus was a tangible sign.

This tour was riding on the heels of our first record deal, which had happened last year. A small, locally-run record company (a friend of a friend of the former manager of the Moonlight Café) had caught wind of us, and had decided to take a chance on a band of four queer losers with moody folk-pop songs and superiority complexes. We had been a bit dubious at first, Cal wondering if our little band of misfits was too “alternative” for the mainstream public (“We’ve got a black girl, a Hispanic-Italian dude, a lesbian, and a trans guy – we look like we’re trying to be as diverse as possible, guys!”) but it turns out that was apparently what the city was looking for. The record went over modestly well, copies being sold all the way out in Chandler Valley and Merinda Heights.

The album was successful enough that we got a few calls from places across the province, hoping for us to play evenings at their pubs and sports bars. So off we went on The Bus (which Cal had gotten dirt-cheap from Paula, a retiring caterer down his street), knowing literally nothing about the logistics of touring but hoping we could learn as we went.

“Can we stop for food soon, Cal?” Dex asked. “Burger King or something.”

“I second that. I’m seriously craving a cheeseburger,” said Em. She curled up on the futon, chucking her notebook away and skimming a hand through her short-cropped red pixie cut. She’d chopped it all off a couple weeks ago but still wasn’t used to the breeziness of it, the air cold on her neck.

We ended up at a little run-down Harvey’s off the QEW. We all piled out of The Bus into the dark and empty parking lot; it was nearly ten at night, and it seemed no one was craving burgers but us. The only employee in the front was a freckly-faced pubescent boy with a bad haircut; he smiled too much while taking our orders, especially at Emmy. “Don’t look now, but you may have a visor-wearing admirer behind the counter,” I whispered to her as we waited for the patties to heat up.

“I noticed that,” she replied. “Poor guy. I’m going to have to crush his dreams.”

We ate burgers with excessive bacon and discussed our first show, which was the following evening at a bar and grill in the Heights. As I sipped my coffee and went to grab the set list, my hand knocked against Emmy’s. A sudden surge of memory from our late-night stop at the diner almost three years ago stunned me with its strength. I didn’t pull my hand back, but she pulled away hers.

The fluorescent light above our heads flickered, buzzed, threw Emmy’s face into eerie blue-white light. I pulled my hands back and tucked them into the pocket of my hoodie; the room was freezing. “No, that’s going to be too much too soon,” Cal was saying, tapping his pen against the crumpled piece of loose-leaf paper that was serving as our working setlist. The list had been crossed out and rewritten in a different order so many times that the paper was almost covered in dark blue. “Like, ‘My Spirit, Your Spirit’ is really intense, so putting it right after ‘Would You Catch the Wind For Me’ just seems too jarring.”

I took a hand out of my pocket and wrapped my fingers around my Styrofoam cup. I hadn’t put enough sugar or cream into my coffee, so there wasn’t anything to mask its sourness. The last time I’d had coffee this bad was back when I was still someone’s daughter; back when Emmy and I were a foot stuck in a door, catching it before it closed, instead of what we were now – deadbolted shut.

“But they’ve got completely different feels,” Dex argued, drawing curvy arrows between two songs, switching their order. “Catch the Wind is really dark and tortured, and My Spirit is super poppy. They’re different enough that I think it’ll be fine.”

The buzzing from the light was distracting. I glanced up at it but its bright fluorescence hurt my eyes to look at, like a small sun. I gulped down the rancid coffee and tried not to stare at the way Emmy’s new haircut revealed the curve of her neck, her collarbone. What the hell was wrong with me? I’d lived with her for a year now with almost no issues, then one bad cup of coffee and some accidental physical contact and I could barely put two thoughts together. Emmy wasn’t looking at me; she was doodling idly in her notebook, spiraling shapes that started small then grew and grew and grew. I finished my coffee, crumpled the Styrofoam in my hand.

“Julie?”

I jerked my head up to see Cal looking at me expectantly, Dex raising his eyebrows. Emmy’s eyes danced, laughed at me. “What?”

“What do you think?” Dex asked, pointing to the setlist. There was barely any room left on the sheet to write on for all the scratching-out.

“Oh. Right.” My fingers traced a pattern on my crumpled cup. I could feel them all looking at me. Could feel Emmy looking at me; after knowing her for three years, living with her for one, I could feel what she was thinking like words on my skin, no need for sound. “I don’t think you should ask me; I’m bad at deciding things.” I finally looked up at her, and she met my eyes square with hers, almost like a challenge. After all, she would know better than anyone that I shouldn’t be trusted to make decisions.

//

“I never thought I would say this,” Dex whispered, “but I don’t think we ever appreciated how clean the Moonlight was.”

He was right. In comparison to Clem’s Roadhouse Bar and Grill, the first stop on our tour, the Moonlight was a five-star restaurant, one of those ones with a maître d’. The floor of Clem’s was covered in a thin layer of grime; the chairs were mismatched, some of them missing cushions. The few small windows let in little sun, but enough to light up the clouds of dust motes hanging in the air, making Cal sneeze. The whole place smelled of B.O. and beer.

“Are you guys The Entertainment?” A little greasy man with a straining shirt tucked into his corduroys came up to us, stuffing his hands in his pockets.

We all nudged Dex forward; somewhere along the way, he’d been appointed the unofficial spokesperson of The Entertainment, even though he only played drums and rarely sang. “Um…yep, yep,” Dex said. Emmy rolled her eyes. When Dex got nervous, he started to talk like an elementary school teacher. “We sure are. It was super nice of you to invite us!”

“Oh, it’s our pleasure,” the man said, flashing us his yellowed teeth. “I’m Charles Lynch, the manager here at Clem’s. I’ll show you guys where to set up.”

I stepped gingerly across the dingy floor, trying not to let the dust seep into my flats. Charles led us to a shadowy corner by the swinging kitchen door. There was no stage, no equipment, no sign that a band would be playing here at all. “So there’s an outlet there where you can plug your amps in,” Charles said, sweeping his arm towards the outlet in a grand gesture, like a used car salesman. “Does seven sound good for a start time?”

Dex looked back at us, waiting to see if one of us would actually say something. Cal crossed his arms. Emmy shrugged. I flashed him a cheeky smile. “Yep, that sounds perfect,” Dex said, shaking Charles’s hand. “Thank you so much.”

“It’s no problem. Let me know if you guys need anything!”

“How about a bath?” Emmy whispered as he walked away.

We all just stood there for a moment, silently acknowledging the grossness of the venue, the lack of preparedness of the host, the clear lack of money the place had which would probably translate to lack of money coming our way. “Well,” I said. “Why don’t we go bring in the amps and make this place look a little like a stage?”

“Agreed,” Cal said, and so we ventured out to The Bus, disappointed and grumpy and more than a little nostalgic.

Seven o’clock came, and with it, a tidal wave of middle-aged businessmen, mothers with toddlers balanced on their hips, sun-browned construction workers in bright orange. Not our usual crowd of twenty-something hipsters, but we’d try our best to win them over anyway. Dex grabbed one of the mismatched chairs (a rickety metal one, rusted and peeling) for his drums, Cal unfolded his portable keyboard, and Emmy and I regretted only bringing one mic in.

“The house is full,” Emmy stage-whispered back to the guys. “Go time.”

“Can we just take a minute,” I said, “to appreciate that no one has to sit on the edge of the stage right now?”

“I would appreciate it more if there was a stage at all,” Dex admitted.

For all our grumbling, music has a certain transcendent quality to it, and nowhere was that so apparent than at Clem’s. As soon as Emmy’s violin, bare and unaccompanied at the start of Would You Catch the Wind for Me, sang out bright and clear, the room stopped moving. Suddenly we weren’t stuck in the back corner of a grimy bar and grill, shoved in beside the kitchen doors like an afterthought – we could have been in the Moonlight on a busy Friday night, or playing a Canada Day show in the city park while kids held sparklers into the evening air. I joined in on guitar and Cal brought in his piano line and finally, Dex with his starting drum fill, and the four of us were in a different place, somehow both completely separate from the crowd and hopelessly intertwined with it. If I closed my eyes, I could almost feel the warm spotlights that used to shine in that old café, the soft worn black paint of the stage, and for one second we were home.

In the end, we didn’t get paid much, but it was enough that we all felt justified in going out for post-show drinks. Dex dragged us to some upscale club called Electrik in the central district of the Heights, one of those places with neon blue lights around the bar counter and tiny thin couches that didn’t sink in when you sat down. I ordered a mojito and watched as Cal flirted shamelessly with the stubbly bartender. “He’s got no game,” I observed.

“None,” Emmy agreed. “Think I should give him some pointers?”

“From you? Absolutely not.” I fiddled with a mint leaf, bit into it, remembered cookies Jamie had made me once. “You wouldn’t know what subtlety was if it socked you in the crotch. Remember that girl from the Christmas party –”

“We don’t talk about the girl from the Christmas party,” Emmy cut me off.

“Besides, this is more fun,” I said, sitting back on the stiff couch and sipping my mojito. “Drinking fancy drinks and watching Cal flirt terribly is pretty much my ideal good time.”

Emmy laughed, low and throaty, and took a long drink of her vodka cranberry.

Dex, who had been sitting with us, took off to go pursue some girl with a high ponytail and tight red dress (but not before fending off comments from Emmy, concerned with checking if Ponytail was legal). We watched him sidle up to the girl at the bar, his wide shoulders curving toward her. I was nearly finished my mojito; only ice was left now.

“It’s sort of hot in here,” Emmy said, polishing off her drink. “I think I’m going to go outside. You done your drink?”

I gulped down the remains, ignoring the icy burn down my throat, and followed her out of the club, dodging some drunk girl’s grabby hands.

We sat on the tailgate of The Bus, our heads a little light from the cocktails, and counted one night stands coming out of Electrik. “Blondie and Glasses,” I said, pointing to a lanky guy and a girl with spiky platinum hair leaning against each other for balance. Blondie lit a cigarette, Glasses bending over so she could light his.

“Nah, they’re too familiar,” Em said, tugging a sweater over her shoulders. “See how close their faces are there? Those aren’t two people who just met.”

The fresh coolness of one a.m. air made goosebumps rise on my arms. I wished for something more substantial than the skirt-and-blouse combo I’d worn to the show; the wind blew right through the gossamer fabric.

“Those two.” Emmy pointed at two girls exiting the club, their arms gripping each other tight. One brown leather jacket covered both their shoulders, shivering in tiny tank tops. “It’s ladies’ night for them tonight, let me tell you.”

“Really? I don’t see it.”

“I do. The girl with the longer hair, she’s covered in tattoos. The other one’s got the sides of her head shaved off. One of them is wearing army boots. I don’t know what you’re seeing here, but I am seeing a clear image of two homos.”

I rolled my eyes. “I think your gaydar is faulty, Em.”

“It worked fine for you.”

My mouth closed in a hard line. I looked up at Emmy. She wasn’t looking at me, was looking at her feet in one of her pairs of stupid dumb Converse. “Emmy,” I said, “you know I don’t like –”

“To talk about it, yeah, I know,” she said, her words short and clipped. “If you want to just erase the gay out of your life, that’s fine. I just wish you…” She drew in a deep breath, let it all out. “I wish you wouldn’t pretend like there’s never been anything here.”

The moon was full tonight; Em’s face was lit up in profile. She bit her lip, kept her eyes down, rubbed the sleeves of her sweater between her fingers.

“I’m not saying that, I just thought we agreed to move on from…what happened,” I said. The parking lot was quiet and my voice was too loud. “You agreed, right?”

Emmy sighed shortly. She reached up to run her hands through her hair, but came up empty. “Yeah, I did. But moving on doesn’t mean ‘pretend it never fucking happened.’”

I stood, dragged the toe of one of my silver flats through the gravel of the parking lot. This wasn’t the first time we’d had a conversation about this, but Emmy wasn’t usually so direct – so accusatory. But she was right; all this burying of truth was directly my fault. It had been my idea to tamp down any feelings I might have for Emmy, my idea to go about life as if we’d just pressed backspace on that part of our story. It wasn’t sustainable; I’d known that from the start. But that hadn’t stopped me from trying.

“I’m sorry,” I said finally, looking back at Em. She looked up at me, her elbows leaning on her knees and her hand cupped under her face. “I have to though.”

When she spoke, she didn’t sound mad anymore, just tired. “I know,” she said. “I know.”

Emmy had never been completely on board with the idea, mostly because she didn’t think it was healthy. But for me, it had seemed the only option. Acting on my feelings had only brought on pain, rejection; I’d lost my parents, and later, Andy too. How many more important parts of my life could I lose before I started feeling broken, fractured? It would be easier on everyone if I just kept things inside, covering it up like a hand shielding from the sun.

The guys were coming towards us now, Dex dragging a very smiley Cal behind him. “I caught him trying to go home with the bartender,” Dex said, “but he looked like bad news to me.”

“Wow, his flirting actually worked?” I said.

Emmy snort-laughed behind me. I turned and caught a quick grin flash across her face; it never took us long.

Once we got everyone loaded up, Dex (the only one sober enough to drive) found an abandoned Canadian Tire and we camped out in its parking lot. We passed a bag of Miss Vickie’s around and listened to Cal dish about his almost-score. By the time he’d finished, I could have drawn an accurate police sketch of the guy; Emmy and I kept jokingly prodding him for more details, as if he hadn’t given us enough. “Cal, you didn’t tell us about his mother’s hometown,” Em said. “Was she a small-town girl or did she grow up in the big city?”

“What about his grades? What if we almost let you go home with a man of sub-par intelligence?”

Cal just laughed, drunk and delirious. I yanked off my show clothes and pulled on some pajamas; after three years with the band, none of us were concerned with modesty anymore. I climbed up onto my top bunk and listened to the faint whir of cars gliding down the highway nearby; the bunk squeaked under me as Emmy crawled into her bed. Underneath, the guys finished off the bag of chips and crashed in just their boxers. As soon as Cal hit the pillow, he started snoring, and I wondered briefly how lovely he would be to deal with the next day. I listened to Emmy’s breathing from underneath me; I couldn’t even begin to fall asleep until I could hear her breaths, measured and slow, like a metronome I could count to.

[juliebeanbook]

twelve: if you had three you’d give me two

I sat in an aisle seat on the train next to a large man who smelled like salami as snow slopped onto the ground outside and stuck to the windowsill; none of this was improving my mood.

Every time I looked down at my phone to check the time and I saw that it had indeed moved forward, a heaviness sank deeper into my gut at the thought of having to spend a week with my parents. For five and a half years now, I had felt uneasy around them, but now everything was different. Now, I felt the tick-tick of a bomb under my skin, volatile and ready to go off at any moment.

The man beside me grunted, waking up from his nap, spread out a little more in his seat. I inched closer to the aisle, crossed my legs in a pair of Jamie’s old winter boots that made my feet sweaty.

My phone buzzed, making me jump. Emmy. “Hey,” I said. “What’s up? Also I’m on a train right now and I’m being an asshole to everyone around me. Just so you know.”

“Noted. I just wanted to check in. Where are you?”

“Smithsville,” I said, checking out the window for a sign of civilization; the search proved fruitless. “I think. Don’t quote me on that.”

“How are you holding up?”

“I’m shitting my pants here, Em.” Some mom with a tiny baby in her arms turned and gave me a look. I gave her one back like, What? You’re afraid I’m a bad influence on your four-week-old kid’s vocabulary?

“Just relax, okay? They’re not going to magically know anything. You don’t have a flashing neon ‘gay’ sign around your neck.”

“Should have gotten me one of those for my birthday.”

“Sorry, I missed the memo. Stay tuned for next year though.”

“Okay, I should probably go, I don’t think I’m making the people around me very happy.”

“Alright. Well, call me if you need to, kay?”

“I will. Thanks, Em.”

“See ya, Jules.” I was surprised to find myself choking up as I hung up the phone. I sniffed and cleared my throat.

The man beside me dug around in his backpack and pulled out half a salami sandwich on rye, offering it to me. “Um, no thanks,” I said, waving the sandwich away and wiping my eyes. “But thank you. That’s very sweet of you.”

At the Chandler Valley train station, my mom was waiting in her little red station wagon to pick me up. As I awkwardly carried my suitcase with both hands, looking like an idiot who didn’t know how to use a rolling suitcase (one of the wheels was busted), she got out of the car and opened the trunk. “Hi, sweetie!” she said, reaching out her hands to hug me. She’d gotten a lot huggier in the last few years, as if all the affection she would have shown Jamie was now allotted to me. It made me feel really uncomfortable, like I was on one side of an uneven scale, about to tip over.

I hugged her back as if she had something contagious that I didn’t want to catch.

“How was your train ride?” she asked me as she started the car and adjusted the levels of hot air blasting onto my front.

“Fine. Short.”

She turned her head to give me a smile, but the smile seemed somewhat empty, drained of something. “It’ll be good to have you back for a while. Your dad and I have missed you.”

I watched the way her small hands gripped the steering wheel hard but shook as they reached up to fix her hair.

My parents’ yard was covered by a thick layer of snow like frosting on a cake, crumbles of dirt showing through like crumbs. My mom insisted on carrying my suitcase inside. The house smelled like blueberry muffins; my dad emerged in his “Kiss Me, I’m Pretending to be Irish” apron. “Jules!” he cried, hugging me with oven mitts on, squeezing tight. I felt myself relax into my dad’s hug, almost forgetting that I shouldn’t feel comforted.

Conversation at the dinner table was scattered and stilted; my parents kept asking me questions (“How were your classes this semester?” “Better grades than first year, I’m sure?” “Any cute boys you want to tell me about?”), and I would answer them shortly or dodge them completely with a request for the salt or a napkin. After my mom brought out an apple crisp, she stopped asking me anything, just tucked into her dessert with small stabs of her fork.

She regained her speech after supper, when she explained to me with great excitement her plans for Christmas Eve, which was in a couple days. I sat on the couch and watched Merry Christmas Charlie Brown and listened to her talk about the “downright spectacular” pageant her Catholic church was planning for the big night, gritting my teeth and hoping it wasn’t obvious. “Of course, it hasn’t gotten off without a hitch,” she said. “There’s been drama, that’s for sure.”

“What sort of drama?” I wondered how drama-filled a Catholic nativity pageant could be. Did one of the shepherds insult a sheep? Was the angel being a little shit to Joseph?

“Well, this is between you and me, but you know Jean Goddard? The one who makes the lemon pies? Well, you see, her little boy, Reid, there’s something wrong with him.” She leaned forward in her armchair. “Dresses in all kinds of girl stuff. We think he’s a homosexual.” The last word was a conspiratorial whisper.

I concealed the shiver that ran through me as my mother told me the gossip, as if we were two old women sipping sweet tea on the front porch.

“So, naturally, we couldn’t have him in our pageant. Libby and I made sure of that. Caused quite a fuss, let me tell you.”

“Wait, you wouldn’t let him be in the show?”

“Of course not. It’s a show full of children, in a church. We can’t have that sort of thing, Julie, you know that. It’s inappropriate.”

I searched and searched her face for any remorse, any human pity, but there was none that I could see.

//

By the time the sun went down on Christmas Eve, falling snow glittered under the streetlights like a snowglobe tipped upside down and shaken. I pulled on some itchy nylons before the Christmas Eve service and slid into a pair of my mom’s heels and stepped out unsteady down our driveway. The toes of my tights were already cold and wet.

The service was long, with a lot of talking, and more repentance of sins than I would’ve thought would be necessary in a Christmas celebration. The pageant was cute, disorganized, and completely heterosexual. A couple of choir girls passed out tall white candles for us to hold while we sang “O Come All Ye Faithful.” I sang quietly, my voice seeming to come from someone else other than me. My mom’s voice soared above mine, joyful and triumphant. Her eyes flickered bright with the reflection of her candle.

Bing Crosby crooned to us through the radio on the drive home. I stared out the window into the dark; it felt just like closing my eyes.

I went up to my room to change as soon as we got back, putting on my own jeans and a flannel shirt of Emmy’s that I’d stolen. I glanced at my face in the mirror before going downstairs. I thought for all the world that you should’ve been able to read everything like handwriting across my skin, but my face was an empty sheet of paper.

Downstairs was too quiet. When I rounded the corner of the staircase, my parents were standing in the kitchen, as if they were waiting for me. As I approached, they looked up. Their faces were grave statements.

“Is…everything okay?” I asked, my heart hammering. Had someone died?

My dad cleared his throat. My mom opened and closed her mouth a couple times before finally saying, “Julie, we need to talk to you about something. We wanted to wait till after service, so that you could have the chance to spend a little time with God and work things through with Him.”

“What things?” My heart was sprinting now; I could feel my pulse in my ears.

“I ran into Patricia Glover yesterday at Walmart,” my mom said. Her voice was thin and wavery. “Renee’s mother. And she mentioned something that…changed my opinion of you.”

Shit. Shit.

“What, um, what did she say?”

“She said that she heard from Renee that you kissed your friend. Your female friend.”

Of course Andy had done this.

The image of her face, hurt and confused, like I’d been lying to her for a year and a half. A door slammed closed twice. She must have needed to tell someone; she kept secrets about as well as a sieve kept water in. Renee would be her first stop. It was such an unmistakably Andy move that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t anticipated she would do it.

But knowing I should have seen it coming didn’t stop the clench in my stomach, the rock in my throat, the nausea rising up and a dryness choking my tongue.

I couldn’t say anything to my parents. I couldn’t say anything at all.

“Is this true?” my dad asked me. My mom’s face pleaded with me; I wished I couldn’t read her expressions so well. “Did this happen?”

I gasped for air like a gaping fish. My head felt disconnected from my body; I struggled to regain balance. I could feel my hands shaking but my mind was clear. I didn’t have it in me to lie.

“Yeah,” I somehow managed to spit out. “It did.”

My mom’s face was a portrait of frozen shock. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “I can’t have two gay children. That isn’t fair.”

“Mom, I’m not –”

“Julie, how could you do this to us?” Dad asked. His voice was pained. “It’s been hard enough with Jamie.”

“It’s been hard enough for you?” I cried. “Try being her! You haven’t spoken a word to her in five years. She doesn’t have parents anymore. Do you know what that’s like?”

My mom was still shaking her head. “Julie, I can’t allow this,” she said firmly; my mom never raised her voice, but this was as close as she got. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t.”

“It’s not up to you, Mom,” I said. “You don’t get to decide this for me. I don’t get to decide this for me. This is how it is. You can’t choose who I am. That isn’t fair.”

My dad was staring at the floor. My mom brought her eyes up to meet mine, her gaze hard.

“This is up to you, Julie,” she said. “If you want to live as a sinner, that’s your choice. This is all on you. You don’t have to be like this.”

“What if I want to be like this?” I thought of the soft touch of Emmy’s hands on my back, her breath hot on my face, the warmth running down the length of my spine.

“Then you can’t stay here.”

I had known it would come, had known the water would be cold, but I hadn’t fully prepared my body for the icy shock, splashing all over me, drenching me. I looked at my mom’s face, my dad’s downcast glance, looking for something, anything, to grab onto. But there was nothing. There had always been nothing.

“Fine,” I said. My voice stood strong on its own.

I ran upstairs and wrenched open my suitcase, stuffing into it all the warm clothes I could find. There was a cardboard box in the back of my closet, and I filled it full of more clothes, my favourite books, one of my pillows. Family portraits blurred past me as I went down the stairs, my suitcase bumping behind me. I looked back into the kitchen, like I was just going on vacation, like I should kiss my parents goodbye. Neither of them would look at me. It was like getting slapped.

I dragged my suitcase out the front door into the snow, my box tucked into the crook of my hip. I made it to the sidewalk before I broke down. I sat on the snow-covered curb, the seat of my jeans soaking through, and sobbed, wiping tears off my cheeks with frantic cold hands. My breath caught, and I wrapped my coat tightly around my body, as if trying to hug myself; after all, I was all I had now.

I reached into my pocket and dialled Jamie’s number clumsily, my fingers cold and shaking. Her phone rang a few times, then went to voicemail. “Hey, Jamie, I need your help. The bad thing that happened to you, it just happened to me. I hate them. I hate them. All my stuff is in my suitcase and a box. I need you. I don’t have anywhere to live anymore.”

I was sobbing all over again by the time I finished the message; I hung up and curled up tight, hoping no one driving by would see me. The snow was still falling. My hair was wet.

Jamie was at Anne-Marie’s for the holidays; her parents’ house was across the city, and I didn’t know how to get there by myself. Looking through my recent calls on my phone, trying to find someone else who could help, I saw the one from Emmy, the one from the train. I remembered her telling me that if things got bad, I could crash at her place. Well, things were bad enough now.

I tried calling her, but she didn’t pick up. I remembered the address of her parents’ house that she’d given me, and mentally mapped out how to get there. Standing up slowly, my joints stiff like rusty pipes, I hoisted my box under my arm, gripped the suitcase handle with the other, and headed to the bus stop.

There was no one on the 52 when I got on at the corner of Brookfield and Meadow. The bus driver looked me over as I fed the machine with a handful of small change. I couldn’t tell if he was judging me or pitying me, but either way I didn’t like it. I held the suitcase between my knees and sat straight in my seat and tried not to look pathetic. So what if I was taking the 52 out of the city at nine-thirty on Christmas Eve? How did he know I wasn’t headed home, to somewhere where people loved me?

I got off at the end of Emmy’s street and lugged my suitcase through the snow, trying to read the house numbers in the dark. By the time I got to number 40, the box under my arm felt like it had gained ten more pounds, and my arms ached. I dropped my shit onto the front porch and rang the doorbell with fingers that had gone numb around house number 10.

A woman with curly red hair and a face full of freckles answered the door. “Hi,” she said. “Can I help you?”

“Is Emmy there?” I asked, picking up my box and holding it close.

The woman turned around and shouted “Emily!” into the house. Emmy came down the hall in a blouse and skirt; I almost didn’t recognize her out of her usual plaid context. Her face was knotted in confusion until she saw me in the doorway.

“Jules?” She ran to the front door, grabbed my arm. “What happened? Are you okay?”

I looked at her and hugged my box and felt the snow settle on my shoulders like the coldest blanket, and she looked right back, and in that moment I knew that my face was no longer a blank page. With Emmy, my face was a rough draft, messy emotions scrawled out in haste, unedited and raw and nothing but true. I couldn’t hide a thing. But I didn’t want to hide anything anymore.

“I’m out,” I said.

She only waited long enough to draw in a breath before pulling me inside.

[juliebeanbook]

don’t tell my mother till I pull myself together

Close your eyes. Wipe your face of salty sweat. Today, it is hot. The air outside presses in around you like walls. You wipe your hand slickly off your forehead and wonder why you offered to get the mail. The distance between you and the mailbox at the end of the street seems infinite, a long stretch of asphalt wavering in the hot air like a mirage in some sandy desert. Moving through the hot air is like trying to run through a pool; your movements meet resistance, each stretch of a muscle feeling heavier, dragging. You pull your hair up into a bun on the top of your head and consider taking up your mother’s offer of cutting it short for the summer – all these heavy curls are hot on your neck.

You reach the mailbox only to find it empty. Frustrated at your fruitless mission, you turn around and stuff your hands in the pocket of your shorts, your flip-flops slapping in an angry sort of way against the pavement of the street. Stupid hot day, stupid empty mailbox, stupid mom, stupid hair.

You’re so wrapped up in calling everything stupid that at first you don’t realize anything is wrong when you get back to the house. You kick off your flip-flops and wish to death for some air conditioning.

Then the shouting makes its way through the haze that’s wrapped around your thoughts. The shouting, but not what’s being shouted.

You creep into the house, not wanting to participate in the scene but needing to know what’s happening. You see Jamie standing in the middle of the living room, her hands wrapped around her body like someone’s trying to hurt her. But your parents are standing far away from her; your mom with her hands on her hips, your dad standing behind the couch, as if he’s hiding.

The bomb has already been dropped; you’ve walked in just after it’s fallen. But the aftermath is devastating, and you can feel it rolling out under your feet like the aftershocks of an earthquake, still managing to destroy despite never wanting to hurt anyone in the first place.

Even months later, it’s hard to remember exactly what’s said here in the living room on the hottest day of the summer, sweat chilling your whole body and making you shiver. The shouting mostly comes from your mother; Jamie says everything in a whisper, a murmur, and your mom responds in a shout, increasingly louder every time she replies. The air in the house seems not to move, just sort of hover, as if the room is holding its breath just like you are. The painting of Jesus over the mantle is, oddly, something that you can’t get out of your head later when you remember this day. His face just looks so sad, so disappointed, looking down below him to your sister like He expected more of her and she is letting Him down.

But you’re the one who lets Him down. Because that day in your living room, the air stagnant and stifling, the sweat sticking your shirt against your back, Jamie looks you straight in the eye, pleading for you to say something, anything. But you don’t, you stand there gaping like an idiotic fish, hiding in the doorway, until Jamie leaves out the front door and your mother sits down on the couch and cries.

[juliebeanbook]

eleven: things are gonna change like a hundred degrees

I stood in front of the steamed-up mirror, a towel wrapped around me, my hair dripping, trying to understand myself. “You did a gay thing,” I told my reflection. She looked back at me with her head tilted, like she didn’t believe me. “You did a really gay thing,” I repeated. “And you liked it. What does that mean?”

My reflection didn’t have an answer and neither did I.

I padded down the hall with damp feet, clutching the towel around myself, and looked around my room for something to wear to class. While rooting through my drawers for a skirt, my hand touched something worn and soft. I pulled out a big sweater, instantly recognizing it as one of Ben’s.

The familiar emotions that came with remembering Ben came flooding back, but instead of making me cringe like they used to, they just made me confused. What I’d had with Ben had been broken for sure, especially near the end, but it had been real. I had loved him and I had wanted him and what did that mean now? I sat down hard on my bed and groaned, muffling the noise by shoving my face into my pillow; I was giving myself a headache.

I spent the next week in a cocoon of self-reflection, sitting through classes distracted and distant. I wrote a physiology midterm and a bio quiz, but my heart wasn’t in it; my mind was occupied by Emmy, by Ben, by thoughts I couldn’t extricate. Thoughts that, a year ago, I promised myself I wouldn’t think about again. I spent a lot of time talking to myself in the mirror, trying to figure myself out. When I wasn’t in classes, I mostly kept to myself, listening to gloomy music; every once in a while I would talk to Emmy, but she seemed to know I needed space. After all, she was part of the problem.

By the time Friday came around, I was feeling a little better; ready to see Em again, ready to embrace the butterflies. As I was putting on a dress for the show, having actually attended to my hair instead of just throwing it up in a sorry excuse for a bun, Andy barged into my room.

“I could have been naked; it’s called knocking.”

“I’ve seen you without clothes before. I’m not afraid.” She picked up a sweater from where it was sitting on my desk, holding it up in disgust. “Julie, I have come in here to stage an intervention.”

She was standing with her hands on her hips, looking at me critically. “Why?” I asked her. “What did I do?”

“I have watched you sulk around for two weeks now. You’ve worn, like, two pairs of pants over and over again, you haven’t eaten a piece of fruit in sixteen days, and if I have to listen to one more Indigo Girls ballad blasting down the hall I’m going to come in here and smash your speakers. What the hell is going on with you?”

I sighed and sat down on my bed, crossing my legs and looking at the floor. “It’s just been a rough couple weeks, okay?”

“No, not okay. I want you to tell me what’s going on, Jules. This isn’t like you. I’m worried.” She leaned against my desk chair.

I could feel my heart thudding in my throat. I looked up at Andy, her sandy hair hanging in long pieces around her face, her skinny legs clad in her favourite jeans. I’d known her for a year and a half now; she’d become a sister to me, someone who knew everything about me but still put up with me. I knew I could trust her with anything. So why was I so afraid?

“Okay, well, I’ve just been…thinking some stuff through,” I said. Fear made my blood freeze up; my hands shook, and I sat on them to keep them still. “I mean, this isn’t new. But lately some shit has gone down. And…I’ve been sorting some things out. Kind of. At least, that’s what I’ve been working on.”

“What are you talking about?” Andy asked.

“Okay. Well. A couple weeks ago I was in the storage room at the Moonlight with Emmy…”

“Okay…”

“And I don’t know what happened, but we, um, well. We made out.”

“You made out?” she repeated.

“Yep. Totally made out.” It wasn’t as hard to tell her as I thought it would have been; the way I was telling her made it seem like no big deal, instead of the Very Big Deal it had been for me since it happened.

“Were you drunk?” she asked me, standing up straight and crossing her arms across her chest.

I shook my head. “No, we were both sober.”

Andy didn’t say anything, just nodded, stared at the carpet. “So…” she said finally. “What does that mean? Did you, like, enjoy it?”

“Yes? Kind of? I don’t know, it was a weird thing!”

“I’m so confused. I thought you were straight! You were dating Ben!”

“Well, I don’t know. I think I might be bi,” I blurted out. It came out as almost a whisper.

In that moment, as the words left my mouth, two things happened simultaneously; I felt an overwhelming sense of right, of things clicking into place, satisfying and true. But at the same time, I felt the way you feel when you drop something off a tall building, or onto train tracks – all I wanted to do was to reach out, take it back, even though it was out of my hands for good.

I was expecting a lot of things from Andy, but I had not expected her to look pissed off. “Wait, what, like bisexual?” she clarified.

“Yes, like bisexual,” I said, feeling mildly annoyed.

“Julie, that basically just means half-gay. And you’re not half-gay. I’ve known you since last year, you would have told me if you were gay, right?”

The comment bugged me, like an itch you can’t quite scratch. “Well, maybe I don’t know myself that well. I don’t know. I’m figuring things out, I told you.”

“But this is a big thing. Like, friends are supposed to know this about each other. You should have told me about this before!”

“Well, I’m sorry that I haven’t kept you updated with a constant internal monologue, Andy. I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Well, I don’t know either. All I know is that I feel like I don’t know you as well as I thought I did.”

I stood up, my arms clutching at the front of my dress. “I’ve got to go,” I said, pushing past her on my way out my bedroom door. “I’m wearing a pair of your heels tonight. Might be a late show, don’t wait up.”

“Wait, are you mad at me?” She was standing small in the doorway, clutching the frame and looking at me with wide eyes.

I pressed my lips together, buttoned up my coat, slid on her heels. “Whatever, Andy,” I said, attempting to slam the door of the sexy apartment behind me as I left. It didn’t slam right the first time, so I kicked it closed with the bottom of the heel, then click-clacked down the hall.

I stayed pissed until about halfway to the Moonlight, when snow had filled Andy’s heels and made my feet cold and miserable. By the time I got there, the anger had mostly abated, leaving me with a slight sense of embarrassment and the overwhelming urge to cry. The rest of the band was already there setting up; I silently helped them, then went and sat on a couch to wait for an audience to show up. Emmy gave me a questioning look from where she was tuning onstage, and I shrugged. I would talk to her later, but right now, I didn’t know if I could tell her anything without breaking down.

“Boo!” I jumped at the sound of my sister’s voice. I turned and saw Jamie and Anne-Marie standing by the couch, with Kathleen in tow, her hint of a belly peeking out from between the flaps of her coat.

“Hey, what are you doing here?”

“Taking my car in for an oil change,” Jamie said. “What do you think, dummy? We haven’t seen you guys play yet and Kathleen was over so we decided to stop by!”

I had to crack a smile at the funny little group – petite Jamie in her bright green shirt from the Dirty Burger; tall Anne-Marie bundled up in a scarf and fuzzy stocking cap like she’d just come out of a blizzard; Kathleen with her hand resting on her stomach and her face stretched in a goofy grin. They were so mismatched, and yet, there were Jamie’s fingers wove between Anne-Marie’s; there was Anne-Marie’s hand hovering around Kathleen’s shoulders protectively.

When I went up to the stage to get ready to start the show, Emmy was smiling at something past me. “What?” I asked her as I sat on the edge of the stage (tonight, I was the duck).

“They’re just so cute,” she said, and I looked at where my sister was sitting with her girlfriend and the girl they’d taken under their wing. Kathleen was showing them something on her phone, and Jamie’s wild laugh could be heard from across the room.

The show did go late that night; the crowd was especially pumped up, and we rode out their energy, playing past eleven. The café staff didn’t really care; their hours were pretty loose on Fridays because of us. Whitney took out a book and read behind the counter until we finished.

When we finally wrapped up it was pushing midnight. I helped the others pack up, in no hurry to get home. Emmy seemed to sense that I wanted to stick around; when we were finished packing, she sat with me on a sofa and didn’t try to make conversation. Kathleen had her head on Anne-Marie’s shoulder; Jamie was telling Dex about the new recipe she was trying out with red chile mayo. We stayed there until Whitney told us that, as much as she would like to let us sleep here, she was pretty sure there were laws against that. So our little group filed out of the Moonlight into the cold midnight air. It stung my exposed cheeks like a little bitch.

Anne-Marie and Jamie said goodbye and Kathleen gave me a hug as they got into Anne-Marie’s car. “Do you want a ride home?” Emmy asked me.

“Um…I don’t really want to go home yet,” I said.

She winced. “Is everything okay?”

I shook my head. “Can we just hang out for a while somewhere?”

She looked down the street, pointed east. “There’s a diner over there that’s open till three.”

There was no one in the diner, a hole-in-the-wall little place with Formica tabletops and red vinyl booths, besides an elderly waitress nodding behind the counter. Emmy found us a booth by the front window, and the waitress made her slow way over in her sensible shoes; we ordered a coffee each.

“This place has the worst cup of coffee in the city,” Emmy mentioned to me as the waitress left.

I stared at her. “Why wouldn’t you tell me that before I ordered some?”

“Because you look like you could use a coffee,” Em said, “and a shitty cup will wake you up faster than a good one.”

Our coffee was served, and Emmy was right, it was stunningly bad. But it did wake me up, and made me feel a little stronger, so I told Em everything, right up until the point where I slammed the apartment door.

“Shit, Jules, that sounds dramatic,” she said. “Good work!”

“Well, it would’ve been more dramatic if I’d actually slammed it successfully the first time,” I conceded. “I actually had to kick it shut.”

She chuckled. “Well, points for trying. For real though, I’m sorry. That it went badly.”

I leaned my elbows on the table and rested my head in my hands. “I didn’t think it would go like that. I thought Andy would be more…on board, I don’t know.”

She leaned back in her seat with a vague half-smile. “That’s the funny thing. People never react how you think they will. I have three siblings, and not a single one reacted the way I thought they were going to when I came out to them.”

“Really?” I squinted at her. “Not even Kathleen?”

“God, no. Kathleen freaked out, wouldn’t talk to me for weeks. Sinead, she’s my older sister, she pretty much pretended it never happened. Even kept asking me if there were any boys in school I had my eye on.” She shook her head, laughing. “Like, seriously, she was deep in denial. And Neil…well, I thought he would freak out too, but he was actually really sweet. We’re close in age, him and I, so I guess he understood me better.”

“What about your parents?” I asked her.

“They…reacted better than expected,” she said carefully, probably aware she was treading on dangerous ground. “A little shocked for a while, but they came around. Yours will too,” she added, to my unspoken question.

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Coming out to my parents is sort of asking for disownment.”

Emmy stared at me. “Is that what happened to your sister?” I hadn’t told her explicitly about what happened to Jamie before, just hinted that things were bad.

“Pretty much. They kicked her out of the house. Haven’t spoken to her in five and a half years.”

“Do you talk to them?”

“When I have to. They want me to come home for Christmas.”

“Jesus Christ.” Emmy covered her face with one hand, sighing. “Well, if you need to get out of there, you can come to my parents’ place, alright? They won’t mind if you stay with us for a bit.”

“No, Em, it’s okay. They don’t know yet, I’ll be fine.”

“Just promise me you’ll come if things get bad.” She stared at me until I met her eyes.

I finally gave in, gave a nod of consent. “Okay, I will.”

She took my hand in hers. I could feel the tough calloused tips of her fingers against the skin of my palm. She made me finish the awful cup of coffee, then drove me back to Maplebrook. I didn’t want to leave her car; stepping out onto the curb felt like breaking a kiss too soon.

The apartment was silent when I got in, all the lights turned off. I slipped quietly to my room, flicking on the light. It was just as I’d left it; my bed unmade, empty wrappers and boxes littering the floor, two cast-off dresses making snow-angels on the carpet. I climbed into bed and tried to pretend things were the same as they were yesterday, but there was no going back. The thing with telling the truth is that no matter how much it hurts you, you can’t deny how good it feels to tell it. I cried into the pillow until I ran out of salt, my truth weighing me down, a muted sense of panic in my chest. When the caffeine finally wore off, I fell asleep feeling short on air; heavy, trapped, gasping.

[juliebeanbook]

so much for answers, I don't have a clue

Close your eyes. Press your hand against your chest, see if that calms you, grounds you. See if you can slow down your breaths, slower, slower, till they are measured and paced, not racing and panicked. You are sitting on the floor of the room you share with Andy and she won’t be back till the end of the week and the light is fading. Try and breathe.

It’s the truth that’s taken your breath away. You wonder if you’ll ever get it back.

You are so afraid of this truth that you can’t even talk about it out loud. Not to yourself, and certainly not to anyone else. It’s a sun that you’re shying away from, too bright for your eyes to adjust to. You can’t form the words, but you feel them, and they’re choking you. You try and figure out what set it all off, what got you here to where you are now, sitting on the carpet and facing something you never thought you’d have to face. It wasn’t just one thing, you don’t think, more like a chain of events, an explosive chemical reaction set off by something undeterminable.

Cameron keeps coming to mind, her face barging into your consciousness uninvited, but you tell yourself for the hundredth time that Cameron is your best friend. Or rather, was, if you want to be truly accurate; ever since coming to university, your friendship with her has been fraying like an old knot. It was just one kiss, you tell yourself, one drunken make-out after prom. Everyone does dumb things like that at prom, right? Everyone gets hammered and makes out with their best friend. It’s practically a rite of passage.

At least, that’s what you’ve been telling yourself for the past five months. But somehow it looks different to you now, what happened with Cameron, when you look back. All the bright lights and beer and the soft of her skin feel different when you close your eyes, and you can’t convince yourself it was nothing like you could before. You have denied yourself so many feelings, and there’s only so much of that you can do before it starts to hurt, before the pain comes to the surface.

You wipe tears off your cheeks; you hadn’t realized you were crying. Crying is dumb, you tell yourself. Crying isn’t going to change the fact that you maybe possibly might have a huge crush on your best friend, and not like that isn’t the worst possible thing to happen to you in a family like yours. You think about your sister, how Jamie hasn’t been back to the house in over four years, and the crying turns to inhaling, gasping. You claw at your chest at the thought, aching, throbbing, trying not to think about being out on the street but the more you try not to think about it, the more you do.

Eventually you climb up onto your bed and crawl in, hug a pillow, start to shake. This shouldn’t be this hard, you decide. It isn’t worth it. Cameron certainly isn’t worth it; you aren’t sure how much longer she’ll stick around. She seems less and less interested in talking to you lately. Maybe she’s picking up on vibes and wants to stay as far away as possible; maybe your crush is creeping her out. Your brain starts to scrounge around for any memories where you might have come onto her, touched her for too long, been too eager to see her, times where you could have given yourself away. The memories make a mess and you shut your eyes and try to make it all stop.

One thought comes out clear through the chaos: no one can know about this.

Once you think it, it’s an easy decision to make. You take what you feel and you shove it in a back drawer of your mind and hope that no one ever digs deep enough to find it. You hope it gets dusty and faded back there, in the dark corners of your brain, and you hope it’s left alone long enough that one day you forget it’s even there.

[juliebeanbook]

ten: so I’ll take what I can get

November came in snowy and wet, covering the city in slush and salt. The horrid weather meant that the audiences for our shows most weeks were a lot sparser than they had been back in the summer; on one particularly bad day, we played for a crowd of seven cold and damp individuals. Although we had dud weeks where the city seemed to have very little interest in a “folk/rock group with a lesbian leprechaun” (Dex’s catchy slogan for us), Cal insisted that we keep playing every Friday. (We’d only missed a few shows since I’d joined the band; a couple times because of Friday night midterms, once because of Dex’s birthday, and once because Cal had cooked for us the night before and none of us could get out of bed the next day.) He wanted us to become a “fixture” at the Moonlight, which I figured we probably were by now after six months, but according to Cal, we had to keep showing up.

So that’s how I ended up walking to the Moonlight in the dark in the middle of a snowstorm the second Friday of November, snow sticking in my hair and freezing the collar of my coat, cursing Cal to hell with every step my boots made into the ankle-deep slush on the sidewalk.

Pushing open the big wooden door into the café, the warm rush of air hit me like opening the door of an oven. My fingers and toes burned as they adjusted to the climate inside; I shrugged off my jacket and surveyed the room. Surprisingly, a sizable crowd of people had gathered, huddled around each other to keep warm; Vera was weaving around groups, passing out steaming mugs of coffee and tea. Dex was setting his drums up on the stage and he waved when he saw me. “Check this crowd out!” he cried.

“Why so many people today?” I wondered as I took my guitar out of its case, propped it on my knee to tune.

“Maybe they came in to escape the storm?” Dex theorized. “I don’t really care why they’re here though. As long as we can keep ‘em here I’ll be happy.”

When Cal came in, a flurry of snow following him through the door, he grinned at the number of people that had collected in the café. “Now this is what I’m talking about,” he said. “We’re a fixture, I told you! They know we’ll be here every week, they’re catching on.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” I asked Dex, and he shrugged.

Emmy arrived last, shaking her hair to rid it of snow. She swept her red waves up into a loose bun and dropped her coat beside the stage. “Full house!” she announced excitedly. She was right – a few more people had come into the café when she had, and now the place was nearly at capacity.

“It’s because we’re a fixture now,” I told her, and she snorted.

We had an almost completely new setlist this week; Emmy had written a bunch of new songs over the last few weeks, and we’d come up with great arrangements. The songs were slightly angsty but fun and poppy, incorporating copious amounts of fiddle solos from Em and drum fills from Dex. Our last song was full of clapping and a cappella bits, and we had the audience clapping along and singing once they’d learned the hook.

I shouldn’t be here; it isn’t healthy. My heart’s out of tune, and now I’m singing off-key.

As the last of the applause died down and the crowd began to mill about, I felt full and warm, like I’d just drank a mug of cocoa. We all began to pack up, clicking our cases closed, laughing as we went, breathless and exhilarated. A good show went straight to your head like a strong drink.

As the guys mingled with the audience (trying oh-so-subtly to get out of helping take down), I picked up the mic and some pickup cables, and Emmy grabbed an amp, and together we ventured up the Stairs of Death. I followed close behind her, spotting her in case she tipped backward and the amp threatened to crush her. At the second floor landing, I pushed open the door of the storage room, and we dropped our equipment inside, the room hazy and dusty and dim.

The heavy old door slammed closed behind me, making us both jump.

The room was dark, the only light coming from the moon outside, casting Emmy in shades of muted grey. She pushed her bangs out of her face and laughed shortly. “Jesus,” she muttered. “Scare the shit outta me, would ya?”

I didn’t say anything back; my words weren’t quite reaching my throat.

Emmy looked at me, her mouth slightly open; the room was so quiet I could hear her breathing. I was suddenly extremely conscious of how close we were standing, by accident, simply by virtue of how we’d stumbled into the room; the cold air from the windows, slightly open, chilled against my skin, but I felt overwhelmingly hot.

My breathing stopped.

Then Emmy was kissing me, her hands gentle and pulling at the arms of my sweater, her lips warm and way softer than I would have guessed. I stood unmoving for a second, paralyzed by the surprise.

But then, without deciding anything, without thinking, I kissed her back. I pressed up into her, my hands weaving around her neck. Her hands wound around my waist to press against the small of my back and I curved into her, my fingers running through the downy curls at the nape of her neck. Her hands snuck under the back of my sweater, and her fingers were so cold against my overheated skin that I gasped.

I pulled away, my forehead resting against hers, my breathing fast and shallow. I had never been this near to Emmy before, and standing so close I could see her light red lashes, the sprinkle of freckles across her eyelids, over her nose. Her hands still rested on my waist; by now, the temperature of her skin had warmed up to match mine.

The lack of thinking caught up with me then, and I was suddenly overwhelmed. I broke away from her hold completely, stepping back, her hands hanging there for a moment in the place where I had been before she shoved them in her pockets.

“Em…” I started but couldn’t finish. I looked down at my hands; they were shaking.

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly, her gaze fixed on the scuffed wooden floor underneath us.

“I’ve got to go,” I said, walking backwards till I got to the door. I pulled it open and ran down the stairs, barely pausing to throw on my jacket and grab my guitar before bursting out of the café into the snow. I tipped my head up, drinking in the cold air like it was water.

I left my coat unbuttoned as I walked home, craving the coolness of the wind. But by the time I got back to the apartment, I was shivering, and I couldn’t stop. I stripped out of my wet clothes and wrapped a bathrobe around me, and then I sat on the floor of my bedroom and rested my head in my arms and cried.

//

I decided that all I wanted to do with my weekend was hibernate. So I hoarded all the comfort food we had in the apartment (Oreos, cheese, half a jar of Nutella), found an old sweatshirt of Jamie’s that I only wore when I knew I wasn’t going to encounter other humans, and burrowed into a mound of pillows on my bed, trying to lose myself in studying for my physiology midterm. When that didn’t work, I switched to Netflix.

Partway through Saturday, Andy poked her head into my room. Before she could ask, I told her I was sick, and she left me alone.

After receiving the tenth text from Em asking if I was alive, I told her that I was, but that I was in hibernation mode. I thought she’d gotten the memo, but a few minutes later my phone rang.

“Hey, you,” Emmy said as I answered, rising into an upright position.

“Hey.”

“Okay, I’m going to predict where you are right now.”

“Go for it.”

“You’re on your couch, wearing those ratty grey sweatpants, eating Nutella off a spoon and watching an old black and white movie.”

I looked down and pick at a hole in my sweats. “Well, you’re right about the pants.”

“And about the Nutella?”

“Well…yeah. It’s done now though.” I glanced at the empty jar on my bedside table and sighed deeply. “I’m in my bed though, and I’m watching Orange Is the New Black, so you’re wrong there.”

“Ooh, I love that show. Which season are you on?”

“The first. I just started. There are, like, a shitload of lesbians in this show.”

“I know right? My kin,” Em said in a creepy Gollum voice, and I laughed.

She laughed too, but then the line went silent. I lay back down and sighed again.

“So how’re you doing?”

“Not great,” I admitted.

“Do you want to talk about –”

“Nope.”

“Jules, I think –”

“Nope.”

“Okay, okay. We’ll wait. You know we’ll have to talk about it sometime though, right?”

“Yeah, I know.” I’d spent all day trying not to think about it, but it kept creeping into my head uninvited, making my stomach flutter. “I’ve just got to…figure some shit out first.”

“For sure. I know what that’s like.” Emmy’s voice held so much understanding that I was tempted to just tip over like a full glass of water and spill everything to her, but at this point I wasn’t sure what would come out.

My room was darker now; the sun had set. I got up and wandered into the living room, flicking on a lamp and the TV and checking what was on that night. “Hey, Emmy?”

“Yeah?”

“Andy’s out with Dex tonight, and I feel like I should probably get in some human interaction before the day ends…do you want to come over and, like, watch a movie or something? Indiana Jones is going to be on at nine.”

“So you want to just watch Indy –”

“And not talk about anything. Yes.”

“I could do that. Do you want me to bring anything? I have some chips here…” I could hear her rustling around her cupboard. “Ooh, peppermint patties!”

“Yes and yes,” I giggled.

“Okay, I’ll be over in five,” she said, and I settled into the couch, my ear hot where my phone had been pressed against it.

Em showed up just before Indy started, a bag of Ruffles and a package of candy in tow. She sat on the old floral couch beside me, leaned against the back of it and turned her head to look at me. I looked back at her, and her face softened. “You okay?” she asked.

“It’s been quite a month,” I said in reply.

She ripped open the bag of chips. “I know. I’m sorry. But it’ll get easier,” she said, tipping the bag toward me, and something in her voice assured me that it would. “Here. Eat.”

It was nice, and it was easy, sitting with Em and watching Raiders of the Lost Ark; we didn’t talk much, but having her there made me feel better. Neither of us mentioned what had happened the previous night, and for the most part I was doing a damn good job of forgetting the fact that twenty-four hours ago her lips were pressed against mine and now we were sitting with barely an inch between our legs. Sometimes though, we’d laugh at something in the movie and she’d turned to face me, her eyes dancing, and I couldn’t help the warmth spreading through me like rich red wine.

[juliebeanbook]

well I should tell you that times have changed

Close your eyes. Try your best to remember how to get to Jamie’s apartment. You wonder why she trusted you to get here on your own.

It takes you four buses instead of two to get to her place in the city, and it’s dark instead of dinnertime. You let yourself into the house, knocking as you go. “Jamie?” you shout into the house. “Sorry I’m late.”

Jamie pops out of the living room. “Hey!” she cries, running over to hug you. “I thought you had decided not to come!”

You hug her back and shake your head. “I just suck at finding things. I still don’t see why you have to stay here over the summer. Why didn’t you come home?”

“I’m taking two summer courses, I told you!” Jamie says.

“Yeah, but I wasn’t listening.”

“I know, you’re the worst.”

“Love you too.”

“Anyway, these are my housemates,” Jamie says, bringing you into the little living room of her apartment. “Sadie and Jude, this is my dorky sister.”

“Hey dorky sister,” Sadie says. Jude waves. They’re both very…alternative looking, you decide. Sadie is wearing a loose tank top that exposes two sleeve tattoos that spread over her clavicle, and her nose has a big ring in it, like a bull would wear. Jude has purple hair that’s shaved on one side and streaked in electric blue. You feel oddly mainstream, your hair pulled back in an entirely ordinary ponytail and not a single spot of ink on your body.

You sit on Jamie’s big armchair and share a big bowl of Cheetos with Jamie’s housemates as they tell you about themselves. Sadie is studying pure math (“It’s cuz she don’t love herself,” Jamie explained); Jude is double majoring in chemical biology and art history. “It’s a weird combo, I know,” Jude says, laughing and running a hand over the buzzed-short part of her head. “But I love learning about beautiful things, and personally, I think the way electrons are pulled towards a nucleus is just as beautiful as Monet and his fucking water lilies. Just different.”

You like the way she explains it, like how she can call one thing as beautiful as another very different thing. You love science and you love music, so you’ve got to agree.

The bowl of Cheetos empties out and goes away, and out comes a bottle of white wine. You are thirteen, so you haven’t ever had wine, but Jamie prods you to try a sip. It’s cool and light, but more sour than you expected, harsh as it slides down your throat. As you drink slowly, small sips at once, you listen to Jamie badger Sadie with questions on her love life. “I don’t actually think she’s real,” Jamie says, stretching out across the loveseat and looking upside down at Sadie. “This girl you keep talking about. I think she’s a fake girlfriend.”

Jude giggles. “She’s real!” Sadie says. “I swear! She’s just very…reclusive.”

“So reclusive, in fact,” Jude says, “that no living being has ever seen her.”

“Is she a vampire?” Jamie wonders.

You can tell Sadie is sensitive about the topic; she seems visibly upset. “Well at least I have a girlfriend that I can talk about,” she says, looking pointedly at Jamie, her words dripping with acidity, “and I’m not so far into the closet that my face is in a fucking coat.”

You wonder, for a second, if maybe you had misheard. Maybe Sadie was looking at Jude. Maybe “the closet” had some different meaning that you aren’t aware of, aren’t old enough to understand. But then you see Jamie’s face, pale like she’s maybe going to be sick, and you know Sadie meant what she said.

Your sister sees you looking at her, sits back upright on the loveseat. “Julie –” she starts.

“Jamie, what’s going on?” you ask as the room seems to tilt a bit on its axis, so that you feel just off-balance enough to feel like you might fall. “Are you…are you gay?” The word is foreign on your tongue, like it is from a different language that you aren’t very fluent in. Barely out of junior high, it is still a word you are almost afraid of, a word that contains more than your scope of understanding at the time.

Jamie swallows, hard. “Yeah,” she says, trembling but with finality, like closing a door hard.

The new information slowly fits into your brain, and you try to make sense of it, attempting to apply it to what you’ve known about your older sister for your entire thirteen years. While you do this, you nod slowly, because as you think back, it begins to make sense. All the boyfriends Jamie had but didn’t seem into. All the clothes she’d been wearing, androgynous and boyish and baggy. All the times Jamie had tried to bring your parents around on current social issues that they refused to budge on.

“Okay,” you say, which seems insufficient to communicate everything you’re feeling but is all you can think to say.

“It’s okay if it takes you a little while to, um, get used to it,” Jamie says. “It took me a long time too.”

“How long?” you ask. “Have you known, I mean?”

Jamie shrugs. “Maybe a year? Year and a half? I was in denial for a long time, that’s for sure. You’re…you’re okay with this, right?” She looks straight at you, eyes pleading as she leans forward, elbows resting on her knees.

“Yeah,” you say, stammering a little. “Of course I’m okay with it.”

Later, you would have time to think about it, to ponder what you knew and what you had assumed and redraw the sketch of Jamie that you carried in your head. But for now, you accept her at face value, as what she says she is. You drink a little more wine. You listen to Sadie’s stories, to Jude’s teasing. And you soak it all in.

[juliebeanbook]

nine: how long it takes they never say

Andy had been telling me for months that my nineteenth birthday was going to be a Big Deal. She’d been legal since January, but my birthday wasn’t until the end of October, so she’d had lots of time to plan. “I swear Julie, this is going to be the party to end all parties,” she insisted back in the summer. “It’s going to blow your mind.”

But by the time my birthday rolled around, I was a week out of my burnt-out relationship, and I wasn’t in the mood for a party at all.

The morning of October 21st dawned drizzly and cold. I let myself sleep in, not having any classes till after lunch; made myself a coffee with extra sugary creamer. I wandered over to the kitchen table, where two cinnamon rolls lay on a little plate, with a card tucked beside them. It was a dorky card with a cat wearing huge glasses, wishing me a purr­-fect day. I checked my phone and saw a text from Andy.

I know you don’t want a party, but come to Barry’s after you get out of classes tonight. I want to buy you your first legal drink :)

I smiled. I couldn’t handle a party right now, but drinks were manageable.

After my stats night class I bussed over in the dark to Barry’s, the bar and grill where Andy worked. I didn’t go often; with deer heads on the walls and thirteen different ales on tap, it had a definite man-cave air about it. Andy had a discount there though, and it was a quick bus ride from campus, so I didn’t mind.

Andy was untying her apron and chatting up the bartender when I walked in. “Hey, birthday girl!” she said. “Perfect timing, I’m just done my shift. Come here.” She pulled me in for a hug, and I hugged her back, her bony shoulders popping under my hands. “How are you?” she asked, holding me at arm’s length. “Be honest here, Jules.”

I sighed. “Not great.”

“Well, I have the solution to that,” she said, leading me to the bar and sitting on a leather stool, “and it’s called a personalized cocktail. I asked Evan to make one special for you.”

“Aw, Andy, that’s so sweet!” I watched as Evan mixed me up a pretty pink drink and poured it into a cocktail glass.

“It’s peach and raspberry and vodka,” she told me, “with a bit of lemon. I hope I got your favourite fruits right.”

“You did,” I assured her, tasting the cocktail. “This is incredible.”

“Good! Can I have one too?” Andy asked Evan.

“I’m going to have to see your ID,” Evan said, crossing his arms.

Andy gave him a deadpan look. “Evan, I literally work here.”

I could actually watch Evan’s comprehension happening in real time. “Oh. Right. Right. Sorry.”

Andy rolled her eyes so far back in her head I worried they wouldn’t come back out again. The poor girl got carded pretty much every time she went out, but this was a new low.

Over peach-raspberry cocktails I talked over the breakup with Andy; not going into excruciating detail, but enough so that she knew the circumstances. She hadn’t known about Ben’s jealousy problem, or his drinking; when I told her, she said she felt guilty for not realizing what was going on, and even though I told her not to worry I knew why Andy felt bad. Sometimes all we can do is stand by when someone we care about is hurting; we want to fix things but they’re out of our control. Sometimes, all we can do is hold their hand and make them a personalized cocktail and hope just being present will be enough to help them heal, like a vine leaning on a stake to grow, dependent on it for balance and sunlight. Sometimes you’re the stake, sometimes you’re the vine; just like the sitting duck at our shows, everyone gets a turn.

//

A couple days later Emmy and I decided that Kathleen should meet Jamie and Anne-Marie officially. We’d mentioned the idea to our sisters, but so far, the parties had yet to meet face-to-face. So Jamie offered to host, Emmy offered to drive Kathleen over, and I offered to bring food.

That afternoon I rode the bus across the city with a homemade pie balanced on my lap. It was a strategic pie; Kathleen had once told me that Emmy’s favourite fruit were raspberries, and pie was Jamie’s weakness. If they had nothing in common, at least there would be pie.

I went up the flagstone path of Jamie’s house and knocked on her bright yellow door. (I had originally advised against such a bright colour, but Jamie had insisted that no matter what sort of mood she was in, the yellow would always cheer her up.) Anne-Marie answered, breathless and excited. “Julie, cherie,” she said, “come in! Kathleen and Emily are already here.”

Oh god, I thought as I hung up my jacket and kicked off my shoes at the front entrance. I’m late. What if they’ve all been sitting in awkward silence for an hour and I wasn’t there to be the mediator?

But when I came into the sunny living room, warm from the big bay window, I didn’t see strangers perched gingerly on the edges of their chairs, hands twisting, making small talk. Kathleen was curled up in the big cushy armchair, listening as Jamie told one of her unnecessarily long jokes. Emmy sat on the ground against the couch, eating from a bowl of Doritos and adding snarky commentary to Jamie’s joke.

“So then the man said, ‘Joke’s on you, I don’t even own a golf cart!’”

Kathleen tipped her head back and laughed; Emmy shook her head but couldn’t help but laugh too. “Hey, you guys,” I said, and they looked up, realizing I had come in. Anne-Marie sat back down on the little couch next to Jamie.

“Hey!” Emmy said, smiling up at me and patting the floor beside her. I sat down and she offered me the bowl of chips. “Cool Ranch!” she said, wiggling the bowl in front of me.

“Julie, look! I’ve finally met someone who appreciates my jokes,” Jamie said triumphantly, patting Kathleen’s arm.

“Kathleen, you’re a special type,” I said, and Kathleen grinned at me, the corners of her eyes crinkling.

“I brought raspberry pie,” I announced, and Kathleen and Jamie both jerked their heads up at me, wide-eyed. Their reactions were perfect; my strategic pie was spot-on.

Although dinner was probably happening within an hour, we all decided pie won out, and so we grabbed forks and dug in. “Careful of your pie, you two on the floor,” Jamie said, pointing at us with her fork. “I don’t want raspberry on my gay décor.” Jamie’s living room was full of bright colours; primary-coloured throw pillows littered the ground, a rainbow-striped mat lay underneath us. Anne-Marie swore it hadn’t been on purpose; Jamie swore it had.

“Gay-cor?” Kathleen suggested.

Jamie giggled. “Yes! Perfect.”

Once the pie was done, we started to get down to business. Jamie and Anne-Marie had prepared a bunch of questions to grill Kathleen with: how far along was she? (Fifteen weeks.) Had she gotten an ultrasound yet? (Yes.) Was she okay with giving up legal guardianship of her child? (She was a bit more hesitant on this one, but said yes.) Was she okay with her baby having two moms?

When Jamie asked her that question, Kathleen cocked her head, gave her a questioning look. “What do you mean?”

Jamie shrunk down in the couch a little bit. “Well, I just…I thought I should ask, some people are weird about it. Father figures and such.”

“Well, I’m not,” Kathleen said decisively. “It doesn’t matter to me. I want my baby to have good parents. Who cares if he has two moms? I really like you guys,” she said, blushing.

Jamie visibly relaxed; Anne-Marie put an arm around her and pulled her close. “Thanks hun,” Jamie said. “We like you too. And we like whoever is in there.” She pointed to Kathleen’s belly. Kathleen giggled.

They wrapped up with questions, and Jamie invited Kathleen to come help her make stuffed pasta shells. Anne-Marie turned on the TV onto some game show. I sat with Emmy on the floor in a big patch of sunlight, my face warm. Emmy frowned at the now-empty bowl of Doritos, but when she turned towards me, she was smiling. “Thank you,” she said. “For this. I feel a lot better. And I think that dork over there does too.”

I shook my head. “I didn’t really do anything,” I reminded her. “Besides, I was drunk when I came up with this; you can’t really give me that much credit.”

“Fair enough,” Emmy said, her eyes crinkling like Kathleen’s did, as she took my hand and squeezed it. I wove my fingers through hers, feeling grounded and safe for the first time in weeks.

[juliebeanbook]

maybe we could find new ways to fall apart

Close your eyes, and when you open them, you have to make a decision. Andy has thirty different colours of nail polish, and you have to pick one; surely, she said, there would be one to heal your broken heart.

The thing with Andy was that she made you feel better about being overdramatic or emotional, because as much as you could exaggerate, Andy could always take it a step further. You had come back to your room after Thanksgiving break lugging your old suitcase behind you to find Andy already there, having already unpacked and already gotten your text. She knew you had gotten dumped and she knew you were sad, but she seemed to have overestimated how heartbroken you really were. It was nice, in a way, to have a friend whose emotions were always so much larger than life; it helped put your own into perspective.

Andy had gone into full-on rescue mode, laying out bags of chips and Oreos on the bed, blasting Taylor Swift, and bringing out all her nail polishes. “Pick,” she ordered, spreading her hands over the polishes like she was trying to sell them. “Which one speaks to you?”

You pick a rich red-purple, but more so because it matches your outfit, not so much because it “speaks to you.”

You lay your hand on Andy’s knee as she paints each nail with the dark purple, delicate and slow. “I’m terrible at doing this on my own nails,” she explains, “but with someone else, you’ve got so much control.”

Andy’s side of the room, where your break-up-fest is happening, is an explosion of brightness. Every available surface is covered with a poster or neon-patterned wrapping paper or pictures; Andy had decided months before she even moved in that she didn’t want to be able to see the white cinderblock walls. “I’m at school,” she’d explained to you; “it might feel like a prison sometimes, but at least it shouldn’t look like one.”

She blows a small stream of air onto each nail as she finishes it to speed up the drying process. As she paints, you eat Oreos, not feeling hungry so much as just a little bit empty. This time yesterday, you were at Pat’s house, holding his cat and trying not to cry as he explained the distance was “too much for him.” He had joined a fraternity, you had seen on Facebook, but when you mentioned it he got angry and defensive, which seemed to support your found-a-new-sorority-girl theory. You didn’t press him on his reasons though; you took it all without much argument. Maybe because now when you looked at him, you could no longer see what had made your heart beat so fast before. Before, he was a sum, but now he’s just parts.

Andy finishes your nails, and you shake your hands to dry all the polish. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asks you, her face a portrait of pity, but you realize that you don’t. Andy is expecting a fallout, a messy aftermath of tears and hurt feelings and betrayal and lies and slammed doors, but that’s not how it happened. Sometimes, you guess, relationships don’t explode outward like a dying star, blinding you, knocking you backwards with the impact of all the colliding emotions. Sometimes they just fade like they’ve been in a window too long and the sun bleached out all their colour; someone turns down the volume on your feelings and the effort to hang on is too much for what you’re getting. There are no dramatic last words, no declarations of love and declarations of hate and accusations and scrambles to explain. There’s just so little, where there used to be so much. And sometimes, that hurts more. But there isn’t much to say about it.

“No,” you say, leaning back on Andy’s pillows and looking up at the photos on the wall, grins and freckles and arms looped around shoulders. “I just want to listen to Taylor Swift.”

Andy smiles. “We can do that.” She turns up the volume and helps you finish the box of Oreos, and she helps fill up that empty feeling a little, too. It’ll be there for a while longer. But not forever.

[juliebeanbook]

eight: the moon is on my side

I felt overdressed as I stepped into the party, in that most of the people inside were wearing minimal clothing. Hot, half-naked skin rubbed up against me as I fought through the dancing crowd, light bouncing off of sweaty faces in blue and red and yellow. Andy yelled something at me over the deafening volume of the music, but I didn’t catch what it was. She made her own way through the crowd, and I sighed, hoping my tiny friend wouldn’t get trampled.

“Hey!” I heard the shout coming from behind me, and I turned around to see Emmy and Cal; Emmy overheating in one of her plaid shirts, Cal looking displeased at whatever it was he was drinking from a yellow cup.

“Hey!” I yelled back. “This party is super gross!”

“I agree!” Emmy shouted.

“I think I need to drink something!” A little alcohol might soften the edges a bit, making the sticky-hot room a little more bearable.

“There’s a mystery punch over there,” Cal said, pointing over to a table, where yellow cups were filled with some sort of undetermined liquid. “And I think if you ask Jenny she’ll pour you some tequila.”

“Thanks!” I went to search out Jenny, who gladly obliged my tequila request. A couple shots and two yellow cups later, the room’s temperature hadn’t lowered, but my outlook had improved.

By the time Ben showed up, I was more than a little unsteady on my feet. “Hey, honey!” I cried, hugging him tight around the waist. He smelled great, like evergreen and a lake at night.

“Hey,” he said, voice off-kilter. His eyes were red and bloodshot, and his breath reeked of beer; he had gotten a head start before the party, then.

“Why don’t we go somewhere more quiet?” he suggested. “I can barely hear you!”

I took the hand he held out for me and he led me down the hall of Jenny’s house, opening doors till he found a bedroom. He pushed me in, a little roughly, and shut the door.

“Ben, what –”

He cut me off with a hard kiss, wet against my mouth. I pulled away. “What are you doing?” I mumbled.

“Shut up,” he muttered, grabbing my ass and pulling me closer. I tried to push his hand away but he didn’t remove it. “We haven’t done this in so long. It’s been way too long.”

“Yeah, well, we were fighting…”

“I don’t want to fight anymore. Let’s not fight anymore.” He was unbuckling his belt, he was pulling my dress down over my bra, and this wasn’t even his bedroom, this was someone else’s bedroom, and his hands were everywhere I didn’t want them.

“Ben, no, we don’t even know whose room this is…”

“But that’s what makes it hot.” His pants were down now, and he pulled me closer, pressing himself against me. His hands were dragging up my back now and I reached around and tried to pry them off me.

“Ben. Get me off me. Stop.” I finally managed to step back, away from Ben, who looked ridiculous with his pants around his ankles, his face hot and sweaty.

“What the fuck, Julie?” he asked, his voice dark and low.

“I don’t want to do this right now,” I said, pulling my dress up.

He pulled his jeans back up over his hips, his belt still hanging unbuttoned. “Why the hell not?” he asked. “What’s wrong with you?”

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” I said, uncomfortably aware of how close he still was to me, so close I could feel his hot sour breath on my face. “What’s wrong with you? You don’t even listen to me, you could tell I didn’t want it –”

“Like hell you didn’t want it,” he said, in something that was almost a growl.

“I didn’t!” I insisted. “You always get like this when you’re drunk, like you don’t even notice I’m not interested, like your fucking boner is thinking instead of your brain. This isn’t the first fucking time.”

“What the fuck are you saying?” he said, stepping closer, his hands planted on his hips.

“I’m saying you’re a goddamn drunk, Ben.”

“This isn’t about me,” he cried. “Stop trying to make this about me. I know why you don’t want to sleep with me anymore, Julie.”

“What the hell Ben? Are you serious? You’re bringing this up again?”

“I saw you with her at the party when I came in,” Ben said. He wavered slightly, spreading his feet a little wider apart to keep his balance. He wasn’t in his right mind. He wouldn’t remember any of this tomorrow.

But to be fair, I probably wouldn’t, either.

“I know you’re cheating on me with that dyke,” Ben said, “so you can stop fucking lying to me.”

My vision wavered, the scene blurring out. I could see Ben standing there, breathing heavily, and my brain slowly processed the accusation, what he’d called Emmy, the way he stood over me that made me feel so much smaller.

“Get the fuck out,” I whispered, but I knew he could hear me.

“Julie…” He stepped cautiously towards me, his hands held out in front of him, as if to show he was unarmed.

“Get. Out. Now.” My voice rose, although it shook. “I’m done, Ben. I’m done telling you the same thing again and again and you not believing me. I want you to leave.”

And for once, he actually listened.

I sat down on the bed, catching my breath, for a long time. The world was spinning, the quilt I was sitting on was scratchy wool. I gripped a handful of the blanket in my hand and tried to stop trembling.

When I emerged from the bedroom back into the hall, the party was even louder. I was suddenly tired down to my bones, the music overwhelming me in a wash of sound. I slumped against the living room wall, all my energy drained.

“Jules?” Emmy was crouching over me. I smiled to see her. “Are you okay?”

I nodded. “I’m really tired.”

“Yeah I bet. Do you – do you want to go home?”

All I could do was nod. Emmy helped me up, and I leaned against her as she led me to her car parked down the street. “Are you going to crash us?” I mumbled.

Emmy laughed. “No, I only had a couple sips of Cal’s drink, I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

We had to go through downtown to get back to my building. The bright neon lights of the signs and the red and green of stoplights pierced through the dark of the night. “I broke up with him,” I said to Emmy, breaking the silence.

“Good,” was all she said back.

Emmy pulled her Civic over in front of Maplebrook Manor. Before I could open my door, she got out and opened it for me.

“You don’t have to pull that Prince Charming shit on me,” I muttered as I stepped onto the curb. “I’m fine.”

Emmy chuckled. “You’re fine, eh?” I stumbled, and she caught me, wrapped an arm around my waist. “Yeah, you’re okay. Don’t need my help at all.”

“Nope,” I said, vaguely noting that we were going through the lobby. Now we were starting up the stairwell. “I don’t.”

My legs stopped working partway up the stairs; until that point, Emmy had been half-dragging me up, but now I couldn’t move. I sunk down onto the fifth-floor landing, leaned my head against the wall. Why was my head so goddamn heavy? It had turned to rock, that was it. My head was now a rock.

“Em,” I said.

“Yes, Jules?” She leaned against the railing, looked at me patiently, as you would look at a toddler who was having a temper tantrum.

“Does my head look different to you?”

“What?” she said. “What do you - are you trying to be funny, Jules?”

I started to cry. “No!” I said. “I’m not trying to be funny.”

“Fuck,” Emmy swore quietly, putting her hands in her jean pockets and looking down at me. “What am I going to do with you?”

I whimpered.

Emmy sighed, deep and long, and bent down beside me. I squinted up at her through tears, wiping my face with the back of my hand. “Put your arm around my shoulder,” she said.

“What?” I murmured, but did what she told me to.

She slipped her arm around my waist and lifted me up, grunting under my weight. “Sorry,” I mumbled, probably too quiet for Emmy to hear. She paused for a moment as we stood, and I leaned my head on her shoulder, soft flannel under my cheek.

We didn’t speak as she half-carried me up; I was senseless anyway. She set me down when they got to my door. “Can I have your key?” she asked me, and I surprisingly found it in my jacket pocket, right away; sober, it usually took me longer to find my keys than it did to walk up the six flights of stairs to my apartment.

Emmy unlocked the door and let me in, flicked on a light switch. I moved like a zombie to the bathroom, where I proceeded to bend over the sink and throw up a night’s worth of tequila.

Emmy came over and held my hair behind my head. “I hope you’re turned off tequila now,” she commented.

I nodded miserably. “And whatever was in those yellow cups.”

“You still don’t know what was in them?” she asked.

“Nope,” I said, filling up a plastic tumbler with water and washing out my mouth. “If you find out, let me know.”

Emmy followed me as I went down the hall to my bedroom. She stood at the door, politely looking away as I took off my dress, pulled on sweats. I didn’t know when I started to cry, but then there I was sobbing, snotting, big fat tears running down. Emmy was suddenly there, and I was leaning into her, making a complete mess of her shirt. I was completely dependent on her for balance; if she had pulled away, I would have fallen.

"Oh, Jules,” she whispered, stroking my hair. “What are we going to do with you?”

I didn’t know I was shivering till Emmy shrugged off her flannel and slid my arms through it. I hugged the warm cloth to my body as Emmy led me to my bed and helped me lie down.

“Are you leaving?” I asked her. My eyes were closed. I nestled my head into my pillow, pulled the quilt around my shoulders.

“No, I’ll stay,” she said. “If you want.”

I was fading fast. I didn’t reply. Her arm was around me, her body hot and comforting like a hot water bottle. As I fell asleep I heard her singing old Irish lullabies, in a language I wished I could understand.

//

My head hurt like an absolute bitch.

I felt like a pair of really big hands were squeezing my head from all sides. I groaned as I remembered all the shit I drank the night before. What the hell had been in those yellow cups?

I lay there, the sun from the window beside me warming my face. It must be late in the morning. I swung my legs out of bed. My head spun, and I waited for a full two minutes at the edge of my bed, waiting for the dizziness to ebb.

I stumbled out of my room to the bathroom and stripped off my clothes, turning the shower all the way hot. The burning water felt good on my achy body. I ran some shampoo through my hair, rinsed, got out, and pulled the wet curls into a ponytail.

I scampered down the hall to my room, feeling considerably more energized but still nauseous and criminally thirsty. I pulled on a sweater and shuffled into the kitchen.

And there was Emmy, standing in front of the stove, frying up bacon.

Right. It came back to me then. I’d been senseless, delirious. I hadn’t been thinking straight. I had barely been conscious. But I remembered how she’d dragged my sorry ass up the stairs. How she’d, um, gotten into bed with me.

“Hey,” she said, turning around and smiling. “You look great!”

I rolled my eyes, leaned against the counter.

“No, really,” Emmy said, flipping over the bacon. I was starting to get hungry despite myself; my stomach felt only slightly unsteady. “Damn, girl. The hungover look really suits you.”

I flipped her the bird.

“How are you feeling?” she asked me.

“Like dog shit,” I said simply, resting my head in my arms.

“Aw, poor Jules,” she said, making a pouty face at me. “Probably shouldn’t have drank so much mysterious shit last night, eh?”

“Em,” I said, “I’m not in the mood right now, okay? I’m really not feeling well, and I’d prefer not to think about last night.”

Her grin faded. She left the bacon sizzling on the stove and went to the counter, leaning against it. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “About what happened last night. About everything that happened with Ben. You didn’t deserve any of that.”

I shook my head. “It wasn’t your fault,” I said. I tried to keep myself from crying but a few tears escaped, running hot beneath my hand and Emmy’s.

“I know,” Emmy said, “but I’m still sorry.”

“Thanks for staying last night, Em. I needed someone there.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I stayed.”

“I smell burning,” I said.

She turned, taking her hand from my cheek, and pulled the smoking pan of bacon violently off the stove, sending a couple pieces flying out onto the linoleum. She turned the heat off and stood in the middle of the kitchen, blowing on the pan. I just looked at Emmy, standing there in her jeans with the rips and the white tank from last night, in bare feet, blowing on a pan of burning bacon. She looked up at me.

At the very same second, we burst out laughing. We laughed until I couldn’t hear my laughter anymore, until I was crying, until my sides hurt.

She served us both some bacon, and we sat at the kitchen table and ate. I only had a bit, on a child’s plastic plate, but it was the best burnt bacon I had ever had.

[juliebeanbook]

this house is falling apart

Close your eyes. Listen to your aunt arguing with your grandmother, and remind yourself not to get involved.

Sunday dinners are always a bit of a struggle – everyone’s in their best starched shirts and ironed skirts from church that morning, politely asking to please pass the pepper, too many relatives all around one table. But this one is the worst of all, because for the first time, the seat next to you is empty where Jamie should be.

Uncle Walter is telling boring baseball jokes again, and you laugh when it seems appropriate but mostly stuff mashed potatoes into your face so you don’t have to talk to any of these people. You catch a look from your mother from across the table, seeming to be asking you to stop shovelling in mashed potatoes, and you maintain eye contact as you take a massive bite and fit it all in your mouth. She looks disgusted; you feel somewhat satisfied.

It was a chore for her and Dad to get you here at all, really. You haven’t talked to them at all during the six days it’s been since they made her leave, not even to ask about groceries or laundry or the weather or the news. Even the most mundane things seem too much to talk to them about now. They kicked your sister out, so they don’t deserve your company. Thus, it took a lot of talking-into from your parents (Mom mostly) to get you at the table, because really, you liked watching her beg. In the end, you only went because you want to see your Aunt Rita, who is about to have a baby, and your little cousin Bethany, who worships you; you didn’t really care to see anyone else, and you don’t plan on talking to anyone who might take your parents’ side about Jamie.

The conversation tonight is careful like a waiter weaving between tables with a precarious tray; every time the topic veers anywhere close to your immediate family, anywhere close to Jamie, your mom steers it far away, asking how is your diabetes, Uncle Walter, and Granny, have you been going to euchre regularly with the girls? Once or twice, someone almost slips up, and I can feel the tension between everyone as they correct their course like a ship veering too far in the starboard direction.

But, as it turns out, your mother can’t control everyone at the table. Just as you’re serving the strawberry rhubarb pie, Bethany, who just turned five, wonders out loud “Where’s Jamie? I haven’t seen her all day!”

Your mother’s fork actually freezes on its way to her mouth. Your dad clears his throat. The table goes silent and cold.

Poor Bethany, however, just wants an answer. “Where is she?” she repeats, sticking out her lip in frustration, in obstinacy.

“She…had to go away,” Mom says, tucking into her pie again in a show of normalcy.

“Where?” Bethany asks. “Why? Why did she leave?”

Your parents don’t answer. Bethany is visibly upset, tugging on the end of her braids.

“You’d have to ask her,” your mother says finally, looking at her niece with level eyes.

“But I can’t,” Bethany says, now speaking in an almost-whisper. “I don’t know where she is.”

“Exactly,” you say, under your breath, but just loud enough for your mother to look up at you and glare. You glare back as you get up, pushing your chair back with force and leaving the dining room without saying goodbye to anyone. If Jamie couldn’t say a proper goodbye to any of them, neither would you.

[juliebeanbook]

seven: we’re gonna rattle this ghost town

The start of second year crept up on us; one day we were all bumming around Dex’s backyard, Cal barbequing burgers to a blackened crisp and Emmy blasting power ballads on the big radio, and the next we were back on campus, with textbooks to be bought and new classes to try and stay awake in. As a health studies major, by the end of the first week I was already neck-deep in cell bio, stats, and the nervous system. Friday afternoon I got off the bus at the end of our street laden down with four new textbooks; I threw them on the kitchen table and collapsed onto the couch, calculating how much reading I could fit in before the show tonight.

Andy burst in just as I finished the first chapter of my readings on neurons. “Hey Jules!” she called out as she came into the main room.

“The sections between myelin sheaths are called nodes of Ranvier,” I replied.

“Nerd.” Andy was studying to be a social worker; she called me a nerd all the time, but she didn’t take a single science or math course so I hadn’t thought of a good comeback yet. “Oh, shit!” she cried as something dropped to the ground.

I jerked around on the couch and saw Andy crouching over a box full of streamers, Christmas lights, and banners. “What the hell is all that?” I asked her.

“Oh, I got these from that shady party store on Clover,” she said. “You know, the one we’re pretty sure is running a back door drug business? Anyway, they were throwing out all these old decorations and I said I wanted to take them, and they said sure. So I got them all for free!”

“Andy, these are shit,” I said, holding up a flimsy plastic banner. “This one says Happy Retirement.”

“Yeah, well, it’s better than nothing, right?” Andy said. “It’ll still look festive!”

“Baby’s first birthday,” I muttered, digging through the cast-off decorations. “First communion. Welcome home, Chucky. Andy, this one is personalized, it literally has someone else’s name on it.”

She grabbed the Chucky banner from me. “This is my favourite one!” she said. “It’s perfect. It’ll go in a place of honour.”

“Wait, what are these even for? Who are you throwing a party for?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m throwing a surprise party for Dex!” Andy said, packing the last roll of crepe paper streamers into the box and hoisting it onto the kitchen table.

“When?”

“Tonight. Do you know if we have any cake mix?”

“What? Tonight? Why am I just hearing about this now?”

Andy shrugged as she rummaged through the cupboards. “It’s a surprise party.”

“It’s not supposed to be a surprise for the guests, Andy. Besides, what about the show?”

“There is no show tonight. It was cancelled like a month ago. By me.”

I checked my calendar; sure enough, there was a hole in the show schedule, which until now had been a mystery.

“Aha!” She pulled a box of chocolate cake mix out of the back of the pantry and held it over her head triumphantly like the Lion King. “I knew it. Now, I need your opinion, do you think he would like a cake better or cupcakes? Cupcakes are a fun novelty, but Dex is a man, you know? I feel like he might feel threatened in his masculinity if I made him cupcakes.”

I sighed and went over to lean on the counter. “Make a cake then. A man cake.”

“Did you mean for that to sound like pancake?” Andy said, pointing a wooden spoon at me and winking. “You punny kid.”

I accepted that I wouldn’t be doing any more reading tonight and helped Andy put the cake together. “Where’s the cake pan?” I asked her when I couldn’t find it in the drawer under the oven.

“Oh, I was using it to hold my jewellery. It’s on my room, on top of my filing cabinet.”

The pan was indeed on top of what Andy called her filing cabinet, which was actually three plastic milk crates stacked on top of each other to act like cubbies. I decided not to question why Andy felt like she needed to use a cake pan to hold jewellery as I emptied a tangle of necklaces and earrings onto her desk.

//

The party was held in Dex’s backyard; an admittedly terrible place to throw a surprise party for Dex, but he was the only one of our friends who had an acceptable yard. (Although the house Emmy lived in had a backyard, she shared it with the people who lived in the attached house, and we were all a little scared of them and their feral cat.) Andy went in to distract Dex for a while (how, I didn’t want to know) while I enlisted the help of Emmy, Cal, and some of our friends from school. We ran around the lawn hanging bright-coloured crepe paper from trees, stapling the inappropriate banners onto the fence, draping Christmas lights over the picnic table.

Stepping back to admire our handiwork, the yard was a colourful hodgepodge of celebration. Andy was right; at least it looked festive.

Dex was pretty surprised for someone whose girlfriend had probably been dropping hints for weeks. We dined on ice-fresh cans of lemonade and Andy’s rich chocolate cake, sitting on and around the picnic table, with its greying wood and cigarette stains. Emmy disappeared around the house and came back with her guitar and her fiddle. She passed me the guitar. “Her name is Bridget O’Malley,” she said, stroking her hand around the curves of her instrument. “And if you hurt her, I will end you.”

“I appreciate your confidence, Em,” I said, and she gave me a cheeky grin as she started playing a slow pretty song on her fiddle. “Key?”

I played along with her music and we invented our own duet in the key of C. It made the party go all relaxed and loose, and then someone brought out a couple cases of beer, and everyone got a lot looser.

By the time the yard was dark and the Christmas lights sparkled above our heads, Emmy was laughing at everything I said, Dex was singing loudly in Italian, and Cal was explaining something in an angry tone to our friend Beth while she nodded emphatically. Emmy and I were passing another beer back and forth. “Jules,” she said, “I’ve got to tell you, Kathleen’s in a bad place. She’s three months along. Three fucking months along.”

“I thought she was going to get an abortion?” I asked her, taking the beer from her and sipping.

Emmy shook her head, drawn-out and lazy. “She backed out last-minute. Too freaked out. It would’ve been over by now though. Now we’re still in shit. Fuck this.” She grabbed the beer from me and gulped some down.

“Is she going to keep it? Or her. Him. Whatever.”

“Hell if I know. She can’t raise a kid though. She just turned seventeen, man.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Fuck no she can’t.”

Sometimes when I was drunk, my brain worked slower than usual, taking three times as long to fit words together and make sentences. But sometimes it worked startlingly quickly, spiralling out of control like a car speeding around a tight corner. “Hey, Em,” I said. “I have a really crazy idea. Hear me out, okay?”

“I’m hearing you,” she said. “Loud and clear. Lay it on me.”

“Okay,” I said, conscious of how slurred my speech was, but not caring enough to stop talking. “So here’s the thing. Your sister has a baby that she doesn’t want, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, my sister wants a baby. So you do the math, Einstein.”

“So what are you saying, we do a sister-baby swap?”

I started laughing at the sheer absurdity of the phrase. Emmy began to giggle uncontrollably. She threw the empty beer bottle into the grass and got up, turning up the volume on Dex’s massive radio. “Come on,” she said, grabbing my hand and pulling me towards where a group of our friends were dancing in the uncut grass. “I fucking love this song.”

Em’s dancing was completely ridiculous, her limbs flailing like someone was tugging her around against her will, but she danced with such abandon, such drunken disregard for what anyone would think, that it was somehow infectious. I went and danced with her, shimmying to some awful sample of 90s white boy rap, laughing as Em sang along to every word.

Andy was sitting on Dex’s lap at the picnic table, grooving along to the beat. “Come on, Andy!” I called out to her, reaching out my hand and beckoning her.

She tumbled off Dex’s lap with both hands in the air as she shouted “God bless America!” and launched herself into my arms.

“God bless fucking America,” Emmy echoed, ripping a Fourth of July banner off the fence and holding it up like a spoil of war, and we all cheered.

I’d never felt so goddamn patriotic.

//

I woke up on Dex’s couch late the next morning, midday sun coming in through his living room windows. A throw blanket was draped haphazardly over me; I was still in my skirt from last night but my shirt had disappeared. I covered my bra with the blanket and blinked, my eyes heavy, trying to adjust to the bright light.

A groan came from under me. I looked down and saw Emmy curled up on the floor, a quilt covering everything except for a spill of red curls emerging at the edge. She pressed the blanket down, uncovering her face and rubbing her hand over it.

“Hey, Em?”

I got a curt grunt in reply.

“Have you seen my shirt?”

She felt around on the carpet around her and pulled my shirt out from under the couch. “How the hell did it get down there?” I asked, and she made a sort of shrugging motion as she hid back underneath the quilt, shrinking back like a turtle into its shell. I sat up and pulled the shirt on, fighting some mad head rush.

“Julie?” Her voice was muffled underneath the quilt.

“Yeah?” I said, my voice sounding croaky. I looked over the back of the couch into Dex’s kitchen and compared the benefits of going to get water versus the physical exertion it would take to do so.

“I’m remembering some weird shit that went down last night and I’m not sure if it was, like, a dream I had or if it actually happened. Something about our sisters…and Kathleen’s baby…”

“Oh. Right.” I groaned as I got up, deciding thirst ruled over all. “We were gonna do, like…a baby swap? Like, Kathleen was going to give her kid to Jamie?”

“Yes. That was it. So that actually happened?” Emmy sat up, scrunching her face, the strap of her tank top falling down her shoulder.

“Well, no actual baby swap happened,” I said, looking through Dex’s cupboards to find the one with glasses in it. “Yet, anyway.”

Em laughed. “Thank God.”

I poured us each a glass of tap water, and handed one to Emmy, who took it and proceeded to chug three-quarters of it in one go.

“You know,” she started.

“Em, no. That’s your plotting voice.”

“I don’t have a plotting voice.”

“Yes you do, you have a cartoon villain voice, like you’re in your evil lair in a cave and you just came up with a plan for world domination.”

Emmy squinted at me. “That’s not a thing. Anyway. I feel like…is it crazy that I feel like our weird little drunk plan is actually sort of a good idea?”

I burst into laughter as I slumped back onto the couch. “You’re kidding, right? See, Em, here’s the thing. I get these crazy ideas sometimes, but they never work. They never work.”

“This one might!” she insisted.

“No. No it won’t,” I repeated, rubbing my head. “You know how in movies, there’s always that guy who everybody thinks is crazy and he has this crazy genius idea and no one believes him but then in the end he’s right, and he proves everyone wrong? Well, I’m not that guy! I have these crazy ideas, and then in the end, it turns out I’m just crazy! Just like everyone thought!”

I stopped talking, sipped my water. Emmy wrapped the quilt around her shoulders snugly, like a mother tucking her child in at night. “It makes sense,” she said quietly, after a while. “I don’t know what your other ideas were, or why they didn’t work, but this one makes sense. My sister doesn’t want a baby, but she has one. Your sister doesn’t have a baby, but she wants one. It’s just a displacement, one family to another.”

I had to admit, it did make sense. But all I could think of was all the times I’d tried to help Jamie before, all the ways I’d tried to salvage the shitshow that was her relationship with our parents, and how they had all failed, every time. Jamie was right; it wasn’t up to her to fix things, and it wasn’t up to me, either.

But this was something my parents hadn’t broken yet. So I didn’t need to fix it, but maybe I could make it better.

Dex came down the stairs then, Andy in tow. “Morning,” Dex called out, his loud voice too loud in our hungover ears. “Julie, you found your shirt!”

“Yeah, what happened to it?”

“I think I took it off you,” Andy said, “but I’m not a hundred percent sure of the context.”

“Pancakes!” Dex announced, brief and to the point.

Soon there was lumpy batter sizzling in the frying pan, and Andy was pouring orange juice into glasses, and the smell of butter and syrup were enough to tempt us over to the kitchen. Emmy kept the quilt wrapped around her shoulders as we sat down on the stools at the counter, pouring way too much sugar-sweet syrup onto pancakes that melted on our tongues.

“Did we sing the Star-Spangled Banner last night?” Andy wondered. She scraped the last of the batter out of the bowl and dropped it into the pan to make one last tiny pancake. “I feel like we did.”

“We definitely did,” Emmy confirmed. “We did a lot of random shit last night. Said a lot of random shit.” She looked at me out of the corner of her eye; quick, but I didn’t miss it.

“You never know when you might come up with something kind of great out of that random shit though,” I mumbled. Emmy wandered back to the living room, but not before bumping into my shoulder hard enough to hurt. I turned toward her, and she smiled at me; the smile of a cartoon villain, the smile of someone with a plan.

[juliebeanbook]

LET'S SPREAD THE WORD

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[juliebeanbook]

What can I say? This house is falling apart We've got no money but we've got heart We're gonna rattle this ghost town