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I'll admit it: I'm not always the best at making good decisions. Actually, I've made quite a few bad decisions in my life, although I think for the most part I've managed to make up for them in the long run. Claud - that's Claudia Kishi, one of my closest friends - once said to me, "I thought mathematicians were meant to be rationed?" She meant rational, of course, and I am, really, most of the time. Just not when it comes to relationships.
Claud wasn't around the last time I made a seriously bad decision. Maybe if she had been I wouldn't have made it, but we don't live in the same city any more, so it's not like she was handy to tell me not to be a huge idiot. We used to live in the same neighborhood, when we were in middle school and high school, and we were best friends almost from the first time we met. But then she got offered a scholarship to an art school in a different state (which was a Big Deal for her, because she is a seriously talented artist, but not so great at anything else school-related) and I moved back to New York to go to college.
I did say back to New York. I grew up there, moved to Stoneybrook, Connecticut, when I was twelve, moved back to New York for a while, and then when my parents split moved back to Stoneybrook with my mom. That's a lot of to-ing and fro-ing for a kid, but I got used to being ping-ponged between Mom and Dad eventually. New York was always home, though, since I'm more of a Bright Lights Big City sort of girl, so as soon as I graduated high school I packed up and left. I still miss Mom and my friends a lot, but I go back to Stoneybrook for holidays and weekends.
Sorry. I've got wildly off-track and I haven't even introduced myself yet. I'm Stacey McGill, shopaholic extraordinaire and student of accounting at NYU. I know - accounting sounds about as boring as it gets, but stuff like tax law can actually be pretty fascinating. Plus, accountants make some serious cash. You can’t feed a shopping habit like mine with a math teacher’s pay, believe me!
Like I said, I go back to Stoneybrook as often as I can. It’s easy – hop on a train with a stack of text books, study for a couple of hours, get off on the other side. I usually tell my dad where I’m going, so he doesn’t panic when I disappear, and by the time the train stops Mom’s there waiting for me. Usually, anyway. A few months ago, when I arrived, it wasn’t Mom waiting for me. It was Charlotte Johanssen.
Charlotte is – well, I used to call her my little sister, but actually I was her babysitter. She was an only child, like me, and really smart for her age, and somehow that made us closer than I was with most of the kids I babysat for. And I used to babysit a lot. I was even part of a babysitter’s club, in seventh and eighth grade, along with Claud and some of our other friends. It seems pretty juvenile now, I guess, but it supplemented my pocket money and kept me out of trouble. Mostly.
Charlotte isn’t that much younger than me, really, but there’s a really big maturity gap between someone who’s in college and someone in high school. That’s what I kept telling myself, anyway. I did my best to still think of her as a kid, even knowing she was planning on following her mother’s footsteps next year to become a doctor, even seeing her driving her first car and consoling her when she was dumped by her first boyfriend. Because, the thing was, about a year ago I’d realized that I liked Charlotte – really liked Charlotte. Not just in an older-sister-former-babysitter kind of way. It was wrong, and I knew it was wrong, but she’d be hurt if I avoided seeing her when I came to visit Mom, so I just tried to bury my feelings and fall in love with someone else instead.
As I got off the train she waved at me, and gave me her usual shy smile, and for the millionth time I thought, no, I can’t be attracted to someone who I’ve known since she was eight. Even if she was almost eighteen now, and had apparently learned to properly accessorize since I last saw her.
“Stacey!” Charlotte called, and I found myself pulling her into a hug. She smelled like chamomile and honey, and I wondered what shampoo she was using to give her hair such full body. And then I thought about Charlotte, in the shower, shampooing her hair, and I quickly dropped my arms again.
“Hi Charlotte,” I replied, as casually as I could. “Did Mom hire you to taxi me?”
Her cheeks flushed slightly. “Oh, no,” she said, “At least, I offered to pick you up. Um. I saw her in town and she said she wanted to make you a roast for dinner,” she explained, steering me towards the cucumber green sedan that was the light of her life. “So I thought it would give her a chance to, um, stuff a chicken...” Charlotte always sounds a little hesitant when she speaks. She’s mega shy, but she’s also super smart and really warm. That’s one of the things I’ve always lov- liked about her. “Sorry – I guess you would have wanted to see her straight away.”
“Hey, don’t apologize,” I told her, “You’re doing me a favour – and anyway, it’s always good to see you.” I honestly didn’t mean to give her my most flirtatious smile when I said that, but it just sort of happened, anyway, and Charlotte flushed again and abruptly started the car. We drove in silence, mostly. Charlotte isn’t a huge talker, and I was busy watching her out of the corner of my eye. Was it just me, or did she seem more nervous than usual?
It was getting dark by the time she pulled up next to my Mom’s house. I invited her in to grab a hot drink, because that was just polite, and then somehow she ended up staying for dinner. Charlotte was quiet but Mom and I talked a lot – I caught her up with all the gossip from college, and she caught me up with all of her own news. Finally, she asked, “So, you’re not seeing anyone at the moment, dear?”
“No Mom,” I said, in what I hoped was a warning voice. Things with Antigone had not worked out, not half at least because at the end of the day she just wasn’t Charlotte. Mom seemed to get the message, because she changed the subject quite quickly.
“I’ve got a bit of paperwork to catch up on – why don’t you stay, Charlotte, and watch a movie? I’m sure Stacey would like you to.”
I wasn’t sure that I would. My attraction to Charlotte made me feel crazy and all over the place – elated, the way I always felt when I was around someone I liked, but ashamed, since there was nothing OK about having sexy thoughts about a kid I’d used to babysit. Even if she wasn’t a kid anymore, and even if she was now looking very happy at the thought of the two of us spending time together. Spending time alone together. “Mary Poppins?” she suggested with a smile.
“That hasn’t been my favorite movie for years,” I protested, but I put it on anyway and felt myself relax back into the sofa as the familiar opening played. It really is one of the greatest films of all time. I don’t care what anyone says. We watched until the scene where Mary Poppins jumped into the chalk world, and then Charlotte let out a huge sigh.
“What?” I asked immediately.
“Oh, nothing, it’s just... I always thought it was sad. That Mary Poppins flies off, at the end, and leaves Bert behind.”
As a matter of fact, I agreed, but I’d thought about this a lot. “It wouldn’t have worked out long term,” I pointed out. “She’s got to be, what, upper middle class? And he sweeps chimneys for a living. He’d never be able to support her.”
“That’s just a little thing, really,” Charlotte said. “Um. If two people really like each other, they shouldn’t let little things like, like class, or race, or age get in the way.”
I was pretty sure Charlotte wasn’t really talking about Mary Poppins and Bert. I hit the pause button and turned to look at her properly. “It’s hard not to let those things matter,” I said. “If you’ve spent your whole life thinking in a certain way it’s hard to change that, even for someone you love.”
Charlotte shook her head. “If you love someone-” she began, and then stopped. She looked scared, and worried, and tired, all at once, and so vulnerable, that I just wanted to make her feel better, and in that split second I made the worst decision I’d ever made. I finally ignored my gut feelings and just acted, and I leaned forward and kissed Charlotte, hard, on the lips. For a long moment, I could feel her pressing back, and then she pulled away, sprang up from the couch, and ran out the door.
Mary Poppins looked disapprovingly at me from the TV. Great, I thought. Another brilliant move from McGill. Of course Charlotte wasn’t talking about me. I was Charlotte’s big sister, not her crush. God, I didn’t even know if she liked girls or not. Basically, I was the world’s biggest idiot, and I’d never find a way to make it up to Charlotte. I turned off the movie, stomped upstairs to my old room, and hoped like anything I’d wake up the next day knowing how to fix my mistake.
I didn’t. I felt so bad about what had happened, about probably, definitely, ruining my friendship with Charlotte, that I didn’t even notice when the striped purple v-neck I pulled on clashed with my lilac and silver earrings. “Did you have a fight with Charlotte last night?” Mom asked, sounding concerned. “She left awfully early.”
“She was just tired, Mom,” I replied.
“Mmmm,” Mom said, which is what she always says when she doesn’t believe me. Luckily, she didn’t press the issue, and after breakfast left me to go to her study and pretend to read over my notes from class while thinking about how much I hated myself for doing stupid, stupid things. I was interrupted some time later by a tentative knock on the study door. I looked up, expecting to see Mom, but instead seeing someone I hadn’t seen for quite a while, gracefully leaning against the doorway – Jessi Ramsey.
Jessi was one of the members of that baby-sitting club I mentioned before, along with her best friend, Mallory. I wasn’t really that close to her, since she was younger than me, and had been a little, well, unsophisticated, but I’d still considered her a friend. We’d lost touch since then, of course, even though we were both living in New York now. Jessi is a dancer - modern dance, mostly, since she grew too tall for ballet – and has a crazy schedule of practice and rehearsals and performances. She must have been between all three, to manage to get back to Stoneybrook to visit her folks.
She smiled softly at me. “I heard what happened,” she said. Of course she had. Charlotte’s best friend is Jessi’s sister, and now the whole world was going to hear about how I’d molested Charlotte. “I hope you’re not going to break her heart, Stace,” she continued.
“What?” That had not been where I thought this conversation was going.
“I know you’ve dated around a lot, but Charlotte isn’t like that. And she’s been in love with you forever – if you’re just playing around, you should stop right now.” She kept talking, and I absolutely gaped, trying to get my head around what Jessi was saying. Charlotte didn’t hate me at all – quite the opposite, in fact. That her freaking out last night wasn’t because she didn’t want to kiss me, but because she’d been carefully planning to tell me as much, and she’d panicked after I’d thrown her plans into disarray. That if I didn’t want to hurt her, I ought to either tell her I cared about her, or tell her it hadn’t meant anything, because if I kept leading her Jessi would never forgive me.
“But,” I interrupted, “she’s – God, Jessi, she’s just a kid! I don’t want to hurt her! I like her! But how can you be OK with this?”
Jessi glanced up at the ceiling, her lips moving silently as if she were praying for guidance, then she looked back at me with a twisted smile. “Did you ever hear,” she asked, and her voice sounded strangely strangled, “that Mal and I were together, for a while?”
I couldn’t say that the news surprised me, exactly, but no, I hadn’t actually known. Then I registered the past tense. “Were?” I asked. “What happened? I mean, I always thought if you guys got together you’d be perfect for each other.”
Her face went red, but she didn’t look away from me. “Her parents happened,” she said, simply.
“The Pikes? You mean they have a problem with you guys being – together? It’s not because you’re black, is it?” That was maybe a little out of bounds, and I bit my lip as soon as I said it, but Jessi didn’t seem offended.
“I don’t think they’d have cared if I was a black guy,” she replied, and she was about as bitter as I’d ever heard her. I could understand that, at least. I mean, Mom was great when I first figured out I was bi (actually, I think she might have known before I did) but it took Dad a little longer to get used to it. Actually, he’s never referred to any girl I’ve dated as my girlfriend, although he’s quite happy to discuss any amount of boyfriends with me. But the Pikes – I knew them when I was growing up, and they’d always been so easy-going. And Mal was going to Smith, for God’s sake. I mean, I’m not saying that every girl that goes there is gay, but – I was just surprised that the Pikes weren’t at home to the idea that Mallory probably was, that’s all. “Mal started off saying that she was fine, she didn’t need her parents’ approval. But she’d always been so hung up about trying to please them – do you remember? – that in the end she had to choose them over me.”
“God, Jessi, I’m so sorry.” She shrugged.
“It was a while ago now, and we’re still friends, despite it. My point, though, is that if we hadn’t at least tried to make it work, we never would have known if it could. I’ll always resent her parents, for not letting us love each other, but I’d still rather that than to spend the rest of my life wondering what would have happened if Mal and I had got together.” She eyed me speculatively. “If I were you, I’d try to make things work with Charlotte. I mean, you care about her, and she cares about you. There’ll be problems, but maybe they’ll be easier to solve if you’re facing them together.”
She left after that, going to see her brother’s trombone recital, or something. I thought long and hard about what she’d said. The biggest problem I could see right now was my own, not wanting to fall in love with someone so much younger than me, but wasn’t that really just an easy excuse? There were problems with any relationship, with every relationship. My parents were almost exactly the same age, and they’d still managed to mess things up. Other people would tell us that we were wrong, sure, but how was that different to people’s reactions to me dating any girl?
After lunch, Mom decreed that I needed some retail therapy, and I was happy to at least temporarily put my worries over Charlotte on hold. They wouldn’t go away, though, not completely, and I finally reached a decision as I paid for the cutest pair of fingerless gloves that I had ever seen. I’d go over to see Charlotte, that night, before I lost my nerve, and tell her how much I cared about her – and to say that I wanted to be with her, if that’s what she wanted too.
I turned up at her doorstep around eight o’clock, relieved that her mother’s car wasn’t in the drive. I rang the doorbell and steeled myself. I’d prepared this big speech, about how it was going to be tough, being long-distant for at least a year, and how other people were homophobic and ageist and would say and do all manner of hurtful things, but when Charlotte swung open the door I only got as far as, “Charlotte, I really like you –”
“I like you too,” she answered, smiling. Looking at her, everything else I wanted to say just sort of drifted away.
“That’s all there is to it, isn’t there?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” she said. “I think so. Yes.” And Charlotte looked so happy and her eyes were so soft that I couldn’t help but slip my hands around her waist and kiss her again. This time, she kissed back, pulling me inside and slamming the door behind her, and as she trailed her fingers up my back, sliding them underneath my bra, and I thought, hey, maybe Charlotte isn’t so shy after all.
And afterwards, when we both lay panting on her mother’s sofa, I realized that even though having sex with the girl I used to babysit for still felt kind of dirty and wrong, it kind of felt OK, too. It was going to be hard work, if Charlotte and I were going to be together. We were going to have to tell our parents, to begin with, and I don’t know that Dr. Johanssen was going to be exactly over the moon. And my dad – God only knew what he was going to say. And then there was going to be the long distance thing, although maybe next year Charlotte would be studying in New York too.
But for a moment – for that one, brilliant, moment – I knew that even if kissing Charlotte had been a seriously bad decision, that this decision, the decision to at least try and have a normal relationship with her, wasn’t bad at all. In fact, it might just turn out to be the best decision I’d ever made.