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Darcy tells her mum she’s a lesbian when she’s twelve. Her hands are clasped on the table like a prayer and she can feel them shaking even still. The words are hard to get out of her mouth, like she’s swallowed paper, choking it up onto the table in front of them. Her mum is watching her, one eyebrow raised, tapping her foot against the floor as if Darcy is an inconvenience to her.
Her mum is silent for a long time, and Darcy wants to scream at her. Look at me, she wants to say, I’m still your daughter.
‘You’re not to tell your grandparents about this, do you hear me, Darcy?’
Darcy’s mouth is suddenly so dry like someone’s sucked all the words out of it and her hands are quaking. She twists her fingers together over and over on the table, eyes stinging around unshed tears and she bites her lip so hard she can taste the copper acidity of her own blood. This is the end of the world as she knows it. She can hear every moment in her mind, every biting comment and snide underhand dig. She’s let them down again. If she’s like this, she’ll be letting them down forever.
‘Mum…please…’ Her voice cracks over the words, reedy and high-pitched, begging.
‘Enough, Darcy. This isn’t the way I raised you.’
You didn’t raise me like anything, Darcy thinks furiously, the hot pit of anger growing in her stomach, ears ringing like cymbals crashing together. I’ve always been on my own.
‘Go to your room,’ her mum flicks a hand at her, dismissing her as easily as she’d brushed off her sexuality. Brushed off the biggest thing Darcy has told her in years.
The tears that have been stinging behind her eyes start to fall as she reaches her bedroom door. She collapses onto the bed and wonders how it’s all gone so terribly wrong. She wonders what her mum will tell her dad, what they’ll tell her brothers.
Her eyes catch on the movement of her door and she’s paralysed with fear for a second that it’ll be her mum, coming to tell her again how much she’s letting her down.
‘Darcy?’ It’s her brother’s quiet little voice in the doorway, ‘Are you sad?’
Darcy sniffs and drags a hand over her eyes, ‘No, Max, I’m not. Don’t worry.’
‘Do you want a cuddle?’ His little blue eyes stare up into hers, arms extended up towards her. It hits her that this won’t last forever. One day he’ll be old enough to understand why their parents think Darcy’s wrong and how is he supposed to know any better than to listen?
She nods her head, swallowing around the lump in her throat as he reaches up for her. She drags him into her arms, holding him tight against her chest. When she buries her face in his hair, he smells like sugar and the candles in her living room. He smells like the only bit of home that’s ever made her happy.
He sleeps tucked up next to her in bed that night. Usually, she’d roll her eyes at his little face when he asked her, telling him she didn’t want a seven-year-old kicking at the back of her legs all night. That night she just holds him and tries not to think about how long she’ll get to have him like this.
-
Darcy tries not to look at the girl who sits down next to her for too long. Her name is Tara Jones and she’s always seemed nice enough, but Darcy isn’t stupid enough to think that this would apply to her too. Darcy is the weird gay girl and Tara Jones is popular and funny and pretty and would never look twice at a girl like her. Yet here she is, pulling her pencil case out of her bag and rearranging her notebooks into neat little piles on the desk next to Darcy.
She smiles at Darcy, which is how Darcy figures out she’s been staring. She squeezes her bitten fingernails into the flesh of her arm, hard as her own private punishment. Stupid. You don’t get caught staring at a girl like Tara Jones when you’re Darcy Olsson. It’s an easy way to end up having your lunch alone in the science bathroom cubicle. Again.
‘Hello.’ Tara says to her and Darcy jumps, shocked out of her spiral.
Darcy hesitates before she replies, looking around quickly to check it’s definitely her that Tara is talking to and she’s not about to get made fun of by one of the popular girls in her year.
‘Hey.’ Darcy thinks she should probably try and say something else, she’s worried she looks rude, but she can’t for the life of her think of anything to say. Turns out it doesn’t matter. Tara leans the side of her head on the palm she’s propped up on the desk and starts talking. Darcy is captivated.
‘I actually hate this lesson you know! I love French but could they have gotten a more boring teacher? And the homework is so hard! Like every week it’s so hard! Did you do this week’s questions?’
Darcy shakes her head no. She thinks guiltily of the unfinished worksheet in the bottom of her bag and the behaviour point she’s going to get when their teacher collects it. That’ll be a detention, with the amount of homework she hasn’t handed in that week. At least, she thinks morbidly, it’s not like my parents could be any more disappointed than they already are.
Tara laughs, sliding the worksheet out of the back of her book, ‘You can copy mine if you want? It’s definitely not all right, though!’
Darcy is taken aback. This wasn’t how she had expected this interaction to go.
‘Thanks.’ She stammers out, smiling uncertainly at Tara, ‘I’ll swap you for a chewy if you want?’ Darcy rattles her blazer pocket as an offering.
Tara’s smile back is wide and open, ‘I’d love one! Thanks!’
It’s quiet between them for the rest of the lesson, but Darcy has never felt so comfortable at school before. It’s only been an hour but it’s enough that she doesn’t think Tara is the sort of girl to shy away from her, or complain in front of the whole class at having to do speaking assignments with her, or ‘accidentally’ spill her bottle on Darcy’s work. It’s a nice snippet of peace in her day.
Tara sits with her every single lesson from then on. They make more conversation now, swapping answers to the question sheets, splitting a Twix between them, gossiping about the other girls in their year. Darcy thinks if you saw them from the outside, you might even call them friends.
She doesn’t know it yet, but they’ll sit in those same seats together for every French lesson they ever take.
-
Darcy almost jumps out of her skin the first time Tara’s hand lands on her shoulder from behind in the corridor after History. She’s headed to the science department, to eat her lunch in the cubicle for the third time that week. The teasing in lessons had been particularly bad that week, given the PSHE lesson on relationships that Darcy had suffered through. If she had to hear ‘When you’re with a man…or a woman!’ as a well-meaning teacher stated right at her, and all the girls in her class quietly snickered around her, one more time, she might actually be forced to walk into Herne Bay and drown.
She turns to face Tara’s smiling face after her initial shock and the second she takes to confirm that it’s not someone she’d prefer to run very fast in the opposite direction from.
‘Where are you off to then?’ Tara asks her, lunch-bag swinging in her hand.
‘Oh, just to have my lunch?’ Darcy hesitantly holds up her own lunchbox to show Tara. There’s not much in it, she’d been in such a rush to get out of the kitchen with her mother that morning that she’d thrown in the first thing she could find and made a run for it.
‘You don’t eat in the canteen? I was going to ask if you wanted to sit together?’ Tara frowns a little at her.
Darcy rushes to reassure her, ‘No, I can definitely eat there. It’s just…I don’t think your friends would want me there that much?’
‘Oh, I thought maybe it would just be the two of us?’ Tara responds, shuffling her feet a bit, ‘I don’t know, it’s kind of annoying eating with those girls, it’s so loud and Alana always makes us move around and there’s never a chance to actually talk. I just want to sit and talk to my friend.’
Darcy can’t think of anything she’d like more than to sit for an hour with Tara, uninterrupted by teachers and classmates and schoolwork. She nods eagerly at Tara, who lights up with that sunshine smile, linking her arm through Darcy’s to pull her in the direction of the canteen while starting up their usual stream of chatter about whatever has currently captured their interest.
Like friends do, apparently. If you’d told Darcy at the beginning of the year that Tara Jones would have called her a friend to her face she would have laughed so hard she cried. She’s so pleased it’s worked out the way it has. Tara Jones is the best friend anyone could ever ask for, it turns out.
-
She and Tara talk in the hallways on their way to lessons now. They don’t share many, Tara is in set one for everything and Darcy just isn’t that clever. She has a pretty good idea of when they pass by each other by now, though, which is why she’s not surprised to hear Tara’s voice as she walks down the corridor towards her maths classroom.
She is, however, surprised to hear her name. Tara is telling her friends about something they talked about in French yesterday and Darcy’s curiosity gets the better of her as she settles against some coat pegs around the corner to listen to the conversation. She’s morbidly curious about how Tara discusses her with her other, much cooler, more popular friends.
She hears someone else’s voice next and it sends ice down her spine. It’s a voice that usually signals to Darcy that she’s about to hear a series of comments that’ll keep her awake at night clutching at her pillow as she cries. Alana Cooke. She imagines this conversation isn’t going to be anything nice, especially considering there’s not a single teacher around to even pretend to care about bullying.
‘Isn’t she like…gay?’ Alana says, the rest of Tara’s group of friends snickering around where she and Tara are facing off against each other. The atmosphere is frosty, and Tara’s jaw is tight as she replies to Alana.
‘Yeah, and?’ Tara’s voice is sharp and defiant in response.
‘That’s kind of weird though. And gross. What if she has a crush on you? You’re not a fucking lesbo, Tara.’
Darcy’s heart clenches in her chest. She’s used to girls like that calling her words like that, but it hurts when they say it to Tara. She worries about Tara agreeing with them and leaving her behind. Tara’s the only real friend she’s got.
Except Darcy doesn’t need to worry.
Tara bites back at her almost instantly, ‘That’s so fucking nasty of you, Alana. Not just nasty, it’s homophobic. Don’t ever talk about my friend like that again, it’s rude.’
‘I’m not homophobic! I don’t mind if boys are gay, but being a lesbian is just disgusting.’ Alana’s tone is no longer joking, there’s a hard edge to it that makes Darcy nervous. The comment stings at her eyes as well, but she shoves it down inside of her in anticipation of Tara’s response. She won’t give Alana the satisfaction of making her cry in school in front of a whole corridor of people.
There’s an intake of breath from the group of people around them. There’s a sense that perhaps Alana has gone a little too far and when Darcy peeks her head around the corner to watch the confrontation she sees uneasy looks on the faces of some of the other girls, who have shuffled towards Tara. Interesting. It seems that not every girl at Higgs is totally on board with blatant homophobia.
Tara, in contrast, doesn’t look uneasy. She looks angry. ‘You’re just awful. I don’t ever want to hang out with you again, I never want to speak to someone that’s horrible like that. I can’t believe you’d even say that.’
The group falls into silence as Tara pulls away, pacing away down the corridor to where Darcy knows she has her own maths class. She’s so focused that she doesn’t even notice her pressed up against the coat pegs. Darcy slinks away to outside her own classroom door, mind racing. Ultimately, she decides she’ll just settle with liking the warmth in her chest that she felt when Tara stood up for her. She doesn’t have to think about those girls ever again if she has Tara on her side.
Tara never tells her about what happened in the hallway, the way she defended her against her friends. It’s like it’s a given, something unremarkable, something Tara would do for her whenever she needed to. She just stops hanging out with half the girls that usually surround her, spending more time at Darcy’s lunch table, and swapping best friendship bracelets they can’t stop laughing at in a Claire’s Accessories at weekend meet-ups.
Darcy almost brings it up once, when Tara sits down next to her on the picnic benches for the third time in a week and starts unpacking her sandwich, but as soon as she says Alana’s name Tara’s face crumples. She covers Darcy’s hand with her own and Darcy tries to ignore how it makes her pulse jump. It’s not a successful effort when Tara leans her head into Darcy’s and mumbles into her hair, ‘You’re better than all of them, Darcy.’ Darcy doesn’t ask again. This answer is more than enough.
Besides, they’re best friends now and Darcy is weirdly thankful to Alana for being such a nasty bitch. It brought Tara closer to her, after all. Life with Tara is much better.
Darcy knows better than anyone that the world is not always kind. But she thinks Tara Jones could be different.
-
They hang out on the weekends now, mostly in Tara’s house. She hasn’t really told Tara much about her family, but she knows it’s not hard to guess when she practically jumps at the chance to get away from home every time Tara offers. She doesn’t know if Tara would get it anyway. She’d always be sympathetic, Darcy knows, but Tara’s family isn’t like hers. They’re gentle and supportive, they welcome her like she’s family, and Darcy aches with it when she watches them. Tara’s parents fold her into the mix as one of their own, even after she had haltingly explained to them that no, she didn’t have a boyfriend and that she wasn’t ever going to have a boyfriend when they asked. Tara’s mum had just smiled at her and put a steady arm around her shoulders, leaning down to tell Darcy that it was very brave of her to tell them that, as Tara’s dad ruffled her hair and made her a hot chocolate. She still thinks about that in bed sometimes, how much she wishes her own mother could have done that for her. But she knows, deep down inside of her, that even if her own family won’t, she’ll always have a home at the Jones house.
They spend the weekends sitting in Tara’s bedroom for hours, shoulder to shoulder on Tara’s double bed watching their favourite films and gossiping about the girls in their year. Tara sometimes paints Darcy’s nails for her and then laughs when Darcy inevitably smudges them almost immediately. It’s nice to feel like a normal teenage girl, braiding each other’s hair and laughing about their teachers, trading answers to the homework questions. It’s the best Darcy’s ever felt. She can’t imagine a place she could ever love more than the four walls of Tara’s bedroom.
She goes home still smiling about it every time, which is confusing given being in her house is never an enjoyable experience for her. But one thought of Tara and nothing around her even matters. She’s even happy to play with her brothers for hours on end after she gets back, endless games of imagine and tea parties and football in the garden as they cling to her legs and beg her to pick them up. She still aches when she thinks about a future where they don’t love her as unconditionally as this, where they believe what her parents say about her, but it’s not so scary to think of that world when she knows she’s not going to be alone in it. There is an end to the sadness now, a bright spark in her that she’s never felt before.
She thinks this is probably what it’s like to live a happy life. She never thought she’d get to do that.
-
Everyone at Higgs is talking about Tara and Nick Nelson. That they kissed at the Higgs-Truham disco that Darcy didn’t even bother going to and Nick really fancies her. Darcy is confused when she overhears a girl in her form class talking about it the day after, almost hurt that Tara hadn’t told Darcy herself. There’s a knot in the pit of her stomach at the idea of Tara kissing Nick Nelson that she tries to ignore, swallowing hard to settle it. It doesn’t work. She thinks she’s going to hate him on principle.
She means to bring it up when they next see each other, but when Tara puts her bag down on the floor next to their seats in French in second period Darcy can tell she’s uncomfortable. Her shoulders tighten as the girls behind them discuss The Kiss in poorly disguised whispers and Darcy knows she doesn’t want to be the one making Tara feel that way.
Instead, she nudges Tara’s arm to offer her a Starburst from the packet she keeps for emergencies in her inside blazer pocket and asks her if she’d seen last night’s episode of Brooklyn 99. Tara shoots her a grateful look, then launches into her feelings about the episode, finishing her discussion up with an offer for Darcy to come to hers for tea that night.
That’s how Darcy ends up sitting on Tara’s bed, watching her across the room as they make casual small talk about their homework. She can tell that Tara wants to tell her about Nick, but she doesn’t understand why she looks so worried. Darcy ignores the tug of jealousy in her stomach as she stares at Tara, working up the courage to say something.
‘So,’ Darcy asks her, ‘Did you really kiss Nick Nelson?’
Tara squirms in her desk chair, twirling a pen in her hands. She doesn’t look elated, the way Darcy expected her to be, the way the girls at school all assumed she would be. After all, it’s Nick Nelson. Every girl in their year fancies him, supposedly.
‘Yeah.’ Tara tells her. Darcy is strangely intrigued by the idea, she’s never had the opportunity to kiss someone and she assumes until she’s moved far far away from their hometown that she never will.
‘How was it?’ She asks, leaning forward a little on Tara’s bed.
‘Honestly, Darce? It was kind of…gross?’
Oh. That wasn’t what Darcy had been expecting. Sure, she found the idea of kissing a boy gross, but Tara wasn’t like her. It didn’t make any sense.
‘So you…don’t fancy him then?’
‘I don’t think I do.’
Darcy contemplates this for a second. Tara’s face looks close enough to crumpling that Darcy hurries to reassure her.
‘Boys are boring anyway. Especially boys that are thirteen! You don’t have to like Nick, especially if you don’t want to kiss him again!’
Tara smiles at her and Darcy’s chest tightens. Her own smile twitches onto her face without her consent as Tara moves off her desk chair to come and sit next to her on the bed.
‘Do you want to watch a film?’ Tara asks her, ‘We could watch Little Miss Sunshine?’
Darcy agrees readily. The day settles back into normalcy and the only thing on Darcy’s mind by the time she leaves the Jones household is the amount of French homework she has left to do.
Maybe not wanting to kiss boys is more normal than she thought.
-
Summer rolls around quicker than Darcy could have imagined. This time she’s not dreading a summer of sitting alone in the park, trying to escape her family but with no friends to run to. This year she’s got Tara and that’s all that matters.
It’s unseasonably hot for July. They’ve spread snacks from the supermarket out across a blanket from Tara’s and Darcy is focused on trying to tie as many knots as she can in a strawberry lace that’s gone a bit gooey in the sunshine. She and Tara are casually discussing what they think Y9 will be like. Tara has already decided on all her GCSEs even though they don’t have to do the form to properly choose until March and Darcy is telling her she’s crazy. In all honestly, she’ll probably take whatever Tara takes. Apart from if Tara takes Geography. She really can’t stand Geography or weird Mr Parker who teaches it with his coffee breath and egg sandwiches.
The idle chatter fades out as Darcy tilts her face up towards the sunshine, basking in the warmth of the afternoon. She can feel the beginnings of a sunburn, but she can’t bring herself to care. When she looks back down again, Tara has pushed her sunglasses onto her head and she’s looking up at Darcy fondly.
Darcy raises one eyebrow at her, ‘What are you looking at then?’
‘I love you, Darcy.’ Tara says, reaching forward to lean her head against Darcy’s leg.
Darcy’s cheeks stain pink, heat flooding into her face. She didn’t realise it was even possible to feel any warmer, but apparently, she can.
‘What’s brought all this on?’ She asks, poking at Tara’s dimple.
‘I think you’re the only real friend I’ve got Darcy. The other girls, they’re nice, but I can’t tell them things the way I tell you.’
‘You’re probably my only real friend too, Tara. Maybe just my only friend at all. I couldn’t ask for anyone better.’ Darcy tells her, suddenly gripped with the urge to make sure Tara knows how much she’s changed her life, how much better things are when she’s around.
‘I think we should stay like this forever.’ Tara whispers, grinning up at her.
The warmth spreads throughout Darcy’s chest and she folds down to lie next to Tara, twining their hands together like a prayer. The heat between them is almost unbearable, but Darcy doesn’t care. She doesn’t think Tara does either, the way she’s clinging onto her. This moment, Darcy thinks, is perfect.
‘I love you, Tara.’
Life hasn’t been kind to Darcy Olsson. It probably won’t ever be as kind as she wants it to be. That’s okay though. If she’s got Tara Jones, she’ll probably be alright.