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The first time Dee feels it, she’s fifteen. A girl in her history class smiles at her — looks past the back brace and the insecurity and smiles at her. The first time she feels it, she doesn’t know what it is, but she’s alive in that instant, fuse lit, firecrackers bursting in her chest. Light and heat and sound. She carries that feeling with her for the rest of the day. Brings it home, drops it on her bed to examine it more closely.
She writes in her diary that night with a pink sparkly pen. If pressed, she’d say it was just the first pen she saw on her desk, but the past seven entries are all written in black ink. She tries to document the warmth she felt all day, tries to draw the diagram, pinpointing where it sits beneath her ribs. Lots of people have looked at her. Nobody ever seems to have the decency to avert their eyes when the Aluminum Monster comes thundering through the halls. It’s just part of her day now, being stared at like that, she thinks. The issue isn’t just that someone looked at her that morning. The issue lies in the fact that it didn’t feel wrong this time.
She wants so badly to get excited when she lands the role of Frankenstein’s monster in her senior year. It’s a huge part, and Dr. Meyers announces it like he’s handing her a Tony Award or one of those giant fake checks for a million dollars, but the whole thing feels like an elaborate ploy to make her feel even more removed from the people around her. Even when she comes out at the end of the show to raucous applause, her back brace digs in at her waist when she bows – still wretched, still a beast, somehow. She counts down the days until she graduates.
In her first semester at Penn, her Psychology 101 professor spends an entire lecture talking about the self-fulfilling prophecy. If you hear something often enough, she says, if you keep telling yourself something, you start to believe it. It becomes true. It feels like she looks right at Dee when she says it, too, insult-injury-implication all at once. It sticks with her, though – the idea that you can make something true just by telling yourself it’s true.
She feels it again two drinks deep at a frat party, a week after that lecture. A girl in a bikini top sits down next to her and whispers something in her ear. Dee doesn’t even register what she said, but she’s electrified by it, willing to drop everything for this girl. It strikes her the same way as it did that morning in her history class, like fireworks, radiant and white-hot. She swears to herself that it doesn’t mean anything. Anyone would have reacted like that if a pretty girl whispered in their ear.
It scares the shit out of her, though. She tries to block it out, leans hard in the other direction to course-correct before it gets too late. She flirts with guys, laughs at their jokes, lets them throw their arms around her while they walk. She goes on dates almost every weekend. She makes out with some guy that lives down the street and walks home feeling wrong . Nothing sticks, nothing lasts.
She gets her back brace off and it doesn’t change her life the way she always thought it would. She still feels like she’s missing something. She takes up acting classes. Learns to roller skate, works at the bar her brother owns with his weird friends. None of it makes her feel any better. Nothing touches the pain, the longing she feels, the absence of something she can’t identify. She doesn’t know what she’s missing, but she’s acutely aware that there is something missing. She wonders if she’d know it if she had it.
Down the street, some no-name coffee shop goes into the space that’s been vacant for months. Dee stops in one afternoon on her way to the bar. The coffee is fine. It’s barely better than the instant shit she makes at home, but the girl behind the counter smiles at her, and a long-extinguished flame is reignited somewhere deep within her. That warmth under her skin comes back — slowly at first, then brilliant and searing, hot metal in her hand.
Charlie develops an obsession with the same waitress from the coffee shop. He stalks her and tries to impress her and bends over backwards to catch her eye and none of it works in his favor. He never falters. All of the rejection only seems to make him more fervent about it. Dee tags along and helps with his schemes, but she’s just in it to see more of the girl she can’t stop thinking about. It’s just enough contact, just enough exposure, to keep her satiated.
Years later, she and Artemis are dancing to some pop song at a club when Dee reaches her limit. Something shatters like a glass underfoot. Something unavoidable and raw and roiling beneath the surface, something that’s been dormant for a while, makes itself known. The music’s too loud and she can’t think and it feels like pressure all around her. She turns on her heel and runs out, Artemis following closely behind.
It’s quieter outside. The cold air is a welcome departure from the sweat-heavy haze inside the club. Dee breathes in deeply, feeling herself come back into her body. Artemis catches up to her and grabs her by the arm. There’s no force, no anger in it. Dee sways a little, willing to blame it on the drinks or the heels she’s wearing. Artemis pulls Dee toward her, holding her so she can look her in the eye. Keeps her steady.
“Girl, what the hell is goin’ on with you tonight?”
“I don’t— I don’t know ”, Dee says.
She feels Artemis scan her face, searching for something. There’s something rising up into her throat and she doesn’t know where it’s coming from but she knows that it’s coming. Her eyes burn like she’s about to start crying.
“I think I might have an idea what’s up. You trust me?”
Dee nods. She’s coming up with a list of terrible things she thinks she’s going to hear when Artemis leans in and kisses her. It’s almost clinical, a procedure she’s performing outside this nightclub, their faces cast halfway in shadow by a flickering streetlight. Dee catches the faintest taste of tequila on her lips. It’s a distorted reflection of the shots she’s thrown back — five, maybe six, by then.
Every time she’s had some well-meaning man try to press his lips to hers, it’s made her recoil, made her sick. This isn’t like that. It’s also not the lightning-strike cataclysm she’s been afraid of all her life. There’s no choir of angels, either. No shimmering beams of light, no levitation. It kind of feels like nothing. It feels easy, natural. Like breathing.
“Got it?” Artemis asks as she pulls away.
“Think so.”
“Cool. It’s not even that late. Let’s get back in there and tear the roof off this bitch.”
Artemis doesn’t say anything else. Refuses to elaborate at all. She drags Dee back inside and orders her another drink – something pink and fizzy – but she doesn’t explain herself. Dee knows exactly what she was getting at, though. She sees it clearly like she’s ten miles up, looking out over the whole thing at once. The Earth, viewed from a satellite in the atmosphere. The two of them drift back into the crowd on the dance floor, and Dee feels something sparkling in her chest again.
Dee doesn’t wake up that hungover the next morning, but she does wake up feeling different. She makes a handful of Google searches, then clears her history. She comes to some new conclusion, sitting up in bed, her laptop balanced on her knees. She doesn’t tell her therapist. She doesn’t tell anyone. She can’t even say it to herself, because that would make it true. She’d make it true just by saying it aloud.
She runs from it like she ran out of that nightclub. She can’t turn around. She can’t bring herself to look it in the eyes. She falls back onto her old routine, first dates and early mornings and an ache in her chest that grows with every passing month. It’s there, though, she knows it, knows it’s just a few steps behind her. Knows that naming it makes it real. Knows that turning to look at it, to confront it, makes it real.
And then goddamn Mac comes out, the summer after they almost died on that cruise ship, right before Dennis leaves for North Dakota. Something releases in Mac that afternoon. He carries himself differently. There’s a cautious relief that washes over him the minute he says it. It’s almost enough to ignore that he’s standing in front of his ass-pounding bike. Or that all of this started over a lottery ticket she bought. He’s still Mac, still fucking annoying, still obsessed with Dennis, but he leaves the arbitration room with this lightness about him. It’s a lightness that Dee wants to feel. She doesn’t know if she can, but she wants it, wants it so badly it makes her sick.
Sometime after midnight, three days later, Dee pulls her journal out of the drawer in her nightstand. If she can’t say it, if she can’t let it get that far, writing it down feels like an acceptable compromise. She opens her journal to the next blank page and writes I think I'm a lesbian in pink sparkly ink. Dead-center, indelible. It doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel like enough of an admission.
She crosses out I think . Lines over lines over lines. Her heart feels like it isn’t beating. Time stops dead, crystallized between pen and paper. It’s not real yet. Not until she says it. It’s still not enough, it’s just out of reach. She wants it so badly. She wants to feel what Mac felt, wants to stand in the face of what she’s been afraid of all these years. This is the closest she’s ever let herself get. She’s holding her breath, but it feels right, feels like she has to, at least for this. There’s too much at stake for her to be indelicate.
“I think I’m a lesbian,” Dee whispers. She’s reading a script, but she’s ignoring the latest revision. There’s no camera for her to look at, no director to provide notes. She sighs. Collects herself. A second take. “I am a lesbian.”
Somehow, taking away the conditionality is what does it. Just rephrasing it is what makes it real. It’s instant . It hits so quickly it makes her head spin. In the silence of her room, it sounds like she’s shouting from the rooftops, and she feels it all the way through, huge and sonorous and seismic.
A few months later, she runs into the Waitress at the grocery store. It’d been a while since she’s seen her, and something snaps into place right there in front of the cooler with all the yogurt in it. She remembers the coffee shop on the corner, the way the Waitress’ smile stuck with her for days, the way she tolerated the coffee to see her over and over again. She remembers that afternoon in the clothing store, that night in the bowling alley. If she thinks hard enough, she can almost remember going for the Boggs record again, but she can definitely remember that flare-gun crackle in her stomach that started long before she’d switched to wine.
“Are you, uh, doing anything this Friday?” Dee can’t meet the Waitress’ eyes. Not here, not like this.
“Not that I know of,” the Waitress says. “Why, what’s up?”
“Just wanted to, like, hang out? Girls’ night, y’know?” Dee smiles as convincingly as she can muster. Her face feels red-hot.
“Let me see if I’m free. I’ll let you know, alright?”
Later that night, Dee gets a text from the Waitress.
Waitress: It’s a date
Dee knows, for the most part, that she just means she’ll be there. It doesn’t stop her from jumping to the most ridiculous conclusion. It also, to her chagrin, doesn’t stop her from sending that text instead of deleting it.
Dee: Like, a real date? I'm down if you are
She hadn’t meant to send it. It was one of those things she had to type out, to get it out of her system, but she wasn’t going to actually go through with it. Her heart starts beating so hard she can feel it in her fingertips. She can’t undo it; it’s just a matter of waiting and hoping she didn’t totally blow her chance with the Waitress. She throws her phone across the room and jumps in the shower to distract herself. When she steps out of the bathroom an hour later, there’s still no response.
Lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling, Dee comes up with every single way she could possibly be rejected. She’s busy, she’s sick. She’s fleeing the country and changing her name. She’s not into women. She’s into women, but she’s not into Dee. The list gets worse and more catastrophic the more she lets it develop. She finally does fall asleep, but not before wondering if it’s a cruel joke or an elaborate scheme by the gang.
She checks her phone at least a hundred times the next day. It consumes her – the possibility, the uncertainty. She keeps turning it over and over in her head, wondering if the Waitress is ignoring her on purpose, wishing she’d never sent the text in the first place.
She’s halfway home from the bar when she hears her phone go off. There’s some little part of her that hopes it’s a text from the Waitress, but there’s no reason for her to believe that without checking. It feels like it takes twice as long as usual to make the drive, and when another text comes through, it takes everything she’s got not to pull over and read them. She’s suspended in a weird in-between where it could be anything on her phone screen. It’s not real just yet. It’s not anything until she looks. Until she turns to confront it.
The second she steps into her apartment, Dee pulls out her phone and her heart stops, freeze-frame still. It’s her.
Waitress: Sure :-)
Waitress: I’ll pick you up at 7
On Friday afternoon, somewhere in between the two customers Paddy’s saw all day, Dee’s phone vibrates in her pocket.
Waitress: What are you thinking for tonight
Waitress: Ice cream at the park maybe?
Dee: It’s nice out that’d be fun I think
It’s a pretty benign first date, Dee thinks, but she can’t get the words first date out of her head. There’s something novel about it, something that sticks in her teeth like saltwater taffy.
“I’m leavin’ early.” At precisely 7:00, Dee comes out of the back office with a smug look on her face. “You boners better not trash this place tonight, got it?”
“Wasn’t planning on it,” Dennis says. “What are you so fired up about, Dee?”
“Yeah, you got a hot date or something?” Charlie elbows Mac in the ribs when he says it, smiling crookedly like he’s getting away with it.
“Actually,” she says, really drawing it out, “I do.”
“Who the hell said they would go out with you ?” Mac asks.
The door slams open before anyone else can contribute. Everyone in the bar – the gang, plus the one old guy posted up in the corner – looks up at the intrusion. The Waitress walks in, and Charlie cranes his neck to look at her, wide-eyed and wondering if this is the moment where she admits her undying love to him. She doesn’t even look his way.
“She did,” Dee whispers. When she turns toward the door, she can’t see the guys anymore, but she can almost perfectly imagine the looks on their faces.
“Let’s get out of here,” the Waitress says, and Dee follows her out.
Once the door slams behind them, the guys sit in stunned silence for a moment. Mac pulls his wallet out of his pocket. He fishes out a five-dollar bill and hands it to Charlie. Dennis stands up, pours himself a double shot of whiskey, and slinks into the back office.
Out on the street, the Waitress backs out of her parking spot with one hand thrown around the back of the passenger-side headrest. It hits like sparklers in Dee’s chest, wild and wired. She’s loosely aware that she hasn’t spent that much time with just the Waitress. She wants to learn everything about her, wants to hear about all of the things she’s missed. Her heart races at the thought of how new this feeling is. How deep she’s already willing to dive into it.
It’s a perfect night to sit in the park, and the Waitress has a picnic blanket in her backseat, so the two of them watch the sunset over the river. Dee thinks about sitting closer to the Waitress. It feels too forward. Too big to bring out this early. She stays a cautious distance away, but she puts one hand on the blanket between them, just barely an offering. The Waitress doesn’t hold Dee’s hand. She does reach over and steal a bite of her ice cream, though, and she smiles so hard the corners of her eyes crinkle, and that almost feels more substantial.
As the sun drops down to the horizon, the sky fades from blue to orange to pink.
Three weeks later, she feels it again when the Waitress shows up at the bar with a giant bouquet of flowers for her. It’s a wild assortment of pinks and oranges, almost neon-bright, wrapped in brown paper. Dee can’t think . The only thing on her mind is how ridiculously, wildly embarrassed and ridiculously, wildly loved she feels in this instant. The Waitress leaves just as quickly, saying she has to get back to work, and Dee stands there like all the air has left her lungs.
She fills a beer pitcher with water. It’s the closest thing they have to a vase, and she figures it’ll be alright until she can take them home and put them in something nicer. She sets it on the corner of the bar, and she walks past it a hundred times that night, but it sends a jolt up her spine. It’s like all her nerves are on fire, lit up from the inside out by some small gesture.
Six months later, the Waitress takes Dee somewhere even nicer than Guigino’s and holds her hand across the table and the way she felt at fifteen is absolutely nothing in comparison. Dee had thought, back then, that it was going to kill her. That she’d always have this secret, necrotic-black and wildly painful, lodged somewhere between her heart and lungs. She’s grateful to have been wrong.
Dee pulls her journal out again that night. She owes it to herself to document this. She opens it to where the ribbon bookmark is tucked in; it’s a blank page, but there’s an indent in the center. The preceding entry is almost blank as well. The only things on the page are the date at the top, a scribble etched deeply into the paper, and then I'm a lesbian , all in glittery ink. She dates the next page, the one with the indent, and starts to draw the diagram, just like she did back in high school.
This feeling is the same as it was in 1991. She’s been carrying it around all this time. It’s warm, like it’s always been, but it doesn’t feel like it’s going to hurt. It’s not a third-degree burn anymore. She doesn’t feel like running away from it. She wants to lean in, to let herself be warmed by it, to feel it in full. The heat radiates all the way out to her fingertips now. Runs all the way through her, like it’s part of her.
“So, uh, you and the Waitress,” Dennis says, when it’s just him and Dee behind the bar one afternoon. “How’s– how’s that going?”
Dee looks at him sideways. He won’t look up from the glass he’s drying.
“It’s been good,” she says. It’s not a lie, but it’s not the whole truth.
“Just… good?”
“What, is it not allowed to be good?”
“I just meant, y’know, are you… are you good?”
Dee isn’t sure how to say yes, I’m good. I’ve never been better. Good doesn’t even get close to the way this makes me feel.
“So good,” she says instead, and that gets pretty close. “Why?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Sure, it does,” she says.
She doesn’t say because you never ask about me. She doesn’t say you wouldn’t get it , or you’re acting weird, or whatever you’re plotting, keep it to yourself. There’s something in his voice that makes her feel like he’s deadly serious.
“Nah, forget it. It’s nothing,” Dennis says. He’s just holding the glass now. His hands aren’t moving.
“It’s like,” Dee says, “it’s just so easy.”
“What do you mean?”
“Feels right. Kinda like, like this is how it’s supposed to feel.”
“And you just… know that?”
“I mean, I know what it’s not supposed to feel like. And I know this is different.”
Neither of them say anything for a moment.
“You’d know,” she adds, and she means it, and she smiles at him like she wants it to stick. “Like, if it was good. You’d be able to tell.”
“Yeah.” Dennis sets the glass down. “That’s good.”
When Dee drives her home later that week, the Waitress doesn’t get out of the car right away, and Dee gets the sense that there’s something staticky and fizzing in the space between them. She wonders if she’s the only one who feels it, heat lightning out over the horizon. Her heart’s beating so hard she can feel it in the palms of her hands. There’s some tiny part of her, deeply-ingrained and deeply afraid, that desperately wants to look away. That urge to run, resurfacing. She doesn’t listen.
She looks over at the Waitress instead. The Waitress meets her gaze, then lets her eyes drift down to Dee’s lips, which feels like enough of a signal. Dee leans over the center console and hopes she hasn’t misread the whole thing, and in a great act of mercy, the Waitress closes the space between them.
Dee kisses the Waitress and she doesn’t run away and she knows within an instant that this is how it’s supposed to be. She’s dead certain. She pulls back almost as quickly, and in the goldenrod glow from the streetlights, she can see the Waitress beaming at her. The warmth in her chest reaches a record high. It’s so hard for her to believe that this is what she’d been so desperate to outrun for most of her life. It comes so easily to her now. Air in her lungs, blood in her veins. Light and heat and sound.