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“You tired?”
“Nah,” says Katherine, circling a finger around a lock of hair, “I dunno, maybe I had my second coffee too late in the day.”
“Maybe we can make a thing of it,” Pearl suggests. “Y’know, make popcorn, stay up telling stories.”
She giggles. “You wanna have a sleepover?”
“Eh, sure, why not? Not like I had enough friends for that as a kid. My idea of a sleepover was just hangin’ down the bunk beds to bother Grian at two o’clock in the morning.”
Katherine cocks her head. “Really? I can’t imagine you not having any friends.”
“Had a lot of friends on MySpace, sure, but I was just kind of adding everyone I ever met for a while. How d’you think I had so much time to get good at the bass?”
It’s silly, but she remembers being a kid with no real friends too. She shifts over to give Pearl space on the bed. “You get comfortable. I’m gonna make that popcorn!”
So she does, and she grabs a couple beers while she’s at it, and by the time she gets back with the tray Pearl has constructed a sort of slipshod pillow fort around the bed, moving the bedside table, pushing the whole thing into the corner so they can set up. Her laptop’s sitting on the far corner, with a completely legal movie watching site open, and her back is straight with her legs crossed like she’s a student showing off her science fair project.
“I thought your brother was the bird,” she says, setting their snacks down and clambering over to the pillowzone.
“I can learn a couple tricks!”
They end up setting something mindless going, one of the dozen action movies where The Rock is in a precarious situation with a wacky sidekick, and slowly melt into one another with the snacks and drinks. It’s a comfortable quiet for maybe half an hour, during which Katherine gives it her solid 35% effort to follow the plot of the movie, and somehow ends up keeping better track of her girlfriend’s breathing, hand perched just above her diaphragm. Yeah, that second coffee was probably a bad idea.
When she finally gives up and looks over, Pearl has already put her beer away.
“You’re having fun,” she comments.
“Pretty lady hands me a bottle, who am I to refuse her?”
“Mmm, I guess that’s true,” she says, and kisses the side of her face where her cheek has landed.
“So,” says Pearl, “it’s a sleepover, are we gonna play spin the bottle?”
“IIII think we’d need a couple more party guests for that?”
“Alright, alright,” she sits up again, “what about truth or dare?”
“Okay,” Katherine grins, “truth or dare?”
“Dare!”
“Ummm…” it’s a little hard to think of compelling options that don’t mean she has to stand up and rob Katherine of her comfort “... I dare you to balance the bottle on your head for ten seconds!”
“I can try,” says Pearl, but to her credit she makes it happen without too much trouble. “Ten! Okay, your turn, truth or dare?”
“Give me truth.”
Pearl pulls her lips in, expression stretching wide as she thinks. “What’s your first kiss story?”
“Oh my gosh, I can’t believe you don’t know that! It was cute.”
“Yeah, go on, then?”
It’s 2006, and Katherine is trying to Find Herself.
Maybe it’s a forlorn hope, but she kind of has this cute little mental picture of herself as a Cool Girl, and she was really hoping to make it a reality this year. Y’know - if you embody the vision, it’ll come to light, right? And preppy girls are so last summer.
So instead she’s going for Skater Girl - you know, like that song? - and her dad did her the good grace of driving her to the mall to pick out all the gear she needs, and subsidizing it, too. She has this cute pair of ripped black jeans, and a plain tee that she shredded the sleeves on for that grungey skater look, and a snapback that she fits backwards on her head as she skips back to the car.
Hey - not skips. That’s not very Skater Girl. She adjusts it to more of a cool and unaffected saunter.
Her trip to the skate park the following day is marked with nervousness, but she’s excited to see how it pans out! She leaves her dad’s car around the block and finds a park bench to settle on, feet on the seat, butt on the table. In front of her, like half a dozen skater people of various varieties are rolling around. Someone has roller blades. Katherine tried roller blades once and it went badly.
She realises, belatedly, that she probably should have bought a skateboard too.
The day is nice, at least, and she has her iPod mini in her pocket keeping her company with From Under The Cork Tree, so it’s not so bad. And it gets even better when she sees a pair of strangers coming close from the other side of the park.
One of them runs ahead, coming to perch by the edge of the… skatey thingy… and shove one of the guys that’s already here on his approach so he stumbles to a stop in the middle of the… concretey part. The other is a girl who looks like she’s straight out of the iPod commercial for coolness.
Her hair is black, but it’s not all black, because she has that awesome hair-dye thing where blue strips neon bright across one of her iron-straightened locks, like a Lisa Frank raccoon tail or something. What’s crazier is that it seriously matches her eyes, like exactly. It must have taken a whole lot of effort to get the dye that close. And her clothes are so much more expressive than Katherine’s - she feels kind of dumb in her plain white shirt and her jeans now, looking at this floaty grey cami with a graphic for a band that Katherine doesn’t even know, over a white tank top, and the low-rise jeans that Katherine’s always wished she had the stomach to rock…
She feels all at once very flushed, and her hands move down to grip the table. Wow. Katherine wants to look like her.
The girl catches up to the boy, says something that makes him wave her off dismissively, and then he’s kneeling down to put his own rollerblades on as she walks away. Walks around the circumference of the skatey thingy, board in hand.
Walks over to Katherine.
“Hey! Haven’t seen you around!”
“Oh, uh, yeah, no, I’m… I was just, y’know, around, and I wanted to… check it out?”
“The skating scene? Yeah, it’s not much, but it’s a couple of us come out here pretty often. You takin’ a break?”
“Yes! I’m, um. I’m just chillin’,” she says, and feels her insides cringe as she says it, “you know how it is.”
“Of course! Well, don’t let these nuggets get in your way. The boys can be mouthy, but it’s all talk, they won’t really stop you.”
“I -” she tries not to look too anxious “- I mean, I figured I could just… sit and watch for a while, y’know?” Dang it, she keeps saying that. She does that when she’s nervous.
“That’s cool too! I’m gonna get in there for a bit, but if you’re still here when I get tired, maybe we can chat?”
“Sure!”
And off she goes, down into the pit, which Katherine still doesn’t know the name of, and she really should’ve looked some of this stuff up before she came out here, huh? She doesn’t know the names of the tricks the girl is doing either, but it’s all very Tony Hawk, all kicks and jumps and smooth turnarounds at the top of the… half… pipe?
It’s cool. It’s hypnotic, really, watching the girl go back and forth. And every time she pauses, she flashes Katherine a charming little smirk that makes her feel something she absolutely cannot put a name to.
Maybe twenty minutes later, the girl comes back. “Having fun?”
The Fall Out Boy album is long ended. She has another couple of options downloaded as well, but she didn’t much feel like taking her eyes off the park to focus on queueing up Hot Fuss. “Yeah, I’m… y’know, I’m cool.”
“The guys are gonna head to the strip mall, if you wanted to come?”
“I - uh - sure! Yeah! Sounds great!”
So they do - four boys of various heights and hair colours chatter away at the front of the pack, while Katherine and the cool girl lag behind. They chat about life, about how long Katherine has been learning to skate (um, not long!) and where she goes to school (she lies, not wanting to admit she’s transferring to a boarding school this August, thanks Mom) and what she’s listening to (that’s an easy one, at least).
“I’ve been really liking The Killers,” she says, “I like his voice, it’s kinda weird.”
“Have you heard My Chemical Romance?”
“No.”
“They’re amazing,” the cool girl tells her, “they’ve been putting out an album every two years, so I think we’re gonna get a new one this year, I’m excited!”
“You’ll have to show me,” Katherine says.
“Oh my gosh, I do, I -” she huffs, annoyed “- I didn’t bring my MP3 player, I can… oh, we can go to the internet café!”
Katherine hasn’t been to an internet café before. The computer at home usually does her fine. But she’s not about to invite a stranger to her house, and what better day than today for new experiences?
She takes a seat, while the cool girl buys their time online and then saunters (yeah, everything Katherine wishes she could be) back over to their spot. “Do you know what you’re looking for?”
“Um…”
“Oh, it’s alright.” And then she’s leaning over Katherine’s shoulder, one arm reaching around her to reach the keyboard, the other resting directly on top of her own hand to move the mouse. It’s fine. Katherine’s not tense. “Here, plug in your headphones, we can each take an earbud.”
The cool girl loads up a website called MySpace, and taps something into the search bar. She scrolls down someone’s profile, finds something called Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge, and Katherine tries not to react to the warmth of the girl against her back as they share earbuds and check out one of the tracks. “It’s… pretty hardcore,” she laughs.
“It’s great,” she says, “you should follow this page, they’re always posting good music.”
“I don’t, um, have an account on MySpace?”
“Whaaat?” says the cool girl. “Oh, c’mon, we’ve gotta make you a profile, scroll up!”
Katherine lets the girl guide her through making a profile, and send friend requests to a dozen different people and fan pages that she doesn’t know. When the song they’re listening to runs out, the cool girl flicks idly through other songs until she finds a music video for one named All The Things She Said.
It’s…
Katherine holds very very still and lets the cool girl keep customizing her profile for her until their time runs out.
They duck back out of the café and into what is looking like a pretty unpleasant storm on the horizon. It’s not raining yet, but it’s making unhappy promises. “Ah, man,” the cool girl says, “I should probably go find the boys. But you should comment on my page! We can talk more!”
“Yeah,” Katherine giggles nervously. “for sure.” She already knows it can’t go anywhere. That much was obvious from the beginning. Katherine doesn’t know how to skate - she didn’t really like the My Chemical Romance song - she doesn’t even remember what the cool girl set her MySpace password as. It all blended together, a blur of… of all the things she’d said, running through Katherine’s head.
Damn it.
“It was nice meeting you,” she says, hoping to drag this out just a couple of seconds longer, as long as she can.
“Yeah,” says the skater girl, and presses a kiss to the corner of her lip before somebody shouts behind her and she turns to go.
Katherine flushes red right down to her chest. She can’t tell her dad about this.
“But yeah,” Katherine finishes, “I couldn’t get into the account when I made it home, and I got scared to go back to the skate park, and then I moved in August, so I never saw her again. But it was a wild day. Probably the best way to find out you’re gay. Although all the guilt for, like, a couple years after that was less cool.”
She pauses. Pearl is staring at her.
“And then I went to a girls’ school, anyway, so… What?”
She snickers. “That was me, you nugget.”
“Wh- huh?”
“I kicked Grian off my Top 8 for you! He was naggin’ me about it for weeks! And you forgot your password?”
“No, wait, hold on, go back a second, you were the pretty blue-hair girl?”
“Yes! I was emo for, like, three years! And the Black Parade broke my fuckin’ heart at the end of that year, I guess you’re lucky you missed it, ‘cause dang!”
Wow. That’s… wow. “You were my gay awakening?”
She makes that pulled-in thinking face again, then nods, solemn but with the hint of a pushed-back smile. “I guess I was.”
“That’s crazy.”
“You were not mine, for the record. That was Madonna at the VMAs.”
“Alright,” says Katherine, rolling her eyes, “you don’t have to rub it in.”
They have a little face-off for a second. Pearl’s the first to break, leaning in and burrowing her head into Katherine’s neck. “I’m glad it was me,” she says. “It’s kinda poetic if you think about it. I was your first kiss and I’m gonna be your last as well.”
“Bold words for somebody who’s not even my wife.”
“Yet,” says Pearl, with a punctuating kiss to her collarbone.
Katherine rolls her eyes and takes another drink from her bottle. “So is it your turn for truth or dare again?”
“Mmm, truth.”
Trap sprung. “Are you really planning on proposing?”
“Been thinkin’ about it. We should talk, though. When I’m not tired.”
Katherine’s still far from ready to pass out, but the words put some soft feeling in her chest that could pass for being enervated if she wanted it to. “Yeah,” she tells Pearl, “whenever you’re ready.”
The laptop screen turns black across the bed. Reflected in its sleep mode, a sleepy girl and her lover who’s apparently been coming back to this face over and over again sink into comfort at the end of a very interesting night.