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It wasn’t until a cold, rainy day that they were allowed to write home. They’d had their morning three-mile run, as usual, but when two girls had slipped and torn their muscles on the slippery field during practice, the counselors had called the day’s outdoor activities off. They’d probably stretch inside the dining hall before dinner, but other than that, the day stretched long and damp and drippy in front of them.
Kitty should’ve felt glad. Other girls were complaining how their muscles ached, but Kitty’s didn’t. Coach Sue wouldn’t’ve let them skip practice, they’d be out there right now, and they ran at least five miles a day. Anyways, she liked the distraction of working out: the burn in her muscles, the pull of the tendons, covering up the ache in her bones.
It was kind of ridiculously stupidly medieval, the sheets of stationary and roll of stamps sitting on her bed. Kitty missed her phone. If she had it, she’d probably text her parents that she was alive, bye lol, fire off a sarcastic and bitchy insult about her cabinmate to a few of the girls on the Cheerios, and then listen to music and try to sleep. Maybe, she thinks, she’d send one to Tina. Say it was because she wanted to give Blaine a few seconds to escape and hide in the bathroom, not mean it. She’s not going to admit that she’s been wishing they were around her, singing, dancing, laughing, every time music for their routines pours out of the huge speakers.
Instead, she’s written a goody-goody note to her mom and dad complete with fucking funny anecdotes (she wants to shoot herself in the head for that) and signed it ‘love’, and another to her little sister, and now she’s staring at another piece of stationary, pen heavy in her cramping fingers and an ache in her heart. She tells herself that she’s an idiot and maybe she should write one to Puck, or even Jake. She thinks how her face would look if she did. For one sharp second Kitty feels a rush, thinking of writing pretending like she and Jake have something going on, and the letter ending up in Marley’s hands, imagines how Marley’s chest would twist and how her heart would drop out of her chest.
And she likes it, she likes the rush, and she hates herself for liking it. She knows that writing her a letter would be stupid, because she’d never send it. She wouldn’t just break her heart. She’d break her, her impossibly tiny waist and thin wrists and eyes huge in her face.
Dear Marley, she writes.
This is probably the worst idea I’ve ever had. Now you know that I have this tremendous idiotic inner romantic who really really likes the way the word dear looks next to your name.
The scratching of her pen is loud in the quiet cabin. Her roommate’s lying on her bunk, staring distantly at the ceiling, and rain drips off the roof and slides down the pane of the window in front of her. Kitty still shields the paper from easy view with her arm, trying to make it look casual.
And this is the stupid, because I know you have him, and Ryder, and Unique, and you’re all just a big gay old happy family, but I remember when we were sitting at the table in school and we promised to stick together, but I’m so afraid of hanging around you guys, because I’m kind of afraid of you. Again: stupid, because you’re about as intimidating as a baby deer and you kind of look like one because you are just all legs and your eyes are big and brown and gentle and shit and yes that was a compliment (a stupid one).
Okay listen I am stupidly in love with you but I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to do about it, what I’m supposed to tell people, how to take off the cross around my neck, but most of all, how to stop ripping you down like I’m addicted to it, and maybe I am.
I’m afraid of you because after all the crap I’ve done to you, you’d still let me hang around your big old gay family or whatever, and you’d be nice and you’d hold hands and sing with me, you’d be more than nice, and I would probably keep on being Quinn Fabray 2.0 and you’d still take me back, I don’t know why.
Quinn Fabray: untouchable, unattainable. Ice queen, warm body. Everything Kitty wanted to be. She was a cheerleader, but life wasn’t But I’m a Cheerleader, and the stories of what happened at cheer camp were invented as masturbation fantasies for nerdy overly hormonal teenage boys more than anything else (for girls, too, she guessed, the thought of the two hottest senior girls as cabinmates had flitted through Kitty’s mind plenty of times).
I know you don’t like me back. I know you don’t love me, because you call out the people you love. You call him out all the time, and you probably talk about shit, but you don’t talk about shit with me. You just give me that look, but I keep on saying things and doing things, and
She was afraid she would break her, but more than that, she was afraid she would like it more than anything else she’d ever done.
I know you’re not fragile. I know you’re one of the strongest people I’ve known, one of the most openhearted and accepting, but also strong. Maybe I’m not afraid of you. Maybe I’m afraid of me.
Her roommate stirred slightly. Kitty instinctively flipped the paper over for a few seconds until it was clear that the other girl wasn’t getting up.
You make me think things like that. But you also make my chest kind of hurt, in a dull kind of way, because I miss you. It’s summer, right? I should be having, like, flings and stuff. Flirting with college guys. Hot college guys. But no, I’m thinking about you and missing you, and I shouldn’t be because I’m pretty sure you don’t love me. But I still think of what it could be. We could put our hair up and our heels on, or maybe you wouldn’t wear heels and I’d still have to stand on tiptoe to reach your lips. I’ve got a nice car and you could sit in the shotgun seat, and my parents have a house up by lake Erie. We could dance on the beach, bonfires and marshmallows and please, please, don’t be afraid to eat them.
The thought made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end like electricity. And for a second she’s sure it’s the thought, that it’s her who did that, that it’s her who made her afraid, that she was capable of that, but then she realizes it’s something else. It’s something heavy and close, lower in her chest than her heart, resting skin-smooth at the bottom of her stomach. She shifts a little in her seat, the one uneven leg of her chair scraping slightly against the wooden floor. For a second she can see it like a movie, herself and Marley, laughing, lesbian jukebox musical, if she stares a little further outside at the damp grey branches and dripping envious leaves she can see shapes in the background, Ryder and Unique and Jake—
It’s not that you’re fragile at all. It’s that I’m a bitch, it’s that I don’t have a reason for being a bitch. My mommy and daddy love me, they buy me nice shit, my older brother doesn’t molest me, my little sisters named her my little pony after me, everyone tells me I’m smart enough and pretty enough and to be honest Coach Sue is the first person to tell me that I can’t do shit right.
It’s that I don’t hold back with people I love. It’s that I hurt them more, maybe that’s why I’ve been so determined to rip you to fucking pieces and keep you coming back for more.
Goddamn, I keep telling myself that it’s me making you come back, and then I tell myself it’s you, and I don’t know which is better, I don’t know which is worse.
Kitty stares at the paper, her writing hand cramping. She hears faint music from outside, the sound of someone yelling through a megaphone. Her roommate rolls over, the old springs of the bed creaking, and Kitty snatches the letter up, heart suddenly beating fast.
She hasn’t got much time. She hears a door slam somewhere distant, grabs her pen and jots down,
XOXOXO,
Kitty
It is about the worst way to end a love letter. It would be barely acceptable to end a forth grade pen-pal letter like that, to her mind, but she has no idea what else she would say. It is the stupidest ending to the stupidest love letter of all fucking time; she might’ve just gotten out the scented Lisa Frank stickers while she was at it.
Folding it, she stuffs it in an envelope and shoves it in between two pairs of her underwear.
Her roommate’s hauling herself into a seated position, adjusting the crumpled folds of her cheer skirt.
Kitty scrambles for some convoluted excuse involving mailing one of the lacier pairs to some random ex-boyfriend, but the other girl doesn’t even ask her about anything.
“Is it stopped raining?” She half-yawns.
“Uh, yeah. I think so,” Kitty says, zipping her bag up so fast some of her clothes get caught in the zipper, tortured white and red fabric sticking out from between the metal teeth.
Whatever. She’ll handle that later. For now, she just pokes her head out of the door. Far off to the east, the clouds thin, showing faint blue like Marley’s most faded and bleached out jeans, the ones Kitty made always made fun of but secretly wished Marley would wear more often. Her legs looked long and graceless in them, her knees scabby through the rips. Someone’s standing in the open field with fire-truck-red megaphone almost as large as their torso, shouting directions at counselors, who’re scurrying around settling up some kind of complicated obstacle course involving tires, cones, fake palm trees, and a very large inflatable Santa.
“Oh my god,” her roommate gapes.
Kitty shrugs. She’s seen worse.
“I’m going to go check it out,” her roommate says, sliding her tennis shoes on and propping a foot up on Kitty’s desk to lace them up.
For a second Kitty’s heart starts pounding again, as if the press of her pencil could’ve reached through the paper and traced her letters and words deep into the wood.
It isn’t until the screen door slams behind her roommate and Kitty’s watching her run down the gravel road to the field, ponytail swinging, that she can breathe again.
“Mail pickup!” Someone’s calling from a few cabins down. Kitty bites her lip, her letters to her family lying in a tidy stack on her desk.
“Make up your mind,” she mutters to herself, kneeling on her bed next to her bag, working the zipper over the knotted threads of her McKinley hoodie.
“Mail pickup!” someone calls from a couple cabins down.
She slaps a stamp on one corner of the envelope and starts to write her return address in the other.
“Mail pickup!” one of the senior counselors raps on the wooden frame of the door, then sticks her head in. “You have anything?” she says to Kitty, a few strands of her ponytail snagged in the rough edges of the door, resting the canvas mailbag on the floor.
“Yeah,” Kitty says, “wait just one second, okay?”
“Okay,” the girl says, shouldering the bag again and letting the door slam shut behind her.
It’s quiet except for the fingertaps of water rolling off the leaves and landing on the windows. She half-expects to look up and see Marley’s eyes, grey-blue eyes like the calm after the storm.
The address is smudged from the side of her hand but still readable. She seals the envelope with a kiss.