Here’s what I know:
In Sunday School Mr. Croucher told me that some love is less sacred than other love. She told me we have to protect the sanctity. She looked right at me when she said it.
In the car I asked Lori about it and she said that Mrs. Croucher meant that sometimes men and men, or women and women, will get married instead of men and women. Lori said, that’s wrong. Lori said, it’s not a complete family, and people like that are not allowed to be married like her and George. Lori said, the reason Mrs. Croucher looked right at me is because she knows I’m exposed to people like that. Lori said, the twin girls named Izzy and Rachel Stryker in my class have two moms instead of a mom and a dad. Lori asked me how I would feel if I had no dad, and I said I didn’t know. Lori said, it would be bad.
At home I asked George if it would be bad if I didn’t have him, and had another Lori instead, but I said “mom” instead of Lori and “dad” instead of George the way they tell me to, even though no one else calls them that. George asked me why I would ask him something like that, and I explained what Mrs. Croucher and Lori said, and then he told me that that wasn’t what Mrs. Croucher meant. Then George ran his hand over his face the way he runs his hand over a light switch, when he’s trying to change how something looks but not how it is.
At school Izzy Stryker is mean. She’s mean to everyone, in a careless way, in the way that what she thinks is funny or friendly or just herself, is mean. But when she’s mean to me it’s special, because it’s on purpose. She tells me I’m stupid for not talking, when I have nothing to say. She says I’m weird, for not smiling when I’m not happy. She says I’m the mean one because I have no friends, when I just want to be by myself without people who confuse me. And when I started bringing Voogelot to school, she said Voogelot was ugly, and she said only babies carry around stuffed animals, and she said things that a bully in a video from an assembly would say. I told Lori I don’t like her and Lori said that I should stand up for myself.
That’s what I know.
Bailey walked across the playground holding a purple stuffed fish in her hands, gripping it in the spots where her fingers had left imprints from always holding too tight, into the belly of a group of first grade girls playing Miss Mary Mack on the playground. Bailey stepped right in between Izzy Stryker and the girl she was clapping hands with, so they both had to draw back to avoid slapping her. Bailey glared right into Izzy Stryker’s big blue eyes.
“Your family is not complete because you don’t have a dad and your parents can’t get married,” she said.
Izzy had stepped back. When she heard what Bailey said she looked to the girls on her left and right, wide eyes and dropped jaw like a movie actor, and then she stepped forwards again.
“You are a homomobic,” she said, and she shoved Bailey backwards onto the blacktop.
The stuffed fish bounced out of Bailey’s hands and onto the dusty pavement. Bailey didn’t cry when the skin shaved off of her elbow, or when her head cracked off of the asphalt and sent stars circling across the laughing girls’ faces. Bailey only cried when she lifted up her head to find her stuffed fish, and she saw Izzy Stryker lift one light-up Sketcher, and stomp right on its purple face.
All the blame for the incident landed on Izzy for making the fight physical. Lori sat on a plastic chair in the principal’s office while he gave her a halfhearted warning about keeping political beliefs at home. Bailey sat in the corner of the room and tried to pinch the dried mud out of Voogelot’s fluff. The dirt would wash away later in the washing machine, while Bailey pressed her head against the glass waiting for him to come out new, but one of his plastic eyes had scratches across it from when Izzy’s foot ground it into the blacktop, and those scars would never go away.
Adults always tell me they’re right and I’m not. But they don’t all say the same things. So how am I supposed to believe them?
At school Izzy cornered Bailey on the blacktop. “My moms said not to take it from you,” Izzy said. She was flanked by three other girls, including her sister. “My moms said not to take it from anyone and they told me I should push back.”
Bailey was holding Voogelot and drawing swirls with chalk. And I don’t have anything else to say to her.
“They’re mad,” said Izzy. “You made my moms mad. I’m telling everyone you’re a hom — a homophobic. That makes you a bad person. I’m telling everyone in school.”
And in the coming months, she did.
Izzy tells everyone I’m a bad person. Everyone believes her. Everyone either likes Izzy, or they’re scared of her. I’m scared of her too. Now she tells me I’m mean every time she sees me in class. She tells everyone else that I’m a bully. She uses words to describe me that none of us know. She must have learned all these words from her moms. Her moms must hate me too.
Now she does other things too. She calls me fish girl. She calls Voogelot ugly and stupid. She gets people to try and snatch him away from me in the hallways. She says I’m a baby. She says I’m a bitch but only in my ear when no one else is around.
I’m supposed to tell an adult when I’m being bullied. But now Izzy says I’m the bully. Everyone thinks I’m a bully, and everyone tells their parents I’m a bully, and soon I just become a bully. I went a whole week without saying anything other than “here” for attendance and no one noticed. How can I be a bully when I can’t open my mouth?
Bailey cried on the last day of first grade. She wasn’t the only one. A lot of little girls in the classes wrapped their arms around their teachers and started wailing. The teachers kept reassuring the criers that everything would be okay, they’d come back in the fall, they’d get to go to school again in the fall. This made a lot of the little girls calmer, but it just made Bailey cry more.
In the second half of that day, all the parents came to visit and have the end of year luncheon out on the lawn. Bailey sat with Lori’s friends and their children, gripped Voogelot in her hands, and tested how long she could go without speaking again. She watched a little white butterfly tumble its way through the luncheon, the platters of ham sandwiches and the sagging wooden picnic tables. Its wings moved fast but its pace was slow, and it was a good few minutes before it alighted on the edge of a table that Bailey realized was Izzy’s. She was sitting with her moms and her twin sister, but she kept waving at other tables and standing up on the bench to see other kids. Bailey was only looking at her for a moment, but in that moment Izzy’s bouncing attention landed on her. Her eyes went wide when she saw Bailey. Then she tapped one of her moms on the shoulder, and said something to her, and as she spoke the other mom’s interest was also piqued, and the smiles on their faces fell away as they listened to her daughter. Then Izzy turned and pointed across the lawn. Both women followed her outstretched finger, and stared straight at Bailey.
They look angry. They look upset. One of them looks sad. One of them looks the way that George looks when he tries to get me to leave Voogelot at home and I won’t.
They don’t look like two Lori’s. They look like parents.
Bailey stared back at them, until one of them women touched the other on the arm and they both looked away.
Lori and George took Bailey to Disneyland that summer. Bailey brought Voogelot into the parks, she brought him on all of the rides. Even when they had to put loose articles in little pouches while the coasters were running, she kept one hand in the pouch and held Voogelot by the fin. She had the fish in her hands when she met Cinderella. Afterwards they went to a gift shop where Lori convinced Bailey to try on a Cinderella costume, even though they had already waited in the Cinderella line for two hours without eating, and she made Bailey put down her stuffed animal while she tried it on. The dress was itchy, but Lori wouldn’t let Bailey take it off, so Bailey started trying to pull it over her own head and it ripped. Then Lori started yelling, and Bailey started screaming, and she didn’t even get her shirt all the way on before she sprinted out of the gift shop. George went after her while Lori tried to put the torn dress back without paying. George calmed his daughter down and got her shirt on right, and wisely bought her some french fries, and Lori came out of the gift shop and tracked the pair of them down. When Bailey saw her mother she instantly stood up and said,
“Where’s Voogelot?”
Lori sagged. She shook her head and walked back towards the gift shop.
Bailey started bouncing up and down on her seat in the food court. “Where is he?”
“Mom will get him,” George promised.
Where is he? “Where is he?” Where is he?
Lori came back twenty minutes later to tell her daughter that Voogelot was gone.
My aunt Lacey gave me Voogelot for my third birthday. Lacey is Lori’s younger sister, her fifth younger sister, and she’s only six years older than me. She found a fish at a gift shop and thought I would like it. That same year George and Lori got me a playhouse to sit in the yard. It was painted pink and had working window shutters and a set of chairs that came with it but I didn’t even go inside it. Because everyone was there that day, all Lori’s sisters and all of her friends, too many people, and I didn’t want a house or a chair set or anything. I just wanted something to hold onto.
I just want something to hold onto.
Bailey started running again, and it took nearly an hour to track her down because she didn’t stop. She was trying to find the gift shop again but she couldn’t remember what it looked like. George had to run to catch her, got his arms around her, and she scratched one of his cheeks trying to get him to let go of her, hard enough that he bled. They wouldn’t take her back to the shop no matter how loud she screamed. She yelled all the way out of the park, into the car, back to the hotel, banging on the car window like she was being kidnapped. She screamed things at Lori, words she wasn’t supposed to know, volumes she had been taught not to reach. It was an incessant, ear-splitting destruction of their family vacation.
Halfway back to the hotel Lori launched herself back over the passenger seat, grabbed Bailey by the face, and punched her.
I need something to hold onto.
When Bailey was three, a pediatrician had recommended Lori speak to a psychologist about her daughter. The man said he was concerned about Bailey’s obsessive tendencies. Lori said something very rude back and they switched pediatricians right then.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Lori told Bailey on the way back home. “There’s nothing wrong with you at all.”
There’s something wrong with me. There’s always been something wrong with me.
There was a new fish by the first day of second grade, a more expensive fish with two perfect shiny eyes. It wasn’t named anything and didn’t mean anything either, but Bailey made a show of holding it the same way she used to hold Voogelot because she wanted Lori to be happy. She put it in her backpack once she got on the school bus though. At school she said “here” in the morning and nothing else. Izzy wasn’t in her class anymore. Seating was done alphabetically that year, and that put Bailey Parson next to one Rachel Stryker.
Rachel knows me. She knows I’m a homophobic. She knows I’m a fish girl. Her parents told her not to take it from me. They told her to push me. They told her not to like me. And Lori told me not to like her. I have to sit next to her in a bubble pot of every bit of everything the adults tell us not to trust and not to love.
“Are you okay?” asked Rachel Stryker.
Bailey turned to look at her. She realized then that she’d never heard Rachel say anything before. She and Izzy were twins, but they weren’t identical. Rachel was smaller, thinner, her hair shorter and her eyes wider. And when she spoke, in a timid voice so unlike anything that Izzy Stryker’s vocal chords were able to produce, it was as though the two of them were from opposite ends of the planet.
If she hated me, she wouldn’t ask if I’m okay. ‘Are you okay’ is a code. It means, I don’t hate you.
Bailey nodded one time. “I don’t hate you,” she offered. I should have coded that message the way Rachel coded hers, but I don’t know how.
Rachel tilted her head to one side. She took her time to internalize what Bailey said before she spoke again. “Where’s your fish?”
No. It was a trick and she’s bullying me and she’s going to call me fish girl. She hates me. I can’t believe I ever thought that anyone didn’t hate me. “My mom stole it,” Bailey said in the quietest voice.
“Oh,” said Rachel. “I thought maybe Isabella took it. She takes all of my things.”
Isabella. Izzy Stryker. We don’t call her the same thing. Do we see her the same way? Bailey turned away, tapped her nails twice on the desk. Rachel is still looking at me. She’s still going to bully me.
“Do you hate gay people?” Rachel asked.
Bailey nearly fell out of her chair snapping her head to stare at Rachel’s wide-eyed gaze. “No,” she said. No one ever asked me that before. No one really wanted to hear my answer.
Rachel nodded one time. “I didn’t think so,” she said. “But I think a lot of people do. The only reason they pretend not to is because they’re scared of Izzy, and you’re not.”
“I am,” said Bailey.
“Last year you weren’t,” Rachel amended. “Then she made you be. She makes everyone afraid. That’s why they’re not mean to her about our parents. They’re mean to me instead.” She tapped her hand on the desk much the same way Bailey just had. “That’s why I knew you didn’t hate gay people. You just hate Izzy. If you were homophobic you would have picked on someone easy.”
Rachel is smarter than me. I’ve never met anyone who I right away thought was smarter than me. I’ve only met people who I’ve had to listen to. Rachel isn’t making me listen to her, but I want to.
Rachel smells like flowers. Not the fake air freshener ones that Lori sprays in the house, but real flowers, on a porch in the spring.
"Do you want to have something of mine?” asked Bailey. Rachel considered the offer with her wide, dark eyes, and then nodded very slowly.
“Okay.” Bailey unzipped her backpack and pulled out the new fish, the not Voogelot. She handed it to Rachel. “I have it so I can hold onto it. But I don’t want to.”
Bailey had never seen a person look like sunshine before, but in that moment Rachel did. Her eyes went wide and her mouth fell open. She took the fish like she was taking a newborn, held it like it was fragile. “I love it! I love it so much!”
I’ve only ever loved one thing before, and I lost it. Now she looks so happy. If she loses him, is she going to feel the way I felt? Is it going to hurt her the way it hurt me? I might be hurting her, hurting her without realizing it the way I hurt Lori. I might be ruining everything.
This is the first time I’ve seen her smile. I like her smile.
“Thank you,” said Rachel. “Thank you so much.”
She was so happy that Bailey giggled, but then all of a sudden the smile fell off Rachel’s face.
“If you don’t have this,” she whispered, “what are you going to hold on to?”
Nothing. Bailey shrugged. “I’ll figure it out.”
It took a few hours, sitting in silence through the lesson, but a couple of minutes before lunch Rachel reached out under the table and took Bailey’s hand.
Here’s what I don’t know:
I don’t know what love is. I asked Lori what it meant and she said that it was the most wonderful thing, but then she said that it was what she and I felt for each other. I didn’t understand how both of those made sense together. I asked her if I could love my friends and she said I could, but before she did she paused. Like she was afraid of the answer. At church I asked again, and Mrs. Croucher told me that there was love between me and Jesus, but that doesn’t feel right to me either. I don’t know how to love sculptures, or stories, or strangers. I don’t trust the things adults tell me about the world anymore, because they don’t know any better than me.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I know I don’t think right. I know I don’t talk right. I know I draw the wrong lines and say the wrong words. I know I feel too much and I feel too little. I want to know why I do it, but I don’t. Sometimes I think Lori’s trying to hide the answer from me, and sometimes I think she’s hiding it from herself. And sometimes I think that she really does want to punch the trouble out of me, but she doesn’t.
I don’t know how to smile without meaning it. Rachel says she’s different at home than she is with me, but I don’t know how to be anyone but me, anytime. Sometimes Lori smiles at me and I just watch her, all white teeth and beady eyes, and I can’t smile back. And sometimes Rachel looks at me with a straight face and I start beaming, just because her wide eyes and narrow face make her look almost like a fish, something bright and small in a big ocean, and I just can’t keep the grin off my face.
But I do know I love the moments where everything seems right, where catches me looking and sees me beaming, and her wide eyes go wider, and Rachel smiles back.
In Sunday School Mr. Croucher told me that some love is less sacred than other love. She told me we have to protect the sanctity. She looked right at me when she said it.
In the car I asked Lori about it and she said that Mrs. Croucher meant that sometimes men and men, or women and women, will get married instead of men and women. Lori said, that’s wrong. Lori said, it’s not a complete family, and people like that are not allowed to be married like her and George. Lori said, the reason Mrs. Croucher looked right at me is because she knows I’m exposed to people like that. Lori said, the twin girls named Izzy and Rachel Stryker in my class have two moms instead of a mom and a dad. Lori asked me how I would feel if I had no dad, and I said I didn’t know. Lori said, it would be bad.
At home I asked George if it would be bad if I didn’t have him, and had another Lori instead, but I said “mom” instead of Lori and “dad” instead of George the way they tell me to, even though no one else calls them that. George asked me why I would ask him something like that, and I explained what Mrs. Croucher and Lori said, and then he told me that that wasn’t what Mrs. Croucher meant. Then George ran his hand over his face the way he runs his hand over a light switch, when he’s trying to change how something looks but not how it is.
At school Izzy Stryker is mean. She’s mean to everyone, in a careless way, in the way that what she thinks is funny or friendly or just herself, is mean. But when she’s mean to me it’s special, because it’s on purpose. She tells me I’m stupid for not talking, when I have nothing to say. She says I’m weird, for not smiling when I’m not happy. She says I’m the mean one because I have no friends, when I just want to be by myself without people who confuse me. And when I started bringing Voogelot to school, she said Voogelot was ugly, and she said only babies carry around stuffed animals, and she said things that a bully in a video from an assembly would say. I told Lori I don’t like her and Lori said that I should stand up for myself.
That’s what I know.
Bailey walked across the playground holding a purple stuffed fish in her hands, gripping it in the spots where her fingers had left imprints from always holding too tight, into the belly of a group of first grade girls playing Miss Mary Mack on the playground. Bailey stepped right in between Izzy Stryker and the girl she was clapping hands with, so they both had to draw back to avoid slapping her. Bailey glared right into Izzy Stryker’s big blue eyes.
“Your family is not complete because you don’t have a dad and your parents can’t get married,” she said.
Izzy had stepped back. When she heard what Bailey said she looked to the girls on her left and right, wide eyes and dropped jaw like a movie actor, and then she stepped forwards again.
“You are a homomobic,” she said, and she shoved Bailey backwards onto the blacktop.
The stuffed fish bounced out of Bailey’s hands and onto the dusty pavement. Bailey didn’t cry when the skin shaved off of her elbow, or when her head cracked off of the asphalt and sent stars circling across the laughing girls’ faces. Bailey only cried when she lifted up her head to find her stuffed fish, and she saw Izzy Stryker lift one light-up Sketcher, and stomp right on its purple face.
All the blame for the incident landed on Izzy for making the fight physical. Lori sat on a plastic chair in the principal’s office while he gave her a halfhearted warning about keeping political beliefs at home. Bailey sat in the corner of the room and tried to pinch the dried mud out of Voogelot’s fluff. The dirt would wash away later in the washing machine, while Bailey pressed her head against the glass waiting for him to come out new, but one of his plastic eyes had scratches across it from when Izzy’s foot ground it into the blacktop, and those scars would never go away.
Adults always tell me they’re right and I’m not. But they don’t all say the same things. So how am I supposed to believe them?
At school Izzy cornered Bailey on the blacktop. “My moms said not to take it from you,” Izzy said. She was flanked by three other girls, including her sister. “My moms said not to take it from anyone and they told me I should push back.”
Bailey was holding Voogelot and drawing swirls with chalk. And I don’t have anything else to say to her.
“They’re mad,” said Izzy. “You made my moms mad. I’m telling everyone you’re a hom — a homophobic. That makes you a bad person. I’m telling everyone in school.”
And in the coming months, she did.
Izzy tells everyone I’m a bad person. Everyone believes her. Everyone either likes Izzy, or they’re scared of her. I’m scared of her too. Now she tells me I’m mean every time she sees me in class. She tells everyone else that I’m a bully. She uses words to describe me that none of us know. She must have learned all these words from her moms. Her moms must hate me too.
Now she does other things too. She calls me fish girl. She calls Voogelot ugly and stupid. She gets people to try and snatch him away from me in the hallways. She says I’m a baby. She says I’m a bitch but only in my ear when no one else is around.
I’m supposed to tell an adult when I’m being bullied. But now Izzy says I’m the bully. Everyone thinks I’m a bully, and everyone tells their parents I’m a bully, and soon I just become a bully. I went a whole week without saying anything other than “here” for attendance and no one noticed. How can I be a bully when I can’t open my mouth?
Bailey cried on the last day of first grade. She wasn’t the only one. A lot of little girls in the classes wrapped their arms around their teachers and started wailing. The teachers kept reassuring the criers that everything would be okay, they’d come back in the fall, they’d get to go to school again in the fall. This made a lot of the little girls calmer, but it just made Bailey cry more.
In the second half of that day, all the parents came to visit and have the end of year luncheon out on the lawn. Bailey sat with Lori’s friends and their children, gripped Voogelot in her hands, and tested how long she could go without speaking again. She watched a little white butterfly tumble its way through the luncheon, the platters of ham sandwiches and the sagging wooden picnic tables. Its wings moved fast but its pace was slow, and it was a good few minutes before it alighted on the edge of a table that Bailey realized was Izzy’s. She was sitting with her moms and her twin sister, but she kept waving at other tables and standing up on the bench to see other kids. Bailey was only looking at her for a moment, but in that moment Izzy’s bouncing attention landed on her. Her eyes went wide when she saw Bailey. Then she tapped one of her moms on the shoulder, and said something to her, and as she spoke the other mom’s interest was also piqued, and the smiles on their faces fell away as they listened to her daughter. Then Izzy turned and pointed across the lawn. Both women followed her outstretched finger, and stared straight at Bailey.
They look angry. They look upset. One of them looks sad. One of them looks the way that George looks when he tries to get me to leave Voogelot at home and I won’t.
They don’t look like two Lori’s. They look like parents.
Bailey stared back at them, until one of them women touched the other on the arm and they both looked away.
Lori and George took Bailey to Disneyland that summer. Bailey brought Voogelot into the parks, she brought him on all of the rides. Even when they had to put loose articles in little pouches while the coasters were running, she kept one hand in the pouch and held Voogelot by the fin. She had the fish in her hands when she met Cinderella. Afterwards they went to a gift shop where Lori convinced Bailey to try on a Cinderella costume, even though they had already waited in the Cinderella line for two hours without eating, and she made Bailey put down her stuffed animal while she tried it on. The dress was itchy, but Lori wouldn’t let Bailey take it off, so Bailey started trying to pull it over her own head and it ripped. Then Lori started yelling, and Bailey started screaming, and she didn’t even get her shirt all the way on before she sprinted out of the gift shop. George went after her while Lori tried to put the torn dress back without paying. George calmed his daughter down and got her shirt on right, and wisely bought her some french fries, and Lori came out of the gift shop and tracked the pair of them down. When Bailey saw her mother she instantly stood up and said,
“Where’s Voogelot?”
Lori sagged. She shook her head and walked back towards the gift shop.
Bailey started bouncing up and down on her seat in the food court. “Where is he?”
“Mom will get him,” George promised.
Where is he? “Where is he?” Where is he?
Lori came back twenty minutes later to tell her daughter that Voogelot was gone.
My aunt Lacey gave me Voogelot for my third birthday. Lacey is Lori’s younger sister, her fifth younger sister, and she’s only six years older than me. She found a fish at a gift shop and thought I would like it. That same year George and Lori got me a playhouse to sit in the yard. It was painted pink and had working window shutters and a set of chairs that came with it but I didn’t even go inside it. Because everyone was there that day, all Lori’s sisters and all of her friends, too many people, and I didn’t want a house or a chair set or anything. I just wanted something to hold onto.
I just want something to hold onto.
Bailey started running again, and it took nearly an hour to track her down because she didn’t stop. She was trying to find the gift shop again but she couldn’t remember what it looked like. George had to run to catch her, got his arms around her, and she scratched one of his cheeks trying to get him to let go of her, hard enough that he bled. They wouldn’t take her back to the shop no matter how loud she screamed. She yelled all the way out of the park, into the car, back to the hotel, banging on the car window like she was being kidnapped. She screamed things at Lori, words she wasn’t supposed to know, volumes she had been taught not to reach. It was an incessant, ear-splitting destruction of their family vacation.
Halfway back to the hotel Lori launched herself back over the passenger seat, grabbed Bailey by the face, and punched her.
I need something to hold onto.
When Bailey was three, a pediatrician had recommended Lori speak to a psychologist about her daughter. The man said he was concerned about Bailey’s obsessive tendencies. Lori said something very rude back and they switched pediatricians right then.
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Lori told Bailey on the way back home. “There’s nothing wrong with you at all.”
There’s something wrong with me. There’s always been something wrong with me.
There was a new fish by the first day of second grade, a more expensive fish with two perfect shiny eyes. It wasn’t named anything and didn’t mean anything either, but Bailey made a show of holding it the same way she used to hold Voogelot because she wanted Lori to be happy. She put it in her backpack once she got on the school bus though. At school she said “here” in the morning and nothing else. Izzy wasn’t in her class anymore. Seating was done alphabetically that year, and that put Bailey Parson next to one Rachel Stryker.
Rachel knows me. She knows I’m a homophobic. She knows I’m a fish girl. Her parents told her not to take it from me. They told her to push me. They told her not to like me. And Lori told me not to like her. I have to sit next to her in a bubble pot of every bit of everything the adults tell us not to trust and not to love.
“Are you okay?” asked Rachel Stryker.
Bailey turned to look at her. She realized then that she’d never heard Rachel say anything before. She and Izzy were twins, but they weren’t identical. Rachel was smaller, thinner, her hair shorter and her eyes wider. And when she spoke, in a timid voice so unlike anything that Izzy Stryker’s vocal chords were able to produce, it was as though the two of them were from opposite ends of the planet.
If she hated me, she wouldn’t ask if I’m okay. ‘Are you okay’ is a code. It means, I don’t hate you.
Bailey nodded one time. “I don’t hate you,” she offered. I should have coded that message the way Rachel coded hers, but I don’t know how.
Rachel tilted her head to one side. She took her time to internalize what Bailey said before she spoke again. “Where’s your fish?”
No. It was a trick and she’s bullying me and she’s going to call me fish girl. She hates me. I can’t believe I ever thought that anyone didn’t hate me. “My mom stole it,” Bailey said in the quietest voice.
“Oh,” said Rachel. “I thought maybe Isabella took it. She takes all of my things.”
Isabella. Izzy Stryker. We don’t call her the same thing. Do we see her the same way? Bailey turned away, tapped her nails twice on the desk. Rachel is still looking at me. She’s still going to bully me.
“Do you hate gay people?” Rachel asked.
Bailey nearly fell out of her chair snapping her head to stare at Rachel’s wide-eyed gaze. “No,” she said. No one ever asked me that before. No one really wanted to hear my answer.
Rachel nodded one time. “I didn’t think so,” she said. “But I think a lot of people do. The only reason they pretend not to is because they’re scared of Izzy, and you’re not.”
“I am,” said Bailey.
“Last year you weren’t,” Rachel amended. “Then she made you be. She makes everyone afraid. That’s why they’re not mean to her about our parents. They’re mean to me instead.” She tapped her hand on the desk much the same way Bailey just had. “That’s why I knew you didn’t hate gay people. You just hate Izzy. If you were homophobic you would have picked on someone easy.”
Rachel is smarter than me. I’ve never met anyone who I right away thought was smarter than me. I’ve only met people who I’ve had to listen to. Rachel isn’t making me listen to her, but I want to.
Rachel smells like flowers. Not the fake air freshener ones that Lori sprays in the house, but real flowers, on a porch in the spring.
"Do you want to have something of mine?” asked Bailey. Rachel considered the offer with her wide, dark eyes, and then nodded very slowly.
“Okay.” Bailey unzipped her backpack and pulled out the new fish, the not Voogelot. She handed it to Rachel. “I have it so I can hold onto it. But I don’t want to.”
Bailey had never seen a person look like sunshine before, but in that moment Rachel did. Her eyes went wide and her mouth fell open. She took the fish like she was taking a newborn, held it like it was fragile. “I love it! I love it so much!”
I’ve only ever loved one thing before, and I lost it. Now she looks so happy. If she loses him, is she going to feel the way I felt? Is it going to hurt her the way it hurt me? I might be hurting her, hurting her without realizing it the way I hurt Lori. I might be ruining everything.
This is the first time I’ve seen her smile. I like her smile.
“Thank you,” said Rachel. “Thank you so much.”
She was so happy that Bailey giggled, but then all of a sudden the smile fell off Rachel’s face.
“If you don’t have this,” she whispered, “what are you going to hold on to?”
Nothing. Bailey shrugged. “I’ll figure it out.”
It took a few hours, sitting in silence through the lesson, but a couple of minutes before lunch Rachel reached out under the table and took Bailey’s hand.
Here’s what I don’t know:
I don’t know what love is. I asked Lori what it meant and she said that it was the most wonderful thing, but then she said that it was what she and I felt for each other. I didn’t understand how both of those made sense together. I asked her if I could love my friends and she said I could, but before she did she paused. Like she was afraid of the answer. At church I asked again, and Mrs. Croucher told me that there was love between me and Jesus, but that doesn’t feel right to me either. I don’t know how to love sculptures, or stories, or strangers. I don’t trust the things adults tell me about the world anymore, because they don’t know any better than me.
I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I know I don’t think right. I know I don’t talk right. I know I draw the wrong lines and say the wrong words. I know I feel too much and I feel too little. I want to know why I do it, but I don’t. Sometimes I think Lori’s trying to hide the answer from me, and sometimes I think she’s hiding it from herself. And sometimes I think that she really does want to punch the trouble out of me, but she doesn’t.
I don’t know how to smile without meaning it. Rachel says she’s different at home than she is with me, but I don’t know how to be anyone but me, anytime. Sometimes Lori smiles at me and I just watch her, all white teeth and beady eyes, and I can’t smile back. And sometimes Rachel looks at me with a straight face and I start beaming, just because her wide eyes and narrow face make her look almost like a fish, something bright and small in a big ocean, and I just can’t keep the grin off my face.
But I do know I love the moments where everything seems right, where catches me looking and sees me beaming, and her wide eyes go wider, and Rachel smiles back.