What We Left Behind

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“I don’t know. I need to think more. I’ve talked to Derek about it. He’s cool. Easy to talk to.”

I can’t tell if that was an accidental pronoun slip or if it was on purpose. I can’t remember the last time I heard Toni use a gendered pronoun. Well, if they’re already out at a party, they’ve probably been drinking, so...

“Derek sounds great.” I swallow, still trying to sound normal. It’s not like I’m freaking out or anything. I’m just kind of...confused? Lost? “I’ll get to meet him when I come up tomorrow, right?”

“Yeah! Of course. They all can’t wait to meet you. I showed them your picture. Nance called you a hottie.”

I laugh. A little bit of the tension goes out of me. I can’t wait to actually see Toni again. Everything would be so much better if we could just touch each other. Just occupy the same space.

Someone bangs on my door. “Gretchen! Let me in! I need your help with this shirt dilemma!”

I laugh again.

“Did you hear that?” I ask Toni.

“Yeah. Have fun tonight. It’s a gay club, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t do any drugs, okay? You would be so embarrassing high.”

I laugh. “Will do. Have fun hanging out in somebody’s room.”

We laugh some more.

“I love you,” Toni says in a low voice that brings a whole new smile to my face, because I know that voice is meant for only me to hear.

“I love you, too. I can’t wait to see you tomorrow.”

“I know. Me, too.”

We get off the phone. Carroll, who’s kept up a steady beat on the door, acts all annoyed when I let him in. He’s topless, holding a stack of T-shirts.

“Finally.” He plops down on my bed and holds the first shirt up to his chest. “Thoughts?”

“Red works for you,” I say. “But isn’t it a bit much?”

“‘A bit much’ isn’t necessarily a bad thing.” He holds up another. “Too boring?”

“No, but won’t every other guy in the club be wearing that exact same shirt?”

“Maybe not. I heard straight people go to this place on Friday nights, too.” He tries the one he bought at American Apparel last week. “This is the safest choice.”

“I agree. It’s hot, though.”

“Yeah, it is.” Carroll pulls on the T-shirt and saunters over to Samantha’s mirror to play with his hair. “I must say, for someone who dresses herself like a slacker hippie, you have decent taste in guys’ clothes. Maybe you’re really a gay man trapped in a lesbian’s body.”

“No way,” I say. “I have a really strong gag reflex.”

He laughs. “So it’s another boring T-shirt and jeans ensemble for you tonight?”

“All I have is T-shirts and jeans. Oh, and that reminds me, I need you to come shopping with me soon. I’m going to a Halloween dance up at Harvard.”

Carroll’s looking through my closet. He nudges aside the backpack I’ve already filled with clothes and books for the bus tomorrow. “You don’t need to go shopping for that. No one at Harvard has any clue how to dress. Here, wear this tonight.”

He hands me a blue silk top I borrowed from someone last year and never gave back. I go in the bathroom to put it on.

I’ve got to stop stressing out. I want to be normal tonight.

Is it normal to have a girlfriend who doesn’t use the word girl, though? Wait, if Toni starts using male pronouns, would that make Toni my boyfriend?

No. Not thinking about this now. Tonight I will be Fun Gretchen. Then tomorrow I’ll go see Toni and everything will work itself out.

“Apparently this dance thing is a big event,” I say through the open door. “Toni told me to get something sexy.”

Carroll laughs. “Okay, whatever the missus commands. For now, though, could you please hurry up and do your makeup so we can get out of here?”

I slide on my Chapstick. “All set.”

* * *

The club is enormous. I’ve been to clubs in DC but nothing anywhere near this massive. Carroll’s never been to a club at all. I try to tell him this place is crazy huge, but as soon as our under-twenty-one hand stamps are in place and the doors have closed behind us, there’s no point talking. All we can hear is the pulsing music.

But it’s fun. It’s so, so amazingly fun.

We did a couple of shots before we came out, in Tracy’s room. (Tracy turned out to be awesome, actually.) Between the alcohol buzzing in my brain, the music pounding in my ears and the sight of hundreds of half-dressed guys grinding up against each other, I feel like I’m in a whole other fabulous universe. I stop thinking about everything that happened before this moment. I close my eyes and let the beat of the music flow up into my chest until it takes over my entire body.

And I dance. I never, ever want to stop dancing.

Carroll, for his part, starts grinning the second we walk through the doors and never stops. He’s entered his own personal heaven.

We dance to Beyoncé. We dance to Britney. We dance to Taylor Swift. Carroll makes the sign of the cross when “Like a Prayer” comes on, and I laugh because Toni’s sort of Catholic, too, and apparently I am destined to spend my life surrounded by sort-of Catholics, and right now that’s hilarious. Right now everything’s hilarious.

Carroll and I dance together for what feels like hours because each song is about twenty minutes long. Carroll’s an okay dancer, but he needs to loosen up. He gets a drink from somewhere, and that seems to help.

Suddenly there’s a sketchy guy dancing next to us. He has a mustache and a gold necklace that says Mama’s Boy. His bare chest is superhairy and soaking with sweat. I turn around so I won’t have to look at him while I dance.

I close my eyes again and sing along at the top of my lungs to the chorus of “Born This Way.” When I open my eyes, Carroll has his tongue down the sketchy guy’s throat.

Oh. Okay.

I dance by myself for a while. Then a guy with brown hair comes over and dances next to me. He shouts something that sounds like, “You’re full of snot!”

“What?” I shout back.

“YOU’RE REALLY HOT!” he shouts.

Oh. This must be one of the straight guys Carroll said might be here. I shout back, “I’m gay!”

“WHAT?”

“I’M GAY!”

“OH.” The guy pauses. “THAT’S OK. GAY CHICKS CAN STILL BE HOT.”

I laugh.

The guy takes both my hands and we start dancing the way you do in middle school—step-together, step-together, one-two-three. I’m laughing even harder now. We dance like that through all of “Hips Don’t Lie.” Then the guy leans in and yells, “IS YOUR FRIEND OK?”

“WHY?” I look where he’s pointing. Carroll and the sketchy guy have broken their lip-lock, and the sketchy guy is talking really emphatically to Carroll. Carroll’s trying to back away, but he can’t get through the wall of bodies behind him.

I wave goodbye to the brown-haired guy and push my way through the crowd.

“IT’S TIME TO LEAVE!” I shout at Carroll. I grab his hand and tug him toward the door.

He tugs back, not moving. “IT’S EARLY!” he yells.

I look at Chest Hair Man. He’s grinning at me. It’s creepy.

“HEY, SORRY, WE GOTTA GO,” I tell the guy. Then I have a brilliant idea. “HIS MOM WILL KILL US IF HE MISSES CURFEW.”

I expect Chest Hair Man to be horrified at the implication of underage debauchery. Instead he licks his lips.

Okay, ewww. I stop smiling and turn back to Carroll.

“THIS GUY IS A DOUCHEBAG,” I say. “WE’RE LEAVING RIGHT NOW.”

This time I tug on both of Carroll’s hands. After a second of resistance, he lets me pull him across the floor.

I look behind us a few times as we fight our way through the crowd, but Chest Hair Man has upgraded (downgraded?) to a kid with bleached hair who doesn’t appear to have entered puberty.

We have to wait ten minutes for a cab. Carroll’s annoyed with me at first. I’m irritated, too. I was having fun before.

It all fades fast, though. We’re both too exhausted to be mad now that the high of the club music is gone. And suddenly we’re both starving.

We get the cabdriver to let us off at the pizza place down the block from our dorm and eat our slices as we walk home, the grease dripping down our chins and onto our sweaty clothes.

“Can I tell you something superembarrassing?” Carroll asks me in the elevator after he’s shoved the last chunk of crust into his mouth.

“Course.” I wipe grease off his cheekbone and reach for my phone. I haven’t looked at it since we got to the club. I have twelve new texts.

“That—” Carroll grins up at the ceiling, but he doesn’t look amused. “That was my first kiss.”

I gape.

“Don’t laugh,” he says.

“I’m not!” I sort of am, though, so I bite my lip. “But—seriously?”

“Yeah.” We’re at our floor, so I follow Carroll to his room. It’s empty. Juan is always out all night on Fridays. Some sort of track team hazing thing I don’t want to know the details of. “I told you before. I wasn’t lying. There were no other gay people in Arneyville.”

“I didn’t think you were lying.” I lie down on Carroll’s bed while he changes. “Anyway, congratulations.”

“Thanks. At least it’s over with, right?”

“Right.” I yawn. I’m tired but not sleepy. My muscles ache from dancing. I want to curl up here and not get up for hours, but I have to stay awake until it’s time to leave for the bus. “Wow, and on your very first night at a club.”

“With an ugly guy, though. Then I look over and see you dancing with a hot one.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure that guy was straight.”

“Like it matters.” Carroll pushes me over to one side of the bed and lies down next to me. “Your turn. When was your first kiss?”

I laugh and start thumbing through my texts. Two are from Briana, asking my advice about whether to ask out a girl she thinks is cute. “You really want to hear about that?”

“I want to hear everything about that. I’m praying it’s more humiliating than mine. Was it the girlfriend?”

“Oh, no. Toni and I didn’t get together until we were sixteen.”

I smile. That night was magic.

It feels like a lifetime ago. I was a different person back then. We both were.

I have a bunch of texts from Toni, too. I glance down the stream. Something about the trip tomorrow.

“So, how old were you the first time?” Carroll asks.

I shift my head onto his shoulder so I won’t have to meet his eyes. “Um. Eleven.”