64 TRUE STORIES, WELL TOLD.
I disguised myself for years. I hid in plain sight. In college, my best friend, Kate,*
and I slept together in a small twin bed, as if inside a jar—it didn’t seem possible that
we could both fit so comfortably. We locked the door to her bedroom, as if sealing a
lid, making sure no one could get inside.
Unlike the octopus, curiously able to open and escape a sealed container, I could
not imagine such openness. I could not imagine coming out. Not in the South. Not at
nineteen.kate and i met during the first week of college. The afternoon of the first day of
classes, I sat nervously in a small classroom, waiting for the math professor to arrive.
I smiled when Kate walked past me and chose the seat behind mine. I noticed how
pretty she was—her shoulder-length blonde hair, her long neck, her peacock-green
eyes.
Maybe we went to lunch after class that day, or maybe we studied for the first test
together later that week, or maybe we ran into each other in a dorm hallway. The
truth is, I can’t remember exactly where it happened, but it wasn’t long before Kate
and I were always together, joined at the hip.to escape our small Southern college town, Kate and I drove. We left our quiet
campus late at night in the blue 1990 Oldsmobile sedan I had inherited from my
grandmother. Some nights, we didn’t pass a single car on the road. All that seemed to
exist out there was pine trees.
Our college had fewer than 1,300 students, and almost everyone lived in the dorms
and ate their meals in the one cafeteria on campus. I looked forward to the nights in
the car with Kate, when everyone we knew was several tiny towns away. We could
have been driving nowhere, and some nights we did drive nowhere—we just drove
until we turned around. The car was one of the only places where Kate and I could talk
without anyone else hearing; what we said seemed safe inside my midnight blue sedan.
Our thin bodies relaxed into the blue cloth seats. Kate propped her bare feet on the
blue dashboard, her toes pressed against the windshield. I wrapped my hands around
the blue steering wheel and adjusted the blue radio dial to find a good song. We both
complained that only country songs came on within a thirty-mile radius of our school.
One night, I told Kate about how I had kissed my best friend in middle school. “It’s
not that strange,” she said as I concentrated on the dimly lit road. “Lots of girls have
crushes on their best friend. I don’t think it means you’re a lesbian.” I was relieved.
I also wondered whether Kate meant that I shouldn’t worry about the ambiguity
surrounding our own friendship. I wondered if she felt the ambiguity between us, too.
Kate moved closer to the blue center console and rested her head against my shoulder.
“I’m getting tired,” she said.* Some names have been changed.