CREATIVE NONFICTION 65
I imagined driving through thousands more towns just like that, with her head on
my shoulder and some country song on the radio. Every store would be closed. Every
field would be empty. Every house would be dark.
on valentine’s day, a boy invited Kate and me—both of us—to be his dates.
Maybe he couldn’t decide between us, or maybe he couldn’t imagine us apart.
When we got ready that night, Kate helped me put on makeup, leaned in close to
line my eyes black, to brush on mascara. “Relax your mouth,” she said, as she drew on
red lipstick. She bit her bottom lip as she concentrated on my face. She folded a tissue
in half and handed it to me. “Now, do this,” she told me, pressing her lips together—
making a popping noise when she opened them—to show me how to blot.
Posing for a photograph later in the night, Kate and I stood in front of a taxidermied
bison on display at the front of the restaurant. In the next photo, our date smiled in the
middle of us, one of his arms around each of our waists.
sophomore year, we lived in the same dorm, and one night that fall, Kate
crawled into my skinny bottom bunk. Our skin was still warm from summer. Her
back against my chest, she put my arm around her so that my hand rested against her
ribs. With my fingers I studied the way one of her lower ribs stuck out further than
the others.
We were best friends—we knew that—but we didn’t talk about how the borders
of our bodies had started to blur. In Classical Latin, costa meant “rib,” which, later, in
Medieval Latin, came to mean “edge” or “coast,” the side of a stretch of land. We were
walking the edge of a boundary neither of us would name. That night, her body slept
against mine like the Atlantic against the Carolina coast.
“i want you to kiss me,” Kate said one night in the spring. When she moved closer,
her face so near to my face I could feel her breath, I turned away. I couldn’t stop my
body from shaking.
My fear of my own desire could be measured like a chemical formula, each aspect
of my anxiety a letter in a chemical compound. Think of each line connecting
hydrogen to carbon as a rib: a butane structure for fear. I was afraid that if I kissed
Kate, the atoms inside me would split, and I might not be able to put them back in
place.
I worried that my relationship with Kate would change irrevocably if we kissed.
What if Kate only wanted to kiss me as an experiment, the way girls in movies joked
about having experimented with a girl in college, as if the experience was so incon-
sequential, so minor they could laugh it off? I hated those girls, the crisp certainty of
their laughs. And anyway, I didn’t think they could call something an experiment if
they already knew the answer to the question they were asking—they’d end up with
a guy.