68 TRUE STORIES, WELL TOLD.
the summer after our junior year, I volunteered to drive with Sarah to California,
to the coastal town where she was going to live with a high school friend for the sum-
mer. She’d have a free place to stay and a job waiting tables at a seafood restaurant with
a view of the Pacific Ocean.
We drove from one coast to the other in four days. We took turns driving all
through the first night, and by the next afternoon, we had made it from South Caro-
lina to Albuquerque, New Mexico. We camped the rest of the nights in deserts.
We didn’t expect it to get so cold at night in May. The days were hot and left us
parched, but at night, the temperature dropped into the forties, and the cold air seeped
through our thin nylon tent and into our bones. The first night we camped, we zipped
our sleeping bags together to conserve heat, and when that wasn’t enough, we moved
as close to each other as we could. I put my arm around Sarah’s waist. When I got back
from the trip, Kate asked if anything was going on between Sarah and me. She was
still dating Brian—he’d mailed her a letter every day of summer break. Nothing had
happened between Sarah and me on the trip, not technically. We’d never kissed or
talked about the undercurrent between us.
“No,” I answered Kate over the phone, “but I don’t know why you’d care.”
“We’re supposed to be best friends,” she said.
That’s the problem with sleeping with your best friend. I didn’t realize until then
that I wasn’t sure whether Kate and I had ever been just friends. Had I loved her from
the moment I saw her walk into that math class? From the night she taught me how to
blot my lips? From the night she rested her head on my shoulder in my car?the first time Sarah and I kissed, more than halfway through our senior year, I
asked her to make a scientific hypothesis: how many times can I kiss you before you kiss me
on the mouth? Lying next to her in bed, on her dark blue sheets, I ran my hand under her
T-shirt and across her stomach.
I kissed her forearm—one. Her skin was warm in the middle of February.
Tw o—just below the sleeve of her T-shirt.
Then an inch above her collar—three.
She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear.
I could feel her heart racing through her skin.
Four—a few inches higher on her neck.
She kissed me on the mouth when I looked up at her.when we graduated from college, Kate was still with Brian, and I was still
secretly dating Sarah. That August, Brian was moving to North Carolina to start
graduate school, and Sarah was moving to Charleston to start a job at an ecology camp.
Kate suggested she and I move to Charleston together. I knew this was a bad idea, but
I agreed to the plan, maybe out of guilt, maybe because I didn’t want to lose Kate. If I
lived in Charleston, at least I would be close to Sarah, I thought.