had stuck with her, clearly, turning over and over until it fit just right.
“I’m sure they want you,” I said. She looked up at me, her expression inscrutable. I stared back, trying to figure it out, until she broke, and looked away. I turned, and with a quick goodbye to Dee and Gaby, I was gone.
The next morning, I got the official offer from UCLA. They offered to cover half my tuition and all my textbooks, and they said I had two weeks to decide. But I didn’t need it. There was nothing else to wait for, and, finally, nothing I wanted more. I signed my letter of intent and sent it back. Three and a half years I’d waited, and it was over in twenty minutes.
Over the next week, Jamie and I worked out our Triple Moon plan over text and FaceTime. It was Jamie, surprisingly, who insisted we go forward with the Sweets show, and so I looped in Ruby, feeling very much like a band manager, and I wondered if this was the feeling Jamie got from starting clubs: the mild thrill of creating an event dependent entirely on you, having ungraded administrative tasks to perform and calendars to coordinate. Because the show would fall in December, it was Jamie’s idea to give it a Krampusnacht theme. Krampusnacht, Wikipedia taught us, was a European pre-Christmas holiday on which a “wicked, hairy devil” appears in the streets to give bad kids coal. This idea seemed very much in line with Sweets’s vibe, and when we texted Ruby the idea, she proclaimed it dope. (Somehow, when Ruby said it, it worked.) We convinced Dee and Gaby that we could charge thirty dollars a head—six times as much as last time—of which the band would keep just eight (two per member), leaving the coffee shop with twenty-two.
I immediately started doing calculations: If fifty people came, Triple Moon would earn eleven hundred dollars. If a hundred people came, twenty-two hundred. If two hundred people came…but then Jamie interrupted me over text, reminding me that the coffee shop couldn’t even fit that many people inside.
Jamie also texted me to tell me she’d biked to the LGBT Community Center in Hillcrest and convinced them to put out a donation box for the holiday season, agreeing to split any profits between the center and Triple Moon. This inspired me to ask my mom if she knew any young queer reporters who could write a story about the coffee shop’s impact on queer teenagers and twenty-somethings who lived here, and simultaneously advertise for the show, and she put me in touch with a college grad named Davey, who promptly emailed to ask about setting up phone interviews with me, Jamie, Dee, and Gaby. If you didn’t know Jamie like I did, it would’ve been easy to miss how impressed she was with me when I told her what I’d done, and she texted back Wow. Period. But I knew. That wow was everything.
Over the same few days, Ruby and I had texted back and forth, trying to decide on a time to hang out before the show. It shouldn’t have been any harder than usual, but I noticed we were slow to respond to one another, and vague when we did. Ruby bailed on the first afternoon I suggested, and when she counter-offered the following night, I ended up canceling with the excuse that I had a migraine, which was only half true. I didn’t know why, exactly, but I was nervous to see her again. It had only been about a week since I had, but it felt like twenty. At night when I couldn’t sleep I tried to replay our hookups in my head, but I found they didn’t rush to me like they used to. I squeezed my eyes tighter, trying to concentrate, but that only made it less sexy, and more like a fact I was trying to remember for an exam. The Fourth Amendment is the right to security from unreasonable search and seizure. Carbon has four valence electrons. First I kissed Ruby there, and then she put her hand here. Or was it the reverse? I gave up.
The obvious solution was to see her again, and do it again, but part of the reason I put off seeing her was