I was delighted by how blunt she could be. “Why, you a lawyer?”
“Sorry.” She shrugged. “Sometimes I wonder which of my parents would be the one to file. Like, I think my mom loves my dad more than he loves her, but I also think he needs her more than she needs him. So I go back and forth.”
“Dark,” I said.
“I know.” We walked in silence for a minute, dipping in and out of lamplight, passing the beach roses, the Gertrude Jekylls, the Sunsprites.
“It was my mom,” I said finally. “But according to her, he basically forced her hand.”
“You don’t believe her?”
“No, I do,” I said. “I don’t know why I said it like that.”
“You’re still mad,” explained Ruby, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. But I wasn’t. I knew they shouldn’t be together, and maybe never should have been. I was relieved when they’d told me. I’d always liked them better individually. But.
“I just didn’t want him to move,” I said. “But he’s been gone so long I’m not sure I want him to come back.”
“This one,” said Ruby, stopping suddenly. She unclasped my hand and pointed to a full, blood-red bloom, lit from the lamppost above. I beamed, quickly cured of the devastation of not holding Ruby’s hand by the all-encompassing pleasure of being right.
“Ingrid Bergmans,” I said. “I told you.”
“You get me.”
My hand tingled where hers had touched mine. I didn’t know what to do with it. What had I used this hand for before holding Ruby’s? It hung at my side, useless and cold. And then, as if guided by a force I couldn’t control, it lifted to the stem of Ruby’s favorite rose, breaking it off in one clean snap.
Oh my God, I thought. I am going to jail. I offered the rose to Ruby, who looked as shocked as I felt. And, I thought, more than a little impressed.
“Wow,” she said. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. “Now we have to get out of here.”
“What about yours?”
I looked around me, but there was no sign of the law, at least not yet. So I grabbed Ruby’s free hand and pulled her into a run, making a break for the orangey-pink Louis de Funès roses. “There!” I whispered, pointing randomly as we flew past them, back over the bridge, laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe.
* * *
—
On Saturday my night with Ruby felt like a dream come true. On Sunday it just felt like a dream—a rose garden? Really? By Monday I was starting to question my sanity: Had it happened the way I remembered it, or had I made the best parts up? My therapist, Jennifer, had once explained that my memory didn’t work right when I experienced severe anxiety, but I hadn’t been anxious that night, had I? I was nervous and excited, and sometimes that felt similar, but it wasn’t the same. I was an anxious individual, but that did not mean I’d invented two (two!) separate instances of fairly prolonged hand-holding with the literal coolest girl at school.
What it meant, though, was still a mystery. History had taught me to be cautious of the casual girl-on-girl handhold. For some reason, straight-girl best friends did it all the time, and I was supposed to believe none of them wanted to kiss. Ruby knew I was an out, proud, capital-L Lesbian, and so it must have occurred to her that I might think it was more than friendly. But whenever I thought I knew anything about the things straight girls did, they moved the goalpost.
It didn’t help that Ruby and I hadn’t texted the rest of the weekend, leaving me without any sort of verbal confirmation. (What, did I want her to text me Thanks for the romantic hand-holding in the Balboa Park rose garden, Quinn Ryan? Yes, that would have been nice.) I was going to, but then I thought I should let her go first, seeing as the last move made was mine. But then she didn’t go