“Among others.” I shrugged, as if that weren’t exactly what I’d meant.
“You’re an idiot,” she said.
“What?” I said. But then she kissed me. Really kissed me. Pushed me into the wall behind me kissed me. Her hand on the back of my neck and both of mine on her shoulders, her back, her hips and waist, the top of her butt. I felt her blindly wave her unoccupied arm at the door until it was closed, and the lock clicked. There was no going back after a kiss like that.
* * *
—
I woke up in Ruby’s bedroom not believing where I was. I saw her in bed, above me, from where I slept in the nicest sleeping bag I had ever encountered, and still it seemed fake. I felt around for my phone to look for evidence that I wasn’t losing my mind. It was 6:32. I had texted my mom at 12:17, during a make-out break, to let her know I’d drunk too much to drive home and would be sleeping at a friend’s house. She’d sent me a thumbs-up emoji and a drop of water, meaning: drink some. If she knew friend referred to Ruby, she didn’t say so, and I loved her for it.
Sometime after that we half ran, half walked from David’s house to Ruby’s, holding hands up and down the tar-paved hills in the dark.
Ruby’s parents were long asleep by then, and she made us tiptoe in the side door, across the entire first floor, and up the stairs that curved around their grand octagonal foyer. Twice on the stairs the wood creaked loudly beneath my unpracticed feet, and each time, Ruby reached out to grab my arm and hold me firm in place, freezing us both until she was sure her parents hadn’t woken. Instead of getting off at the second floor as expected, Ruby pulled me toward another set of stairs, which I climbed with one hand in hers and the other clinging to the banister. I was afraid of heights, particularly those witnessed from staircases, but I made myself look over the edge at the foyer growing farther below us. I tried to think if I’d ever been in a house with three stories before but could only come up with some historic miner’s mansion my fifth-grade class had toured on a field trip we took during our Gold Rush unit. And even that might have been more like two and a half.
Ruby’s bedroom took up nearly the entire floor, and I briefly worried she’d have me sleep on the couch at the opposite end of the room from her bed. (A couch. In her bedroom.) But then she closed the door and pulled me toward her bed, and I stopped thinking altogether.
We didn’t have sex, though it was obvious we were both wondering if we would. During a break in the kissing she looked up at me and I felt like she might be waiting for me to ask her if we could, but I couldn’t come up with the words, and something about being put in that position made me stubborn. Replaying it in the early-morning sunlight, it felt silly to think of it that way, but at the time, I didn’t want to be something Ruby just went along with.
Eventually she’d pulled a sleeping bag from her enormous closet, and I was surprised by my own relief. Not that I’d really thought I’d sleep with her in her bed, because if she had the kind of parents you tiptoe around, they probably weren’t the kind of parents who’d be cool with an obvious lesbian sharing their daughter’s bed. But when we were still lying there together, mouths numb from liquor and kissing, I’d felt lonely and claustrophobic and homesick and embarrassed by all of these feelings and more. I’d never been much for sleepovers as a kid—something about another house’s smells and sounds felt foreboding in the dark, and though I always woke up first, I was afraid to leave my friend’s bedroom without them, convinced I’d encounter her pajamaed dad in the hallway, and he’d awkwardly ask if I slept okay, and I would have to lie. (This had happened to me once, at Melissa McDougal’s house in second grade, and that