something, but the words got caught in my throat. I sat there with a weird sense of wanting to freeze time, to remember every little detail of the moment, from the happy tear tracks on JaKory’s face to the texture of Maritza’s fuzzy orange socks. I could feel my heart banging with the significance of it all.
After a minute, Maritza said, “Well, I guess we can all talk about boys together.”
That’s when I burst out laughing. Maritza and JaKory stared at me, and I shook my head and the words poured out.
“We can’t,” I said, “because it turns out I like girls.”
The three of us laughed so hard we ended up flat on our backs on my basement floor. Maritza kept squeezing our hands and JaKory kept saying, “What are the odds, though?!” When my mom called us upstairs for dinner, we sat around my family’s kitchen table trying to hide our secret smirks until JaKory choked on his water when my dad asked if he wanted a piece of pork sausage.
I guess it was pretty significant that all three of us turned out to be queer. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it further explained why we’d always felt a little different from other kids, and why we’d never clicked with anyone the way we clicked with each other. In any case, it made me even more certain that I would never find anyone who understood me like Maritza and JaKory did.
We still hadn’t told our parents. Maritza’s parents were devout Catholics, and JaKory’s mom was burdened with too many nursing shifts, and my own parents thought I was alien enough already, given that I’d inherited none of their perfect, all-American charm. But it went beyond that, too. We hadn’t told anyone else simply because it wasn’t relevant yet. I’d never kissed anyone, and neither had JaKory. Maritza’s only kiss had been last summer in Panama with some boy who hung out with her cousins. In short, we had no experience, so why worry about making an identity claim? Our sexuality—or, as JaKory sometimes called it, our “like-eality”—was something we all knew to be true, but which hadn’t really drawn a breath yet.
The thing is, I wasn’t sure it ever would.
* * *
“God, I want a boyfriend,” JaKory said, staring dazedly up at the movie he’d picked. He hugged a pillow to his chest like that would help.
“Me too,” Maritza said. “Or a girlfriend. Just someone I can send flirty texts to and make out with whenever I want.”
“Yeah, and eventually do more than make out,” JaKory said, wiggling his eyebrows. “But we need to get the first step down before any of that can happen.” He took a long breath and sighed. “Damn, I need to kiss someone so bad. Don’t y’all wanna kiss someone?”
I nestled further into my blanket. The fact that I was seventeen and had never kissed anyone was not something I liked to think about. As much as my friends wanted to talk about it, I never had anything to say. I guess because I knew, somewhere deep down, that simply talking about it would never get me anywhere.
“I’ve already kissed someone,” Maritza said smugly. She liked to remind us of this achievement at least once a week. I caught JaKory’s eye and mimed stabbing myself in the face.
“I can see you, asshole,” Maritza said, tossing a Gusher at me.
“I know,” I said, tossing the Gusher right back. “And by the way, you kissed a boy.”
“That counts, Codi. I like boys.”
“Yeah, but don’t you want to kiss a girl, too?”
Maritza went silent. She’d gotten more sensitive lately about identifying as bisexual, and for a moment I worried I’d offended her. “Of course I do,” she said in a clipped voice. “I actually think it’ll be better than kissing a boy.”
“How?” I asked.
“I don’t know, like … more delicate.”
“I’d take passionate over delicate,” JaKory said, shaking his head. “I want to feel something. I want it to be like … like the moment you hear a brilliant line of poetry. Like it knocks the breath out of you.”
“I think it feels like the top of a roller coaster, just before the drop,” Maritza said.
JaKory made a face. “You know I hate roller coasters.”
“So? You still know what the top feels like, with butterflies in your stomach and your heart pounding—”
“And like I’m gonna pass out or throw up everywhere—”
“What do you think, Codi?”
I kept my eyes on the TV screen, not looking at them. “I’m not