Page 35 of Leaving the Station
I shook my head. “Isn’t it closed?”
He pulled a key chain out of his backpack. “I know a guy.”
“You always know a guy.”
“It’s always the same guy.”
This time, to get to yet another place we weren’t meant to be, we walked through the main library and beneath an archway, then down a dark set of stairs past foreboding signs claiming that trespassers would be caught on camera and persecuted to the full extent of the law.
“There are no cameras,” Alden assured me. “They just say it to scare you.”
It was working; I wanted to turn back.
But I kept my feet firmly planted as Alden fumbled with the key, then pushed open the door.
“Voilà,” he said as if he had built the room just for me.
I took in the scene: the walls were lined with giant leather-bound tomes, and there was an overpowering mildewy stench.
He wandered the room, rubbing his hands against the spines of the books. “Look at this one,” he said. “It’s old herbaria pressings.”
Alden pulled it off the shelf—he wasn’t wearing gloves, which felt wrong. There had to be a fixed protocol for handling a book that delicate. It was part of a collection labeled “Nineteenth-Century Friendship Albums.”
“I thought you’d like it,” he said. “Since you work in the greenhouse.”
I nodded as I carefully flipped through the pages, silently apologizing to the people of the past who had created these notesand ephemera, as well as the current librarians who would kill Alden if they knew.
“Idolike it,” I whispered. “Thank you.”
I read the finding guide of the collection, which said that the flowers held within were pressed by a woman named Henrietta to give to her “friend” Jane. But the letters Henrietta had written to Jane were far from “friendly.”
These were lesbian flowers, and once I figured that out, my heart was beating out of my chest.
Because, of course, I assumed that the next thing Alden would say was, “Ialsothought you’d like it because you’re a lesbian.”
I glanced up at him, but I had to look away before he could see in my eyes the lie on which our relationship was based. But itwasn’ta lie, I reminded myself, because Ididlike him. So that made me something otherthan a lesbian.
He was toogood, and I was toowrong.
After I made him try to put the pressings away exactly as he’d found them, I pulled out my phone—I had a number of texts waiting for me in the Tees group chat.
Rex:COME THROUGH
UNDERWEAR PARTY IN DONLON
EVERYONES A LIL NAKEY
They sent a video to go along with the messages: Rex, Autumn, and Shelly were dancing in one of the auditoriums, surrounded by people in varying states of undress.
I had vaguely remembered hearing about the party from them earlier in the week: some queer senior was having a clothing-optional dance party, which was my worst nightmare.
Me:ah i totally forgot!!
i have a ton of hw to do but have so much fun!!!!
Autumn thumbs-upped the message, and I turned back to Alden, the presumably straight boy who’d dragged me to the library to see pressed flowers.
I almost laughed at the irony of it: a boy showing me a book with historical lesbian love notes when he didn’t even know I was queer.
