Page 41 of Leaving the Station
“Why didn’t you tell Edward we weren’t dating?” I ask Oakley once they’re gone.
I shouldn’t care so much, but she didn’t shut down Aya either back in the train station. She just let it happen.
“I don’t know.” She shrugs. “I guess I’m just happy to be read as queer. Obviously we’re not dating, but the idea that someone thinks wecouldbe, that I could be queer enough to date someone like you. That’s kind of nice.”
“Oh,” I say, but my mind is focused on the “queer enough to date someone like you” part. I know what she means in the abstract—on the outside, it’s hard not to read me as queer. Not that being read as queer makes you queerer than someone else.
Except she doesn’t know that just weeks ago I was read almost exclusively as straight. That I wastryingto be read that way in public.
Oakley nudges me gently, and when I turn to her, she has a sly smile on her face. “Though of course if he knew that I have my entire birth chart memorized, he’d probably have figured it out already.”
I snort-laugh at that. Oakley’s good at knocking the bad thoughts out of my head. “What’s the part of your chart that makes you such a know-it-all?”
“My Virgo moon,” she says without a hint of sarcasm.
“I’m a Pisces,” I tell her. “I don’t know my moon sign, though.”
“Sothat’s why the baby loves you so much,” she says. “My sun sign is Cancer.”
“What does that mean?” I know enough about astrology to tell people my sign but not enough to be able to understand anyone else’s.
“It means I’m protective of myself.”
“Oh yeah?” I ask. “What are you protecting?” I try to sound flirty, but it comes out serious.
Oakley glances down at her seat.
“You don’t have to tell me,” I say quietly.
“No.” She shakes her head. “It’s okay.” I wait for her to continue, and eventually, she does. “I only left the Church last year. I knew I would, one day, but I thought maybe—” She takes a deep breath, then looks me right in the eye. “I wanted to travel the world. I wanted to fall in love.”
I’m taken aback by her directness. “Why couldn’t you do that while still being part of the Church?”
“Why do you think?” She gestures to herself, then sighs. “I would’ve done it. I would’ve gotten married to a man and had an eternal family. I might’ve become a Mormon family vlogger—”
“You would’ve been good at that,” I say. “You have the right aesthetic.”
“I know.” The corner of her mouth turns up. “But the problem is, it would’ve been a lie. There are plenty of lesbians married to men in the Church, some are even married togaymen, but I didn’t want that. I care about love. About loving someone.”
I let her words hang in the air between us, unsure what to do with them.
“So, you’re a hopeless romantic?” I ask eventually. “And that’s why you moved to New York?”
“Partially, yes.” She shrugs. “I thought it would be easier to find other queer people there. To befriend them and date them and actually have acommunity, you know?”
Idoknow. More than I can say. Because, at the beginning,that’s what I wanted too. Until I found Alden, and I tried to make two different parts of my life fit together when they had no business doing anything of the sort.
One Month and a Few Days into College
I knew I needed to be better about hanging out with the Tees if I wanted to maintain that friendship, but they always made plans at night, and that time was reserved exclusively for Alden.
So I came up with a solution: we’d all hang out together. I organized the whole thing, but when the time came, we were running late because I had no idea what to wear. I couldn’t decide between something obviously queer—whatever that meant—or something I usually wore around Alden. Maybe it was a false dichotomy. Maybe I could’ve worn the more masculine clothes I’d brought to college in front of him, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
I felt like I did when I had to dress up for my cousins’ b’nai mitzvahs. I would wear an old cardigan and a skirt and I would want to tear my skin off when we took family photos.
But this was different. This was a dinner in the dining hall with my friends and my boyfriend.
Boyfriend.
