“Blow on your hand,” she said.
“What?”
She took my hand from underneath her sweater and put it up to my face. “Blow on your hand! It’s too cold!” She hid her white earbuds back under her blonde hair and continued looking forward. The bus bumped and bounced both of us up off our seat. We both knew that pot hole, it meant that the school was at furthest five minutes away.
I breathed on my hand and briefly considered giving her a peck on her indifferent face. Would she even notice if I did it? Would she mind? I couldn’t muster up the courage to try. “Hey, Julie,” I said. “Hey!” I tapped her on her shoulder.
She ripped the headphones out of her ear, but only the one facing toward me. “Look, we only have a few minutes,” she lectured. “This is why you’re not in a relationship with anyone, you don’t listen.” She pulled her sweater down past her skirt’s waistband. I had been locked out.
“Yeah, that’s, I mean—“ I struggled to regain my composure. “I kind of wanted to talk to you about that. The relationship thing, I mean.” I smiled and laughed a little bit. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what I was saying. I just said it. “Can we actually go out? On a date, I mean.”
She yanked out the other earbud. For better or worse, I had her full attention now. A heavy sigh escaped her breath, punctuated by the cold air freezing it in front of her, the awkward moment laid bare for the world to see. “We talked about this,” she said. “We talked and we talked and we talked. I have a boyfriend. He would not like me dating you.”
“But you hate him!” I said this a little too loud, my voice lightly echoing up through the front of the school bus. I had maybe gotten too excited and forgotten our golden rule: discretion is key.
She narrowed her eyes at me, her brows arching down in such a way that Adam & Eve would have feared the look if they saw it in the clouds. “You don’t get it. And keep your voice down. Do you want everyone to know?”
My mouth said “No,” but my heart didn’t mean it. Yes, I wanted people to know! I wanted to tell all my friends that the girl I thought was the most beautiful person in the world, the one I grew up next to and watched from afar, was intimate with me. I wanted them to know that we fondled each other lovingly when no one was looking. I wanted to give them the details I had to keep inside. I needed their acknowledgment. I needed her acknowledgment. I had never needed anything more in those few minutes of silence than her to tell me that she loved me, too.
The rickety frame of the bus quieted down and we filed from the back to the door. The freshly melted snow was deceptive, mocking me as a rush of wind chilled me to the bone. She walked past me, clutching her textbook tightly against her chest without paying any mind to my existence. Some part of me was convinced that she loved me, she just needed to realize it. Formulating a way to help her became my goal the rest of the day. Academics stood no chance in front of my romantic ideals, I was lost in a daze of hope and planning, two things that never seem to work out well together.
By the end of the final period, I was no closer to designing a realistic way to help her realize how she must truly feel about me. In retrospect, this line of thinking was arrogance, but being fifteen and in love, I was not sure that arrogance and irrationality were not my only possible emotions. I chose to walk home, not wanting to ruin my chances with her further before I could formulate my plan fully. The ice on the sidewalk had mostly melted, but a thin patch here and there threatened to send me careening in to the ditch on the side, made all the more dangerous by the broken branches menacingly pointing up from the ground.
“She’d be sad, then,” I thought. “I’d be in the hospital and she’d have to come visit me.”
I wiggled the door knob on my front door. “Locked out.” Mom was running errands, in all likelihood. I went around to the patio door, carefully stepping around the pits of mud that had formed in the grass. The fake rock, left inauspiciously in a sole flower pot by the door, eventually chose to relent against my struggles and release the house-key from inside of it. As the key entered the patio door’s metal handle, I heard a sharp scream from next door. I left the key in the door, dropped my backpack on the wooded planks, and leaped over the fence I had vaulted so many times before, but rarely with such urgency. Julie’s back door was open, it was always open, it was how I would get in. Another scream, this time I pinpointed it from upstairs. I didn’t know what would be behind her door, but I knew I was the only one who could stop it.
Inside, she was crying in the corner, small patches of hair torn from her head, noticeable only to someone who worshipped and idolized every aspect of her. My body reacted before my mind and I moved toward the corner of the room.
“Who the fuck is this?!” a booming voice came from behind me. A bald man in a leather jacket snarled at me.
“It’s just my neighbor, John. John, please, please, just don’t do anything else.” Julie flinched as he punched the wall above her, his knuckles already bloody from working her over minutes before. “I won’t say anything about this, we’ll forget it ever happened, won’t we?” Her voice was cracking, a silent sob that told me this was not the first time it happened. She looked at me, tears in her eyes.
“I…was never here,” I mouthed. I don’t know if any words came out. I was seeing red, my mind had basically shut down. Who the fuck was I? At that point, even I didn’t know the answer to that question. Could I not even stand up for the woman I loved? Where was the person who dove in to that room not sixty seconds prior?
“Fuck you both,” he said. He turned to leave, grabbing his motorcycle helmet off the bed and shaking his hand as if Julie had done him a disservice by forcing him to use a fist. I couldn’t take it anymore.
“FUCK YOU, YOU SHITHEAD!” If I was quiet before, I had vastly overcompensated now. I choose to believe the neighborhood itself must have been empty except for us three, as it’s the only way I can rationalize how no one rushed in to prevent what happened next. The last thing I saw was Julie’s face, wide-eyed in disbelief, before I felt the fist on my chest. During the melee, he said things that I could not make out, but I doubt they were complimentary. Several punches later, my lip was bleeding, my body bruised, and I had been slammed in to the wall next to Julie. It was the place I had wanted to be all day, next to her and her boyfriend out the door. In my mind, I had won.
I sat in Julie’s kitchen, trying to find a place to drip blood without causing a mess, eventually settling on my hand with hopes that she returned with a towel before it overflowed. She did, but only just barely.
“Thanks…” she started. “I…he probably would have killed me. Even when we were kids, you said you’d protect me and you always have.” She started crying. “Do you remember when we were kids? We’d always play together and people would say we looked like twins. I guess that’s not really true anymore.”
“Especially with this bloody lip,” I interjected. It was supposed to be humorous, but I was trying to subtly remind her of what just happened. She was so close to acknowledging me. “Julie,” I said, dripping blood in to a towel. “Can we talk about us?”
There was not a slow reaction. She pushed away from the dining table and stood up. “Again? Again with this? You know why we can’t be together!”
“No, I don’t!” I screamed.
“I am not a lesbian!”
She was. I knew she was. She wouldn’t have done the things with me that she did unless she was. “But—“
“Rachel, stop. Just…no. I go to church every week, I wasn’t abused by my parents, that’s not me.” She turned her back to me to mask the tears welling up in her eyes. “I like men. Don’t you get that? I’m not sick.”
There was a minute of silence. I timed it in the ugly Garfield wall clock.
Her back was the last thing I had ever saw of her as I walked out of her kitchen. If I had the courage, if I had the brains, if I had the life experience, there were so many things I would have told her. I would have explained how much she meant to me. I would have told her that she was not simply her family’s expectations of her. I would kissed her, like I should have done that morning, like I did so many times before. I would have held her in my arms and told her everything would be okay. Instead, I left a bloody towel on her dining room table and walked away.
I went back to my patio door, adjusting my skirt after climbing back over the fence, and shambled to the key still placed inside the patio door’s lock. I turned it, dragged my backpack up to my room, and buried my still-bleeding face in my pillow.
It was not until two cops arrived at my door a day or two later that I had heard Julie ran away. The police officers questioned me about the fight in her room, my mom questioned me about our friendship, her parents questioned me about her life. I gave them the only answers I had. I did not tell them I was the one who made her leave. I did not tell the jury at her boyfriend’s trial that I loved her as I sat there stoically recounting his abuse. These things do not bother me late at night.
What does bother me is that I never told Julie I loved her.