Chapter 20

Saturday morning, her father decided to finally tackle the depression that had once been a fish-pond, now that the briars had been cleared away. Which meant hacking up the shrubs rooted inside, before excavating.

“Oh my,” a familiar voice said, late in the morning. “I thought your stepmother said yardwork, not construction.”

Nikki. Dana planted her shovel and looked up from the pit. Her breath caught for a moment—Nikki still had her cheerleading curls, but now she wore a soft blue sweater that hugged her curves, and tight, flaring jeans. “Didn’t you hear?” Dana said, leaning on the shovel’s handle. “Partlow & Children, General Contractors—we filed the papers last week.”

Nikki laughed.

“Good morning, Nikki,” her father said, pulling off a muddy glove and offering his hand.

“Mr. Partlow.” She shook it.

“Care to join the fun?” he asked.

“Ha!” Brad muttered. He had stopped struggling to uproot a bush stump at the edge of the pond.

“It comes complete with surly teenagers,” their father added.

“I heard that!” Clara shouted from behind the back fence.

“I’d be delighted, but,” Nikki looked down at herself, “I’m not exactly dressed for it. Actually,” she said to Dana, “I came to ask, were you serious about helping me with algebra?”

Dana nodded, noticing for the first time Nikki’s backpack.

“I should have called, but I had to get out of the house.”

Dana wondered what had happened with her mother. She wiped her brow with her sleeve, then looked up at her father.

He hmphed. “Well, we’re nearly done for the morning, and it’s clear we won’t finish today. It is a larger job than I expected. Go on. But in the future, I’d appreciate advance notice of deferring your household chores. Defer, mind—we’ll do more tomorrow.”

With a barely suppressed smile, Dana climbed out of the hole, leaving her father to deal with the Brat Patrol’s protests. She wondered what Thea would make of his admission about the job size.

What she did make was a fuss over Dana tracking dirt into the house. Dana had to scrape her shoes off and promise to scrub immediately before she was allowed inside.

When Dana looked in the mirror, she saw why—she looked like a photo-negative raccoon, pale only around the eyes. Dana washed the worst dirt off and changed into a clean sweatshirt. Which felt way too casual for being with Nikki, but finding dressier clothes would have been too obvious, with Nikki watching. She came out of the bathroom, tying back her ponytail, to find Nikki on the floor of her bedroom, leaning against the bed, math book out.

“We’d better do actual work first,” Nikki said.

“Or we’ll never get it done?”

Nikki pointed at her—bingo. “Besides, I really need help. I just don’t get it!”

Dana put on some music and sat down beside Nikki—she felt obscurely glad there wasn’t enough room at her desk. Then she saw: word problems. Dana could understand having difficulties with those.

Nikki went on, “I mean, I know you’re supposed to find the equation in the words, but I don’t see how. Once I do, I can do the math, pretty much, but the words just make more sense, you know?”

“Um. Sort of. The words are the hard part for me. Numbers are easier.”

Nikki looked at her in surprise. “Really?”

“I am not looking forward to this essay for Monday.” Dana suppressed a shudder. She was good with a snappy comeback, sometimes, but words tangled up when she tried to write.

“Maybe I could help you with your essay.”

“I’d love it.” Not that she knew how anyone could help write an essay, but she would love the chance to be with Nikki. She couldn’t help grinning.

Nikki smiled, catching part of Dana’s eagerness. “Yes, well. First things first.” Which meant work now, but promised things to come.

“Well, one thing that helps, is to look at the units.”

“Units?”

“Every number in a word problem is a measure of something—like here, the width of the river is how many feet, and the current how many feet per second. If you know what the units of measure for the final answer are, you know what units need to cancel out, like numbers you cancel when reducing fractions.”

“Um...”

“Here, let me write it out.”

Tutoring Nikki was more frustrating than expected—Dana kept tripping over things she didn’t know Nikki didn’t get. Not that it was irritating, exactly, but she really wanted to help her—and she couldn’t just will Nikki to understand. Still, Dana was guiltily relieved when Thea interrupted them.

“I just wanted to ask whether Nikki will be joining us for lunch.”

“Whatever it is,” Dana told Nikki, “it’s good.”

“If it’s no trouble,” Nikki said.

“Of course not,” Thea said, “just a matter of setting one more place. Three teenagers means large meals with leftovers. Five minutes.”

Dana nodded.

Also a lunch guest was one of Clara’s friends—a freshman nearly as talky as Clara, with nearly the same make-up, and the same way of speaking. How had Clara fitted in so quickly? The two spent the whole meal chatting about what they’d do that afternoon at Riverton Mall, and who would be there, and the latest round of who’d fallen out and in with whom.

Dana listened instead to her father’s polite checklist conversation with Nikki: junior—check; no classes with Dana—check; but same history teacher in a different period—check. Dana bit her tongue, though she hated his cross-examinations. Someday, she’d be an adult, with privacy, and never have to answer a question she didn’t want to. At least Nikki was polite enough to make a good impression.

Clara’s friend found the bayleaf, and hesitated over dessert before sharing it with Clara. Nikki listened to Brad’s not entirely coherent explanation of the bayleaf thing with a bland expression—one Dana was learning meant she was being polite.

As they walked upstairs, Nikki said, “Your family has some ... interesting traditions. It’s rather sweet.” Dana got the impression that was interesting as in odd, and wasn’t quite sure what to say. Especially given what she thought about some of Riverton’s traditions.

Back in Dana’s room, Nikki stood in front of the soccer poster for a moment.

“Is that who I think it is?”

“Miii-a,” Dana said, channeling her inner soccer-mad 10-year-old.

“I had no idea.”

“How could you not have her as a hero? I mean, look at her.”

Nikki glanced at Mia Hamm again. “You like brunettes, eh?”

“Always have. Even before I knew.”

“I’m surprised you don’t have more pictures up. I mean, all the other cheerleaders do—of both hunks and babes.”

“Moving seemed like a good time to make a clean start,” Dana said. “But even so, I’ve never put up many. I keep them private.” Because many were from her secret stash of girlie magazines, but that was too embarrassing to tell Nikki. Even when Nikki’s troubled look made her ache.

Nikki was biting her lip. Then she knelt by her pack and pulled out a scrapbook. “I wasn’t sure I was going to show you this. I’ve never shown it to anyone. I brought it in case I worked up the courage.”

She sat down next to Dana. It was full of photos of gymnasts. “It started with just my classmates. But after I left the program, I continued clipping pictures, saving them. I told myself I was following my friends—here, that’s Lydia, when she came in 14th at the World Championships.” She pointed to a magazine photo of a vaulting redhead. “But I clipped anyone I thought looked good—that had good form.”

Dana leafed through the book. It was nearly full.

“I was thinking about what you said, about me maybe not being as straight as I thought. Then I remembered this.”

A book of photos of girls—girls with svelte, well-muscled bodies. Many of them quite attractive. Okay, the idea of lusting after the ones who still looked like pre-adolescents was a little icky. But the older, more developed ones—oh yes, Dana could see the appeal, though even they looked a little young. Their bodies were as built as swimmers’. And was there a law requiring a minimum level of pixie cuteness in gymnasts?

“And then there’s the secret ones,” Nikki said.

Dana looked at her. More secret than a private scrapbook?

Nikki pulled out a folder. “Did you hear about the Romanian gymnast scandal, a couple years ago?”

Dana shook her head.

“Some of the national team were filmed doing routines topless. It was a publicity stunt that backfired, and vidcaps are like all over the internet.” She opened the folder. “Ted, my older brother, found these and showed them to me. I think he was teasing me. I printed them out and kept them in this super-secret file.”

Not just topless—the girls wore bikini bottoms skimpy enough to almost not be there. But oh those bodies. All the girls were all well into their teens—the photos might even be legal, for all Dana knew.

“I see why you kept them secret.” Speaking of trust. Quickly, she added, “I see why you kept them, too—they’re stunning.”

Nikki looked at her. “But you like knowing I have these.”

“A little,” Dana said. “I’m glad you felt able to share them with me.”

“But that’s not everything, is it. It really did bother you that I think—that I thought of myself as straight.”

Dana started to deny it, but stopped herself. “It shouldn’t. But it does. A little. I’m working it.”

“By me telling you I had a little something for girls all along, even if I didn’t recognize it.”

“It’s not just that—I mean, not that at all.”

Nikki hmphed.

“Okay, it is part of it. But it’s mostly fear—that one day you’ll look at a guy and see what you really like. Someone it’s easier to be with.” She thought of the boys Nikki had kissed last night.

“You don’t think I worry about that?”

Huh? Like Dana ever looked twice at a guy. Other than Josh.

Nikki rushed on, “When I’m with you, it’s perfect. But when we part, I wonder how long it’s going to last—whether this is just a girl crush I’ll get over someday. Whether you’d be better off with someone more permanent.”

Dana looked down at the scrapbook. “That looks like a pretty permanent trust to me,” she said softly.

Nikki gazed at her, silent. Dana wanted to say something, to thank her, but that would—trivialize it. The only possible answer was an act of equal trust. But what? Though Dana knew what. When Nikki opened her mouth to speak, Dana raised her hand. Without looking away from the scrapbook, to remind her of why, she began speaking.

“About a year ago, I met this girl, Charlene—she was at a game with her brother, who was dating a teammate. She caught my eye, sitting on the sidelines. And I caught hers, playing. She came up, after, and talked. She’d heard I had a reputation, she’d said, for—for being good with first-timers, and she wanted to experiment.”

Nikki made a sound, but Dana went on—if she stopped, she wouldn’t be able to continue. “So we went out. I fell for her—hard. Within a week, we were steady. I was in love, more deeply than ever before. I—I even started wondering whether Charlene was The One.” Dana shook her head. “I mean, I know it’s not likely, not in high school, but I kept thinking about Uncle Rick, and how he met Danny when they were 15.

“It was three weeks before I found out about her boyfriend.”

“How could—?” Nikki broke off.

Dana smiled bleakly, still not looking at Nikki. “Different school.” She made a small gesture with her fingers. “Across town. Both of them. They’d been steady all along—I was just a fling on the side.”

“She was cheating on him?” Nikki said.

“No. He—well, he laughed when I confronted him with the truth. He’d known all along, and gotten off on his girlfriend being bi-curious. Charlene told him everything we did.” That still hurt—everything else, Dana could have given up by now, if Charlene had been cheating on them both. But not that.

Nikki caught Dana’s hand, squeezed it. Dana finally looked at her, and found sympathetic gray eyes. Dana squeezed back.

“What happened?” Nikki asked.

Dana shrugged. “I cried for a week. Then a friend—a, ah, girlfriend, Anya—she came over and seduced me with sympathy, which was what I needed. And when we were done, kicked me in the ass back out of bed. And I started seeing other girls again, which was also what I needed.” Though said out loud like that, it sounded selfish or something.

Nikki cocked her head. “No one special, eh?”

“Anya? No, I—well, I slept around. A lot.” Then Dana remembered—Nikki’s question, their first time out. But she’d left Charlene behind long ago.