Chapter 88: Season of Love

Friday, February 10, 1984

The Valentine’s dance was not going to be the first outing for my new tux. For one thing, I didn’t even have it yet. For another thing, no one was wearing tuxes to this dance. I used my old trusty suit with a red shirt and a gold tie, and Jas wore her beloved ao dai. I drove the two of us so that Angie and Paige could drive together.

They were, officially, just going as singles, and weren’t doing anything to show that they were more than just friends. At least, that was the theory. I didn’t understand how people could miss it, but then I had the advantage of knowing. Either people didn’t notice, or didn’t care, and either was fine.

When I was picking Jas up, she’d taken a few extra minutes to get ready, which gave me a chance to quickly discuss Jasmine’s birthday with Camille. I needed to know what sort of cake she was making and also make sure there were no other issues with my plans. There weren’t, so all was well. Very well, indeed.

Jas and I received the usual mix of admiring and critical looks. I’m pretty sure that Trish Harrison’s reaction was along the lines of ‘Who the hell would wear that? How did he beat Mike out?!’ Freed of the constraints of being my friend, Mike’s expression pretty much matched Trish’s (but then, perhaps he was just doing what he thought she would want him to do).

The dance itself was pretty much just a dance. If it was better than Valentine’s dances of the past, it was that it was my third with Jasmine, and each time we’d been closer than the year before. I danced with as many girls as I possibly could, but several more times with Jasmine than with anyone else.

Jas and I also flirted a bit more with kisses that pushed the boundaries of the rules. What were they really going to do? Ban me from Sadie Hawkins? That would be the outcome, and it would be absurd, since I’d still be able to go to Prom, and no one enforced the usual ‘public display of affection’ rules at Prom as long as everyone’s clothes stayed in the right places and no one was openly making out on the dance floor.

I had that trophy to win, after all. The Valentine’s Dance certainly counted. Oh, I was pretty sure there was no actual trophy, but I’d take a statement from Principal Riggs that I’d broken the record. He wouldn’t lie to me about a thing like that!

The dance only went until ten, of course, which annoyed many of us. It was amusing that, three years ago, that had been a major selling point to skeptical parents. So much had changed!

Under other circumstances, we might have zipped back to Jasmine’s house, but this wasn’t Valentine’s Day, nor was it Jasmine’s birthday, both of which were drawing ever closer. With that in mind, we headed to the House of Pies, which would be open this late.

As I drove, I thought about Mike, and the dance, and people in general. Sometimes you don’t know who people are until something happens to make them reveal their true colors. It was a lesson that I really had to learn. I was too trusting, too quick to see the good in others, too slow to read them as antagonists or opponents — or simply too willing to trust that they would never change.

Part of the solution wasn’t to change myself, but to surround myself with people who saw things differently. I took advice well (or, at least, I thought I did), and if Angie, Jas, Paige, Jess, or Cammie said someone was trouble, I would likely listen to them and be on guard sooner rather than later.

If someone took us all in, that would be different. And, of course, we were unlikely to often be all in the same place at the same time. Jess would be doing her own thing, and Cammie might well be, too. I had a feeling that both of them would always be in our orbit, or we in theirs, intersecting again and again.

The thought fit the goal that I already had of retaining the friends that I could. I didn’t want to be the guy that walked into his high school reunion in five, or ten, or twenty years and knew only a few people (like, for instance, my wife, my sister, and her wife). I couldn’t keep all of my friends, but I could keep some of them, and I could keep up with more of them.

The flip side of that, of course, was that I planned to have money and be successful. People who have money and are successful are targets, and not just for people with ill intent. There were stories of friends of Michael’s who’d gone to work for Dell and left quickly, both because they couldn’t just be ‘friends’ with the CEO and because all of their coworkers thought they were getting special treatment. I’d have people I barely knew looking to me for a job, or investment advice, or money, or whatever. Some of them might be good employees, but would it ever be a good idea?

That would be a question for the group. Between the four of us, we could make good decisions. That, and we’d learn from the bad ones.

Paige sighed as she sat down, saying, “I wonder when we’ll be able to go to a dance as ourselves.”

Angie shrugged. “Prom?”

“Is that an offer?” Paige said.

“I already asked you to Prom,” Angie said.

“Not as your date, not really. We agreed that we weren’t doing that,” Paige said.

“Unless we decided to.”

“Want to decide to?”

Angie looked around, then smiled. “In this case, I have to say ‘If you want to.’ I know what we want. You know what we want. Our families, parents, and everyone else supports us. For the rest... don’t fuck ‘em.”

Paige giggled a bit. “Except for my jerk brother, anyway, on that ‘families’ part.”

“Don’t... ” Angie said, letting it hang, which got another giggle.

Paige looked at both Jasmine and me.

I shrugged, and she shrugged, too.

“Don’t look at us,” Jas said. “You know we’ll support you completely, either way. It probably won’t make the newspapers this year, or get Steve quoted by the President, but it’ll be out there. If some professor hates gay girls, and finds out, you’d be buying trouble. On the other hand, both of you are tough enough to win that fight.”

“You said there’ll be a student gay and lesbian club, Steve?” Paige said.

I nodded. “Unless Curtis torpedoes us, which seems unlikely. The whole thing is in the courts right now, and the Fifth Circuit without Curtis ruled that the university had to accept the organization.”

“So, we’ll be out as far as that goes, I think, ” Paige said, with Angie nodding along.

“You don’t have to decide tonight,” Jas said. “I mean, sure, ‘If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice,’ but you can change your minds up until the dance.”

Angie and Paige nodded this time.

“I think it’d be cool,” Angie said, “but...”

“Yeah,” Paige said. “‘But’ is right. It’s one of those ‘crossing the Rubicon’ things. Like Jas said, it’ll be out there. I’m not sure that I care, but...”

“But we’d better think about it. And then there’s...”

“Mel and Cammie,” Paige finished. “Yeah. They’d be so jealous and, unless something earth-shattering changes, they won’t be dates at Prom.”

“That’s one where you’re allowed to be the ‘white knight’ if the circumstances arise,” Jas said, patting my arm.

“Nothing would stop me,” I said, grinning.

The waitress interrupted us to take our orders, which was why we were here, after all. The switch of subjects calmed down Prom talk. Now that it was out there, though, it wasn’t going back in the bottle, and Angie and Paige had to make a decision. It didn’t seem to be make or break, not like those 2020s Hallmark Christmas movies where the girl is going to break up with her girlfriend because she feels like a ‘dirty little secret.’

Of course, I might well be the only person in the world who knew that Hallmark was making Christmas movies involving lesbian couples by 2020. We were still almost a decade away from the first lesbian kiss on American network television, after all.

After pie, we headed home, me dropping Jas off and Angie dropping Paige off. Tomorrow was potentially our last free Saturday for a long time, and we planned to have fun with it.

I was home about ten minutes before Angie, and was mostly ready for bed by the time she came in. We hugged, rubbed noses, then kissed.

“Tired. Any objections?”

“None, of course.”

“See you in bed!”

I chuckled, and got into bed. She joined me just a bit later, turning out the lights on the way.

“That was surprising,” she said. “I think we’re screwing up on communicating just a bit.”

“Fixable, though.”

“Definitely fixable, but I should’ve known that conversation would maybe go wrong. We just need to be on the same page...”

She stopped, then nudged me. “Pun acknowledged.”

I chuckled. “Got it!”

“Anyway, we do. Not the punny way, though. Maybe one day, for ... reasons. Which amuses me, because we’ve had some very frank conversations on reproduction but missed the ‘How out are we?’ conversation, at least in how it relates to Prom.”

“You two are going to be turning down a lot of earnest guys, you know.”

She wriggled in a way that made me suspect she was blushing. “Fuck! Well, see, there’s another thing I didn’t think through! We’ll be the ice queens, and the rumors will start from that alone. Especially since we’ll probably know a lot of the same people.”

“Just talk. Nothing’s wrong. Seriously, it sucks that you can’t have what Jas and I have. I hate it. We’ll make things better, but not fast enough for college.”

“Maybe just fast enough. What we both are is tough! No one’s going to fuck us over because we’re gay. We won’t let it happen. Seriously, they have no idea how tough I am! The number of incoming eighteen-year-old college freshmen who’ve spent seven years in a high-security women’s prison is probably one.”

“I would have to think so!” I said, chuckling.

“Like you said, we’ll fix it. This is actually good. We need crap like this to whack us over the head and make us remember that it’s not magic, it’s work, and we always have to put in the work.”

“In that case, good.”

“And on that note — sleep!”

“Love you, tough sis.”

She giggled.

“Love you, sensitive but yet also tough bro.”

“Forever...”

“ ... and always.”

Saturday, February 11, 1984

We slept late, but not that late, getting up around nine. The first thing we noticed was that Mom and Dad were not up. That was obvious from the dark house and the closed master bedroom door.

The second thing, which Angie noticed, was a series of noises that caused her to retreat to my room.

“I guess they had a good time while we were at the dance,” she said.

“Want to pretend we slept later than we actually did?”

“I’m very good with that.”

We closed the door and climbed into bed, reading for a while. Once we heard their bedroom door open, and their voices in the hall, we gave it five minutes and then ‘woke up.’

Had Mom checked on us, our little subterfuge would’ve been blown, obviously, but she seldom if ever did that, now. She knew we’d behave, and she also knew we’d get home safe.

Over breakfast, Mom quizzed us about the dance. After getting the scoop (as well as being assured that we’d had photographs taken by the official photographer, which we would never miss!), she said, “You know ... three years ago, I really had some doubts about freshmen going to a Valentine’s dance!”

“In retrospect, you should have,” Angie said, blushing.

“Water under the bridge!” Mom said, leaning over and hugging Angie, “and that wasn’t the point. The point was that I did the right thing then, and yes, I mean even considering who you went with. If I’d put my foot down, you’d have just gone around me, and we wouldn’t have the relationship we have. I knew Steve was single, and just going to have fun, but then he could keep an eye on you, too.”

“Which I did,” I said.

“Thank goodness!” Angie said.

“It just makes me happy how well things have worked out. I know I completely surprised Sam when I said that you should be able to go to dances and on dates...”

“You really did!” Dad said, walking into the kitchen and sitting down at the bowl of cereal Mom had left for him.

Mom chuckled, then said, “I completely surprised myself, too, but it was the right thing. I don’t know how I knew, but I knew.”

“You knew because you’re a great mother, honey,” Dad said.

That got him the hug this time.

“You are,” Angie said.

“Definitely!” I said.

And that made it hugs all around.

“I’ll miss you two,” Mom said. “Oh, I know you won’t be that far away, but I’ll miss you.”

“We’ll be here,” I said. “Often. But you’ll have plenty of other things, too.”

“Plenty!” Dad said.

“We’ll never be gone that long,” Angie said. “Besides, we all agree that, one day, you two will be doing a lot of grandparenting!”

“I may not survive!” Dad said. “It was bad enough having little kids at my age way back when!”

“It was fine, and you know it, Sam!” Mom said, chuckling.

“Okay! It was fine!” Dad said, overplaying his capitulation.

“We’ll do the hard work. You get to do the playing and the spoiling,” Angie said.

“That sounds better!” Dad said.

“Not too soon, though,” Angie said.

“Definitely not,” I said.

“Good! I really think that, as much as I’ll miss having you here, we could use a break between parenting and grandparenting!” Mom said.