Chapter 10
13 years ago
It took Bette Porter two weeks and four meetings to decide the drama club was her favorite part of the week. She waited with enthusiasm for every Monday and Wednesday to come around just so she could go to Mrs. Chadwell’s classroom, and spend an hour -sometimes, even an hour and a half- doing the most unexpected thing possible. Sometimes they would be given a certain character, and they would have to put up a whole play out of the blue inserting their given character in it. Other times the teacher would wait for them with a sheet of paper lay out for each of them, a handful of brushes and every color you could ever imagine. Then they would relax painting whatever they wanted, watching the colors melt together in one beautiful piece of art.
She loved when Mrs. Chadwell proposed meetings in the ones they had to do everything following a certain, ridiculous rule. One time, for example, they had to act any daily life scene they could think of, but screaming at the top of their lungs. Bette had so much fun doing it that, at the end of the day, her sore throat had nothing to do with her aching abs, that hurt from laughing non-stop.
It felt like a life-changing experience.
Back when she was cheerleading, it was all about looking as pretty as possible while putting your physical health on the line with every jump and crazy formation. Okay, Bette thought once, maybe it wasn’t all that bad. But she had come to resent it, that structure that you always had to follow, and that search for a homogeneous beauty. All of them had to look the same, all of them had to act the same. All of them had to feel the same. And in the last couple of years, she had been feeling a pull of something that she couldn’t quite name yet but couldn’t be found there, in those uniforms and routines.
But the drama club was like the place she had been craving. A place in the one she could cry, and laugh, and do whatever she wanted. Sometimes, when she was feeling down, she was even allowed to not do anything at all and just sit back and watch her classmates do their thing, chuckling at their ridiculous but funny inventions.
Oh, and there was also that detail: the drama club had Tina Kennard.
At the beginning she had tried to fight it, thinking she just liked Tina because she was new in town, and shy, and she needed a friend. So she made sure to always save a seat for her when she got to the classroom first, and to offer her company when they had to work in pairs. She noticed a couple of times, while walking from class to class, that Tina seemed to be mostly alone during breaks. Were the other kids her age not being nice to her? Was she having trouble adapting to Los Angeles as a whole? It made her sad to think that the blonde was feeling lonely, given how sweet and kind she was always to her.
“Mind if I sit here?” she asked one day, approaching the table Tina was sitting in on her own.
“Bette?” Tina asked, surprised. “No, of course not. Have a seat.”
Bette balanced her tray of food until she was able to put it down on the table.
“You always sit here during lunch break?”, she asked, while picking up her burger. One of the luxuries she could indulge now that she had left the strict cheerleading life behind was one cheeseburger with fries every now and then.
“Most of the time, yeah” Tina replied. “Sometimes I just go outside and sit on the grass listening to some music. I’m still getting used to all the sun you guys have here.”
Bette laughed at the comment, but her mind immediately started imagining how beautiful Tina’s eyes would look in the sun. She snapped out of that thought quickly.
“Yeah, it gets pretty intense in the summer.” They ate in silence for a while, before Bette asked, “So, have you made any friends? Someone you might have a crush on?”. She tried to sound casual and light-hearted, but she was so curious about the answer she held her breath while waiting for it.
Tina just laughed, as if the mere thought was ridiculous.
“I get along with everyone, but it’s not easy for me to make friends. Had some shitty experiences in the past, I think I’m better by myself.”
“That’s a shame” Bette commented. She wanted to know more, but she also knew that it wasn’t her place to ask so much about a person she had just met. “You were so nice with me that first day of the drama club, tho. I think making new friends might come naturally to you if you ever feel like it.”
“Well, you seemed to need my help that day”, Tina pointed out, smiling. “Plus, I found your whole ‘oh I’m Bette Porter, I shouldn’t even introduce myself’ kind of funny.”
“Oh, you think I’m funny?” they were both laughing now, remembering that chaotic first meeting. “Well, I can live with that. I like the sound of your laugh.”
She meant it.
From that day on, Bette looked for Tina at every lunch break, and they would eat together, sharing jokes and planning whatever they were going to do next at the drama club. Her friends never questioned her (after all, most of them used their lunchtime to catch up with all the homework they never did, because cheerleading was a time-consuming activity), but they commented one time how she was spending so much time with someone so young and out of their radar.
“She’s just nice.” She explained once. “And she has no one here. I’d hate to feel like that.”
But with every day that she spent with Tina Kennard, sharing lunch or doing some crazy thing in the drama club, she started thinking that maybe that thing she couldn’t quite name yet was the fact that she had had boyfriends, but none of them had ever made her stomach twist and turn like Tina’s laugh could do.
-
Tina had never had a date in her life.
In fact, she hadn’t even thought about anything romantic until ‘the thing’ had happened. Boys kind of grossed her out, and in her head, there was nothing else possible. When Sarah and Sue and her whole former school made up those rumors about her sexuality, she quickly dismissed them, not thinking about them twice. Of course she knew gay people existed, and despite the comments her parents and her friends usually made, she had nothing against them. But she was not one of them, not at all. The rumors had been hurtful to her simply because they weren’t true.
Or at least that’s what she thought.
And then she met Bette Porter.
To say that Bette was stunning was the understatement of the century. She was captivating, with her tall frame, her curly hair and her huge eyes, that would bore into Tina’s as if they had known each other for ages. She also had the softest smile, and Tina’s stomach would do crazy jumps every time that smile was directed towards her. And there was also the fact that Bette was a sweetheart with her, always helping her out in whatever she needed and being there for her when she had no one to talk to.
At the beginning, Tina didn’t think much about it. After all, she had come to the conclusion that she had never had any real friends, so maybe this whole thing she felt around Bette (the giddiness every time she walked her way, or how dumb and happy she felt for hours after the most minimum interaction) was just what it was supposed to feel like to have a friend. But then there were other things, like the fact that sometimes, when Bette’s hand lingered a little too long on her shoulders, she felt like melting into the embrace and staying there forever. Or that when she went to sleep every night, she would let herself fantasize how it would feel to be able to kiss Bette.
Maybe she wasn’t gay.
Maybe she just liked this one particular girl, who was certainly very beautiful and very out of her league, so it was only logical to like her.
But she never even fathomed the possibility of that (whatever it was) being mutual. That’s why it took her so much by surprise when one day, while they were lying on the grass outside of school listening to new music they had just discovered, Bette said:
“I’m sorry for what I’m going to say, and if I got it all wrong, you just tell me”, the brunette started, clearly nervous. “But there’s… something between us, right?”
Tina sat up and looked at her friend, confused.
“What do you mean? We’re friends, right?” the thought of Bette thinking of her as anything less than a friend terrified her.
“Yeah, I guess we are.” The other girl agreed, nodding. “But you know, I don’t wonder what it’d feel like to kiss my friends. And I wonder what it would feel like to kiss you all the time.”
Tina choked on the juice she was drinking.
“I’m sorry” she said, wiping her mouth with the sleeves of her t-shirt. “You what?”, she wanted to believe what she had just heard, but that couldn’t be right. She was not the kind of girl who got that lucky.
“I mean” Bette gesticulated with her hands, as if trying to find a coherent way of saying what she wanted to say. “When we’re together at the drama club I just feel this… thing between us. Like, there’s an energy that I never felt with no one else. You’re the one I always want to spend time with, and I think it’s the same for you. You make me laugh, I’m comfortable with you, and I also think you’re so… beautiful. And I think you feel the same way about me.”
Tina was speechless. Genuinely, utterly speechless. She felt the same, but she had no idea it was that obvious. More than that, she had no idea what to do with the turmoil of emotions that were invading her body at that moment. So she just nodded, not knowing what Bette expected from her.
The brunette just smiled and squeezed her hand, a smile impossibly wide and a squeeze impossibly warm. Tina felt like she was living an out-of-body experience.
That’s how she ended up in front of her bedroom mirror, adjusting her jeans and wondering what the fuck did people wear to dates. Were her blue jeans and green T-shirt a decent outfit? Was she supposed to wear something fancier? Were her black Converse too dirty? Bette had said to dress “casual and comfortable”, so she thought her choice of clothes was just fine.
When Bette finally came to her door, she was wearing some dark jeans and a red and black flannel that made Tina feel dressed to the occasion (it also made her pick up a jacket, recognizing that the weather was getting a little bit colder those days). They walked through her neighborhood before they got to a nearby park, where Bette bought ice creams for them both and a single red rose for Tina.
She had never felt so much blood run to her cheeks so quickly.
She knew from their very first meeting that Bette was one charming human being, but this new side of her was incredibly sweet and caring. She would brush Tina’s cheek with her long fingers to rearrange her hair and hold her hands like it was the most natural thing in the world. She would casually compliment her, saying how beautiful she looked or how talented she thought she was at the whole theater thing. She made Tina feel like there was no one else in the world she would rather listen to talk for hours and hours, and when the sun started to come down and they realized that they had spent almost five hours at the park, Tina started thinking that maybe that wasn’t just a feeling she got. Maybe Bette also felt like being in each other’s presence made her feel light-headed and foolishly happy.
That night, Tina didn’t have to wonder how it would feel to kiss Bette, because now she knew. She knew that the brunette’s lips were soft and warm, and that they moved easily against hers, making her insides melt. She knew that the other girl tasted like cherry lip balm and chocolate ice cream, and a little bit like the happiest place in the world, too. She knew that she felt as light as a feather after kissing her, and that she would never forget that feeling.
She wondered, though, about other things. What would her dad, who would usually laugh at whatever gay couple who showed up on TV and called them faggots, would think? What would her mum, who never corrected her dad and usually laughed with him at his jokes, say? Would kids at school start rumors against her again? Would those hallways turn into hell, just like the hallways of her old school in North Carolina did? Would Bette stick with her through it all? Did she really want to put Bette through that?
She fell into an uneasy sleep, the sweet memories of Bette tangled with the ones of the life she had so eagerly run away from.