I couldn’t resist an underdog, though. I’m a born-and-bred Chiefs and Royals fan, after all. When Rae declared us “best friends,” I thought, All right. I can work with this. She’s a little rough around the edges, but what is life without a project?
It didn’t take long for me to figure out that Rae wasn’t like other girls. Probably because she came right out and told me, the first time I tried to give her a makeover.
“I don’t do girlie stuff.”
“What do you mean, ‘girlie stuff’? This isn’t about being girlie. I like sports, too, and it’s cool that you help your dad fix things, but if you let me do your hair and dress you in some of my new school clothes, I can show you how fun it is to—”
“That stuff’s lame.”
“No, it’s not! All the girls at Kennedy are going to have these jeans this year.” I held up my mom’s latest purchase for me. “Aren’t they cool?”
She wrinkled her nose. “They’re pants. I have plenty of pairs.”
“Not these, though. Yours are all… straight and stiff. Like something Greg would wear.”
“As long as it’s not a dress or a skirt, I’m okay with that.” She slid down from my high canopy bed. “Let’s go see what the guys are doing. Did I hear Greg say he got a new video game with his allowance money?”
“They’re not going to let us play.”
“So? Watching is fun, too.”
I disagreed, but already at that young age, I hated conflict and avoided it at all costs, so I dropped my efforts to prissify my new friend. I revisited the topic several times over the next few years, as it became a bigger and more exhausting job to play protector and champion to Rae, the nonconformist.
Being different at that age isn’t easy. It’s not like I was the most popular girl at school, but I wasn’t an outcast, either, so I took it upon myself to help Rae settle into life at Kennedy Middle School. I introduced her to my respectable-sized group of friends, who tolerated her until about halfway through high school, when I suddenly realized Rae and I were now a duo and were increasingly being left out of group activities.
It was about that time, during our sophomore year, that Rae disabused me of any lingering hopes of her assimilating.
Facing each other, we were sitting on the floor of my room one Friday night during a sleepover involving just the two of us, oohing and aahing over whichever baby-faced idiot teenaged celebrity we (supposedly) were into at the time, when she suddenly got quiet and closed the magazine between us.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Nothing. I don’t feel like looking at that anymore, that’s all.”
“Oh. Whatever. Wanna go see what kind of chips my mom got?” I moved to stand, but she stopped me with a hand on my arm.
“Wait. I— I need to tell you something.”
I could tell by the slightly sick look on her face that whatever it was would be juicy, so I settled in for some meaty gossip. “I knew it! You like Jeremy Ward, don’t you? I’ve been telling Kimi for weeks that there’s something going on there, but she keeps saying, ‘No way! Jeremy’s going out with Brandi,’ as if that matters. I mean, if you like someone, you like someone. Danny Ashland’s been going out with Heather-the-Feather Poole since eighth grade, but that hasn’t stopped me from being, like, totally in love with him. So, when did you start to feel… you know… wiggly about Jeremy?”
She ducked her chin at me. “‘Wiggly’? What the hell does that mean?”
Secretly, Rae’s fascination with cussing made me uncomfortable, but I suspected that made me an unsophisticated goody-goody, so I tended to pretend I didn’t hear the bad words. In this case, it was easy, because I was more intent on answering her question. “You know! Wiggly!” Sitting with my legs folded under me and my feet under my bottom, I squirmed and pretended to tickle my own stomach. “Like when you look at someone you like, and you feel all… fizzy.”
For the first time in several minutes, Rae’s face relaxed, and she laughed. “You’re such a dork.”
“But you know what I’m saying!”
She nodded. “Yeah. I do. Exactly.”
“Then I’m not a dork. I’m good at describing things.”
I was reveling in the satisfaction garnered by her conceding shrug when she dropped, “But Jeremy Ward doesn’t make me feel like that.”
“Whatever. Then why do you follow him and Brandi around all the time? I see you watching them when you think nobody’s looking.”
Her shoulders sagged, and she picked at the fringe on my area rug. I figured her big confession was about to happen—and I was confused as to why she was so hesitant to admit it—so it took me a while to comprehend what she meant when she said, “I’m not looking at him. I’m looking at”—she inhaled, reinflating her chest and sitting straighter once more—“Brandi.”
Still so dumb (and young and Midwestern and wrapped up in my own narrow experience with life), I was on the verge of saying, “Why? Do you like Brandi’s new haircut? It would look super-cute on you, too,” when the penny finally dropped. I swallowed. Hard. “Brandi makes you feel all wiggly?”
Rae rolled her eyes. “Yes! Duh. I don’t like boys.”
She said it like someone would say, “I don’t like onions,” like it was no big deal. But to me, it was a big deal.
I also knew my next response was a bigger deal. In a matter of seconds, I processed what she was telling me—what I already knew, if
