“Grand Canyon. We went for my seventh birthday. It was…unreal.”
“Favorite food?”
“The pizza at Mario’s on 13th Street. They have two-dollar, two-slice Tuesdays. It’s to die for.”
“Aren’t you lactose intolerant?” Mia asks.
I open my eyes and turn my head to look over at her, surprised she knows this random bit of trivia about me. “Well…I said it was to die for.”
She smiles at that. A real smile. Not one of her passive-aggressive, midfight smirks that makes my blood boil.
It lights up her whole face, her blue eyes brighter than I’ve ever seen them, a dimple I’ve never noticed before appearing on her right cheek.
“Mario’s is pretty good, but there’s a pizza place back where I’m from that makes a mean Hawaiian pizza.”
I grimace. “You would be the kind of person to like pineapple on pizza.”
“Guilty as charged,” she says, not one-upping me for once. I watch as she looks away, tilting her head back to rest on the wall behind us.
I take one more slow breath in and hold it, my eyes registering the straight line of Mia’s nose, the fullness of her lips.
When I let the air go, I finally feel back in control of my body.
“This is…so crazy.”
“What?” Mia asks. “Us actually having a peaceful conversation?”
I laugh, nudging her arm lightly. “That. But also everything happening in the world right now. Quarantine. The coronavirus.”
“Murder hornets,” Mia adds.
I nod. “Some days it feels like the freaking apocalypse.”
“What a way to go. Holed up in an apartment, stuffing ourselves with Pop-Tarts and cereal.”
“Stuffing ourselves with my Pop-Tarts and cereal,” I correct.
Mia grins at that, the dimple reappearing. “Stuffing ourselves with your Pop-Tarts and cereal,” she echoes.
We both fall silent and I realize I’m still holding her hand, her fingers folded gently over mine.
I notice a thin scar running from the base of her pointer finger all the way down to her thumb, the raised, pale skin standing out against the olive of the rest of her hand.
“What happened?” I ask, nodding to it.
Mia glances down, tilting our hands to get a better look at the scar. “Nothing interesting.” She chuckles to herself, shaking her head. “When I was a kid, one of my older brothers ran over it with his bike and shattered three different bones. I had to get surgery and everything.”
I grimace at the mental image of that. “How many brothers do you have?”
“Four. And three sisters. I’ve got a pretty big family.” Our eyes meet and she shrugs, the corner of her mouth ticking up into a soft smile. “That’s partly why I play music at night. Too much quiet kind of freaks me out.”
“What’s the other part?”
“Annoying you. Obviously.”
I roll my eyes and swat at her shoulder. She laughs, dodging out of the way, seven siblings’ worth of practice behind her.
“You must miss them,” I say, and her face grows a little more serious, her eyebrows jutting down.
“At least half of them,” she jokes, but the light doesn’t fully meet her eyes. There’s definitely a lingering sadness there.
“Why didn’t you go home?” I ask.
“I couldn’t.” She sits up a little straighter and lets out a long exhale. “A last-minute, cross-country plane ticket was way too expensive. I would’ve had to sell at least one kidney to pay for it.”
She doesn’t ask why I can’t go home, but I find myself wanting to tell her, wanting someone to share the weight of it for just a little while.
I take a deep breath, the words I’ve been holding back for months tumbling out. “My parents pretty much disowned me over Christmas break.”
Mia’s eyes widen in surprise, and she turns to look at me.
“They’re, uh.” I look away, swallowing. “They’re super religious. Always have been. Church-every-Sunday, hosting-Bible-study-on-Fridays, Harry-Potter-is-blasphemy kind of religious.” I laugh, thinking back to a random retreat I went on my freshman year of high school where we had a two-hour-long sermon on the sanctity of marriage and the horrors of premarital sex. “I even signed an abstinence pledge when I was fourteen, which is the Catholic school version of sex ed.”
Mia doesn’t laugh at that. She just watches me, her expression concerned.
“Anyway, I came out to them on the last day of break, and they pretty much told me to never come back because I’m, you know…a massive disappointment who’s going against God’s plan for my life.” I squint, trying to keep it together. “Which, I mean, I knew they’d say. I even packed my bags before telling them because I knew they weren’t going to be okay with it.”
My voice cracks on the last word and I swallow, my vision blurring as tears begin to stream down my face. What a terrible price to pay, just so I can be fully and completely and honestly myself.
“I just think maybe I secretly hoped they would find a way to be okay with it, you know? Okay with me.”
A sob escapes my lips and Mia’s instantly there, her arms wrapping around me, as the panic and the hurt and the sadness I’ve forced down for months finds its way to the surface, the pressure of quarantine squeezing it out.
I don’t know how long we sit there for.
Me, crying like an actual baby, definitely getting snot on her black sweatshirt.
Mia, gently rubbing my back through all of it, her black, snot-covered sweatshirt smelling like the vial of sandalwood perfume in our bathroom cabinet, warm and woody and comforting.
Soon, the tears start to slow, a heavy tiredness setting in as two thoughts crystallize in my mind.
The first thought is that, deep in my bones, I know I’m going to be okay. It may hurt for a while—in fact, it will probably always hurt, some days and moments more than others—but I’ll survive. This isn’t going to break me or change who I know I am.
And…the second thought is, as her arms tighten around me, my eyelids slowly closing, that…I don’t hate it. I don’t hate sitting here,
