The Proposition

For Christmas in my junior year of high school, I got a postcard from my parents in Bora Bora and a broken finger after falling on my hand because I slipped on a spool of thread. The other girls at Sacred Heart Academy got Macbooks, Gucci purses, and diamond earrings. And honestly, good for them. I wouldn’t have wanted any of that stuff anyway. What I’d asked for was a nose ring, but it would have to wait until I turned eighteen in June.

The first day back from the holiday was always the same. The halls were filled to the brim with girls in plaid skirts talking solemnly about how new and changed they felt because it was a new year and about how their aunt who lives in Paris didn’t bring them exactly the right perfume as they’d asked. It was all the same humdrum dressed up in ripped wrapping paper and the smoke of fireworks. But me? I had one goal and one goal only upon my return; to be reunited with my great love once again.

Chloe Barnes was the president of the speech and debate team, the student council secretary, and the vice president of the honors board. She had long, curly, orange hair that gleamed like gold but shined like fire. Her eyes were a deep, nearly-gray blue, and she had freckles just across her nose and on her lips. My favorite way to pass the time in history class was to watch her long, black eyelashes float up and down like angel’s wings.

It was kind of like the freshman cheerleader crushing on the captain of the football team thing, only I was a debate squad member crushing on the most talented performer our team had ever seen and there was no creepy age gap dynamic.

Alas, we existed in two different worlds. Our paths were not destined to cross. Not emotionally, anyway. They definitely crossed physically.

I spotted her near the entrance to the school, looking as poised and polished as always. Her skirt was the precise uniform-required length, ending just after her knees. Her tights had not a single rip or tear in them. Her shoes were sparkling white, just like her teeth, which I could see because she smiled radiantly but carefully like a politician. Her signature red lipstick seemed to be an upgraded, deeper shade that I could only assume she’d received for Christmas. The top of her hair was pulled back into a delicate ponytail, but the rest flowed like water around her shoulders. Even her sweater was perfectly pressed, sitting just so. She was a remarkable beauty.

So remarkable that I didn’t realize, as I stared without shame, that I was still moving. My feet had altered my trajectory, so entranced was I, and I was no longer on my way to homeroom. I didn’t notice until I felt my body crash into hers and we were both propelled backward, slamming onto the floor amidst a flurry of papers, panic, and loud chatter.

I wanted to spontaneously combust right there on that spot. It was no longer a requirement that I go on existing.

“Clarita?” came her melodic voice, because of course she recovered from the fall immediately. “Are you alright?”

I looked up into Chloe’s sparkling eyes and thought I saw a twinkle of real concern until her tone of voice registered and I realized that she was speech-girling me. It had all the appearances of kindness, but what she was really asking was, “Who dropped you on your head as an infant that you just ran into me like a lunatic?”

I clawed and scratched my way to my feet like a squirrel and held out my hand to try to help her up. Admittedly, it wasn’t all innocent. I would have died happy if I’d gotten the chance to touch her just then. But I didn’t.

I should have been paying attention to what the people around us were saying instead of the graceful way Chloe had managed to land because if I had, I would have found a way to spontaneously combust.

“Ew!” shrieked Lisette, a short blonde with brown doe eyes and a concentrated dose of spicy mean chick. She was also Chloe’s best friend. “Don’t touch it! That freaky fat lesbo ran into you on purpose.”

My first thought was, Am I fat? I didn’t make it to my second thought because my heart was beating so quickly and so loudly that it drowned out the rest of the world. My senses disappeared, and I became nothing. Nothing but a beating heart. Up until that moment, I had navigated through high school relatively unscathed due to my talent for being both silent and invisible. Suddenly, the whole world was watching and they knew my name: Freaky Fat Lesbo. A chorus of taunts and laughter followed me like a rabid dog back into the hallway until I finally made it to homeroom and took my way-back corner seat.

I was suddenly grateful that my last name was Villemarette, but my location didn’t stop people from walking in, looking at me, and snickering, pointing, or outright laughing. As the day wore on, the number of people who were doing it gradually increased as the story spread around the school. One of the biggest detriments to attending an all-girls school. Gossip was faster than the speed of light.

I contemplated, quite seriously, giving up my third year of perfect attendance to toss myself into the void. How could I have made such a serious blunder? And what was there to be done about it? And when had everyone decided I was a lesbian? I knew I was a lesbian from an early age, but I’d always thought I was pretty good at straight passing. It was bad enough that I didn’t believe in God, but to be gay and an atheist in a Catholic school? I hadn’t come out as either, but now the whole school was talking about my nonexistent love life.

I thought I could start to breathe normally again when I finally made it to the last class of the day. It was art, for one, so there wasn’t a whole lot of pressure. Again, I was incredibly wrong about how life was going to work for me.

“Mrs. Garcia, can you please send Miss Villemarette to the office?” Not even three minutes after the bell rang, I was the center of attention. Every head in the room, including my teacher’s, swiveled and craned to get a good look at me. They all wanted to watch the walk of shame, I suppose.

I was scared I was going to poop my pants in front of everyone, but I got up and stiffly walked out of the room. Once outside, I froze. I had never had a reason to go to the principal’s office. Not in all of my time at school. Not since my first day of class as a teeny tiny tot. I’d never even been in trouble with my au pair as a toddler. My parents once grounded me as a joke and because they claimed it was vital to my development to have as many normal high school experiences as possible.

“Well, Clari, you can either run or walk to your doom,” I told myself. Once again, my inability to pay attention to my surroundings backfired, and another girl glared at me as she passed by and watched me talk to myself. That was it. I had to run.

It was more of a brisk walk. But the point is I hustled to that office. When I got there, I wasn’t sure what to do exactly. The secretary blinked at me from behind her big, circular pink desk like she was waiting for me to give her an explanation.

“Yes?” she asked finally. She made no attempt to hide her disgust with me.

“I’m here to…I got called in?”

“Name?”

“Oh. Uh, Clari Villemarette.” I swear I saw her roll her eyes at me before she glanced down to take a look at her notes.

“Alright, Clarita. Principal Allen’s office is right there. Head on in”

It occurred to me, as I slowly shuffled into the principal’s office, that the secretary was the same woman who had just called for me over the intercom. She knew who I was when I walked in.

The principal was sitting at her desk, her glasses hanging off of the tip of her nose. She could stare at me with even more judgment as I walked in. She seemed somber and glum. Almost Morose.

“Have a seat, Miss Villemarette,” she crooned. I did. “We’re here to discuss a serious matter regarding your behavior. It was reported to me this morning, and my colleagues and I have been discussing what to do about you all day.” She paused, scanning me up and down as if she could somehow determine whether or not I was a bad kid just by looking. “We’ve come to an agreement, finally, but first, do you know why you’re here?”

I shook my head, no. I didn’t. Her eyebrow shot up behind her thick, wiry gray bangs to suggest that I was lying. I said, ”I can’t think of a thing,” when she had stared so long I thought we would both die there.

She must have taken it as cheek because the scowl on her face grew deeper than ever. “We’ve had multiple reports from your classmates regarding…” Her lip kind of quivered and her nose twitched as she paused. Whatever had been reported clearly repulsed her. When she spoke again, it was in a whisper. “Sexual harassment.”

Sexual harassment? Allen stared at me and I stared back at her while we both allowed the phrase to sink like a dumbbell weight into the center of the room, slowed only by the thick fog of tension.

“What exactly are the–”

“And since we’ve received these reports, we’ve no choice but to put you on indefinite school suspension until we’ve completed a thorough investigation of the allegations and your behavior. Here’s the paperwork for you to bring to your aunt. It has instructions on what happens next in there. Now, you’ll need to leave the grounds immediately.”

I blinked at her. There was still an hour left of school. “Immediately? But I–”

“You’ve been listed as a walker on our transportation lists before, so when your aunt didn’t pick up the phone we decided we’d let you go that way.”

I swallowed.

Had I just been kicked out of school and told to walk home like a sorry prom date?

There was clearly no discussion left to be had, so I took the papers from her, grabbed my things, and headed home. All the while, I replayed the fall in my head. I hadn’t even made contact with Chloe body to body. I’d run into her bookbag with my textbooks because I was holding them in front of me. If anyone had a right to complain about sexual harassment, it was me, who’d been bullied about my sexuality in front of the entire school just for being clumsy.

Just like that, Chloe Barnes didn’t seem quite so pretty anymore.

I got home and waited, unmoving, on the couch for my Aunt Liv to get home. When she did, she immediately asked what was wrong and I told her the entire sordid tale over sodas she’d brought home with her from work. Liv was a nurse, and her best friend in the hospital was the vending machine where, for some reason, they stocked foreign sodas and eight flavor varieties of an Italian cream soda she was heavily reliant upon to get through the day. The one she brought me was blueberry. It was my favorite because it tasted like eating freshly picked blueberries with ice-cold homemade whipped cream and felt like a summer’s day. I left it untouched.

Liv was, well, livid. Unlike my parents, my aunt was incredibly pro-social justice, and, also unlike my parents, knew that was a raging homosexual. The cool thing about Liv was that she truly seemed to grasp what this all meant for me and my future.

“They’re going to kick you out of school over this,” she said quietly, sucking her bottom lip into her mouth like she often did when she was thinking. Liv had dark, creamy soft skin and close-cropped hair. It made way for the natural, wild beauty of her facial features to stand out. She was a fascinating creature both inside and out, and one day I hoped to be just like her. That day, I wanted to trade places with her. “Look, I’m not going to let anything happen to you, okay? Why don’t you go run down and visit Hank? Tell him I’ll stop by later and pay for whatever you get, and you just grab anything you want. I’ve got to go talk to someone.”

Just like that, she was gone again. For getting off of a 12-hour shift, she sure was spry.

So I walked to the corner store near Viv’s house which was owned by her unofficial boyfriend Hank. Hank was a sweet, no-nonsense kind of guy with a good heart. He was even kind of cute. But Viv didn’t trust people, and Hank didn’t seem to care about a label, so they worked.

Jaling.

“Hey, Hank!” The bell at the top of the door clattered noisily back into place as the door swung closed again. “Viv said–”

“Go ahead, kiddo. I saw her speed down the street like a demon and figured you were headed over. What happened to you?”

I recounted the events of the day, adding how mad my parents would be if I got kicked out, or worse; if they knew I was gay. I was allowed to stay with my aunt at her house only because it was close to SHA, which funneled graduates into my top college choices. Also known as my parents’ top college choices.

I finished my story just as I finished gathering my haul and dumped it all onto the counter. “So she said she’s going to talk to someone. I don’t know who.”

Hank snorted in disgust and shook his head. “Kids are evil,” he complained. “How hard is it just to mind your business?” He started to ring me up, but he was getting heated. “My store boy Jose gets the same shit. This group of guys comes in every time he’s alone. They call him names and last night one of them gave him a black eye because they don’t like the way he acts. Told him he was a disgrace to men. And I’ve called the cops and installed cameras, and they don’t care. It’s everywhere. It’s sick. And he tries, Clari. He really tries to act differently so they’ll leave him alone. They don’t care!”

My heart clenched at the thought of a fellow gay teen facing that level of bullying and violence because of suspected homosexuality alone. And I just really wanted to hug him. Hank threw a pack of Viv’s cigarettes and a lighter in the bag for her.

“She’ll need it,” he said. “I hope you get it figured out, C. I would miss your face in my store after school.”

I smiled and waved, though I didn’t feel like too much of a smile inside. When I turned to head out the door, there he was. Jose was tall, lean, and handsome in a rugged way. I knew he was our age from Hank, but he could have passed for anywhere between 15 and 35.

“Excuse me,” he said, immediately ducking his head to get around me to the door. Before my thought process could catch up with my hand, I reached up and tilted his face away from me so I could look at his eye. He froze, stunned by the sudden touch.

“Are you Jose?” I asked.

“Um…yeah. Who are you?”

“Hank’s friend.” I dropped my hand and stared him in the eyes. “He told me what happened, Hank, and you seem like a wonderful guy. So I have a proposition for you.”

—

Isabella and I were the last to arrive at my mother’s enormous, over-the-top Christmas party. We could hear the music and the laughter from out on the street. My mom could certainly throw a good party. After graduating with my master’s, I spent two years studying architecture abroad, which is where I met Isabella. It was my first time home. And while I was glad to see my parents, I was much more excited to reunite with an old friend.

“Are you nervous, Hermosa?” asked Isabella, punctuating her sentence with a delicate giggle.

“Just excited,” I assured her, linking her arm in mine and pulling her in for a quick kiss. “Let’s go in. You already know who I’m waiting for.”

Inside, there were swarms of people everywhere, of all different ages. We chatted with my parents first, who came to the door to greet us, but seemed like they were more interested in the party. Then, I saw Viv, Hank, and asleep between them, their young triplets.”

“They’re getting so big!” I whisper-squealed.

We made a few other rounds while I introduced Isabella to everyone. I couldn’t help but think that, just a few years ago, I wouldn’t have even brought her home, much less expected everyone to be so nonchalant about it.

Finally, I spotted them across the room. My hero. The man who made sure I could stay in school, finish college, and go off to see the world without any hiccups. My best friend and ex-boyfriend, Jose.

He had brought his fiancee, Dylan, and Dylan’s sister’s daughter, Camille, who they had adopted the year before. “Jose!”

“Ah, my love. You finally made it to come to see me,” he lamented, his movements a bit loose and random from the booze. “And you must be the gorgeous Isabella,” he said, turning to look at my girlfriend with a grin.

“That’s me,” she laughed. “I’ve been told that the first thing I need to ask you about is how the two of you fooled the world into thinking you were a straight couple through senior year and all of college. Oh, and I wanted to say thank you! If Clari hadn’t gone to school and then come to Barcelona, she never would have met me!” The four of us laughed like a blissful chorus.

“Well, it all started with an invasion of my privacy.”