Kiss Her Once for Me (99)

“I am?” I wipe my snot onto my arm. “Don’t you live with four other people?”

She nods. “Yes, but it’s a big house.”

“With an extra… closet?” I ask, remembering her original offer. The offer I was too full of self-pity to seriously consider the night of the napkin contract.

“It’s definitely closet-adjacent in size, but it does have a little window. And we wouldn’t charge you very much in rent, on account of it being, you know, not a bedroom. But don’t worry—there is a ton of common-area space downstairs, and one of the housemates, Ruby, they’re a psychic, and they do free tarot readings in exchange for cleaning the bathroom. And I think you’ll love Winslow—he’s trans like me and an artist like you, so hopefully you won’t care that he has canvases up in the living room all the time. He does mostly paint naked men as part of his ‘Reclaiming the Male Gays’ series…. Are you chill about nudity in your living spaces?”

“I’m not really chill about anything,” I tell her, and Ari nods astutely like she understands.

Two weeks ago, just the thought of moving in with Ari and four other people would’ve necessitated a three-hour hibernation under my weighted blanket. But now, I think about Lovey’s calming presence and the smell of her expensive weed; Meemaw’s effervescent energy; Katherine’s neuroses and Andrew’s friendship. Maybe it wouldn’t be so terrible to be surrounded by a bunch of loud, chaotic Portland hipsters.

“Sure,” I say, throwing up my arms in resignation. “I’ll rent your closet.”

Ari’s smoky eyes go wide. “Wait, really? You will?”

Meredith cocks her hips. “Wait. You will?”

“Forward,” I say. “Not backward.”





Chapter Thirty


Friday, December 30, 2022

“Okay, so when you said closet-adjacent, you meant—”

“It’s a bit cramped,” Ari admits. Given that Ari, Meredith, and I can barely all fit in my new bedroom, this admission feels like an understatement. “But if Ikea can create an entire apartment in three hundred square feet, surely we can make this work for sleeping!”

Meredith sets down my one box of stuff.

“That’s it. That’s all the floor space, taken up by a single box. Good thing you’re poor and own very little.”

“Anything is better than the depression chamber you were living in before,” Ari says. And no one argues with her there.

So, I move into my new closet.

Ari lives in a large foursquare house on a corner lot with a massive front porch, a pride flag over the door, and a sign that says “Welcome to Brideshead” (because one of the housemates, Bobbie, is an English professor at Lewis and Clark). There is a backyard with raised garden beds and a fire pit and all of Ari’s bees, and inside the house is a home. A cozy, lived-in space, with walls of books and Winslow’s nude paintings and the supplies for Ari’s honey business and a nursery’s worth of plants, all tended to by someone called Gardenia, who is at least half-plant themself.

All of the housemates are queer, most of them are artists, and they’ve already cleared a shelf for me in the fridge.



* * *



Meredith helps me paint my closet mint green, helps me turn my twin mattress on the floor into a chic lounging space, then sits me down on said mattress, opens my email, and forces me to write a response to the editor who reached out about my webcomics.

Every single word feels impossible to type, so Meredith decides to torture me by playing Rebecca Black on repeat, refusing to shut it off until I finish crafting the email. And miraculously, somewhere around the sixth replay of “Friday,” I start remembering the way it used to feel to create art alone in my bedroom as a kid. I remember the joy I used to feel before I let other people’s praise define the value of what I produced. I remember the way Jack looked baking Christmas cookies, like the recipes were written into her bones, like baking was an extension of her heart, like she couldn’t possibly fail at doing the thing she loved most.

I think about the hole inside me, and what’s going to fill it up, and the response comes a little bit easier once I know what I have to say.

On New Year’s Eve, Meredith flies back to Chicago. We stand in the departures zone outside PDX for a long time, our arms wrapped tight around each other. Meredith, who is comically short, fits nicely beneath my chin.

“I’ll come visit you,” I promise. “After you take the bar, I’ll fly out to see you and we’ll party for three days straight.”

“By ‘party,’ you mean eat Sour Punch Bites, drink hard cider, and rewatch all of Gilmore Girls, right?”

“Obviously.”

“Have you heard back from the editor yet?”

“I promise, the second I hear anything, you will be the first person I tell.”

Meredith narrows one eye at me. “Before you tell Ari?”

“Before I tell Ari, I swear it.”

Satisfied in the knowledge that she is my true best friend, Meredith adjusts her carry-on bag over her left shoulder. “What are you going to do about Jack?”

I groan. Jack. I had gone a whole seven minutes without thinking about her (a personal record), but now I’m thinking about her again outside PDX. I’m thinking about how when I sent that email to the editor, she was the first person I wanted to tell.