Across the Green Grass Fields (Wayward Children, #6)(9)
When the bell rang for lunch she jumped in her seat, so startled she nearly fell over. Only Laurel’s hand grasping her sleeve and pulling her back kept her upright. Regan glanced at Laurel, thanks on her lips, and swallowed them when she saw the bright intensity in the other girl’s eyes. Laurel had been scenting a secret all morning and now, like a hunting dog kept on the leash too long, she was ready to start biting at anything between her and her quarry.
“Come on,” she said. “You promised.”
And that was how Regan found herself at a table in the back of the library with Laurel, her lunch unpacked in front of her, the librarian somewhere up at the checkout desk, where she could keep an eye on the less obedient students, telling Laurel everything.
Maybe she wouldn’t have done that if her mother had insisted she take a day off from school to think about what she’d learned and what it would mean for her future. Maybe she would have realized staying quiet wasn’t the same thing as lying, and that while her body wasn’t any sort of shameful secret, she was under no obligation to share it with anyone, especially not with a girl who had proven, over and over again, that she couldn’t be trusted with anything that didn’t fit her narrow view of the world. Maybe she would have realized that if there was no right way to be a girl, there was no wrong way either.
But Regan was accustomed to trusting Laurel, treating her like a vicious dog that wouldn’t bite the one who held its leash, even as it barked and snarled at everyone else. Maybe that was why she missed the slow widening of Laurel’s eyes, the slow paling of her cheeks, right until the moment Laurel pushed her chair away from the table and demanded, in a horrified tone, “You’re a boy?!”
“No,” Regan protested. “No, I’m not a boy, I’ve never been a boy, I’m a girl just like you, just one whose body’s built a little differently—being intersex is perfectly normal, it’s as common as being redheaded, and we have six redheads just in the third grade. I’m not a boy!”
“You are, though,” Laurel insisted, taking a big step backward. “You line up with the girls during PE, and you come to slumber parties with girls—you’ve seen me in my pajamas!” Her lip curled in clear disgust. “You’re a gross, awful, lying boy!”
Regan leapt from her seat, shouting, “I am not! I’m a girl! My parents said so!” As soon as the words were out, she had to wonder if they’d been the right thing to say, or whether Laurel would care what her parents said about her.
Laurel did not. She took another huge step backward. “Don’t you come near me! If you do, I’ll scream!”
But they were already making more than enough noise. The librarian burst into the room, demanding, “What is all this ruckus about?” as she glared at the pale-faced Laurel and the shaking Regan. Laurel pointed at Regan, beginning to babble about liars and deceitful boys who wanted to get close to girls for wicked reasons. Regan ran.
She brushed past the librarian, who stared in bewildered shock as she made for the door. She ran out of the library, not bothering to wipe away the tears that now streamed freely down her cheeks. The scope of her mistake in trusting Laurel was just beginning to sink in, trickling down through layers of confusion and hurt.
She believed her parents when they said there was nothing wrong with her, because they were her parents and they had never lied to her. If they thought she was perfectly fine the way she was, they must be right, and since she’d been herself since she was born and it hadn’t hurt her yet, there was no reason to think they’d start lying now. She’d just been confused and overwhelmed—was still confused and overwhelmed, if she was being honest with herself. This was a lot to try and wrap her head around at once, and reaching out to her best friend had seemed reasonable and logical. And it had been wrong, so wrong, so very, very wrong. Laurel looked out for Laurel before anything else, and Laurel’s ideas about the world were black and white and starkly drawn, leaving no room for anything that didn’t fit into her little boxes.
For Laurel, there was one right way to be a girl, and it was Laurel’s way, always. Laurel believed in destiny. Laurel believed you had to be what people told you to be. And she’d almost convinced Regan to think the same way, that following Laurel’s rules would be enough to keep her safe and ordinary. But that had never been the truth. Destiny had never been an option.
So Regan ran, and Regan kept running, barely slowing down when she hit the parking lot. She knew she’d get in trouble for leaving school grounds before the final bell, but she didn’t care. Laurel was probably already rushing to the cafeteria to tell all the other girls what Regan had told her. Thinking Laurel would be capable of keeping anything in confidence had been the biggest mistake of all.
Regan ran across the street, into a small residential neighborhood. She’d been there before, trick-or-treating with Laurel and some of the other girls; she knew where she was going. At the end of the block there was a gap between fences through which a skinny girl who had yet to start the pressures of puberty could just fit, shoving herself through into an empty field filled with mustard grass and scrubby thorn bushes. She paused, chest heaving as she fought to catch her breath, then started to run again, loping across the field with the long, ground-eating strides of a child who’d been running for pleasure almost as long as she’d been able to walk.
At the end of the field was a slope, grass giving way to smooth, bare earth, hardpacked and streaked with reddish clay, shadowed by the branches of the nearby oaks. It angled toward the banks of a narrow creek, clear water dancing with catfish and crawfish. Regan slid down the slope on the sides of her feet, stopping at the water’s edge, ragged breaths giving way to angry sobs that wracked her bones and burned her eyes and made her feel as if the entire world was shaking apart at the seams.