Trinity (34)
Amber returns with five cookies instead of two. She gives one to me, keeps one for herself, and stuffs the other three in the pocket of her jacket. They’re plain sugar cookies, and they taste like paper, but I nibble on mine anyway.
“Well? Your turn,” Amber says after a minute. She’s already eaten the one cookie, and now she’s rearranging the chair next to her so she can comfortably prop her feet on top of it.
“My turn?”
“Yeah, you used some kind of shy wizard magic to make me speak, so it’s your turn. Tell me a secret. Then we’re even.” She raises her brow at me.
I blink at her, remembering back to when I first saw her before the Spring Fling. It’s almost like she’s a different person. But her face has the same sharpness, her gaze is still shrewd, her hair is even styled into the same two ponytails. I wonder for a moment what Pearl would think if she knew I was talking to Amber.
“I don’t really have any,” I admit. I really can’t think of a secret, even if I did want to tell her something.
Amber pushes out a breath. “I thought you’d say that. At this point I think I believe you, which honestly just proves how boring you are. No offense.”
I am a tiny bit offended. “Well you didn’t have to tell me anything,” I try to shoot back, but my voice isn’t very forceful.
She swings her feet off the chair next to her and slaps her palms on the table. I see a boy a table away from us jump and turn at the noise. “Listen. The only reason I brought it up is--” She follows my gaze; I’m eyeing the boy who’s still looking at our table. “Piss off, Jake!” she bellows, and he flips her off, which causes other kids to murmur, and the group leaders chastise everyone.
Amber turns back to me, a satisfied grin on her face. She looks more relaxed than she had been. I guess yelling calms her. “I’d wanted to say something about it before. On the phone. But I’m still shit at talking about it.” She bites absentmindedly on a nail before continuing. “I thought maybe you could also be… It’s stupid.”
I notice that she hasn’t repeated the word since the first time she’d said it. Aromantic. Aromantic, that was the word, wasn’t it?
“It’s not stupid,” I tell her. I trace the carving on the table again. S and M. M and S. Two people that liked each other enough that they carved the first letters of their names into a table. “What does it mean, though? You don’t kiss people?”
She tips her head back and crosses her ankles back onto the chair next to her. She drums her fingers against the edge of the table. “No. No, not at all, actually.” She uncrosses her ankles, scratches her arm. “Fine, I’ll tell you,” she says finally. I hadn’t realized that there was a chance she wasn’t going to. She speaks so openly about everything else. Everything.
“Again, I am not looking for any opinions on this,” she reminds me with a glare. I shrivel up a little in my seat, which seems to satisfy her enough to continue. “Alright. It’s… it’s, ok, this is going to sound dumb, but it’s the best way I can think of explaining it at the moment.” She rubs her eyebrow.
“You know the butterflies you were talking about on the phone? So there’s different ones. The sexy ones happen when you’re looking at someone and you’re thinking, holy hell, they’re hot. And you’d like to--”
“I get the point,” I interject. We’re still sitting in a building that is basically a church.
“Fine,” she laughs. “And there’s other ones that appear when you’re with someone and you want to be around them all the time. Not like friends, but like dating. I don’t know, really, that’s why it’s hard to explain. I don’t get those ones.”
I chew the end of my cookie and think for a moment. “Oh.”
“And some people don’t have those butterflies--that attraction--but they date anyway. And it’s the same for the sexy butterflies; you can be ace and do it.” I scrunch up my nose. “But I choose not to date, because I don’t want to. I like just having friends instead.”
“How do you know…” I say slowly. Amber’s eyes narrow at me, and for a second I’m afraid to continue. “…if it’s something you’re missing?”
She barks out a laugh, and she squares her shoulders. The boy--Jake--from the other table, glances over, then quickly away. He’s afraid of her, I think. I almost wish I was at his table instead. Amber rises from her chair and leans over the table towards me, hands braced on the table and her eyes dark. “It’s not missing. I’m not missing anything. Fuck you. How do you know you’ve got it, then? Huh? How do you know?”
People must be looking at us now. Not just Jake. I shake my head and pull my hands to my face.
She sinks back down. Huffs. Scratches her arms and sighs. “I’m sorry, Trinity. I didn’t really mean that,” she says eventually.
I nod a little, but I’m still hiding behind my hands.
. . .
My last experience at YRJ is in a big, open room with all the other kids. That includes the overnight ones, which means it includes Pearl.
They gather us all into a giant circle, and Pearl’s on the opposite side of the room, and Amber is a few kids away from me because I didn’t really want to stand right next to her. Pearl smiles at me across the circle, and I, of course, smile back.
We’re instructed to all hold hands, and I don’t know either of the kids next to me, but I see that the kid on my left has cuts on his wrist, and I’m afraid holding his hand might hurt him. And the kid on my right has sweaty palms, and when I glance over I recognize that it’s Michael, the kid who gave a talk at the beginning of the day. He looks at the floor and doesn’t look very excited about God’s love anymore.
We recite some prayers, and then, all of a sudden, it’s over for me. It’s eight o’clock, and we all get our phones and things back from the cubby room, and my parents pick me up. And I’m glad it’s over, but I also feel guilty because Pearl’s still there, and I know she hates it, and I spent the whole time at the end thinking about Amber and not her.
. . .
Saturday ends, and Sunday starts, and now I’ve got to do my homework. I pull my notebooks out of my backpack, glad that I at least don’t have any math homework that needs done, since Kelly helped me on Thursday. Any math homework that needs done immediately, anyway.
A crumpled sheet of paper falls onto the floor as I pull out another book, and I pick it up. It’s the red flyer that I’d been given on the way out of school on Friday. I hadn’t even read it, just stuffed it away.
I smooth out some of the wrinkles to read it.
EASTER RISING TALENT ASSEMBLY
Do you have a creative talent you’d like to
share with Saint Paul’s?
The Easter Rising Talent Assembly is a
celebration of music, writing, and art.
See Mrs. Vena for more details.
All grade levels are encouraged to participate!
I remember Mr. Sumner mentioning this assembly in one of his daily announcements. It’s going to be at the school on Easter Monday, even though we have school off that day. I’ve heard Maggie talking about it, too, because it’s part of her Easter planning. Luckily I’m not in charge of decorations for that, though.
Speaking of, Kelly had texted me while I was at YRJ. All it says is, ‘meet thurs again?’. I had some kind of jolt of energy seeing that he’d texted at all, and then, upon seeing that he wanted to meet again, I felt more like I’d been electrocuted.
I’d like to see him again. I’d like to meet on Thursday. But I haven’t responded yet, because there’s a buzzing happening in my brain or in my stomach, I can’t tell, and I don’t know if it's butterflies or something else.
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(first part: https://theprose.com/post/432343/trinity)
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(previous part: https://theprose.com/post/452158/trinity-33)
(next part: https://theprose.com/post/454423/trinity-35)