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It’s not exactly a secret that I’m not great at change, but some changes are easier than others. Like when they’re a normal next step in life and you have plenty of warning that they’re coming, as was the case with next week’s huge change. Starting on Tuesday, the five senior members of the Baby-Sitters Club would officially be high school students.
Claudia was on a drawing spree, eager to submit to the art magazine. Stacey, the Overachiever, had taken a summer intensive math class so she could start a year ahead, which, on the list of things she was most excited for, apparently ranked just below finally going to the same school as my stupid older brother, Sam. Mary Anne had spent the last month fine-tuning her Drama Club audition, down to the last syllable, and Dawn was planning to start a new student club for every sociopolitical issue that didn’t have one already.
I was looking forward to more challenging classes and trying out for SHS softball, but with the way everyone’s schedules were filling up, my instinctive hatred of change was threatening to rear its ugly head. We’d already had to move our meeting times from five-thirty to six. What if before long, we didn’t have time for the BSC at all?
I knew that was crazy. After all, we were best friends! And right now, two of us had our last major babysitting gig of the summer to focus on. Stacey and I were chaperoning nine-year-old Wendy Johnson’s birthday party. I’m not gonna lie, I was hoping it would remind my starry-eyed friend of what a good thing we had going.
And so far, it was going great. Wendy, twirling her new fishtail braid, eagerly dragooned my brother David Michael into being her partner for the scavenger hunt we’d put together. Other alliances sprang up in their wake, with the children of SES showing impressive skills at realpolitik.
Except for one little girl. Lisa Parker, who as of yesterday had been Wendy’s best friend, sat alone at the far end of the picnic table, picking at her cake like David Michael confronted with Watson’s pancake buffet. Stacey, herding Charlotte Johanssen and Nicky Pike over to join the group, shot me a concerned look, and I nodded and headed over to Lisa.
“Hey there,” I said, plunking myself down next to her, “do you want me to wrap that up for you to take home? The scavenger hunt is about to start.”
Lisa swallowed her bite of yellow cake, which was mostly frosting. “No thanks,” she said, not looking up at me. “I don’t want to do the scavenger hunt.”
Uh-oh. “Are you sure?” I asked. When I’d sat for her on Wednesday, it was all she could talk about. Then I realized that I’d barely seen her and Wendy together at all today, and I wondered if maybe they’d had a fight.
“Yeah,” said Lisa sullenly. She turned her plastic fork over in her hand. “Kristy, does David Michael like Wendy?”
“What?” I asked. “Of course. Everyone here likes her. It’s her party.”
Lisa wrinkled her nose. “I meant like like. Does he like like her?”
“Um,” I said, “not that I’m aware of. You know he’s only nine, right? That’s a little young to like like somebody.”
“I’m nine,” said Lisa, sticking her chin out pointedly.
“Right,” I said quickly. To me, fourteen was a little young to like somebody, even if Mary Anne had Logan and Claudia had Trevor and Stacey was her boy-crazy self. “Never mind. Why do you ask?”
“Because Wendy likes him,” said Lisa, fixing her sad eyes on a pink frosting globule. “She told me this morning. She wants to do the scavenger hunt with him.” Lisa shook her head, then looked straight up at me. “She was supposed to do it with me.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry, Lisa, but I’m sure she didn’t mean anything by it—”
“But she did,” said Lisa. “She likes him. That means she doesn’t like me.” At long last, she looked straight up at me. Cheeks red, eyes bright, waterworks threat level imminent. “I like her.”
Oh. I leaned forward and gave her what I hoped was a kind, reassuring smile. “Well, you know that’s okay, right?” I said, careful to maintain eye contact. “You’re allowed to like whoever you want. Girls, boys, anybody. You can’t make people like you, but I know that Wendy values you as a friend. Every time I babysit for her, she always tells me how you’re her very best friend.”
“Thanks, Kristy,” said Lisa. Then she hugged me, burying her face in my T-shirt. “I knew you’d understand.”
I patted her on the back, because that seemed like the thing to do, but over her shoulder, I stared into space, or more accurately, into Wendy’s neighbors’ yard, in confusion. The way she’d said it almost implied that—
Then I got that weird, hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck-standing-up feeling you get when someone’s standing right behind you. I turned to see Stacey, holding Charlotte by the hand, her eyes as wide as my own. I didn’t know how much she’d heard, but it was clearly more than enough.
“Um,” she said, when she realized I was looking at her, and then she pulled herself together, once again a picture of eighth—no, ninth—grade sophistication, like when a YouTube video that’s stuck loading suddenly starts up again. “We’re starting. Are you sure you don’t want to do the scavenger hunt, Lisa? Charlotte still needs a partner.”
It took a second, but Lisa let go of me. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll be Charlotte’s partner.”
“Yay!” said Charlotte. “Come on, Lisa!” She took off back towards where the other kids were waiting, Stacey trailing behind her and politely pretending not to have noticed the spot where Lisa’s watery eyes had met my shirt. Lisa followed them with leaden steps, as though she were being marched to the guillotine. Or a custody hearing. Or a manicure. Then I remembered that I was on the clock, so I followed her, my mind reeling.
I knew you’d understand. Did Lisa just think that I was a great babysitter, or had she assumed that I also liked girls? And if so, did I? Did Stacey think I did? Was that what her awkward moment had been about? Sure I wasn’t boy-crazy like she was, but—
But—
It hit me like a ton of bricks. I didn’t know. My opinion of boys hadn’t changed much since first grade playground cooties, but I’d never given any thought to liking girls. All of a sudden, my worries about high school changing things no longer seemed to matter. My understanding of myself had changed. For the first time in my life, I didn’t entirely know myself.
It was terrifying. Zero stars. Do not recommend.
Somehow, despite my petrifying emotional tailspin, the rest of the party went off without a hitch. And by “somehow,” I meant “thanks to Stacey.” Even Lisa left smiling, materially helped by Charlotte turning out to be amazing at scavenger hunts. They took first place, and Wendy’s parents thanked us profusely and promised to recommend us to anyone and everyone they knew, and I smiled and nodded and shook their hands, my proud presidential self again, until the door shut behind us.
All I wanted to do was go home and spiral in peace. I walked fast, but Stacey hurried after me. “Hey, Kristy!” she called. “Wait up!”
Reluctantly, I did. Very reluctantly, like Mary Anne’s dad stepping into the twenty-first century.
“I, um,” said Stacey, uncharacteristically hesitant. “I thought you handled that really well.”
“I hope so,” I said, not looking at her.
“I mean it,” said Stacey. “You made the Club look awesome.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Was that all?” It was sharper than I’d intended, but I just wasn’t ready to talk about this. I wasn’t ready to think about it, even though it was now the only thing I could think about. I didn’t know. How could I not know? This was impossible. I had always known who I was.
“Listen, Kristy,” said Stacey, “about that last thing Lisa said—”
So she had picked up on it. Wonderful. “I really don’t want to talk about it. Sorry, Stace.”
“No need to be sorry,” said Stacey. “That’s kind of why I brought it up. I wanted to say it’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it. Specifically,” she added, pressing on before I could say great, let’s not then, “it’s okay if you don’t know what to say.”
This, from the most straightforwardly boy-crazy person I had ever met in my life. “Easy for you to say,” I said, before I could stop myself.
“Not really,” said Stacey quietly. She stopped walking, and part of me wanted to seize the opportunity to keep moving, to get as far away from her as possible, but the part of me that still had some semblance of a working brain ultimately won out. “Laine and I kissed,” she said, addressing the cracks in the sidewalk. “When I was in New York last month.”
I couldn’t have heard that correctly. Did boy-crazy Stacey just casually tell me she’d kissed a girl? “What?”
“Laine and I kissed,” Stacey repeated. She wrenched her eyes upward, once again bright with her usual New York City confidence. “I don’t know what it meant, and neither does Laine, and we decided we’re both all right with that.”
“So, what?” I said, unable to help myself. “You’re bisexual? Or pansexual, like Dawn?”
Stacey shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe it was just an emotional moment in a complicated friendship.” She gave a self-deprecating smile. “I like boys. I think you may have noticed. Beyond that, I don’t know. And I just wanted to say, one Type A to another, that it’s okay not to know.”
Type A? Try mind-reader. “How did you—” I started.
Stacey looked away from me again, suddenly struggling to affect the nonchalance she usually oozed so effortlessly. “You were shook,” she said, which was obviously true, but equally obviously wasn’t the whole story. She might as well have been holding up a big neon sign saying “LYING BY OMISSION.”
And I had a horrible feeling I knew what she was omitting. “And?” I asked, suspiciously.
“And we’d, um, wondered before,” Stacey said in a rush, “whether you just weren’t into the topic of boys or you weren’t into boys at all.”
“We?!” I sputtered, indignant. “Has the whole Club been speculating about me?”
“No!” said Stacey, shaking her head violently. “Absolutely not. All that happened was that a long time ago, way back in seventh grade, you made some ‘ew, boys’ comment, and I wondered if there was more to it, like maybe you had been out for years, and Claudia and Mary Anne knew that, but I didn’t because I was new. So I asked Claud if I was missing something and she said she wouldn’t be surprised either way, and that was the end of it, Kristy, I swear.”
I buried my face in my hands. “Ugh,” I said. “I’m so embarrassed.” It was the understatement of my life. Everyone knew about my potential queerness but me, apparently.
“I’m sorry,” said Stacey, and she clearly meant it. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. I just wanted to help.”
Which I knew, and she had. “You did,” I admitted. “You said exactly what I needed to hear. I was just freaked that you knew I’d need it.”
“Well,” said Stacey, once again examining her shoes, “trying and failing to solve my diabetes like a math equation kind of prepared me for Laine.”
And that made so much sense that it was kind of unfair. “Right,” I said. “Thanks, Stace.”
“Anytime,” said Stacey. She looked up then, clearly relieved. “And we’ll all be by your side, no matter what. No matter how many new high school commitments we have. Best friends forever, right?”
“Right,” I said. I smiled at her, almost relaxed, and she beamed at me and squeezed my hand. My pulse raced at the fleeting contact, which might have been psychosomatic, but also might not have been—
I wasn’t looking forward to the soul searching ahead of me. But I’d get through it, because my best friends weren’t going anywhere.