Page 23 of Best Woman

Somehow I make it through the rest of the evening without another incident quite as dramatic as my bathroom tête-à-tête with Rachel.

Kim and I mingle, chatting with people she knew from college and people I knew from high school.

All night I catch interested glances from across the room, people who knew who I was and everything that entailed.

It’s such a different experience from what I’m used to in New York, where I regularly run into people I haven’t seen in a few years and have to update them on my presentation and pronouns.

Maybe it’s because I’m so insulated, or perhaps New Yorkers are just that much more cosmopolitan and unflappable.

It’s not like Boca Raton is some backwater hick town—the entirety of Palm Beach County is rather progressive—but context is everything, and Florida is such an unbelievably weird and shitty state.

But tonight feels more than anything like wading in, a preview of what the next few days will be like.

Because Aiden’s friends who half remember an old version of me from ten years ago might not approach me with inappropriate and uncomfortable questions, but my extended family would certainly have no problem doing exactly that.

I’m already exhausted and on edge in anticipation, which is how Kim and I have ended up here.

…

Here is the Publix bakery.

Founded in 1930 by George Jenkins, Publix is a chain of grocery stores covering the south: Florida, Georgia, both Carolinas, Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

You might think your local grocery store chain is the best in the game, but you’d be wrong.

Publix has an unmatched deli—their chicken tender subs are divine.

The air of Southern charm extends to the friendly staff, who will walk you to your car and load your groceries into the trunk without expecting or accepting gratuity. But best of all is their cake.

I am basic and boring and never as happy and blissed-out as when I’m eating, from a pan larger than my torso, yellow sheet cake covered in buttercream so thick and sweet I should schedule a dentist appointment after the first bite.

The cake is so moist and spongy, with colorful frosted flowers piped lovingly along the sides.

Honestly, if I had a cake-sitting fetish, there is no cake I’d rather sit on. But I’d prefer to just eat it.

There are fewer cake slices than there were last night when I stopped in for a postcoital sugar rush—I’ve never been shy about eating my feelings. Standing under the fluorescent lights in the empty bakery department, I hold up two options for Kim. “Chocolate or vanilla?”

“Neither,” she answers. “I’m not really into sweets.”

I clutch my heart in mock horror. “How can anyone resist Publix cake? I don’t care if you’re not into sweets, Publix cake is like, transcendent. I think there’s heroin in it.”

She grabs the slices from me and starts toward checkout. “I had more than enough growing up. My mom always brought a huge cake to school on my birthday to share with the class. I will forever associate the taste with unwanted attention.”

“See, I had the opposite problem. I’m a summer baby, so I never got the school birthday experience.”

“Summer baby…wait, what’s your sign? I can’t believe we haven’t done this yet.”

I laugh. It’s true, though. I don’t think I’ve met a queer person since college and not known their zodiac sign within the first twenty minutes of conversation. “I’m a Cancer. July fifth. You?”

“Sagittarius. December fifth.” She stops to peruse beverage options at a large display case.

“Interesting. Water sign”—I point to myself—“and fire sign”—I point at her. “We’re…steamy.” That came out much flirtier and more suggestive than I’d intended.

Kim turns and gives me that same look she did in the car earlier, one far too dark and searching for Publix at 10 p.m. All I can do is give her a bland smile and duck my head.

There’s only one register open, and the person behind it has hair so shockingly pink it looks like a MySpace background circa 2005.

Their face is studded with piercings, covered with the kind of pubescent acne that looks like it hurts, and smudged with eyeliner that clearly started in one place at the beginning of their shift and has since migrated.

They are painfully young and have perfected an aura of ambivalence thicker than Axe body spray.

Oh god, it’s me at fifteen. The horror.

Kim drops our loot onto the conveyor belt and the cashier looks up at her, eyes widening a little bit in a way I’m coming to realize everyone does when faced with Kim Cameron in her full glory, before finding me standing next to her.

They snort. “Wow, two nights in a row? You know this stuff is like, pure lard, right?” Oh, they must have checked me out last night when I was too deep in my self-flagellating spiral to notice. They scan our purchases.

I cross my arms, aiming for haughty rather than defensive.

“I happen to have a very fast metabolism.” Not quite the sickening comeback I was aiming for, but I lean into Kim to show off a bit.

She takes it in stride, even paying for the cake she won’t be eating.

I could swoon. She grabs our bag and heads out the door, and it takes me a moment to get my body moving again.

The surly nonbinary teen rolls their eyes. “Um, hello, follow her .”

So I do.

There’s nowhere to sit outside, so Kim and I take our (my) snack to her rental car. Despite my repeated offers to share my cake, she’s untempted. A pity, as it would be very romantic to feed it to her and fulfill some weirdly specific adolescent fantasies.

Kim shifts her body to lean against the door and turns to look at me. “Tonight wasn’t so bad, right?”

I do the same on my side. “No, it was mostly fine,” I answer.

“I totally got what you meant about your brother, though,” she says, wincing as if in pain. “That folks joke. And the way he reacted to me bringing up Jenna. What a dick.”

For a moment I’m pissed and want to jump to my brother’s defense, but I can’t.

She’s only following the breadcrumbs I left for her, interpreting everything through the lens of my lies.

I chew my cake slowly, giving myself a moment to think.

This is my chance to come clean. I don’t even need to tell her the full scope of my fibbing.

I could just minimize everything I’d said, or tell her that Aiden and I have cleared everything up over the past few weeks.

But then her hand comes down on my thigh, and she looks at me so sweetly, sincere and sympathetic and lovely.

I think of myself at sixteen, as awkward as the cashier who just checked us out, in this very same position.

Sitting in a car next to Kim Cameron, wanting her but knowing she’d never want me back. I don’t want to be that kid again.

So I swallow my cake and nod. “I don’t really wanna talk about it,” I say, because the least I can do is not dig myself in deeper. She nods, so understanding I could die from shame. I have to change the subject.

“You know, Rachel kind of accosted me in the bathroom to ask about my intentions with you.”

Kim’s face is surprised, and also perhaps a bit pleased. “She did not! What did she say?”

“That you’re a perfect lesbian saint and she will personally have me banned from every coffee shop in Greenpoint if I break your heart.

” She laughs. Delighted at the sound, I shovel more cake into my mouth.

I decide to be a little brave. “I can’t believe you remembered driving me home that time.

And here we are again, sitting in your car.

It’s bringing up a lot for me. All we need is Ani DiFranco. ”

“How could I forget? You looked so lonely sitting outside all by yourself.”

“I was pretty lonely, yeah. I think it was partially self-imposed, teen angst and all. But I don’t think I let anyone in, because if I did they might…you know, actually see me.”

“Would that be so bad? Being seen?”

“Back then? Definitely.” I shiver. It’s because of the AC, I tell myself.

“Now…I’d like to think I let people in a little bit more.

The people who count, at least. But I still feel so, I don’t know, passive all the time.

Like my life isn’t something I’m participating in, but something that’s just happening to me. ”

“I think that’s bullshit.”

I choke on a piece of cake and Kim magnanimously offers a sip of water from a reusable bottle in the cup holder. “Care to elaborate on that?” I ask once I’ve recovered.

“I won’t presume to know that much about you, but I don’t think a passive person would be living the life you’re living.

You fucking transitioned in a world where that’s still a pretty radical thing to do.

The world told you that you were one thing, but you said fuck that, you’re wrong . That’s fucking badass.”

“I know all that intellectually, I guess, but I can’t always feel it.

When I came out, it mostly felt like…a lie I just couldn’t keep telling anymore.

That’s what no one here seems to get. At first, everyone saw me as this impulsive weirdo who woke up one day and decided poof, I’m a woman!

And I couldn’t judge them too harshly for that, because I have always been impulsive. ”

There’s nothing Kim hates more than a liar, Rachel whispers in my head. But I’m not lying. I’m just…curating the truth.

“That doesn’t give them a pass to be shitty. You don’t have to apologize or make excuses for them. It sucks that they think that.”

And I let myself do the thing I shouldn’t do, in fact just promised myself I wouldn’t do: I dredge up all the old hurt and paranoia of four years ago, the fears my family disproved almost immediately after I came out.

“It sucks to know that they think this is something I’m going to change my mind about in a few years. ”

“Damn,” Kim says, sucking a breath in through her teeth. “That’s brutal.”

“One of the most—and believe me I’d love to not use this word— affirming moments when I first started transitioning was telling my grandparents.

I was terrified, so sure that they wouldn’t get it, that they’d just have no way to even conceptualize what I was talking about.

But when I told them, my grandma said, ‘When you were little, you used to always tell us you were a girl.’?”

The story is spilling out of me in a way I can’t control.

“And that was great, because they got it, and they’ve been supportive even if they get a pronoun wrong or slip with my name now and then.

But like, if I told them”—and I hate so deeply that I can feel my throat getting tight, my eyes burning—“why didn’t they just listen ?

I know, I know, it was a different time and there wasn’t the fucking visibility and resources there are now, but it’s what makes me furious because you’re right, Kim.

” I lift my head up to look into her eyes, which are wide and unblinking.

“Deciding to transition was one of the first times in my life I took real agency, where I made a big scary decision about who I was and how I was going to show up in the world, and I worry sometimes that they think twenty years from now we’ll be sitting around Aiden’s perfect house while his perfect children and their golden retriever run around the backyard, laughing about that time I decided to be a girl for a couple years. ”

For a moment there’s just the sounds of the AC blasting, the faint hum of the radio playing Fleetwood Mac.

I did it again, took something real but made it uglier than it was, made myself the victim, all so Kim would look at me with that same frank, open expression on her face, no pity or sympathy or unease at my extreme overshare.

Just letting me vent, letting me dig myself into a deeper hole of lies and drag her down with me, all so I can prove something to my sad little inner child. I have to salvage this, somehow.

“I’m sorry, that was a lot. Too much.”

“It wasn’t,” Kim says. “And I can’t say that I get all of it, because I’m not you, but I think I get a little bit of it.” There’s a moment where she seems to teeter on the edge of a decision, searching my face for…something. It looks like she finds it. “Do you remember Emily Sullivan?”

“Oh god,” I groan. “I haven’t thought about her in years.

” Emily Sullivan was every high school archetype come to life: perfect, pretty, popular, and mean enough to make you cry if you crossed her.

She’d been in Kim’s year and so far away from my subterranean social status that we’d never even interacted, but every school had an Emily, someone who shone with their own self-importance, making everyone around them that much duller in comparison.

“We…dated isn’t even really the right word for it. We hooked up all through senior year. I was totally, ass over tits in love with her. And the crazy thing is, I think she loved me too. At least a little bit.”

I’m shocked, but not that much. I distinctly remember hearing at some point that Emily had come out after college.

“She wouldn’t tell anyone about us,” Kim continues, “especially her parents. It wasn’t because of the gay stuff, or at least not just because of it.

She said her parents might be able to handle her having a girlfriend. But not a Black girlfriend.”

“Fuck.”

Kim shakes her head with a haunted look in her eyes. “I haven’t always been as self-possessed as I appear.”

I snort. “That can’t possibly be true. I bet you came out of the womb cool, calm, collected and flirted with the doctor.”

“Something like that, yeah.” She’s smiling again, so there’s that.

“I let Emily keep me her dirty little secret for far too long because at that point I…maybe I didn’t agree with her, but I loved her enough to hurt myself for her.

So yeah, I know a little bit about not fitting into someone’s idea of what their life should look like.

I know what it’s like to watch someone say one thing and do another, and how much that hurts. ”

I am a monster. I am the worst person who ever lived. Not only because I’m another girl who has used Kim, but because I’m not going to stop.

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” I say, grasping her hand where it’s still resting on my thigh. “Thank you for sharing that and…for everything.”

We gaze at each other for what feels like an eternity, but is only long enough for the Fleetwood Mac song to end, giving way to Kate Bush.

“…you had a temper like my jealousy, too hot, too greedy…”

“I’m really glad to be here with you,” Kim says.

She shouldn’t be. I know that now more than ever. But I’ll take it.