Page 20 of Every Step She Takes

Mal

“I’ll do it!”

Sadie bounces up next to me in a flurry of sunburned limbs.

She must’ve jogged to catch up, because her face is beet-red, she’s sweating even more than usual, which is saying something.

Her chest heaves up and down as she gulps in desperate breaths, and holy hells .

That’s all it takes for my brain to replay the pornographic way she ate nata at morning tea.

The way her eyes blew wide with wonder and pleasure, the way she savored each bite on her tongue, the way she gasped and moaned, completely unselfconscious and unapologetic, maybe for the first time all trip.

Maybe for the first time in her whole life.

I should’ve known she’d react that way to the world’s greatest pastry.

When Sadie thinks no one is watching, she stares at the scenery with unbridled joy.

She smiles at the blue sky every morning, and she’s taken at least two hundred pictures of the beach that’s always to our left.

Seeing the coastline through her eyes makes it feel new to me too.

It makes me feel like I did as a kid, growing up near these shores, in awe of everything.

I squeeze my eyes shut for the length of one deep breath, then look back at Sadie without picturing her mouth dotted with custard. “You’ll do what?”

“The queer—” She cuts off as she pinches her side and pants. “The queer adolescence thing. I’ll do it. I-I want you to help me make up for lost time.”

“It’s not about making up for lost time.” I hand her my water bottle, and she stops walking to take a long drink. Water sloshes out the side of the bottle’s wide mouth and drips down her chin. “It’s about reliving the coming-of-age experiences our heteronormative society denied you.”

“Sure. That.” She wipes the water off her chin with the back of her hand, and I don’t let myself stare at her wet mouth.

It’s been a long, quiet morning walking on boardwalks and sand, sidewalk and dirt paths, and now the Camino has taken us through a bamboo forest, the midday sun filtering through the trees in golden slats.

It’s been a day of creeping silence: the silence of dead dads and homelands and roots that have been cut and lost. The silence of spinning thoughts about intentions and inheritances; of memories I wish I could forget.

In all that silence, I forgot about the particulars of my conversation with Sadie last night. I forgot about coming out of the bathroom to find her crying on the floor of our hotel room, and I forgot how desperate I felt to make her feel better.

Twenty-four hours. I couldn’t even make it twenty-four hours without comforting Sadie.

“I want those queer experiences,” Sadie says to me. It’s not a whisper, not an apology. There’s no hesitation in her voice. Even though Vera is only a few meters behind us, pausing to take photos of the way the light bends around the trees, Sadie speaks at her normal volume.

Which, granted, is still fairly quiet.

“Okay…” I stretch out the word so it’s three syllables, and I’m not sure if I’m acknowledging her statement or agreeing to be her fairy god-dyke for real.

“Great!” Sadie claps her hands together the way Inez always does, as if her excitement is too big for her body to contain. And I guess I’ve agreed to do it, then. “Where do we start? Should I kiss a stranger at a bar tonight? Or maybe you should teach me how to flirt with a woman first?”

Sadie’s face is all freckles and sweat and youthful exuberance. To Sadie, the prospect of flirting with a woman is as exhilarating and new to her as pasteis de nata.

Everything is new to her, and I’ve always chased newness.

“We start,” I tell her, “with your hair.”

“What’s wrong with my hair?”

Sadie stares at me from across the lunch table, twirling a strand of her thick auburn hair.

“There’s nothing wrong with your hair. You have great hair. That’s the problem.”

“It’s a problem that I have great hair…?”

“Yes. We need to fuck up your hair.” I lower my voice and lean closer, even though the rest of the group is loudly counting in unison as Stefano does push-ups on the floor of the restaurant.

Ari bet he couldn’t do one hundred push-ups before our food arrived.

He’s currently on 342, and no one is paying any attention to Sadie and me.

“Fucking up your hair is a queer rite of passage.”

“Three hundred forty-five!” everyone shouts.

Sadie is double-fisting her curls. “You’re saying that in order to be queer, I need to have bad hair…?”

“No, no.” I take a gulp of my ice water and search for a better way to describe this.

349. “Growing up, I always had long, naturally brown hair, because my father never let me cut or color it. I wasn’t allowed to choose what I looked like, because my father saw me as an extension of his own image.

” I reach for my water again. That’s a little more than I meant to share, and I take a drink to gather myself.

“So, after I kissed my boarding school roommate for the first time, I shaved my head without telling him.”

Sadie’s eyes are the size of the sexually suggestive oyster on her hat.

I hold up both hands. “I’m not saying you have to shave your head! I’m saying that for a lot of people, coming out is about seizing autonomy over your own body.”

“Three hundred sixty!” The chorus rings out.

“Especially for those of us who were socialized as women.” I dodge an excited air punch from Ro of all people.

“Our lives revolve around other people telling us what to do with our bodies from a young age. To me, queerness is about existing outside those gender norms. It’s saying fuck you to the rules that dictate how we look and how we act. It’s true freedom.”

365 .

I watch the mental gears turn inside Sadie’s head. She has a tell when she’s grappling with something that challenges her view of herself: she bites her upper lip with her bottom teeth, like a nervous, inverted beaver.

“Three hundred sixty-nine!” The group chants just as the server comes through the back curtain carrying a heavy tray on each forearm.

Stefano springs up, fresh-faced and not remotely perspiring, and effortlessly relieves the server of one tray with a flirtatious wink.

Ari curses and slams a twenty onto the table.

Our lunch spot for the day is a family-owned diner that closed for a few hours so we could take over the cramped space.

Linoleum flooring and Formica tabletops and red plastic chairs—it reminds me of the kind of place I would sneak away to as a teenager so I could eat a plate of french fries and pretend to be a normal kid for a while.

Today I ordered a Francesinha, for nostalgic reasons. Sadie ordered the same, for anxiety reasons, and I let her, because no one has ever looked sexy while eating a Francesinha.

“I’m not sure what alarms me more,” she says when Stefano places the sandwich in front of her. “The fact that it’s so wet, or the tiny green olive sticking out of the swamp like an eyeball.”

“Don’t insult the olive. It brings the whole dish together.”

Sadie pokes at her very wet sandwich with her fork before finally loading up a bite that’s mostly cheese, soggy bread, and tomato sauce. “It’s not… totally revolting,” she says after she forces herself to swallow.

“Rave review.”

To me, the sandwich tastes like summer afternoons reading the latest Meg Cabot in a corner booth.

It tastes like a sidewalk café in Porto, like nights when my father was out of town on business and his house manager, Luzia, would feed me a home-cooked meal.

It tastes like comfort and five different meats.

“This whole fucking up your hair thing…” Sadie points at me with her fork. “Is that why you have a mullet?”

“Are you implying that my mullet is fucked-up?”

“It’s blue.”

“My mullet is cool . Like Joan Jett. Or Kristen Stewart playing Joan Jett.”

“Or like my high school geometry teacher,” Sadie adds.

“Oh, was your geometry teacher a smoking-hot dyke?”

She snorts. “Definitely not.” But then she starts chewing on her top lip again as she reconsiders the sexuality of her former teacher, her whole face tightening like a fist.

“Sadie.”

She’s so lost in thought, it takes her a minute before her eyes come back into focus on my face. “Hmm?”

“I need you to admit that my mullet is sexy.”

Her pinched eyebrows smooth out, then crumble. She lets out a small laugh. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“Yeah, we’ll see.”

Sadie’s face flushes the color of her Francesinha, and a heat spreads across the back of my neck, too.

“Ari, I need you to settle something for me.” I turn toward the pretty Portland barista and find she’s already looking at me with her smoky eyes. “I’m explaining to Sadie that fucking up your hair is a queer rite of passage.”

“Oh, totally.” Ari nods solemnly. “I got frosted tips in eighth grade.”

“ Merde ,” Stefano curses. He has conjured hand weights from somewhere and is doing bicep curls between bites of his halibut. “When I first thought I might be gay, I styled my hair like David Cassidy. I thought it was manly.”

Everyone at the table turns to stare at Stefano. “David Cassidy?” Rebecca repeats. “From The Partridge Family ?”

“Wait. How old are you ?” Ari asks.

Stefano clutches an imaginary string of pearls. “A lady never owns her age.”

“What are we talking about?” Ro asks as they come lumbering back from the bathroom.

“Fucking up our hair in our queer youth,” Ari answers.

“I had the Weird Al,” Ro grunts. When Rebecca gasps, they shrug. “What? It was the eighties.”

“When I finally accepted that I’m aroace, I threw away my hair straightener, curling iron, and all my hair products,” Vera adds, gesturing to the natural wave of her curly bob. “I used to spend an hour on my hair every morning, because my mamá told me it was the only way I’d ever find a husband.”