Page 24 of Square Waves (Big Fan #2)

XXIII

That afternoon, I text Jo to make sure the meeting is still on with Ray, the girl he emailed me about.

I had set it for after Willa’s opening, thinking it could be another good distraction once my fake job was over.

Now that the day’s arrived, I wonder if it might be something more: a test case of how it feels to talk to someone in a controlled way.

He writes back to confirm, resending his organization’s San Francisco address, and I reread the background information about Ray he had shared with me over email. I don’t want her to have to recount it to me all in painful detail.

Ray came out as pansexual in the seventh grade, Jo wrote; she’s gone back and forth on whether or not she might be nonbinary, and right now, she’s leaning toward not.

That wasn’t such a big deal here as it might have been in other places.

But then, relationship stuff got messy: Last year, when she was a sophomore, Ray broke up with her boyfriend and started dating a girl almost immediately.

The ex-boyfriend responded by posting the nudes she had sent him while they were together.

The pictures were reported and removed pretty quickly.

But a screenshot is faster than apps’ trust and safety teams can ever be.

And SF kids are pretty chill about a lot of things, but they’re also kids, with all of the cruelty and carelessness that that entails.

Ray knows—we all know—that those pictures will never entirely go away.

As I drive across the Bay Bridge at 4p.m., I let the traffic distract me. I’m just going to have a conversation. My only job is to try to help in whatever way I can. Even if it feels too small to matter.

Jo has set us up in a small conference room; he gets us all water and then takes a seat.

“So...” He looks between us. “Ray, I told you about Cassidy, and Cassidy, you’ve heard Ray’s story.

Ray has been thinking that getting involved in activism might help her cope with some of what she’s gone through in the last year.

Cassidy, I thought you might have some advice for her. ”

It’s strange to try to match up what I know about Ray with the girl sitting across from me.

I can’t see any of what she’s been through on her face.

She hides herself, a bit like I suspect I hide myself.

She’s pale, with dark-brown hair pulled into a loose braid.

She’s pretty in the way all teenage girls are—fresh faced and too young and self-conscious to understand it.

“Sure, of course.” I give Ray an encouraging smile, and she offers me one back. Teenagers can be such wildcards, but she seems engaged. She’s willing to make eye contact, at least. “What were you thinking?”

Ray tells me about an essay she wants to write; we discuss the possible ways to frame it, if there are details she’d prefer to keep private.

I encourage her to have a plan in place if she decides to share it or try to get it published somewhere: therapy sessions, friends on standby.

“Speaking out can be important and healing,” I tell her.

“It can also feel like retraumatizing yourself. And it can be hard to tell how you’ll feel until it happens, so it’s important to be ready for whatever comes your way. ”

We’ve been talking for the better part of an hour, and I can feel Ray’s attention slipping. She’s been jiggling her foot; now she twists in her chair like she wants to get up but then doesn’t. “Can I actually—can I ask you a question? In private?”

I look to Jo for confirmation; he shrugs as if to say, Your call .

I try to practice what I’ve just been preaching to Ray. I check myself to see how I feel about making this encounter more intimate. If my skin crawls at the idea of her asking about something she doesn’t want to bring up in front of Jo—which, if I had to guess, would be about sex.

But I don’t feel trapped or numb. And I know that as soon as I get back to my parents’ house, I’m going to run myself a bath and get into it with a glass of wine. Go to sleep early. I’m tired, but I’m not worn out. I have a little more to give.

“Sure,” I say.

Jo shuts the door behind him, and Ray looks at me. “When you’ve, uh, I assume you’ve, like, been with people. Since.” Her cheeks are reddening with every word. “Is it—do you think about—if they’re thinking about—”

I nod to let her know that I’ve gotten the gist of the question. “Okay if we make this about you instead of me?” I ask her. Boundaries. I think of Tilly and Ms.Palazzo.

She nods.

“There will be people who will know this about you and think about it always. And there will be people who will know this about you and will barely think about it at all. This fear you’re having might not ever go away completely.

But with the right person...” I sit straighter.

“With the right person, you might stop worrying about it surprisingly quickly.”

“Part of me really wants to just, like, prove that I’m totally over it. But every time I try...”

“You might not be ready yet. That’s okay. It really is.”

Ray shrugs like, I guess , and I’m pretty sure that wasn’t an entirely satisfying answer. So I try another tactic. “Okay, here is one piece of wisdom I can share: There’s no such thing as being all the way over it.”

“Cool. So it never actually ends.”

“No. It doesn’t.” I wish I could tell her something different: that we can escape our past selves and their worst mistakes and experiences.

That you can outgrow trauma like an old coat.

“But what if that’s actually freeing? Because then you don’t have to try so hard to get over it?

It’s not a race to the finish. Instead, it changes.

And you change too. You have no idea how fucking much people can change. ”

The f-bomb coaxes a smile out of her. Predictable.

“Can I tell you something?” she asks. “I don’t mean this in a mean way. But, like, when Jo said I should talk to you, I honestly had no idea who you were.”

Ray delivers this line with perfect, puzzled sincerity. And I can’t help it: I throw my head back and laugh.

Of course she doesn’t know who I am. She’s sixteen.

She would have been ten years old when my scandal broke, too young to care about sex or presidential politics.

It’s a welcome reminder that to some people, I’ll always be notorious, but there are plenty of others who might never know my name unless they meet me.

That I can’t outrun my past. But my relationship to it—everyone’s relationship to it—will keep evolving, shifting, and recalibrating.

On my way home, I don’t listen to podcasts. I don’t try to improve my mind or run away from it. I turn on music and let myself feel every mile of the drive: the distance between who I have been and who I want to try to be.