You love it
Hanna Banana
Lilith
Good
Papaya Maya
PETTY!
Lilith
Okay I am boarding, ttyl xox
Papaya Maya
Nice, we are in about ten minutes, smooth travels babe
Hanna Banana
Hanna smiled to herself as she reread the text thread from her seat (not next to Maya), on their way back to Boston. The trip had gone better than she had expected, and she hummed in satisfaction: she had two girlfriends. If she wasn’t in public and in close proximity to a stranger, she might actually squeal.
Perhaps the most freeing aspect to Hanna was that she had acted like an ass, or like abrat,as Lily and Maya described her, and that had beenok.There was a new level of delicious pleasure in confirmation that she wasallowedto be everything, pleasant and unpleasant, with her girls. She knew that a small tantrum when they went out wasn’t ahugedeal to some, but it was to Hanna. Sheneverbehaved that way. She had fully given into her emotions, ready for her two girls to say she wastoo much,to have it all blow up in her face and break whatever they had been building. But it hadn’t.
They werehers, and they liked it.
She had no idea what that meant, and she had no idea how she was going to tell her parents, but she also had the rest of the school year to figure things out, and she wouldn’t be alone in doing so. Maya and Lily would be there for her.
Hanna was also certain that her parents were going to be way more upset at her deferring medical school and being in a nontraditional relationship than the fact that she was bisexual. Her mother wouldn’t understand how to explain either to her church group. Hanna cringed inwardly for her mother’s sake; she didn’t want to hurt or disappoint her. No matter the odd pressure Hanna felt, she knew her parents loved her and had given her everything. That was part of the problem: they’d given her everything and she couldn’t shake the feeling ofowingthem, of wanting to beperfectfor them.
So they could never regret her.
The fact that Maya and Lily had seen her act out and still felt that shefitwith them was everything. It was perhaps, Hanna thought, the little push she needed to understand that to love is to love the whole, not just the part. Emboldened, Hanna turned on some music and popped in her headphones.
As the plane lurched forward, she closed her eyes, smiling, knowing that through all the clouds, the sky above her was blue.
PART IV
AN ENDLESS SUMMER
31
MAYA
Maya opened her eyes in a still-unfamiliar bedroom but felt happy her mother had finally found a house. She had barely spent any time in the room and wondered briefly when it would start to feel like hers, if ever. And now she was back to packing. She turned in her warm bed, unruly curls streaming down her back and over the pillow, to look at the boxes she’d barely unpacked in the first place.
Back in Maplewood and heading to Providence, RI. Maya shook her head at her inability to get out of New England. It had been Rhode Island or New Jersey, but Hanna had gotten a job in Providence, and Lily apparently could go anywhere—perks of being a rich kid—so thems the breaks.
“Only you would begrudgingly give up a spot atPrincetonfor one atBrown,”Lily had said when they’d video called to discuss how to finally all be in the same zip code. Princeton did have the better program, Columbia was out of the question for her due to recent events, and besides, Brown had a kickass MFA program if she got deep into her studies and decided to forgo her funded degree and roll the dice on being a writer.
“It just would be nice to live somewhere and not be one of the few Black women,” Maya said. Sure, she was biracial, but she had grown up being seen, and seeing herself, as a Black woman. Plenty of African-Americans were in fact, mixed—whether consensually or otherwise—with something, if their families were old enough. That was part of being Black in America, as far as Maya and her dad had been concerned. Hell, according to his DNA, her father was something like 20% Norwegian. “I mean Providence, Rhode Island in general is pretty…”
“Brown is diverse—” Lily said.
“White,” Hanna interrupted. “It’s white. You may not notice it everywhere Lily, but your girlfriends definitely stand out. Let’s not forget senior year of high school when people avoided me because of Covid—even though I’m adopted? And from the US?”
“And that’s ignorant, and plain racist as hell?” Maya interjected.
