When the bell rings, they all walk me there, and Ms. Lundahl smiles at me when I step into the classroom. She was the first teacher to email my mom back and grant an extension. “Just have them turn in the rough draft by Thanksgiving break,” she’d said.
I head straight to my seat, keeping my eyes on my desk, scrolling on my phone. I hear Forrest when he comes in, chattering away to Stef and Alexander, and a second later they all go silent. They’ve seen me, and I feel them looking at me; I can even see them in my periphery, stopped just inside the doorway, but I don’t move. As more students push in behind them, they finally head for their desks.
As class starts, I peek at Forrest out of the corner of my eye, and slowly turn my head to look at him. He’s staring at his desk, hands fidgeting in his lap. I’ve never seen him this subdued before, and my heart aches. This is my fault. I need to talk to him, to explain somehow, and if he still likes me like Jayden thinks he does, maybe there’s a chance for us.
As the clock moves closer to lunchtime, my stomach feels worse, and the voices get louder. I guess they’re not really voices, because they’re inside me, but they’re still impossible to ignore: telling me to run, that this is a mistake, it’s goingto end terribly, here are all the ways it could end and destroy my whole life—
That’s not real. It’s not happening,I tell myself.
That’s not real. It’s not happening.
That’s not real. It’s not happening.
It’s hard to just let the thoughts be there without reacting to them. Tracy made it sound so easy.
“If you weren’t here, I’d be hiding in the bathroom right now,” I mutter to Anna as she walks me to the Queer Alliance meeting. She laughs, pulling me in with the arm she’s linked through mine, and squeezes my bicep with her other hand.
“You could totally do it on your own,” she says. “But I’m happy to help.”
We round the corner, into the short hall that leads to Mr. Harrison’s classroom, and manage to stay linked as we squish together through the doorway. Makayla is scooting chairs into place, and Jayden is standing with the back of a chair in his hands, talking to Alexander, both of them blushing furiously.
“They’re so cuuuuute,” I say in Anna’s ear, and she nods vigorously.
“Hey,” a voice says behind us, and we both turn. Forrest stands there, hands in his pocket, hoodie up. His eyes search my face, and he looks like he wants to ask me a question but doesn’t know where to start.
“Hi,” I say.
Before we can say anything else, more people appear behind him and we split apart, me and my friends on one side of the circle of chairs, Forrest and his friends across from us. It’s like the beginning of the year, only instead of annoying each other, we’re pining for each other.
At least, I am.
“Welcome, welcome, welcome,” Mr. Harrison says, appearing from his doorway. His eyes land on me. “Sidney, we are so glad you’re back.”
“We missed you,” Riley says, and I smile at them. They blow me a kiss with freshly bejeweled nails.
“So, I know we were going to have a reelection at the start of the new quarter,” Mr. Harrison says. “Now that both our presidents are here, we can proceed—”
“Mr. Harrison?” Nyx says quietly, and then again, louder. Mr. Harrison stops and holds out a hand for them to continue. They shrink a little, glancing around the room, but Mercury grabs their hand and they straighten up in their chair. “While Sidney was gone, the rest of us have been talking.”
I clasp my hands, squeezing until my knuckles turn white. I can guess what I’m about to hear, and I want to accept it with grace, not wild sobbing.
“I know that having two presidents is out of the norm for Queer Alliance,” they continue. “Well, I don’t know, because this is my first year, but some of the rest of you know, and, um, anyway, it’s been a different approach. At first, things were a little...” They look from me to Forrest. “Tense. Butsince then, both Forrest and Sidney have been really great leaders in different ways. So we’ve all talked in the past week or so outside of Queer Alliance, and we decided we don’t need to do a reelection. We want to keep them both.”
My mouth drops open. Nyx is smiling at me, and at Forrest, and the rest of the club is nodding in agreement.
I’m not losing the presidency.
And neither is Forrest.
At the beginning of the year, I thought the world had ended when we tied. I was so attached to being the president, theonlypresident. And now I don’t want to be. I can’t imagine being president without Forrest, and it’s strange to think about how much he annoyed me before. I know him now: his sense of humor, his family life, his fears, his ideas. He’s not out to ruin the Queer Alliance. He never was.
Anna squeezes my arm. I hadn’t noticed we were still linked, but the realization warms my heart. She’s right here, like she always has been, along with Jayden and Makayla.
In that moment, a golden bubble expands inside me, out of me, around all my friends and this room and all the people in it. I picture Shar on her job site hammering away, and Mom at her desk, and Dad in an AA meeting, and Brekky and Earl Grey curled together on the couch, and Forrest kissing me in the kitchen.
I want to kiss him again. I want to hold his hand, and make him laugh, and talk about everything and nothing, and watch that show he introduced me to, and—
My eyes are stinging, and I blink back the tears. I’m going to do it. I’m going to talk to him. I’m not going to let the fear of what might happen keep me from what I want right now.
