I’d rather have the Charlie thoughts. I’d always rather have Charlie. Best friends forever, after all.
Owen used to say Charlie and I were always going to end up as more than friends. He’d been saying it for close to three years, even before I’d really claimed the word bisexual. Charlie had known she liked girls since she was twelve, so that was no secret. And I knew I did as well, but I liked boys, too, and it took me a while to figure out I could like both in different ways and for different reasons and that was actually a thing.
The year I met Charlie, I was nowhere near ready to own that. I’d just had the worst summer of my life, eight weeks stuck in a barely air-conditioned classroom repeating prealgebra because I failed the class the last semester of eighth grade.
Only I didn’t fail the class. My teacher, Mr. Knoll, failed me.
Regardless, I was in summer school, my parents completely shocked and disappointed that I had earned an F. Consequently, during the hours I wasn’t suffering through material I already knew, I was grounded. I would close myself in my bedroom, mulling over that rainy day in Mr. Knoll’s classroom at Butler Middle School, reliving the scene over and over. How quiet the room was. The smell of the dry-erase markers and teenage sweat. The summer weeks passed slowly, a heart-shrinking routine. My parents assumed I was just being petulant. Owen knew better. Nearly every day, he tried coaxing me onto the roof, promising stories, but nothing really helped change my mood.
Everything I knew seemed to change after that last day of eighth grade. I changed. Mr. Knoll, looking at me with that smirk on his face, stripped me of my choices, my control, the safety of school and teachers and my own body.
By the time I started ninth grade at Pebblebrook, the mirror always reflected limp hair, purple crescents under my eyes, a blank stare and a flat-lined mouth.
On the first day of school, I met Charlie in American Lit. She sat behind me, told me her name and how much she liked my hair. Asked if she could braid it. I’ll never forget how shocked I was by her question, almost scandalized. I turned in my seat, my eyes searching hers, and she just grinned. She seemed so sure of herself. Still, there was a weariness to her smile and I clung to it, pulled it into my own emotional exhaustion.
Charlie was wearing a plaid shirt with a lace-trimmed tank top peeking out from the bottom and skinny jeans. Her legs were splayed wide under the desk. “Knock yourself out,” I’d said, and my permission shocked me too. I hadn’t let anyone touch me all summer. My mom would squeeze my arm or try to hug me good night and I’d stiffen, all my senses instantly on alert. I knew it hurt her, but I couldn’t tell her why. Not even Owen’s playful shoulder bumps when we passed in the hall were allowed. I’d arc away from everyone. My dad didn’t even try, but the sad look on his face every time I shrank away from him was clear.
But when Charlie started lacing her fingers through my hair, I instantly relaxed. Breathed easier. I still don’t really understand why. Later, Charlie and I laughed over our first meeting, joking about what a creeper she was.
“I like hair, okay?” she’d said, twisting a lock of mine around her finger. “Yours in particular.”
“So you have a hair fetish. That’s what you’re saying, right?”
She’d laughed and tugged the lock gently, but something serious spilled into her eyes.
Almost a year later, when our friendship had blossomed into something neither of us could live without, lying together in my bed, limbs entangled and still under the guise of just friends, she’d confessed that she hated her own long hair.
“I don’t know what it is about it,” she’d whispered in the dark of my bedroom. We spent at least one weekend night together at one of our houses, binging on pizza and watching eighties movies. “When I look in the mirror, it just doesn’t look like me.”
“I think you look beautiful.”
She’d smiled, but it was a sad sort of smile.
“If you don’t like it,” I said, “you should cut it.”
“I don’t know if my mom would let me. I want it really short.”
“Have you asked her?”
She pressed her lips flat and shook her head softly, looking away from me.
“I’ll cut it for you,” I said. I just wanted her to smile again.
She’d laughed. “Really?”
“Sure—?how hard can it be?”
She smiled, her foot brushing up against my calf. A week later, I totally butchered her hair.
Slowly, I slipped into my own skin again. Slowly, the memory of Mr. Knoll faded to a dull buzz in the back of my head. Slowly, I started to need more. Do more. Fight more. I’d spent months feeling small and inconsequential. I won’t say that Charlie was completely responsible for the change, but she definitely helped. She made me feel safe, like it was okay to be whoever or whatever I needed to be. Charlie dealt with so much inside her head, hid so much from her parents, but she never hid herself from me. She let me see just how hard life hit her, just how confusing it was sometimes for her. All of the assholes in our school who’d bump into her in the halls, wondering aloud and obnoxiously if she was a girl or a guy. Every time her mom wanted to take her dress shopping. Every time her dad pulled her into his arms and whispered how thankful he was for his beautiful daughter. She wore it all with a lifted chin and steely eyes, with a grace I envied. I still kept so much from her at that time, but she made me feel like, someday, I wouldn’t anymore—?she made me feel so many somedays.
Empower was my idea, but Charlie and I really started it together. A place to talk about the shit that girls and queer kids deal with every day. A medium to write about it. We got school approval and convinced our chorus teacher, Ms. Rodriguez, to be our faculty advisor, and for the first time in months I felt as if I was holding the reins on my own life. Steering it the way I wanted it to go. There was no topic I’d shy away from, and I quickly became known as Queen Bitch at school, which just fueled every flame I had in me. I devoted an entire article to why I found the term delightfully empowering, and the piece ended up being a pretty hilarious and scathing commentary, one of my favorites I’ve ever written. I remember typing it up furiously on my laptop in Charlie’s room. She sat on her bed, ankles crossed lazily as she attempted to knit a Ravenclaw beanie hat out of blue and gray yarn, which I knew was for me because she was a Gryffindor through and through. Every now and then the clack of her needles would still and our gazes would snag. Her proud grin was like kindling for my fingers.
Near the end of junior year, we had just put the finishing touches on a kick-ass issue tackling the double standard when it comes to sex: guys were sex-crazed animals; girls just did it for an emotional connection. We interviewed a ton of students—?all genders, all orientations, different races and ethnicities. Some owned being virgins; some talked proudly about one-night hookups; some discussed how much the idea of sex stressed them out; some confessed a total lack of interest in sex. It was the best issue all year and I knew people would talk about it for months. Principal Carr got sort of pissed when he read the draft for approval and almost didn’t let us put the issue out, but Ms. Rodriguez calmed him down. I don’t know what she said to him, but I felt almost high that day in her choir room as I hit print.
“This is really amazing,” Charlie had said as she read over the articles on the computer. We’d done a chat piece together, where she and I discussed her liking girls and me being bi and our general thoughts about sex. I wanted to add in some stuff about Charlie’s gender identity, but she hadn’t wanted to get into it publicly. Unless she brought it up, we rarely talked about it, even though I knew it was something she dealt with every day.
“I think so too,” I’d said. “Thanks for your help.” I beamed at her, adrenaline flooding my veins, the paper in my hands still warm from the printer. She peered at me over the laptop, her hair almost impossibly tall.
