“My bi awakening.”
Heat swells in my chest, but I tamp it down and grab the remote. For the first time in my life, I am willingly searching for where to stream a movie musical. “Okay, but who is Rizzo in the movie?”
“One of the Pink Ladies.”
I blink at her. “O…kay?”
“The girls with the matching pink jackets? You have to know the jackets.”
My apology comes in the form of willingly paying $3.99 to rent this movie.
“I obsessed over those jackets as a kid,” Renee goes on, digging into her fajitas just as the opening credits begin. “Dad had a red bomber jacket that was kind of similar. It was enormous on me, but I’d wear it around the house. And then he got me a real Pink Ladies jacket for my birthday, just like theirs, but I cried, because I wanted a red one. Just like Dad’s.”
Grief rises in my throat, sharp and hot, but I gulp it down. “So you just stuck with red from then on, huh?”
Renee lifts a shoulder, nodding until she’s swallowed her first bite. “Red goes well with blue. It makes my eyes pop.” She opens her hand on the wordpop, making a firework with her fingers that bursts inside me, too, sparkling in my chest as Renee rambles on. Now that she’s talking about theater, she can’t stop. Her face glows as she reminisces on productions past and the hyperintense professors in her BFA program. I pause the movie—not because I don’t want to miss anything, but because I’d rather watch this: The undiluted excitement that shines like a spotlight behind Renee’s eyes. She stops only when our phones both buzz on the coffee table at once—a text from Chrissy about tomorrow’s bridal shower.
“I assume I’m driving you to that?”
Renee bats her eyelashes and rests her chin on the backs of her hands, framing her face in a look of sheer innocence. “Sorry to always be that friend,” she says.
There’s a kick in my stomach. Right. Because we’refriends.
I roll my eyes just to pull myself away from the adorable face she’s making. “I really don’t know how you live here without a car.”
“Here?” Renee points toward the floor. “We are talking about Chicago, Illinois, right? The city with arguably the best public transportation in the country?”
“Sounds like maybe you’d prefer to take the train.”
“Never mind.” Renee straightens. “I take it back. Chicago is a driving city. Thank God I have you, Alice.” Every word drips with sarcasm, but my body can’t take a joke. I swallow the hot pulse in my throat and hit play on a movie that I would detest under anyother circumstances, but it’s different with Renee. Everything is. She works up a sweat dancing in her seat, and when she lifts her hair up off her shoulders, I catch a flash of the sun tattoo between her shoulder blades.
“You never finished telling me about your tattoos,” I point out.
“I didn’t, did I?” This time, she’s the one to pause the movie, freezing Danny Zuko in the middle of “Greased Lightnin’.” She turns her wrist over, showing off the phases of the moon.
“This one.” Her finger lands on the waxing gibbous. “Is a reminder that if the moon is meant to change, so are we.”
“Beautiful.”
“And the sun.” She motions to her back, then pauses, scrunches her face up tight, and shuts her eyes so she doesn’t have to look at me when she says, “So I was in a production ofAnnie.”
My eyes go wide. All I can whisper is “No.”
“I saw the sun on this tattoo flash sheet and thought—”
“Please. I hate where this is going.”
“…Oh, the sun will come out tomorrow.”
“No,” I repeat. “Take it back.”
Renee shakes her head, and when her eyes open, they’re filled with not a small amount of glee. “I can’t take it back. It’s tattooed on my body forever.”
“I wish I’d never asked.”
“Too late.” A coy smile tugs her lips into a perfect open parenthesis. “At least now I don’t have to carry my most embarrassing secret alone.”
“Is that really your most embarrassing secret?” I challenge. “That you have anAnnietattoo?”
