Page 45 of Every Step She Takes
“Weloveit,” Ari croons.
Vera also nods emphatically. “We reallyreallylove it.”
Stefano rattles off a few words of rapid-fire Italian. I only understand about half of it, but from his tone, it sounds complimentary.
Sadie can’t stop reaching for what isn’t there. “It’s not too short?”
“If you keep searching for approval, you’re going to give me a complex,” I tell her as she ruffles her new bangs. “I think I did a damn good job.”
“You did. Of course you did,” Sadie rushes, “but I’ve just never… it’s soshort.”
It’s notthatshort, but it was easily eighteen inches of Sadie that we left on the bathroom floor, so it makes sense that she’s going to need time to adjust. I know she doesn’t regret it, because when Inez knocks on the door and everyone is distracted by letting her in, I catch Sadie stroking her new hair and smiling to herself. It’s not her awkward smile, or her apologetic smile. It’s the smile she gives the blue sky and the sunshine when no one else is watching.
“Who ordered the ham and Swiss?” Inez asks from the doorway, and Vera’s hand shoots up. After our heavy lunch and a long day in the sun, no one felt like going out to dinner, so Ro helped Inez collect sandwich orders, and now they’re helping her pass them out to their correct owners.
“Sardine sandwich, right here!” I hold up my hand, and Ro holds my sandwich like a football and launches it across the hotel room with a perfect spiral.
“Meu Deus!” Inez shouts once all the sandwiches are divvied up. She claps her hand to her mouth as she stares at Sadie. “Your hair! It looks amazing!”
Sadie’s cheeks explode in fiery splotches. I guess I’m not the only one who can make her blush like that.
She reaches up for nothing, and then lets her limp arm fall. “Uh, thank you, Inez. Mal did it.”
Inez’s eyes shift over to me on the floor, and I can already hear the lecture that will be coming my way tomorrow. “Enjoy your dinner,” Inez says, turning toward the door.
“Stay!” Vera calls out. “Stay! Stay! Ro, you too! Eat floor sandwiches with us!”
And that’s how we all end up sitting on the floor of the hostel room eating subpar sandwiches. Rebecca joins after her shower, hobbling into the room with a towel wrapped around her hair. “My blisters have blisters,” she cries out, and Sadie passes her a pillow to sit on.
Everyone is either punch-drunk from the exhaustion of the last three days, ordrunk-drunk from the extra bottles of wine that somehow materialize. Stefano tells a story about getting travelers’ diarrhea on the twenty-fifth mile of an Ironman race in Ecuador, including a very vivid and hilarious reenactment of what took place behind an unsuspecting tienda.
Inez tells stories about the best and the absolute worst tour groups she’s taken on the Camino. Then Rebecca has everyone howling as she describes the social politics of her HOA, and Ari tells stories about working as a barista in Portland, which are honestly more horrifying than Stefano’s desecration of that Ecuadorian tienda.
And it’s a nice night. Inez goes to bed first, and then Ro offers Rebecca an arm to help her up off the floor. It’s a surprisingly sweet gesture from such an unrelenting curmudgeon. They say goodnight, and one by one, the group winnows. When Ari saunters out after kissing me on the cheeks eight times as a goodbye, it’s just Sadie and me.
She’s quiet and withdrawn, the way she always seems to be after the whole group has been together. I putter around for a minute, cleaning up food wrappers and rogue bits of hair from the floor. When she’s still quiet after all that, I gently nudge her. “What are you thinking about, Freckles? Profoundly regretting the haircut?”
Her hand reaches for invisible hair, but she shakes her head. “No, no. I was… I was thinking about my geometry teacher, actually.”
I snap my fingers. “Shewasa smoking-hot dyke! Iknew it!”
Her lips crack into a smile, but then she’s chomping on her upper lip again. “I honestly don’t know…”
I sit down on the edge of my bed across from her and wait for her to say more. “Her name was Mrs. Daniels,” she continues after a long, heavy silence. “She had this black-and-gray, helmet-shaped mullet, and all the boys in our class used to make fun of her. It took me a while to understandwhythey made fun of her, because she was such a good teacher, perfectly nice, sometimes even funny.”
Sadie draws her legs up beneath her, staring at some fixed point on the wall. “Back in ninth grade, I didn’t know the stereotype. I-I didn’t know that having a mullet made you a lesbian, but I quickly learned that being a lesbian made you a joke.”
Her words land on my chest like a punch. I can see it so clearly: a fourteen-year-old Sadie, with that same innocent face and those same freckles, simply trying to find the area of a triangle. Maybe she wasn’t even questioning herself then. Maybe she didn’t look at Mrs. Daniels and see some part of herself mirrored back at her. But she was surrounded by ignorant teenagers who made it clear that being a lesbian was something to mock and ridicule, and there’s no way she didn’t internalize that.
Did Sadie always make herself small, or is it something she learned to do out of fear that if she took up space, people might truly notice her? And if they noticed her, maybe they’d realize she was a joke too.
“I’m not even sure if Mrs. Daniels was actually gay,” Sadie muses. “Everyone just assumed she was. We called herMrs.Did she have a wife?”
“Was gay marriage even legal in Washington state then?”
“Oh.” Sadie blinks at me. “No. I guess not.”
She pauses again, gnawing on her lip. “Do you think she knew she was the punch line of freshman boys’ jokes?” Sadie asks. “Do you think she cared?”
