Page 39 of Every Step She Takes
“You don’t have to date a woman to be queer,” she says, pulling her knees up to her chest on the floor beside me. Her elbow brushes mine, and why does even the smallest, accidental touchmake me feel like a stranger in my own body? “Attraction and action are different things.”
“But how can I even be sure if I’m gay if I’ve never kissed a woman?”
“Straight people are allowed to know they’re straight without kissing anyone,” she points out. “And I didn’t kiss a girl until I was seventeen, but I knew I was queer the first time I laid eyes on Julia Styles in10 Things I Hate About You.”
I pull my legs up to my chest, too, and hug them tight. “My Nan opened the store when I was six,” I hear myself say, “and I spent my whole childhood helping her run it. And then my mom, well… she sort of got… sick. After my dad left.”
“Sick?” Mal prompts without demanding I share.
I share anyway. “Depressed. My mom has always struggled with depression and anxiety, but that… that was a really hard time. I had to take care of the store and my sisterandmy mom, and I was only twelve. And at twenty-one, I inherited all of it.”
“Inherited?” Apparently, Mal’s strategy is just to repeat key words back to me until I elaborate on them. I’m not sure why it’s working.
“My Nan left everything to me. Before I even finished undergrad, I had a store to run and a house to maintain. I-I never had time to question anything. And at a certain point, I didn’twantto question anything, because I had this sneaking suspicion that if I did, my entire idea of myself would crumble all around me.”
“I see.” Mal nods slowly. “So you didn’t just miss out on a queer adolescence. You missed out onanyadolescence.”
“I guess…”
Mal clears her throat. “I can relate to that a bit, actually,” she says. I turn my head to study her face in profile, waiting for her to share more, but her gaze remains fixed forward, and she doesn’t offer any other personal details. She hasn’t sharedanythingpersonal about herself, now that I think about it. Malprojects this outgoing, carefree demeanor, but there’s something in the set of her jaw right now that suggests there’s more going on just beneath the surface. Almost as if the right sandpaper could scrape away her varnish and reveal the true grain pattern underneath.
I want to peel back the varnish, but not everyone wants to share their most intimate secrets within forty-eight hours of meeting someone, so I drop it. “What do you do when you missed your chance to be a messy teenager?” I ask rhetorically.
Mal releases her knees, and her long, bare legs spill out in front of us. “You give yourself permission to be a messy thirty-five-year-old.” She’s her happy-go-lucky self again. “You have your second adolescenceright now!”
I gawk at her. “Um…how?”
She jumps up excitedly. “You said you came on this trip to escape real life. So, for the next two weeks, what if you relive all those experiences you were denied as an adolescent?” She begins pacing our cramped room. “Like sneaking out and going to a party, and having a crush, and holding hands with a girl.”
“What girl?”
“We’ll find one,” she says dismissively as she continues her enthusiastic laps across the floor. “You can get bangs and pierce something you shouldn’t and kiss a stranger, if you want. You can do whatever you want. Mess up and make mistakes and justbe.”
I snort. “That sounds nice, but I’m not really…”
Not reallywhat? Why does what she’s describing feel as impossible as finishing this two-hundred-mile journey?
Mal stops excitedly twirling around the room and looks down at me. Whatever she sees on my face shatters her brief glee. “But first, we’ve got to take care of these feet,” she says soberly. “Did your sister tell you to pack Compeed?”
“Yes!” I try to get up to grab the bandages from atop my bed, but my calf muscles seize, and I end up right back on my ass.
“Where?” Mal asks. She doesn’t even laugh at the fact that I can no longer stand on my own accord. I point to the blue cosmetics bag on my twin bed. She grabs it. “After your shower, we’ll get your feet as dry as we can, slather them in Vaseline, and cover them with socks. Then in the morning, we’ll cover your blisters with Compeed. It should work like a second skin and will last for a few days. Come on.” She sticks out her hand. “I’ll help you get into the shower.”
“I can get in the shower by myself,” I mumble.
“Oh yeah?” Mal grins. “Show me how you can stand up on your own again?”
In the face of her mockery and my debilitating exhaustion, I stick out my tongue at her.
She laughs. “Let me help you up,” she insists, and I do.
“First, shower,” she says. “And then we can get to work fixing your pack.”
“What’s wrong with my pack?”
Everything, it turns out, is wrong with my pack.
After a long shower, Mal makes me spend an hour cutting my belongings in half. She holds up each item like the Marie Kondo of long-distance trekking, asking me if Ireallyneed it. But I need everything I packed.
