Always on Your Side (NaNoWriMo 2019)

15.

I keep mentioning Marina, but I haven't really talked about her much. I've barely thought about her, really. I feel bad about that. I'm so caught up in my family tragedy it seems everything else - and everyone else - is just floating on the periphery.

I met Marina the year before last. We were just friends at first, of course. Not even close friends. But I don't usually make close friends.

We ended up in acting class together, a second-choice elective for both of us. I'd wanted basketball skills or a similarly easy A; Marina had wanted cartooning or fashion. Instead, we both got beginner's acting, which was full of either aspiring theater kids or disgruntled slackers that didn't want to be there at all. We were alike in the sense that both of us were somewhere in the middle, not passionate about theater but thinking it sounded sort of fun. The first week of class had been spent memorizing names - our teacher literally had us sit in a circle all week and recite everyone's names in order until everyone could name anyone. This was initially awkward and tedious but it, combined with the playful nature of the acting exercises we started out with, eventually resulted in a class full of diverse personalities who all knew each other surprisingly well. Marina and I did a few partner exercises together and got along well.

The second semester, we got paired together for a project – memorizing and performing a two-character scene - and that's when we started to click. We exchanged numbers, added each other on Facebook, and met up a few times to practice our scene. I sat with her and her friends at lunch a few times. We still weren't close – I didn't even introduce her or her friends to Brendon, who was a senior that year – but we clicked.

That summer, Brendon went away to college. It was my first summer without him. And I don't want to attribute everything about about everything in my life, including Marina, to Brendon – but I can't help but feel it was related. With him gone, I didn't have someone I could just drag with me anytime I wanted to go somewhere with company. I started hanging out with school-friends more than I usually did outside of school. Marina was one of them.

I didn't really think of her romantically back then. Not that I didn't like her – I was just so far in the closet that I never expected anything from my friends. She was beautiful, but that was just one more reason not to expect anything from her – even if she was gay, why would she go after someone like me? She was short but curvy, with big round eyes, long eyelashes, and soft cheeks. She had long, rich brown hair and serious styling talent. She wore cute outfits inspired by anime – cat stockings and doughnut buns. She always had perfectly-drawn eyebrows, and could contour on special occasions. Compared to her, with my stout build, frizzy hair, and glasses, I felt totally plain. She was like a gorgeous porcelain doll, and I was like a frumpy plastic doll from the dollar store on display next to her.

Marina later told me that she'd had a crush on me all along. That every time we met up she made sure to look extra cute, in case I'd meant it as kind of a date thing. She later mentioned things that happened in our acting class that she had taken as potential signs of a budding romance - like, the improv exercise in which we portrayed a couple, or the part in the scene we did together when we had to hold hands. I hadn't thought anything of them until she mentioned it.

We didn't come out to each other until the year after that. She had always been open about supporting gay rights; she had rainbow pins on her backpack, was in the Gay-Straight Alliance, and went to the Pride Parade. She thought that would be a dead giveaway, but I never thought anything of it. I just thought she was passionate about equality. Or if she wasn't straight, she might be bi or asexual or somewhere else on the spectrum. I knew lots of bi and ace girls, so I wouldn't have been too surprised. I wouldn't have guessed she was into girls exclusively.

As far as I went, Marina said she kind of suspected I might be gay because I was tomboyish and conspicuously averse to the topic of attractive boys, but since I'd never told her my opinion on gay rights when she talked about it, she wasn't sure.