Vanilla

Notes

Tessa and I were inseparable for the rest of that summer. We ate together, read together, swam together, talked about everything and anything under the sun. By the end of nine weeks she probably knew me better than I knew myself.

The other girls took notice, of course. And they only increased their use of my nickname because of it. "Queers! Look, it's the queeeeers!" They would yell it to us no matter how far away from us they were. And then they'd clutch at their stomachs and double over in laughter.

Luckily, Tessa was strong. While sometimes the name calling would bother even me, she never cared in the least. She would hug me when I cried, her face all the while retaining its stoic serenity.

On our last night together at camp, Tessa and I went to our secret wooden cabin. It had become our favorite hangout place since nobody ever bothered us there. The only place we could ever truly be alone.

When we got there, Tessa closed the door behind us and flipped the light switch up. The small, dirty lightbulb in the center of the ceiling sputtered to life. We sat for a while in silence, looking at the tiles between our pairs of sneakers.

When I finally spoke, my lower lip was quivering. "Tessa, how am I...how am I going to survive without you?" I whispered.

She shook her head. "Don't talk like that..." She gathered me into her arms and embraced me tightly.

"But this is our last year of camp, and you live three states away from me," I mumbled into her shoulder, moist with my tears.

Without a response to this, Tessa suddenly pulled away from me and reached into the drawer of the lone table in the cabin. She pulled out a pencil and a notecard. We had fully redecorated the cabin earlier that summer, and so it was stocked with all office-like materials.

She scribbled something onto the paper, folded it, and handed it to me.

It was her phone number, written neatly in the crease of the card.

"Call me every day, and next summer, maybe you can stay over at my house. My parents would love to have you there, and my brother would adore you." Tessa smiled her radiant smile. She knew how much I would love that due to my poor home situation.

I grinned back at her and nodded. "That would be perfect."

There was a pause. Our eyes were locked, as we listened to raindrops slowly begin to hit the tin roof of the cabin. Tink. Tink. And it was in this setting that Tessa did the thing I'd never forget--the thing I'd never expected her to do.

The thing that led to our demise.

She leaned over, and pressed her lips firmly against mine.

After about two seconds, when my brain fully processed what had happened, I pulled away from her. My eyes must have been as wide as the full moon outside.

I didn't mean for my expression to come off negatively. I was just genuinely surprised. The way Tessa had always spoken about her two ex-boyfriends...I thought she was the straightest person alive. I was just genuinely surprised.

But of course, she mistook the look for one of disgust. And for the first time, I actually saw tears in the girl's eyes.

She jumped off the chair she had been sitting in across from me and ran out through the door of the cabin, into the rain. I shot after her, but she was far faster than me. She always had been.

"Tessa!" I yelled. "Tessa, stop! Please! Wait!"

But she never turned back around. Her black curls bouncing, my best friend kept running, eventually disappearing into the darkness.