Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

It’s winter. I’m laying on my best friend’s bed, in her house. We’re snuggled close together, watching Skins on her laptop. (I am still, to her, a girl. A woman. I have not yet decided to be anything but, anywhere but online.) We watch Maxxie’s fumbles through a world of straight people, trying to define what queerness means to him, together. “You know,” she says, after the episode comes to a close. “I’m okay with gay people. I just don’t want them to be gay anywhere near me. They should respect that.” “Oh,” I say, even as I try to disentangle her position with better words, and my heart sinks in my chest a bit with a feeling I hadn’t even recognized until that point. Oh. It’s spring. My best friend has a new boyfriend. I haven’t seen her in weeks because she is so busy, she explains. Her boyfriend is living at her house. He was a Marine, like her dad, and her dad loves him. He is finally taking care of the bushes in their front lawn. He’s a bouncer at a club in the city. They’re very much in love. It’s summer. I’m miles away from home, in a ramshackle lake cabin my parents rented for a week to fish. It’s almost dinner time, and I’m huddled over my laptop, leeching wifi from the cabin next door. I get a Facebook message from my best friend, who I have not heard back from in months. “He let me log into his Facebook. He cheated on me. I saw the messages. Can I call you?” “I’m about to have dinner,” I write back, looking furtively at my expectant family. “We haven’t spoken in months. Why now?” “Can I please call you? I need to talk to someone. You’re my BEST FRIEND.” I eat my dinner instead. — It’s like that. NeoCab: 4.5/5 stars