Lesbian writing Snippet

“What happened to you? I’ve called like a hundred times,” Danielle said from the run-down doorstep of her home.

Danielle was a stocky goth with an unremarkable men’s haircut that was, right now, dyed the colors of cotton candy. Her eyelids were shadowed with a blackberry-dark shade that turned into a muted green as it cat-eyed over her mild crows feet. Today, like most days, she was wearing all black, except for a pair of colorful socks that peeked around the ankles of her ripped jeans.

“You look nice today,” I said instead of answering.

She pursed her lips in annoyance and a cute little dimple appeared on one side of her face, beneath the mole. Danielle pulled out her phone and flashed the screen at me. “Look at this,” she said. Her manicured nail clacked against the screen as she swiped through a one-sided text history.

“I lost phone privileges for the whole vacation,” I lied. It was easier than explaining that we had been locked out of our house and the phone I used to call her from belonged to my late father in law who would no longer be capable of paying his phone bill. I’d tell her eventually, just not now.

“Uh huh,” she said in a that’s-a-shitty-excuse kind of tone. “Clearly you know my address so why not come over?” She stepped onto the porch with me and shut her front door. I sensed she didn’t want her dad to hear her starting an argument with me. Was she expecting me to raise my voice at her?

“Camping trip,” I said. Then, to placate her, “Funeral, too.”

Her face softened as I figured it would. “Oh. I’m sorry,” she said. A pause. “Do you want a hug?” She raised her arms in that socially awkward way that I adored.

“Sure,” I said. It wasn’t like I was going to refuse her; it wasn’t like I was going to admit that I probably needed one more than she knew.

I stepped toward Danielle and her arms closed around me. She was warm and comfortable. My eyes closed. I craned my neck down to press my face into her shoulder. It was like being in a cocoon, a chrysalis, like what I was named after. Choir’ee’sa. 

Briefly, I wondered if I would emerge from her arms as a moth or butterfly.

As we parted, I looked down at myself—my jeans with the hand-sewn red X’s across the knees, the belt with a bite mark gouged into it, the ripped white T-shirt over a black tank—and wondered where the wings were. The only difference was that my eyes were a bit misty with emotions that I hadn’t meant to let surface.

“Aw, babe,” Danielle said, cupping my face and consequently breaking the tear housed at my canthus so it could roll down my cheekbone. She wiped it away with her thumb. “Come inside. We can talk about it if you want, or if you’d prefer, we can find something to distract you.”

“Second option’s good,” I mumbled, breaking eye contact to stare into the blurry peripheral image of her palm. Her wrist was adorned with a tiger’s eye bracelet and a cheap beaded string with the letters of Danielle’s and her three sibling’s initials. 

She brushed some gold hair out of my make-up crusted face and tucked it behind my ear. We went inside.

I stayed there for a while. The both of us laid across her bed with our heads tucked together. My legs stretched over the far side of the mattress. 

We didn’t do much besides talk circles around what exactly had happened to me over the time we’d been apart. I had never been particularly open with her about my personal life so she didn’t pry. That was one of the nice things about her. Danielle left my family life alone. She told me that as long as I didn’t show up with bruises, she’d wait until I brought things up myself. And I never did.

“Sometimes I feel like you don’t have hobbies,” Danielle said after I admitted I hadn’t done anything interesting or fun since school ended. “Like, I can’t figure out what you do with all your time.”

“It just runs away, I guess.”

Annie said something similar. That I lack hobbies because my time is filled with overthinking my scatterbrained goals.

“Do you play an instrument? You can join my band.”

“I don’t but I can learn,” I said.

She sat up on her elbows and scrutinized me. “You seem like a drummer. We need a drummer.”

“I get to hit things with sticks and not get in trouble for it? Sounds good to me.”

“Is that what got you grounded?” she joked.

“Possibly,” I said, my lips sealing over a grin. “Though, hypothetically, it would’ve been a larger object than a drumstick.”

“Okay, okay,” she laughed. “Hypothetically, sure…”

I didn’t really have a good reason to continue the ‘grounded’ story. Maybe it was just an excuse to be more interesting than I really was.

I really don’t have hobbies, huh?