As Jackie wiggled out of her tight skirt and settled on the toilet, Charlotte examined the graffiti on the walls. Thousands of names and messages sprawled across the faded wallpaper in overlapping ink.
Dante Evans, 1999.
Cherise + Tanya 4ever
We’re here we’re queer go fuck yourself!!
On the back of the door, just beside the lower hinge, she found her signature. Charlotte Thorne, the cursive letters forming a thick green vine. A rose bloomed at the tail of the e of “Thorne,” its red petals faded with time.
A mason jar of markers still sat next to the sink. She seized a red pen and squatted on the floor to touch up the color.
Jackie flushed. “How you doing, Char?” she asked as she washed her hands.
“Wonderful.” Charlotte sucked her bottom lip between her teeth as she doodled. The red wasn’t the same shade as the original. She must have used a different brand way back when. This marker would have to do.
When did she draw this? End of sophomore year, probably. It took Charlotte a while to feel like she had the right to make her mark on the house. After she met Jackie, before she met Ben. That radiant window of time when she felt like she belonged somewhere at last.
“It’s not too rowdy for you here?”
Charlotte shook her head. The atmosphere at Acronym never bothered her. Her brain wrote it off as an exception to her usual noise and crowd sensitivity. If anything, she wanted to blend into all this bright chaos.
Jackie peered over her shoulder at the door. “That’s still there? Jeez, that’s incredible.”
“The whole door is intact.” Charlotte popped back up on her feet. “Is yours?”
Her best friend pointed to the lip of plaster above the shower. Jackie’s signature was less artistic, just a jumble of letters following a dramatic, swooping J. She left her mark the night she came out to her parents over the phone. Jackie said the supportive, anticlimactic conversation still deserved a symbolic memorial—after all, her parents’ kind reaction didn’t discount the terror she felt when she told them she was pansexual.
“You still need to design a tag for me,” Jackie pouted. “You’ve owed me one for like a decade.”
Charlotte snorted. “Seven years, tops.” A fleck of glitter stuck to Jackie’s cheek, and she brushed it away with the side of her thumb. “Besides, there is nothing wrong with your chicken scratch.”
“Coward.” Jackie turned to the mirror to fix her red lipstick. “You just don’t like to draw anymore.”
The accusation landed funny in Charlotte’s chest. She dropped the marker back in the mason jar. “No comment.”
Her phone chimed where she’d left it on the sink. Jackie glanced down at it and raised her eyebrows. “Aren’t you popular. Roger again?”
“It’s Reece,” Charlotte said. “He wants me to join him at the hockey party.”
Jackie’s eyes lit up. “Then what are you waiting for?”
Charlotte could think of a million reasons not to go. The kid DJing at Acronym had great taste in dance jams. She didn’t want to ditch Jackie, especially because she could tell something was off between them, though maybe she was overthinking it. Ben was out there too somewhere, strutting around campus like a peacock. And it could be Roger texting her next time with an important task.
“I’m here to spend time with you,” Charlotte said.
Jackie folded her arms across her chest. “Sweetheart, I know that’s not the reason.”
“It’s not a good idea.” The words came out of her unsteadily. She fought the urge to grab the marker again and draw all over the counter. Flames, maybe, in pink, purple, and blue. Anything other than having this conversation.
Jackie studied her in the mirror as she neatened her braids. “Why is it not a good idea?”
The question was too large and too small to answer. Charlotte remembered the way Reece looked at her at dinner all soft and vulnerable, the way he smiled…
“I screwed it up the first time around.”
A sly grin snuck across Jackie’s face. “So you admit you want a second time around.”
“I don’t need you to make me feel stupid,” Charlotte growled. “I already feel like an asshole.”
“You’re not an asshole.” Her best friend extended a hand. Charlotte took it reluctantly. Jackie tugged her in front of the mirror and grabbed a Kleenex to touch up her eye makeup. “It’s not your fault that Ben messed with your head so much you couldn’t see straight.” She swept up some runaway eyeliner, her breath spilling across Charlotte’s face. She closed her eyes and let Jackie work her magic. “Besides, Reece didn’t have his shit together then. That boy drank more vodka out of his thermos than water.”
It was hard to reconcile the Reece attending the reunion with the Reece she knew as an undergrad. The day they met at support group, he wore hockey team sweatpants and a long-sleeve shirt she was pretty sure doubled as his pajamas. If the 3Ds got together before noon, he arrived viciously hungover, and on one occasion still drunk. At twenty-one Reece was already gorgeous, but he had a frenetic air of distraction and hunger around him like he was afraid to sit still.
It made the sex fantastic: desperate and intense and absorbing at a time when Charlotte wanted to forget herself. He always tasted like spearmint with a streak of hard liquor. He kissed with his teeth.
Now he was contained, somehow. Present and patient.
That new wisdom made him even more dangerous.
“I don’t know if I can do this again,” Charlotte breathed.
“Honey, you never did it in the first place.” Jackie wrapped an arm around her waist and held her close. “You never let that boy matter to you. Not really.”
Charlotte wasn’t so sure about that. Not when she remembered the surge of emotions in her gut when he got to the reception last night, or when he walked away from her in the hallway, his fists clenched at his sides.
Her old attempt to wall Reece out of her heart had been a fool’s errand all along. Somehow he wove himself through the bricks with his precise, gentle questions and his sense of adventure. Cups of coffee and late-night grins. A firm core of strength and resolve hid underneath his silly exterior, the genuine concern of a big brother.
It wasn’t nothing, what she felt. She just didn’t know what to call it.
