Welcome to the Pine Away Motel and Cabins by Katarina Bivald

Author:Katarina Bivald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2019-11-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 29

More of Us

None of the other students cared about the proposed measure, despite the fact that it centered around schools. We might have been the battlefield the two sides were fighting over, but none of our schoolmates seemed to think the war affected them.

It was our last year in high school, but it felt like it was never going to end. Like nothing would ever happen. Most of our classmates weren’t going on to college, and few had any idea what they were going to do instead. We were caught between the safety of our former lives and an uncertain future that would, at the very least, allow us to get away from the classroom.

Looming in the distance was the school prom. What did a proposed change in the law mean in comparison? We weren’t old enough to vote, and the majority wouldn’t have bothered even if we had been.

Still, we weren’t the only ones in town who were against the measure. Some of the adults formed a working group, and notes were put up in the post office. MacKenzie forced the whole school group to attend their first meeting. We met on Broadway, at a house belonging to two of the women. They lived right next door to Michael.

I think we were all pretty nervous about going over there, but once we arrived, we realized the women were just as nervous as us. There were ten or so of them, most in their forties, all looking acutely uncomfortable as they sat on the sofa and in the armchairs and chairs that had been brought in from the kitchen.

MacKenzie was the only one who wasn’t nervous.

“Hi, I’m MacKenzie,” she said. “And I’m gay. This is Henny. She’s heterosexual, but she’s here because she’s my friend. Michael, also heterosexual, and Camila, hetero too.”

Or so we thought at the time. I suddenly wonder how Camila remembers those days. MacKenzie felt so liberated now that she had finally come out, and I was focused on Michael. But Camila didn’t argue. She just looked from MacKenzie to the others with sarcastically raised eyebrows, as though she knew exactly what they were thinking.

They were thinking that she didn’t look especially macho.

MacKenzie turned expectantly to the women gathered there. The ice cubes in their glasses clinked as they rushed to reassure everyone that they were perfectly straight but that they were, of course, against the measure, which was possible even if you were heterosexual. Very heterosexual. Married. Their husbands were against the measure, too. Because they were married. Every one of them.

All but the two women whose house it was. They glanced at each other and then shrugged as if they had already made up their minds and were just waiting for the right moment. “Actually…” said one of them.

“We’re not just friends.”

“We’re not married, either. We were, but then we met.”

“We got together and moved here a few years back. No one seemed to care that two women were living together. I guess they thought we were only doing it so we could afford a house.

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