Pink

Chloe was the coolest person I’d ever met. She was tall and thin and had elegant long fingers and pointy elbows like those pictures on women’s dress patterns. Today she was wearing a black pencil skirt with fishnet stockings and hot-librarian shoes, which she’d kicked off beside my bed. She had a black shirt on under a dark, tweedy fitted jacket. Her dyed black hair was short and spiky and elfin. Two silver studs glittered in her nose, and four in each ear. Her fingernails were painted a very dark plum. The only lightness about her was her porcelain skin, and her white cigarette.

Chloe read battered Penguin Classics she found in thrift shops and at garage sales. They were all by people like Anaïs Nin and Simone de Beauvoir and made her look totally intellectual, particularly when she was wearing her elegant horn-rimmed glasses.

Chloe didn’t really care about school. She said most of the teachers were fascists, and sometimes even cryptofascists, whatever that meant. She said that our education system made us docile and stupid, and that true education could only come from art, philosophy, and life itself. Chloe would rather sit on the low stone wall just outside our school and smoke cigarettes and talk about Existentialism and Life and make out with me.

She was wonderful, and I was pretty sure I was in love with her.

So how come I wanted to leave so badly?

When I first told my parents I was a lesbian, they threw me a coming-out party. Seriously. We had champagne and everything. It was the most embarrassing thing that’d ever happened to me.

They loved Chloe-possibly even more than I did. When Chloe came over, she usually ended up poring over some Anne Sexton book with Pat, or listening to Bob Dylan on vinyl with David. Ostensibly, I was there too. But I didn’t really care for washed-out poetry about wombs, and I thought Bob Dylan was kind of overrated. So I just sat there politely like I was at someone else’s house, until the phone rang or something, and I could finally drag Chloe away to my room. Then there would be less talk about feminism, and Chloe would read to me from my favorite book of Jorge Luis Borges short stories, and I would make her laugh by doing impressions of Mrs. Moss, our septuagenarian English teacher. Making Chloe’s lips curve upward in a smile, or her eyes crinkle with laughter, made me happier than just about anything else in the world.

When it was finally time for Chloe to go home, she’d smooth her hair and rearrange her clothes, and we’d troop back out to the kitchen. Pat and David would always look so crestfallen that she was leaving. “So soon?” Pat would say. “But we’ve hardly had a chance to chat!”

Sometimes I thought my parents wished Chloe was their daughter.