To The Girl I Once Knew

We’re laying in my bed together, her fingers stroking my hair and my thumb rubbing circles into her sharp hip bone. My neck’s raw from her mouth, and we’re in that strange post-coital haze. Her blue eyes are lidded and she’s got this smile on her face, and I feel one tugging at my own lips, my brows furrowed. Confused. 

“Darb?” I say, and she’s grinning now, showing near-perfect teeth. 

“That’s me,” she chirps back, her fingers now scraping along the nape of my neck. It feels good. She’d gotten her nails done earlier in the week. Acrylics or something. I never understood cosmetic stuff like that. We went to Sephora after school once and I was lost. She laughed at me and my, as she put, “deer in headlights” look. 

I roll my eyes. She’s feeling cheeky, which I can get with. She giggles at me and buries her face into my shirt, her hands leaving my hair to slide down my back. 

Ugh. Darby. 

Living with Mom now meant that she trusted me alone in the house. She’d go to her friend’s mountain house every other weekend to drink and play Scattegories with my stepdad, and this was one of those weekends. I took full advantage of it and invited Darby over for the night. That’s what you do when you’re in-love. 

Crazy, isn’t it? I’m barely fifteen and I’m in-love with the first friend I made in high school. Go ahead, call me cringe, lame, stupid, all the derogatories. I know what this is, though. It’s exhilarating. 

She’s a year above me – I’m a freshman, she’s a sophomore, you get it – and she approached me my second week, saying that I “seemed interesting.” It was probably my purple hair that drew her in. It was always a conversation starter. Now, though, my hair’s bright red.She loves touching it and saying I look like Gerard Way. Pretty high praise when a cute girl says that to you, so make sure you jot that down, guys. 

I was never super good at making friends, so having a random girl approach me at 8 AM to tell me I “seemed interesting” was a weird thrill. Me? Interesting? Sure, I guess I can be interesting. After such an introduction, we exchanged numbers and she told me she’d be texting me when school let out, then she skipped away to homeroom. I mean, wow, right? 

We texted everyday for hours. We’d talk about music, about TV shows. She’d tell me that she thought certain senior boys were cute, I’d agree for the most part. She encouraged me to talk to this senior, Eric, and I went through with that. She hyped me up to ask him out, and I did that. She urged me to kiss him at Penn’s Landing, and I did it. After that kiss, I was over it. I let him down easy, he didn’t take it personally, and now we’re just friends. 

The senior Darby currently has it bad for is a guy named Josh. He’s a cool dude, I guess, tall and pretty and funny. He’s friends with Eric, and she dubbed them the “hottest guys in school.” Sure. Hottest guys in school. Eric kissed like a fish, but I’m sure Josh is good. Her and Josh have been chatting with each other for the better part of a month now, and they went on an ice-skating date yesterday for Valentine’s Day. They kissed and, when she got to my house tonight, she clutched her heart and gushed all about it to me. Did it hurt? Sure. I’ve only been aware of my love for her for two months now, and I’m holding that real close to my chest. A girl like that doesn’t date and love a person like me. I have to be her friend. 

Still, it didn't really stop me from kissing her earlier, and it didn’t stop her from falling into bed with me. Poor Josh. I wasn’t expecting a rewatch of That 70s Show to turn into a passionate – dare I even say scandalous – night. 

She’s rubbing at my shoulder blades and doing that nail-scrape thing that makes my leg twitch in anticipation, and in a moment of boldness, I press a kiss to her bare shoulder. She’s lovely like this, satiated and blushing, and I think I might also be a little in-love with kissing her shoulders. They were pale and freckly, just like her cheeks. I could just kiss her face, but the shoulder feels more personal. Intimate. It’s like I’m staking an invisible claim on her that I expect Josh to be able to suss out at school on Monday. Let’s hope he doesn’t. 

“Hey,” I say to her, and her head moves so she’s looking at me, all big eyes and smudged mascara. I did that to her. Holy shit. 

“Yeah, what’s up?” she asks, and I can’t look at her in those big, blue, bush baby eyes. I stare at the wall behind her, and my hand squeezes her hip. 

“This is kinda stupid,” I say with a laugh. It sounds like a weird cough to me. “But, um… Jesus, no, nope, this is real stupid–” 

“Nooo,” she sing-songs, reaching up to grip my chin. She uses her thumb and index finger to squish my cheeks together. I roll my eyes again, and she beams at me. “No, c’mon, tell me.” 

Here goes. 

Darby, I love you.

Darby, I want you to be my girlfriend. 

Darby, I– 

“I’m trans,” I blurt out, and she lets go of my face. 

She does this weird thing where she’s pensive for a second, then she’s mulling something over, but at the end of it she just smiles at me, small and private. 

“Yeah?” she says, propping herself up on an elbow and putting her chin in her hand. Those bush baby eyes are looking down at me now, and I finally meet her gaze. There’s a tenderness in her face, no more pensiveness or mulling over. I have her full, undivided attention. 

“Yeah,” I say, and it’s like sandpaper in my throat. I clear it and I look away from her again. Gently, she turns my head back so I could look at her. 

“Y’know,” she sighs, but she’s still smiling at me. “I had a feeling. You had too much of an edgy, bad boy thing going on.” 

That gets me to laugh for real. “Oh yeah?” 

“Mmhmm,” she teases, and her smile grows with it. One of her hands rests on my stomach, pushing my shirt up a bit so we can be skin-to-skin. I grunt. 

“Your hands are cold,” I grumble. 

“Stop deflecting,” she says with her own eye roll. Then, she gets serious, her nail tracing nonsense shapes into my flesh. God, that feels weird. “Thank you for telling me.” “‘Course,” I say, shrugging. “Kinda felt right considering you and I just spent, like, two hours obliterating each oth–” 

“Oh my god, stop,” she says, laughing and backing off to grab her shirt from the floor. I sit up to watch her. 

She dresses in silence, but it’s good. I get to see those freckles disappear under a Fall Out Boy shirt, and it’s like a dream. 

“Could use some help pickin’ a name,” I say, breaking the silence. She looks up at me. “Really?” From the look on her face, she’s excited. Her eyes light up and she sits back down on the bed, her big grin turned on full-force. It’s blinding. “What were you thinking?” “Caleb?” I try. She makes a noise, shaking her head. 

“Uh… Vince?” Same noise. Same headshake. 

“Ugh, no,” she says, patting my knee. “Something unique. A name you don’t see a lot.” “Fabio,” I deadpan, and her head falls back on a laugh.

“No,” she groans, looking at me and pantomiming the act of gripping my neck and

strangling me. It makes me laugh again. 

“I’m fresh out of ideas,” I say. 

Finger to her chin, she thinks for a moment, then jumps before grabbing me by the shoulders. 

“I got it!” she says, smiling so big her dimple’s showing. I want to kiss it. “Lay it on me.” 

“How about Ezra?” 

Ezra? Ezra. E-Z-R-A. 

Yeah. That’s a cool name. It’s got a Z in it.

About the Author

Ezra Cuevas is a senior Creative Writing major here at Arcadia. He enjoys horror movies, zombies, and long walks on the beach.