"What?"

Chapter Two: "Trunk, Interrupted"

We were at the mall that day, clothes shopping. I miss that now. Too bad malls basically died out after 2019. We had just spent an entire month's pay on new outfits for the school year, and I wanted to end the day strong. Kat's latest crush was a senior who graduated last year, Sean Little. He'd come this close to asking her out the last week of school, but chickened out. She was devastated for a few days. This wasn't the first time we'd resorted to retail therapy. But only a couple of weeks earlier, I heard Sean was working at a CD Warehouse in the mall. I told Kat I wanted to find music to load on my old iPod, a pretense to give him another chance.

When Kat hit me with the curveball, we were walking through the front doors.

I wasn't really listening, so it took my brain a moment to catch up. I readjusted the shopping bags that were tucked inside my elbow, and then looked up at her. She wasn't exactly holding her breath, but Kat was definitely waiting for my reaction before saying anything more. When I finally found words, they weren't what either of us wanted.

"With each other?" I cringed even as the words left my mouth. Of course that was what she meant. My heartrate spiked as the statement's context soaked into me. Fight or flight, and somehow I chose option C: act dumb. Kat looked more offended than hurt. And then it got worse.

"Welcome to the Warehouse, guys." You could feel Sean's baritone in your chest. He looked and sounded like a big teddy bear. 6 foot 3. He gave the best hugs. Kat didn't care about any of that right now. "Interested in- Oh hey!"

Oh hey. He recognized us. Kat turned to look at me, and I pretended not to see the **** glare. I beamed up at Sean.

"Heyyy!" I drew out the word as long as I could, giving him a little wave on my tiptoes. Despite my heels, I somehow felt shorter than normal. "What are you doing here? Haven't seen you in months."

"Oh, yeah, man." He chuckled. "Millview doesn't like to let you go, you know? Been working on an exit strategy for a while. Nearly there." He gestured grandiose at the rows of shrink-wrapped music. "This place is an oasis in the desert."

"I thought CDs went the way of Vinyl." Kat's tone belied her lack of amusement.

"Oh, that's coming back very soon, dudes." Sean hesitated, feeling the need to course correct. "Girls." He smiled at Kat hopefully. I felt the laser stare again, Kat attempting to fry my frontal lobe remotely. "Yeah, plus I think we're going to get a lot of foot traffic this spring. People are gonna go on senior trips, road trips, you know? Gotta have tunes."

"For sure." My response felt lackluster. I wasn't great at matching other people's energy. I felt my stomach churn a bit. "Uh, where would we find, um... What was the genre you recommended?" I shouldn't have tried to get Kat to throw me a lifeline. She'd sooner let me sink.

"Techno." I hated techno.

"Oh, do you want dubstep? Or house?" Sean thought he was being helpful. I didn't know how to respond, but it didn't matter. "There's also trance, and we had to make a new section called 'electro' because some elitists came in and complained to management about our categorization of a few artists." He stuck his hands in his pockets while we thought of something to say.

"I've been looking for something really poppy. Upbeat?" I looked at Kat again, swinging for the second time. She pitched me a second curve ball.

"I think you were telling me the genre you were looking for earlier." Her saccharine smirk was one part ****, one part insult. "Bimbo music."

Sean looked confused for a second, then broke out in a grin. "Oh, for sure." He reached past me and Kat, squeezing between us to grab a plastic case off the shelf of featured albums. "You want these guys." I stared at the cover, a picture of an evergreen with two people standing beneath it. Sean shrugged almost to himself. "I don't get the appeal, but people seem to love them." I took the album from his hand gently.

"Thanks, Sean." He nodded, satisfied with his level of customer service. Over our shoulders he took notice of the next people to enter the store, and smiled at us apologetically.

"Let me know if you guys need anything else, yeah?"

"Sure." Kat smiled with her eyes, but not her mouth. The instant Sean was out of earshot I blurted out my apology.

"I'm so fucking sorry." She let out the heaviest sigh of all time, and I felt my gut drop along with it. "I was thinking that I could- you could-" I stopped myself. "I wasn't thinking."

"I don't give a shit about Sean," she rolled her eyes. "I just didn't realize you were planning out my future for me. You could have told me." Her smirk was infectious. I scoffed at myself, and she let me.

"I'm such a bitch." My thoughts scattered.

"How many kids should we have?" she asked, and I shot her a worried look. "Obviously we'd be adopting." I broke out in a laugh. Goddamn it, why did she have to do that? Make me feel deservedly awful, and then give me just enough sarcasm to dig myself out of the hole. I appreciated the levity.

"Tell the truth, I think he might be able to do it." I gestured to Sean, who was now standing with his hands on hips, proclaiming music recommendations for anyone unfortunate enough to let him. "He's... virile."

"Oh god," Kat recoiled at the adjective. "That's disgusting."

"What?" I asked. "It's not like it's anything you haven't seen."

"His junk? Or junk in general?"

"Whoever's junk. I'm junk agnostic."

"Please, Cassie. You're painfully straight," she said. I didn't like the way that sentence seemed to bite me. I flipped the CD over in my hand to look at the backside of the case.

"What even is this trash?" came my painfully obvious attempt at changing the subject. Kat set the new record for heaviest sigh. I stammered as she turned and headed for the other side of the store. "Kat, come on."

She kept walking until she hit the far wall, ignoring me. I shuffled past the oversized Vinyl racks and poster displays, cornering her before she could reach an exit.

"Seriously, Katie Kat. I wasn't thinking."

"You said that already."

"It was a stupid idea. I just... You were distraught. I haven't forgotten the pajamas that you refused to change out of so we could wash them for you. You spent so long at my house that you put a dent in the couch. My mom still brings that up."

"You're not making me feel better."

"I wanted to try and give the universe a second chance. Sean was into you. He hemmed and hawed for so long he psyched himself out. And you liked him enough that you let him fumble right at the finish line."

"Finish line? He didn't get out of the gate."

"My best friend deserves to be happy." I peered into her brown eyes, even as she struggled to look away from me. "I'm sorry. I thought he was what you wanted."

"Maybe six months ago." She shrugged, her shoulders sagging like when I first met her. I felt my gut sink lower. "But I..." She grasped for words. "We've spent all summer together. I thought I was reading between some sort of line."

We'd danced around the topic before. People had started rumors about it. Slutty McBoobs and the local Trans kid. Living in Texas, it was easier to let people assume we were together. At the end of the day, we could be seen as a straight couple, just with extra steps. She'd never said anything more than a sentence or two laughing it off. I'd always laughed with her. Not once had I actually thought that Kat considered me something more.

"I thought going out together was what today was. What this whole summer has been." I set my bags on the floor, reaching out to take my best friend's hand. "I'm beyond flattered. You're one of the prettiest girls in our class, and I mean that."

"Don't hype me up too hard, it'll sound fake. You're the one who got invited to senior prom as a freshman."

"Don't remind me. Brad Tramish was a sleaze." Thank god he graduated before he could do any real damage to me. "Fucking ****," I muttered. Kat tried to slide her hand out of mine, but I didn't let her go that easily. "Painfully straight, huh?" I pretended like I'd been shot by a gun, taken out by her words. "Ouch."

It must have been an open secret for everyone but me. True, I'd dated exclusively one gender. And yes, while technically junk agnostic, I'd really only enjoyed one flavor. Not like there was much of a selection down here. The dating scene for Millview was like a going-out-of-business sale: Everything must go. If you didn't pair up with someone -hell, even if you did- you were bound to pair up again in a few weeks. Kat had been the outlier. It wasn't like she was a virgin, but a dry spell for her would have been a lifetime for me.

Though, at the moment, we were both single. I'd planned on scoping out any of the new boys for the both of us, first couple weeks of school. I knew her tastes. Well, I thought I did. Was I willing to take myself out of the dating pool early?

Thoughts processed quickly, not even so much thought as raw feeling. I felt my stomach churn even as I spoke, but it wasn't from fear, but anxiety. My thoughts flashed back to when we met. That night, when I'd done her nails. She'd never had anyone braid her hair for her before. Having sleepovers when we wanted to talk about taboo subjects in the dark. She'd slept in my old jersey. I let her keep it.

I searched her face, hoping she'd give me a lead of some kind, any indication of what to say that wouldn't end up with me eating my foot.

"Which one is doing the asking?" Her brow lifted slightly. "You or me?"

"Obviously me," she snarked. She reached down and picked up my bags for me, extending an arm for me to wrap my own around. "I'm the one who's dumb enough to ask out a straight girl." I paused, and she hesistated.

"You know me well enough," I said, barely knowing myself in the moment. "Where are we going?" She scoffed, and then... Finally realized I was being serious. "What would you like to do with me?" The surge of uncertainty flooded me in the best way as I waited for her answer. It was her turn to search my face. Her nose scrunched as she finally allowed herself to picture us together as anything more than friends.

"Normally I would have said here. This." She looked down at the couple hundred dollars worth of clothes we'd picked out for each other. It occurred to me how difficult that had been for her, standing in a dressing room right next to mine. I felt heady from this, this something new. I'd been asked out plenty of times. But this was Kat. Dating boys had never felt like the penultimate scene from a movie, but this? My gut churned in the best way. I felt the heat coming from her chest like a cloud of radiation, threatening to infect me. I basked in it.