Amanda Villarreal

"Phase"

I don’t know her by her name, anymore. Everyone calls her Xan Garvin now, her new name that she created when she re-invented herself. It still confuses me to hear her called by it. When I call her, her voicemail disorients me, making me hesitate for a second too long after the beep. “Yo, this is Xan Garvin, leave a message and all that shit.” She sings her last name, and somewhere between her dragging out the first syllable and lilting sharply upward on the second, I’m lost.

We first met at Incarnate Word School for Girls as freshmen, after lunch on the second day of classes, when the skies were hot, clear and a faded blue. The wind was blowing, the meteorologist claiming on the morning news that the dust it carried was all the way from Africa, some natural phenomenon that occurred every few years to cover the city in a dull haze. I was hurrying to my biology class, still excited about attending high school, thinking about the shine of my Tommy Hilfiger loafers and newness of my black watch plaid uniform. Then she just smashes into me, notebooks out of our arms, Chanel clutch gone, papers sailing off into the pond.. She’s cussing, and I’ve never even heard some of the words she’s using, but the ones I do know are awful enough. And who actually uses the word ‘fuck,’ besides, you know, public schoolers?

She helps me pick up everything, the whole time complaining about how we’re not allowed to study outside, and how some old lady reprimanded her for sitting on the bench outside of the science building. Why, she asks, would someone put a bench outside if no one was allowed to sit on it? Then she turns to run after the papers that haven’t made it into the pond, yet.

I’m wondering whether to tell her not to bother, because I just want to get away from this girl who is talking to me like she knows me, with her wild curly hair hanging in her face. The matching black watch ribbon we all wear in our hair is tied around her throat, a dark collar, strange. And then she’s already back in front of me, her blue eyes too big for her face, like a bug, and she sticks her hand out. I take it, and she squeezes so hard that my ring loses its shape. Alexandria Jo Carollo, she says. Alex.

It turns out she’s a friend of friend, she used to go to public school, but she said that yeah, she was technically Catholic. We sit next to each other in theology class. She writes poetry about blood, love and broken mirrors in our workbooks, and rips out pages from her bible to make paper cranes. Thin strips of Matthew and Mark collect under her desk, and when the teacher says, Alejandra, explain yourself, she pretends not to hear because her name is not Alejandra. I’m like, dumb-ass gringa, just answer her. Then we both are sent into the hall with demerits, because I cussed and she blasphemed. So we sit around in the hall with her destroyed Bible, reading about Onan and the Song of Songs, and talking about how “dumb ass” is about as colorful as I get.

Understanding between us developed quick and easy after that. Alex, all smart, funny, and direct, everything coated with a layer of cynicism, me with my firm belief in the value of the three I’s: implied, implicit, and inferred. We talked in a code meant for only each other, laughing as non sequiturs piled one after another, leaving our friends confused. “Ivy, my tetra of a luffer,” she’d coo, and I’d dramatically collapse into arms, crying, “Oh, Pomegranate Salvation! Take me on blue-flowered sheets!” On a note she stuck on my locker, it read, “Always speak your mind and remember to smile with potassium. Jesus wants to eat your eyes.” She signed it, “Your Salvation.”

Alex couldn’t even laugh like the other girls. Her laugh came bubbling up from deep inside her, a throaty sound that would shake her shoulders until it came pouring out, loud and deep like a man’s laugh, her head thrown back so I can see her throat, long white graceful thin. The kind of throat that suggests reaching out to run a finger down it to the dip in the collar bone, or wrapping both hands around and strangling her because she’s flipped up my skirt again in the hall, flashing everyone my unicorn boxers.

People mistook us as twins. Never our friends, because our personalities made it impossible for them to see us as we were—they always insisted Alex was larger than me, even though she was slimmer, and that my features were more feminine, while it was Alex who had porcelain skin, a small nose and high cheek bones. But teachers and nuns only saw that we were the same height, with curly brown hair and light eyes, and assumed that we were the same person, or sisters. Never mind that she was white, and I had excellent manners and a perfect pony tail. One Halloween we dressed up like each other and switched places. All it got me was two demerits by the end of the day, for talking back.

“We are sisters, lost through the generations,” Says Alex, sitting cross-legged in front of me, mimicking my motions, so that we could impress our friends later with our mastery of the mirror game. “I bet,” she says, and we both reach to caress the other’s cheek, “That my gypsy ancestors seduced your noble relatives.” My hand falters and draws away as Alex reaches up with her other, breaking the mirror. Alex rolls her eyes. “Seven years bad luck. But still, I can see it. Your pretty, tight-laced distant relative taking a turn in their Spanish rose garden on the edge of their villa, and then up rolls my family in their wagon, all loud color, silk scarves and tambourines, and the two are knockin’ boots out by stable before the day’s done. That’s why we look the same.”

“That’s disgusting,” I say, re-creating the mirror. “My family would never mix with gypsies.”

Alex adored my family, eating their food on weekends and using them to irritate me on school days. “Christ,” she would exclaim, “Where are your earrings? How is anyone going to see you without your earrings?” mimicking my grandmother. Or maybe, “I saw the strangest thing just now. I could have sworn I saw a boy in our school, wearing our uniform,” she’d pause, allowing for my eye roll since I knew what was coming, “But then I realized it was you. Where’s your make-up, mija? How is anyone going to tell you’re a girl?”

But by the time she gets to “girl” she’s already laughing, ruining the impersonation of my grandfather. The most annoying part of it is that my grandparents are convinced that Alex never leaves the house without make-up, even though she doesn’t even own lipgloss, because of her naturally rosy cheeks and purplish tint of her eye lids. “Don’t you white people have anything better to do than mock well-bred Mexican girls?” I huff. “Go steal someone’s land, or something.”

“Been there, done that. We call it the King Ranch.” That’s another sore point in my family, particularly for my father, who brings it up every time he has to pay a bill. Alex finds it hilarious that he can complain about something that happened a hundred and fifty years ago, but she doesn’t understand history the way we do. Alex’s father died when she was ten, and her mom’s her only family. It’s strange enough that she never attended Catholic school before high school, her mom doesn’t go to church and she’s not Mexican, not even a little bit, not even a little bit of anything that speaks Spanish. But no family, too? So none of the girls ever tease her about her family, because some things are just rude to bring up.

After school our stomachs growled and we sat around and talked, the heat and our hunger making us lazy. Alex and I would hang out by the rose bushes and the overgrown honeysuckle and wait for our moms to pick us up. Alex would lay right on top of that honeysuckle, like it was a couch, and pull me on with her, leaves like feather down and pink-orange trumpets stuck between our lips to satisfy our sugar cravings.

In the spring, Alex and I picked all the roses, each one full of rain, and wove them wet into our hair. Rose water, we said, hoping it would make our curls magic or manageable. We stuck the petals to our skin in swirling lines, and called ourselves rose warriors. That’s when Alex kissed me. It short and tasted green because we’d been hungry and eaten some of the roses.

Then my mom showed up and I went home, ripping flowers out of my hair and frantically pulling it into a ponytail as I ran to the car. It didn’t work, and I got in trouble anyway, for making a mess of myself.

Alex and I loved each other in simple ways. We went to the movies together sometimes, just us, not our friends. She’d buy me Mayan chocolate ice cream and I’d buy her a book, or a shiny rock. Maybe in the hall, when her arm was slung around my shoulders like any friend might do, her thumb would brush along my neck. Or when she would hug me, one of her hands would find the place where my shirt ended, and my back would feel her palm, hot. During sleepovers, we’d share a sleeping bag, my head under her chin. In the summers we’d meet up on weekends, get a smoothie with two straws and sit around in a bookstore reading trash fantasy novels and flipping through stacks of comic books.

Our friends knew about it; mostly, they pretended it wasn’t happening. Alex and I were just best friends, they reasoned, and weren’t all the girls really affectionate, kissing hello and goodbye, sitting on each other’s laps at lunch to steal a fry? What made Alex and I different were the smallest increments of time, that when added together, gave the other girls an uneasy feeling—a hug that is too long, with hips pressed too close together. A kiss on the lips that lingered a fraction of a second too long to be playful. The way our gaze lingered on one another, always watching the curve of her back, the bend of my wrist, the turn of her head.

We stopped hanging around the gardens near the parking lot and would sneak up onto the roof instead, sprawled out staring straight up into the clean blue sky, Alex’s eyes absorbing the color into her own. Her shirt riding up and my arm slung over her exposed stomach, fingers stroking her side, but neither of us caring or really feeling anything beside the sun pressing on us, burning us into the stone under our bodies. Sometimes we’d just sit around and bitch about Math, or watch the white pigeons as they flew in and out of the school’s bell tower, and wonder how they became so different from the other pigeons. Mostly, we were just worried about keeping our mothers waiting, and we spent a lot of time peering nervously over the edge of the roof.

As the days cooled we’d find the energy to argue, happy and sarcastic, for hours up there. I would reach behind her neck and let my hand rest there, while my fingers played with the knot of her ribbon-choker, so that it would come loose at a sudden gust of November wind. She caught me at it once, grabbing my wrist and squeezing until the bones made a wet, snapping sound as they slid past each other. “Stop that,” she said, her eyes narrowed, electric blue from the sky.

“It doesn’t look,” and I stop myself before I say ‘good,’ and finish, “right.”

“It’s what I do. Deal with it.”

And I did, because that was the only way to have her. I never told her it was also the only way I wanted her. Alex, bold and reckless, flipping off the principal as we drive away in my jeep, ditching class for Chinese food. I chided her for her wild irresponsibility, and lectured her about her violent streak, but I loved her and everything about her. I collected demerits for tying my tie like a boy’s, for drawing on my shoes and cussing after chapel. I let my hair go free like hers, although it never looked quite as pretty, the curls never as defined, and my grandma started addressing me as “Bruja.” Alex was everything in world worth having: all that loudness, color, bang fuck shit smash it all to hell. “Don’t be afraid to cut your tongue as you lick up the shards of life,” she’d say. She was strong, unstoppable, afraid of nothing, and I swore I would never let her go.

When I told my parents that I was in love with Alex, my mother told me to go to my room and spent the rest of the night talking to my father. Laying on my bed, I watched the overhead fan beating the dying spring air and the mosquitoes the size of avocado pits dance on the wall. Eventually I pulled out my Math textbook and wrote down some problems, not really intending to solve any of them, only wanting to look productive if my father came in. There were words, I knew, that would be attached to these feeling I had for Alex. I had read books about it to satisfy my curiosity, but it was different from Alex and me, I thought. That movement, the politics, those women were not Alex. They were certainly not me, with my altar to the Virgen in the corner of my room, well decorated with dried roses, honeysuckle scented-candles and my Clinique compacts dropped there from this morning. But if my parents came in, and demanded answers, I would have to claim something, I would have to give them some reason, some understanding, and I knew that I would point to that word, the one that everyone understood and I still could not bring myself to say while thinking of how much I loved her. Over the hum of the fan, mosquitoes, and the flipping pages of my textbook, I could hear nothing. There was no yelling, no slamming doors, no hint of tense whispers beyond my bedroom. I was ready to defend my right to love, to run away into the San Antonio night, or maybe even be kicked out of my home, a choice which seemed the most preferable in consideration to romantic notions, but I just waited. When my ten o’clock bedtime came, I washed my face, brushed my teeth and tucked myself into bed. Hours later, my door opened briefly to shed light on my bed, and they whispered “I love you,” and “Goodnight,” and then shut the door, assuming I was asleep.

The next day, when my mother drove me to school, she talked about how young people sometimes experiment and go through these phases. Young people can develop such intense friendships that they get confused and think they’re in love. But of course, they’re not really in love, and it all goes away once they start to date members of the opposite sex, and once they really fall in love, they forget all about that other person. After that, we didn’t talk about it anymore. And once I realized that Alex had no intention of ever telling her mom about her feeling for me, not even Alex and I talked about it.

I started dating boys, and so did Alex. Neither of us talked about this with each other; when guys asked us out we just shrugged and said okay, or blushed and said thank-you, depending on the guy and the occasion. Alex went out with guys who had names like Valentine, Wolf, and Laterrious Starks. I dated boys who kept their hands to themselves, didn’t expect me to kiss them, paid for everything, and proposed at the appropriate time. I told them I was going to college out of state.

On the last day of school, Alex helped me clear out my locker. We rested at the on the back stairwell, overlooking the drained pond. Alex sucked on one of her curls. I’m sorry about everything, she said. I know it sucked, but I couldn’t tell my mom. I know that wasn’t really fair to you. But you know, it was probably just a phase, right? We’re dating other people, and college starts soon, and it was probably just a phase. And then she pulled me toward her, awkwardly bending over the box on her lap, and kissed my neck as she hugged me. You’ll always be my Ivy, she said.

Alex went to a state college in conservative East Texas and started going by the name “Xan.” She began to brush her hair and wear jean skirts and button down tops, and pearl earrings. When I declared Creative Writing as my major, she counseled caution. “Best go into teaching. At least then you won’t starve. God, the ideas those hippie northerners come up with.” I wanted to point out that this was the path she had told me to take, written in my senior memory book. “I’ll curse you if you don’t make something of yourself. We need to be published so the world may tremble! Love you, always will, despite myself.” I should have understood that last line better.

After a two-year long engagement, she finally was finally married in her junior year in college, with me as her maid of honor. She was literally bouncing with excitement the whole time, much to the dismay of the congregation. Her last name changed to Garvin as I held her bouquet at the altar. And somewhere, between vows, acceptances, and announcements, I don’t let go, and I’m lost.