After breakfast Emmy wanted to go shopping down in San Diego, so we jumped in the Mini and drove to the nice mall in the valley. Emmy got herself a bunch of new outfits, but also insisted on buying me a couple of hundred bucks worth of clothes, over my protests. I felt uncomfortable about her spending so much money on me but she insisted, and since she had so much money, I figured it really didn’t mean much to her, right?

Walking along the upper deck of the mall back to the car, Emmy took my hand in hers. I was worried about what people would think, though, and when we were on the road, I told Emmy that we should probably keep under wraps in public.

“Emmy, uh, look. I think we should keep it cool. I mean, we don’t want anybody to see us, and think we’re, I don’t know. I guess what I’m trying to say is that we need to act like nothing happened.” It sounded lame when I said it, but I couldn’t think of any better way to tell Emmy we needed to keep our feelings for each other hidden.

“Oh,” Emmy said in a soft voice. “If that is what you wish…” and that was the last of it. When we got back to my place Mom and Tiff were already home. After a few quick hellos, Emmy packed up her stuff and headed back to her house.

Courtney called that Thursday night. “What’s the deal?” she demanded, almost before I even said hello.

“What do you mean?” I asked, puzzled.

“Did you and Emmy get in a fight or something?” Courtney shot back.

“What? No!” I protested, but Courtney wasn’t listening.

“Because you two have hardly even said two words to each other all week. You hardly look at each other. It’s like you’re going out of your way to make it seem as if everything is normal, but you suddenly can’t even stand each other.”

“What?” I was floored. This wasn’t the conversation I’d expected at all.

“Whatever it is, you two need to kiss and make up, because you’re both a pain in the ass to be around right now. You two are having like some kind of passive aggressive bitch-fest and it’s driving the rest of us crazy.”

“No, it’s not like that at all. Wait, what do you mean ‘the rest of us’?” I asked.

“Allie, Tom, me, even freaking Mindy Stock asked me what’s going on. Seriously, everybody can see that something’s going on. As your oldest and bestest friend, I’m telling you that you and Emmy need to work it out once and for all,” Courtney concluded.

“Um… I guess I’ll talk to Emmy,” I agreed, lamely.

“Yeah, well, you’d better.” Then, in a more conciliatory tone, Courtney continued “Leah, if you need to talk to somebody, call me. I know it’s hard to talk at school now, especially since you and Emmy are almost always in the same place, so just call me. If you need help dealing with Emmy somehow, you know I’m there for you.”

After that surprising and disturbing conversation, I didn’t know what to do. My first instinct was to call Emmy, but I knew she wouldn’t answer. She never does once she gets home. Some kind of quirk of hers, I guess. Failing the ability to talk to Emmy, I brooded on it all evening. There was no use in even trying to do my homework. It just wasn’t going to happen.

I wandered out to the kitchen to talk to Mom. She was reading and taking notes, prepping for her classes the next day.

Looking up, she must have seen the look on my face, because she asked “Lee, honey. What’s the matter?”

“Mom…” I started, but I really wasn’t sure what to say next, so I just kind of trailed off.

“Here, have a seat. Tell me all about it. Would you like some tea?” she asked, getting up to put the kettle on.

“Yeah, that would be nice,” I said, settling down for a long, difficult discussion.

Mom waited patiently for the water to boil, not saying anything. She could tell I had a lot on my mind, and thankfully was willing to wait for me to spill when I was good and ready.

When she set the cup of hot chamomile tea in front of me and sat down with her own cup, I’d finally worked up the courage to start.

“Mom, you know how crazy I was about Chris, right?” I began. When she nodded yes, I continued.

Plunging ahead, I said “Well, I think I’m falling in love again.”

“Hmm…” Mom responded, trying to show she was listening but not being judgmental. It didn’t really help my nerves as much as she might have intended, but I kept going anyway.

“And I’m pretty sure it’s mutual. The thing is, neither of us are sure what to do next.”

“I think I understand,” Mom said, looking into her tea. “You two are in love, but there is some barrier to being able to express it? Is that right?”

“Um, I guess that’s a good way to describe it,” I agreed.

Looking up at me, Mom put her hand on mine. “You know I’ll love and support you in any decisions you make, honey. I think I see where this is going, and I want you to know that I think she’s an amazing girl, too. I can see why you’re so infatuated with her.”

I felt my face turn red as a beet. My blood was rushing in my ears, and I tried to speak, but just couldn’t make any words come out.

Mom, seeing my distress, became concerned. “Lee, are you O.K.?”

I nodded yes, then found the words to stammer, “You… you knew?”

“I had my suspicions, yes,” she admitted. “After last weekend. I was pretty sure something had happened.”

“Well, it did. I mean, Emmy and I just sort of clicked. But that’s the problem. I mean, she’s a girl, and I’m not into girls like that.”

“It’s not unusual for a girl to be attracted to other girls, Lee. It is a lot more common than people think.”

“But I’m not attracted to girls! That’s what I’m trying to say. I’ve always been attracted to boys, the manlier the better. I mean, look at Chris. He was about as macho as they get. He joined the Marines the day after he graduated high school! He was shaving when he was fourteen! I… I…” I trailed off.

“Yes, Chris was definitely gender secure, no doubt about it,” Mom conceded.

“Gender secure? That’s one way to put it. And before him, it was always the athletic guys I had crushes on. Big, strong guys. I can’t be gay, I just can’t.”

“Oh, Lee…” Mom said sympathetically.

I took a sip of my tea, trying to hide the tears welling up in my eyes. It didn’t work, though. They just came spilling out, leaving me shame-faced and embarrassed.

Mom came around the table to kneel next to me, putting her arms around me. “Lee, it’s O.K. Love is a crazy thing, and there’s no way to understand it.”

“All I can do is think about her, all I want to do is be with her. But I can’t, because I don’t want everybody to think I’m gay. They’d hate me,” I said, finally breaking out in sobs as Mom held my head on her shoulder.

“Things are different now, Lee. People are different. There just isn’t the stigma there used to be. Nobody will hate you for loving another girl. You’ll see,” she said, trying her best to console me.

“Tell that to my teammates on the squad!” I responded bitterly. “Tell that to Nicole or Abbie. I guarantee they’d hate me. Nicole belongs to one of those churches, you know, the kind that hate everything. Hell, she’d probably serve the ball straight into the back of my head every chance she got if she thought I was a lesbo. No, announcing to the world that I have a girlfriend would be a ticket straight to high school hell. There’s no way I could do that. Not going to happen.”

Mom started to say something, but I cut her off. “Besides, I’m not really gay. I don’t like girls that way. Just…” I faltered. “Just Emmy, that’s all. And I’m not even sure she feels the same way.” And it was back to the tears again.

Mom knew better than to say anything. She just held me. With a shock, it reminded me of the time Emmy sang that Pink Floyd song, and then held me while I cried my eyes out. What made the comparison worse, though, was the fact that deep down inside I knew it was Emmy I wanted to have comforting me.

Neither of us said anything for a long time. Finally I pulled away, and said “I’m going to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”

When I climbed into Emmy’s car in the morning, I told her we needed to talk.

“Courtney called me last night. She told me everyone thinks we had some kind of fight and are trying to act normal. She said we need to- her words- ‘kiss and make up’.”

“If me kissing you will make her happy, I think we should kiss a lot.”

“You… you want to kiss me?” I asked, surprised. “It’s just- well, like Courtney said. You’ve been ignoring me since the weekend.”

“I do want to kiss you, Leah. I want it more than anything. But you said that we needed to stop, and not be affectionate.”

“No, Em, that’s not what I meant. I mean…” I trailed off, unsure what to say or how to say it. “Look, we just went too far, and then we tried to act like everything was just the same as before. We overcompensated, I guess. We just need to try to get things back to the way they were.”

Emmy had a thoughtful look on her face as she pulled out of the parking lot. “I will try my best. But I do not like hiding. It is not in my nature.”

“I know, but for now, just please. We need to cool it. My life, at least, will get a whole lot more complicated if everybody thinks I’m gay.”

In the drive through at the coffee hut, I really noticed the barista for the first time. She had those plugs in the lobes of her ears and stars tattooed on her collarbones (all of which I’d seen before) but what caught my eye were the two interlocking Venus symbols on the inside of her wrist. She usually wore a big wristband watch, I recalled.

The rest of the way to school I couldn’t get the barista out of my thoughts. Is that my destiny? To be so out of the closet I had it tattooed for all to see? To live an indie lifestyle, and maybe read bad poetry about my angst at open mic night at the coffee shop? Have too many facial piercings to go along with my bad haircut?

No, I’m being just as mean and judgmental as Nicole, thinking thoughts like that, I told myself. The girl at the coffee hut is probably just as nice and normal as anybody else. She just happens to like other women, that’s all, right? These thoughts kept me distracted until Emmy pulled into the school lot. Besides, I’m not really gay, anyway, right? I mean, sure, Emmy and I kissed and cuddled, but that didn’t mean anything, did it?

At lunch, Courtney gave me a questioning look when I sat down at our table in the caf. I told her “Everything’s worked out. It’s all cool.”

“You want to talk about it?” she asked, but just then Allie and Tom came in, so we both clammed up. A minute later Emmy sat down, and we all chatted away like usual. After a while, I gave Courtney a meaningful look, and she nodded that yes, it all seemed back to normal. No way was I going to tell her the truth. Heck, I still wasn’t sure what the truth was myself.

“Can you come up to Riverside County with me this afternoon?” Emmy asked a couple of days later. We had been acting ‘back to normal’ so well that things really had gotten completely back to normal- like nothing ever happened.

“Sure, why not? I’m not scheduled to work at the yogurt shop today,” I replied to Emmy’s question. “What’s up?”

“Do you remember the music I bought at that record store? I have been trying to play that kind of music, and my guitar is just not right for it. I need to get a new guitar.”

“And you need to go to Riverside to buy a guitar?” I asked, not clear on why this would be the case.

“There is a very well-known guitar store in Corona. It is a bit of a drive, but they have several guitars listed on their web site that I am interested in.”

“Well, O.K.,” I agreed. “It still seems like far to go. I’m sure there are shops down in San Diego that have nice guitars,” I said, still unconvinced we needed to go to go all the way to Corona.

Soon enough, though, we were in Emmy’s Mini, heading north on Interstate 15. Emmy had one of her new CDs in the stereo, and was explaining why the guitars she already had wouldn’t reproduce the sounds we were hearing. Something about the echo, or reverb, or something like that.

The guitar shop didn’t look too impressive from the small parking lot, but once inside I was blown away by the sheer number of guitars and other stringed instruments that were hanging on the walls. There were a couple of bored looking guys who seemed uninterested in helping us, dismissing us as unlikely to be real customers. Emmy wandered a bit, looking at the various guitars, while I just followed her lead. She zeroed in on one really pretty iridescent turquoise one with gold-colored metal bits, and when she took it down off its peg the sales guy finally woke up and came over really quickly. “Look! It is almost the same color as my Firebird!” she exclaimed.

“Um,” he said nervously, looking Emmy up and down. “That’s a very expensive guitar,” he said. “Please be very careful with that.” He reached to take it away from her, but she was already checking the tuning, and wasn’t about to hand it over just yet.

Satisfied with the tune, she finally looked up and acknowledged the salesman’s presence, but not his outstretched hands. “Is there an appropriate amp to try this out?” she asked sweetly. “Perhaps that Marshall over there?” she asked, pointing to an old, beat-up looking thing.

Flustered, the sales guy stammered “But… but it isn’t plugged in…”

Seeing her opening, Emmy hit him with a beaming smile, and said “If you could plug it in that would be wonderful. Oh, and I will need a cable to connect the amplifier to the guitar,” she added.

The sales guy hurried off to get her what she asked, and I just stared in amazement at how she’d just turned the encounter around. “Wow. You totally just- I mean, he was trying to give you the brush-off, and you wrapped him around your finger.”

“Yes,” she agreed. Seeing that the guy had the amp plugged in, she strolled over to the amp she’d pointed out. It looked used and abused. I had no idea why she’d picked that one when there were tons of nicer, newer ones on display.

“How long will it take to warm up?” she asked the sales guy.

“Um, maybe a minute? It’ll be ready by the time I get you hooked up,” he answered. Again, I marveled at how Emmy had simply taken control of the situation, with very little effort.

Finally hooked up, Emmy took a guitar pick from her pocket and strummed a chord. She adjusted the knobs on the guitar, strummed again, and adjusted the amp. Happy with a third strum, she started in to playing a familiar old surf tune- you know, the one that was the theme music for that old cop show set in Hawaii? I glanced over at the sales guy, and the stunned look on his face as Emmy ripped through a minute or so of the song, then Emmy switched to a slower, more twangy sounding thing. As she played, she adjusted the knobs on the guitar and gave it a sound I can only describe as big and hollow.

By this time, the other sales guy had come over, and he, too, was staring in amazement at Emmy’s playing. Emmy stopped for a moment, adjusted the settings on the amp. She then played something that sounded really, really old- like the very early days of rock and roll. It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

The first sales guy turned to the second and said “This chick can really play!” confirming my belief that the two of them hadn’t thought of Emmy as a real customer at all.

Emmy asked if she could try out another guitar, a really pretty dark green one. The second sales guy hustled over and grabbed it off the hook, bringing it back for Emmy to try. She played a bit of a song I recognized- that one about stray cats- but then handed it back.

“I think this guitar has better sound,” she said, picking up the turquoise guitar (which I later learned was called a hollow-body) again. She played the same song again, and seemed much more satisfied this time.

Another customer had walked in by this time, a middle-aged guy who looked like an old rock dude, but the two salesmen were too busy fawning over Emmy to pay him any attention. I wandered off to look at the banjos and stuff, irritated by how the two guys who worked there were behaving. It’s like they’d never seen a pitch black-skinned hot teenaged girl who could really rip it up on the guitar or something, I thought. Well, O.K., of course they hadn’t. But still…

Finally Emmy was done, and the first sales guy went to get the case for the guitar. Emmy waited while the second guy started getting together a box full of cables, strings, and who knows what. He also grabbed a dolly to wheel that nasty-looking old amp up to the counter. I strolled over as the first guy was writing down the order on one of those old-fashioned duplicate receipts. I looked down and saw the guitar was well over three thousand dollars, and the amp was almost two grand.

Seeing the sales guy do a double-take, I looked at the credit card Emmy was handing over. He asked “Is- is this real?” holding the black card up to look more closely at it.

“What?” asked Emmy. “Of course it is real. Call AmEx if you are not sure.” Her tone seemed enough reassurance for the guy, and he ran the card through and it worked just fine.

The two guys helped Emmy get the equipment into her Mini, which was kinda tough, but it fit. We blasted off, and the two stood in the parking lot, waving goodbye.

“That was surreal,” I said to Emmy as we got on the freeway. “The way that first salesman didn’t even want you to touch the guitars, then you totally turned him around. I bet you could have gotten a big chunk off the price if you’d just asked there at the end. Those guys were all over you like white on rice. I don’t even think they even noticed they had another customer.”

Emmy laughed, and agreed. “Yes, I was not what they expected, that is true.”

Changing the subject, I asked “So, Emmy, that credit card. I’d always thought those black cards were just some kind of urban legend. Is it true it has no limit?”

“I do not know,” admitted Emmy. “I am sure I could not buy a yacht, but I could buy anything reasonable with it.”

“And you think five thousand bucks for a new guitar is reasonable?” I asked, still amazed.

“Yes, for the right guitar. And the right amplifier, too.”

“Wow. Just, wow.”

“It is a very nice guitar,” Emmy said, a bit defensively.

“For that kind of money it’d better be.”

Emmy had no response, so she just put in another CD and selected the same twangy song she’d played at the shop. With full instrumentation it sounded very, very familiar.

“What song is this?” I asked.

“It is Duane Eddy playing the song called ‘Peter Gunn’. I love the sound he gets, do you?” she asked, turning up the volume. We listened to that super old-school rock and roll all the way home, and later that evening I found myself humming along to ‘Diamond Head’ by The Ventures. I hadn’t even known the name of the song or who played it that morning, and that night I couldn’t get it out of my brain.