Bottled

Sitting beside the girl she likes, C tries to gather up the courage to finally spill her secret. But she can’t do it.

Once, she had a slur yelled at her. And half an hour later she was catcalled. She took both as compliments, and she took both as vile. Each yeller had only seen her for a second, but they thought they knew her. They thought they saw right through her.

It wasn’t even the right slur. The slur-yeller had misdiagnosed her. He had yelled it out in front of his child. The child laughed. In her little leftie suburb, they yelled and laughed at her.

It was the third time something like that had happened in the space of two weeks. None of them had used the right slurs. That shouldn’t have mattered, but it mattered to C.

The catcaller was sort of right. She did look hot, but she didn’t need him to tell her that.

She gets so nervous when she tries to compliment people. She worries they’ll think she’s seeing through them, and assuming she knows them without really seeing them at all. She worries she’ll be another unsolicited yell out a car window.

Once – not just once, hundreds of times – at the start of high school, the PE change rooms were loud with the barking of one particular girl. She had a permanent sneer and she liked to yell about all the lesbians who were probably watching her get changed. She only knew of two lesbians in C’s year level and C was one of them. It didn’t matter that she kept her eyes on the wall as she got changed. It didn’t matter that she sometimes got dressed in the toilet cubicle. It didn’t matter that she had to take her glasses off to change shirts and couldn’t see the loud girl at all. It didn’t matter that C never, ever looked her way.

Twice, C came out to friends whose first question was whether C had a crush on them. The moment passed so quickly – and then C’s coming out was no longer about her, it was about them. It was about whether she would look at them differently in a changeroom. There was something in their voices when they asked it – hope or worry, she wasn’t sure. When she said no, she didn’t like them like that, they seemed relieved and disappointed, both at once.

She shouldn’t have had to answer the question. They would never have liked her back anyway. They would not have tolerated C asking them the same question.

The thing that scared her about the slur-yeller and the catcaller was the ease of their shouts. They didn’t have her problem. They just yelled and the words flowed out easily. They laughed and moved on. C clung to what had happened, balling it into her pocket to look at later when she could sit quietly in her room and let herself cry about it.

C worries, as she sits beside the girl she likes and listens to her talk about art and books and films, that the girl can see right through her. That she can see that C likes her, and C worries that she would be relieved if C denied it.

C doesn’t know how to deny things like that anymore. But still, she can’t push the words out.

The girl turns to her, elbows her gently. She doesn’t speak, but a smile twitches in the corners of her mouth.

She sees her. She knows her. But she doesn’t have to say it.

Lydia is a queer writer, editor, and artist who works, studies, and lives on Wurundjeri land.