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wasn’t for her and had left after homeroom. But that wasn’t the option I was hoping for when lunch began.
    “You misplace your attention span?” my best friend, Teddy, asked when he caught me looking around.
    “There’s this new girl,” I said.
    Teddy snorted. “Now, that didn’t take long, did it?”
    Teddy was once the new kid, too. He was born in California, but he spent most of elementary school in Korea. Then his parents moved back to California when he was in sixth grade. In tenth grade, they moved again, this time to our town. That’s when I met him—the first day of tenth grade. I hated him almost instantly.
    His first words to me were “If you’re not a [not nice word for lesbian], you sure as hell dress like one.”
    I must’ve immediately looked miffed, because he quickly added, “Hey, to me [not nice word for lesbian] is an affectionate term. After all, I’m a big ol’ [rather sexually explicit word for gay man].”
    I wasn’t ready for terms, affectionate or otherwise, from him. I was still coming to terms with myself, dealing with the anxiety and disappointment and exhilaration of being into girls. I tried avoiding him for months. It didn’t work.
    “You got it bad, and that ain’t good,” he said to me now.
    “She called me Miss Lucy,” I told him.
    This made Heron, also at our table, perk up. She’d been reading. She was always reading. She was the only person I knew who’d gotten carpal tunnel syndrome from holding books for too long.
    “Miss Lucy is our thing,” she said. She wasn’t saying it out of jealousy or possessiveness. It was like she wanted to remind herself.
    “Where is she?” I asked Teddy. “Use your gaydar.”
    “You
know
gaydar isn’t like air-traffic control,” he tsked. “The person actually has to be in the room.”
    “Well, she’s not here,” I said. “So I’m going to find her.”
    “That’s ballsy,” Teddy said.
    I looked to Heron for some help.
    “Why not?” she said. That was her version of advice.
    As I left the cafeteria, it became a test: If I found her, surely that was a sign that things were meant to be. Granted, the sign wouldn’t really spell out what those things were—it would be like a street sign that said STUFF AHEAD . But that was good enough for me.
    I found her in the parking lot, leaning on a blue car, eating French fries.
    “I had to reward myself for surviving the morning,” she explained, offering me some.
    “That bad?” I asked, taking a few.
    “Yeah, but not without its prospects.”
    I was so used to being the brazen one that I just about flipped to have someone be brazen in my direction.
    “Prospects, eh?” I said, fishing for confirmation.
    “Yes, Miss Lucy,” she replied, stretching away from the car, toward me. “And I believe the afternoon’s already getting better.”
             
    You should never kiss someone in the first ten minutes. I know that now, but back then it just seemed like nine minutes too long to wait.
             
    “So, are you girlfriends or what?” Teddy asked me, three weeks after Ashley and I started our thing.
    The only place I called her
girlfriend
was in my head. Sometimes I’d say it about a million dozen times in a row, staring at her in class. I wasn’t secret about it or anything. Hunger is something you can’t hide.
    “I dunno,” I told him. “I think I’m her girlfriend, and I guess she’s mine. We don’t talk about it.”
    “If you’re not girlfriends, then what are you?” he pestered.
    I didn’t tell him the answer, because I was too proud of it and also a little embarrassed by my pride.
    Even if I wasn’t her girlfriend, I was definitely her Miss Lucy.
    “Come over here, Miss Lucy, and give me a hand,” she’d say, and I’d be over in a flash, whether it was to sort out her locker, fill in her homework, or unhook her bra.
    “I like you, Miss Lucy,” she’d tell me, and I’d have to do everything I could not to lob a
love
back at