The Inside of Out (5 page)

I myself had quit stalking Sean after a firm but gentle intervention from Hannah late freshman year. But I didn't blame the ones who'd kept trying. After all, I'd written two-fifths of an opera for the guy. That was devotion.

“We've been
Skyping,
” he was sighing to sympathetic noises from the milkmaid. “But it's just really hard, you know? Having an ocean between— Jack! My man!”

Sean Bentley high-fived in my general direction.

“And . . .” Sean pointed at me. “Daisy, right?”

He remembered my name.

“Daisy Beaumont-Smith,” the milkmaid said, a smile lifting the corner of her mouth as she recited the name I'd given them at the booth. “I'm Sophie. So glad you came.”

“Did you ever finish that opera?” Sean asked, and even though he was just being polite, I felt the blood drain from my face as I scrambled for an answer that sounded better than “Nope!”

Luckily, Raina picked that moment to gather her legal pads and smack them against the table in a smart stack. “Should we get started?”

I glared at the clock mounted above the whiteboard. Where was Hannah?

The door squeaked and I twirled in my fancy conference room chair to wave hello. But, again, not her. A younger kid with short-cropped brown hair re-shouldered his giant backpack and stared around the room. I wondered whether he'd gotten lost looking for the nurse's office.

“Welcome!” Sophie's voice was just this side of cult leader.

“Um . . .” The kid moved back a step. “Is this the club for if you're gay? The sign doesn't say.”

“It's for quilt bag students, yes,” Sophie said, and I glanced around, wondering if that had made sense to anyone else.

Raina smiled tightly. “Come in and shut the door, please, we're about to get started.”

The kid fumbled for a chair, his eyes everywhere but on us.

“I'm new too,” I offered. “Daisy Beaumont-Smith.”

“Cool. Kyle Hornsby. I'm a freshman.” He winced, as if it were a painful admission. “This room is super nice.”

Raina nodded. “They tried to marginalize us last semester by putting us next to the wood shop. We lobbied the administration, citing noise violations and health concerns, and . . .” She gestured to the room with a smirk. “We won.”

“Awesome,” I said, guessing from Sophie's flat expression that the “we” in this case was one Raina Moore, Attorney at Law.

“So. Daisy,” Raina said, her voice notably sharper than a moment ago. “Why don't
you
go first?”

Everyone turned to blink at me while I sat there trying to figure out what exactly constituted “going first.”

Hannah wasn't here. And Hannah was prompt. The promptest. That squeaky conference room door to the rest of the world was looking awfully inviting right about now. But then I looked at Raina—and saw a challenge in her eyes.

Screw it
.

I cleared my throat and stood, realizing too late that it was kind of a grandiose gesture for an audience of five.

“I'm Daisy. As you know. I . . . am very passionate about LGBTQ issues,” I started, praying that I'd gotten the acronym right. “I want to . . . um . . . fight for equal treatment and rights for every gay student.”

They were smiling at me. This seemed to be the right track.

“I mean . . .” I leaned against the chair and it swiveled but didn't fall over. “I feel like this school tries to bury issues instead of dealing with them head-on, so we need to be proactive in making sure our voices are heard.”

That was a direct quote from my mother, complaining about cafeteria options with her Real Food activist friends at our dinner table a few nights back.

Raina raised her eyebrows. She was listening. This was my in.

“Like
you,
Raina,” I said. “You lobbied the administration for a better room and you got it. I want to be a part of things like that.”

Sean leaned forward and I had to brace myself not to fall over from the blinding glow of his smile. “What kinds of
things
do you have in mind, Daisy?”

I swear he made that sound dirty.

“Well . . .” I refocused, wishing I'd thought this through in advance. “I think there should be tougher crackdowns on bullying. I want to go to a school where gay students feel comfortable bringing their boyfriends and girlfriends to dances without worrying about the football team making fun of them.”

Everyone glanced awkwardly at each other, and I went hot and prickly, insta-sweating. Had I miscalculated? Despite their losing record, the Pirates were beloved across the social spectrum, for reasons I myself could not fathom.

But then Sophie spoke up.

“Actually, Daisy, students aren't
allowed
to bring same-sex dates to dances. It's in the school rules.”

For a second, I was too surprised to speak. I'd always known that the conservative element ran strong here, and that our school wasn't exactly immune to it. But this was the twenty-first century. Marriage equality was a done deal nationwide. How could we
still
have that rule?

“We need to
fight
it!” I shouted.

There was a breath of silence, then everyone in the room started talking at once, except Raina, who squinted at her legal pad as if waiting for an answer to appear on it. I watched her, my veins thrumming.

Her eyes lit up.

Bam.
I'd won over the room. I was part of the LGBTQ solution. The only way this moment could be better was if Hannah had actually bothered to show up and witness it. I blinked a quick glare at the door.

“We should strategize,” Raina said over the chatter of the others. “Plan for prom, not homecoming.”

“Why
not
homecoming?” I was too excited to stop. “The sooner the better, I say.”

“Hear, hear!” Jack offered me a high five, but I noticed a beat too late and wound up high-fiving his shoulder. It was fine. This was amazing. I couldn't wait to tell Han. We had an agenda. We would take on the school and we would win. We would enact real, lasting change. And then maybe next year, orchestra? Might be fun to learn the violin, although the larger string instruments were arguably—

“Awww.” Sophie beamed at me, going crinkly. “You want to take your girlfriend to homecoming, don't you, Daisy?”

My chair swiveled on its own.

“Hannah von Linden?” Jack waggled his eyebrows. “No need to front, dear, it's obvious you're together.”

“Oh!” I laughed. “
Noooo
nonono. Hannah's not my girlfriend. Actually, I'm straight.”

The silence that fell was so sudden, I wondered if I'd gone momentarily deaf. Then Raina stood from the table, pointed to the door, and chirped:

“Nope! Out! Go.”

I fought to keep my smile from shaking loose. “Excuse me?”

Raina leaned over the table. “What part of ‘Not a GSA' did you not understand?”

“All of it? I guess?”

She clenched her jaw so hard I swore I heard her gears sparking.

“I'm so sorry, Daisy,” Sophie said from the end of the room. “But this group is just for students who identify as queer.”

Now everybody was smiling again, but in this
oh it's so sad
way. No, more of an
all the seats at our lunch table are taken
way.

“Okay, yeah, I . . . wow.” I picked up my backpack.

“‘Wow' is right,” Raina said, under her breath, and I was heading toward the door, I really was, but then she added, only a tiny bit softer, “More like
whack job
.”

My bag fell with a thud onto the table. “Mental illness is nothing to joke about.”

The room went freeze-frame except for Raina's hand flying to her mouth. “I—I didn't—”

“I have
not
been diagnosed with mental illness, but if I
had, I would find the term you used even
more
offensive.” Raina's hand dropped, the tilt of her eyebrows decidedly less impressed than a second ago, but who cared? I'd wanted to say that for
years
. I leaned against the table, revving up. “Also.
Also!
Don't you realize how hypocritical this is?”

Her eyes narrowed to slits. “
Excuse
me?”

“Discriminating against me based on my sexual orientation?”

Next to me, Jack Jackson murmured, “Ohhhh, this should be good.”

Raina's face went cheerleader sunny at the prospect of a debate. “Are you seriously standing here trying to appropriate—?”

I wasn't one hundred percent sure what “appropriate” meant as a verb, so I cut her off. “I'm standing here trying to help. Trying to add my voice to yours. If I'm not welcome, so be it, but just know that you're silencing me. You're doing to me exactly what you're fighting against.”

“Oh my God,” Jack said. “You are one privileged little bitch, but I think I love you.”

I blinked down at him. “Thank you?”

“She has a point, Ray.” Sean shrugged amiably. “And I know things got ugly when we were a GSA, but—”

“We're not letting cis dilettantes into our group to claim ownership over our narrative. End of story.” She scribbled something onto her legal pad as if making it official.

What in the hell did “
cis”
mean?
Should I be insulted?

Instead of asking, I snatched up my bag, ready to embrace defeat and join Chess Club with Hannah. Getting checkmated
by cocky freshmen over and over again for forty-seven minutes had to be more fun than this.

I was two inches from exiting stage left when Sophie's hand crept up.

“I might have a suggestion. In this one case.”

Everyone's eyes darted to hers and her lashes fluttered downward.

“It seems like Daisy's sincere about wanting to help change the homecoming rule.”

And
everybody looked at me.

“I am.” I leaned against the door. “I'm a very sincere person.”

At Sophie's wince, I shut up.

“So,” she continued, “why don't we let her run with this a little? And then we can decide whether being more inclusive makes sense.”

“Sounds good to me,” Sean said, drumming a swing beat on the table in celebration. “The inclusive part
and
the Daisy part.”

When he said my name, he winked.
Shameless
. Jack reached up to shake my hand and Kyle gave a rapid-fire nod, probably afraid we'd ask him to say something out loud. When I dared turn to Raina, her smirk yanked me right back down to earth.

“Fantastic! Go for it. Multiple generations of gay students haven't managed to reverse the dance rule, but hell—you're
sincere,
Daisy Beaumont-Smith
.
I'm sure you'll succeed where everybody else failed.”

“I appreciate that, Raina,” I said, partly to show how sincere I was but mostly to annoy her. She glared flaming chain saws
at me as the bell rang and we all made our way into the administrative wing.

Outside the door, Sophie motioned to an alcove beside a water fountain and ducked inside. Something in the combination of her furtive expression and peasant garb made me want to whisper
“Vive la Resistance!”

“
You
are awesome,” I said instead, following her. “I'm sorry if I put you in a weird spot.”

“Not at all.” Her voice was a normal volume but her eyes kept rising over my shoulder, presumably scanning for Raina. “It might be tricky, though. The last thing we want to be is discriminatory, but—there's a history. Ray was part of the group when it was founded. It was a GSA then, but the response from the straight students was . . . not what they'd hoped. A bunch of seniors got together and showed up to meetings to make fun of them. It became a sort of sick party. And one by one, all the gay kids dropped out. Some of them were only half out of the closet until then, so it wasn't good. Two kids ended up transferring out of the school. One tried to kill himself.”

“Oh my God.” My hand darted to my forehead. “That's
horrible
. Why didn't I hear about this?”

“I was in seventh grade when it happened. So you were probably in middle school too. And what you said about the school burying issues?” Sophie glanced at the ceiling as if making sure it wasn't bugged. “Anyway, things aren't that bad now. It was probably just a rotten batch of seniors, but when Raina and I talked about restarting the group again last year, we decided we'd create a safe haven for gay students. So
while we
love
our straight friends, we don't include them in the Alliance.”

“You know I'm not like that, right? I would never do anything to jeopardize the group.”

“I know,” she said, picking a cat hair off my shoulder. “It's just tricky.”

“Wait, hang on,” I said. “You and Raina founded the Alliance
together
?”

“We were . . . sort of”—Sophie looked down at her espadrilles—“dating at the time?”

I kept my mouth shut, but my eyes must have flashed
“Shut. Up,”
because Sophie smiled, shaking her head like even she couldn't believe it.

“It didn't last long,” she said. “We're way too different. And our visions for the group are pretty different too.”

The second bell rang and we both jumped.

“I'll do what I can for you, Daisy,” Sophie said. “Either way—thank you!”

She waved and walked off, while I lingered, trying to decipher her thanks.

Oh. Right. I was “running with this.”
This
being the huge school-policy battle that I myself had just full-on Joan of Arced. Okey dokey then.
Vive la whatever.

I glanced at the hall clock, sprinted past a flock of lost freshmen consulting school maps, and caught Hannah slipping out of Chess Club a few minutes late, shaking hands with a knobby-necked boy she'd clearly just defeated. When she spotted me, her apologetic grimace deepened.

“You missed an awesome meeting,” I said.

“I'm sorry!” She picked at her nails as we started down the hall. I swatted at her fingers before she could bite them. “I don't know why I said I'd see you there. This week has been . . . yeah, do you ever just feel like your brain's going in so many different directions that your mouth goes into autopilot—or, no, like you're sleepwalking—”

“So you weren't planning to come at all?” I pulled a loose thread on my jeans.

“It's just—” She pressed her lips together as if debating what to let out when she opened them again. “They seemed pretty standoffish.”

“They're not,” I lied, my head jerking back up. “They were super welcoming. And we have all sorts of plans already.”

“Yeah?”

I nodded. “Big ones. Confidential. I mean, you'd have to come to a meeting . . .”

Hannah's eyebrows were about as high as I'd ever seen them. Then she smiled. “It's not too late to switch, you know. I'll teach you to play chess.”

“You taught me four years ago. And I'm still horrible. All that
strategy
.” I shuddered.

“
Or
you could
skip
clubs this year and . . . I don't know . . . paint a ridiculously elaborate mural for the rec center?”

I glared her down. Her mouth twitched.

“Why would you even bring that up?” I shook my head as she snickered. “So mean.”

“You've got options, is all I'm saying. The Foodies? As one example? I'm still mad I was wrong about that.”

My stomach rumbled at the prospect of becoming a Foodie.
And yet, all through bio, it was the Alliance I kept thinking about. So Hannah wasn't exactly gung-ho about joining the yay-we're-gay club. So what? Once she found out more about their . . . no—
our
plans, she'd get involved. I could just see her, swept up in our strategy sessions, devoting all her spare time to helping fight the school's discriminatory practices, like a getting-stuff-done montage in an action movie.

And if, say,
Natalie Beck
was too cool to join our cast, then she simply wasn't going to make the final cut, now was she?

Guessing that Hannah's learn-to-drive directive hadn't taken effect within the last seven hours, I waited after school as usual outside the hideous arts wing, its 1970s lime-and-orange walls especially garish under today's overcast sky.

It was still drizzling. Maybe we could hit the beach again on the way home and Hannah could help me brainstorm an action plan for Operation Bring-Down-the-School's-Unjust-and-Antiquated-School-Dance-Policy.

Step One: Come up with snappier code name.

I knew better than to go to Principal Zimmer, at least. Mom had called him an “empty suit” enough during her school-lunch tirades that I knew who held the real power—the school board. They were having their first public meeting next Wednesday. As a member of the public, I would be there. I'd entered it into my little phone calendar and everything.

Basically I was off and running. Hannah would be beyond impressed. I grinned into the sputtering sky. A raindrop landed in my mouth. Gross.

I was staring at a dead hedge, watching a sparrow digging
for twigs in its desiccated center, when it occurred to me that Hannah was late. A few minutes later, she still hadn't shown, and then here I was, facing down a slow stream of fellow students squinting quizzically as they filed past.

“Smurfette!” one of them shouted.

Alert.

I ducked away, hoping to get lost in the sparse crowd, but he found me. QB always found me.

“Nice shirt,” he said, making fun of my Kudzu Giants album-cover tee. His friends weren't swarming this time, so I wondered who he was performing for. He dug his hands into the pockets of his hunting jacket, his face clouding. “No, I'm serious. I like that band. And their . . . music.”

QB Saunders looked, against all probability,
awkward
.

The only possible response was to out-awkward him by blurting, “I like them too.”

Before we could continue this scintillating nonversation, a neon-blue pickup pulled up and the football team's actual quarterback, Darius, waved for him to get in. QB walked backward, dodging the rain, saying, “See you around, Daisy.”

And then, dear Lord, he winked. Or tried to. His eye twitched shut, so he had to rub it to get it to open again.

Also—hang the hell on—had he just called me Daisy?

Chilled to my core, I hurried to the school parking lot to see if, against protocol, Hannah was waiting for me there.

She was, thank God. She waved over the roof of her car.

“I was about to leave you!”

Odd. It wasn't like us to get our wires crossed.

But it only took me five steps across the lot to identify the
gremlin in the works—Natalie Beck, curled up in the front of Hannah's car, examining her nails with the door shut and the window rolled up, a celebrity waiting for her driver.

“Do you mind the back? Nat got here first, so she called shotgun . . .” Hannah's face started to flood. She was never any good at hiding her nerves.

And although I was empirically better in that area, I wasn't a cool enough customer to sit in a car with Hannah and the Beck making googly eyes at each other without launching into an impromptu intervention.

So I said, “I'm meeting my mom. She's on her way. Sorry for the confusion.” And turned on my heel so I didn't have to field Hannah's skeptical glare.

I rounded the corner of the school to the rhythm of my thudding heart. What was wrong with me? Oh! Right! My best friend had been stolen by a scheming ice queen and
not even
a fun one who builds snow castles and sings power ballads.