“Going into the stockpile?” she asked with a grin.
“You know it.” Andi put her phone aside and dunked a carrot stick into freshly made hummus. “Last time I tagged these guys, they sent me a twenty-five-dollar gift certificate.” She popped the carrot into her mouth, chewed, then asked, “So, what’s new? How’s life?”
Cherry adored Andi. She was so cool and so much of what Cherry wanted to be. At thirty-nine, she was a few years older than her, but she gave Cherry something to shoot for. A visible goal. “It’s good. My day job is annoying. No. That’s a lie. Mysupervisorat my day job is annoying. Just a miserable human.”
“Your posts look great. I loved your beach stuff.”
She blushed a little. She could feel it. Andi was referring to her posts from two weekends ago where she’d walked the shores of BlackCherry Lake, found rocks and shells, and generally talked about spring. “It was freaking cold,” she said with a laugh.
“Yeah, Julianne pointed out how rosy your cheeks were. She said it made you look all cute.” Andi’s wife of four years featured prominently in a ton of her posts. She told Cherry once that she felt it was important to portray a regular married life so straight people could see that queer people weren’t any different. So Andi hashtagged things like #wifelife and #datenight so they’d show up in places right alongside married straight couples.
“Thanks, Jules,” Cherry said with a soft laugh, even though she’d never met the woman. “Glad freezing my ass off made me cute.”
“The things we do for our art, am I right?”
Hanging out with Andi was easy, and Cherry loved that about her. Despite having a huge queer following online, she was extremely chill. Very real. Nothing phony or uptight about her. Cherry wanted to be like that, but her control-freak tendencies made it difficult. “What’s up next for you?” she asked, taking a bite of her Greek salad. “Any travel?”
“I’ve got a trip to the Adirondacks coming up fairly soon. There’s a sporting goods store there that wants me to take some shots, rent a kayak, stuff like that. Jules has to work, so she can’t come with me, which is a bummer.” And it was—Cherry could tell by the dejected look on Andi’s face. She wondered what it was like to be that in love with somebody else. Andi seemed to shake herself and then grinned at her and lifted one shoulder. “Ah, well. What can you do, right? How about you? What’s going on with you?”
“Doing the Barkathon this weekend at that animal shelter near the park.”
“Junebug Farms? Cool. Yourgirlfriendgonna be there?” Andi made air quotes and gave her head a small shake. She was the one person in the world who knew there was no girlfriend now, that Alyssa was long gone, and the partner Cherry referred to often in her posts was fictitious.
“Yeah, she is.” A grimace. “I know, I know.”
Andi shook her head. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again—it’s deception. People don’t like being deceived.”
“I know,” Cherry said again, and she did her best to keep her irritation in check. “But my followers are much more engaged with posts that include reference to my partner.” She had no idea why, butthe first time she’d posted anything with Alyssa, people were all over it. What a cute couple they were. How long had they been together? Where did they meet? And once Alyssa had left and Cherry had fibbed and told a little white lie about having a new sweetheart, she felt she had no choice but to keep fibbing. Her following grew, her likes increased. She’d never given her fake girlfriend a name, never posted any kind of photo, obviously, but referred to her sweetie, her partner, her better half often.
Andi made no comment, just shook her head. Cherry knew how she felt, so there really wasn’t any need for discussion.
“You got your dog from Junebug, didn’t you?” she asked, desperate to change the subject.
It worked. Because coaxing Andi into talking about her dog was the second-best way—after coaxing her into talking about Julianne—to get her to light up. And light up, she did.
“Yes! They’re so great there. I forgot Barkathon was this weekend. Maybe I’ll go and bring Auggie. Would make for some good posts. Queers love their dogs.”
Cherry smiled at the line she’d just muttered to herself earlier. “I wish I could get a dog. Maybe one day.”
“Why can’t you?”
“I have two roommates, and we’re all on different schedules. Plus, I don’t really have the time right now.”
“That’s really responsible of you.” When she gave Andi a skeptical look, Andi added, “No, really. You’re being honest with yourself, and you seem to know that a dog would need more of you than you can offer at the moment. You’ll know when the time’s right.”
“One day,” Cherry agreed. A quick glance at her phone told her she had about twenty minutes to get to her next appointment, so they wrapped up their conversation and headed outside into the cool spring air. “I’ll look for you this weekend then,” she said as she wrapped Andi in a hug.
“Definitely.”
They said their good-byes and went in opposite directions. As Cherry slid into her car, she hopped on Instagram and called up Andi’s page. Looking at her posts that included Julianne, she felt a little twinge. An unexpected one. She’d been on her own for a long time now, focused on her work and her online trajectory. Alyssa had been gone for almosttwo years. Dating barely made her top five things that were important to her, but every now and then, that little poke would happen. Like a little person that lived inside her was saying,Hey, look at that. You want that, don’t you?She looked at a photo from four years ago. Andi and Julianne on their honeymoon in the Bahamas. On the beach. Sun-kissed skin. Jules in a hot pink bikini, her mass of dark curls blowing in the beach breeze. Andi in a swimsuit of boy shorts and a sports-bra-like top, her hair her natural blond. The two of them looking happier than anybody had a right to be…and there was the twinge again. And then something weird happened. Something unexpected and confusing and…perfect. Cherry’s brain replaced Andi and Julianne with Cherry and Ellis the waitress from Sunny Side Up. It was them on the beach. Ellis in a bikini. Ellis smiling at her with love in her eyes that was clear to anybody who looked, her gaze on Cherry as they held hands and ran together into water so crystal-clear green-blue that it didn’t even look real. She stared, tipped her head, stared some more, and warmth filled her chest because what if—
HONK!
A car horn blasted her back to the present, and she jumped in her seat, startled.
“What the hell was that?” she asked and let herself believe she was asking about the car horn and not about…the other thing.
* * *
