The First Time (Babysitters Club, Charlotte/Stacey, PG)
Written for yuletide 2006.
The first time Charlotte had a crush, it was on a boy named Bruce who had red hair.
Well. That wasn’t entirely true. But the time with Bruce was the first time she had a crush and knew it was a crush. It had all the classic symptoms that she recognised even at eight, all the giggling and blushing that spelled out crush.
He was a boy. You were supposed to have crushes on boys. She knew that.
She spent hours in front of the mirror, her mother’s make-up smeared all over her face, imagining what it would be like when he finally stopped acting like an idiot and realised she was a girl.
Charlotte quickly realised that boys were silly, though at that age she didn’t appreciate this in its entirety.
***
The first time Stacey McGill left Stoneybrook to move back to New York, Charlotte cried herself to sleep for two weeks. The second time she left, three years later, Charlotte sobbed her way through a mushy movie that was on the TV and then reminded herself of what had happened the last time. Stacey had come back.
She kept believing that she would, until it was summer again and Charlotte realised it had been a year.
Two weeks later, Charlotte kissed Bruce. Not because he was cute or because he had grown up at all since they were eight years old, but he was there.
It would do.
***
The first time Charlotte started to think that she might not be as smart as she’d always been led to believe was in the tenth grade. There was a math test that she’d done well on, but not brilliantly; a paper with a B emblazoned on it instead of an A.
It wasn’t that she was dumb, she knew, but somehow she had stopped being smart, stopped being the bright kid who had to be skipped ahead a year. She looked around at the others in her class, all those people who got As on everything.
For the first time, she missed being called the teacher’s pet, because at least that had meant that she was special.
There was a showcase in the hallway where they kept all the school’s academic trophies. Charlotte had to avert her eyes every time she walked past it now. They still had some fancy math award in there, the one Stacey had got in tenth grade, the last year she’d completed at Stoneybrook High.
Charlotte was nowhere near good enough for that.
***
The first time Charlotte kissed a girl was three weeks into her academic crisis.
It was supposed to be a slumber party. Her, Becca, Sophie, Vanessa, Natalie, having the kind of girly night in that they never had anymore. But then Becca’s boyfriend had planned something special, or something, which bothered Charlotte but at least meant she wouldn’t have to hear about how Becca’s little brother was getting on at his separate smart-kid school and feel like the dumbest person in the world, and Sophie had an overdue paper, and Natalie had a family thing, so it was just the two of them.
Vanessa Pike was, Charlotte thought, probably too cool for her now. It was only the fact that they’d grown up together that kept them being friends. They knew too much about each other; they had to stay on good terms.
Vanessa brought over some beers she’d 'borrowed' from her older brothers, and made some comment about how the others would so never dare take even a little sip, which made Charlotte smile and take a gulp, then another, and another.
Smart girls didn’t drink. They spent their Saturday nights all alone, learning pointless redundant facts to regurgitate for their next test. They were sensible. They were boring.
Charlotte wasn’t a smart girl anymore. So when Vanessa leaned over to press her lips against Charlotte’s, Charlotte kissed her back.
***
The first time Charlotte didn’t reply to an email from Stacey was a month later, when Stacey asked about how she was getting on in school, how her friends were, whether she was seeing anyone.
She couldn’t find the words to explain that even when she was in school, she was always somewhere else. She sat in class and daydreamed and thought and analysed, and she skipped class and hid out somewhere with Vanessa, and she marvelled at the fact that no one seemed to know.
She couldn’t figure out how to tell Stacey that she wasn’t seeing anyone, exactly, but that she was maybe sort-of seeing a someone and it was a girl someone.
She tried telling herself that Stacey was a sophisticated city girl who had seen it all and maybe done it all, and that maybe even -
No. She wasn’t going to be an idiot about Stacey. She wasn’t going to even let herself consider that possibility for a second.
She just wasn’t going to say anything.
***
The first time Charlotte cried at a wedding was when she had just turned eighteen. She was home from college for the summer, back in Stoneybrook to escape from the world where everyone seemed smarter than she was, and when her mom told her that Stacey was moving back, that she was getting married, it didn’t feel real.
Stacey had always been older, wiser, smarter, but when had she become that much older? She was barely out of college.
It was some guy named Pete she’d gone to school with. They were all ready to settle down in this small town and raise their kids and - and, what, Charlotte thought, have a white picket fence on top of it all?
But then she heard people talking at the wedding, in whispered gossipy tones, and she saw how Stacey looked tired, not beautiful, in her white dress, and she understood it all, horribly.
She went to the reception and spent the first hour sobbing in the bathroom, and then ten minutes redoing her make-up, because it was too early in the day to be drunk enough for that much crying, too early for tears to be about anything other than that.
When she rejoined the group, one of Pete’s friends, a guy named Alan, kept buying her drinks, and it occurred to Charlotte that he was Stacey’s age, and that he wanted her, and that she wasn’t too young anymore, and that it was too late.
She let him take her back to his place, because it was better than another round of crying helplessly.
***
The first time Charlotte really felt like an adult was a summer later. She was sitting for Rose - Stacey always called her if she needed a sitter during vacation time, the only person still in their teens that Stacey would trust with a daughter who wasn’t even a year old yet - and when Stacey and Pete came home early and mad, Charlotte knew enough to read between the lines, to know that Pete had been caught out at having an affair.
She knew enough to bring Rose upstairs and put her to bed, to quietly return and remove various breakables from the kitchen where Stacey and Pete were yelling at one another, to put the kettle on for tea after Pete had left, to let Stacey rant about him until the early hours of the morning. She knew enough to expect the tears when they came, and to know that none of her words would be any use.
Charlotte made breakfast in the morning, and made sure Stacey was in a fit state to go to work, and that Rose was going to be okay, and only let herself feel just how much it hurt when she was safe in her own house.
***
The first time Charlotte brought a girlfriend home, she was twenty-one, and they were already inside, fingers unmistakably intertwined, when she realised that they had company.
This was not supposed to be that hard. She was ready for it. She had thought she was ready for it.
But she was not ready for this. Introducing Anna to her mom and dad was okay. It was not difficult. She had rehearsed it in her head a thousand times.
Her voice shook when she said, “And this is, um, Stacey. She’s a - a family friend.”
That’s one way of putting it, a little hysterical voice in her head said.
Anna’s fingers tightened around hers supportively, appreciating the awkwardness, but for all the wrong reasons.
***
The first time Charlotte was ever broken up with - she had decided that Vanessa didn’t count, since they had never really been together-together in the first place - was when she was twenty-two, and Anna got mad because she was spending so much time at Stacey’s.
Charlotte had her excuses - the long and complicated divorce between Stacey and Pete had just been finalised, Stacey needed someone to help around the house, to help with Rose, just to talk to - but there was no way to recover from the too-long pause in the argument after Anna asked, “Are you in love with her or something?”
When Stacey asked about how Anna was, and Charlotte said they’d broken up, her excuse was that they had different priorities.
It sounded like a sufficiently grown-up thing to say. Charlotte was a responsible adult now, gainfully employed and saving for her own place. Different priorities were what responsible adults broke up over, right?
They did not break up over stupid childhood infatuations that were long overdue to fizzle out.
***
The first time Charlotte admitted out loud that she might possibly be a little bit in love with Stacey McGill was at Mallory Pike’s wedding.
She had possibly had a few too many cocktails, and it was a wedding and everyone was so happy and paired-off and Vanessa was engaged, and it wasn’t that Charlotte was jealous but she was alone and twenty-three and single, which wasn’t the worst thing in the world to be by a long shot but it felt it, at weddings.
She confessed everything to Byron Pike because he was a good listener, because he was also alone at the wedding, and because she figured he was, out of everyone she’d known who’d 'experimented’ in their youth, the most likely to take her seriously instead of just going on about it being a phase.
“I can’t tell her,” she said. “She’s - she’s Stacey. She’s a mom and she’s a grown-up and she still thinks of me like I’m eight and smart and good and I’m not and I’m a mess and she’s -”
“You’re not a mess,” he said firmly, and offered up a few more platitudes that she forgot seconds after they were uttered.
What she did remember, even the next day through her pounding headache, was what he’d said about how they were all so different now. How things had changed. Charlotte wasn’t the good-sweet-smart kid anymore. And Stacey - Stacey wasn’t a beautiful-stylish-brilliant teenager anymore.
She wondered who it was, exactly, that she was in love with.
***
The first time Charlotte said “I love you” was at Rose’s sixth birthday party.
She hadn’t brought a date. It hadn’t even occurred to her.
It was the first birthday Rose had celebrated since starting school, and when Stacey introduced Charlotte to the new sets of parents, all she said was, “This is Charlotte.”
It didn’t mean much to her, or anything, really, until she was sticking a band-aid on Rose’s knee after she’d grazed it, and one of the mothers said something about how good she was with her and asked tactfully or tried to about whether she and Stacey had thought about another child and Charlotte stared at her in silence until there was a flustered embarrassed apology and then she forced herself to laugh and say it was all right even though it wasn’t.
She slipped out of the room as soon as she could, fleeing to the guest bedroom upstairs, the room she’d slept in at least a couple of times a month ever since Stacey had moved into this house. She stayed over after dinner, sometimes, or if Stacey had an early morning and wanted someone to make sure Rose got to school okay.
But it was a guest room, still, wasn’t it?
She wasn’t - why did they -
She’d been watching Stacey all day, watching her talk to the other parents, watching her with the kids, watching her be almost-thirty and domestic and small-town and motherly. She’d been watching her ever since that conversation with Byron Pike almost a year ago. She’d been watching her be an adult, someone who couldn’t ever possibly -
Except that there was at least one woman at this party who thought that it was possible.
She was still sitting on the bed, biting her nails, when Stacey tapped on the door.
“Are you all right?”
Charlotte nodded.
Stacey sat down next to her. “You sure?”
Charlotte took a deep breath, and then another, before staring determinedly at the floor and saying it. “I love you.”
There was an unbearable silence, and Stacey’s voice was shaky when she finally spoke. “You mean that, don’t you? I mean - you mean it - like -”
“Yeah. Like that.” Charlotte summoned the courage to look up. Stacey was the one scrutinising the floor now.
“I’m going to get back down to the party,” Charlotte said, standing up.
There were fingers wrapped around her wrist, pulling her back. “Wait.”
***
The first time Charlotte kissed Stacey, there were ten parents plus an assortment of hyper five- and six-year-olds running around downstairs waiting for cake to be served, and neither of them cared.
It was not exactly the ideal situation that Charlotte had pictured, in all the years she’d thought about this, and what kissing Stacey would be like, but it was perfect all the same. It had the one element she had never dared include in her fantasies: Stacey kissing her back.
Stacey’s mouth was pressed against hers and Stacey was kissing her back.
“Mommy!” An impatient Rose was calling up the stairs. “Can we have the cake now?”
They broke apart. Charlotte looked at Stacey, and then they both burst into giggles. Like being a kid again, she thought, only not.
“We should - ” she began.
“Cake,” Stacey supplied, and then they started laughing again.
***
The first time Charlotte had a crush, it was on a girl named Stacey who had blonde hair and who was, in Charlotte’s eyes, absolutely perfect.
Of course, she didn’t know it was a crush. She was seven years old and even if she had known it was a crush, she wouldn’t have known what to think about it.
The first time she fell in love, she was older and wiser and knew exactly what it was.
She had to wait until she was twenty-four to find out that she was loved back, but she was old enough by then to know that it was more than worth it.
The first time Charlotte had a crush, it was on a boy named Bruce who had red hair.
Well. That wasn’t entirely true. But the time with Bruce was the first time she had a crush and knew it was a crush. It had all the classic symptoms that she recognised even at eight, all the giggling and blushing that spelled out crush.
He was a boy. You were supposed to have crushes on boys. She knew that.
She spent hours in front of the mirror, her mother’s make-up smeared all over her face, imagining what it would be like when he finally stopped acting like an idiot and realised she was a girl.
Charlotte quickly realised that boys were silly, though at that age she didn’t appreciate this in its entirety.
***
The first time Stacey McGill left Stoneybrook to move back to New York, Charlotte cried herself to sleep for two weeks. The second time she left, three years later, Charlotte sobbed her way through a mushy movie that was on the TV and then reminded herself of what had happened the last time. Stacey had come back.
She kept believing that she would, until it was summer again and Charlotte realised it had been a year.
Two weeks later, Charlotte kissed Bruce. Not because he was cute or because he had grown up at all since they were eight years old, but he was there.
It would do.
***
The first time Charlotte started to think that she might not be as smart as she’d always been led to believe was in the tenth grade. There was a math test that she’d done well on, but not brilliantly; a paper with a B emblazoned on it instead of an A.
It wasn’t that she was dumb, she knew, but somehow she had stopped being smart, stopped being the bright kid who had to be skipped ahead a year. She looked around at the others in her class, all those people who got As on everything.
For the first time, she missed being called the teacher’s pet, because at least that had meant that she was special.
There was a showcase in the hallway where they kept all the school’s academic trophies. Charlotte had to avert her eyes every time she walked past it now. They still had some fancy math award in there, the one Stacey had got in tenth grade, the last year she’d completed at Stoneybrook High.
Charlotte was nowhere near good enough for that.
***
The first time Charlotte kissed a girl was three weeks into her academic crisis.
It was supposed to be a slumber party. Her, Becca, Sophie, Vanessa, Natalie, having the kind of girly night in that they never had anymore. But then Becca’s boyfriend had planned something special, or something, which bothered Charlotte but at least meant she wouldn’t have to hear about how Becca’s little brother was getting on at his separate smart-kid school and feel like the dumbest person in the world, and Sophie had an overdue paper, and Natalie had a family thing, so it was just the two of them.
Vanessa Pike was, Charlotte thought, probably too cool for her now. It was only the fact that they’d grown up together that kept them being friends. They knew too much about each other; they had to stay on good terms.
Vanessa brought over some beers she’d 'borrowed' from her older brothers, and made some comment about how the others would so never dare take even a little sip, which made Charlotte smile and take a gulp, then another, and another.
Smart girls didn’t drink. They spent their Saturday nights all alone, learning pointless redundant facts to regurgitate for their next test. They were sensible. They were boring.
Charlotte wasn’t a smart girl anymore. So when Vanessa leaned over to press her lips against Charlotte’s, Charlotte kissed her back.
***
The first time Charlotte didn’t reply to an email from Stacey was a month later, when Stacey asked about how she was getting on in school, how her friends were, whether she was seeing anyone.
She couldn’t find the words to explain that even when she was in school, she was always somewhere else. She sat in class and daydreamed and thought and analysed, and she skipped class and hid out somewhere with Vanessa, and she marvelled at the fact that no one seemed to know.
She couldn’t figure out how to tell Stacey that she wasn’t seeing anyone, exactly, but that she was maybe sort-of seeing a someone and it was a girl someone.
She tried telling herself that Stacey was a sophisticated city girl who had seen it all and maybe done it all, and that maybe even -
No. She wasn’t going to be an idiot about Stacey. She wasn’t going to even let herself consider that possibility for a second.
She just wasn’t going to say anything.
***
The first time Charlotte cried at a wedding was when she had just turned eighteen. She was home from college for the summer, back in Stoneybrook to escape from the world where everyone seemed smarter than she was, and when her mom told her that Stacey was moving back, that she was getting married, it didn’t feel real.
Stacey had always been older, wiser, smarter, but when had she become that much older? She was barely out of college.
It was some guy named Pete she’d gone to school with. They were all ready to settle down in this small town and raise their kids and - and, what, Charlotte thought, have a white picket fence on top of it all?
But then she heard people talking at the wedding, in whispered gossipy tones, and she saw how Stacey looked tired, not beautiful, in her white dress, and she understood it all, horribly.
She went to the reception and spent the first hour sobbing in the bathroom, and then ten minutes redoing her make-up, because it was too early in the day to be drunk enough for that much crying, too early for tears to be about anything other than that.
When she rejoined the group, one of Pete’s friends, a guy named Alan, kept buying her drinks, and it occurred to Charlotte that he was Stacey’s age, and that he wanted her, and that she wasn’t too young anymore, and that it was too late.
She let him take her back to his place, because it was better than another round of crying helplessly.
***
The first time Charlotte really felt like an adult was a summer later. She was sitting for Rose - Stacey always called her if she needed a sitter during vacation time, the only person still in their teens that Stacey would trust with a daughter who wasn’t even a year old yet - and when Stacey and Pete came home early and mad, Charlotte knew enough to read between the lines, to know that Pete had been caught out at having an affair.
She knew enough to bring Rose upstairs and put her to bed, to quietly return and remove various breakables from the kitchen where Stacey and Pete were yelling at one another, to put the kettle on for tea after Pete had left, to let Stacey rant about him until the early hours of the morning. She knew enough to expect the tears when they came, and to know that none of her words would be any use.
Charlotte made breakfast in the morning, and made sure Stacey was in a fit state to go to work, and that Rose was going to be okay, and only let herself feel just how much it hurt when she was safe in her own house.
***
The first time Charlotte brought a girlfriend home, she was twenty-one, and they were already inside, fingers unmistakably intertwined, when she realised that they had company.
This was not supposed to be that hard. She was ready for it. She had thought she was ready for it.
But she was not ready for this. Introducing Anna to her mom and dad was okay. It was not difficult. She had rehearsed it in her head a thousand times.
Her voice shook when she said, “And this is, um, Stacey. She’s a - a family friend.”
That’s one way of putting it, a little hysterical voice in her head said.
Anna’s fingers tightened around hers supportively, appreciating the awkwardness, but for all the wrong reasons.
***
The first time Charlotte was ever broken up with - she had decided that Vanessa didn’t count, since they had never really been together-together in the first place - was when she was twenty-two, and Anna got mad because she was spending so much time at Stacey’s.
Charlotte had her excuses - the long and complicated divorce between Stacey and Pete had just been finalised, Stacey needed someone to help around the house, to help with Rose, just to talk to - but there was no way to recover from the too-long pause in the argument after Anna asked, “Are you in love with her or something?”
When Stacey asked about how Anna was, and Charlotte said they’d broken up, her excuse was that they had different priorities.
It sounded like a sufficiently grown-up thing to say. Charlotte was a responsible adult now, gainfully employed and saving for her own place. Different priorities were what responsible adults broke up over, right?
They did not break up over stupid childhood infatuations that were long overdue to fizzle out.
***
The first time Charlotte admitted out loud that she might possibly be a little bit in love with Stacey McGill was at Mallory Pike’s wedding.
She had possibly had a few too many cocktails, and it was a wedding and everyone was so happy and paired-off and Vanessa was engaged, and it wasn’t that Charlotte was jealous but she was alone and twenty-three and single, which wasn’t the worst thing in the world to be by a long shot but it felt it, at weddings.
She confessed everything to Byron Pike because he was a good listener, because he was also alone at the wedding, and because she figured he was, out of everyone she’d known who’d 'experimented’ in their youth, the most likely to take her seriously instead of just going on about it being a phase.
“I can’t tell her,” she said. “She’s - she’s Stacey. She’s a mom and she’s a grown-up and she still thinks of me like I’m eight and smart and good and I’m not and I’m a mess and she’s -”
“You’re not a mess,” he said firmly, and offered up a few more platitudes that she forgot seconds after they were uttered.
What she did remember, even the next day through her pounding headache, was what he’d said about how they were all so different now. How things had changed. Charlotte wasn’t the good-sweet-smart kid anymore. And Stacey - Stacey wasn’t a beautiful-stylish-brilliant teenager anymore.
She wondered who it was, exactly, that she was in love with.
***
The first time Charlotte said “I love you” was at Rose’s sixth birthday party.
She hadn’t brought a date. It hadn’t even occurred to her.
It was the first birthday Rose had celebrated since starting school, and when Stacey introduced Charlotte to the new sets of parents, all she said was, “This is Charlotte.”
It didn’t mean much to her, or anything, really, until she was sticking a band-aid on Rose’s knee after she’d grazed it, and one of the mothers said something about how good she was with her and asked tactfully or tried to about whether she and Stacey had thought about another child and Charlotte stared at her in silence until there was a flustered embarrassed apology and then she forced herself to laugh and say it was all right even though it wasn’t.
She slipped out of the room as soon as she could, fleeing to the guest bedroom upstairs, the room she’d slept in at least a couple of times a month ever since Stacey had moved into this house. She stayed over after dinner, sometimes, or if Stacey had an early morning and wanted someone to make sure Rose got to school okay.
But it was a guest room, still, wasn’t it?
She wasn’t - why did they -
She’d been watching Stacey all day, watching her talk to the other parents, watching her with the kids, watching her be almost-thirty and domestic and small-town and motherly. She’d been watching her ever since that conversation with Byron Pike almost a year ago. She’d been watching her be an adult, someone who couldn’t ever possibly -
Except that there was at least one woman at this party who thought that it was possible.
She was still sitting on the bed, biting her nails, when Stacey tapped on the door.
“Are you all right?”
Charlotte nodded.
Stacey sat down next to her. “You sure?”
Charlotte took a deep breath, and then another, before staring determinedly at the floor and saying it. “I love you.”
There was an unbearable silence, and Stacey’s voice was shaky when she finally spoke. “You mean that, don’t you? I mean - you mean it - like -”
“Yeah. Like that.” Charlotte summoned the courage to look up. Stacey was the one scrutinising the floor now.
“I’m going to get back down to the party,” Charlotte said, standing up.
There were fingers wrapped around her wrist, pulling her back. “Wait.”
***
The first time Charlotte kissed Stacey, there were ten parents plus an assortment of hyper five- and six-year-olds running around downstairs waiting for cake to be served, and neither of them cared.
It was not exactly the ideal situation that Charlotte had pictured, in all the years she’d thought about this, and what kissing Stacey would be like, but it was perfect all the same. It had the one element she had never dared include in her fantasies: Stacey kissing her back.
Stacey’s mouth was pressed against hers and Stacey was kissing her back.
“Mommy!” An impatient Rose was calling up the stairs. “Can we have the cake now?”
They broke apart. Charlotte looked at Stacey, and then they both burst into giggles. Like being a kid again, she thought, only not.
“We should - ” she began.
“Cake,” Stacey supplied, and then they started laughing again.
***
The first time Charlotte had a crush, it was on a girl named Stacey who had blonde hair and who was, in Charlotte’s eyes, absolutely perfect.
Of course, she didn’t know it was a crush. She was seven years old and even if she had known it was a crush, she wouldn’t have known what to think about it.
The first time she fell in love, she was older and wiser and knew exactly what it was.
She had to wait until she was twenty-four to find out that she was loved back, but she was old enough by then to know that it was more than worth it.