Fic: The Circle of Acceptable Women (skating, Meryl/Tanith)
It's September, and I'm back in fandom more or less, once I get past the craziness of today. Here's fic for femslash10! For willowbell, whose requests were fantastic.
Title: The Circle of Acceptable Women
Fandom: figure skating RPF
Pairings: Meryl Davis/Tanith Belbin, Meryl/f
Rating: R for sexual content
Warnings: None standard.
Summary: Meryl will always be in love with Tanith. Someday, Tanith will catch up.
Word Count: about 4,900.
Disclaimers: This is a work of fiction. The characters herein are based on real people, but the words and events are completely made up. They are not intended to be mistaken for fact, and no libel is intended. This original work of fan fiction is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License; attribution should include a link to this Livejournal post.
Notes: Thanks to thistle90 and annaalamode for beta reading and making me stop stressing about this. The title is adapted from Audre Lorde.
*
[thirteen]
Meryl sat in the lobby of the new rink, doing her algebra homework while she waited for her mom to pick her up and take her to school. After a six-AM lesson on the Starlight Waltz, math seemed refreshingly easy. The new rink was a different world from the one she and Charlie had skated at before. For the first time, they were skating among kids who were as good as them, maybe better. Their stern Russian coaches demanded deeper edges, more power, and more speed. They weren't stars anymore: they were the new team, the same dorky outcasts they both were at school.
The queen of the rink was a girl named Tanith. In addition to her impossibly lyrical name, Tanith was tall, blonde, and so gorgeous she had done actual modeling in Canada. Her boyfriend, Fedor, was the coach's son. She was nice to Meryl in an icy, superior way, but Meryl daydreamed about becoming her best friend. Tanith could teach Meryl how to wear makeup - not just the caked-on stuff for competitions, but an everyday natural look that would keep everyone from assuming Meryl was nine years old. she would teach Meryl to be terribly cool. And then, as they strolled through the mall on a warm afternoon, Meryl's hand would brush Tanith's, and Tanith would turn to kiss Meryl softly and say she loved Meryl most of all, so much more than the coach's son.
Meryl knew the daydreams weren't supposed to go in that direction. Maybe the growth hormones she was taking were messing her up. But she liked the fantasies because they were private and romantic, as improbable and epic as her favorite books. They made her breath quicken and her hands warm, made her think about all of the body parts with technical names she'd learned in to label in health class and understand why people made such a big deal out of them.
Tanith walked by with her bag over her shoulder, dressed for practice, not school. She was homeschooled in one of those charter programs so she could focus on skating full-time. Meryl's parents wouldn't let her do that because they wanted her to have friends and a normal life. They didn't understand that she never would: she was too weird and quiet, too tiny and mousy, to ever fit in. Only on the ice did she feel beautiful and at home.
Tanith stopped in front of Meryl, looming over her until she looked up from the math problems that had become remote and inconsequential. "Excuse me?" Tanith said. "Hi."
"Oh. Hi."
"I just wanted you to know?" Tanith said, and Meryl can only think of the many times in her life when that phrase had been followed by a snide comment about her outfit or personality. The speech usually ended with no offense and a flip of the hair as Meryl sat stunned, unable to think of a comeback.
But Tanith was saying, "I'm having a sleepover this weekend. All the other girls really want to get to know you better. I mean, if you want to."
Meryl instantly thought of ten ways this could be a trap ending in humiliation. "You don't really, do you?"
"Why wouldn't I?" Tanith said sweetly, seeming confused.
"I - I don't know."
"I knew it!" Tanith sat down next to Meryl, close enough to excite Meryl and make her cringe. "You're just shy. Some of the other kids think you're stuck up, but that didn't seem right."
"Maybe I'm stuck up and shy." Meryl smiled: she felt like she'd been given a secret identity.
"Maybe you're my new best friend," Tanith said. Meryl suspected that Tanith's word was deed, and if not, it didn't matter, because Meryl was going to do everything she could to make it true.
[fifteen]
Tanith's sleepovers were legendary and exclusive. Sometimes there was crime: underage drinking, group streaking, midnight excursions to TP the houses of skaters who were new or unpopular. Meryl loved those wild nights - the adrenaline rush of getting away with them. Otherwise, she was studious and obedient, no rebel at all.
The quieter nights, the ones with manicures and movies, she loved less. There was nowhere to look except for Tanith in her pajamas, fresh and soft. Meryl's crush wasn't heartbreaking anymore - that was junior high stuff - but she still felt it intensely. When they gave each other sleepover massages, Meryl prayed Tanith's hand would slip and touch her breast.
Worst was when the conversation turned to boys. The others knew that Meryl was shy and private by nature and didn't normally goad her into participating. They were too preoccupied with their own hearts, anyway, to really care who Meryl liked.
But tonight, it seemed like every girl but Meryl was in a particular mood. "Here's how it works," Brooke said, holding up a pink teddy bear in ice skates. Its name was Roscoe, and it was the scapegoat whenever they got caught. Who egged your car? Oh, must have been Roscoe.
"Roscoe holds the magical power of knowledge," Brooke was explaining. "If someone asks a question, and Roscoe is in your hands, you must answer it truthfully."
It seemed juvenile to Meryl, but everyone else was into the new game, so she went along with it. She had a group of regular friends at school now, but she was invisible there. Only at the rink was she popular, and hanging onto her status meant sometimes going along with things she thought were stupid. She held her breath, hoping she wouldn't have to admit to any humiliating secrets.
So of course the first question was, "How far have you gone, in baseball terms?" This was a relief, as Meryl had made out with a few boys, to maintain her cover and to confirm to herself that they didn't interest her much, so she could confess truthfully to second base. Most of the girls were too giggly to ask anything sexual, anyway. Meryl prepared a question - "Have you ever masturbated, and did you have an orgasm?" - that came off as risque in comparison to all the safe inquiries into locker room pranks and pre-competition superstitions. She started to believe the other girls might get bored with the game before anyone asked what she dreaded, but no, it was Tanith who ruined Meryl's night. "Which boy at the rink do you have a crush on?"
There were lots of votes for Fedor. One for Charlie, which took Meryl aback, and she happily swore secrecy, since he'd be more embarrassed than thrilled to learn that a girl from the rink liked him. He blushed when he talked about girls; he blushed when Meryl talked about them, too. She hadn't come out to him, in so many words, but it seemed she didn't need to. He knew they had the same taste in actresses and tennis players.
Roscoe landed in Meryl's lap, and she made a quick visual joke of trying to pass him to the girl next to her without answering. She almost lied and cast another vote for Fedor, but she couldn't stomach it. The gay boys her age made no secret of who they liked, and they hooked up gleefully at competitions, kissing each other unashamed at parties. Why shouldn't Meryl have the same freedom? Her throat thick with anxiety, she said, "I don't really have crushes on boys. In general. Girls, on the other hand."
The room filled with a silent gasp, then seemed to exhale. Brooke got up wordlessly to give Meryl a hug. Everyone was staring at her the way they normally stared at Tanith - with awe. They were impressed. Feeling her inner Queen Bee awaken, Meryl said, "So yeah, it's someone in this room, but I'm not saying who."
She was mysterious now, and proud of herself. The other girls seemed to crowd around her like she was a fascinating artifact. Were they trying to figure out if she was in love with them?
In the morning, Meryl helped Tanith clean up while the other girls went home. She liked being around Tanith, and she wasn't ready to call her mom yet. "It's me, isn't it? Who you have a crush on?" Tanith said as they gathered breakfast dishes into the sink.
"I said I'm not telling!" Meryl shrieked, too defensive.
Tanith trapped Meryl with her back to the counter and kissed her. Startled, Meryl kissed back, closing her eyes and parting her lips. She hadn't expected to ever actually kiss Tanith. In comparison to her fantasies, it was pedestrian, just another kiss, but that didn't disappoint her.
"I've always wanted to know what that felt like," Tanith said brightly.
Meryl ran out to the front stoop to call her mom and waited outside in the cold until her ride came. She was no one's experiment. It was as if Tanith had snatched the kiss back from her.
[sixteen/seventeen/eighteen]
The solution to her problems, Meryl discerned, was to kiss some other girls. There was a local LGBT Community Center with a teen night, which Meryl had discovered on the internet but never desired to attend. Now she desired it but had no way to get there.
She'd smoothed things over with Tanith and been reinstated at the sleepovers, but a ride to the gay teen mixer was outside the conditions of their fragile friendship. None of her other friends had a car, and she was far from ready to have the necessary conversation with her family. Meryl wasted a month of Fridays locked in this dilemma before Ben Agosto happened to, in the guise of being friendly and making conversation, ask if she had any exciting plans for the weekend.
"I don't know," Meryl said. "There's this thing I want to go to, but I don't think I have a ride."
"I can take you," Ben said.
"That's not what I meant!" Gathering her composure, she added, "I mean, I wasn't asking, I wouldn't impose, it's okay, I'll just... talk to my mom, I guess."
"Okay," Ben said. "Now I insist."
The next day, he dropped her off at the Community Center. Meryl was wearing a dress her mom had bought her for a school dance she'd been too shy to go to. The mixer was divided into four cliques of equal size, each of which held court over a corner of the converted gym, like compass points. Meryl had never met another lesbian before, that she knew of, so she stood by the soda until a large girl in a polo shirt and a rainbow triangle necklace welcomed her. A circle of strangers became her instant friends.
Meryl attended the teen mixers every week as if she would be graded at the end of the year on her progress in becoming a proper lesbian. Many of the kids came and went, but there was a definite cadre of regulars. Meryl had made out with all of the girls from her corner by the end of her sophomore year of high school. She didn't even know the names of the girls from the other cliques, and that made them all the more alluring.
Charlie asked her where she always went on the weekends. "I wish I had a mixer," he said. "I mean, for straight people who feel awkward at school dances. The wallflower ball."
Ben drove Meryl until she got her license, and her parents handed the family's old minivan down to her so they could stop ferrying her to skating practice. When AJ, the girl with the polo shirts and the pride necklace, found out that Meryl had her own van, it became the Rainbow Van, and she picked up kids from all over the Detroit suburbs in exchange for gas money, even kids from the other compass corners of the mixer. This critical role compensated for her natural shyness: she was Meryl, the girl with the car, and nobody dared offend her, knowing that someday they would need a ride.
One of Meryl's frequent passengers was Mickey, a tall girl with cornrows who hung out all the way on the other side of the gym. In the real world of school and family, she was probably Michelle, and she probably wore skirts and lipstick to keep from drawing attention. At least, this was the story Meryl made up for her, not knowing her well but having watched her race to the van and then relax as she put on her seat belt.
One night, Mickey was last on Meryl's route. She said, with a deliberateness Meryl knew must have come from dozens of rehearsals in her mind, "I don't know why I never asked you to dance. You were always the prettiest." They both knew very well why, but Rainbow Van social rules were more permissive. Meryl pulled the van into a drugstore parking lot. Under the warm Walgreen's light, Meryl leaned over the driver's seat and kissed Mickey.
After that, Mickey was always last to be dropped off. She lived in a small, neat house in a quiet neighborhood of old trees, and her grandmother was always asleep by the time the dance ended. Mickey was the star of her high school's track and cross country teams, and her bedroom walls, like Meryl's, were quilts of ribbons and medals. They talked about practice and training a lot, about finding moments to do their homework in the bleachers, about being part of a team but also, in the crucial moment, feeling alone with only their bodies.
And they messed around, kissing and touching, soft breasts and muscular thighs, fingers grinding clits until they came. The night after Mickey won a regional meet, she got bold and put almost her whole hand inside Meryl, enough to make Meryl bleed afterward and skip around with her head in the clouds the whole following week. "I have a girlfriend," she chirped to Tanith, unable to hold it in. She showed Tanith the pictures in her camera.
Tanith seemed tight-lipped and subdued, and Meryl feared Tanith wasn't as accepting as she'd thought. "Sorry," Meryl said. "I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable."
"Oh my God, no, it's not that at all, it's more - things aren't going so good between me and Fedor, and I - don't let that get around, okay? But I'm glad for you. I mean, whoever she is, she's lucky. To have you."
Meryl and Mickey lasted until graduation. Mickey got a track scholarship to Texas A&M, and they agreed the distance would be too difficult. When Meryl got home from their farewell date, she meant to call Charlie, but it seemed mean to cry to a guy who'd never had a girlfriend. She found herself calling Tanith instead.
"I declare this a pity party," Tanith said. "Let's get drunk."
They took a jug of Sauvignon Blanc into the treehouse behind Tanith's parents' house and emptied it, complaining about skating and girls and boys, almost but not quite kissing.
[nineteen]
After the Torino Olympics, all the boys and their coaches got an unofficial email from the ISU. The International Olympic Committee, it said, was concerned about the way some of the skaters had presented themselves as athletes. After it went out, a pall of depression weighed down the rink, even though everyone knew that ice dancers weren't the real targets of complaint. None of them were dressing up as swans or rhinestone fairy zebras, and if they did, they'd still be skating with girls.
Charlie slipped his arm around Meryl's shoulder as she was putting on her skates. Since he'd started college, he'd found his social element at last, in the engineering dorms playing D&D and World of Warcraft. Surrounded by girls who wore capes with cat ears sewn into them and wanted to suck his dick, he'd developed some well-deserved confidence. "Better butch it up," he told Meryl. "Someone might think you're gay."
"Don't make me talk to you about systems of oppression," she said. Their only class together was Intro to Women's Studies - the first time their school lives had converged, since Charlie had gone to private school. Meryl liked having him around to pass notes with; it made her feel safe on the big, anonymous University of Michigan campus.
"If you want to rebel, I'll go along with you," Charlie said.
But there wasn't even a question. "I want an Olympic medal way too much for that."
He side-hugged her and kissed her hair. "Me too."
The memo had set their coaches on edge as much as the skaters. "More romantic!" Marina shouted later that day as they practiced their original dance. "Meryl, look at Charlie like he's beautiful woman. Charlie - same thing." She let them stop laughing before she made them skate again. It was the last they heard from Marina about the email.
Tanith and Ben had come home from Italy with a surprise silver medal, and they went on tour for the summer while Meryl and Charlie lived in the rink, waging a friendly war with Tessa and Scott. When Meryl could finagle an evening off, she drove to Grosse Pointe to see her girlfriend, Brittany. They'd pledged Tri-Delt together - not quite what the sorority charter had meant by sisterhood. Meryl's skating schedule kept her from committing to anything serious, but she loved Brittany's curves and garrulous laugh, her unfettered outrageousness. Meryl was probably just Brittany's college lesbian experiment, but she was having too much fun to mind.
So Tanith's seriousness, when she came back from tour for a week-long break, shocked Meryl. She loosened Meryl with a margarita before announcing, "I think Evan and I are going to go out for a while."
"Isn't he gay?" Meryl said.
"Yeah, but after that email - he asked me if I'd help out, and I said yes."
Meryl was trying so hard not to be angry, she couldn't find anything to say.
"Don't be mad," Tanith said.
"Too late."
"Listen. You've been here, so you don't understand. The federation has been cracking down on the boys like crazy. They got Drew to dump Johnny. Evan heard it'd be better if he had a girlfriend, so he got one."
"That sucks," Meryl said, unable to express how deeply it did so. She could probably keep hiding behind Charlie, and that seemed like a cruel luxury.
"Do you really think you're safe? People know about you, Meryl. You might want to lay low for a while."
Meryl clenched her teeth until they hurt. "What are you saying?"
"I hear Ryan Bradley's looking for a girlfriend," Tanith said.
"Ryan's straight."
"And single, which means he has no proof," Tanith said. "But it would be more about protecting you than him."
Meryl opened her mouth but couldn't make a sound. Eventually, she managed to squeak, "No. I'm not doing that."
"Well, you should at least break up with whoever you're going out with. Just for now. Until this all blows over."
"I can't believe you would be like this," Meryl said, storming away from the table and out of Tanith's house, too furious to continue.
A week later, a USFSA monitor showed up at Arctic Edge to see how everyone's new programs were coming along. She just happened to ask whether Meryl was dating anyone - and to ask Charlie, Marina, Igor, Tessa, and Brooke, too, to make sure. Fortunately, they all kept Meryl's cover. But she broke it off with Brittany that night.
"I hate my life," she moaned to Charlie as they warmed up the next day.
"Hey, at least you had a girlfriend," he said. But he hugged her and promised, "It'll blow over. It will."
[twenty/twenty-one]
It turned out that not dating did wonders for Meryl's grades and skating. She tried to take pleasure in that silver lining. Meanwhile, Tanith was openly miserable in her fake relationship with Evan. Meryl decided that this low-grade suffering was enough punishment, and once again, they made up. She wondered if she should be stronger than that and make some friends who didn't keep pissing her off.
For that, she had Charlie. Unlike her, he got to have a social life. His succession of nerd-chic girl-flings watched their practices from the stands, scrutinizing Meryl jealously.
Meryl took her sexual frustration out on the ice. At first, she could hardly stand the cloistering, but her body adapted. She let her eyes follow the pretty girls on campus and imagine what they would feel like naked on a dorm bed, how they would taste when she got them wet and swollen under her tongue. She knew her fantasies were better than any of those girls would actually be, and so was her vibrator.
Time passed, and new scandals overshadowed the old. The IOC turned its attention to the Summer Games. Meryl and Charlie were kicking ass and taking home medals on the senior circuit. The gay boys were dating each other and not caring who noticed. Meryl braved a movie night at the campus LGBT Center and got a backrub, a hand in her lap, a phone number, and seven new Facebook friends.
But Tanith and Ben had made a mistake at Worlds, and Tanith had been casting a gray mood over the rink ever since. The glory heaped upon Tessa and Scott as well as Meryl and Charlie seemed to make matters worse. Tanith looked like an emaciated zombie, but Meryl couldn't tell if it was her place to say anything.
She found Tanith behind the rink, smoking and crying. "What's wrong?" Meryl said, afraid to touch her.
"Oh, nothing," Tanith sobbed. She pulled Meryl roughly into her arms, almost burning Meryl with her cigarette, kissing Meryl like she had permission.
"Don't," Meryl said.
"I - I just needed to remember how it feels to kiss someone who loves me," Tanith said, smearing her mascara with her hand.
"There's got to be someone else." Meryl wanted to run, but she didn't want to leave Tanith alone, either.
"Not like you." Tanith held Meryl's wrists. "This whole time, I couldn't stop thinking - there was no one like you." She laughed, the late-afternoon light striking her face at sharp angles. "Don't be so surprised."
"I was fifteen," Meryl said. "I moved on."
"Yeah. That's exactly how things have been going," Tanith said.
"I'm sorry, I didn't - I didn't mean to make things worse."
"It's not your fault," Tanith sniffled. "You can't help how you feel. No one can. That's the problem." She shook her head. "That's the fucking problem."
Tentatively, Meryl put her hand on Tanith's arm. "What happened?"
"I told Evan I was done," Tanith said. "He got really upset. Not even angry, more - manipulative. When someone knows exactly what to say to hurt you? That."
All Meryl could do was say she was sorry. And hold Tanith in her arms, pet her hair, tell her she was beautiful, brilliant, talented, strong, and kiss her, sliding down the rabbit hole of bad ideas. She'd been in love with Tanith since she was thirteen. Why stop now?
"The thing with Evan," Tanith said. "The arrangement. It wasn't just for him. I - I knew at that sleepover, and I always wanted to tell you, but you were so proud, and so serious - being gay was your thing. And you always seemed to have a girlfriend."
"Well," Meryl said. "You always seemed to have a boyfriend."
"They kept asking me out," Tanith said.
"You could've said no."
"Yeah, well." Tanith stroked a lock of hair back from Meryl's face. "You're better at that than I am." She put her hands on Meryl's hips. "Say yes. Say yes to me."
Meryl shimmied away, saying, "No," but knowing she'd hate herself later and forever if she turned Tanith away. "Okay," she said, kissing Tanith, collapsing almost half her life into this moment of their lips meeting.
[twenty-three]
In the Olympic Village, in Tanith's no-fornication twin bed with the lavender satin sheets Johnny had brought for the two of them, Meryl and Tanith made Olympic love. Two years of long distance had kept the fires burning: Tanith had switched coaches right after they'd gotten together. A skating decision, not a personal one, but it had kept suspicion away from them. Tanith was eating more, to please her new coach and to please Meryl, curves where once were angles. Her body made waves when she came, rolling out from Meryl's hand inside her.
"You're just trying to make me lose," Tanith said among heavy breaths, sweat sparkling between her breasts.
"We all know it's fixed." Meryl lay across Tanith's chest. It was easy to be sanguine when she'd been preordained a silver medal. Gold for Tessa and Scott and Canada. Bronze for the Russians, to prevent an international incident. Tanith and Ben left behind in fourth because they'd already gotten theirs last time, no matter how much Meryl deserved to stand beside her as their flags descended, holding her hand.
Johnny came into Tanith's room without knocking, floating in new calfskin shoes. "Ew, the pussy smell, I'm wilting in the sitting room."
Tanith hurled a pillow at him. "So go get laid somewhere."
"Gay men, so fragile." Meryl flashed her breasts at him.
"I'm immune to tits," Johnny beamed.
"Who let me room with you?" Tanith said. They were joking about it, but Meryl knew they were bitter, too: this suite was the gay ghetto for the skaters USFSA couldn't keep in the closet. Johnny was more Johnny than ever now that he was a reality TV star, and Tanith had spent the past two years atoning for Evan with coy references to her new-found adoration of women. She was careful not to implicate Meryl, but her and Ben's international ranking had taken a beating.
Meanwhile, it seemed like the federation's method of punishing Meryl for ten years of carelessly concealed homosexuality was pretending not to notice. Officially, she was sharing a double with Amanda Evora; unofficially, there'd been some room swapping, and she'd scored a bed in the Fraternity Suite with Jeremy, Charlie, and Bates. Jeremy was to her as Johnny was to Tanith; he stood behind the same thick, clear glass closet door Meryl had found herself behind, wearing eyeliner to Nationals and showing off his tattoos. They'd fallen so hard in nonsexual love that Charlie had claimed jealousy.
Her comfort in the Fraternity Suite surprised her. She'd made jokes all her life about spending more time with Charlie than anyone else, and she felt comfortable living with him. Boys took five-minute showers and talked meaningfully about hockey. They liked picking her up and carrying her around. She wondered why she'd spent so long believing she had no use for them.
As they packed up their gear to report to the rink for the compulsory dance, Meryl tilted her forehead against Charlie's. "Let's kill 'em, roomie."
He tilted her chin upward with his fingers. "Pretend I am beautiful woman," he said in a fake Russian accent. "And not dude in towel playing Madden." Later, on the ice, they skated like they deserved to win, knowing they did and wouldn't.
Meryl didn't get to have as much Olympic sex as she'd hoped. Despite the foregone conclusion of the rankings, Tanith was angry for a few days after the free dance. With a weight in the pit of her stomach and her medal heavy around her neck, Meryl waited for the breakup speech. She kept waiting until rehearsals for the summer tour began. Too frightened to approach Tanith about their future, she whispered to Charlie in the wings of the rink, "How do you know when someone's fallen out of love with you?"
"I never know why anyone does anything," Charlie whispered back.
Tanith came clomping backstage in her skates, distracted and furious. This was the worst moment to confront her. She grabbed Tanith's arm. "Fine. Dump me already."
"What?"
"I knew you were going to," Meryl said. "I've known since Vancouver. So get it over with. Cut the cord."
"I wasn't," Tanith said, rubbing under her eye. "I wasn't, I - I don't know why you would think that, but I guess - I guess if you want to break up, then -"
"I don't."
"Then why did you -" Tanith looked Meryl dead in the eye, and her hard anger eased into her usual beauty. "Never mind. Whatever it was, I'm sorry. Because I never want to break up with you. I want to pack up the dog and move back to Michigan and just live in your arms forever."
Meryl stood on her toes and kissed Tanith. She kind of hoped Scott Hamilton would walk by and fire them both. But she'd been getting away with this stuff for a decade. She passed because people wanted to believe in the romance of ice dance and not in the romance of two girls in high heels holding hands. Because she was shy and obedient, and her voice was soft, because she knew when to kiss a girl in a hallway and when to stand with narrowed eyes and lie for Charlie and for her country, for a gold medal next time.
Title: The Circle of Acceptable Women
Fandom: figure skating RPF
Pairings: Meryl Davis/Tanith Belbin, Meryl/f
Rating: R for sexual content
Warnings: None standard.
Summary: Meryl will always be in love with Tanith. Someday, Tanith will catch up.
Word Count: about 4,900.
Disclaimers: This is a work of fiction. The characters herein are based on real people, but the words and events are completely made up. They are not intended to be mistaken for fact, and no libel is intended. This original work of fan fiction is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License; attribution should include a link to this Livejournal post.
Notes: Thanks to thistle90 and annaalamode for beta reading and making me stop stressing about this. The title is adapted from Audre Lorde.
*
[thirteen]
Meryl sat in the lobby of the new rink, doing her algebra homework while she waited for her mom to pick her up and take her to school. After a six-AM lesson on the Starlight Waltz, math seemed refreshingly easy. The new rink was a different world from the one she and Charlie had skated at before. For the first time, they were skating among kids who were as good as them, maybe better. Their stern Russian coaches demanded deeper edges, more power, and more speed. They weren't stars anymore: they were the new team, the same dorky outcasts they both were at school.
The queen of the rink was a girl named Tanith. In addition to her impossibly lyrical name, Tanith was tall, blonde, and so gorgeous she had done actual modeling in Canada. Her boyfriend, Fedor, was the coach's son. She was nice to Meryl in an icy, superior way, but Meryl daydreamed about becoming her best friend. Tanith could teach Meryl how to wear makeup - not just the caked-on stuff for competitions, but an everyday natural look that would keep everyone from assuming Meryl was nine years old. she would teach Meryl to be terribly cool. And then, as they strolled through the mall on a warm afternoon, Meryl's hand would brush Tanith's, and Tanith would turn to kiss Meryl softly and say she loved Meryl most of all, so much more than the coach's son.
Meryl knew the daydreams weren't supposed to go in that direction. Maybe the growth hormones she was taking were messing her up. But she liked the fantasies because they were private and romantic, as improbable and epic as her favorite books. They made her breath quicken and her hands warm, made her think about all of the body parts with technical names she'd learned in to label in health class and understand why people made such a big deal out of them.
Tanith walked by with her bag over her shoulder, dressed for practice, not school. She was homeschooled in one of those charter programs so she could focus on skating full-time. Meryl's parents wouldn't let her do that because they wanted her to have friends and a normal life. They didn't understand that she never would: she was too weird and quiet, too tiny and mousy, to ever fit in. Only on the ice did she feel beautiful and at home.
Tanith stopped in front of Meryl, looming over her until she looked up from the math problems that had become remote and inconsequential. "Excuse me?" Tanith said. "Hi."
"Oh. Hi."
"I just wanted you to know?" Tanith said, and Meryl can only think of the many times in her life when that phrase had been followed by a snide comment about her outfit or personality. The speech usually ended with no offense and a flip of the hair as Meryl sat stunned, unable to think of a comeback.
But Tanith was saying, "I'm having a sleepover this weekend. All the other girls really want to get to know you better. I mean, if you want to."
Meryl instantly thought of ten ways this could be a trap ending in humiliation. "You don't really, do you?"
"Why wouldn't I?" Tanith said sweetly, seeming confused.
"I - I don't know."
"I knew it!" Tanith sat down next to Meryl, close enough to excite Meryl and make her cringe. "You're just shy. Some of the other kids think you're stuck up, but that didn't seem right."
"Maybe I'm stuck up and shy." Meryl smiled: she felt like she'd been given a secret identity.
"Maybe you're my new best friend," Tanith said. Meryl suspected that Tanith's word was deed, and if not, it didn't matter, because Meryl was going to do everything she could to make it true.
[fifteen]
Tanith's sleepovers were legendary and exclusive. Sometimes there was crime: underage drinking, group streaking, midnight excursions to TP the houses of skaters who were new or unpopular. Meryl loved those wild nights - the adrenaline rush of getting away with them. Otherwise, she was studious and obedient, no rebel at all.
The quieter nights, the ones with manicures and movies, she loved less. There was nowhere to look except for Tanith in her pajamas, fresh and soft. Meryl's crush wasn't heartbreaking anymore - that was junior high stuff - but she still felt it intensely. When they gave each other sleepover massages, Meryl prayed Tanith's hand would slip and touch her breast.
Worst was when the conversation turned to boys. The others knew that Meryl was shy and private by nature and didn't normally goad her into participating. They were too preoccupied with their own hearts, anyway, to really care who Meryl liked.
But tonight, it seemed like every girl but Meryl was in a particular mood. "Here's how it works," Brooke said, holding up a pink teddy bear in ice skates. Its name was Roscoe, and it was the scapegoat whenever they got caught. Who egged your car? Oh, must have been Roscoe.
"Roscoe holds the magical power of knowledge," Brooke was explaining. "If someone asks a question, and Roscoe is in your hands, you must answer it truthfully."
It seemed juvenile to Meryl, but everyone else was into the new game, so she went along with it. She had a group of regular friends at school now, but she was invisible there. Only at the rink was she popular, and hanging onto her status meant sometimes going along with things she thought were stupid. She held her breath, hoping she wouldn't have to admit to any humiliating secrets.
So of course the first question was, "How far have you gone, in baseball terms?" This was a relief, as Meryl had made out with a few boys, to maintain her cover and to confirm to herself that they didn't interest her much, so she could confess truthfully to second base. Most of the girls were too giggly to ask anything sexual, anyway. Meryl prepared a question - "Have you ever masturbated, and did you have an orgasm?" - that came off as risque in comparison to all the safe inquiries into locker room pranks and pre-competition superstitions. She started to believe the other girls might get bored with the game before anyone asked what she dreaded, but no, it was Tanith who ruined Meryl's night. "Which boy at the rink do you have a crush on?"
There were lots of votes for Fedor. One for Charlie, which took Meryl aback, and she happily swore secrecy, since he'd be more embarrassed than thrilled to learn that a girl from the rink liked him. He blushed when he talked about girls; he blushed when Meryl talked about them, too. She hadn't come out to him, in so many words, but it seemed she didn't need to. He knew they had the same taste in actresses and tennis players.
Roscoe landed in Meryl's lap, and she made a quick visual joke of trying to pass him to the girl next to her without answering. She almost lied and cast another vote for Fedor, but she couldn't stomach it. The gay boys her age made no secret of who they liked, and they hooked up gleefully at competitions, kissing each other unashamed at parties. Why shouldn't Meryl have the same freedom? Her throat thick with anxiety, she said, "I don't really have crushes on boys. In general. Girls, on the other hand."
The room filled with a silent gasp, then seemed to exhale. Brooke got up wordlessly to give Meryl a hug. Everyone was staring at her the way they normally stared at Tanith - with awe. They were impressed. Feeling her inner Queen Bee awaken, Meryl said, "So yeah, it's someone in this room, but I'm not saying who."
She was mysterious now, and proud of herself. The other girls seemed to crowd around her like she was a fascinating artifact. Were they trying to figure out if she was in love with them?
In the morning, Meryl helped Tanith clean up while the other girls went home. She liked being around Tanith, and she wasn't ready to call her mom yet. "It's me, isn't it? Who you have a crush on?" Tanith said as they gathered breakfast dishes into the sink.
"I said I'm not telling!" Meryl shrieked, too defensive.
Tanith trapped Meryl with her back to the counter and kissed her. Startled, Meryl kissed back, closing her eyes and parting her lips. She hadn't expected to ever actually kiss Tanith. In comparison to her fantasies, it was pedestrian, just another kiss, but that didn't disappoint her.
"I've always wanted to know what that felt like," Tanith said brightly.
Meryl ran out to the front stoop to call her mom and waited outside in the cold until her ride came. She was no one's experiment. It was as if Tanith had snatched the kiss back from her.
[sixteen/seventeen/eighteen]
The solution to her problems, Meryl discerned, was to kiss some other girls. There was a local LGBT Community Center with a teen night, which Meryl had discovered on the internet but never desired to attend. Now she desired it but had no way to get there.
She'd smoothed things over with Tanith and been reinstated at the sleepovers, but a ride to the gay teen mixer was outside the conditions of their fragile friendship. None of her other friends had a car, and she was far from ready to have the necessary conversation with her family. Meryl wasted a month of Fridays locked in this dilemma before Ben Agosto happened to, in the guise of being friendly and making conversation, ask if she had any exciting plans for the weekend.
"I don't know," Meryl said. "There's this thing I want to go to, but I don't think I have a ride."
"I can take you," Ben said.
"That's not what I meant!" Gathering her composure, she added, "I mean, I wasn't asking, I wouldn't impose, it's okay, I'll just... talk to my mom, I guess."
"Okay," Ben said. "Now I insist."
The next day, he dropped her off at the Community Center. Meryl was wearing a dress her mom had bought her for a school dance she'd been too shy to go to. The mixer was divided into four cliques of equal size, each of which held court over a corner of the converted gym, like compass points. Meryl had never met another lesbian before, that she knew of, so she stood by the soda until a large girl in a polo shirt and a rainbow triangle necklace welcomed her. A circle of strangers became her instant friends.
Meryl attended the teen mixers every week as if she would be graded at the end of the year on her progress in becoming a proper lesbian. Many of the kids came and went, but there was a definite cadre of regulars. Meryl had made out with all of the girls from her corner by the end of her sophomore year of high school. She didn't even know the names of the girls from the other cliques, and that made them all the more alluring.
Charlie asked her where she always went on the weekends. "I wish I had a mixer," he said. "I mean, for straight people who feel awkward at school dances. The wallflower ball."
Ben drove Meryl until she got her license, and her parents handed the family's old minivan down to her so they could stop ferrying her to skating practice. When AJ, the girl with the polo shirts and the pride necklace, found out that Meryl had her own van, it became the Rainbow Van, and she picked up kids from all over the Detroit suburbs in exchange for gas money, even kids from the other compass corners of the mixer. This critical role compensated for her natural shyness: she was Meryl, the girl with the car, and nobody dared offend her, knowing that someday they would need a ride.
One of Meryl's frequent passengers was Mickey, a tall girl with cornrows who hung out all the way on the other side of the gym. In the real world of school and family, she was probably Michelle, and she probably wore skirts and lipstick to keep from drawing attention. At least, this was the story Meryl made up for her, not knowing her well but having watched her race to the van and then relax as she put on her seat belt.
One night, Mickey was last on Meryl's route. She said, with a deliberateness Meryl knew must have come from dozens of rehearsals in her mind, "I don't know why I never asked you to dance. You were always the prettiest." They both knew very well why, but Rainbow Van social rules were more permissive. Meryl pulled the van into a drugstore parking lot. Under the warm Walgreen's light, Meryl leaned over the driver's seat and kissed Mickey.
After that, Mickey was always last to be dropped off. She lived in a small, neat house in a quiet neighborhood of old trees, and her grandmother was always asleep by the time the dance ended. Mickey was the star of her high school's track and cross country teams, and her bedroom walls, like Meryl's, were quilts of ribbons and medals. They talked about practice and training a lot, about finding moments to do their homework in the bleachers, about being part of a team but also, in the crucial moment, feeling alone with only their bodies.
And they messed around, kissing and touching, soft breasts and muscular thighs, fingers grinding clits until they came. The night after Mickey won a regional meet, she got bold and put almost her whole hand inside Meryl, enough to make Meryl bleed afterward and skip around with her head in the clouds the whole following week. "I have a girlfriend," she chirped to Tanith, unable to hold it in. She showed Tanith the pictures in her camera.
Tanith seemed tight-lipped and subdued, and Meryl feared Tanith wasn't as accepting as she'd thought. "Sorry," Meryl said. "I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable."
"Oh my God, no, it's not that at all, it's more - things aren't going so good between me and Fedor, and I - don't let that get around, okay? But I'm glad for you. I mean, whoever she is, she's lucky. To have you."
Meryl and Mickey lasted until graduation. Mickey got a track scholarship to Texas A&M, and they agreed the distance would be too difficult. When Meryl got home from their farewell date, she meant to call Charlie, but it seemed mean to cry to a guy who'd never had a girlfriend. She found herself calling Tanith instead.
"I declare this a pity party," Tanith said. "Let's get drunk."
They took a jug of Sauvignon Blanc into the treehouse behind Tanith's parents' house and emptied it, complaining about skating and girls and boys, almost but not quite kissing.
[nineteen]
After the Torino Olympics, all the boys and their coaches got an unofficial email from the ISU. The International Olympic Committee, it said, was concerned about the way some of the skaters had presented themselves as athletes. After it went out, a pall of depression weighed down the rink, even though everyone knew that ice dancers weren't the real targets of complaint. None of them were dressing up as swans or rhinestone fairy zebras, and if they did, they'd still be skating with girls.
Charlie slipped his arm around Meryl's shoulder as she was putting on her skates. Since he'd started college, he'd found his social element at last, in the engineering dorms playing D&D and World of Warcraft. Surrounded by girls who wore capes with cat ears sewn into them and wanted to suck his dick, he'd developed some well-deserved confidence. "Better butch it up," he told Meryl. "Someone might think you're gay."
"Don't make me talk to you about systems of oppression," she said. Their only class together was Intro to Women's Studies - the first time their school lives had converged, since Charlie had gone to private school. Meryl liked having him around to pass notes with; it made her feel safe on the big, anonymous University of Michigan campus.
"If you want to rebel, I'll go along with you," Charlie said.
But there wasn't even a question. "I want an Olympic medal way too much for that."
He side-hugged her and kissed her hair. "Me too."
The memo had set their coaches on edge as much as the skaters. "More romantic!" Marina shouted later that day as they practiced their original dance. "Meryl, look at Charlie like he's beautiful woman. Charlie - same thing." She let them stop laughing before she made them skate again. It was the last they heard from Marina about the email.
Tanith and Ben had come home from Italy with a surprise silver medal, and they went on tour for the summer while Meryl and Charlie lived in the rink, waging a friendly war with Tessa and Scott. When Meryl could finagle an evening off, she drove to Grosse Pointe to see her girlfriend, Brittany. They'd pledged Tri-Delt together - not quite what the sorority charter had meant by sisterhood. Meryl's skating schedule kept her from committing to anything serious, but she loved Brittany's curves and garrulous laugh, her unfettered outrageousness. Meryl was probably just Brittany's college lesbian experiment, but she was having too much fun to mind.
So Tanith's seriousness, when she came back from tour for a week-long break, shocked Meryl. She loosened Meryl with a margarita before announcing, "I think Evan and I are going to go out for a while."
"Isn't he gay?" Meryl said.
"Yeah, but after that email - he asked me if I'd help out, and I said yes."
Meryl was trying so hard not to be angry, she couldn't find anything to say.
"Don't be mad," Tanith said.
"Too late."
"Listen. You've been here, so you don't understand. The federation has been cracking down on the boys like crazy. They got Drew to dump Johnny. Evan heard it'd be better if he had a girlfriend, so he got one."
"That sucks," Meryl said, unable to express how deeply it did so. She could probably keep hiding behind Charlie, and that seemed like a cruel luxury.
"Do you really think you're safe? People know about you, Meryl. You might want to lay low for a while."
Meryl clenched her teeth until they hurt. "What are you saying?"
"I hear Ryan Bradley's looking for a girlfriend," Tanith said.
"Ryan's straight."
"And single, which means he has no proof," Tanith said. "But it would be more about protecting you than him."
Meryl opened her mouth but couldn't make a sound. Eventually, she managed to squeak, "No. I'm not doing that."
"Well, you should at least break up with whoever you're going out with. Just for now. Until this all blows over."
"I can't believe you would be like this," Meryl said, storming away from the table and out of Tanith's house, too furious to continue.
A week later, a USFSA monitor showed up at Arctic Edge to see how everyone's new programs were coming along. She just happened to ask whether Meryl was dating anyone - and to ask Charlie, Marina, Igor, Tessa, and Brooke, too, to make sure. Fortunately, they all kept Meryl's cover. But she broke it off with Brittany that night.
"I hate my life," she moaned to Charlie as they warmed up the next day.
"Hey, at least you had a girlfriend," he said. But he hugged her and promised, "It'll blow over. It will."
[twenty/twenty-one]
It turned out that not dating did wonders for Meryl's grades and skating. She tried to take pleasure in that silver lining. Meanwhile, Tanith was openly miserable in her fake relationship with Evan. Meryl decided that this low-grade suffering was enough punishment, and once again, they made up. She wondered if she should be stronger than that and make some friends who didn't keep pissing her off.
For that, she had Charlie. Unlike her, he got to have a social life. His succession of nerd-chic girl-flings watched their practices from the stands, scrutinizing Meryl jealously.
Meryl took her sexual frustration out on the ice. At first, she could hardly stand the cloistering, but her body adapted. She let her eyes follow the pretty girls on campus and imagine what they would feel like naked on a dorm bed, how they would taste when she got them wet and swollen under her tongue. She knew her fantasies were better than any of those girls would actually be, and so was her vibrator.
Time passed, and new scandals overshadowed the old. The IOC turned its attention to the Summer Games. Meryl and Charlie were kicking ass and taking home medals on the senior circuit. The gay boys were dating each other and not caring who noticed. Meryl braved a movie night at the campus LGBT Center and got a backrub, a hand in her lap, a phone number, and seven new Facebook friends.
But Tanith and Ben had made a mistake at Worlds, and Tanith had been casting a gray mood over the rink ever since. The glory heaped upon Tessa and Scott as well as Meryl and Charlie seemed to make matters worse. Tanith looked like an emaciated zombie, but Meryl couldn't tell if it was her place to say anything.
She found Tanith behind the rink, smoking and crying. "What's wrong?" Meryl said, afraid to touch her.
"Oh, nothing," Tanith sobbed. She pulled Meryl roughly into her arms, almost burning Meryl with her cigarette, kissing Meryl like she had permission.
"Don't," Meryl said.
"I - I just needed to remember how it feels to kiss someone who loves me," Tanith said, smearing her mascara with her hand.
"There's got to be someone else." Meryl wanted to run, but she didn't want to leave Tanith alone, either.
"Not like you." Tanith held Meryl's wrists. "This whole time, I couldn't stop thinking - there was no one like you." She laughed, the late-afternoon light striking her face at sharp angles. "Don't be so surprised."
"I was fifteen," Meryl said. "I moved on."
"Yeah. That's exactly how things have been going," Tanith said.
"I'm sorry, I didn't - I didn't mean to make things worse."
"It's not your fault," Tanith sniffled. "You can't help how you feel. No one can. That's the problem." She shook her head. "That's the fucking problem."
Tentatively, Meryl put her hand on Tanith's arm. "What happened?"
"I told Evan I was done," Tanith said. "He got really upset. Not even angry, more - manipulative. When someone knows exactly what to say to hurt you? That."
All Meryl could do was say she was sorry. And hold Tanith in her arms, pet her hair, tell her she was beautiful, brilliant, talented, strong, and kiss her, sliding down the rabbit hole of bad ideas. She'd been in love with Tanith since she was thirteen. Why stop now?
"The thing with Evan," Tanith said. "The arrangement. It wasn't just for him. I - I knew at that sleepover, and I always wanted to tell you, but you were so proud, and so serious - being gay was your thing. And you always seemed to have a girlfriend."
"Well," Meryl said. "You always seemed to have a boyfriend."
"They kept asking me out," Tanith said.
"You could've said no."
"Yeah, well." Tanith stroked a lock of hair back from Meryl's face. "You're better at that than I am." She put her hands on Meryl's hips. "Say yes. Say yes to me."
Meryl shimmied away, saying, "No," but knowing she'd hate herself later and forever if she turned Tanith away. "Okay," she said, kissing Tanith, collapsing almost half her life into this moment of their lips meeting.
[twenty-three]
In the Olympic Village, in Tanith's no-fornication twin bed with the lavender satin sheets Johnny had brought for the two of them, Meryl and Tanith made Olympic love. Two years of long distance had kept the fires burning: Tanith had switched coaches right after they'd gotten together. A skating decision, not a personal one, but it had kept suspicion away from them. Tanith was eating more, to please her new coach and to please Meryl, curves where once were angles. Her body made waves when she came, rolling out from Meryl's hand inside her.
"You're just trying to make me lose," Tanith said among heavy breaths, sweat sparkling between her breasts.
"We all know it's fixed." Meryl lay across Tanith's chest. It was easy to be sanguine when she'd been preordained a silver medal. Gold for Tessa and Scott and Canada. Bronze for the Russians, to prevent an international incident. Tanith and Ben left behind in fourth because they'd already gotten theirs last time, no matter how much Meryl deserved to stand beside her as their flags descended, holding her hand.
Johnny came into Tanith's room without knocking, floating in new calfskin shoes. "Ew, the pussy smell, I'm wilting in the sitting room."
Tanith hurled a pillow at him. "So go get laid somewhere."
"Gay men, so fragile." Meryl flashed her breasts at him.
"I'm immune to tits," Johnny beamed.
"Who let me room with you?" Tanith said. They were joking about it, but Meryl knew they were bitter, too: this suite was the gay ghetto for the skaters USFSA couldn't keep in the closet. Johnny was more Johnny than ever now that he was a reality TV star, and Tanith had spent the past two years atoning for Evan with coy references to her new-found adoration of women. She was careful not to implicate Meryl, but her and Ben's international ranking had taken a beating.
Meanwhile, it seemed like the federation's method of punishing Meryl for ten years of carelessly concealed homosexuality was pretending not to notice. Officially, she was sharing a double with Amanda Evora; unofficially, there'd been some room swapping, and she'd scored a bed in the Fraternity Suite with Jeremy, Charlie, and Bates. Jeremy was to her as Johnny was to Tanith; he stood behind the same thick, clear glass closet door Meryl had found herself behind, wearing eyeliner to Nationals and showing off his tattoos. They'd fallen so hard in nonsexual love that Charlie had claimed jealousy.
Her comfort in the Fraternity Suite surprised her. She'd made jokes all her life about spending more time with Charlie than anyone else, and she felt comfortable living with him. Boys took five-minute showers and talked meaningfully about hockey. They liked picking her up and carrying her around. She wondered why she'd spent so long believing she had no use for them.
As they packed up their gear to report to the rink for the compulsory dance, Meryl tilted her forehead against Charlie's. "Let's kill 'em, roomie."
He tilted her chin upward with his fingers. "Pretend I am beautiful woman," he said in a fake Russian accent. "And not dude in towel playing Madden." Later, on the ice, they skated like they deserved to win, knowing they did and wouldn't.
Meryl didn't get to have as much Olympic sex as she'd hoped. Despite the foregone conclusion of the rankings, Tanith was angry for a few days after the free dance. With a weight in the pit of her stomach and her medal heavy around her neck, Meryl waited for the breakup speech. She kept waiting until rehearsals for the summer tour began. Too frightened to approach Tanith about their future, she whispered to Charlie in the wings of the rink, "How do you know when someone's fallen out of love with you?"
"I never know why anyone does anything," Charlie whispered back.
Tanith came clomping backstage in her skates, distracted and furious. This was the worst moment to confront her. She grabbed Tanith's arm. "Fine. Dump me already."
"What?"
"I knew you were going to," Meryl said. "I've known since Vancouver. So get it over with. Cut the cord."
"I wasn't," Tanith said, rubbing under her eye. "I wasn't, I - I don't know why you would think that, but I guess - I guess if you want to break up, then -"
"I don't."
"Then why did you -" Tanith looked Meryl dead in the eye, and her hard anger eased into her usual beauty. "Never mind. Whatever it was, I'm sorry. Because I never want to break up with you. I want to pack up the dog and move back to Michigan and just live in your arms forever."
Meryl stood on her toes and kissed Tanith. She kind of hoped Scott Hamilton would walk by and fire them both. But she'd been getting away with this stuff for a decade. She passed because people wanted to believe in the romance of ice dance and not in the romance of two girls in high heels holding hands. Because she was shy and obedient, and her voice was soft, because she knew when to kiss a girl in a hallway and when to stand with narrowed eyes and lie for Charlie and for her country, for a gold medal next time.