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Stoumen v. Reilly, the California Supreme Court rules that homosexuals have the right to public assembly, for example, in a bar.
Now she laid the women pilots on the bed next to Katharine Hepburn and Tommy Andrews and looked at them all in succession. She couldn’t put into words why she had gathered these photos together, but she could feel it in her bones: a hot and restless urge to look—and, by looking, to know.
She’d always thought there was something magical about the city, with its steep stairways and sudden glimpses of the bay between tall, narrow buildings. It felt expansive and full of promise, each half-hidden opening a reminder that the city she had been born in still held mysteries to discover.
A question hovered in the back of her throat, tangled up with the paralyzing sensation of being on the cusp of connection. She couldn’t put it into words.
They found an empty patch of grass beneath a tree, and Lily ate her sorbetti with a tiny wooden spoon while Kath licked her gelato with a slurping sound that made them both giggle.
All around her, the laughter and chatter and tinkling sounds of spoons against sundae glasses reminded her of where she was. This bright, clean restaurant in Chinatown that smelled of sugar and cream was not the place to ask, but Lily felt as if her thoughts must be written in plain English on her face. Are you like the girls in the book too? Because I think I am.
It was that yet that made Lily’s skin flush warm. The knowledge that despite the clothes that Tommy wore, despite the attitude that invited everyone in the room to gaze at her, she was not a man. It felt unspeakably charged, as if all of Lily’s most secret desires had been laid bare onstage.
And she remembered the hint of cologne she had smelled on her; there had been an edge to it that felt distinctly, confusingly masculine. It sent a giddy thrill straight through her—as if Tommy had run a fingertip right up her spine. She lay in her bed for quite some time trying to catch that scent again, as if she might call it into existence out of the sheer force of memory.
It wasn’t like chocolate, Lily thought. It was like finding water after a drought. She couldn’t drink enough, and her thirst made her ashamed, and the shame made her angry.
The drills continued year after year, although the enemy who might attack them changed. Japan was vanquished but Korea and China might invade, and now it was the Soviets who could drop atomic bombs. She had secretly welcomed their potential Soviet invaders, because at least she’d never be mistaken for a Russian.
She wondered if Kath was thinking about her. What if they were thinking of each other at the same time? The idea made her pulse quicken.
On Tuesday, Kath left a note in Lily’s locker. They’d begun leaving each other messages after Christmas break—only a few lines long and never signed.
So cute!
The more her mother insisted it was a mistake, the more certain Lily was that it wasn’t. Perhaps that was the most perverse part of this: the inside-outness of everything, as if denial would make it go away, when it only made the pain in her chest tighten, when it only made her emotions clearer. “It’s not a mistake,” Lily said miserably.
Lily jerked backward, shocked. Her mother hadn’t hit her in years—since she was eight or nine—and she instantly felt like that child again, cowering in fear of another strike. With the terror came a crippling guilt and the belief that she must have done something awful, that she deserved this punishment.
