Your vision is unfocused, voices and faces distorted, as though you’re watching from beneath an ocean wave. The surface is in sight, but you’re weighed down with legs like lead and distracted by your own ceaseless, ticking heart.

Somewhere below, detached and drifting, you bear witness for the girl with defiant eyes. Your father paces, turns, scrubs a hand over his face. The air goes quiet. He demands you stop this, start acting normal again, allow them all to return to normal. The order is that vague and that explicit. It leaves no room for maneuvering, and just enough space for crossfire.

The sound of your mother crying jolts you back into your body, makes you wince. There is nothing you can say to them to explain yourself. You sit on the edge of the bed, motionless, rebelling silently against the insinuation that this is something you can control, or something you planned. It is neither. It is a wildfire raging without concern for fences or the stark, black lines of right and wrong. This pressure in your chest, this fierce unexplainable need, lives in a gray area where possibilities are endless. Here, there is nowhere to hide. No guiding light pointing north. There are only all the things you never knew about yourself that are rising to the surface, reaching for air in a way you don’t understand but can’t deny.

There is a girl.

There is a girl, and that is bad enough, but that’s not all. She is a high school dropout, your English partner in a long-ago freshman course, then gone. Now you are the salutatorian of your senior class, with a flawless GPA, from a family name old and well-known across the small county where you were born. She lives with two roommates in a shabby, decaying house with peeling paint in the worst neighborhood in town. Your bedroom is filled with books and pillows and furniture specially chosen. Your old hand-sewn baby blanket is resting now on a closet shelf, carefully folded. Her bedroom has a mattress on the floor, crumpled blankets, and a naked pillow at the head. She smiles when you talk about your dad, asks questions about your sister, but dodges any about her own family. Her whole body goes cold if you push, her mouth forming an edge hard as any blade.

She is so soft-spoken that often you can barely hear her. Even now, you remember listening hard to catch her words, her laugh, carried over a phone line. A gentle voice, the perfect pitch to comfort a frightened kitten, or to tug at the interest of a girl easing into her own soul step by step, like a fawn testing a glade’s safety in the deep woods. This despite the fact that the two of you share almost nothing.

You are a voracious reader, bringing books to sports games and restaurants and sleepovers, and she misspells a word in every text she sends. You drive the car your parents bought for your seventeenth birthday, and she has one pair of jeans, the ones she was wearing when she left the note for her mother and slipped out in the night. With no belt to hold them up, and a kitchen containing mostly expired frozen pizzas, those jeans sag on her narrow waist. Often, when you come to see her, you bring food. A sandwich, cookies, a jar of peanut butter, any snacks you can sneak from your own fully stocked pantry. She never asks, but you can see the hollows of her hips and the way she shivers at the slightest chill. Despite all these things, despite what divides you, for a brief, immeasurable period of time, you belong to each other.

Secrecy breeds intimacy. The two go hand in hand. Try to hide a relationship from the family you love, the family that is the one dependable piece of a world that otherwise seems made of spun glass. That secret relationship, anomaly against everything you’ve been told you are, progresses faster than seems possible. No adult tells you to get off the phone when you’re whispering into it at three in the morning to someone they don’t know exists. There is no one telling you not to stay the night at her house when you’re a liar.

There is also no sharing of that person in your other life, the one without her. No talking about her funny quirks, the way she listens with rapt attention to everything you say, the way she can’t stop staring at you when the sun is fading, and the approaching twilight darkens your eyes. You are not the only ones who love me, you think, never say, to your parents. The closer you hold it to your chest, the fiercer it burns, irresistible and undeniable. Knowing it is wrong has no bearing on the reality of her skin, on the softness of her neck.

The first time you kiss her, it takes an eternity. Looking back, you’ll be unable to say for sure who came to who. There is only a memory of the things that mattered much more; the jolt in your belly when you catch the scent of her: coconut, lime, and nerves. The way her lips part when they’re an inch from your own. The soundless question her eyes are asking, and the answer yours return.

You grow bolder with her. You spend afternoons discarding one piece of clothing after another, tossing them onto the sun swept floor of her bedroom. Leaving with hair a mess from her hands, mouth swollen and red as raspberry juice. A desperation grows in you for her hands, her tongue, the tremble she brings to your thighs. You teeter on that ledge, where your body is on fire and you burn until you’re nothing but appetite. You are a walking inferno, a ticking time bomb for disaster and discovery.

The snatches of time you steal pass too quickly, snowflakes in your palm. There is never enough time, never enough minutes and seconds to talk about nothing at all, to whisper against her jawline, eyes closed. You can’t leave her side without running back into her arms for one last touch. Over and over again, you retrace your steps across the front porch, leaping from your car, like the time where she reaches in and undoes your seat belt, pulls you back into the house, pushes your back against the slammed front door. Lifts you so your legs wrap around her waist.

In class, you trace your own hand with the other, picturing her, lost in quiet agony. Your world begins to be defined by the times you can see her and the times you can’t get away.

She seems to never get her fill of your body, the curves of your hips; the way you ignite at her touch. Maybe that is what you remember most: the exquisite torture, the aching bliss when you arch beneath her on a bed or kitchen table or hard floor, biting your lip, biting hers. Each moment is made sharper, more precious by its fragility. In the bottom of your deepest despair you know this is all fleeting; it cannot sustain itself. Your fear does not keep you from her. Far from it. It draws you to her, the shore calling to the ever-returning sea.

The day comes when all falls apart, and it unfolds as usual. Everything is normal until everything is wrong.

So, you sit on your parents’ bed and reckon with the astronomical phone bill, the multiplied nights where you’d missed curfew, the evasiveness and duplicity of your whereabouts at any given time. You succumb. Their pride in you is everything. Their shame in you is everything. Graduation is weeks from now, they remind you. You are accepted to college hundreds of miles away. Your future is in sight, and there is no room for her.

No one tells you how hard it is to explain something to others that you cannot explain to yourself. People, parents, demand explanation and rationale where none can be found. The why of it all matters so much to everyone looking in from the outside. For you, it is the least important detail. Far more significant are the eruptions of feeling that she brings to you, the way she makes being alive suddenly seem bright and brand new. She demands so little that you want to pour yourself into her, filling her spaces with your spaces. Everyone else plucks away at you like birds tearing at a carcass, ripping out whole chunks with hungry beaks until you’re nothing but bleached bones. She is the only one who calls your pieces back home, back into you.

But the hungry beaks peck away at you. You are all impulse and emotion, driven by synapses constantly firing. Hormones flow like schools of fish through the tributaries of veins toward the sea of your heart, and your judgment is not to be trusted. What’s best for you is not what you think. Every word they say is another wound, a little more of you gone. Bit by bit, the flesh is torn away until your ribs stand out stark like the teeth of something wild.

So, you stop answering her calls, except late at night when it’s dark and quiet and your defenses are most in danger of collapse. You ignore her texts or barely answer them. You walk from your room to the kitchen table in a haze of dull pain, your whole body a constant throbbing bruise. Your mother does your hair in the mornings, her hands like butterfly wings, pulling the strands of you tight and back into place. Your face in the mirror is a frozen mountain lake. A treacherous, temporary surface. A shell concealing unseen depths.

But for your mother’s tears, you try. And for your father’s pleas, you try. It is like wearing someone else’s clothes, like wearing someone else’s skin. It’s ludicrous, so violently wrong that it surprises you when no one seems to notice. You wonder if everyone else lives their life this way, burying the seeds of their souls in salted earth.

Another afternoon, another gray sky. Time ticks by, aligned with your damaged heart. You sit on your bedroom floor, a book in your lap, ten others strewn about you. A book is the only place you can escape, the only place it doesn’t hurt. The silence stretches like poured honey stripped of sweetness.

You are standing before you know it. Then you are running to your car with long, desperate strides, anxious to cover ground, tugging on a sweatshirt as you go. Go to her, go to her, go her. It is a chant in your blood, a chorus in your mind. You drive with shaking hands, bottom lip between your teeth. The sun sets below the horizon as you park and wait for her to come to you.

Hunched against the chill, she walks out to your car, a hood over her head. Seeing her is different now. Something has shifted, changed, since the world told you this is wrong. That’s part of why you hid it, isn’t it? Because you knew what they’d say, and you knew it was nothing you wanted to hear. A reckoning you couldn’t brush off, couldn’t ignore. There is a special grief in the absolute vehemence with which your love for her was dismissed. Though that changes your love for her not at all, that anguish is part of you now, lodged deep.

Her face in streetlamp light is drawn, full of anxiety and an exhaustion that infuriates you. She holds your hand, but her eyes are far away. The agony you feel now has been a part of her for a long time, an inky black stain on the soul you have loved. This is not the first time she has been told that her love has no place here, that it damages. It will not be the last, no matter how much you fight her, how much you argue that the two of you together are anything but a mistake. That the peace that comes when she touches you is worth the world’s denial a thousand times over.

But her quiet refusal is the blow you didn’t know to brace for. You are full of fight, breathing fire, but she has experience where you have hope. Her knowledge comes from the wound she was marked with long ago, left to fester and swell, the wrongness smeared on her like old blood. She is experienced in scorn and the unseen scars of hatred where you are not, yet. Nothing is the same now that they all know. Through your panic, you can see the totality of her withdrawal, and it scares you more than anything else.

You will learn that she has been prepared for this moment all along, the moment when you are cleaved apart. You remain in denial, from fear, and the arrogance of having spent your life being loved. She opens the door to leave you with hands that tremble. Her eyes are bleak. You cannot change her mind. Much later you will be moved all over again by the sacrifice she made to ignore her own feelings, her attempt to protect you from her imperfect love, knowing the world as she did in all its changeless judgment. But you never got to tell her she couldn’t be anything but sublime, the counterpoint to all your hurts, the answer to endless questions asked in darkness.

One last time, you leap out of the car and run after her. She turns to meet you as you throw your arms around her neck the way you’ve done in joy a hundred times before. You are crying with fury, with the blistering unfairness of it all. She holds onto you with fingers that bruise, turning her face into your neck. Then, she lets you go. She walks away. She shoves her hands deep into her pockets, and you know it’s to keep them from reaching back for you. Her footsteps are silent on the pavement, the indifferent sky bright with stars above her head.

Years later, you write her a letter. You are steadier now than you were then, the night it all fell apart. The pain of searching for the answers submerged beneath your own skin has lessened with the discoveries brought by time. You want to tell her this because you know she would care. Despite what divided you, she loved your flaws, your defining peaks and valleys, even the ones she did not understand. You have brought that lesson with you. You never thanked her for giving it to you, never thanked her for teaching you that gentleness. The combined hurt of all the things you never had the chance to say still lodges in your throat, sometimes, until you choke.

The letter is in a nightstand drawer, shoved to the back with the others. A part of you will always be that girl crying on the sidewalk, the girl whirling around for one last kiss.

Sometimes you still hear her voice, soft and slow, in a late-night whisper. There are days where all you have to do is close your eyes to see her face in your mind the way it was on that final night, drenched in tears and moonlight.

And there are times in the dark, in those last moments before sleep envelops you, when you remember what it’s like to have your world begin and end with the pieces of someone. It unfurls in your mind over and over again, a carousel of sensation. Long hair your hands tangle in, a smile that unfolds against your own, each jagged edge prized in equal measure. The gift that is being seen. Even less often, in dreams you are that girl again, the one running wild near the sea, laced with secrets, unaware. You are living again in the only way that makes sense, in the way we all one day sacrifice in exchange for a world we can survive: with a reckless, careless abandon, doing cartwheels on the edge of a cliff that is crumbling under your very touch

– Shannon Layne

Author’s Note: Loosely based on a true story, “The Gift” explores a relationship that develops between two teenage girls with a focus on the visceral elements and intense emotion that characterizes their connection. This piece examines the unique way two young girls relate to each other on the most elemental of levels despite the obstacles and the improbability of their situation, made more complex by their youth and socioeconomic differences. Even a temporary relationship leaves marks and traces, and “The Gift” works to uncover individual truths and revelations brought to the surface by a connection that’s as undeniable as it is unsustainable. The fragility of the relationship mirrors the tentative steps that each girl, in their own way, is taking toward becoming themselves. Bravery is discovered in hidden places, and the girls in this story draw that, and hope, from each other.