“We could hang out of course.” Molly smiled sardonically, batting her eyelids. “In your dreams. Now piss off, please, before somebody sees you.”

I dropped my gaze immediately. I knew that they stood there for a minute longer, allowing her words to sink in, before they both silently hurried back in the direction from whence they came. Molly was laughing still, Orla sniggering along beside her, but Connie’s eyes were on me. I shoved aside the queasy feeling in my stomach and the odd sense of liability that was gnawing at my innards, taking only a quick moment to settle myself before sitting back up.

“I can’t believe you used to hang out with people like them.”

“We weren’t really friends. You know that.”

“You still hung out with them.”

“Yeah, but—I wasn’t like them. I sat with them at lunch, that was it.”

“You gonna go to the movies with your friends, Alex?” Molly sniggered. “What dorks. Hey, are they like—lesbians or something?”

“Huh?”

She sighed impatiently, clicking her teeth. “Are they lesbians?”

I shook my head quickly, looking somewhere to the side. “I, uh—I don’t think so.”

“I’d say they are. They look like it, don’t they? They look like they could be dykes.”

It was a word I wasn’t very well acquainted with but I certainly heard it before, and I knew it wasn’t intended as a compliment. Sometimes we would go into the city together and my old friends would mutter it under their breath when we passed by certain people and the rest of us would laugh—women with shaved heads or flashy tattoos or masculine clothing. They would say it about women who caused mothers with their children to cross to the other side of the road, the kind that elderly men would shake their heads at. I didn’t quite know exactly what it meant and nobody ever defined it for me, but in time I began to piece it together. These were the women they spoke about on the News, who marched for strange, foreign things like ‘liberation’ and ‘equality,’ who cast aside social conventions and respectable livelihoods in the name of free love. These were the women they sometimes spoke about at church, those who would never find refuge in the kingdom of God for their very essence was a sin. These were women who loved other women, and sixteen-year-old Molly couldn’t conjure up an insult worse than that.

I pieced together, over time, that it was exactly the kind of word to describe the kind of person I knew myself to be.

“I—uh—I’m really not sure—But I don’t think—”

“We should tell people they are,” she said, an edge of unbridled excitement clipping her words. “So that everyone knows.”

I glanced at Connie. She was looking out to the sea, apparently deep in thought.

“Connie? Did you hear me? I said—”

“I heard what you said,” she snapped, and turned her head around. “It’s a stupid rumor, Molly. Nobody even knows who they are. Why don’t you tell everyone—I dunno—Aidan gave Rosin chlamydia or something if you’re so desperate to stir someone’s shit up?”