Ava collects straight girls like other women collect shoes. She has three roommates—Dani, Matty, Jules—and Matty’s new girlfriend Sage. They’re the only steady faces in her life. The rest come and go: Lacey in the dark, Renee on the couch, two strangers in a bar restroom whose names she never learned. All straight, all curious, all gone by morning. Now she’s in a play. Greta cast her as Estelle, a woman who loved Bea in the fifties but let fear rip them apart. Shannon plays Bea. Shannon is straight, the kind of straight that should make Ava walk away. Yet onstage Shannon moves like she’s done this before—every look, every pause, every tremor in her voice. It feels too real. Rehearsals run late. Lines bleed into conversations that aren’t scripted. Ava watches Shannon’s mouth shape the words “I loved you then,” and something in her chest answers before she can stop it. The same pull she feels with every straight girl, except this time she can’t picture the exit. She wonders if the story they’re telling onstage is already rewriting itself offstage, if she’s the one about to choose fear over happiness—or if, for once, she’ll risk the opposite.
Ava collects straight girls like other women collect shoes. She has three roommates—Dani, Matty, Jules—and Matty’s new girlfriend Sage. They’re the only steady faces in her life. The rest come and go: Lacey in the dark, Renee on the couch, two strangers in a bar restroom whose names she never learned. All straight, all curious, all gone by morning. Now she’s in a play. Greta cast her as Estelle, a woman who loved Bea in the fifties but let fear rip them apart. Shannon plays Bea. Shannon is straight, the kind of straight that should make Ava walk away. Yet onstage Shannon moves like she’s done this before—every look, every pause, every tremor in her voice. It feels too real. Rehearsals run late. Lines bleed into conversations that aren’t scripted. Ava watches Shannon’s mouth shape the words “I loved you then,” and something in her chest answers before she can stop it. The same pull she feels with every straight girl, except this time she can’t picture the exit. She wonders if the story they’re telling onstage is already rewriting itself offstage, if she’s the one about to choose fear over happiness—or if, for once, she’ll risk the opposite.
