The Necklace That Wouldn't Leave Me Alone

          I wasn’t born with the necklace. I woke up with it one morning when I was ten years old. I didn’t remember putting it on, but then again, I’d had a pretty eventful night. I’d stayed over at Nina’s house until 8 pm, unprecedentedly late for me. It was for Nina’s eleventh birthday, but you wouldn’t have known that Nina was the star of the night, because Amber was the one everyone focused on. Because Amber had gotten that most precious of honors: the first one in the grade to get a boyfriend.

          “I knew it,” Lia said to me in a stage whisper, when we went to get more lemonade from the kitchen. “She totally liked him. They’re sooo cute, right?”

          “Aren’t we too young to have boyfriends?” I said, in the same gossipy tone. The drama excited me, and I knew what my role was: the weirdo who contributed the weird opinion.

          Lia raised her eyebrows at me. “What, you don’t think any boys are cute?”

          “Uh, all the boys in our school are so annoying,” I said.

          “OK, so true!” Lia said. “But like, you haven’t had any crushes?”

          My face turned bright red at the grown-up topic, and Lia squealed. “Oh my God, you do! Who is it, who is it?”

          “I don’t!” I said, willing my face to go back to normal. This only spurred her on.

          “Guys!” she yelled back to the living room. “Mallory has a cruuuu-ush!”

          Everyone shrieked and I covered my face. They kept egging me on to tell them, but I didn’t have a crush. I hadn’t even really thought about boys, beyond being annoyed at them.

          Amber said, after about ten minutes, “I bet I know who it is. Luke, right? You guys are always talking together!”

          “Oh my God, it totally is!” Sarah said. “I’m gonna call him right now!”

          “No!” I shouted, panicked. “Come on, guys.”

          “I’m gonna call him unless you admit you like him,” Sarah said, folding her arms.

          “Fine,” I said. “To keep you from calling him. I like Luke.”

          It felt wrong to say it, but everyone collapsed into giggles and gasps, and it felt good to be normal, so I went with it. Sure. Luke. He wasn’t so bad.

          I remembered the decision to have a crush on Luke, the next morning, as I removed the necklace to inspect it. A thin but sturdy silver chain, long enough to reach my chest, with a small glass bead. I didn’t really like jewelry, so I took it off and returned it to the jewelry box, where it must have come from, to sit among all the other jewelry that my grandma insisted on getting me.

          At school, I saw Luke and got nervous. What were you supposed to do when you liked a boy? He sat next to me during Quiet Reading Time and said, “Are you seriously reading that book? It’s only a fourth grade level. I’m reading a sixth grade level book.”

          I rolled my eyes. OK, crush over. That was a relief.

          The next morning, I woke up wearing the necklace again. I definitely did not remember putting it on the night before. Was I sleepwalking or something?

          I took it off again, this time putting it on my bookshelf. Maybe that would confuse my sleepy brain.

          But the next morning, it was around my neck again.

          “Mom,” I said at breakfast. “Are you putting a necklace on me at night?”

          “No,” she said. “What are you talking about?”

          “I keep waking up with a necklace. Is it you? Or Emily?”

          “Emily, sweetie, are you putting a necklace on your sister while she sleeps?”

          Emily froze midway through trying to grab an extra pudding pack for her lunchbox.

          “Nope,” she said, then snatched the pudding pack and threw it into her lunchbox. The breakfast conversation quickly shifted to the topic of pudding, and I put the necklace out of my mind.

          By the second week of me waking up with the necklace, I chalked it up to some magical destiny that was clearly waiting for me. Like all magical destinies, it needed to be kept secret, because otherwise the Chosen One’s friends and family would make fun of them for still believing in magical destinies. I tucked the glass bead under my shirt, where it was small enough to be ignored, and no one asked about it. One of the perks of no one really looking at me.

          The necklace became a regular part of life. It didn’t do much vis-à-vis magical destiny, as far as I could tell, or vis-à-vis anything else. When my friend Nina noticed it, she assumed I’d gotten it at one of the goody bags from her birthday. When my mom noticed it, I told her it was a prize I’d chosen from the prize box at the library’s summer reading contest.

          “You chose a necklace?” she said, her eyes lighting up.

          “Sure,” I said. Sweet, I got girly-girl points without even trying.

          Girly-girl points were a term I’d come up with in third grade, when my mom had gotten me to wear a fancy dress to my cousin’s wedding. My grandma had burst into a speech about how I was blossoming into a young woman, and that she was so glad I was wearing dresses now instead of the “tomboy clothes” I usually wore. As far as I could tell, tomboys were girls who liked sports, and the girls I knew who liked sports would be extra girly to make up for it. Nina, for example, played softball, and always insisted on wearing a pink bow in her hair to games. The thing was, I didn’t play sports- I just didn’t wear totally girly clothes.

          But it made adults so happy when I was a girly-girl. It was like I’d taken a burden off their shoulders. If I were to ask for makeup instead of books for a birthday present, that would be, like, ten thousand girly-girl points. My mom didn’t care as much about girly-girl points as other adults, but every so often I could see her need for them shine through, like she was just waiting for the girly-girl me to break out of my baby cocoon.

          Like she thought I was too shy to admit that I wanted to grow up and become just like all the teenage girls who wore makeup and high heels and liked boys.

          She asked me, in sixth grade, very gently, if I’d been looking at boys. Knowing that “the talk” was coming, I said, “Ew, no!”

          “It’s OK if you have,” she said. “Lots of girls your age-”

          “Well, I’m not lots of girls,” I grumbled.

          “Oh,” she said, and her face fell a little. “When you do find a boy you like- you know- you can tell me-”

          “Yes, yes, I know, oh my god,” I said, knowing full well that whenever I decided which boy I was going to like, I certainly wouldn’t tell my mom about it.

          My friends were harping on it, too. When we were in elementary school, it was OK to still be on the fence about boys, but now, time was of the essence. I stopped being friends with Lia and Sarah and dealing with their invasive questions, but even Nina, who I still liked, would talk about boys incessantly.

Sometimes, I ran over the boys I knew in my head, desperately trying to find anything appealing about any of them. They weren’t bad people, but the thought of kissing them? Of even spending enough time with them to qualify as boyfriend and girlfriend? It was unsettling.

          Every time I settled on one to like, they’d open their mouth and say something stupid and shatter the illusion. It was exhausting.

          I wondered if the necklace was somehow connected. It had appeared the night after I’d confessed my first crush. It still hadn’t done anything, though. I was starting to think it didn’t have a magical destiny attached after all, when it finally acted up in eighth grade.

          I’d been placed in art as my elective class. I liked drawing, so I was happy. The art teacher, Ms. Melman, showed us a slideshow the first day.

          “We’re going to be trying a lot of art styles,” she said, and fired up the projector. She went on about the different paintings while she clicked through. It was fairly interesting, not fascinating, until the slide.

          I half-registered the class bursting into giggles and some of the guys saying, “Ohhhh!” in the background.

The painting mesmerized me. It showed two young women in dresses sitting in two canoes on a lake. They were leaning towards each other- and kissing.

          In the darkness, hiding in the very back of the art room, I stared at it as Ms. Melman rushed to calm the class down, and then I felt it. I thought it was the warmth of embarrassment, but it wasn’t. It was concentrated in the glass bead of my necklace, brilliantly hot, like it’d been sitting on a stove, pressed against my chest. It was beginning to burn.

          I quickly grabbed the necklace out from my shirt and looked at it. The lights were off, but I could still see: the clear glass had turned bright red.

          I hid the necklace and snapped back to attention as Joey S. said loudly, “That’s hot, bruh.”

          Ms. Melman walked right over to him.

          “That’s inappropriate to say, bruh,” she said, and he muttered, “Sorry,” and laughed.

          She returned to the projector and started going on about Impressionism, before she switched slides. But the image burned in my mind, and my heart raced. The necklace. The necklace meant something, and I was soon going to learn what, I thought.

          But I didn’t end up learning what. Instead, I went home like normal, hoping that a wizard or someone would approach me, and did my homework and ate my dinner and went to bed like always.

          In bed, the image came to my mind again. Two women, curls framing their faces, leaning over their boats towards each other’s mouths. My skin went warm. And the necklace- the necklace, again, turned bright red.

          What else could women do with each other? My brain filled with images. I couldn’t sleep. Sweat filled my forehead. I could not think about this. I had to think about this. Oh, God. The necklace was hot as fire and just as red. I tore it off.

          This was inappropriate, bruh.

          This was not what good girls do.

          This was not fair to the latest boy I’d selected for my crush, and the months-long streak I’d built of continuing to like him no matter what dumb things he said.

          And this was one shitty magical destiny.

          I realized pretty soon what this was: my sexual awakening. What poor luck that it had happened while looking at an image of two women. That was bound to confuse my brain, and make me think that sex with a woman was what I wanted. The necklace seemed to have been confused as well, turning warm all the time now when I saw girls in short-shorts, or lingerie catalogues, or anything else. Even when I saw Nina looking attractive in some way, it’d light up sometimes, as if to sexualize her.

It was a sex necklace. That was horrifying. I didn’t want a sex necklace. I threw it away.

          I woke up with it around my neck the next morning.

          I was furiously ashamed. Not only were my sexual fantasies somehow pointed in the opposite direction of the guy I was working to have a crush on, but I had a sex necklace. What the hell was that supposed to mean? I wasn’t a sex-necklace kind of girl. I was boring. And I hated that it was trying to ruin my friendship with Nina, one of the few girls who were nice to me, by putting sex thoughts in my head about her.

          The thought occurred to me one night that this probably made me a lesbian, and at that thought, the necklace turned a brilliant violet. I entertained it for a while- loving girls. Dating girls. Even marrying one. That wasn’t fair, though, I thought, and the necklace became clear again. What kind of person would I be, to be both a lesbian stereotype and an actual lesbian? People had already asked me several times if I was a lesbian, because I wasn’t girly enough. I wasn’t going to fulfill their expectations. And it also wasn’t very nice to the real gay community, to try and waltz right in just because it sounded so wonderful.

          Besides. There was the matter of the guys I had worked so hard to like. What was I going to do, throw out all that hard work?

          In high school, I finally came to the realization that you weren’t supposed to force yourself to like guys just to fit in. You were supposed to like a guy because you found him likable, no other reason.

          This was how I came to like Scott. Scott and I were part of the same study group, with Nina and a bunch of other kids who took all AP classes. He was funny, smart, actually seemed to care about learning, and treated me as a human being. It was thrilling for a boy to treat me as a human being. Most boys thought of me as some anomalous freak, not hot enough to be a girl worth pursuing, but not a boy either, therefore not worth talking to. Scott, on the other hand, talked normally to me. We’d discuss books we liked, make fun of ridiculous school-spirit activities, and struggle through homework assignments together. My whole chest warmed around him. Finally, finally, this was what it meant to fall in love. I hadn’t even had to try.

          I waited for the necklace to catch up and confirm my attraction to him. It would sometimes glow a bit during study group, but it didn’t really do anything until the day Scott and I were the first ones to arrive at study hall. I sat down nervously.      

          “Hey, Mallory,” he said, and smiled, which made me melt. “What’d you think of the reading for AP Lit?”

          “It was weird,” I said. “But good.”

          “Right?” he said, and we talked for a few minutes, and then he said it: “You always actually get the stuff we read. We should talk about books more.”

          Oh my God, oh my God. He was smiling right at me. This was- this was flirting, right? A boy was flirting with me. Oh my God.

And then Nina walked in and saw us smiling at each other. My eyes darted to her immediately. I could spot the tiniest, near-imperceptible sadness in her eyes.

          My necklace cooled to a freezing point, and then- cracked. It wasn’t loud, but I still heard it, and more, I felt it, sharp against my chest.

          Nina was jealous. She- oh God- she must have liked Scott, too.

          My necklace had never gone cold before.

          For the next few days, I couldn’t focus on anything except Nina and Scott. I felt like the most selfish person on Earth. I’d spent months obsessing over Scott, thrilled to potentially have a boyfriend, without even considering that Nina wanted him too. And I would give up Scott for Nina. For her, it was worth it. She mattered so much to me.

          I’d thought the necklace was a sex necklace, hoped it was a love necklace. But now I knew what it was- a friendship necklace. It had even reacted to thoughts of Nina before- thoughts of true friendship. Girls were my friends, and when I thought about girls, the necklace glowed. It made sense.

          No- it didn’t make sense-

          Come on Mallory, you know that’s dumb, you know what it really means-

          No, god damn it, that can’t be true-

          What about the boys, what about the girly-girl points, what about Mom, or Scott, or everyone else who wants you to be-

          Who wants you to be-

          The necklace was cracking everywhere. It started hurting me to wear it. I couldn’t pay attention in class. I hated the damn thing. It wasn’t a friendship necklace, either. It was a demon, tormenting me with lies about myself. I was perfectly fine being the person everyone thought I’d always been.

          I walked to the edge of town and threw it deep into the woods. I woke up with it again the next morning. I drowned it in a pond. I woke up with it again. I tossed it out the car window on the highway. I woke up with it again.

          I went back to the place where it’d first lit up, my eighth-grade art room. Ms. Melman was in there.

          “Mallory!” she said. “What a surprise! What brings you here?”

          “Um, nothing,” I said, fidgeting with my necklace through my shirt.

          She looked at me with such a gentle expression I wanted to cry. “Are you sure?”

          I bit my lip. I could feel tears welling up.

          “Um,” I said. “You, uh. You showed us a painting one time- it was- it was, like, Impressionist- or something- there was two women- you know what, never mind-”

          “Oh, honey,” Ms. Melman said. “You don’t have to say it. I know.”

          A tear came through and streamed down my face.

          “I know it’s hard,” she said. “I want you to know I’m here for you, okay?”

          It couldn’t be true. I knew myself. I knew I wasn’t…

          I knew I wasn’t…

          I knew I was gay.

          The necklace shattered, and the tightly wound glass released into a whooshing of sand that spilled over the classroom floor. It lay there for a moment, then a wind came and whisked it away.

          It was free.