Kate in Waiting by Becky Albertalli (ereader with android txt) 📕

“There’s the Suckle,” says Brandie.

“Yeah, but what does the Suckle really tell us?” Andy says. “B, I distinctly remember you freaking out last year when Mr. D didn’t suckle—”

“Oh my God. Please stop talking about Mr. D suckling.” Raina shudders.

“Rain, you’re literally the one who—”

“I know.” Raina pokes Andy’s ankle. “But not as a verb.”

Andy pokes her back. “Anyway. I’m just saying, I’m one hundred percent positive that Mr. D didn’t do the Suckle for Brandie last year, and, hmm, oh yeah . . . what part did Brandie get?”

Brandie can’t help smiling into the mouth of her Braden bottle.

“Maria, Maria, Maria, Maria,” Anderson sings.

“Right,” says Brandie. “But remember, he did suckle for Raina—”

“Ewwwwwwww.”

Brandie ignores her. “And this year, he definitely did it when Vivian was singing.”

“But not Kate,” Andy says, “and Kate was—”

“Nope.” I squeeze my eyes shut. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

A straight-up lie. I totally want to talk about it, and they know it.

It’s the traditional audition postmortem. We spent the car ride here dissecting every moment, from every angle. And since Anderson’s mom was home, we ran through the whole thing again for her benefit. She didn’t even ask questions. She pretty much just sat there working on her cross-stitch, letting us monologue, like the hero she is. And now we’ve taken over Andy’s crisply made queen bed, going for round three under the watchful two-dimensional eyes of Billy Porter, Lizzo, and Lena Waithe—Andy’s Gallery of Icons.

“Kate.” Raina stretches and yawns beside me. “You know you were amazing.”

“What? No.” I hug my knees. “Y’all were amazing.”

Andy scoffs. “Excuse me, you three were amazing. My high note sounded like a shriek having sex with a grunt.”

“Would that be a squawk?” Brandie sips her Coke.

“At least your first verse didn’t sound like a sheep masturbating,” I say.

“At least you didn’t sound like a toad farting out of its mouth.”

“This is the single most fucked up interaction I’ve ever witnessed,” says Raina.

“We’re not fucked up,” Andy says. “We’re just competitive. In a healthy way.”

“You just said your voice sounded like a toad fart.”

“Because it sounded like a toad fart,” Andy says.

“What it sounds like,” says Raina, “is a little boy named Anderson Walker fishing for compliments.”

“Hey,” Andy says. “I don’t fish.”

And it’s true. Andy doesn’t fish for compliments. He just gets like this when he’s anxious. He goes into pendulum mode, swinging between cocky and self-deprecating. It’s like he simultaneously does and doesn’t know how talented he is.

“Anyway, I’m calling it,” Anderson says, reaching past Brandie for a bag of Skittles on his nightstand. “Brandie as the jester, Raina as the queen—”

“Stop! Don’t jinx me.” Raina’s cheeks flood with color.

I swear, some people’s faces are legit neon signs. Raina has always been like that. She doesn’t blush all that often, but when she does, it’s so loud.

Raina wants to be the queen, and she wants it badly.

I probably could have guessed that. Raina’s always had a thing about queens. It’s why she picked the name Raina. I still have this crystal-clear memory of the first day of second grade, the year she socially transitioned at school. Her parents are so wholly and utterly extra, they’d bought her a whole wardrobe of skirts and dresses. But that day, Raina just wanted jeans and one of her sister’s old T-shirts, with a picture of Elsa from Frozen. The shirt said Snow Queen. And every time Mira Reynolds and Genny Hedlund deadnamed her or misgendered her, or asked weird intrusive questions, Raina pretended to be Elsa. She explained it to me once. She said the secret was acting confident—unimpeachably confident. Queen-level confident.

And it worked. Mira and Genny moved on pretty quickly, and I think that was about the worst of it. Even in middle school, the f-force mostly left Raina alone. Honestly, I think a lot of people just forget she’s trans. She’s totally out, but she doesn’t talk about trans stuff much, except with us and Harold. Because even though Raina’s Elsa powers successfully repelled Mira and Genny, she’ll still never trust them. She has a hard time trusting anyone in the f-force, to be honest. And she’s probably right.

“Oh!” Anderson nudges me. “Matt wants to know if we’re going to Sean Sanders’s party tomorrow night.”

Raina laughs—but stops abruptly when she catches Anderson’s eye. “Oh, honey. You’re serious.”

Anderson swallows a Skittle. “Why wouldn’t I be serious?”

“A party.” Raina squints. “With Sean Sanders.”

“And other people!”

“Right, right,” says Raina. “I’m sure the whole gang will be there. All six of his abs—”

“Actually, eight,” Brandie says.

Anderson smiles sheepishly. “I don’t know. It could be fun.”

“I would.” Brandie smiles wryly. “But I have that movie.”

“With your bestie,” chimes Raina.

“Okay, that’s—”

“And it’s not a movie.” Raina says solemnly. “It’s a film.”

Brandie swats her arm. The two of them are so funny, I swear. My dad calls them the Odd Couple. They’re total opposites, but I actually think, in their own way, they’re as enmeshed as Anderson and I are. For a while, Andy was convinced Raina and Brandie were secretly dating. He had all this evidence lined up, like the day Raina showed up to school smelling like Brandie’s shampoo—or the way Raina lost her mind checking every grocery store for Cokes with Brandie’s name on the label. In retrospect, it was maybe a bit of a stretch, but I swear it made sense at the time.

But no. It was just Anderson being full-throttle Anderson. Raina and Brandie laughed for hours when he told them. Raina’s bi, but she made herself perfectly clear: dating Brandie would be practically Oedipal. And to this day, we have no idea how Brandie identifies. I mean, there was one time she blushed and called Harry Styles “adorable,” but that’s it. That’s all we’ve got.

Andy turns to me. “Kate, you’re coming, right?”

“Of course I’m coming,” I say. “Like I’d miss out on all those fuckboy abs.”

But Andy just snorts. “Like you’d miss out on Matt,” he says plainly.

It’s like he pulled the words straight