Girls, girls, girls. “Hey, Mama? How do you tell if a girl likes girls?”
Cheryl Jones looked up from her newspaper, her green eyes piercing even through her thin-framed glasses. She always had a rather stern look to her, although that was definitely not who she was. “Oh, uh,” she fumbled, folding up the paper. She placed it on the coffee table in front of her, its absence and the resulting visibility of her reminding Sammy just how well-dressed her mother always was, a collared shirt beneath a sweater with the sleeves rolled to the elbows. “Lauren?” she called, leaning in the direction of the kitchen. “Could you come here for a second?”
A moment thereafter, her wife, Lauren Meeks, entered the living room, drying her hands on a towel. “What is it, babe?” she asked.
“Sammy just asked me an interesting question,” said Cheryl, running a hand through her short brown hair, motion aiding product in keeping it pushed back. “Why don’t you ask her, Sammy?”
Both of her mothers immediately and in sync turned their attention to her. “How do you tell if a girl likes girls?” the Pecari repeated, slightly unnerved but generally not one to buckle under pressure. Still, it was one thing to give a speech to a class of twenty kids your own age and a whole other thing to have both your moms staring at you.
“Oh,” Lauren said. She seemed confused, but not at Sammy; she turned her crinkled brown eyes to Cheryl, as if to silently ask why this required her attention. Sammy’s biological mother was a fairly small woman, but she was the type that grown-ass men ran from when she was in a proper mood. “Well,” she went on, a stubby finger wrapping unconsciously around a strand of blonde hair. “How can you tell if a girl likes boys?”
“...I don’t know,” Sammy replied after a moment of thought. “I guess when you’re kids and there hasn’t been a lot of evidence in any direction, you just… assume?”
“Right,” her mother answered. “So in this case, just do the same thing. Even if there has been boys in a girl’s life. She still might not be strictly straight.” Lauren smiled, and Sammy noticed Cheryl somewhat nervously follow her lead. “If you like a girl, ask her out,” her mom concluded bluntly. (Sammy knew she got her tactlessness from somewhere.) “The worst she can do is say no.”
“Okay, Mom. Thanks,” the fourth year returned a bit distantly, pondering her possibilities for when she would return to Sonora. “I just might do that.”