Misreading

We were in the blue station wagon, my head in her lap. We’d come to this park near the basketball courts in Honolulu because the sky filled with shooting stars. One after another, for hours, as though the world were ending in failing light.

She had her hand on my belly, and we hadn’t done anything yet. Not really. I’d grown sleepy from stars, and her hand making circles, and then I felt her hair on my face and then gently her lips on mine. I rose up into the kiss. My hands in her hair, and I had yet to imagine what that would feel like. To be both submerged and holding my breath while simultaneously rising up weightlessly, unbounded.

Have you ever tried to read subtext in every social encounter for years? Have you tried to decide when flirting is just a fun conversation and when it has an actual destination?  Have you spent years trying to decide if you are simply misreading things? Because that is the way I remember being a queer teenager. Even in the middle of a kiss, always wondering if this was real real or just wishing.

I listened to the actress who played Barb in Stranger Things read Leah on the Off Beat yesterday, and those old anxieties of trying to suss out not just whether someone is into you, but whether it is safe to be into that person yourself, kicked me in the throat. You beautiful anxious kid. Always overthinking.

Because, you know, you had to.

You had to overthink everything.

I didn’t meet an out lesbian until I was in college.

High school was guess work. The girls like geometry. There’s a solution! Keep solving for X! Use your theorems!

And then, sometimes, one would lean over you in a station wagon, and you’d open your mouth to protest her itchy hair in your face, and suddenly everything would stop as she covered up your protest with something miraculous. And it sounds like fiction but the stars kept falling over both of us, and it was a terrible thrill to wake up this person inside me who had been trying to breathe and keep quiet while being stuffed in a sad, tiny space deep at the back of my chest.

When scientists announced they’d discovered a hidden organ in our sternums, I kept thinking, Oh that spot where I hid being queer. Yeah, that organ is surprising. There and not there like queer camouflage. Is this a spot where I should wear desert or forest fatigues? The exhaustion of costume changes. You gotta learn to blend in with girls better! You gotta find some way to separate from girls because they are calculus and you are still algebra.

Please stop mixing math and costumes and metaphors. Just say what you mean.

Say how heartbreaking it was to be in love with someone who hurt you.

Say how scared you were to approach a girl who kept flirting with you when she might just be friendly. Kind. She might just be kind.

Say how terrible it was that stars fell over the station wagon and you were ending and beginning and not at all yourself while finally letting that poor, frightened girl take a breath inside you at last. You were letting her climb up and out of the scary place inside you and kiss back. You were letting her respond at last. And it was the bravest thing. To let her respond. To let her inhabit all of you, and that kiss, as herself. No costume. No theorem.

It was only a kiss. It was only a kiss. And there you were at last. Terrified. Tender. Filled with that most frightening of impulses: hope.

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Jill Malone

Jill Malone grew up in a military family, went to German kindergarten, and lived across from a bakery that made gummi bears the size of mice. She has lived on the East Coast and in Hawaii, and for the last seventeen years in Spokane with her son, two dogs, a hedgehog, and a lot of outdoor gear. She looks for any excuse to play guitar. Jill is married to a performance artist and addiction counselor who makes the best risotto on the planet.

Giraffe People is her third novel. Her first novel, Red Audrey and the Roping, was a Lambda finalist and won the third annual Bywater Prize for Fiction. A Field Guide to Deception, her second novel, was a finalist for the Ferro-Grumley, and won the Lambda Literary Award and the Great Northwest Book Festival.

Giraffe People

Giraffe People

Between God and the army, fifteen-year-old Cole Peters has more than enough to rebel against. But this Chaplain’s daughter isn’t resorting to drugs or craziness. Truth to tell, she’s content with her soccer team and her band and her white bread boyfriend.

And then, of course, there’s Meghan.

Meghan is eighteen years old and preparing for entry into West Point. For this she has sponsors: Cole’s parents. They’re delighted their daughter is finally looking up to someone. Someone who can tutor her and be a friend.

But one night that relationship changes and Cole’s world flips.

Giraffe People is a potent reminder of the rites of passage and passion that we all endure on our road to growing up and growing strong. Award-winning author Jill Malone tells a story of coming out and coming of age, giving us a take that is both subtle and fresh.

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A Field Guide to Deception

A Field Guide to Deception

In Jill Malone’s second novel, A Field Guide to Deception, nothing is as simple as it appears: community, notions of motherhood, the nature of goodness, nor even compelling love. Revelations are punctured and then revisited with deeper insight, alliances shift, and heroes turn anti-hero—and vice versa.

With her aunt’s death Claire Bernard loses her best companion, her livelihood, and her son’s co-parent. Malone’s smart, intriguing writing beguiles the reader into this taut, compelling story of a makeshift family and the reawakening of a past they’d hoped to outrun. Claire’s journey is the unifying tension in this book of layered and shifting alliances.

A Field Guide to Deception is a serious novel filled with snappy dialogue, quick-moving and funny incidents, compelling characterizations, mysterious plot twists, and an unexpected climax. It is a rich, complex tale for literary readers.

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Red Audrey and the Roping

Red Audrey and the Roping

Occasionally a debut novel comes along that rocks its readers back on their heels. Red Audrey and the Roping is one of that rare and remarkable breed. With storytelling as accomplished as successful literary novelists like Margaret Atwood and Sarah Waters, Jill Malone takes us on a journey through the heart of Latin professor Jane Elliot.

Set against the dramatic landscapes and seascapes of Hawaii, this is the deeply moving story of a young woman traumatized by her mother’s death. Scarred by guilt, she struggles to find the nerve to let love into her life again. Afraid to love herself or anyone else, Jane falls in love with risk, pitting herself against the world with dogged, destructive courage. But finally she reaches a point where there is only one danger left worth facing. The sole remaining question for Jane is whether she is willing to accept her history, embrace her damage, and take a chance on love.

As well as a gripping and emotional story, Red Audrey and the Roping is a remarkable literary achievement. The breathtaking prose evokes setting, characters, and relationships with equal grace. The dialogue sparks and sparkles. Splintered fragments of narrative come together to form a seamless suspenseful story that flows effortlessly to its dramatic conclusion.

Winner of the Bywater Prize for Fiction, Red Audrey and the Roping is one of the most memorable first novels you will ever read.

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