They are kicked out of the bar at 2 am by a very annoyed bartender who bangs her brick of a novel against the rickety old door and yells at them to get out. They walk home. Well, they’re heading down the same street, anyway. For a few steps, they’re silent. Noel is trying to remember how to put her feet in front of each other without falling, but she can’t get the image of that shiny little bottle out of her head. Finally, she trips over air and Clare grabs her arm and they half fall, half lower themselves to the curb. People can walk around them anyway.

“So,” Noel says. 

“Yeah,” Clare says. 

“I thought I was the only one.” 

“Me too.” 

“Is this normal?” 

Clare smiles the kind of smile that only makes an appearance very, very early in the morning. “Normal,” she says. “Is very boring.” 

# 

They don’t tell each other what secrets they keep locked away inside their respective jars. That would entirely not be the point. But they talk about it. The words start to come easier once they’ve been sitting there awhile, and Noel begins to feel less tired and less alive all at once, which she knows has everything to do with the ridiculously early hour and the alcohol and nothing to do with the fact that she just learned that the thing she thought made her so other from everyone else isn’t so strange after all. 

“Do you think they’ll ever break?” Clare asks, tilting her head back against the dirty brick of the building. They’re still outside the bar. The bartender had been one of the people to walk around them. 

Noel is glad she asked first. “I don’t know,” she says. “I used to have nightmares about it. Yours is a lot smaller than mine. It probably can’t hold a lot.” 

Clare shrugs. “People don’t tell me a lot.” She says it softly, like it’s a confession, like there’s something hiding underneath. 

“I’ve never told anyone before,” Noel says. She checks the time on her phone: 4:02 am. Jesus. 

“Doctors see mine pretty often,” Clare says. “But they never really mention it? They always look away. Maybe, it’s magic?” 

“Maybe, it’s magic,” Noel echoes. Something festers in her throat, something like a laugh or a sob she’s not quite sure. She coughs. “I think we’re very drunk.” 

“I’m not that drunk,” Clare says. She tugs on Noel’s sleeve. “You’re not that drunk either. You’re just scared.” 

 “Maybe,” Noel admits. 

Clare swallows, and Noel wonders how she does it, if she ever chokes on the jar in the night, if she can move it around with her tongue. “Nothing feels real to anyone,” Clare says, finally, like it’s something rehearsed; the words have an off-kilter lilt to them. “We’re all just making everything up.” 

# 

Noel does get home, eventually. Clare had called a cab, but not until after slipping Noel a warped white business card. “Call me?” she’d asked, and Noel, sad, giddy, drunk, had winked at her like an idiot and given her her number. The sun is up by the time she unlocks her apartment door and calls her boss to say she won’t be coming in today. She spends the morning dry heaving into the toilet bowl, her jar click-clacking against her ribs with each wretch. At night, she watches mind-numbing romantic comedies and eats popcorn and wonders when her life became so terribly mundane and so horribly magical. 

# 

In the end, Clare calls her a few days later. “Do you like pancakes?” she asks. Noel does, as it turns out. They meet at a local diner that is cheap and sweet and not too crowded. Clare orders strawberry pancakes and Noel gets toast and they spend an awkward few minutes fumbling over forks and food. 

“This is weird,” Noel says, finally, because she has to say something. 

Clare nods and swallows down her coffee. “Yeah,” she says. She sketches something out on a napkin that Noel can’t see. 

“Does it hurt?” Noel asks. “Eating?” 

“No,” Clare says. “It feels...kind of heavy sometimes? And when something else is added it itches, kind of like a scab.” 

“Do you add new secrets a lot?” 

“No.” Clare sets down her fork and pushes her plate away. “It’s been…maybe a year? Before we met.” 

Noel’s jar flutters a little against her rib cage. “Really?” 

“Yeah,” Clare looks at her, hard. That’s the only way Noel can think to describe it. It’s not something negative or accusatory or anything. Just intense. No one has looked at her like that for a long time. 

“I killed a deer when I was sixteen,” Noel finds herself saying. The words just tumble out like they’d been there all along, waiting. She flushes. It’s one of the first secrets she ever swallowed; it still rattles around in her jar late at night. 

Clare blinks, but doesn’t flinch or laugh or say anything at all, except: “With your car?” “Yeah.” Noel remembers the flash of brown, the burning rubber of the brakes, the car thrumming under her feet like an out-of-control heartbeat. 

“My sister’s dead,” Clare says; she says it so calmly and so quietly that it takes Noel a moment to process the words at all. 

“What?” 

“In the womb,” Clare says. “I was a twin.” 

“Shit.” What else is she supposed to say? 

Clare looks down and shifts in her chair so the legs squeal against the floor. “It’s stupid,” she says after a moment. “But I miss her, sometimes.” 

“That’s not stupid.” Noel does not tell her about her own secret, the one shivering just under her tongue. It had snuck out of her jar sometime during their conversation and she aches to swallow it down. Something about Clare makes her entirely too honest. 

The secret under her tongue isn’t something she’s ever said before, which is probably why it’s the most important. Everyone usually knows anyway, usually figures it out. She’s never had to say it out loud. 

Clare knows, she can tell. There’s something in the way she watches her, the way they move around each other. . 

God, she hates the coming-out narrative. Maybe that’s why the secret has been there for so long. She’s never wanted to have to say it. But it’s there, caught between her teeth anyway. 

# 

They meet at the same bar again the next Friday. The bartender is reading a new book. This one is somehow bigger than the last, and there’s a dragon on the cover. Clare is already there when Noel arrives. She’s wearing a blue collared shirt and jeans, and her hair is combed back, away from her eyes. Her shoulders are all tense and hunched. Her drink is full. “Hey,” Noel says, and sits down beside her. “You okay?” 

“Yeah,” Clare says. She’s obviously lying but they don’t know each other well enough yet for Noel to push, so she doesn’t. Noel orders a gin and tonic, and they talk. Noel’s secret is all tangled s between her back molars like bad dental floss and the alcohol burns when she swallows it down. 

“Do you think we could die without the jars breaking?” Noel asks after their second round of drinks. 

“Like, never tell anyone any of the secrets?” Clare asks, propping her chin up on her hand. “I don’t think so.” The paper in Noel’s abdomen flutters, a not-so-phantom itch. “Secrets can be dangerous.” 

“Other people carry secrets around all the time.” 

“We’re not other people.” Clare’s eyes are wicked-bright in the dim light of the bar. Noel can’t stop looking at them. 

“No,” she says through her clenched teeth, her dry throat, the buzz in her ears. “We’re not.” 

# 

Clare texts her during the week. They’re simple conversations, nothing particularly flirtatious or strange. Usually, Clare sends her pictures of her cat. The cat is the kind of cat with a scrunched-up face so it looks like it is perpetually scowling.

Grim says hi 

Hi, Grim. 

Noel replies with mundane things: selfies, pictures on street corners, her favorite pancake recipes she’s stolen from her Mom. Sometimes, they ask each other for secrets. Tell me something you’ve never told anyone else, Noel will say, and Clare will respond three times, always three times: 

I hate mint-flavored toothpaste. 

I failed my driving test four times. 

I’m very bad at cooking. 

When Clare asks, Noel sends back three secrets of her own: 

I don’t like chocolate. 

I am scared every year to do my taxes. 

I hate Broadway musicals. 

It feels strange, revealing these mundane secrets. They don’t weigh anything, and she hasn’t swallowed any of them, but there’s still a kind of relief in letting them go. She hasn’t ever really let anyone know her in this way. No one had ever asked. 

# 

“Hey,” Clare says on another Friday, a month after their first conversation. They’re in that bar bathroom pressed up against the sink and Noel’s pulse is thundering so loud in her ears that she can barely feel the jar in her stomach rattling, rattling, rattling. “I like you a lot.” 

Clare says it suddenly, slowly. 

Like it’s a secret. 

Noel pauses for a moment, breathes. She can’t say anything. She wants to run. She wants to tell Clare everything, smash the jar, spill all the secrets. She wants to hide. She wants to hold Clare’s hand. She’s so very afraid to hold Clare’s hand. 

Clare takes her hand anyway, and Noel’s heart nearly stops. 

Clare tilts her head up, never looks away. “You don’t have to say anything,” she says. “It’s okay.” 

When they kiss, Noel can feel the shape of the bottle against Clare’s throat, thrumming like a second pulse. 

That night, Noel dreams of finding beach glass in New York City, far from the ocean. Clare is there. She picks up the shards of green and black and red and slices her fingers with them. She says that they’re beer bottles. 

# 

They start meeting up for lunch, on Sundays, because their Friday night drunken conversations aren’t enough. These meetings always feel warped to Noel, suspended in time. They talk about books and philosophy over coffee. They walk through the park. 

Noel sees other couples walking, too. Holding hands. Sometimes kissing. She can feel Clare’s eyes on her, the closeness of her, the heat of her breath, close, close, close. Noel wants to hold her hand. She wants to kiss her. She doesn’t. She watches a girl and a boy kiss on the bench across from them. She watches two girls hold hands, swinging while they walk. She watches boys lay all tangled up with each other on their picnic blanket, and she aches. The jar in her stomach rattles. 

“I’m sorry you’re carrying this,” Clare says, quiet enough that only Noel can hear. “I know it’s heavy.” 

Noel doesn’t have anything to say to that. 

# 

On a Monday, after their first park…date? Should she call it a date? Noel makes her favorite dinner. She spends an hour wandering the buzzing fluorescent-lit aisles of the grocery store. Her cart’s wheels get stuck and she trips over her own feet, but she manages to buy eggs and flour and everything she needs and bakes her chicken in the oven just so and makes brownies from scratch. She texts Clare a picture of flour everywhere, of brownie batter stuck between her teeth from licking the spoon. Clare responds with heart emojis. Look at you, she says. Being all domestic and a proper adult. 

Noel’s jar lurches. She sends back, yeah, and stabs her half-cooked brownies with a toothpick. She wants to write back something more but can’t find the words. Clare lights up her phone: save some for me! Bring them over later? 

Sure, Noel says, and is surprised by how much she means it. It’s 9 p.m. and she was going to go to bed early, but she throws on a jacket and walks half a mile to Clare’s door, brownies tucked against her chest like a secret. 

# 

The next day, Clare calls her. 

“I think it’s breaking,” she says. Noel can hear her breathing hard on the phone, quick, sharp sounds. 

She runs. 

# 

Noel finds Clare bent over her kitchen sink. She’s wearing a rumpled red t-shirt with a faded logo of some company on it, but Noel can’t make out the letters. She takes a few steps into the room, rests a hand between Clare’s heaving shoulder blades. They’ve never touched like this. She can feel the tight cords of muscle writhing under her hand as Clare wretches. Noel doesn’t quite know what to do. She rubs her hands in circles along Clare’s back. This feels intimate, maybe too intimate, but not wrong, exactly. 

“You okay?” It is such a stupid question, but it’s the only one she has. There are tiny shards of glass in the sink, little flecks that sparkle like beach glass when Noel bends down to look. 

“I didn’t say anything,” Clare whispers. “I didn’t tell anyone anything that I wasn’t supposed to.” She’s not crying, but there’s a kind of hysterical strain in her voice, a tautness that Noel has never heard before. “I promise I didn’t. I just woke up and it was splintering.” 

“Can you breathe? Did it cut you?” 

Clare shakes her head, spits another shard of glass into the sink. 

“Okay,” Noel says. “You’re going to be okay.” This seems like the right thing to say. She has no idea if it’s true. 

Clare reaches into her mouth and unfurls strands of wet paper. Some of the secrets are legible, some aren’t. Noel doesn’t read them, not really, just catches fragments of words in wet ink: bathroom. Tear. Sister. Mom. Clare holds them, makes her fingers fists around them. When she’s wretched and cried enough, she hands them to Noel. Noel collects them in a pile. 

“We should burn them,” Clare whispers. Her voice is splintering and raw and it makes Noel’s chest ache. Her own jar twinges, heavy glass cold in the pit of her stomach. She says, “Okay.” 

Noel holds Clare’s hand and wipes the blood from her chin and strikes the matches for the burning. It’s almost ceremonial. The flames lick up the match and singe her fingers a bit. The paper smokes and snarls, wet and resistant to the flames. Clare whispers the secrets into Noel’s shoulder as they burn. When the secrets finally catch fire, she twists away like the flames hurt her. 

Noel’s pulse thunders in her ears, reckless and loud. She has never felt anything like this before. She has never felt so alive. 

When it’s over, they sit together on the kitchen floor, all tangled together. Noel strokes her fingers through Clare’s hair. Her jar is a dead weight in her stomach. “What changed?” She whispers. “What did you do?” 

Clare shakes her head. She passes Noel a crumpled piece of paper, one of the fresher ones. It’s barely wet. The material is rough, course, like a napkin. On it, Clare has written, I’ve decided to be okay. 

# 

When she leaves Clare’s, Noel writes a new secret on a scrap of tissue. It’s been so long since she swallowed something new that she almost chokes on it. It goes down awkward and sideways. It hurts. It isn’t really supposed to hurt. 

Her phone sings in her pocket; Clare texts her: thank you for being there. 

Of course, Noel says. Saying it feels easy. True. 

# 

The next Friday, they don’t go to the bar. They order pizza and sit on Clare’s couch, Grim the cat sleeping against Noel’s right hip, Clare pressed against her left. 

“How do you feel?” Noel asks, halfway through the stupid movie they’re not really watching. 

“You mean since it broke?” 

“Yeah.” Noel tangles her fingers in Grim’s fur, rests her chin against Clare’s curls. Her jar rattles a little. It’s been making her feel sick, lately. 

“Quiet,” Clare says after a few minutes, her voice muted and strange. “More like myself than I’ve felt in a long time.” She twists a little, tilting her chin up to look Noel in the eye. “I feel good, you know?” 

Noel doesn’t. “No.” 

Clare sighs. “You aren’t meant to carry secrets for so long, Noel,” she says, like that’s a normal thing to say. 

“That’s very Tolkien-esque.” 

“Well,” Clare says, and laughs a little. “I’m magic, don’t you know?” 

Noel does. 

# 

Noel writes down her secret, the biggest secret, on a fresh piece of paper a year after she and Clare first met at the bar. 

Clare takes it, tucks it in her back pocket. “There,” she says. “I’m holding on to this now.” 

Noel writes it down again, in a notebook, tears the piece of paper. She writes the Q all loopy and fancy to make it feel more real. She whispers the word to herself over and over while Clare laughs and applauds. Queer, queer, queer.