“Okay,” she finally said. “The Planet, 8 am tomorrow.”

“Thank you, Tina. I’ll be there.”

Long after they ended their conversation Tina laid in bed wide awake, her mind running over everything that happened since the day she met Bette. It was as if an old film reel about her life was projected on the whiteness of her bedroom wall and Tina was reliving it all over again.

Three Years Ago: Tina’s narrative

I worked as a script supervisor at the independent movie studio but business had been slow for quite awhile and I spent most of my time making coffee and answering phone calls because my boss couldn’t afford an executive secretary any longer. I love movies but I began to hate my job. I wanted to be a screenwriter or a documentary filmmaker but so far everything I had written or produced had been turned down.

And if that wasn’t dramatic enough, recently I realized that I was a lesbian. A huge revelation, considering that I was raised in a strict catholic home in a small town in North Carolina. Looking back on my childhood I realized that I was always more comfortable with girls. I was a tomboy but my close friends were always girls. I remembered that I used to fantasize about being a guy and marrying one of them.

After I graduated from high school I went to college in New York City and began dating, though I didn’t find myself attracted to any of the frat boys, even the most popular ones. Not at all. They were all immature imbeciles and again I found myself spending my times with a few girls in my program that became my closest friends.

One of them, Alice Pieszecki, was openly gay and very flamboyant, if you can apply that word to a lesbian. She was so much fun and she knew all the cool places to hang out and I spend most of my free time following her around. But even then it had never occurred to me who I really was. I kept thinking that something was wrong with me and I just didn’t have a great personality or looks to attract any decent guys.