Chloe Rodriguez
Monday | August 3rd, 2020.
Chloe was a life-saver.
I was always one to space out in our Spanish class. As much as I tried to pay attention to the fascinating nuances of verb tenses, I could never fully engage myself. Chloe always snapped me back. She was one of the few that spotted me when I didn’t know what the hell was going on, managing to consistently make me laugh even when I was half-asleep. It had been months since I had last seen her, but when I first met Chloe, her appearance was quite unassuming.
That’s why it was all the more surprising to see her show up with sharp, double-winged eyeliner, a blonde streak in her hair, and a brazenly elegant floral skirt.
“Quarantine did her well.”
I supposed. I smiled as she sat down at the picnic table then attempted to shuffle the cards. We met in the middle of Edgewater Park in Foster City, a place she frequented.
“What do my shoes tell you about me?”
She asked, holding up the card. I gazed down at her brown Doc Marten lows, then at my own Doc Marten 1460s. I laughed.
“Well… you know.”
I uttered, referring to the gay Doc Marten stereotype. We never felt the need to explicitly ask each other about our sexuality—we shared a pretty mutual understanding. She opened up to me about her distaste for labels, knowing straight wasn’t an option for her after a particularly confusing stint with a boy.
I discovered more about her style change over quarantine. I wasn’t surprised to hear that she was always a bit punk/alt internally, a dedicated fan to My Chemical Romance and Bon Iver. I never pegged her as someone devoid of personality— for good reason, I guess.
She admitted that she suppressed her identity for a while, going with the motions of middle and high school cliques as an investment in her social survival. After some self-reflection, she realized that she indeed did not care for the soul-sucking high school assimilation from her freshman year.
I eyed the taped off playground behind her.
“Do you want to hop that fence to shoot?”
I suggested, wanting to take her newfound mischief for a spin. She agreed, and we helped each other over the little wire fence together.