My mom should’ve understood. At the Beatles’ 1966 concert in Chicago, she’d had to slap my Aunt Martha hard to get her to stop from screaming herself into a faint. From the teenyboppers to the Beliebers, teenage girls have been mocked for their crushes, but that scorn is just a shoddy mask for the anxiety these crushes inspire. Because a teenage girl with a crush is frightening. The Beatles were always on the run from shoving, hysterical girl-crowds, who wanted—what? To crush into them, to crush themselves, to crush against other girl-bodies that were all feeling the same feeling together, a chaos of feeling, a feeling that took your breath away. “A Beatle who ventures out unguarded into the streets runs the very real peril of being dismembered or crushed to death by his fans,” Life reported in January 1964. A girl with a crush is also capable of crushing.
“Are you a top or a bottom when you sleep with women?” I ask.
“I’m still trying to figure that one out.”
“How about heterosexually? Top or bottom?”
She dips her head back in the water. “Heterosexually I’m a full-out bottom.”
“You’re probably a bossy bottom,” I guess.
“No,” she says. “That’s Madonna. That’s the difference between us… .
A Kylie moment is when a bit in a song inspires a slightly unexpected surging emotion, and happiness but also some sadness, with a sense of being slightly close to tears for no real reason. It is a bit like Christmas.