hailey/lex childhood friends....neighbors...... always the odd ones out at school, never fitting in with the other boys. labelled slow and violent respectively, they end up in the same class, the one the teachers delicately refer to as troubled.
neither of them are good with friends, but it's inevitable when they find out they only live one street apart in the trailer park. countless nights spent in the woods together, hiding from whiskey and cigarettes, catching fireflies in jars and listening to coyote-song and wondering aloud what the animals are singing to each other.
for lex, this closeness (and accidentally making hailey cry 100 times) teaches them a lot of like. conscious empathy. whether or not they choose to actually act compassionately is a different story, but with hailey they get decently good at seeing things from another perspective and being kind. ish. they know this is something to be protected, that they have to listen and exercise care to keep it safe. like hannah, a bit.
unlike zoey (who is actively derogatory towards hailey like 75% of the time), lex does want to be nice to her/make her feel better and just doesn't really know how to handle someone so vastly different from her in terms of emotional reactions
hailey watches lex change as they approach middle school, chipped black nail polish and hair grown down to her shoulders, eyeliner and bracelets and skinny jeans. she tries to pretend that she isn't nauseatingly jealous. does her best to remember that lex isn't like her, isn't feeling the same wrongness.
because there is something wrong with hailey dilmore. she knows it. they've both been called names for as long as they could remember, and hailey is starting to wonder if the kids calling them faggots were on to something. is lex gay? if hailey thinks they're pretty, does that make her gay?
she doesn't want to ask. she doesn't want to know. but she has to. she trips on her words trying to get it all out, eventually just sort of saying, gay? in a questioning tone. usually lex laughs when she stumbles over her words out of embarrassment, but they're looking at her solemnly. hailey is trembling, which makes it hard to see that lex is, too.
lex — in a voice more shaky than hailey had ever heard them use — admits that she's a girl. a lot of things suddenly click into place. and suddenly it's all whispered confessions, things they've never been able to verbalize, the comfort of "me, too."
it's like a wall she didn't know was there has suddenly collapsed, revealing a whole world she'd been blind to before. pilfered magazines and giggles over cute clothes they want to wear. stolen eyeshadow palettes and shitty youtube tutorials on cracked phone screens. early attempts at eyeliner and first kisses in the dark turning into a slow trickle of self-discovery.
straight-laced hailey, so afraid of rebellion that lex ditches her, sometimes, for cooler friends who smoke weed and go to parties. and being left behind is so much worse than doing things that scare you. hailey who does her best to appease everyone, and lex who can't comprehend her docility and deference to authority. growing distance and passing glances on the street. someone you used to know better than yourself nearly a stranger, despite all the ways you are the same. lex who desperately wants to take hailey and run away to california, to escape this awful town, to live their dreams somewher safe. and lex who knows hailey will never, ever be able to do it. and hailey who knows just as well that she will be in hatchetfield for the rest of her life.
