Two 17 y/o girls go to school together. They start to have feelings for each other. It’s exciting but also really scary. They’re both closeted but one of them, James, is more ok with her queerness. The other one, Betty, is more afraid. She has a very strict single mom (her dad left). She has a harder time coming to terms with it and falls pray to compulsive heterosexuality more often, etc.
James and Betty develop a very ~intimate~ friendship, where it becomes clear that they have feelings for each other, maybe they kiss etc. but the point is that they’re falling in love. They play it cool at school, texting each other to come meet in hidden secret places, playing “hide and seek”. On the weekends they slip away to get drunk together and just hang out walking around the neighborhood, finding little secret ways to touch each other. James makes Betty feel really special, like no boys/men have made her feel before (including her own father).
Shortly before the summer, there is prom. James is more of an outcast in school, and she’s not super comfortable with these events that are so gendered, so she doesn’t really feel super comfortable at prom. Meanwhile Betty, who is more ~popular~ has many guys sort of after her. James and Betty both go alone under the pretense of meeting up as friends. Some boy asks Betty to dance, and she’s really nervous about meeting James in such a public social event. She’s confused and scared and before she knows it she’s dancing with him. James sees this, and it’s kind of the last straw for her. She tries to be very patient with Betty not being as comfortable with her queerness, but seeing her dancing with some boy when they were supposed to meet there was really hurtful. She leaves, very upset, and summer starts.
James goes to spend some time in a beach town with her family or something for the summer. James meets another girl, let’s call her X, who is clearly into James. This is refreshing for James, coming from a sort of relationship with Betty where Betty was so secretive and filled James with doubts. She’s heartbroken over this situation, half feeling like maybe Betty never really liked her as much as she liked Betty. Because of that, she entertains X’s advances, eventually giving in to them. They go to the beach together, and “glass closet” a lot more, though X still can’t write her name on James’s back in sunscreen or anything like that. They meet behind the mall to make out, and have sleepovers pretending to be just friends. It’s a lot of fun and X makes James feel less wrong for being queer all the time, but still all she can think about is Betty. With Betty it was real, it was intimate, and she misses her.
Summer is over, James breaks it off with X because she can’t stop thinking about Betty and wants to chase her again and make things right. But, another girl, Inez, saw James and X together and told Betty. Now Betty is super hurt, because she doesn’t understand why James would do that to her, seeing as from her point of view she has been very serious about James and gone really out of her comfort zone for her. Betty avoids James at school, switches classes so they don’t have to be in the same room, and tries to leave this all behind. Meanwhile James tries to ~ accidentally ~ run into Betty, skateboarding past her house, etc. It doesn’t work.
Eventually James finds out Betty is having a party at her house. She wasn’t invited of course but she can’t take it anymore and for the weeks prior she practices what she’ll say when she crashes it: she’ll say she knows where it all went wrong, the misunderstanding with the prom dance, the hurt, she’ll say it was just a summer fling, that didn’t mean anything. “I don’t know anything except that I miss you”. She wonders if Betty will believe her or if she’ll tell her to fuck off. She plays it over and over in her head, including one last time when she’s standing in front of Betty’s door, wearing the cardigan she left at her house. Betty opens the door. James spills out her guts, asks for a kiss, ready to come out in front of everyone and throw it all to shit. Ready to get in her car, make out when they stop at red lights, and be together.
And there you have it: cardigan + betty + august, the Taylor Swift folklore teenage love triangle makes the most sense as a lesbian story.
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