Chapter 15
Seventh Grade
(age twelve)
“C’mon, just try it once,” said Elaine.
They were in the school bathroom, skipping class.
Elaine had been looking good lately in that itchy, confusing way all the girls were doing, the way that Am liked to look at but recoiled at adopting for herself.
Elaine had been wearing darker lipstick than the other girls and painting sharp thick lines around her eyes, which made her look like a villain from television. Elaine always loved everything evil.
Kelli was Am’s very best friend, but Elaine came in a close second.
She was almost as sharp, even if her grades said otherwise, and just as strange.
Kelli had always accepted Am completely, even when she didn’t quite get what was going on; but sometimes, Elaine was the one who got it.
Kelli never, ever skipped class. Elaine got why Am hated school enough that she’d rather hang out here in a smelly bathroom, staring at the tube of dark lipstick that Elaine held up like poisoned candy.
There was something else about Elaine, too, something secret and sad.
It was something about the way she never let anyone come over to her house, and the way her clothes were never clean even though everybody in Basic Housing got laundry vouchers, and the way she kept getting pulled out of class to go talk to a therapy chatbot in a different building.
Neither of them ever talked about it out loud, and Am knew instinctively that she shouldn’t ask—the last thing Elaine wanted was curiosity or pity.
But Am was okay letting Elaine being a little mean, sometimes; whatever that sadness was, it had earned her a couple free passes.
“You’d look great in this shade,” said Elaine.
“We could be villains together. I don’t get what your problem is lately.
You’re acting like we all betrayed you, but you’re the one who suddenly doesn’t want to hang out with us.
You’re the one who’s sulking in the leaves with Kelli instead of going shopping. Why can’t you do anything fun anymore?”
“I don’t see what’s fun about smearing things on your face,” said Am. “It’s just not fun for me.”
“You’d look like a sexy villainess,” said Elaine, waving the lipstick around. “Don’t you want to look like a sexy villainess?”
Am did not think the two of them were old enough to call anything sexy, least of all each other, but she understood what Elaine meant.
Am liked to be roguish and clever, to play rough and break the rules.
She didn’t mind other girls calling her mean, or teachers calling her badly behaved.
If she let herself mind it, she’d end up hiding in a corner like Kelli all day.
Am lived by her own rules, and if people wanted to call her a villain, they could go right ahead.
“It’s just,” she blurted, groping for any words at all that would explain not wanting to be a sexy villainess, “I don’t want to be a girl.”
“Too bad, so sad, you are one. Come here.” Elaine lunged for her with the lipstick, and she ducked out of the way. “Seriously?”
Am wondered if there was a way to parlay this into something cooler and more fun. If she ran, would Elaine chase her with the lipstick? She’d been wanting to play tag. What about lipstick tag? Would that work?
But she didn’t run, just flinched in the corner like a loser, and at last Elaine put the lid back on the lipstick with an aggrieved sigh. “You literally would rather die than put on lipstick.”
“Hey, nobody said anything about dying.”
“I think we need to talk about our feelings here,” said Elaine in a different voice, officious now, like she was quoting what the therapy chatbot told her to say.
Am didn’t know much about the chatbot Elaine talked to twice a week, but from everything she’d heard, it was almost as bad and as useless as Kelli’s old robot.
Except that Elaine was older than Kelli had been back then, and had a stronger will, and at least the chatbot didn’t literally follow her around everywhere.
She could ignore what it said if she wanted to.
“I value you as a friend,” Elaine said, in that officious voice.
“But I don’t feel like you value me as a friend anymore, because you won’t do anything I like to do, and you keep telling everybody that all the things we like now are fake and dumb and stupid.
You’re getting mean, Am. I want you to be pretty and cool with me.
I think we could be best friends. But every time I tell you anything lately, you just bully me. ”
“I’m bullying you?” said Am. Last time she’d checked, she wasn’t the one who was chasing someone around the bathroom trying to stick something to their face.
Elaine crossed her arms. “There’s one other explanation.”
“There is?” said Am, more lost than ever.
“Do you like girls?” Elaine demanded.
It was such an innocuous question that it didn’t make sense. Am blinked at her. “Sure I do. Just because I don’t want to go out buying clothes and talking about boys doesn’t mean I don’t like you, c’mon.”
“But you’ve never liked a boy in your life, have you?”
“No, I haven’t! They’re gross! They think they own everything and they pick on us and there’s no point to them. Girls can do anything boys can do anyway.”
“Anything?” said Elaine, in a villainous voice, leaning in. “If a girl looked evil like Lukas, and sang a romantic song like Lukas, you’d be all about it, wouldn’t you?”
Am blinked again, caught off guard, trying to picture this. If a girl looked evil like Lukas did, then. . . .
Well, then she’d look a lot like Elaine.
Was that what this was about? Elaine always loved everything evil. Did Elaine have her stupid crush on Lukas the stupid AdventureVerse villain because somehow, on some level, she wanted to be him?
“I think that would be great,” she said honestly. She reached up to pat Elaine’s hair, wanting to comfort her. “I think you could totally do that, for sure. You could be just like him.”
“I KNEW IT!” Elaine shrieked, slapping her away and recoiling, like Am’s hands were suddenly made of poison. “You’re a dyke! Dykes aren’t allowed to touch me!”
She turned and ran out of the bathroom, shrieking and cackling like she’d pulled off the most diabolical scheme of her life. “Am is a dyke!” she shouted. The door clanged shut again behind her.
“I’m a what?” said Am, blinking after her.
Kelli, in times like these, was Am’s refuge.
While all the other girls tried as hard as they could to turn into grown, painted-faced women, Kelli was still herself, exactly the way that she’d pinky-sworn she’d be: hiding in the leaves, doing her homework, reading and making up stories.
When other girls did the usual seventh-grade bullying, Kelli never joined in.
So after a whole afternoon of classmates whispering did you hear?
Am is a dyke! and tripping her in the halls, Am knew just what to do.
She made an excuse about homework and came over to Kelli’s house, where they could both hide in the pristine tidiness of Kelli’s room and whisper to each other about whatever they wanted.
In Basic Housing, most apartments looked just like each other—identical little concrete blocks, connected to each other through a warren of littler hallways and tunnels.
Identical layouts, identical cheap gray furniture, except for the little touches people bought with their allowance to brighten the place up.
Toys and wall hangings and so on. Am’s apartment had more bedrooms so it could hold all her siblings, and Kelli’s only had two—one for her parents and one for herself.
Other than that, they both could have lived in the same apartment.
She might not have walked any distance here at all.
Am privately liked to think that everyone’s parents were also the same.
Nobody in Basic Housing had a job. They all did the same daily hour or two of mandatory volunteer service—mostly the boring kind of computer stuff, like helping evaluate the language model’s outputs for a new task, or moderating the fan feeds.
They all did the same daily hour of exercise that everyone in Callisto’s low gravity had to do.
They all cooked and cleaned and took care, nominally at least, of their kids.
And then they had the rest of their time to themselves.
In theory that should have freed them up to do all kinds of awesome stuff—and some of them had found something mildly interesting, like the cooking club that Am’s dad went to where they tried different recipes.
But in practice, most people’s parents mostly lay around on the couch and watched AdventureVerse.
Case in point, Kelli’s mother and father were sitting like that right now, in the living room, leaning vaguely up against each other as the television played.
The current show was Jupiter Adventures, an old and long-running one which Am hated more than most of the shows, because it was for babies.
Just a lot of stuff about the old Earth deity that the planet Jupiter was named after, bouncing cheerfully around in his spaceship and doing random sidequests with the flock of fluffy animal friends that the planet’s moons were named for.
“Oh!” said Kelli’s mother, getting up from the couch as Am and Kelli walked in. “What a nice surprise, Amelia. We’re always happy to have you. I lost track of the time; I’d better start cooking.”
She fluttered over into the kitchen. Kelli’s father called out a gruff hello, but he was pretty absorbed in the show. So no one objected when Am and Kelli crept into Kelli’s bedroom and booted up her workstation. They’d only just recently gotten old enough to have ones of their own, unsupervised.