Chapter 15 #2
Kelli’s bedroom was religiously tidy, everything exactly in place, even the shelf of AdventureVerse character figurines, carefully posed in ways that suited their roles in the story.
Am hated AdventureVerse, but Kelli still loved stories more than anything else in the world, even the meaningless slop stories that most of those characters were from.
“I don’t really want to do homework,” Am confessed, sprawling on Kelli’s immaculate bedspread while Kelli sat in front of the screen. It wasn’t much of a confession; she never really wanted that. “I actually came over because I have a question.”
“Yeah?”
“Like, a secret question. A research question. You know all kinds of stuff, right?” Am pressed. “I need you to look up a word.”
“Why can’t you just look in the dictionary?” said Kelli. From other girls, that would have been a brush-off; from Kelli, it was literal and honest curiosity. She was already tapping the workstation’s dictionary icon.
“Well, you try it. It didn’t work for me when I tried. The word is ‘dyke.’”
“Oh, that,” said Kelli. From the uncomfortable look on her face, Am knew it was a word she’d heard in the halls today, too. “Um, I don’t know what it means either, but let’s see.”
Am looked impatiently over her shoulder as the page loaded. The dictionary said:
Dyke. 1. n. An artificial embankment keeping waters away from a low floodplain; a levee.
2. n. Slang; vulgar; derogatory. Definition age restricted.
Did you mean “dike”?
“It says it’s a swear word,” Kelli translated, which made sense because Elaine definitely hadn’t been talking about floodplains. “And you have to be a grown-up to see the definition. So it’s probably a sex thing. Did you say any sex stuff to Elaine?”
“Ew. No, I didn’t at all.”
Kelli clicked on “dike,” just to make sure, and got a few other innocuous definitions, like pliers and geological formations. Those were clearly not it, either.
“Well,” she said, “I could use my mom’s.”
Kelli’s mom was the kind of mom who thought that when children were old enough to ask questions, they were old enough for the answers.
They had a shared password that they secretly used, strictly for educational things—dictionaries, encyclopedias, and so on.
Plenty of parents did that, even though it was technically against the law.
If Kelli logged in to her mom’s tablet, she’d be able to see the definition of every word.
“Mom,” Kelli called, poking her head out of the bedroom, “can I look up some stuff on your workstation? For our project?”
“Of course, dear,” said Kelli’s mother, distracted.
So the two of them tiptoed into Kelli’s parents’ bedroom before anybody could change their mind.
It was almost as tidy as Kelli’s bedroom—she’d come by that honestly—but the bed was bigger so it would hold two people, and the decorations were classier.
Wall hangings and animal figurines, that kind of thing.
Kelli’s mother could afford to be cavalier with her workstation because she’d already set the permissions up carefully.
The password she’d shared with Kelli allowed access only to purely informational resources like the dictionary.
Everything else—especially messaging, private documents, and the fan feeds—stayed locked down behind another password, or maybe three passwords, plus a fingerprint scan.
Even Am hadn’t ever been able to crack that one.
“Okay, are you ready?” said Kelli.
“Yeah,” said Am, trying not to look as daunted as she felt.
Kelli logged in to her parents’ workstation, opened the dictionary app, and typed the word “dyke.” In hushed tones, she read out the definition that flashed onto the screen:
Dyke. 1. n. An artificial embankment keeping waters away from a low floodplain; a levee.
2. n. Slang; vulgar; derogatory. A lesbian.
Well, that didn’t help. “What’s a lesbian?”
“I don’t know. Let me see.” Kelli looked up the word “lesbian,” then frowned in confusion as a slightly longer definition flashed up. “A woman who is sexually and/or romantically attracted to other women,” she read out.
Am frowned as a feeling of unease passed over her. The grown-up version of the dictionary could be like this, sometimes—making vague and clinical references to sex stuff, assuming it made sense to an adult reader, when to people like her and Kelli it still didn’t at all.
“A what?” she said. “What does that mean?”
“Hang on a minute,” said Kelli. She cleared away the dictionary app and switched to the encyclopedia, typing “lesbian” in there instead, and scanning a few screenfuls of dry and factual information.
She had an intent look on her face now—the one that Kelli got when there was some big mystery that she absolutely must solve.
Kelli with that look on her face could hyperfocus on just one thing for days.
Am couldn’t focus on the screen, though, not when she was this nervous all of a sudden, so she squirmed impatiently as Kelli went through it all.
She let the few phrases that popped out at her bounce around in her head, along with the phrase, sexually and/or romantically attracted to other women.
She didn’t know what that meant, but she knew what it sounded like it meant.
Did women actually—?
Did Elaine think she was—?
But why—?
“Okay, I’ve got it,” said Kelli. “So, you know how all the girls lately are getting crushes on boys, and you hate it?”
“Yeah,” said Am, whose stomach was sinking lower and lower by the minute.
“Lesbians are like that, except instead of getting crushes on boys, they get them on other girls. When they grow up they can have whole relationships with other girls. They even have sex somehow. That’s what it means. Apparently there’s boys who get crushes on boys, too.”
“Oh,” said Am, as the sinking feeling reached rock bottom. “Well . . . gross.”
“Did Elaine think you were a lesbian? Like, did she think you have a crush on a girl?”
“I don’t know,” said Am, and then she crumpled down and pressed her hands to her forehead as the dots began to connect themselves.
“Wait. Yes, yeah, she did. This is all my fault. She asked me if I liked girls. I just thought she meant—you know, girls rule and boys drool, you know I’m all about that.
And then she asked if I’d like it if there was a girl who was evil but romantic like Lukas, and I said. . . .”
“So, it was a misunderstanding?” Kelli said hesitantly. “Can you, like . . . clear up the misunderstanding? Just go talk to her and say you’re not really a lesbian, you just answered wrong because you didn’t understand the question.”
Am stared at the bedspread distantly. “I don’t think that’s how that works.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s what a lesbian would say if she just wanted people to shut up and leave her alone.”
Am didn’t have a crush on anybody, as far as she knew.
And there were other girls who didn’t have crushes yet.
But most of those girls got by, because they still did other girl things, like going out and buying makeup, and they were supportive about the rest of the girls’ crushes.
Am had always hated the idea of crushes on boys so much.
That was the not-normal part. She’d hated the idea of doing girl things, even though she liked how the other girls looked when they did them.
What if that’s what lesbians were like, when they weren’t even quite teenagers and the actual crushes on women hadn’t started yet? What if everyone could already tell?
Did that mean Am was always going to be like this, and everybody was going to whisper about her like this, from now on, forever?
She wanted to throw up.
“Okay,” Kelli said—impatient, in the way Kelli often got when she’d just learned something exciting.
“But there’s more. It says lesbians have existed in various human cultures for thousands of years.
They originally came from an island on Earth, called Lesbos, that’s how they got the name.
But in a lot of times and places, it was against the law. ”
“Great,” said Am, flopping back to look at the ceiling. So, what, people were going to put her in jail?
“On parts of Earth and Mars, it’s still against the law.
But in other places, they used to even have lesbian weddings where they got married.
To each other. Not everybody liked that, though.
In the Jovian system. . . .” She scrolled down to that part, pursing her lips.
“Uh, in the Jovian system and other Inspiration-owned territories, it’s not against the law, as long as it’s consenting adults, in private.
But it’s against the law to talk to minors about it because you might, like, corrupt them into being lesbians when they weren’t supposed to be. ”
“I don’t care if it’s against the law or not,” Am snapped. Lesbian weddings? She couldn’t even think about that.
“But don’t you understand what that means?
” Kelli said, fascinated and enthused. “For you and Elaine? We’re not old enough to be consenting adults.
So Elaine is falsely accusing you of a crime!
And if you knowingly make false accusations, that’s a crime too.
Elaine could be breaking the law. This is serious. You should tell a teacher.”
Am rocketed back up to a sitting position. She yanked Kelli’s chair away from the workstation, which made Kelli shriek a little. “No, I should not. Don’t you get it? She already told everyone at school. If the teachers gave a shit, they’d have done something about it already.”
“Don’t swear,” said Kelli, drawing up her brows in distress.
“I will swear if I want to. And I don’t want to hear any more about dykes ever,” said Am, getting up from the bed. “I’m going to go watch your dad’s show.”
“But you don’t even like AdventureVerse,” Kelli called after her.
Am slammed the door behind her.
Sometimes Kelli got all wrapped up in interesting facts, forgot that other people might have feelings about those facts, and became completely insufferable.
But Kelli’s saving grace, at these times, was that she also obeyed instructions.
Am had told her not to talk about dykes again, so she didn’t.
As a result, their friendship made a full and swift recovery.
The rest of the class was more difficult.
They kept stage-whispering and calling Am a dyke.
Boys too—the rumor had spread far enough to cross gender lines.
Am had once been the queen bee of the whole class and now people scooted away from her like they might catch a disease.
But whatever. If she haughtily ignored it, maybe it would go away.
Maybe she’d find some way to get back at them all.
“It’s just girls your age,” said Am’s mother, wringing her hands; Am’s parents had always been useless about things like this. “Twelve is a terrible age. In a few years it will all start to settle down again.”
In the meantime, Am played with Kelli and tried to pretend everyone else wasn’t there.
They were allowed to wander off the school grounds at lunch now, so Am set herself to the task of finding spots where other girls wouldn’t bother them.
Trees they could climb in the public parks.
Maintenance tunnels behind the walls, which one of Am’s cousins—a professional maintenance engineer—had showed her how to creep into unseen.
“I wish my old robot was here,” said Kelli plaintively, hiding with Am in that darkness with all of the maintenance pipes.
“No, you don’t,” said Am, alarmed. Why would she wish that?
“It would tell us why everyone was behaving like this. Calling you names, I mean. It’s not normal for it to last this long. If the robot was here, it could tell you how to fix it.”
“No it wouldn’t. It would just tell you a random reason.”
That was how it had always worked. Kelli would ask the robot what she’d done wrong, and it would come up with the most statistically likely words about things people like Kelli did wrong, according to all the language in its model.
A nice safe answer that fit Inspiration’s business model, and that didn’t have anything to do with the human mess that was actually in front of it. The robot didn’t care about humans.
Some people wanted answers that sounded good, Am supposed, even more than they wanted the truth. Some people wanted rules, even fake and made-up ones. It bothered her that Kelli still wanted that.
But she stayed with Kelli anyway. They told stories like they’d used to, even if it was lonelier now, with just the two of them and not a rotating cast of other girls.
They never, ever talked about dykes. But once or twice, when Am peeked at Kelli’s workstation while Kelli wasn’t looking, she saw a half dozen tabs with encyclopedia articles on marriage laws throughout history, or on the Island of Lesbos.