Cleansing
The air tastes like fall and the future, a glorious blend of possibility, promise, and—Lilianne pauses in her giddy inhale to cough into her hand, shifting her books to her other arm to avoid dropping them—leaf mold.
Definitely leaf mold. Attending school on a campus with multiple creeks running through it and plenty of overhanging trees was not going to be kind on her allergies.
She coughs again, then digs her inhaler out of her pocket and takes a throat-clearing puff, letting the vapor sting her sinuses before she tucks it away again and continues on her way.
She’s not the only new graduate student being welcomed by the mold off of Strawberry Creek: she sees at least two others taking hits off their own inhalers, their motions very different from the furtive care taken by the people who think they can stealth-vape after an hour spent without their drugs of choice.
She’s not going to tell on them, but she still takes note of their faces.
These are the people she’ll need to avoid in the future, lest their addictions become her asthma’s problem.
It’s not that she has an issue with smoking, per se.
Back home in Alabama, more than half the kids she’d known through the school GSA had been smokers, and having too much of a problem with it would have cut her out of her only available social circle.
Better to clutch her inhaler a little closer and have people she could talk to who would understand at least a little of what she was going through.
Better not to burn any bridges she might need later.
She hugs her books a little closer, the shade of the overhanging trees suddenly much colder than it was only a moment before.
She’s not that person anymore. She never has to be that person again.
She’s a graduate student now, and she’s going to publish her thesis relating to her official major—American history—while she focuses properly on her true major, and she’s going to transform herself in every way that matters.
Squaring her shoulders, she walks briskly onward, shaking off the chill.
She’s so focused on walking briskly onward, on projecting the idea that she’s utterly untouchable and not at all disoriented by her new surroundings, that she doesn’t pay proper attention to those same surroundings.
In a moment straight out of a college movie, she walks straight into an attractive-looking Indian woman roughly her own age but—and this is important to the physics of the moment—easily eight inches shorter, sending the stranger sprawling.
The woman hits the brick surface of the quad with a bone-rattling thump, her own books spraying in all directions.
Lilianne gapes at her, momentarily unable to process what’s just happened.
Part of her brain is reminding her that she was hoping to run into a pretty girl at school, another part is howling that knocking people over is not the best method of making friends, and a third is advocating loudly for sinking into the pavement, never to be seen again.
She decides—as much as she’s currently capable of deciding anything—to split the difference, and begins rapidly apologizing.
“I am so sorry! I was about a million miles away, and I guess I just didn’t see you there—I mean, obviously I didn’t see you there, I don’t go around running into people on purpose—but I’m so sorry and are you all right? ”
By the time she stops babbling out her half-coherent apology, the woman looks more amused than irritated. She still doesn’t move, resting her weight on the heels of her hands and just watching Lilianne, like she’s waiting for her to finish.
When she does, she lifts one hand, holding it up like an invitation to offer aid, and says, “You must be new around here. There’s always traffic on this part of the quad, even in the middle of the night.
We have a terrible infestation of LARPers.
They like to play vampires between the hours of ten and four. Can I get a hand?”
“Oh. Oh! Oh, I’m so sorry.” Lilianne scrambles to get her books firmly under one arm while she extends her offside hand to take the woman’s own.
Tugging the stranger to her feet takes what feels like no effort at all.
Cheeks burning bright and hot enough to be actively uncomfortable, she lets the other woman go, taking half a step back at the same time.
She’s tall enough that it can be upsetting, sometimes.
She’s been told that she looms. Looming isn’t a great way to make friends, especially not with perfectly put-together women whose eyeliner looks like it could be used to stab God.
She’s not sure the stranger is wearing any mascara; her eyelashes look like they may just be like that, thick and lush and charcoal-dark.
Some people get all the genetic luck. Lilianne realizes that she may not be looming, but she’s definitely staring.
She forces her eyes away, the burning sensation in her cheeks getting even stronger as her ears join in the fun.
She must be red as a fire truck by this point, so red she’s visible from space.
“I think your face is about to catch fire,” says the stranger, as she bends to start collecting her own books from where they’ve fallen, scattered all around her in a surprisingly elegant arc. Which only makes sense, really. Lilianne can’t imagine this woman ever doing anything inelegant.
“I’m so sorry,” she manages to say without stammering, and that shouldn’t feel like such a major accomplishment, but right now, it’s what she has, and she’ll take it. “Can I make it up to you somehow?”
“Smooth,” says the stranger, flashing her a smile like a searchlight. It’s almost too bright to look at directly, and somehow, it takes some of the sting out of Lilianne’s cheeks and ears, dulling the burn to an almost-tolerable level. “Is this always how you meet girls?”
No chance of answering that one without stammering. “I—ah— I mean— I didn’t—”
“Relax! I was just kidding.” She’s laughing now, and still laughing as she offers Lilianne her hand, this time to shake, not pull her off the ground. “I’m Smita. It’s nice to meet you…?”
“Lilianne,” says Lilianne hurriedly, and she’s never been so glad to have chosen something easy to pronounce, something that rolls trippingly off the tongue, as Shakespeare put it.
She knows too many girls with multisyllabic names they stole from anime that had been meaningful to them before their eggs cracked, and she can’t imagine getting one of those names out with stumbling over it right now.
(She knows even more girls named “Crystal,” which is basically the “Taylor” of the trans set.
Fortunately, it never called to her. She always knew she was going to be a flower, just like Asphodel.
Just like the woman who showed her the way.)
“Lilianne,” says Smita, smiling.
Lilianne swears on the spot that she will never change her name, never accept a nickname (apart from “Lily,” which was the whole reason she chose the name to begin with) from anyone else.
It’s poetry on Smita’s lips. It’s a prayer.
And the god that’s being prayed to must love her very much, or she wouldn’t be here to hear the prayer as it’s spoken.
Smita doesn’t say anything after that, just raises an eyebrow, clearly waiting, and Lilianne realizes she needs to speak.
That’s how conversations work, isn’t it?
Both parties have to participate, or there’s not really a conversation going on, just a handful of words that will fade all too soon to silence.
“I, uh, sorry,” says Lilianne. “I’m new here—which you knew.
I’m from Alabama, originally. My parents are still there.
I’m here to get my PhD in American history, with a focus on early American children’s literature.
It was the best way to thread the needle between English and history, and I felt like I needed both of them if I was going to be anything like happy. I, uh. Are you a student here?”
She can’t possibly be so lucky. This living goddess must be a professor, or a visitor, or something else that means Lilianne is never going to see her again after this moment inevitably ends.
She’s fallen in love at first sight before—a natural risk for a queer girl in small-town Alabama, where her options were limited even before she started registering them, where it was safer to keep her head down and her heart tucked away from prying eyes.
She’s never fallen in love like this, where it’s so solid that it feels like she’s breathing around a rock, like it’s weighing her down and choking her at the same time.
She can’t breathe for all this love. She can’t breathe, and she can’t spit it out, no matter how much she wants to—and she doesn’t really want to.
She is in love with Smita, and she wants to be in love forever, and she knows she won’t be able to hold on to this feeling for much longer, so she’s going to do whatever she can to make it last while she can.
Smita is smiling and nodding like Lilianne just asked a perfectly reasonable question, rather than vomiting words all over her.
“I am. Still,” she says. “I’ve been here awhile now, and I’m in biogenetics.
I’m trying to identify a variety of biological markers that may serve as warning signs for various genetic conditions and lineages.
It’s all very complicated—I won’t blame you if you don’t understand it.
Sometimes I’m not sure that I understand it. ”
Lilianne blinks. “You must be really, really smart,” she says.
Smita laughs. “I don’t know that I’d describe it like that,” she says. “So what brings you to Berkeley?”