Wavelength

22

Lillian

I’m going to kiss Sasha tonight.

It’s after the show, and Sasha is sitting on the edge of the stage at Initialism while I coil my cables and someone sweeps up.

“Wavelength is my new favorite band,”

they say.

“I’m not flattering you. I love some mournful, yearning alt-rock, anything that has me wanting to dance in a sad way. But I almost liked the moments of release better, where you were nearly pop-punk. Heavier on the punk than the pop, of course.”

“I should fucking hope we are. When we make an album, fingers crossed that you’re the one reviewing it.”

“It’d be five stars for your songs alone. Did you write them all?”

“Most of them.”

I unplug the cable from my microphone.

“Hey, so you clearly know something about music, right?”

“A little.”

“Brutal honesty, how’d we sound tonight? Not in some general way. Tonight.”

Sasha tilts their head to the side.

“Style, great. Individually, great. Lyrics, great. As a unit, like someone was missing.”

“That was honest, but I asked for brutal.”

“Like a car on three wheels, Lillian.”

I’m glad they don’t try to pretend otherwise. Emelia normally stands to my left. We reoriented, but all night I felt adrift between where I usually stand and where Emelia should be. It was even worse because we’ve played at Initialism so many times.

Heartbreak is the familiar made unfamiliar.

“Is that why you didn’t play the new song?”

Sasha asks.

Quinn’s a few feet away, locked in what might be described as a passionate embrace with a guy our age who’s often at our shows. His name’s Sef, and it didn’t take him and Quinn many minutes of banter to get where they are. It isn’t helping my loneliness, though it may prompt other thoughts re Sasha.

“It’d be better with another voice,”

I say simply, throwing a coiled cable on the stage and starting on the next one. Though I’m not sure the new song would have felt any worse than the old ones we played tonight. On those songs, Emelia had always been paired with me.

“Joining in on the second ‘please’ of the pre-chorus,”

Sasha says, fiddling with a stray guitar pick from the stage.

“I can hear it.”

I can hear it too, in that exact spot, but there’s nothing there.

I’m standing behind Sasha, and they tilt their head back to look up at me. They sing the pre-chorus in a tenor.

“Please, please / keep my vices close to me.”

Their eyes look big even without makeup. They make a comment about Initialism that I don’t hear, because that’s when the thought of kissing Sasha tonight becomes a decision. With their face an inch from my leg and the notes rising up to me.

That’s the first chance, and I don’t take it.

With the gear packed, we can’t fit Sasha’s bike in the station wagon. There’s no school tomorrow, so we’re all heading to Cyprus’s house. Sasha leaves before us, but at nearly two in the morning when we’re unloading at Cyprus’s, they still haven’t showed up.

The night’s taken on the stable darkness of everyone in bed, with no headlights disrupting it. I squint down Cyprus’s street for a sign of Sasha.

“I think the universe is on our side,”

says Quinn as he picks up Cyprus’s synth.

“It’s the only explanation for getting Monday off the day after a late gig.”

“Or everything is random,”

I say.

“and we’re just tremendously lucky.”

“That’s quite good.”

Cyprus is videoing me rather than moving her equipment..

“Everything is random and we’re just tremendously lucky’ is exactly the vibe the fans want from you.”

“We have fans?”

Quinn pretends to almost drop Cyprus’s synth before slinging it over his shoulder. She flips him off and heads toward the door.

“Who do you think you were making out with after the show?”

I say distractedly. I’m looking out into the dark street.

“Do you think Sasha will find us okay? They’re new to the city.”

“I quickly realized Sef was a fan of me personally,”

says Quinn.

“A little too much so. Too enthusiastic with his tongue. If it wasn’t so, I would be off with him right now.”

“You would be exactly here right now talking about how Sef was just the right amount of enthusiastic with his tongue and how possibly you’re in love.”

“Not wrong. But I would have gotten his number.”

Quinn punches me in the shoulder.

“Speaking of love …”

I try to smack him back, but he ducks out of the way.

“Worrying about my queer friend riding home at night in a new city is basic decency,” I say.

“Do you usually concern yourself with basic decency?”

“Don’t you have a keyboard to carry?”

“Don’t you have a keyboard to carry?”

Quinn copies me in a fake whiny voice and follows Cyprus inside.

I’m nervous Sasha decided to go home instead. Or got lost. Even though they’re going through safe neighborhoods, I’m worried about them.

I see the blinking red safety light on their bike come around the corner. I wave and call for Sasha since I’m sure they can’t see the house number. They get off their bike right in front of me. Suddenly my heart quickens a bit. They’re taking off their helmet and trying to fix their hair and I say.

“Here, I’ve got you,”

and touch their hair to make it how they seem to like it, and that’s the second untaken chance to kiss them.

Inside, we all talk quietly until we’re downstairs. No one wants to wake up Cyprus’s parents, but their house is huge and easier to sneak around than mine. Once you’re in my house, everyone knows you’re there.

Cyprus’s place is an old-fashioned upper class house. It’s the sort of sprawling, multi-storey monstrosity that has a staircase for servants from the kitchen to the second floor, which her parents think is nostalgic. For them, the good old days also include several administrations that should burn in hell.

Behind the house, there’s an in-ground swimming pool and a yard that sweeps down to the edge of the river. Sweeps really is the right word. The landscapers made sure of it.

Cyprus wants to get everyone into the basement as quickly as possible, since it remains untouched by the latest renovation. Where modern floor plans haven’t knocked out walls and comfort hasn’t been replaced with a “tasteful”

mix of the old and the cold and contemporary. Expensive yet bland art, gray floors, uncomfortable couches, but with vintage chandeliers and elaborate, garish banisters.

“Please excuse how I’m literally descended from The Man,”

says Cyprus. She’s slightly embarrassed by her family’s class, though Sasha takes in all the wealth with a glance and without comment.

“Cyprus is only friends with us to be rebellious,” I say.

“Shut up. You know I’m friends with you because you make me feel good about myself.”

“Glad I have qualities.”

“But will they be … okay with all of us?”

Sasha asks me as Cyprus leads us through the house to a door that opens onto a steep staircase. Quinn’s already down there. I hear the soft clack of pool balls being set in a triangle.

“Yeah, yeah,”

says Cyprus.

“Confused, but passively accepting. When I told them Quinn’s pronouns, they were like, ‘That’s nice, honey.’ They honestly had more follow-up questions when I got everyone to start calling me Cyprus in middle school, and the only reason I did that was because they gave me the beigest name of all time.”

“They are prone to absent-minded deadnaming,”

I say.

“and the occasional very broad cultural generalization.”

“I’m chipping away at them,”

says Cyprus.

“Yesterday, there was a teachable moment about how benevolent racism is still racism. Watch your head on that beam.”

Sasha ducks under it, then grins as they look around the room.

We’re surrounded by wood-paneled walls. Our feet are deep in orange shag carpet. There’s a pool table with faded red felt, ugly posters of cult classics on the walls and a pile of partially disassembled electronics in the corner. The couches are worn, striped fabric, and the gaming system is a decade old.

This is Cyprus’s space. She crosses the room and pushes a VHS into an ancient TV. A Dropout Burnouts concert video from the early nineties starts playing in the middle of a song.

Here there is no closing time. Tomorrow, we have no clock to punch.

An hour later, Cyprus and Sasha are playing an old racing game while I’m facing Quinn in what is not our first game of pool. I want to be good at it, because being a pool shark seems intimidating and like the sort of skill that a person like me should casually have.

Instead, me and Quinn are both terrible. Me, because I’m trying too hard. Quinn, because he thinks every shot is an opportunity to attempt a trick.

“You’re doing it again,”

says Cyprus.

Sasha crosses their legs.

“Well, you’re lapping me again.”

“You asked me to help you learn how to not flash everyone.”

“I am imagining my knees and/or thighs are attached to each other,”

says Sasha.

“I am imagining that I’m incapable of leaning over.”

Cyprus sets down her controller as her car takes itself on a victory lap and Sasha finishes the race.

“I presume at this point you’ll all be sleeping here? I’m going to go see what sort of bedding I can scrounge from my room.”

Quinn accidentally sinks the eight ball long before he was supposed to.

“Can we please call that the end of the game, or do I have to pull all my balls?”

Cyprus and Sasha both snort.

Quinn says.

“I’m here allllllll week.”

“I’m in a basement full of children,”

I say, cuing up my shot.

I scuff it completely and accept Quinn’s resignation. He follows Cyprus upstairs, saying he’s going to make stealth nachos, which as far as I can tell are nachos made while he sneaks around like a cartoon villain.

I swing myself over the couch and land shoulder to shoulder with Sasha. They smell like a cozy idea of Christmas that I didn’t know I had. All pine and sugar.

This third chance to kiss Sasha is when I start to get annoyed at myself.

I should be able to do this. It’s just a kiss. A lot of people kiss a lot of people.

I used to believe that Emelia would be both the first and only person I kissed. It was ridiculous to begin that level of romanticism when I was fourteen.

Emelia’s probably already done something emotional and rebound-ish with one of her other friends. Margot’s a lesbian, like Emelia, and single, and has wavy blond hair that’s never a mess and has never involved regrettable undercuts, and she smiles at everyone in a way that makes them feel like they belong, and I bet Emelia’s been thinking about kissing that smile for a long time and I bet dating Margot would feel soft, not sharp.

Like how I felt dating Emelia, not how she felt dating me.

The hour has me sad and uninhibited. I should be coming off a performing high that never arrived. One move toward Sasha and I could create a rush in my body that would cover up the grief.

Kissing Sasha would be soft.

The voice in my head calls me a coward when I pick up Cyprus’s controller and start a new race.

“Prepare to meet Mad Lillian: Fury Road.”

“You, competitive? I don’t believe it.”

“If we’re friends after this, we’re friends for life.”

I’m flicking through cars, trying to find one that’s the same shade of purple as my guitar, Butler, and trying to ignore that I’m counting chances in my mind.

“But I’m a beginner, so will beating me really be satisfying?”

“Cease your mind games.”

I shift on the couch, because their mind games aren’t the ones they think they’re playing. I hope their effect on me isn’t something they can guess. That they don’t see through me like how they saw that I’d love Monochrome Stoplight.

It’s in their shoulder against mine. How they aren’t shy after seeing me in ruins behind school and how easily they’ve settled in with my friends. That they’re already making fun of me even though they barely know me.

By four in the morning, I feel like asking for a corresponding fourth chance is too much to ask. I’ve got an ache growing in me as I lie down on my air mattress between the couch and the TV. Sasha played me pool for first dibs. I won, and I chose the air mattress. I said it’s way better than the couch, which is a lie that will cost me some sleep.

This crush is getting entirely out of hand.

Quinn turned the pool table into a blanket fort and crawled in a while ago wearing his headphones, while Cyprus has gone upstairs to bed with a promise to leave a note on the basement door so that her parents and her older sisters don’t wander down here in the morning.

Cyprus said my performance clothes are so spiky they might puncture the mattress, so I’ve changed into an orange camp T-shirt of hers. It’s that heavy cotton, boxy variety that fits no one. I’m wearing these pajama pants she had that are too long yet too tight at the hips and have something in silver lettering written across the butt. I chose not to read it.

I try to confidently walk to the mattress, but it’s hard when Sasha is lying on the couch, looking all tired and gorgeous sleeping in their clothes. While here I am, lying two feet from them trying to decide if I take off these goddamn pants underneath the blanket or try to see out the night wearing them while feeling both crushed and short.

“I’ve had too many second winds to be sleepy,”

says Sasha. We’re both lying on our backs looking at our phones.

“I’m playing space pinball out of nostalgia. I’m still a wizard.”

“Does that include real pinball?”

I’m scrolling through pictures from last summer, trying to find a single one where I both like how I look and I’m not inseparable from Emelia.

“I’ve never played.”

They hum along to a sound effect in the game.

“Maybe next time we’re at Initialism, you can teach me.”

“School you, maybe,”

I say, though I like all the implications of Sasha’s suggestion.

“What’s with the robots at Munchies?”

Sasha asks.

“You’ve got to say the full name every time or people will know you’re not from here.”

I turn off my phone. It’s making my body ache more somehow.

“What’s with the robots at Munchies Arcade and Culinary Delights?”

“Oh, those robots. Len and Taylor, the bouncer and the doorperson, they painted them.”

Sasha rolls onto their side to face me.

“Are they like impossibly sexy or is that just me?”

“I wouldn’t say Taylor’s ‘impossibly’ sexy.”

I can’t see Sasha’s face anymore now that the glow of our phones is gone. It makes them feel closer.

“You know I’m talking about the robots,”

says Sasha.

“But true. I should have asked Taylor what they put in their hair.”

I’m thinking about the androids and what Sasha might see in them.

“When I first saw that wall,”

I say.

“I panicked. I was with my mom, and with the mural and all these hot people it just felt like there was sex all over the place. And she was comfortable with it all, which was almost worse.”

“You were with your mom at Initialism?”

“To my perpetual shame, she found it before I did. She took me there to see this properly heavy band on my thirteenth birthday, like way heavier than anything I listen to. I’d been out for a couple years and I still had this sense I was alone in that. Being there that first time … I felt almost dazed.”

“Like you couldn’t blink?”

suggests Sasha.

“Yes!”

I lower my voice.

“Yes. And especially with the androids. It’s like that wall is a dystopia for someone, but not for me.”

“Or a utopia written by someone who understood me.”

Sasha’s generating this enthusiasm and connectivity in the middle of the night, understanding me like the mural understands them.

“I took a picture of the one with the transparent heart. If you get it from the right angle, it’s making eye contact with you and it’s devastating.”

They turn their phone back on.

I roll off the air mattress and kneel beside the couch to look at the picture. I’d barely have to move to press my lips to their mouth.

This fourth chance proves Quinn right. The universe is trying on my behalf, gracing me with me another opportunity.

I don’t hesitate before taking chances. I’m not afraid to start a song on a big note. I don’t usually have trouble committing. Things occur to me and I try them to see what happens. Growing up with Cyprus taught me how. Even with Emelia, I asked her out. Sort of, at least.

Maybe first times are easier because you don’t know how much it can hurt.

Sasha’s looking at the picture. I’m looking at their mouth. My body breaks through the barrier to motion. It’s jumped and I’m going to kiss them.

They go tense.

I think it’s something I’ve done. I’ve barely started moving, but it’s enough for Sasha to know what’s going on. They’ve turned their body away from me. I follow Sasha’s eyes to their phone and they swipe the message away fast. Another one appears and they push it off-screen without opening it.

They sit up, say they have to go to the bathroom.

I see another message blink onto their screen as they walk across the basement. They close the door behind them and I can hear it lock.

That’s that, then. Click.

I crawl back onto the bed, but I can’t get comfortable. I take off these ridiculous pajama pants and wrap the blanket tight around me. There’s no way I’m getting out of bed now. I’d wear just my underwear and a T-shirt in front of Quinn or Cyprus, but not with a new person around.

I’m crying in a way where I realize it’s happening instead of feeling it build up. There’s a well of emotion in me that’s brimming all the time. Teardrops are just slipping out. Figures I’d have the ugly cry on the steps when Sasha can see me and (I presume) the less-ugly cry when I’m alone in the dark.

It stops after a few minutes, and all I feel is less. I flip over my pillow.

Sasha’s gone for long enough that I pretend to be asleep when they get back. I can feel their energy clenched and awake a few feet away. That may have been because of me.

The crying is still in my voice. I can’t disguise it. I won’t reveal it.

And I can’t stand to hear them say they just don’t feel that way about me, so I stay quiet.