27
Sasha
Lillian’s working on her track stands on the sidewalk in front of her house when I arrive. She stands on her bike pedals — body shifts slightly, holds stiff, shifts, maintains her balance. Her concentration breaks when I pull up next to her and she’s forced to put a foot down.
She pretends to glare at me.
“I was on my way to a record time.”
“Isn’t that true every time you start?”
She takes a second to think about it.
“One part math, two parts truism. Everything I hate wrapped together. Are you good to ride far?”
I’ve barely responded yes, I’ll go anywhere, when she’s off and moving. Riding fast in the almost empty streets, weaving around potholes and the trash that’s swept to the curb. She calls back to me.
“We can make this light!”
and then digs in a little harder. It’s less reckless than it is expert. She knows this city, and I trust her to lead the way.
I have to work hard and stay focused to keep up.
The Channel-mandated gym sessions and the personal trainers who got Augustus and I to maintain “ideal” body shapes are gone.
I don’t miss it, and neither does my body.
Those spaces always disconnected me from myself.
But right now, I’d definitely take the cardio and strength that came from hours of training, rehearsals and performing every other night.
Lillian constantly glances over her shoulder to make sure I’m keeping up.
She makes turn signals for my benefit.
She never races through a light if I can’t follow her.
She’s got me.
I know it.
The city starts to thin out to industrial buildings and metal roofs.
Here, everything’s a little more run-down, and there are too many train tracks.
We cross a bridge over the railyards.
It’s a faded area, rusted out and covered in street dust.
We push out toward the edge of the city, where the remnants of an ambitious mall project stand partially completed.
The buildings look well over a decade old.
Lillian sweeps into an empty parking lot and makes straight for a multi-storey parking garage.
She squeezes through the gap between the gate and the wall without getting off her bike.
Inside, there’s a cool darkness.
We climb in spirals up the ramps.
Lillian stands and pushes hard on her single-speed while I gear down to survive the climb.
She doesn’t stop until she reaches the western edge of the open, empty top level.
I pull up beside her, sweaty and breathing hard.
With the breeze up here, I’m glad I dressed warm.
I was rushed enough when I was leaving that I just picked black jeans and a hoodie.
My favorite green hoodie, and let it be noted that it’s coordinated to my lipstick, which is coordinated to my eyes, which is a lot of green overall and may be too much.
I catch the thought sooner than I sometimes manage to.
Because when people say a gender presentation is too much, they mean it makes them uncomfortable.
I remind myself of how Isabelle once told me there’s no such thing as style that’s inherently too much.
It just shows what someone can’t cope with.
Lillian gestures to the chest-high concrete barrier around the edge of the parking garage.
“Take a seat, if such heights suit you.”
She hops onto it and swings her legs over the edge, letting them dangle six storeys from the ground.
I lean on the barrier beside her, keeping the concrete between me and the drop.
The light’s starting to fail around us. The sun is sinking down, though there aren’t enough clouds for a dramatic sunset. We can see out over the failed mall to the edge of the city, where the fields and tree lines begin. I haven’t been out there yet, but I’ve crossed the prairies in Admirer’s tour bus.
Augustus said it was a godforsaken lack of topography.
I felt like the world opened up, nothing rising around me. Half the world was sky, not just slivers above you like where I grew up. Even facing the ocean, humanity was pushing against my back in high-rises.
“Do you take all the enbies here or just me?” I ask.
She holds her legs straight out, revealing enough of the hangman tattoo on her leg that I can read it. There’s a blank, then lowercase o, another blank, and a lowercase e. There’s a crossed out a too, but no parts of the person.
“I wanted to show you someplace you couldn’t find in a tourist guidebook.”
“This city has tourists?”
“And a long and fascinating history which I will now summarize. Hem-hem.”
Lillian takes on a chipper, informational tone.
“After a long period of dubious colonial activity, which you will find conspicuously absent from school textbooks, the railroad arrived.
Its construction remains a hallmark example of racist employment practices.
The railway marked an increase in capitalist industrialization and a redoubling of most bad things, especially colonization.
Then, in short order, airplanes were invented, and the city became irrelevant.
Visitors can still enjoy a vibrant arts scene, with great local bands such as Wavelength, as well as tour buildings that are nearly one hundred years old, which means in one hundred more years, they might be considered notable.
But you get to see them first!”
I break off a loose concrete fragment from the parking garage.
“Is this one of those buildings?”
Lillian keeps up with her tour guide impression for a sentence.
“There’s no way this cheap structure survives that long.”
When she goes back to normal, it reminds me how much I like the timbre of her voice, with her singing power hidden just behind it.
“Bet you can’t hit that fire hydrant.”
I throw the piece of concrete as far as I can, but it plummets before the hydrant and shatters in the empty parking lot.
We’re quiet for a while, watching the day fade out.
It’s one of those moments where the last trace of summer stops clinging on, which would normally be melancholy.
To my summer, I say good riddance.
It was the fallout of scandal and disaster.
I was shifting back and forth between fury at Augustus and some corner of me that wanted to justify his actions so I could believe my brother was good.
I spent too many days locked in the beach house wondering if Augustus had cost me everything I’d worked for and if there was something I could have done to stop it all and protect the people who got hurt the most.
Kicking Jasmine’s brother in the head when he was down wasn’t Augustus defending himself.
That’s just the violence of someone who’s too powerful to believe in restraint.
No one says no to Augustus.
How could his relationship with Jasmine be anything but wrong?
When I eventually take my helmet off as part of Admirer, and people see who I am, the first words I say in public will have weight.
I’m not going to burn them in support of Augustus’s crimes.
But I can’t stand for them to be condemning my brother either.
I just can’t.
I’m still not sure what those first words will be for.
I hope it’s my choice.
The silence has turned into a long one, where my thoughts drift away and then return to watching Lillian silhouetted against the dusk.
She seems solid and relaxed here.
Occasionally, she closes her eyes and her fingers move slightly.
I imagine there’s a storm of notes inside her head that need to pour out.
I recognize it.
It’s started happening to me again for the first time in a long time.
There are melodies popping into my head that I record on my phone.
Often there’s no words, just runs of notes and rhythms.
I keep thinking of them as being for Admirer, but they’re all mine.
They may never mean anything to anyone beyond myself, never see the radios and playlists. I could write them by myself without an army of professionals working and reworking every detail.
I can’t say they’d be better, just that they’d be mine.
I climb onto the barrier, take a deep breath and let my legs hang over the edge.
Now I’m sitting next to Lillian with a long, straight drop below me.
My hand grips the concrete too tightly, an inch from hers.
She barely seems to be holding on.
“It’s better here, right?”
she says.
“The first time I found this, I couldn’t sit on the edge at all.”
“You’re not afraid of falling anymore?”
She turns to me, and I feel her slightest movement in my stomach. Because she’s so high above the ground, or because she turns toward me. And her hand gets close enough to mine that I swear I can feel the warmth off it and I remember how it felt when she grabbed my hand at the Mercury.
“Of course I’m still afraid of falling. Aren’t you?”
Lillian seems concerned, and I guess that surprises me. I read her as flippant about death.
“Definitely afraid,” I say.
“Good.”
She’s looking right at me, and I turn my face to meet the intensity of her gaze.
“I don’t want you to fall. I’m just getting to know you.”
It’s only occurring to me now that possibly she was worried about me when I disappeared for the week. I know Quinn definitely was. His messages stayed upbeat, but the concern snuck in. I just responded to them all tonight. I owe him many apologies for ignoring him.
Lillian didn’t say anything, so I thought she probably didn’t care. Not in an unkind way. We’ve only known each other for a couple weeks.
Yet there’s a memory of right before I saw Isabelle’s texts, when I was showing Lillian a picture. Her face near mine. Then the rest of the night is overrun by lying awake, trying to decide what to do.
There’s an alternate next that’s missing. A scenario where Isabelle doesn’t text me right then, and I want to know that other timeline. A deep wanting, radiating through me, curved after something that might not have been there at all.
“It was weird not seeing you around at school. Have you been okay?”
Lillian asks.
“I think I am now,”
I say.
“I just had to lay low for a while.”
I’m scared she’ll ask me why, and I’ll have to lie. I didn’t leave my apartment with a lie planned. I like that she’s been looking for me, that she’s looking at me now. In the half-light, with her eyes focused on me. They’re not eyes I want to deceive.
Instead, she asks.
“What got you out of it?”
Even if I could tell her the truth, this would be the perfect question.
“I overwatered one of my plants,” I say.
“Yeah, that actually makes sense.”
I look back out at the darkness past the city.
“It’s beautiful out here … not like glossy beautiful, but the kind that cuts you open. Does that make any sense?”
I say, unsure if I mean the view from this parking garage or the entire world. I believe Lillian will understand.
The edge of my hood is blocking my view of her face, but I think she smiles.
“I’m glad you like it. The closer we got, the more I thought I should have taken you somewhere pretty, like a cute park or something.”
I get stuck on why she’d want to take me somewhere pretty.
I’m used to people flocking to me, to being an object to project desire onto. The concept of Alexander Ash is something people want. The Channel used Isabelle to ensure that, and vice versa, though what with not showing my face, I needed the boost in desirability more.
This oh-my-god attraction is what I’m used to, and it’s very easy to recognize. I also know the use-me-to-advance-their-own-career attraction — a slimier, less innocent industry by-product than fandom. Alexander Ash experienced plenty of that.
I don’t think anyone’s been attracted to Sasha before.
And I have no idea what to do with it.
I’m not even sure I’m reading it correctly. It seems real. I almost definitely want it to be real. I’m not simply drawn to the concept of someone desiring who I actually am, though that’s an ecstatic thought.
It’s that it’s Lillian.
When I was in Admirer, I used the helmet and being with Isabelle and the sheer relentlessness of my life to deny most attractions. They were hypothetical, distant. Lillian is not hypothetical.
“Have you ever noticed,”
she asks.
“how being on the edge of something high feels the same way as the second before you make a big decision? Like it’s the same as when you send a message and you’re not sure what’s going to happen, or you buy a plane ticket without a plan.”
My hood’s still blocking my view of her face, so I have the courage to say.
“To me it feels almost exactly like the moment you’re deciding whether to tell someone you like them.”
I only know this feeling from right now, this second. I’m setting myself up and I don’t even mean to. I’m being honest and it’s happening.
“The moment before you kiss someone for the first time,”
says Lillian.
“Or I guess any sex thing for the first time. Not the warm, we’ve-been-together-forever feeling, but new and unknown.”
I’m definitely blushing. Thank god for this hood.
“I’ve never kissed anyone.”
Wait, what the hell? Why did I say that? It just spills out.
“I’ve only kissed one person, so you could surpass me with a good game of spin the bottle.”
Lillian means it like a joke but says it too flatly.
It reminds me of how she sounded on the back steps of school.
Right, that.
She’s just out of a big relationship.
Admitting anything right now isn’t kind to her.
That’s what I tell myself. I won’t admit anything now because I’m being kind.
Lillian picks a piece of concrete off the edge and lets it slip out of her hand.
I follow the piece all the way until it clatters off the pavement.
“If I fell, they’d blame you,”
I say.
“It’d be a murder case.”
“As if. Most people don’t care if people like us fall, Sasha.”
For me, there’d be tribute concerts.
That’s the imbalance of the world.
There’d be headlines for months.
It’d put this city on the map.
There’d be a shrine built at the base of this parking garage with flowers and posters and helmets.
Augustus and Isabelle would do teary-eyed interviews that would mix genuine with performative, because there’s no way to stop the show from creeping in when there’s a camera in your face.
I’m suddenly aware that I may be in the least safe place I’ve been in my entire life.
That for all its warm corners, the world is a more frightening place without a security team.
I say something about how dark it’s getting.
Lillian responds by singing the soft chorus of a song about nightfall, the notes drifting into the void in front of her.
I take the first lines to learn the melody and grab a quiet harmony when she repeats the last one.
It doesn’t show any of my full singing ability, just that I can pick it out.
She punches my shoulder, which, given the distance between me and the ground, is terrifying.
“Not too shabby, Sasha. Have you considered a career in music?”
Then we both laugh, her at the absurdity and me at the truth.