Chapter 9
Ninth Grade
(age fourteen)
“You told her what?” Kelli yelped.
“That we could be friends again, as long as she didn’t try to ruin my life again.”
Am shifted her weight against the rough bark of the tree they were sitting in, up on a high branch, masked from public view by all the leaves.
They couldn’t do any kissing in a tree; it was too easy for people to glance up and see them by accident.
But it was a nice place to hang out, hold hands, talk privately.
And she’d known that this talk would need to be private.
She’d hoped Kelli would take it better than this.
“Elaine is an evil villain,” said Kelli. “That’s, like, her entire deal.”
“So? I’m evil too, remember? Like in the movies where there’s a bad, worldly lesbian and an innocent good one. That’s me. I’m the evil lesbian who seduced you and you like evil.”
“That’s different,” said Kelli. “You got me to do nice things that we have to keep secret, but Elaine hurt you. You don’t owe a second chance to people who hurt you.”
There was a lot about this in the books on the data chip; a lot of talk about what queer people did and didn’t owe to the people who hated them.
A lot of talk about cutting people out, whether and when it was necessary.
Am didn’t like those parts. She liked her family, and she didn’t like to think about what would happen if they all found out she was a lesbian and got mad at her.
But Kelli had latched on to the whole concept a little harder than Am might have liked.
People always stopped being friends with her when she messed things up, she’d explained.
It wasn’t always nice but it was their own free choice and they were allowed to do it.
So it was only fair if Kelli got a free choice to stop being friends with people, too.
“Maybe I don’t owe her anything,” said Am. “Maybe I just want to be nice to her anyway? Maybe that’s my free choice, because we were friends once and I feel kind of bad for her.”
“She’s a bully. She bullied you. You can’t feel bad for your own bullies. If you have two people at a table and they let a bully sit there with them, then what do you have? Three bullies.”
“I don’t think that’s exactly how that works.
” Am kicked her feet out idly. “You don’t have to remind me what she did.
But I think she’s really sorry now. And I always kind of wished for this, you know?
That she’d realize it was wrong and we’d be friends again.
Besides—haven’t you noticed the other thing about Elaine? ”
Kelli raised an eyebrow irately.
“I feel like—” Am bit her lip. “Every time you look at Elaine, you can tell she’s really hurting.
She hurts all the time. I don’t know why exactly; I think it’s probably a bunch of things at once.
But if she thinks she’s maybe gay, then maybe that’s part of what’s always been hurting her.
Maybe having gay friends would help her hurt a little less. ”
Secretly, Am also hurt all the time. Maybe not as badly as Elaine.
There was something that flared deep down whenever the teachers got her in trouble for stupid reasons, whenever the thing the whole rest of the class was doing didn’t make any sense.
Am didn’t know what that feeling was called or how it worked, but it didn’t feel good.
She saw a feeling like that in Kelli’s eyes, too, sometimes, behind all the rule-following.
A flame. Surely it was better to risk hurting each other than to leave each other all alone with a feeling like that.
“Well, she doesn’t deserve them,” said Kelli. “And I don’t consent to hanging out with her.”
“Then don’t hang out with her. I’ll do it myself,” said Am with a shrug. It was Kelli’s free choice and she was allowed to make it, but Am didn’t feel very good about it. Was it so hard for Kelli to forgive people when they were sorry?
“I wish you wouldn’t,” said Kelli. “I don’t want you getting hurt like that again.”
“I can take care of myself,” said Am, taking Kelli’s hand. “Don’t worry. Do you consent to me kissing you until you stop worrying?”
Kelli blushed a little, and the start of a grin crept onto the side of her face as she turned toward Am. “That could take a long time. But okay.”
Consent was a topic that Kelli had seized on when she read about it.
They’d learned a little about it in health class—no means no—but some of the books on the data chip went into a lot more detail.
When she was little and had the really bad kind of meltdowns, teachers had sometimes tried holding Kelli down or dragging her out of class so she’d stop screaming in front of people, even though that was stupid because it only made her scream more and sometimes bite them.
But now that she was old enough to secretly read about sexual consent, Kelli had been enchanted by the idea that she always got to control who touched her and when and in what way.
She’d also been horrified by the thought of getting any part of that process wrong.
“You have to ask me out loud, every single time, before you do anything,” said Kelli, “even if it’s something we’ve done before, or even if we’re already doing things.”
“Okay,” said Am. She wasn’t as fussed about it as Kelli was, but it should be an easy rule to follow, and she definitely didn’t want to touch Kelli in any way that Kelli didn’t like. Besides, asking out loud, there in the closed-in darkness of the maintenance tunnel, was kind of hot.
Can I kiss you?
What do you think, want me to kiss your neck, too?
What if I bit your ear?
She got to feel the naughty thrill of saying something like that out loud, and she got to watch Kelli part her lips and agree, shyly or ravenously, and then she got to try it for real. All three of those things were Am’s favorite.
On the rare, daring occasions when she asked for anything more serious than neck-kissing, Kelli would fluster and maybe even giggle, but she’d shake her head. “Not now; that’s too much.” Or, “We’re fourteen; it would be against the law.”
This was just fine with Am, who liked to think about lesbian sex in theory but who still wasn’t totally sure about it for real.
She understood how her own body worked, and there’d been offhand references in some of the books; out of these clues she had cobbled together a general idea of how two grown-up women could be intimate together.
But there were still a lot of missing pieces to that idea, as well as something nebulous and daunting about the whole thing.
It would mean offering up parts of her body that she honestly thought were a little gross and didn’t like thinking about.
The truth was that, if Kelli ever took a turn asking Am to take off her clothes, Am might be the one to shake her head shyly.
Mostly she asked because she liked being the evil, worldly, seductive one who would ask a girl like Kelli for a thing like that.
The books on the data chip talked about pulp stories, where there was always an evil, worldly, seductive one, and Am liked that role.
She liked asking and then watching Kelli’s face in the gloom, shaking her head, scandalized and intrigued.
Loving Kelli, and being friends again with Elaine, meant that Am had to navigate between the two of them.
She thought she was good at dealing with people, finding just the right words to say, the way she’d used to find ones to say to the robot; but this was tricky.
She had to find enough time to hang out with Elaine, teach Elaine to jailbreak a tablet, show her the secret books safely and explain where they came from—but she had to do it without mentioning Kelli too much.
And without taking time that was supposed to be Kelli’s.
She ended up skipping class more often, sneaking into the bathroom with Elaine while Kelli was preoccupied learning things.
“What did you think of the books?” she asked, sotto voce, in the corner of the bathroom. She’d checked under the stalls to make sure no one was hiding in there and listening, and she still only dared to speak in a whisper.
Elaine leaned on the wall next to the row of sinks, looking as villainous as ever, in a black sweater with a low collar that she’d clumsily cut lower with scissors, and with thick black eyeliner like a raccoon.
Am happened to know that sometimes Elaine got detention just because of her makeup.
The teachers would march her in here and make her wash it all off.
“They’re evil,” said Elaine, with a daring little smile of approval. “And really long. And my parents are always up in my shit, so I didn’t have much time to read them yet. But I like them. Why was there a protest movement?”
“What?”
“There’s some book with some title about throwing bricks and it’s called Speeches from the LGBTQ+ Protest Movement.
But when I looked at the summary blurb, it said it’s all about the olden days, like more than a hundred years ago on Earth.
Why were there protests back then? I thought you said there weren’t laws against dykes or anything then. ”
“It sort of varied,” said Am, rocking her hand back and forth. “Sometimes it was against the law and sometimes it wasn’t, you know? When it was against the law, then they had protests. I think that’s what happened.”
Elaine looked at her, sidelong and shrewdly. “You haven’t even actually read these, have you?”
“You know me. I skim here and there.”
“And you’re not the one who went and found them all. I know you call yourself a hacker, but you’re not that good.”
Am had grown to trust Elaine again a little. But ratting out Bruno to her still seemed like a bad move. “Um—”
“I knew it!” Elaine shrieked, jumping up in the air, and Am had to hurriedly motion her to quiet down. The pale tiles of the bathroom made her voice echo. “Kelli found them. That’s the only way this makes sense.”