Ninth Grade
(age fourteen)
The day Elaine died, Am went to school obliviously, like it was any other day.
Even Elaine’s empty seat didn’t faze her, although it gave her a funny twinge; she still had weird feelings for Elaine that she didn’t know how to sort out, and she was pretty sure Kelli was still mad at her for having them.
That day as Am sank into her own seat at her own desk, she didn’t know anything was wrong.
She assumed Elaine was just skipping class or sick or in therapy again.
Then the whispers started. Did you hear—? and Can you believe—?
People didn’t say the whole thing loud enough for Am to hear, which was annoying; once upon a time when she was younger, she’d been the first person girls came to with juicy gossip.
But people looked at her, and they looked at Kelli, and they looked meaningfully at Elaine’s empty seat, and the more they whispered, the more she had a bad, creepy feeling.
Then the teachers called them all out for an assembly.
Am sat frozen there in the gym—with Kelli at her side, and crowds of other boys and girls—while the teachers read out a prepared statement.
On occasions this solemn, teachers weren’t allowed to extemporize and add their own personal opinions; the statement was language model generated.
It said, We learned today about a tragic loss affecting our student body. . . .
It said Elaine’s full name.
Am didn’t understand. She recognized this; she had a big family, which meant a lot of grandparents and great-grandparents and great-aunts and uncles who were all so old they’d turned white and shriveled up, and it meant a family funeral every few years, full of rote phrases like these.
But that was old people. It wasn’t Elaine.
Elaine had been fine the day before, so Am didn’t understand, not in her heart or her gut where it mattered.
The teachers didn’t say much about Elaine, herself—mostly just the canned phrases. This was just an announcement; the funeral would happen later, elsewhere. They didn’t say how she’d died.
But they said things like, Tragedies like this can be prevented if we look out for each other. If one of your classmates is struggling or seems hopeless, let them know help is available, or tell an adult. To confidentially contact a mental health professional, here is the comms number. . . .
Except Am already knew what happened when a kid from Basic Housing called a mental health professional. They got referred to a stupid office where they talked to the stupid language model. Elaine had already been doing that, and it hadn’t helped, had it?
Anyway, if Elaine had died of a heart attack, or a horrible hyperloop accident, or even murder, no one would cluck about reaching out to people who were struggling. People didn’t struggle with their mental health before a heart attack.
Am knew what it meant.
This couldn’t be real. It had to be some awful joke Elaine was playing.
The assembly would end and Elaine would jump out from behind a closet door and say, ha-ha, fooled you, psych!
I’m so evil! Then Am would fucking punch her, probably, because this wasn’t a good joke, but after she punched her she’d draw her in and hug her harder than anyone had ever hugged Elaine in her life, and then . . .
But nobody jumped out from behind anything. The assembly just went on and on.
Hadn’t Am always seen a secret pain, deep down, behind Elaine’s eyes?
Hadn’t she said as much to Kelli? Hadn’t she worried, in a formless way?
She hadn’t expected this. But she’d seen how even at the happiest times, even when she stood on a bench in the middle of one of their games and cackled the evillest cackle, something in Elaine was beginning to fade away.
Kelli sat stiff and frozen beside Am, barely breathing, and for a weird few seconds Am hated her. At a time like this, of all times, why wasn’t Kelli holding her, telling her it would be okay? Why wasn’t Kelli even looking at her?
But she knew why not. Kelli was in shock too, and they were in front of so many people. It wasn’t safe.
Am gritted her teeth and moved her hand, in the most slow and stealthy way she possibly could, not even looking at it.
Like a magician—she’d been reading about magicians, lately—doing sleight of hand.
She crept her fingers over into Kelli’s fingers.
She half-expected Kelli to fearfully jerk away, but instead Kelli took her fingers and squeezed them, hard, like she needed to cling to Am as much as Am needed to cling to her.
That helped. Not much, because nothing in the whole solar system could have helped much, but it meant Am immediately stopped hating Kelli.
Now she only hated everyone and everything else.
The weirdest part was that they were all supposed to just go back to class when the assembly ended. Which, for Am, was absolutely out of the question.
“Want to get out of here?” she whispered to Kelli, stiff and shaky, as everybody started to meander back into the halls.
She half-expected Kelli to say no to her, even after everything that had just happened. Kelli had never skipped class even once. But today she gave a jerky nod and followed.
Am knew the way, and she knew how to skulk around and act casual.
She ducked into hallways and passages, turned odd corners.
Out from the school, into the square, and then through the hidden hatch into the maintenance tunnels.
She didn’t talk. She had started crying as soon as they were out of sight of the teachers and now she couldn’t stop; she could only try to keep it quiet, ragged rhythmic breaths that weren’t quite sobs.
Usually Kelli was the one who cried when any little thing went wrong.
It felt even worse the other way around.
Only when they were shut up in the dark of the tunnel did Am let herself sob out loud.
Kelli reached out her arms and Am crumpled into them hard.
They both overbalanced and ended up on the bare concrete floor, clinging to each other for dear life.
Kelli wasn’t crying but her fingers dug into Am’s upper arms so hard it hurt. Everything hurt.
“It’s not fair,” said Am, thick and distorted through her tears. “It’s not fair.”
“It’s not fair,” Kelli echoed. She looked too overwhelmed to find words of her own.
Why was Kelli even upset? Kelli had good reasons not to want Elaine around. But Kelli looked as devastated as Am. There was a small, selfish comfort in that somewhere. In not having to be this gutted and broken alone.
“She didn’t even tell us she was thinking about it,” said Am. “She didn’t bother to say—”
Somehow, that was the part that made Kelli start crying too.
She screeched, a noise like a derailing hyperloop car, as she sagged down against Am.
They clawed at each other like life rafts, hard and grasping and clumsy, with a need that had nothing to do with passion.
The weight in Am’s lungs felt like darkness and drowning.
If they didn’t both keep holding each other as hard as they could, they might only fall forever.
Entire years or hours later, when the tears slowed, it wasn’t because anything felt any better. It was a purely mechanical thing. The body could only weep and gnash its teeth like that for so long.
“Am—” Kelli whispered, eyes wide and wet in the darkness, “Is it—is it because of me?”
“What?” said Am.
“Because of me. Because she wanted to date you and I was selfish and I didn’t let her; is that why she—?”
Am made a face. Was that what was bothering Kelli? “No, it couldn’t have been. She didn’t know any of that. Why would I tell her?”
“But if I’d said yes—”
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” Am said forcefully. “Everybody knows you can’t save somebody by dating them. Even the book of movie reviews said that.”
“But—”
Am could feel what was happening in Kelli’s mind. It was what always happened with Kelli; when bad things happened, she assumed it was because she’d broken some rule. But that had never been helpful, and it was less helpful now than it had ever been.
“Kelli, stop.” Am took her by the shoulders.
She pushed the words out, through her tears, only with effort.
“Don’t do this. I don’t know whose fault it is.
The only person who could have told us that is Elaine and she’s gone.
But if we blame ourselves then we aren’t going to make it, either. I know that. I can feel it.”
“But it has to be someone’s fault,” Kelli insisted.
“No it doesn’t.” Am’s tears rose again for a moment, choking her, and she let go of Kelli just long enough to wipe them away.
“Elaine was always hurting as long as I’ve known her.
It’s why she was in that stupid therapy, and of course the therapy couldn’t help, it was just a language model, and it followed the same rules everyone follows where you’re not allowed to even admit that people like the three of us exist. It just . . .”
It had done the thing the language model always did.
It had done its level best to erase the truth of people like Am and Elaine and replace it with the most bland, palatable, averaged-out combination of words that it knew.
And when Elaine needed help—with her sexuality and gender, or with whatever had happened with Oscar, or with who knew how many other complicated things—the model had erased the truth so hard that it erased her, too.
The people in charge had made it do that on purpose.
They’d made all these laws, saying that you couldn’t talk about any of this stuff with minors, for a reason.
They’d thought it was worth losing a few Elaines so that they could keep not talking about it.
Maybe they really believed this was better; maybe whatever they feared would happen, if they did let people talk about things, was awful beyond description.
But the result was the same either way. It wasn’t an accident.
Someone, somewhere, had bloodlessly done that calculation and decided.
“It’s not fair,” Kelli said wretchedly. “And even if it’s not our fault, we can’t just sit here.
The people from the books, in the old days, some of them had it even worse than us.
Sometimes people didn’t just call them bad names, sometimes they beat them up and put them in jail and got them killed.
And do you know what people like us did then?
They fought back. They broke the laws. They rioted.
If they were dying then they crawled up and died right on the government’s steps.
They threw bricks at cops. If we just sit here, that’ll make us just as bad as the other people who let this happen. That’ll turn us into—into nothing.”
“Yeah, but—” Am rubbed her face. It surprised her that Kelli wasn’t doing what Kelli normally did, curling up and insisting they follow the rules. It surprised her that this was what it took. She still couldn’t stop crying. “There’s just the two of us now. What can we . . . ?”
“I know what we can do.”
Am blinked through her tears at Kelli’s expression.
She recognized this. The flame she’d always seen behind Kelli’s eyes, deep down, smothered under Kelli’s lists of rules for being good.
The one she’d always wanted to see more clearly.
It had leapt up now, in this moment of extremity, closer to the surface than ever.
And the look of it, there in the darkness, took Am’s breath away.
“You’re the evil lesbian, right?” said Kelli. “The one who knows how to do all the forbidden things the rest of us want to do. And your cousin showed you everything about the maintenance tunnels. You know how to get supplies? Tools?”
Am stared at her, mouth dry. Kelli always told such wonderful stories—of adventure, of peril and courage, of bad guys getting their comeuppance.
A plan, Am suddenly understood, was the same as all that, except that it could happen in real life.
The same strength of imagination gave rise to them both.
Am needed that now, more than she ever had.
“Yeah,” she said. “Sure.”
With that flame in her eyes, with that mesmerizing conviction, Kelli said, “Then I want you to help me start a fire.”