Ninth Grade
(age fourteen)
Am didn’t look back again. She knew her sense of direction was better than Kelli’s, and she knew the most important part now was to follow the right route—a twisting one that didn’t leave any evidence in any super-obvious places.
Here, around this corner, was a place to stow their tools.
Here, around several other corners, a small corridor where they could slip out undetected and dump their protective equipment into the trash.
Now to double back, this way and that, so that if people followed their trail and found the tools, they wouldn’t be led in the direction where Am and Kelli had actually gone.
Eventually they would sneak into a side alley near Basic Housing—right near one of the parks where they often went after school.
Right where they would have gone if they’d just been skipping class, comforting each other, and minding their own business when the alarm sounded.
As she ran, she felt dimly amazed. She couldn’t believe they’d done it. She was awed and starstruck with how Kelli had done it. That look in Kelli’s eyes as she lifted the match . . .
At last they reached the maintenance hatch that would take them back into the real world for good.
Am paused at the hatch and listened. Between the klaxons, there were the sounds of running steps and frightened voices, but not right there in the hallway.
Farther on. She held up a finger for Kelli to wait.
There were periodic lulls in the sound of running. Signs that it would be safe to leave, and to dart out into the mess of running people, without anybody seeing where they’d come from.
But Am did not want to leave.
There was something in Kelli’s eyes, when Am looked back at her.
Her pupils were so big in the darkness. She looked very alive, very beautiful, very overwhelmed.
Am felt pulled between two poles—a loss that hurt so much she still didn’t even understand it yet, and a fierce crazy villainous love.
She wanted to put her hands on Kelli. She wanted to touch that look on Kelli’s face and let it burn her away.
“We should go,” said Am, in a voice that came out far weaker, far more desperate and hesitant, than she wanted it to. “But—I really need to kiss you.”
And maybe Kelli should have been the sensible one, or at least the one who hated this klaxon and this tunnel more than anything and who needed to get to safety. But Kelli met Am’s eyes and Am knew that Kelli needed this too. She stepped closer, pulled Am in, and kissed her.
It wasn’t like the ways they’d kissed before.
It was like punching a pillow, or screaming without making a sound: hungry and panicked and perfectly awful.
It was like drowning and knowing that the only air left in the room was inside Kelli.
Their teeth clacked together by accident.
Am pressed Kelli up against the wall. She wanted to grab Kelli so hard that she got every part of her at once into her hands.
She didn’t even understand what she wanted.
“I have to tell you,” Am whispered. She could barely pull away long enough to make the words.
“I always knew—” She got distracted by kissing for another moment, had to regroup and try again.
“Under all those rules the robot told you. There was something else. There was a fire in you, I saw it, Kelli. I always knew. You have no idea. I love you so much.”
They were both breathing so hard that Am could hear it even with the alarm going.
Am pressed her hips up wildly against Kelli’s.
She let her hands climb down, closer to Kelli’s chest than she’d ever dared before.
She was too far gone to remember that she was supposed to ask first, but Kelli didn’t stop her.
Am wanted to separate out all her molecules at once so she could just push into Kelli’s body all at once, like a mist, meld into her, be outside her and inside her at the same time. She wanted—
Oh.
Until this very moment, the idea of sex had always, for Am, been slightly abstract.
Sex—lesbian sex, of course—had been something fascinating and titillating and disgusting and important, something she liked to turn over in her mind and think about, something she was pretty sure she’d work up to eventually.
She’d liked poking her toe right up to that line, making Kelli think that she wanted it, knowing Kelli would giggle and flush and refuse.
She’d never actually wanted it, for sure, consumingly, right then in the moment.
She did want it that way now. It was a bizarre feeling, blazing and unfamiliar, zinging through her whole body.
She almost hadn’t recognized what it was that she wanted.
But she wanted it so bad she couldn’t think.
The image of it came to her, vivid and perfectly awful, not just a visual but a tactile vision of just what her body should do.
Except—
It wasn’t her body.
In the image that came to Am’s mind just then, the image so powerful it drowned out even the fire alarm, she was a man. She wanted to grab at Kelli, tear at her clothes, and ravish her the way a man would. She wanted a flat chest and powerful arms; she wanted to be inside her.
Am sprang away like she’d been shocked. She didn’t know what to do.
She was too overwhelmed to think anymore.
Kelli didn’t try to grab her back. They blinked at each other in the darkness, panting, confused.
Kelli looked as overwhelmed as Am, eyes glazed, lips slightly parted.
Am wanted to grab her again, so badly, but now she couldn’t think about how to do it at all.
After everything else that had just happened today, there was no room in her head to figure out about this.
“What?” Kelli asked at last.
“Nothing,” said Am. It took effort even to put that many words together. “I felt . . . I don’t know. I’ll tell you later.”
Kelli looked like she was about to argue, but Am absolutely could not right now, so she quickly opened the hatch and slipped out. Kelli followed silently, tugging on her clothes, trying to straighten herself out.
This was an alleyway near Basic Housing, near the park with the trees where they sat together on weekends.
In this sector, the designated safety room was the Basic Arena, a plainly constructed multipurpose sports gym.
Without another word to each other, they both ran through the alley and through the bigger halls, zigging and zagging with the other running people until they made it through the Arena’s doors. Nobody questioned them.
The Basic Arena usually looked boxy and empty, a big rectangle of playing floor with bleacher-style seats around the edges.
Now it was filled with a whole crowd of worried people, sitting in groups or pacing frantically.
It was mostly adults and small children, who’d been home at the time, but there were big clumps of people Am and Kelli’s age, people who’d had the day off or who’d been skipping class, which meant Am and Kelli didn’t stick out.
At their age, the law said that they had to go to school, but it wasn’t enforced super strictly.
If teenagers wanted to be high school delinquents and miss their chance at a career, that was mostly up to them.
It took a second for Am to even sort out, in the chaos of that panicking crowd, where her parents were.
Am’s brain wasn’t working right. She needed to find her parents, and Kelli needed to find hers, and they also needed to stick together, but that was a contradiction and Am couldn’t work through it; she could only keep running into the crowd, into the noise.
She caught sight of her own family—a big clump of aunts and siblings and cousins, off to one side—and started running toward them an instant before Kelli’s own worried parents scooped her up.
She didn’t stop running. She needed to stay by Kelli, her brain insisted—but everything was a mess, and anyway, probably they’d look less suspicious if they weren’t together.
In the general din, she heard Kelli’s parents wailing her name and exclaiming over her. Kelli clung to them and cried and apologized, incoherently, over and over.
Then Am’s own parents caught up to her and there wasn’t anything to decide anymore—just a gauntlet of hugs and shrieks and exclamations of worry.
“They couldn’t find you at the school,” Am’s father fretted. “Amelia, of all the times to skip class. Don’t ever do this to us again.”
Am just growled. She couldn’t talk anymore.
Normally it was Kelli who shut down and lost speech, not Am.
She wasn’t used to this feeling and she didn’t like it.
She barreled past her father and onto the bleachers and curled up in a ball, growling at anybody who came close.
Her head hurt. Everything was too loud. And if this was how Am felt, how much worse was it for Kelli, the sensitive one?
Am should go to Kelli. She should make sure Kelli was all right.
But everything was terrible, and she didn’t know how, and she couldn’t move.
“Leave her alone,” she heard her mother saying somewhere above her. “Honey, didn’t you hear, one of Amelia’s friends just died today.”
That led to more siblings and cousins making concerned noises and trying to hug her, but Am growled and half-heartedly swatted at them and they backed off.
It was satisfying, vaguely, to hear her mother mention Elaine.
At least some adult had some idea what had happened.
But the rest of this wasn’t satisfying at all.
Am had wanted a blaze of righteous fury and the satisfaction of a rebellious job well done; that’s what it had sounded like when Kelli asked her to help with the fire.
That’s what she’d expected while she snuck all over the place getting supplies.
But she was becoming dimly aware, in the overwhelm and shock of this room, that this wasn’t exactly what she’d gotten.
It was hard to feel rebelliously satisfied in a room full of parents terrified for their children, people younger than Am and Kelli huddled up together, waiting to see if their air ran out.
For all Am knew, if the firefighters did a bad job, that might actually happen.
She hadn’t been thinking of random parents and children when she made this plan, only the therapists and their clients.
Now it made her queasy, seeing and hearing them all. She hadn’t been thinking at all.
Except—Elaine was gone. That’s what she’d been thinking.
Elaine was gone, and everything was terrible.
There was none of the rebellious satisfaction Am had wanted, but there was a small and sour fulfillment in knowing it was terrible now for everybody, not just her and Kelli.
Elaine was gone, and it was everybody’s problem now.