Cleansing #2
The real answer isn’t something she can expect anyone halfway reasonable to believe, and the backup answer isn’t one she’s willing to give to this goddess made flesh.
For right now, she wants to exist in a world where Smita is perfect, and not a world where she’s had the chance to show herself as flawed as any other human.
“I got accepted for the research year,” she says. “I was studying at the University of Alabama before, and that was a great school, very solid. I just needed to get out of the South for a little while, you know?”
“I do,” agrees Smita. “Sometimes the only thing you need more than a hug and a hot beverage is a change of scene. I guess coastal California is about as far from the South as you can get, hey?”
“This isn’t coastal.”
“Not in the technical sense, but we can be standing on the shore of the Pacific in just a few hours. Take the BART to San Francisco, catch a cable car or rent a bike, and there you are, looking at the waves rolling in. It’s a really nice day trip. You should take it some time.”
“Are you not from California?”
“Nope,” says Smita. “I grew up in Seattle, even closer to the ocean than we are here. I was at the beach every other weekend.”
“Why only every other?”
“I was at the library the rest of the time.” Smita’s eyes widen fractionally as she finishes speaking, and she leans around Lilianne to wave to someone she’s just spotted. “Erin! Over here!”
Lilianne turns to see who Smita’s waving at, and watches as another ridiculously attractive woman half-jogs over to join them.
She’s curved and muscular where Smita is lithe and soft, with strawberry-blonde hair and a peaches-and-cream complexion that any Hollywood star would kill their stylist for.
A dusting of freckles covers the bridge of her nose, and her eyes are an impossible shade of blue that Lilianne immediately dismisses as colored contacts.
She’s too pretty. Smita’s prettiness is earnest and honest. This woman’s prettiness feels more like a lure, like the shiny light an anglerfish dangles in front of its prey before it swallows them whole. Lilianne clutches her books a little tighter, ready to turn and run if the moment demands it.
“Are you all right?” asked the newcomer—asks Erin—as she slows to a stop next to Smita. She doesn’t appear to have noticed Lilianne yet. There’s still time to run.
“Just chatting with my new friend Lilianne,” says Smita.
Time’s up. Erin swivels to look at Lilianne with those blue, blue eyes, and it’s all Lilianne can do not to squirm like a moth pinned to a specimen board. If she had wings, they’d be beating frantically to signal her escape right about now, she knows that much without the need to think about it.
“Hello,” says Erin, with surprising caution.
She’s standing so that her body is positioned between Lilianne and Smita, a perfect wall of flesh and bone and sinew.
There’s nothing coastal about her voice.
She sounds like the Midwest made flesh, like the cornfields of Ohio and the rolling Kansas wheat, all of it somehow pressed flat and given flesh, here in the form of a wary blonde college student. “I’m Erin. It’s nice to meet you.”
It makes sense that Erin should be cautious. If Lilianne had a girlfriend who looked like Smita, she’d be cautious all the time.
For a day that started with such absolute conviction, it certainly has devolved into a series of ifs, hasn’t it? The thought is amusing enough that Lilianne is able to summon up a smile as she extends her hand toward Erin. “A pleasure,” she agrees.
“Lilianne’s studying American history,” says Smita.
“What do you study?” Lilianne asked.
A flicker of something more sour than cautious crosses Erin’s face, there and gone in an instant.
“I used to study theology,” she says, reclaiming her hand.
“I finished a while back. I just stuck around town to deal with some unfinished business. And because my housemates would never remember that normal people run the dishwasher if they didn’t have me around to remind them. ”
“Hey,” protests Smita. “You make us sound like we’re a bunch of slobs. We’re not slobs. We’re just…”
“Academics?”
“Yes. Academics.” Smita turns a pleading look on Lilianne. “You’ve gotten distracted by research and forgotten about the clothes in the washing machine, haven’t you?”
“I think just about everyone has.”
“Ugh,” says Erin. “I don’t understand how you people have managed to live long enough to reach adulthood.”
“Luck, skill, and a phenomenal bodyguard,” says Smita. “It was lovely to meet you, Lilianne. I hope I’ll see you around the campus?”
“I hope so too,” says Lilianne, managing, somehow, not to say that she’ll arrange it if she has to bribe the office to give her a copy of Smita’s schedule. People tend to view that sort of thing as creepy, and the last thing she wants to do is upset her new friend.
Or friends. Erin is still looking at her steadily, and her smile has faded; she’s just a predator now, studying the new gazelle at the watering hole.
“Yes,” she says. “I’m sure we’ll see you around. Smita, come on. We’re going to be late.”
“And I know how much you hate lateness,” Smita agrees. She hooks her arm through Erin’s, and the two of them walk off, leaving Lilianne behind.
She watches them go until the crowd closes up behind them, and they’re officially gone. Then she glances around, making sure that no one else is watching her, and takes off for the comforting chaos of Telegraph Avenue.
Telegraph had been one of the only tangible things she’d been able to explain to her parents when they’d asked her why she wanted to go to graduate school so far away from home.
Half thoroughfare, half carnival midway, it’s a chaotic expanse of specialty stores and street vendors, the sound of voices and buskers playing all manner of stringed instruments drifting sweetly through the air.
Due to city ordinances about street food, there’s just one semi-illicit tamale cart and another selling roast nuts; beyond that it’s all pizza, donuts, and noodles from the storefronts, served hot and steaming in Styrofoam containers.
She fell in love with Berkeley the moment she saw Telegraph Avenue, the vendors in chainmail and leather and layered skirts like something from a medieval market, the college kids wandering by, the parents of college kids clutching their purses and looking around themselves with wide, terrified eyes, like the tall man with the bushy red beard was going to mug them in broad daylight.
There’s a booth selling wound-wire insects with two glass jars labeled GIVE ME YOUR NAME and GIVE ME YOUR GENDER.
Both are half-full of slips of paper like wishes thrown into a sacred well.
She doesn’t stand out on Telegraph, no matter how tall she is, no matter how awkwardly she sometimes moves, or how obvious it is that she’s still getting used to the intimate embrace of her bra, wrapped around her ribcage like a lover’s arms. (Not that she’s had many lovers, or wanted many lovers; this is the only one she intends to take with her to the grave.) Everyone here is brand-new, even if they’ve been walking these tangled urban miles for years on years. Everyone here belongs.
About half the vendors know her already.
They flash quick smiles or bob their heads as she passes them, even the busker with the electric fiddle and the leather bustier.
Half the Avenue is in love with their fiddle-playing angel, and the first time she remembered Lilianne’s name, it was like the heavens opened up and shouted their approval from on high.
The campus is a beautiful dream. Telegraph Avenue is well on its way to becoming a beautiful reality.
She walks two blocks down from the campus, then turns left, heading for a small food court, where she unlocks a near-hidden door set into the wall just past the ramen shop, revealing a narrow staircase up into the darkness.
She climbs quickly, not looking back. Like Orpheus before her, she has long since learned the dangers of looking back.
Not that she has a true love to lose to the depths of the Underworld.
Not that she ever expects to be called to katabasis.
That isn’t the sort of thing that happens to or for or around girls like her.
She’s fine with that, honestly. Extravagant childhood dreams aside, no one who wants to live dreams of life recast in Greek mythology. She’ll be content with what she has.
The stairs are just steep enough that even after weeks of climbing them, there’s a pleasant burning in her calves by the time she reaches the top.
One of her roommates says that they’re lucky to live in a place that guarantees them a daily workout without needing to pay for a gym membership.
Lilianne isn’t so sure about that. But she is sure that they’re lucky to have found off-campus housing for less than the cost of a kidney a month.
The Bay Area real estate market isn’t just horrifying: to a girl from small-town Alabama, it’s literally unbelievable.
The prices here are some fairyland shit, and her father looked like he was going to have an aneurism when she asked for help with her deposit.
But he helped her. Her parents have always been willing to step up and help her, first when she was a child, then when she was a terrified teen standing in front of them with her heart in her hands, informing them that they had never actually had a son, only a daughter who was finally feeling brave enough to let them see her properly.
She credits them with everything she is today, with setting her feet on the path she’s walking now into adulthood, with showing her that anything could be possible if she was just willing to put in the effort.