Cleansing #3
(They also taught her that linear time is a mug’s game, especially when the world around you has been looping over and over again for the better part of half a million years.
Why can’t two people meet in college and have a college-aged daughter twelve years later, with all the dense and delicious years of childhood sandwiched in-between?
Why can’t that same daughter finish her first trip through the halls of academia and walk away with her desired degrees, then go back to start all over again with a different name, a different major, a different way of looking at the world?
Time is an irregular quantity, happening at different speeds depending on the situation.
Why shouldn’t someone with the proper tutors learn how to bend that variability to her own ends?
It’s not much of an advantage in this world; every day still had to be paid for in its own way, with aging or with other currencies, and she’ll never be the age she should be in this moment ever again.
But she gets to be the age she is, and she gets to press forward, into the sweet, wide expanse of the future.
She gets to follow this road wherever it leads her.)
The door at the top of the stairs is closed and locked against the world.
That doesn’t mean anything: this is Berkeley, and even though it’s a college town, it’s still a fairly large city, with a fair amount of crime.
Leaving a door unlocked is unthinkable here, just like needing two doors locked between her and the world would be unthinkable back home.
She undoes the deadbolt and lets herself inside, into the dim, cool, marijuana-scented air of the living room.
“David!” she half-yells as she closes the door behind herself. “I thought we had an agreement about smoking inside!”
“I’m gonna do it anyway, so you’ll be cool about it, even though you’re an uptight weirdo?
” suggests the voice of her roommate, coming from the kitchen rather than the couch.
She turns toward the sound like a sunflower toward the light, and watches as he emerges, a Hostess cherry pie in one hand.
He’s shirtless, wearing a pair of dark blue sweatpants, and the geometric tattoos across his chest and upper arms are fully revealed, black ink on dark skin.
They’re old enough to have healed and settled, permanent parts of his body, and still fresh enough that the lines are crisp and unblurred.
He makes an impressive sight, even in the gloomy clutter of their apartment, with blankets tacked up over the windows to hold the sun at bay and the natural clutter of four college students more interested in extracurriculars than in housekeeping.
The garbage goes out on time thanks to Raven, who can’t handle the smell of anything that’s been out for more than a day, and none of them have time for pets.
Their rather laid-back approach to cleanliness makes Lilianne grateful for the covered windows; as long as she doesn’t have to look at it, it can’t bother her.
Raven found this place first, and when people look at her and Lilianne like they expect the two girls to take care of the housework, she laughs her odd little rising-and-falling laugh and says that her parents never taught her how to clean.
“My mother spent her whole life being groomed to be some man’s perfect trophy wife, and she didn’t want that for me, so she made sure I wouldn’t have the skills for the position if he showed up and wanted to give it a go,” she’d said, the first time she was asked.
The second time, she’d given in, and everyone had regretted it, as the kitchen was almost worse after she was done than it had been before she started.
She still had to do her share of the chores, but discussions of shifting the lion’s share onto her shoulders had died with dirty silverware put away alongside the clean and old spaghetti sauce dried onto the plates in the cupboards.
Lilianne’s excuse is similar, but was delivered more quietly.
She’s more competent with a sponge and bucket than Raven is; if nothing else, she’d started out as an agriculture major, and despite the amount of mud and animal manure agriculture involved, it required clean workspaces whenever possible.
She worked for years to keep her chickens and goats healthy, to understand their relationships to their surroundings, and when she’d decided to pivot to something less organic, she’d retained the ability to do her own damn laundry.
Still, David and Snake are smart enough to understand that while pushing the work off on their two female roommates is shitty and patriarchal, they might be able to get away with it, but doing it to just one of their roommates makes them look like assholes.
Do it to the cis girl and you’re saying the trans girl isn’t enough of a girl to be your maid; do it to the trans girl and you’re saying that she deserves less respect than the cis girl.
It’s a lose-lose act of patriarchy, and the men she lives with backed down as soon as they fully understood that.
They’re a weird lot, the football star, the local girl, and the two professional students.
Technically David’s a professional student too, playing for the Golden Bears and spending most of his days down at the school training center, but Lilianne and Snake are the ones who really dedicate their lives to their studies.
Snake is an entomologist by training. He’d argue that he doesn’t get the title until he gets the degree, but anyone who coos to house centipedes like they were kittens and breeds his own cockroaches deserves to be called by the name of his profession.
His dedication to the exoskeletal borders on the unreal.
David has a major apart from football, but he’s not a grad student yet, and so she can’t be bothered to remember it for more than a few minutes at a time.
Which is probably shitty of her, but hey, she gets a few less-than-perfect personality traits.
Everyone does. If she wants to be a little arrogant, she’s allowed.
And then there’s Raven. Unlike Snake, who begged them all not to look when he filled out his rental paperwork, her parents actually gave her that name, actually looked at their red-faced little potential of a person and thought, “She looks like someone who’s going to need a manifest connection to a trickster god.
” She was born in one of the nearby suburbs, and has lived in or around Berkeley for her entire life, which is somewhere nebulously between twenty-five and forty: young enough to still have a sense of adventure that drives her to take more risks than is probably good for her, old enough that she’s no longer willing to sit or sleep on the floor.
It’s because of Raven that their shared living room is dominated by large, soft couches, three of them crammed in at odd angles, all rescued from curbs and sidewalks.
But the apartment has four bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room.
It’s almost embarrassingly large when compared to the student housing.
Raven was the one who found it and posted flyers looking for people to share it with her.
The rules are simple: no smoking, no sex in public spaces, no pets, although there’s no guarantee the house will be pet-hair-free: several of Raven’s friends have service dogs of one type or another, and Rachel’s seizure-alert dog sheds like that’s his actual job.
Snake’s insects aren’t pets. The landlord doesn’t consider anything with an exoskeleton a “pet,” and as long as they don’t tell him about the roaches, he doesn’t care much about the rest of them.
Not telling him about the roaches is one of the household rules.
He’s a pretty calm guy, but there are limits.
David quirks an eyebrow and takes a bite of his Hostess pie, and Lilianne realizes she’s been standing silently in the doorway too long for normal social behavior. She winces, just a little, and starts across the living room with the forced nonchalance of someone trying desperately to seem normal.
“How was your day?” she asks.
“First day of classes, so no practice,” he says easily, dropping back onto the couch with the grace he brings to everything he does.
Sometimes Lilianne considers hating him for that.
He moves like a predator, like someone who understands every inch of his body and what it can do.
And then she dismisses the idea of hatred as illogical, because he earned that awareness.
He’s at the gym more often than he’s anywhere else, even the football field, and his weird friends and bizarre diet don’t seem to hamper his goal of being the most well-conditioned man in Berkeley.
“I had classes,” she says. None of which had involved actual learning, for her: she’s acting as a TA for the head of her department, and her day has been spent showing undergrads around, helping them understand the concepts behind the syllabuses they were supposed to read week ago, and directing them to the student store for the books they just forgot to buy.
It’s been a lot, and even though it brought her nothing new, she feels like her brain is so full that it might explode at any moment.
Academia will do that to you.
“Good for you.” David yawns, teeth flashing white against the dark of his skin. “Oh, wanted to let you know: I’ll be out late tonight. Don’t wait up.”
“Don’t wake me,” she counters.
“No promises,” he says, and smirks.
David has a small flock of rotating girlfriends, women he disappears with for entire nights, coming back in the morning shockingly refreshed and ready to face the day.
She’s never seen him miss a workout due to a date, and she’s seen him go on plenty of dates.
So whatever’s keeping him away, it won’t be a problem.