Chapter 15 #2
Wait: no. Not a stranger. As she automatically grabs for the falling woman’s arm, Lilianne realizes she knows her.
She knows very few people in Berkeley so far, but she knows this one, with her beautiful face and her thick black hair.
She can no more stop knowing her than she can unring the crystal bell of her own heart, and so she just freezes, pendulum still spinning in her unoccupied hand, to stare at Smita.
Smita recovers her composure before Lilianne does, using the firm anchor of the taller woman’s grasp to pull herself to her feet, shaking her head until her hair falls in a black ink river down her back.
She’s wearing a tan jacket, something like a short, stylish trench coat, and carrying a large leather purse.
And she’s still the most beautiful woman Lilianne has ever seen, so beautiful that it almost hurts to look directly at her. It’s like staring into the sun.
“We keep running into each other,” Smita quips, half-dryly, and it’s such a dad joke that it breaks through her beauty for just a moment, allows Lilianne to recover her composure and risk a dry, shallow laugh.
Smita gives her an assessing look. “What brings you this far from campus?” she asks.
“Forgive me if I’m making assumptions here, but when we met earlier, you didn’t strike me as a local.
I don’t normally find out-of-state students wandering around the residential neighborhoods, especially not after midnight. ”
Because it is after midnight now, well after midnight, sliding into the deep slow hours of the morning.
These are the best hours for alchemy, which is a form of debate as much as it’s a science, even if half the alchemists Lilianne has known would never admit it; through alchemy, they can negotiate with the universe, argue with the rules it chooses to follow on a daily basis, and sometimes win in ridiculous ways, rewriting everything to suit themselves.
The fewer waking minds there are nearby, the easier it becomes to win those arguments, because there’s no one available to offer contradiction.
“I, uh…” she says. “I just wanted to go for a walk, you know? And I guess I moved away from all the noise and fuss coming off the campus just sort of automatically. I didn’t want to run into anybody.”
“I can go,” says Smita.
“No, that’s all right,” says Lilianne hurriedly.
Maybe too hurriedly: Smita looks momentarily amused, as Lilianne’s cheeks burn.
Still, she soldiers on: “I don’t mind a little company.
You’re not a stinking drunk frat boy telling me how tall I am like he thinks I somehow never noticed, or a sorority girlie looking at me like I’m some sort of a threat. ”
“Well, you know, they might be right about the threat.” Lilianne’s heart sinks, only to rebound back into her throat as Smita continues: “You do keep walking into people.”
Lilianne smiles. “Only you.”
“Oh, so I’m special? Well, I’m flattered. Every girl wants to be special. I just feel like I could be special without hitting the ground quite so many times, you know?”
“Picky, picky. And what are you doing out here? Is there something interesting in that vacant lot? How is there a vacant lot in the middle of the block? I thought the local real estate market was so tight that any open ground would have been snapped up and overbuilt by now.” She takes a step toward the point where the sidewalk ends and the rough, rocky ground of the lot begins.
For some reason, for just a moment, she smells peaches.
Then Smita is in front of her, hands raised and a disarming smile on her face.
It’s like she can’t decide whether she’s distressed or not.
“Remember the earthquake we had a few years back? The house that used to be here had a bad-enough gas leak that the whole thing burned to the ground. It was a nasty piece of work. Anyway, the owners still own the plot, and they’re planning to rebuild eventually, they just haven’t gotten around to it yet. ”
“And the something interesting?”
“I was visiting a friend who lives over there.” Smita gestures vaguely.
It’s hard to tell which of the neighboring houses she’s trying to indicate; it could be any of the three on the far side of the lot.
“Cutting through is faster than trying to find my way through the maze of little streets between here and there. I don’t know what I’ll do when they rebuild the house that’s supposed to be here.
Learn to go the long way around, I guess. ”
“Huh,” says Lilianne, and takes another step toward the lot. She keeps smelling peaches, and she can’t figure out why …
But Smita doesn’t move, and if Lilianne keeps going, she’s going to knock the other woman down again. She stops where she is, bewildered.
Smita smiles. “I’m out on the street because my friend needed to go to bed,” she says.
“You met her earlier—Erin? And anyway, if we’re not going to visit her, there’s really nothing there but a bunch of rocks and old, broken glass.
You can get hurt wandering around in the dirt if you don’t know where it’s safe to step. You want some company?”
Lilianne can keep arguing, keep trying to get into the vacant lot, but why?
There’s nothing there, and the strange smell of peaches could be coming from almost anywhere.
A nearby tree or Smita’s shampoo. The world is filled with tiny mysteries that were never intended to be solved. She can leave this one safely alone.
So instead she turns her body halfway back toward the pendulum she’s been ignoring for these last few minutes. It isn’t swinging anymore. Instead it’s spinning in small, tight spirals, each one pulling toward the same unseen destination.
“What’s that?”
Smita’s voice is, for once, an intrusion.
Lilianne flinches away, eyes flicking between her pendulum and the other woman, trying to decide her response.
If she tells the truth, Smita will think she’s strange—assuming Smita doesn’t think that already after everything that’s happened so far.
Smita thinking she’s strange would really be the least of her problems, a blip in the cosmic weight of the universe.
But still, it’s something to consider. Lilianne has always been awkward around women, and yet, even for her, developing a crush and grinding it into the dust in a single day’s time would be an impressive new record.
She’d rather be able to dream about Smita for a little longer, even if it can never be forever.
The trouble is, she can’t think of a single lie that makes her look any less strange.
“I was taking my pet rock for a walk” is the sort of statement that gets mental health professionals involved, even here in Berkeley, where some people truly believe that Snake’s cockroach colony is also an emotional support animal.
When the truth and the lie are both ridiculous, it’s easier to keep track of the truth. So Lilianne sighs and says a silent farewell to the sweet dream of Smita before she explains, “It’s a dowsing pendulum. They’re more accurate than the rods, at least for me. Never had much luck with rods.”
“A … dowsing … pendulum?”
“Mm-hmm. It’s made of rhyolite. There’s lots of it around here.
You want to use a mineral that’s found where you’re searching.
Back home in Alabama, I’d be using hematite or blue star quartz, just to be sure my intent is in harmony with the land around me.
” That’s a lie. Back home in Alabama she’d be using a pendulum of baked red clay with some hay mixed in for structure and solidity.
Back home in Alabama she understands what the land wants, not just what the land knows, and she can tailor her choices better for the understanding.
Smita gives her a half-frustrated look. “That’s what it’s made of, not what it is.”
“It’s a stone dowsing pendulum. You use it to find things.”
“What are you trying to find?”
In for a penny, in for a pound, as the sages say. “Have you ever heard of alchemy?”
There’s a beat as Smita’s eyes widen, and it looks almost like she’s going to step away, back over the boundary into the rocky vacant lot.
But she holds her ground and composes her expression, eyebrows relaxing, and in a neutral voice says, “That was a Greek thing, wasn’t it?
Philosopher kings and wizard scholars and that sort of stuff? ”
“All the inkpot gods,” says Lilianne, with audible relief. “It’s not magic, it’s scientifically applied force of will, and some of it’s deeply silly, but some of it really isn’t. Some of it works, if you know how to do it properly.”
Smita nods. “I’ve heard a bit.”
“Really? Oh, that’s amazing! So many people have no idea about alchemy, or they think it’s all just fairy tales and positive thinking, like you can good-vibrations reality into doing what you want.
A lot of it’s just about finding the sympathies and harmonies that exist in the world, and then twisting them around until they take the shapes you want them to have.
” It’s a miracle, but Smita is still watching her, still looking like she understands and can accept what Lilianne is saying.
The most beautiful woman in the world and she’s responsive to the idea of alchemy? If she didn’t already know the gods were real, this would be enough to convince her. This feels like the opening verse to everything she’s ever wanted in her life.
“Are you an alchemist, then?” asks Smita.
Lilianne snaps back into the present, leaving her wondering thoughts of alchemical fulfillment behind.
“I’m trying to be,” she says. “I’m self-taught.
The … the American Alchemical Congress has been a little broken up recently, and even if they weren’t, they’re pretty sexist. A lot of them still don’t think women are suited to alchemical studies, like our brains will run out of our ears and try to escape if we have to contemplate the process of purifying base minerals or transforming one flesh into another. ”