Zoe Rosenthal Is Not Lawful Good

by Nancy Werlin

  Sebastian beamed. Liv, who had wandered back up the stairs to us, snorted. “You said the same thing about Sarah Lawrence a few days ago.”

  “I hadn’t seen NYU yet.”

  I asked, “What about money? Do you have to think about that? You mentioned a basketball scholarship for Liv.”

  Cam said, “Yes, it’s definitely a factor. We’re both hoping for aid. What about you, Zoe?”

  I nodded. “Money’s an issue, for sure. That said, there’s only me, and my parents started saving when I was born. But Simon needs as close to a full scholarship as possible, and that affects my situation. He can’t be a burden on his mother.”

  Cam asked, “So what happens if Simon doesn’t get enough scholarship money? Or any? What will you do if his needs are different from yours?”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” I said primly.

  “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

  “I’m not.”

  “My plan is community college for a couple of years, if I don’t get enough scholarship money,” Cam said. “I can live at home, then transfer later.”

  “No!” Sebastian exclaimed. “You can’t do that. I mean, I couldn’t have stood it, to stay at home. I had to get out of there!”

  “You could have done it if you had to,” said Cam. “And community college is a great option. I like having a plan B.”

  Sebastian shook his head. “If I’d stayed home, it would have been bad. I’m afraid that I’d have flunked out and stayed in my room and played video games.”

  “And, like, never showered?” Liv asked. “And eaten Fritos?”

  “Cheez-Its. But yes.”

  Cam said, “No. Give yourself some credit. You’d have made it work if you had to be at home for a few years. Because you’d have known it’s a slippery slope. If you’re living at home, you can’t just hang around and pretend to be fourteen, pretend your life isn’t happening already. That way lies, you know, total self-destruction. So, you put limits on yourself. Or else.” Cam made a motion with his hands like he was setting off an explosive. “Not that I’ve thought about it for myself at all,” he added. “Not that I’m preparing myself just in case. I don’t want that to happen; I want to be in New York!” He rotated again, flinging out his arms. “But I’m not going to think my life is over, either. No matter what. You have to be flexible.”

  “Have alternate plans,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  We all smiled, but a serious feeling remained, hovering like a rain cloud.

  I said compulsively, “Simon will get a lot of aid. He’s really, really smart. He has all As and good SATs, and he’s taking two AP classes this year. And he might be able to get a recommendation from—well, someone impressive.” I was taking four AP classes myself, but that wasn’t what we were talking about, and Mrs. Albee was certainly not going to write the kind of impressive recommendation that a maybe-state-senator would. In fact—now that I thought about it—Mrs. Albee was capable of writing me a recommendation in the persona of Wentworth. Meow, Zoe is a very smart human person, meow!

  I winced and pulled out my bullet journal.

  I like Mrs. Albee. I really, truly do.

  It’s Wentworth I can’t stand.

  I was tucking my bullet journal away when Cam asked me, “If it doesn’t work out, would Simon do community college to start? Hello? Zoe? Hello?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I was thinking about a cat.” After a moment, I said slowly, “Simon is very practical. So yes, he’d make the best of it. I’m sure he would.” It would hurt his pride, though. Especially if I got in somewhere he wanted to go. Only I couldn’t, wouldn’t. I would certainly never go somewhere that he had to turn down because of money, or that he didn’t get into. I wouldn’t even tell him if I got in somewhere he didn’t.

  We were going to be together. There would be at least one school in the middle of the Venn diagram, overlapping with the circles of where he got in, where I got in, and what was financially feasible.

  “Would you stay home with him?” asked Cam. “Go to community college also? In that case?”

  I exhaled. “Yes.” And then: “I don’t know! All right? I don’t know! I’ll think about it if the situation comes up. Which it probably won’t! Is that all right with you?”

  “Of course it’s all right,” said Liv, with a reproving glance at Cam. “Sorry. It’s just that Cam and I have talked about what happens if one of us leaves home for some fabulous college and the other one doesn’t. Our parents said we needed to think about it in advance.”

  Cam said, “I didn’t mean to make you feel bad.”

  I took a deep breath. “I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t . . . it’s just that I’d never really thought about that possibility before.” I wondered if maybe Simon was thinking about it, silently, and hadn’t wanted to bring it up. I would have to talk to him.

  “Really and truly?” said Cam curiously. “There’s no page in your bullet journal about it?”

  Liv elbowed him. “It probably won’t happen,” Liv said.

  I looked at them. My new friends. My friends.

  I said, “Bloodygits, you would really like Simon.”

  “I know I would,” said Cam, instantly and sincerely.

  “Since you like him,” said Liv, more temperately, “and we like you, I know we would like him.”

  Cam said, “He really is awfully cute. I completely get what you see in him.”

  “He’s more than just a pretty face!” I forced a smile. “Sebastian? Onward?”

  “Sure. Follow me.”

  The rest of the weekend flew by. We roamed the convention center in our cosplay. We ate bad food. We posed for pictures whenever asked, which—surprise!—was often.

  Maybe it wasn’t so surprising. We looked good as a group, and we now had an awesome Bleeders sign. Meldel and Todd had made it while the rest of us were touring NYU. Using Sebastian’s white bedsheet, they’d written BLEEDERS in ketchup, with artistic splashes of red dripping below the title, no misspellings, and spot-art accents like hypodermics and knives and a spaceship, added with my Sharpie.

  Sebastian explained to photographers: “I’m supposed to be bleeding slowly from every pore, but I haven’t figured out how to make that work.” This turned out to be an effective conversation starter. Some people hung out for quite a while to discuss potential solutions. They usually also said they were going to check out the show, and wanted Sebastian to let them know what he decided to do about bleeding. He collected a lot of contact information.

  We attended sessions for Firefly and Stargate and Star Wars and Star Trek—any show that had something in common with Bleeders and that had a session that wasn’t impossible to get into.

  And of course we handed out flyers. Meldel said it didn’t matter if they got tossed, so long as people saw the Bleeders name. We did pick them up off the floor and reused and recycled whenever possible.

  The whole time, we talked and talked and talked about our show.

  “So there’s been nothing so far this season about how Lorelei killed the five Sanitation Soldiers in the Season 1 finale.” This was me.

  “Well, Lorelei does practice that tai chi–looking thing,” said Meldel.

  “But then why wouldn’t they show her using it to kill them?” asked Liv. “It’s got to be that the crystals make her deadly.”

  Sebastian said, “I think she’s turning into a robot. I think she grabbed them by the neck maybe with her mind somehow and . . .” He made a twisting motion with both hands.

  Cam nodded thoughtfully. “More and more, it looks like she’s AI.”

  I said, “Is she on the way to becoming one of the Sanitation Force robots?”

  “We can’t rule that out,” said Meldel. “We have no idea how the robots are made, but we know they’re part-humanoid.”

  “That’s what Josie thinks,” I said. I don’t talk to Josie about Bleeders—obviously I can’t do that—but I interact with her onl
ine using my Bloodygit alias, LoreleiWillBiteYou.

  “TBD,” said Todd. “We’ll see what happens.”

  “But don’t you want to figure it out now?”

  “They’ll let us know in good time.”

  When we weren’t talking about Bleeders, we talked about whatever came up, from Todd arguing that music sampling should always be considered artistic freedom and not theft to my explaining Simon’s passionate political convictions to Cam’s love life—or rather, lack thereof.

  “I’m like Saint Augustine,” said Cam as he eyed a muscled Spiderman walking ahead of us. “I want to fall in love, but not yet.”

  “He said that about chastity, not love,” I said. “ ‘Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.’ ”

  “How do you know that?” Cam asked.

  “I’m the daughter of history teachers. My mom does history of religion. Also, that’s a pretty famous quote. Everybody just loves it because, you know, it’s so relatable.”

  “I knew it was about chastity,” said Cam. “I was just being delicate when I said ‘love.’ But what’s that about continence?”

  “Did Augustine have trouble toileting?” asked Todd. He snickered. “Of course he did! Because there were no toilets!”

  “There were too,” I said indignantly. “Ancient Rome had excellent plumbing. Running water and covered sewers and everything. But continence actually meant mostly the same thing as chastity or abstinence then. Nothing to do with, you know, control over peeing.”

  Meldel said, “I wonder when it started meaning pee. It might be a translation thing.”

  “Google knows,” said Todd.

  Liv looked on their phone. “No, actually, Google doesn’t.”

  “You’re probably just not using a good search term,” I said pompously—even I knew it was pompous as it came out of my mouth—but then I couldn’t find the information, either.

  Sebastian offered, “I’m ready to fall in love anytime. But I don’t expect it to happen very easily for me, because even if girls like me sometimes, it’s only ever as a friend.” He sounded both pragmatic and sad. It made me wonder if I could maybe fix him up with Maggie. Maggie claims she’s looking. But then of course I reminded myself that I had to keep my worlds separate. Even though Maggie knew everything.

  “You just need someone to stick around for long enough to get to know you,” said Meldel to Sebastian. “It’ll happen.”

  “It really can just happen,” I added earnestly. “The right person simply comes along, and that’s when you get it that the person from before who you thought was right really wasn’t, after all. You made yourself miserable for nothing when instead, you should have been patient and trusted and been happy.”

  Sebastian said, “What?”

  I reviewed what I had said. “Oh, sorry. I mean that if you had, you know, like, a near miss? Somebody you thought you wanted to be with? Who you obsessed about afterward because you weren’t with them?” I paused. “Do you do that ever? Obsess over somebody you liked, but it didn’t work out for whatever reason, but still you can’t forget it?”

  “Oh yeah,” said Sebastian gloomily.

  “All the time,” said Cam.

  “I once lost a really good friend and did a lot of obsessing over what went wrong between us,” said Liv.

  “Sure,” said Todd, although Meldel said nothing.

  I explained, “Well, there’s no need to obsess. Because when the right one comes along, then you let the old dream go. And it follows logically: if you knew in the past about your happier future, then you wouldn’t be sad in the past.”

  “What?” said Todd.

  “But you can’t know in the past what’s going to happen in the future,” Sebastian pointed out.

  “Yes, but you’ll find out in the future. When you fall in love for real, you’ll realize you didn’t need to be miserable before, so you shouldn’t be miserable now, in anticipation of how much better you’ll feel later. Does that make sense?”

  “I lost you long ago,” said Sebastian.

  “It makes sense, but it’s wrong,” said Cam.

  “Interestingly wrong, though,” said Meldel.

  “Yes. Love you anyway, Zoe,” said Cam, and blew me a kiss.

  “Being single is a great, rich choice, too,” Liv said. “And that’s another good reason not to obsess, if I may take Zoe’s side in the true love argument for a different reason. You don’t need that wrong person in your life. Being unpartnered doesn’t mean being alone and sad! Freedom! Lots of friends!”

  “But that’s a totally different conversation, Liv,” said Todd.

  “No, it’s an expansion of the conversation. There’s all kinds of love in life. Many kinds of important relationships. Not just romantic partnerships. You have to look at the full picture of life. Life and love.”

  “That’s not being in love. I’m in love with Meldel,” Todd said. “Even though she’s not in love with me. But my eyes are open. And I think she loves me.”

  A rare moment of vulnerability from Todd. Meldel elbowed him and smiled but didn’t dispute this.

  We were quiet for a while.

  “I know she’s out there,” said Sebastian finally. “My true love. Somewhere. I’ll wait, like Zoe said. I will be patient. And I love having friends, like Liv said.”

  I couldn’t help feeling a little smug about me and Simon. It was very good to have my love life resolved, checked off on my list, done, while so many of my friends were still searching and wondering.

  On Sunday, we went to a panel on women in the Star Wars universe. It was held in an enormous room that fit a thousand people at least. We stood in line and the Force was with us and we got in—probably because con attendance had dwindled as the weekend came to a close.

  The session closed with a ten-minute tribute slideshow of Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia. It had images from when she was a teenager in the original Star Wars, in her white robes with her hair twisted in the double side-buns, all the way to her appearance in The Last Jedi in her high-collared jacket, with her graying hair and her lined face and her level, mature gaze. In some of the photos, she was with other characters, talking or in action. But in most of the pictures they selected, she was simply shown alone.

  In the background, they played “Princess Leia’s Theme” by John Williams.

  It was like nobody in that whole entire huge room spoke or coughed or even—it seemed—breathed.

  And as one photo after another came and lingered and dissolved to be replaced by another, I realized that something the panelists had been saying was correct. Even as a teenager, there was opinion in Carrie Fisher’s face. She never fit the old-fashioned storybook idea—sweet, lovely, passive—of what a princess should be like. The panel had discussed whether the director understood this when he cast her—some thought yes, others no—or if instead Carrie Fisher had so imprinted herself on Leia that the princess and the whole Star Wars universe actually developed differently than they would have if another actress had gotten the role.

  When the slideshow ended, no one moved, because we’d all been told to stay in our seats. The lights were dim, and got even dimmer.

  The actor who plays R2-D2, who had been on the panel, now stood up. He said, “Everyone who is not cosplaying Leia, please turn on your phone flashlight. Hold it ready on your lap, pointing your light downward.”

  We did this.

  “Now, everyone cosplaying Leia, stand up.”

  There was rustling around the room.

  “Flashlight bearers, now hold your light aloft, as high as you can.”

  We did.

  The Leias stood in the light, all genders, all ages, all races, all shapes, and all sizes. There were hundreds of them. Their faces were full of opinion—and dignity and pride and love.

  “Light bearers, continue to hold your light aloft, but also make room for the princesses to file out of your row and into the aisle. Princesses, when you reach the aisle, join hands with the other princess
es.”

  Very low, then, the Princess Leia theme music came back on, and all over the room, the Leias came together. They raised their joined arms.

  The rest of us held up the light for them.

  The music swelled.

  On one side of me, I felt Liv grab my empty hand and squeeze it tight. I squeezed back just as tightly, and I stretched my other arm upward, holding my light as high as I could for the Leias and for us.

  The Leias stood there for a full minute.

  This feeling rose up in me and stopped up my throat with a weird kind of . . . conviction. I felt the reality of how one particular person can make a difference to the world. This is what Simon believes: that we must all do our small part and that it’s our responsibility to do it. I agree.

  But I realized that Carrie Fisher’s impact on the world was another way, a different way, a more random and weird and inadvertent and mysterious way, a way that was about being genuinely and fully yourself and following your own odd particular star, however haphazardly, wherever it might lead you, not even knowing where it might lead you. Just trusting.

  But maybe that only worked for a really extraordinary person, a Carrie Fisher. What did it matter if someone like me was fully herself? What did that even mean, anyway?

  “Wave your lights as the princesses depart.”

  The room turned into a sea of moving light.

  The Leias marched quietly and ceremoniously from the room.

  Outside the auditorium where the princesses—where all of us—had been held in the light, we handed out flyers and said, “If you like women in science fiction, please watch Bleeders,” and “New SlamDunk SF show, why not try it?” and “Woman showrunner, mostly female mixed-race cast,” and “This show isn’t getting much marketing or publicity, but it deserves love.”

  One of the Leias paused and held out her hand for a flyer. She was smiling, radiant, still floating on the atmosphere we had all created together. I’d noticed her earlier; she was an older fat woman cosplaying as Slave Leia in a gold two-piece outfit with a mesh skirt, but she was also distinctive because she carried herself with obvious assurance.