A&b

by J. C. Lillis

  “You can figure things out without being an asshole.”

  “I can’t think bad things about her. It hurts more than it helps.” I try a short topspin serve but my heart isn’t in it. “Plus being single is better for my music. Love is too unpredictable. My heart needs a baseline level of safety for my brain to function.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “I just wish I didn’t tell her so much, you know? She knew all my secrets and she has them still, and I can’t ever get them back. She was the only one who saw me—”

  I let the ball zing by. Oh no. Why’d I have to start this sentence? Tears collect in my eyes and I have to summon the runaway-kayak scene in Camp Creekbottom II to will them away.

  “Saw you what?” Ava spins the paddle in her hand, her eyes never leaving my face.

  “Without the wig.” I shrug. “But you know, eight million people saw my head on live TV, so it’s all good.”

  Ava puts the paddle down.

  She comes over to me, her bare feet crunching the dry grass. She hoists herself up on the ping-pong table and kneels on it to even our height out. We’re face to face, eye to eye. The breeze shuffles her curls. She strokes a lock of my wig hair between her long fingers, then brushes my cheek with the back of her cool hand.

  “I want to look,” she says. “Will you let me?”

  The Transitive Properties guy sings something about stray cats and shadows and then there’s a droning cello solo. I focus on that as I unstick the wig tape, piece by piece. I strip away my golden bob.

  My legs are newborn-foal legs. I might as well be naked.

  Her fingers flick toward me. “Can I touch?” she says.

  My brain forgets how to word. So I nod, and I bow my head to her.

  She scoots closer and runs soft fingers over my scalp, exploring in a gentle, matter-of-fact way. She’d make a good doctor if the music thing doesn’t work out.

  “You have more up here than I thought,” she says, touching the grown-in patches along my hairline, on the sides of my head.

  “It’s been growing out a little.” My voice shakes. My everything shakes. “I usually keep it almost shaved.”

  “Why?”

  “When it’s grown out, the bald parts look worse.”

  She grins. “So you’d rather have nothing if you can’t have perfection.”

  “You get it.”

  “I get it. When did it start?”

  “When I was twelve. It’s pretty rare—really rare in young people. I didn’t get a good diagnosis till last year.”

  “There’s no cure?”

  “You can’t stop it. Only slow it down.”

  “Shit.”

  I swallow the lump in my throat. “I used to think it happened because I was rotten inside and I was trying too hard not to be, so the rotten had to come to the surface somehow.”

  “You know that’s dumb as hell, right?” She lifts my chin. “Right?”

  I nod.

  She hesitates, then lightly touches the top of my head. The worst most secret part of me, the part I only touch when I hate myself. “Do these bumpy things hurt?”

  “No. They never heal, but they don’t hurt.”

  “Can you get transplants?”

  “No. Not with this diagnosis.” I close my eyes. She’s smoothing her fingers over all the bad spots and it feels so, so good. “Eventually I’ll lose more.”

  “Barrie,” she murmurs. “That sucks.”

  “It does suck,” I whisper. I haven’t allowed myself to think that in years and I never, ever said it out loud. I’ve tried so hard to reframe it as something cool, like part of a superhero’s backstory. In bed at night I’d imagine Tera running her warm fingers over my scars, telling me my head was strangely beautiful, like the surface of the moon. This feels better. More honest. More real.

  “Hey,” I say.

  “What,” she says.

  “I like you,” I say.

  These words would never pass muster in a song and I’m so busy thinking up poetic things I should have said that I barely hear her say “oh fuck it,” and before I know what’s happening we’re both deep in this kiss that tastes like burnt marshmallows and the birth of a whole new world.

  Ava Alvarez is kissing me.

  With my wig off.

  And she said my real name.

  “One thing I noticed,” she says, as we break apart with a gasp.

  “Yes?” What are letters? What are words? The universe is her lips and her curls and her fingers playing lightly on my waist like I’m her favorite instrument.

  “Dance songs,” she says. “They’re very sexual.”

  “Most of them.”

  “So, maybe we should, you know…” She tips a head toward the house. “Study.”

  “Yes. To help us write.”

  “We’ll do it for victory.”

  “Do it for art.”

  “Fifteen minutes max.”

  “Twenty.”

  “Eighteen.”

  Our fingers tangle and untangle and tangle again. Her eyes scan the grass where we’ve left our things.

  “Do you want to wear the crown?” I whisper.

  “If I could,” she whispers back.

  “Go for it, Alvarez.” I smile and pull her close. “It’s you.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  To-Do List

  First Entirely Positive Sexual Experience Edition

  Choose appropriate music. This is of paramount importance. If you and your partner are equally devoted to and argumentative about music, you could spend up to eighteen minutes debating the proper soundtrack. If you’ve set aside a certain block of time for getting busy, be sure not to start the clock until an agreement has been reached. (A “60s Sweet Soul Classics” playlist is a safe, solid choice. Avoid Prince until you’re both established pros.)

  Set the scene. If you’ve envisioned your first sexual experience in a gazebo hung with white Christmas lights but none are available, don’t despair: go with what you have. Even a hamburger novelty comforter can be romantic, especially when the pillowcases look like sesame seed buns and your partner says “your buns are alluring” and then you both crack up. (Have someone you can laugh with. This is essential. See below.)

  Encounter at least one embarrassing hurdle you must leap together. In our case, it is a jammed jumpsuit zipper, which has me prostrate on said hamburger comforter while Ava straddles my upper legs (objectively sexy) and Googles stuck-zipper remedies (objectively unsexy). “Do you have ChapStick, crayon wax, Windex, or petroleum jelly?” may not be the foreplay talk of your dreams, but giggling uncontrollably is a known aphrodisiac.

  Read a text that gets you back on track. Hopefully your friend will text while the zipper-Googling is going on, and he’ll tell you that he and his on-again boyfriend have whisked each other off to the hotel in Long Beach where they had their first kiss. It will be so consumingly romantic that you will tell your lady to screw the zipper and rip the jumpsuit right off your body. (If your wrist is still a mess of sores from your probably-magic bracelet, make sure you leave your gold fingerless gloves on.)

  Briefly wrestle old body-image issues. You know, the ones you thought you banished via nine years of self-love and Tera affirmations? When you trust another person to undress you for the first time, you might hear Shaun Woods singing thun-der thiiiighs like the Spider-Man song or Sarah Stoller calling you pancake boobs and giant freak in the ninth-grade locker room. And then your girl kisses you and you remember who you are and why you’re here, and in a rare foray into Olympic-level swearing, you’ll tell all the bad ghosts to fuck right the fuck off.

  Kiss a lot. Like a lot. Everywhere. This is self-explanatory, but here are a few places that may be surprisingly erotic: the shoulder, the sternum, the inside of the thunder thigh (which I am reclaiming because who wouldn’t want legs that can summon a storm?).

  Resolve possibly troublesome power dynamics.
If you’ve got about five inches and forty pounds on your partner, there will probably be a moment when you roll on top of her and feel the uncomfortable fact of your own power. It works for you when you’re solo onstage: you’re a goddess there, and larger-than-life comes with the job. But here you don’t want to dominate, unless you know that’s what she’s into. So you ask a lot of questions like do you want to be on top and do you like it like this and you’re scared it’ll sound so dorky but you put on this husky whisper and holy crap, it actually adds to the sexy. (Answers: yes, she likes to be on top, and she definitely likes it when you thumb both her nipples at once.)

  Lose your chill in the presence of breasts. Wonder if you’ll ever be naked with a girl without your brain going OMG BOOOOOOOOOOOOOBS. Decide it’s okay, and that the person who first deemed excitement uncool was probably very unhappy in life.

  Put your foot in your mouth because you’re you. Maybe you remember this sexy movie Ma was snickering at one night while you were watching it for real, and you recall how you tingled when the sweaty guy in the black satin robe growled I’m gonna make you forget your name. Maybe you get cocky and try it out but instead your mouth says I’m gonna make you forget HER name, and you see on her face how you’ve just put Dani in bed between you. You say you’re sorry. You wish for an elimination hatch to swallow you whole. But she says forget it, it’s cool, so you try to believe her. And the way she trails kisses down your body, it’s easy.

  Don’t think about Tera. Try not to, at all, even when the Queen of the World crown glints in the moonlight on Ava’s head. Because it’s weird and wrong to retreat to celebrity-crush-land when in bed with a real girl, especially when she is touching you there like oh dear God what is she doing and please can it never stop.

  End with a small romantic gesture. If the twist-tie she’s using as a hair band has come loose by the end, untangle it gently from her curls, shape it into a heart, and press it into her palm. If it’s cheesy, so what? In the bliss of brand-new maybe-love, you get a free pass.

  Close your eyes. Let a smile as big bright and bold as a disco chorus blaze across your face. Fall in love with the universe and everything in it. See yourself for one moment as the subject of every love song ever written. And as she drifts to sleep beside you, start a brand new song.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  It’s your turn to love

  So let it surround you!

  You’ve waited so long and now

  It’s finally found you!

  The lyrics burst forth from my brain and I sing them as loud as I dare, which isn’t that loud because I am standing in the gentle patter of Abel’s shower and Ava is sleeping in the next room. I figured I’d let her doze for a while. She might be a little mad because our songwriting time has already shrunk quite a bit, considering how long our sexual research took (by the rocket clock, forty-six minutes instead of the allocated eighteen).

  But this song? This is going to be easy.

  I scrub my head joyfully, humming and tweaking scraps of melody. I tap a beat on the tiles with my fingers. I name-drop Ava in one line, which we obviously can’t use because this is her song and referring to yourself in the third person is a good way to lose votes. This week, my lady will be victorious.

  I’m toweling off in a happy haze when I realize I’m being watched.

  I turn around slowly, the way people do in horror films when there’s a vengeful ghost grimacing behind them. It’s there on the edge of the sink, its colors drained in the sallow bathroom light.

  My bracelet.

  Did I leave it there? I don’t remember. It creeps me out so much I consider shutting it up in the medicine cabinet with Abel’s ocean kelp shaving cream and superhero Band-Aids. I edge closer to the sink and crouch down to its level. The faces etched on the metal pustules look—different, right? Angrier. More accusatory, if that’s possible.

  I can’t imagine clicking it back on my wrist. I can’t picture myself buttoning my velvet jacket, zipping my boots, striding onstage and belting songs fueled by bitterness and envy and resentment. I don’t want to sing about that, not anymore.

  I’m closing the cabaret. I whisper the words to see how they feel. I imagine issuing refunds to this week’s ticket-buyers, canceling the six private Smash Sessions I have scheduled this week. Disappointing the people I’ve pledged to help.

  Rocks pile in my stomach. And then I think of Ava, and they burst into clouds of glitter-dust.

  I have to see her.

  I tie on a bandana, pull on my mixtape pajama pants and my long-sleeved Tera hoodie from the Queen of the World tour. It’s one of my three lucky songwriting shirts. Not that we need luck when we’re together.

  I poke my head in Brandon’s room. The bedsheets are pulled up and smoothed flat.

  She’s gone.

  My heart sinks for a second but then I hear it outside: the ca-think, ca-think of a ping-pong ball compelled by an expert’s paddle. I peek out the porch door. She’s back in her jeans and tank top, playing against herself. She’s pulled one half of the table vertical—I didn’t know they bent that way—and she’s clacking the ball back and forth with the kind of focus I reserve for attempting Tera’s piano part in “Rearview.” I slip out the door and watch her for a second, because I love her intensity and her precision and her clever fingers and her clenched jaw and a million other things, and then I feel like a creeper and dent the silence with “Hey.”

  “Hey.” She keeps up her rally.

  “You ready to write? I had a chorus idea and we’ve got like—” I check my wrist, even though I don’t own a watch. “—three hours before I have to drive you back.”

  She catches the ball between her palm and paddle. “Yeah. Sure.”

  I tense up a bit. I’m detecting some weirdness. Don’t jump to conclusions. Maybe she’s in the zone. Maybe you blew her mind and she’s in a state of mild shock.

  I tell myself not to be that insecure possible-girlfriend who tests her lover’s mood with a kiss, but then I do it anyway. It’s as magic as before. Her lips are soft and bold at once and her hot hand sneaks under my shirt and teases my breast and if a spontaneous burst of roller-rink starlight ever happened on Earth, this would be the time and place.

  “Shit.” She breaks away.

  “What?” I look down. “Oh my gosh. Did I step on your foot?”

  “No. No, you’re—great.” Her fingers play absently across her lips. “I can’t do this.”

  I close my eyes. There’s already a lump in my throat, because apparently my throat is a realist and was expecting this from the second we kissed. I see Chelsie in her window again, watching me go without waving goodbye.

  “Don’t say that,” I whisper.

  “It’s not you.”

  “Oh God. Please don’t.”

  “Barrie, listen.”

  “No. Ava. This should be easy. This is where happy endings go in stories like these.”

  “Except we’re not people that stories happen to,” she says. “We’re the storytellers.”

  She locks eyes with me. I don’t want to get what she’s saying. But I do.

  Ava turns away from me. She taps up the ball with her paddle, focusing like her life is on the line. Her letter-A pin is tied tight around her wrist.

  “Happiness is a risk I can’t take. Not now.” Tap tap tap. Her eyes never leave the ball. “I’m not ready to give up my broken heart. It gave me my voice. It brought me here. So close to a whole new life.” Her voice wavers, but her hand doesn’t. “All my success grew from sadness. All of it. What if I can’t write without it?”

  “I get it.”

  “I know you do.”

  “But—”

  “There’s no buts. When I’m with you—” The ball pings off the corner of her paddle and bounces under the table, out of reach. She tosses the paddle on the table and folds her arms. “When I’m with you, I forget how to hurt,” she says. “And if I forget that…then
who the fuck am I?”

  “Someone different,” I admit. “Maybe someone better.”

  “I can’t be someone different eighteen days before finale night.”

  “But the people who love what we do…wouldn’t they want us to be happy?”

  She snorts. “We both know how it works. When you make things, people don’t fall in love with you. They fall in love with how you make them feel. They want heartbreak and drama and brokenness and envy from us. They want to see us feeling it, not faking it.” She sits down hard on the edge of the porch. “I can’t let them down. I can’t let myself down.”

  I sit down beside her. Above us in the night sky, the full moon peers down at us like a god, holding its breath for what we’ll do next.

  “I’m closing the cabaret,” I blurt.

  “What?”

  “I’m shutting it down.”

  “Shit, Barrie. No you’re not.”

  “I can’t sing those songs anymore. I can’t be jealous of you, or anyone. Not when I’m falling in—”

  “Don’t.” She shuts her eyes, squeezes the pin in her hand.

  A million years pass. A cloud drifts in front of the moon.

  Then Ava’s like, “This is what’s happening. I’m ending this.”

  “Okay, hang on—”

  “Tonight was brilliant. It can’t happen again.”

  “Ava. Stop.”

  “We can’t see each other. No texting. No vidchats. No more. I have to focus.”

  I shake my head at her.

  “You’re serious,” I say.

  “I am,” she says, and it’s a punch in the throat.

  “This is bull.” My eyes fill up and spill over. “This is such crap!”

  “Watch your language, woman.”

  “You’re not even being honest! You’re scared, or you’re still hung up on her, and you’re using music as an excuse.” She flinches. I touch her shoulder. “Ava. Look at me. Please?”

  She doesn’t. She squeezes the pin tighter. Her lips part for a long moment, and then they clamp shut.