by Deiri Di
She nodded. "You have to fit into the restrictive little box they call well adjusted. Otherwise, they're going to want to dope you up on pharmaceuticals until you're so riddled with side effects you can't see straight." She put her other hand on top of his and held him in such a small way. Yet, it is the little things that add up to big things. "You gotta play the game they want to play, or you become an outcast."
Benjamin looked down at her hands, holding his, then held her gaze for a long inscrutable moment. "If we're playing a game, why don't we just rewrite the rules?"
"Mari," Chase stood in the doorway leading to the gym. Students piled up behind him. Had the entire auditorium run riot and chased after them to see what was going on? Chase looked into the pool, then back at them. His face twisted in the effort to say something, but nothing came out.
Benjamin's fingers curled around hers. He pulled her hand away from his chest but didn't let go. Instead, he laced his fingers through hers.
"Let's blow this joint," he quipped.
He started walking, towing her alongside him.
Well, why the hell not.
If she stayed there, she would just have to deal with bullying students and interrogation from teachers. She didn't have to put up with that sort of nonsense.
She would do what she wanted.
Which was ditch school hand in hand with the hottest guy there. A guy who had also kissed her cause he thought it was funny to kick the bees' nest when they were already stinging her. A guy who would tackle a dinosaur to keep it from ripping her apart.
Yeah. Sure. Why not.
#
He had a car.
A red sporty classic.
Mari didn't really know what type of car it was because she didn't care very much about cars unless they were the newer type that ran off of solar or hydrogen. Fossil fuel gas guzzlers were stupid.
"How did you get this?" Mari asked.
Benjamin opened the door for her. "My dad bought the shell and pieces, and when we were done fixing it up, he gave it to me."
Mari slipped inside.
Leather seats. Stick shift. The latest technology embedded in the dashboard – it was an opulent mix of old and new, a balance that would have taken a lot of money to manage.
"This was expensive to build." It wasn't a question.
Benjamin shrugged as he slid into the driver's seat.
"My parents have money," he said.
How nice that must be.
Mariposa's family wasn't poor – well, they weren't out on the street. She always had enough to eat. They went shopping at the second-hand store for new clothes and the dollar store for everyday necessities.
She didn't get the newest technological toys.
Her house didn't have the latest upgrades.
They still had to pay for electricity.
They weren't like the families that had the money to jump ahead of the curve and plate every surface with solar panels and biodegradable graphene, an environmentally friendly supercapacitor that could store and transfer energy more effectively than any previous battery technology.
The head cheerleader's family paid all of their other utility bills from the income brought in from selling energy back to the network...
Mari's family ignored where technology was going, so now they were stuck buying energy from the savvier until they could afford to refit the roof.
They were a paycheck to paycheck kind of family.
Benjamin tore out of the parking lot.
Mari clenched the edge of her seat.
They didn't talk as the car rumbled along through the back streets. They didn't speak until they got to a park, a large pond rippling in the center of LA, if you can call any part of the sprawling mess labeled a city a center.
Patches of grass had long been taken over by the city's urban garden space program, so the park was a mass of trees, raised gardens, and a path that wound around the pond where ducks squabbled.
They got out of the car and walked along the path.
"So you are positive I'm not going mad," he said as they reached the edge of the water and began following it past rows of artichokes.
"If you've gone mad, then I've been completely insane for a terribly long time," Mari mused. "Of course, that remains a possibility."
This entire story could just be in her head.
Benjamin bumped her arm. She looked up at him, and he grinned down at her. "I fought a dinosaur."
"Yeah, you did," she smiled back.
"Heh, so I heard something off the Internet from some guy with pink hair," he said. "In every moment in life, you have in one hand an ice cream cone and one foot in a pile of dog crap."
"Ew," Mari said. "Gross."
"You can either pick up your foot, sniff the crap, and tell everyone around you to come to look at the crap you stepped in," he gestured, holding an imaginary cone. "Or you can enjoy the nice ice cream. You can share your ice cream."
Mari blinked. Huh.
"Crap: Everyone in the school now thinks I'm batshit crazy," Benjamin weighed that thought on one hand. "Cone," he gestured with the other. "I fought a dinosaur to rescue a pretty girl."
It was a matter of perspective. What you focus on, what you pay attention to – that is what becomes your life. If Mari sat around fixating on all the things that went wrong, all the things that had been done wrong to her, she would never be happy. All she would be doing was focusing on the negative.
Yet you have to understand a negative to move past it.
The fairies that tormented her all her life didn't do it because they were inherently evil. They did it because of communication problems. Their worlds would intersect, but instead of taking the time to figure out a way to speak in a manner that the fairies understood, Mari just reacted to them. She never tried to learn their language.
When she did and realized that they operated on the principles of trade and their own system of fairness, the little tormentors became allies.
Cookies and doll's clothing were the keys.
Wait, did he say she was pretty?
No one had ever called her pretty before.
"Crap: I can't go back to school, not after that. Cone: Now I see things that only you and I can see? How is that even a positive? Yeah, fighting a dinosaur is cool, but if no one else can see you do it, then what the hell is the point? Oh, look at me, I'm fighting a delusion!" Benjamin squeaked out the last couple of words, the stress of the situation, twisting his tone like a clown twisting a balloon into shape.
"You think that's bad?" Mari said. "Try seeing things other people can't see your entire life. You just saw one monster on one day. Guess how many monsters I've seen."
"So what, I shouldn't have run screaming out of the auditorium in front of the entire school? I should have sat there and acted like everything was normal when it was pretty damn clear that everything was not normal? Fake sanity until I make it?" Benjamin was shaking. His entire body trembled with the overwhelming pressure of emotions that make life ever so much clearer in its exquisite confusion. "What do I do, Mari? Tell me what to do!"
A duck floated closer to them across the water.
There he was, this gorgeous, strong guy brought to panic by a weight that Mari had carried all of her life. She looked at his panic and saw her own strength. Look how much she had handled.
She was so incredibly strong.
Now, someone else was going through the same struggle.
Unlike her, he had someone more experienced to guide him.
Such a gift she could give him merely by shining a light to guide the way.
"No," she said. "I'm not going to tell you what to do."
"Why the hell not?" he shouted.
The duck wiggled its entire body in agitation at the unexpected noise, then floated away, it's anxiety passing through it and back into the world in the form of movement.
"Because feel the force, Luke!"
"What?"
"You can't go through life, expecti
ng other people to solve all of your problems. They are your problems. You created them. So you have to solve them. But you can't solve them until you understand them. So no, I'm not going to tell you what to do. You're going to tell yourself what to do once you figure out why you do the things that you do."
"Okay," Benjamin looked at her, all the intensity in his focus. "I'm listening. You want me to figure out how my own brain works so I can use it to find my own solutions. So how do I do that?"
Mari didn't really know the answer to that. She had no idea what she was doing. She only knew that when she was under the influence of a love potion and kept thinking all those thoughts that made the world feel full of wrongness, she didn't solve the problem by wallowing in them.
She solved it by noticing the disconnect.
She noticed that the world inside her head didn't match the world outside of it. She listened to her internal guide, the part of her that knew something was wrong, that kept whispering the truth until she heard it past the love potion's lies.
But how do you do that practically?
How do you look at your own thoughts?
"Why did you run away when you saw the dinosaur monster thing?"
"Because it was a monster?"
"But WHY do you run away from monsters?"
"So that I don't get eaten."
"Why don't you want to get eaten?"
"Isn't that obvious?"
"Pretend I'm an alien."
Benjamin looked at her tits. "I'd rather not."
"Ben! Focus! Pretend I'm someone who doesn't understand how human beings work. I didn't grow up in your culture. I grew up elsewhere. I'm a complete outsider from a planet where getting eaten is awesome or something. Now explain how your brain works. Why don't you want to be eaten?"
"It's like science and history and stuff. The monkeys that waited to see if the scary-looking creature was a friend or not didn't live to breed. The monkeys were afraid of things with teeth and ran away right away. So I ran away because it was a reaction. That reaction comes from years of natural selection. It's like a gut instinct. Fight or flight."
"Do people often do things because of instinct?"
"Yeah. Like if someone attacks you. If your instincts have been honed to curl up and protect your head, that is what you do. If you've taken martial arts training, then your instincts are honed to fight back."
"So why didn't I run?"
"Instead of giving into your evolutionary instincts, you were able to see your fear for what it was and make the choice that was best for your survival and your social reputation."
Mari liked the way that she looked from his perspective. He saw her as someone who had it together. He saw her as someone calm, and zen.
"That or you did the whole deer in headlights thing," he finished.
"You're better at social reputation than I am," Mari pointed out.
"I really am," Benjamin looked out on to the water. "But that is just because my parents taught me that to be popular, all you have to do is find what you genuinely like about other people and tell them. There is something worth complimenting in everyone. They can tell if you mean it or not, and if you mean it, then they can't get enough of you. People are starved for affection."
Huh. Mari thought about that for a moment. She almost never complimented people. She rarely even noticed things about other people – she was often too much in her own little world, spending all her time trying to not react to the things that only she could see.
Was that why she didn't have friends?
You don't make friends by being self-absorbed.
You make them by finding something to love in the other person.
"Benjamin." She put her hand on his bicep. He looked down at her, away from the two white swans that swam through the water that had been purified by being run through a facility that contained huge tanks with swampland ecosystems. There were a lot of big problems that were being solved by already existing natural systems. "When you saw that dinosaur turn to come after me, you leaped on its back, knocked it into the water, and used its natural weaknesses against it."
Mari stared into his eyes. To see that she meant it, she had to look him in the eye and let him see the truth behind them.
"You did that, even though your natural instinct was to run away," Mari squeezed his arm. "Instead of being ruled by your unconscious reactions, you chose to fight fear. Just like you're choosing to think about your own thoughts. You really are a magnificent guy."
He blushed and looked down at the ground.
There was something else she had to say.
It was essential to communicate.
"I didn't want you to kiss me," she said. "Under the bleachers, I was freaking out and really sad. I didn't want you to kiss me at all and I don't like that you did. I especially don't like that you did it so that underclassman could get another picture. I'm the one who had to deal with bullying, not you. That was an unfair thing to do."
"Okay," Benjamin said. "But why didn't you want to kiss me? I mean, look at me. I'm the most kissable guy in the school. All the girls want to kiss me."
Egotistical, sure – but a good question none the less.
Last year she would have died for a chance to kiss him.
"I'm going through something right now," Mari explained. Should she tell the truth? "I'd just found out that I killed someone."
"You what?"
Maybe she didn't want to talk about that.
"I didn't want Chase to kiss me either," she said. She shifted her backpack. It was unusually hot against her back, like the egg inside contained molten fire. "I don't understand why you guys think it’s alright to just go ahead and do that when the girl doesn't want it."
"Dude, you just said you killed someone." Benjamin frowned. "Was that a joke? You girls are confusing." Then he smiled. "See, you can help me with this. If you want a guy to kiss you, what do you do to show him to go ahead?"
What a question.
How was she supposed to answer that? What sorts of things did she do when she wanted a guy to kiss her?
When had she ever wanted a guy to kiss her?
Chase. She’d wanted Chase to kiss her once upon a time in a land far away, in a time that seemed so long ago. She’d wanted him when she didn't know what he'd done.
When he was an image, she’d clung to for survival.
Now she could see the things he'd done. She knew the horrid thing she’d done to him. What lay between them was an emotion pulled by both sides of the emotional spectrum. It was something that had nothing to do with kissing.
Something that had everything to do with sorrow.
Something that had everything to do with love.
She couldn't think about the past to answer the question. She had to think about the present.
Who was she right now?
What sorts of things would she do if she wanted to be kissed by a boy? If she wanted to be kissed by Benjamin?
She would kiss him the way she wanted to be kissed.
"I would act as if I was going to kiss him and then pause a little ways away," she said. "That way, he could avoid being kissed. He could turn his cheek or kiss me on the cheek or pull away, and it wouldn't be awkward. If he wanted to kiss me back, he could rise to the challenge."
Benjamin was silent for a moment.
Then he turned towards her, grabbed her around the waist, and pulled her towards him. He ran his thumb along her cheek. "So like this," he said. He leaned in and stopped, his lips a few inches away from hers. His eyes darted from her eyes to her lips and back again.
Mari was so flustered she couldn't move.
She held perfectly still.
Benjamin let go of her and resumed walking. "Like that, right?"
Mari exhaled a breath she didn't know she'd been holding. "Yes. Exactly like that."
She glanced sideways at him to see he was smiling.
Crack.
"What was that?" Benjamin looked around. "Did you hear that
? It sounded like something breaking."
The sound had come from her backpack.
"I have to go home."
"Okay," Benjamin ran his hand down her forearm, his fingers tangling up with hers. "Are you sure?"
Mari pulled her hand free. "Yup. Bye."
[ 7 ]
"You're grounded!" Her father shouted.
This was not surprising. He taught at her school. There was no way he missed her bolting out of that auditorium then running away with a football player. "Your Thanksgiving break will be spent in this house, in your room! No television! No hanging out with friends! No going to the library!"
That last one hurt.
Except for Benjamin, she had no friends. She wasn't even sure he was a friend, though she wanted him to be. Television... well, she didn't want to end up like Cathy, addicted to the mindless meanderings of people who got drunk and made fools of themselves on camera.
But the library?
He didn't even ask her for her side of the story.
Crack.
Sweat rose on the back of her neck as her backpack burned hot against her back. Perhaps the grounding was for the best. Just because her father was too angry to talk to her like she was a person didn't mean something good couldn't come out of the situation.
"FINE!" Mari shouted back. "I'LL BE IN MY ROOM!"
She stormed up the stairs. The entire house vibrated as she slammed the door shut behind her, taking visceral satisfaction in the bang.
She opened her backpack.
The egg was burning up.
Could eggs get fevers?
It was too hot to pick up, so she opened up her backpack up wide and let it roll out onto her bedroom floor. The was a large crack radiating down the side.
Mari sat down next to it and waited.
And waited.
The egg sat there and radiated heat.
Mari crossed her legs and waited, determined to be there for the slightest change. She settled her hands on her knees.
Breath in. Breath out.
Why was she a social pariah?
Mari let the question roll around in her mind.
Originally it was because she reacted to the fae, the yōkai, the spirits that nobody else could see. When you have sensations or stimulus that nobody else can identify with, you are labeled as abnormal.
