Empress of the World

by Sara Ryan

  My surprise at his lack of reaction must show on my face, because he says, “Nic, remember, I’m from San Francisco. I assume everyone I meet is a bisexual pagan until proven otherwise.”

  All my muscles turn from wire to Jell-O with relief.

  “It’s because of Battle,” I say before I lose my nerve again. “That’s what makes me think it, that I might be.”

  I’ll tell him everything. I’ll make him admit he wants Katrina.

  I wonder how old his aunt was when she knew.

  July 8, 4:30 p.m., Archaeology Classroom

  It’s raining, and it’s very hot, and I feel like an entire pantheon is trying to hammer its way out of my head.

  I can hear the rain splat against the sides of the building. Through the tiny windows of this room, I can see it falling: fat, heavy drops of rain that don’t do anything but make it seem even hotter, as though the sky was sweating.

  “Nic?” Anne pokes me. “Wake up.”

  “I wasn’t asleep, just thinking.”

  “Well, your eyes were closed,” Anne says.

  “It’s too hot to keep them open.”

  Anne looks perfectly cool and collected, as usual. No sweat has gathered on the keyboard of her laptop, though she’s been taking notes as rapidly and conscientiously as always.

  “Are you okay? You look kind of flushed.” Anne’s looking at me all concerned, as though I’m a potsherd she can’t identify.

  “I kind of have a headache,” I admit.

  “What do you want? I’ve got aspirin, ibuprofen, Midol . . .”

  Of course she does. She probably keeps them in color-coordinated vials.

  “Midol would be great, thanks.”

  She opens her purse, removes a tiny blue vial—I was right—shakes out two tablets, and gives them to me. She’s probably got some fancy bottled water in her purse, too, but I decide not to push my luck. I swallow the tablets dry.

  I just pray that Alex doesn’t break in with one of his totally off-topic rants—I couldn’t take his voice right now.

  “But don’t you think there’s a responsibility to the greater society that’s more valid than whether the bones happen to belong to some distant relative of some Indians?”

  It’s not Alex. It’s his partner in crime, Ben, who likes to think that he’s being hip and cynical when he’s actually just being stupid and offensive. But at least Ben’s voice doesn’t grate on me the way Alex’s does.

  “What sort of responsibility are you referring to?” asks Ms. Fraser.

  “The record of the past should belong to everybody. Catering to one group over another doesn’t make sense,” Ben says, putting his feet up on a desk.

  “Anyone have another opinion?” Ms. Fraser asks.

  I raise my hand. My headache is getting worse by the second, but I can’t let him get away with that. I say, “So Ben, what you’re saying is that you’re really interested in the culture of the ancestors of Native Americans, but you couldn’t care less about what the actual Native Americans who are living now think about the burials of their relatives being desecrated. That doesn’t make sense to me, I don’t know about anybody else.”

  Anne snickers.

  Ms. Fraser clears her throat. “Thanks, you two. Ben’s and Nicola’s comments provide a good basic overview of the debate around these issues. There aren’t any easy answers. Ben, I’m sure you can imagine a situation where you plan to excavate a site and the arguments of the indigenous people make you reconsider your plans. And Nicola, perhaps one day you’ll be doing research on important human remains in a museum somewhere, only to find out that a tribe has demanded their return before you can finish your work.”

  I look back at Ben, who has wrinkled up his nose as though he smells something bad. I have an urge to stick my tongue out at him but decide that the action would be overly juvenile. Instead I merely wrinkle my nose in the same way and turn again to the front of the classroom to try and pay attention to Ms. Fraser.

  My headache hasn’t gotten any better. Headaches have been part of my personal cornucopia of PMS symptoms for years, but this one is much worse than normal. It must be stress.

  I tried to eat dinner after class, but just the smell of the cafeteria made me gag. Battle made me drink juice so I’d get vitamin C, but that didn’t help. I went to my room, turned off the lights, and pulled down the shades, but that didn’t help either.

  I paw through the shoebox of CDs that I brought with me and find Carmina Burana. It’s not the most soothing piece of music in the world, but I love it so much, I think maybe hearing it will make me feel better. Or at least my head may start to throb in time with the percussion. I put the CD into my little boom box and lie back down.

  As usual, while I listen, I stare at the picture on the CD cover—a medieval engraving of Fortune’s wheel. Fortune’s wheel has fascinated me since the first time Dad explained it to me—the idea that at any moment, the wheel could turn and a queen could become a peasant, or vice versa.

  There’s a knock at my door. When I sit up, my head spins, and when I stand up to walk to the door, I feel like I’m on some alien planet where I’m not used to the gravity.

  “Um, hi—I thought you might still not be feeling well,” says Battle. “I brought aspirin—and this.” She holds out a washcloth full of something, with a rubber band around it, I guess to keep the something from spilling. “It’s crushed ice. You, uh, put it on your head.”

  “Thank you,” I manage to say, aware that I’m speaking more slowly and softly than usual. “Please come in, I kind of have to lie down again but don’t—I mean, you don’t have to leave.”

  Battle steps into my room and shuts the door quietly as I collapse back onto the bed. Now my headache is mixed with the manic nervousness I get right before a concert or a show.

  Carmina is suddenly loud, startling Battle. “What are you listening to?”

  I point to the CD case, which I have conveniently left on the floor. She picks it up. “Oh—I know this. They choreographed part of it for us to do at All-State. Um . . .you have a headache?”

  “I know,” I say, louder than before, to be heard over the chorus that’s blasting out of my boom box. “But I love it. I thought it might help.”

  Battle’s still holding the washcloth full of ice. “Do you want this? You don’t have to—”

  “Oh, yes, I do,” I say.

  walks to the bed, leans over, and very carefully places the ice-filled washcloth onto my forehead. There’s a small trickle of sweat running down into the hollow of her neck, and her green tank top is clinging to her. I feel something start thudding more than my headache and realize it’s my pulse. I hear her breathing, and mine, and then her face is so close and I lift my head just a little and our lips touch.

  I close my eyes.

  I am kissing her, and she is kissing me back.

  I can still feel my head throb but the pain is very far away.

  Even farther away, I hear the soprano solo. “Dulcissime,” she sings, “totam tibi subdo me.” Sweetest one, I give myself to you totally.

  July 10, 9:30 p.m., My Room

  field notes:

  let’s discuss this matter clinically. Kissing is wetter and softer than i with my romance novel education had expected and not quite as exciting except in retrospect. well, no, actually it is—i can’t explain it any better than that. “frenching” (i hate that word) does live up to my expectations. that is really as “far” as we have gone.

  what i am really afraid of is the next logical step in this process—i want to stay where we are now for a while at least. of course, looming in the distance is the perennial concern which i’m not even going to think about until this has lasted much longer than it has and “things” have gone much further. we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it. people’s reactions:

  kevin: does not appear to have noticed that anything has changed between me and battle. i have begun to refer to him as captain clueless. he keeps wanting to feel batt
le’s head. she keeps letting him, and doesn’t even seem mad about it. i find this somewhat disturbing.

  isaac: has been great, although he’s totally jealous, since he still hasn’t done anything about his crush on katrina. if anything, he’s a little too excited about having “dyke friends.” i said i thought i was bisexual, since i’d been interested in guys before, and he said, “by and by, you’ll be gay!”

  [bisexual is a weird word. it sounds like you have to buy sex. or it could be one of those one-celled creatures that you study in biology. “today, class, we will study the life cycle of the bisexual.” “oh, i thought those were extinct.”]

  katrina: i don’t quite know what’s going on with her. sometimes, she seems totally fine. other times she is mean and resentful and i don’t know why. maybe she feels left out?

  i wish isaac would just make a move on her. he can’t seem to figure out how. ways for isaac to approach k.:

  -fake that he has another computer problem. make sure to do it when no one else is around for her to rope in.

  -ask for advice about where he should live; she loves to give advice.

  -(unhealthy but could work) ask for a cigarette, have her teach him to smoke.

  -get a really bad headache (worked for me!)

  -just tell her he’s interested (totally unlikely).

  field notes:

  the whole idea of body language makes so much more sense to me now.

  when she’s happy, battle can’t stay still. she does these things with her arms that look almost like hula or a belly dancer, except she doesn’t move her hips in the same way. she’ll walk with a lilt in her stride. not a whole “i’m sexy” kind of strut (although she is)—it’s just as though she’s hearing this great music and is walking with the rhythm. it’s like no one ever told her that being awkward was a possibility.

  and the funny thing is, when i see her move like that, instead of feeling like i’m this giant maladroit klutz who should really avoid doing anything involving physical coordination, i can . . . i can sort of hear her music, too.

  July 13, 5 p.m., Up in the Big Tree in the Courtyard

  “This reminds me of the Indian Tree.”

  Battle looks up at me from the lower branch where she’s sitting. “The Indian Tree?”

  “It’s this giant, dead tree—it’s been dead for as long as I can remember. All the bark is stripped off so it’s just smooth, like a piece of furniture. I used to climb it all the time with Jamie—I mean James.”

  “You said that name like it made you want to spit. An ex?”

  “I don’t have any exes. You’re the—I mean, no. It’s like this. When James was Jamie, when we were little, we were best friends. We made potions. We deciphered signs that only we knew were important. When we were nine, he moved away. I missed him so much that I saved up all this money for a whole summer so I could go find him. I went on the bus for hours by myself. When I got there, to his new house, he was already friends with all these boys, and he was James, and he was awful. The End.”

  “Ouch. What kind of signs?” Battle has to squint a little to look up at me since the sun is so bright this afternoon.

  “Oh—like which way a branch was pointing would be the way we’d walk that day. And you know how when they’re doing work on sewers or power lines or something, they paint little squiggle things on the road and the sidewalk? We’d come up with all these crazy meanings for them. That kind of thing.”

  “It sounds great. Sorry he turned out to be a jerk.”

  I’m dangling my legs down from my branch, and Battle touches my calf briefly in sympathy. It sends a shock from my leg all the way up my spine.

  “Who was your best friend, growing up?” I ask, to regain my composure. I can’t get used to this.

  She sighs. “Nic.”

  “I’m sorry, is it an awful story? You don’t have to—Oh. You mean Nick-with-a-K. Right?”

  She nods. “We were just a really close family. Until we stopped.”

  “Anyone besides him?”

  It’s funny. Being here, up in the tree, sitting on different branches—it makes it easier to talk somehow. Is it because we can’t look directly at each other?

  Battle sighs again. “I’m shy, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “I hadn’t.” How can she say she’s shy? She’s dated people. She’s the one who kissed me, the first time.

  “If Katrina hadn’t made me come over the first day, I probably never would have talked to any of you.” She has a finger in her mouth as she says this.

  “But—you’re so—” Beautiful. Brilliant. Amazing. “You seem so sure of yourself, the way you talk, just the way you are. I mean, you’re not like Katrina—you don’t talk a lot, but everything you say, it just feels . . . important.”

  Battle’s finger is bleeding. “I don’t talk a lot because words don’t always work.”

  Yes, they do, I want to say, but I can’t, for some reason.

  Which means she’s right.

  But I can’t let the silence hang, either—I ask something that’s been bothering me for a while.

  “When he left, what did your parents do? I mean, did they try to find him?”

  Battle says flatly, “They fought. Mom wanted to call the police, hire a private detective, the whole shebang. Dad said it was Nick’s choice to leave, and he’d get in touch with us when he was ready.”

  “Who won?”

  “No one.”

  It’s another of her nonanswers. Doesn’t she want me to know anything about her? I try another approach.

  “It’s so awful when parents fight. Mine almost divorced when I was nine. They didn’t yell, they just got cold and overly polite—like suddenly we were all living in some strange hotel. Do your parents yell?”

  “No.”

  All right, that didn’t work either. Third time’s the charm?

  “Hey, this is totally off topic, but how long have you had Dante and Beatrice?”

  Battle smiles up at me for the first time since we started talking about her brother.

  “They came from the same litter—the mother belonged to one of the families from church. I got them . . .four years and thirty-seven days ago. They were eight weeks old. Mom and Dad weren’t sure I’d be able to take care of them, but I read every book in the library about dogs and took lots of notes. And I kept track of their growth. I measured them and weighed them every day—I paper-trained them and got them used to being on leashes—oh, I miss them!”

  The ache in her voice makes me miss them, too, even though I’ve never seen them except in her pictures, and I’ve always hated dogs.

  “Wow, you did all that? That’s really impressive. You’d make a great vet,” I say.

  Battle looks so surprised it almost makes me laugh. “That’s exactly what I want to be,” she says softly.

  July 14, 6:30 a.m., My Room

  field notes:

  last night when i was coming out of battle’s room, this girl i don’t know looked at me like i was a three-headed monster, and absolutely scuttled away from me down the hall like she thought i was going to breathe fire or something.

  but on the other side, the angst crow who was so mean to me when i liked her dress saw battle and me walking around holding hands and she actually smiled—although she turned it into a scowl as soon as she saw that i had noticed.

  alex and ben from class also look at me like i’m a three-headed monster, but then i look at them the same way, and have since day one.

  i’ve started to keep track of the number of times i hear someone mutter the word “dyke” in my direction—five so far.

  i guess i should be getting angry, or upset, but more than anything it’s just odd—what has changed about me, that makes these people now want to call me this name? do i look different? it’s not as though battle and i have been out necking constantly. not that i’d mind. or would i? i don’t know—whenever we’re outside, in public, something happens that keeps us from doing anything but
holding hands. like magnets that repel each other if they get too close. i’ve also been wondering if it’s a new phenomenon for there to be tons of [boy/girl] couples all over the place, practically having sex on the lawn, or if they’ve been there all term and i’m only just now noticing. i’ve tried to look for other (ahem) same-sex couples, too, but it’s hard to tell. so many girls are all over each other, holding hands or doing each other’s hair or giving each other back rubs. it’s impossible to know if you’re looking at friendship or lust. or both. as for boys . . . there are some jocky-looking guys who are forever punching each other on the arm or slapping each other on the butt. i suppose it’s possible they could have something going on, but you’d certainly never catch them, say, kissing. and there’s another boy i’ve seen, i think he’s in katrina’s class, who often wears long velvet skirts and lots of black eyeliner. but i believe this to be a fashion statement rather than a declaration of sexuality, since i have observed him making out with various angst crows.

  i suppose he could like boys, too, though.

  i of all people should remember that.

  July 15 (one-week anniversary), 6:30 a.m., My Room

  field notes:

  battle noticed my viola last night. “how long have you been playing?”

  i told her—since i was in fifth grade—and she said, “that’s how long i’ve been dancing. play something for me.”

  “only if you dance,” i said, expecting her to laugh and change the subject.

  “all right,” she said.

  so i opened my case and took out my bow to put rosin on it, something i always do when i’m especially nervous about playing. it didn’t need any rosin, but it gave me something to do for a minute while i tried to figure out what i knew well enough to play from memory while i watched her dance.

  finally i remembered a little bach piece i did years ago for the solo-ensemble festival. “this is slow,” i said. “i hope you didn’t want something fast.”

  battle shook her head.

  the way she was standing, it’s as though her whole body was listening. which i suppose it was.