by Anna Birch
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To Daniel:
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear
—ROBERT BURNS
To Levi, Rhys, and Parker (in no particular order!):
I love your hearts!
CHAPTER 1
ILIANA
Hate is a complicated word.
Some people believe hating is wishing death on someone.
Others think it’s three-minutes-in-a-dark-broom-closet away from True Love™.
If this is the case, I don’t hate Rhodes Ingram at all: I don’t hate her, and I would rather die myself than be alone with her anywhere.
But, oh, it feels good to say it:
I hate Rhodes Ingram.
I hate Rhodes Ingram.
I. HATE. RHODES. INGRAM.
We’re standing in the doorway of the dorm room Rhodes shares with Sarah Wade, my best friend since we were kids, and I never have any idea what’s happened here. She doesn’t tell me when she fights with Rhodes, or when Rhodes makes her feel small, or when Rhodes bites her head off for turning on the overhead lights too early in the morning. Sarah only Velcros herself to my side, and then I have to needle around for details until I can finally pull everything out of her.
And oh my God.
I despise Rhodes for it.
I’ve memorized every square inch of Rhodes’s face—her dark, full eyebrows, the way her hair hangs in long sheets past her shoulders, the wisps that curl at her temples, too short and too new to be forced into submission. I’ve blended shades of orange and pink watercolor until I could find the precise shade of her cheeks when she flushes either from embarrassment or anger, and I find myself comparing sticks of soft pastel to match the blue of her eyes.
Every day, we take seats across from each other in Drawing III. We spend seventy-five minutes in uncomfortable eye contact over the tops of our sketchbooks instead of working, ignoring the endless blathering of our drawing teacher, Benjamin Randall.
Which is exactly what we did today—literally nothing.
Nothing at all, but glaring and fuming and whispering snide remarks over the tops of our sketchbooks at each other. And now we’re here, two hours later, standing three feet from each other while she scrambles—because that’s the only thing she knows how to do—flushed and shoving dirty clothes into a hamper.
“I can’t believe you talked me into this,” I whisper to Sarah.
Her face pinches up in that way that it has since childhood, a little red and a lot ugly.
She doesn’t respond—she doesn’t have to.
Her texts in our messaging app earlier today said more than enough:
Its_sayruh_17 6:13a: look you don’t have to talk to her ok
Its_sayruh_17 9:42a: it’s my birthday
And
Its_sayruh_17 10:46a: don’t you think you can just like pretend to get along for five minutes
And
Its_sayruh_17 12:15p: you’re both my best friends??? Clearly you both have good taste??? Like?
And
Its_sayruh_17 1:52p: ANSWER
Its_sayruh_17 1:52p: YOUR
Its_sayruh_17 1:52p: TEXTS
Its_sayruh_17 1:53p: BITCH
So, here we are.
Thirty minutes later leaving than we had originally intended.
Rhodes’s things are nice enough—I recognize her quilt from the cover of a Pottery Barn Teen catalog I saw in my orthodontist’s office. She has one of those boutiquey burlap-tufted headboards and crystal bedside lamps that are completely ridiculous paired with the cinderblock walls. Her curtains match her bed skirt, a preppy kelly-green-on-white lattice print.
But six half-empty water bottles litter Rhodes’s shelf over her bed, and two have plummeted between her headboard and the desk. Her office supplies match, too, all the way down to a cup filled with unsharpened pencils that have sat there as long as Sarah and Rhodes have shared a space, but today they’re scattered willy-nilly across her desk.
Meanwhile, Sarah’s side of the room is meticulously tidy. She possesses a kind of ingenuity I don’t see from the Conservatory kids who come from money: She’s broke, the other sophomore-year transfer besides me, and she’s only here due to one of a handful of scholarships the school extends to the area’s talented poor. Whereas the girls down the hall order their room supplies from places like West Elm or Pottery Barn, Sarah has upcycled literally everything she owns from thrift stores, dumpsters, and her grandmother’s attic.
There are three rows of bins on the shelves that hang over her bed, spray-painted white and fitted with DIY tie-dyed liners. She braided the rug that sits on the linoleum floor between the two beds from old sweatshirts and crocheted her shower bag with strips of old plastic bags from the grocery store.
I like Sarah’s side far better.
Rhodes has moved on to stowing dirty bowls spirited away from the dining hall beneath her bed, cursing under her breath, so I direct my attention to Sarah instead. She nudges me toward her bed; I duck under Rhodes’s long arm, which is flailing out to grab a dining hall mug from where it sits on top of the microwave, and hoist myself up onto Sarah’s mattress. “Well? What do you want to do first, Birthday Girl?”
“I think we should read tarot cards,” Sarah says. “Did you bring yours?”
“Oh, give me a break.” I dump my bag onto Sarah’s homemade quilt, an uncharacteristic hodgepodge of every monogrammed article of clothing she’s owned since birth. Three decks tumble out, each safe in tiny, hand-sewn silk pouches. “I always have them with me.”
Sarah takes each deck from its bag and turns the cards out.
First, the original Rider-Waite deck, with a pretty tile pattern on the back that makes it impossible to tell if a card is upright or reversed before it’s been flipped—a detail that could change the meaning of the card if the picture on the back is upside down or right-side up. Second, a deck influenced by the art deco movement from the early twentieth century that shimmers with touches of gold leaf. The last deck—and my favorite—my Sacred Feminine deck.
Even if we go through this little ritual every time I’ve read for her, she always chooses the same deck. She glances over to where Rhodes lies sprawled across her own bed, then places the Sacred Feminine deck in my upturned palm.
“What makes you think you can see the secrets of the universe with a deck of cards?” Rhodes drawls. She’s lying on her side, her head propped in her hand. “Why do you, Iliana Vrionides, think you possess a sixth sense for the unknown?”
We’ve been through this eight hundred times.
Every single God-dang time she sees my cards, she asks the same question.
I always give the same answer, and I recite it now as if I’m reciting a Bible verse in church:
“Tarot cards are mirrors, not windows. I don’t practice tarot to see the future; I practice tarot to see myself.”
“Yeah,” Sarah echoes, frowning. “It’s not about trying to see the future.”
Rhodes sniffs. She rolls onto her back and stares up at the ceiling. “I don’t see why you can’t just, I don’t know, look in a mirror. If it takes a deck of playing cards to ‘know yourself,’ Iliana, you’ve got bigger problems.”
I don’t like the way my name rolls around in her mouth: It’s pure, old-fashioned, rural Alabama drawl, with consonants conveniently forgotten and every vowel delicately stretched into its own kind of music. It sounds like a secret; I’ve wondered what it would sound like to hear my name whispered like that.
Sarah shifts and uncrosses her short legs and stretches them out in front of her. She’s gone from a pleasant, excited flush in her pale cheeks to an all-over crimson that even screams pink under her bleached hair. We make eye contact; she shakes her head, and I drop my eyes to the cards between us.
This girl is the person I called when I experienced my first orgasm on accident two summers ago, leaning up against the washing machine during the spin cycle to reach the box of fabric softener on the top shelf. I was the one she called for advice the three months she hid having her period from her mother, an overly emotional, sentimental woman who Sarah had caught searching phrases like “moon sister” and “first period party” on Pinterest the week before.
Sarah’s my best friend in the whole world, since we were little girls, and I absolutely hate watching Rhodes tear her apart.
Rhodes watches this wordless exchange from her bed with an air of boredom.
I lose track of time running through the myriad things that may or may not cool the burn in Sarah’s cheeks: that new horror movie coming out over Thanksgiving weekend she’s excited about, the buy-one-get-one sale at the bubble tea place on Richard Arrington Jr. Boulevard, whatever nineties Christian metal band she’s ironically-slash-unironically obsessed with this week.
“Oh!” I dig down to the bottom of my bag to retrieve two small, gift-wrapped rectangles. I hand them over, beaming. “Open your birthday present!”
I have the decency to wait to throw Rhodes a look of pure victory until after Sarah turns her attention to the careful task of unwrapping each gift without tearing the paper. Sarah’s been my best friend for as long as I can remember, but this is also what today is about: a carefully choreographed dance demonstrating each of the eight million ways Rhodes and I are the better friend to her.
Rhodes stares at her nails. She knows me well enough to feign indifference, and I know her well enough to identify that the little twitch in one corner of her generous mouth means she isn’t indifferent at all.
Sarah gasps, and holds up a cassette tape with both hands as if it’s the Holy Grail. “Antestor! I don’t have this one!”
“Lucky you,” I say, “apparently somebody dropped off their old cassette tape collection at the flea market last week.”
Sarah cries out again as she opens the next. “The Finnegans Wake LP! I’ve been looking for this everywhere.”
“Is there really an entire album named after that God-awful James Joyce book we had to read in Lit Two last block?” Rhodes will never be able to match my gift, and the fact that she categorically refuses to glance up from her hands tells me that she realizes the same thing.
“I loved it.” Sarah takes on the snotty, poised mannerisms we’ve seen in Rhodes more than I ever care to admit. When Sarah does it, it looks more like a little girl clodding around in her mother’s heels.
“I read that Joyce wrote the whole thing in six weeks, and for some reason he was proud of the fact that he never changed any of it,” Rhodes says.
“I doubt that any of the guys in the Billy Saunter Band ever actually read Joyce, Rhodes.” I hope to God this isn’t the way the rest of our night will go. “If I remember correctly, you didn’t even read Joyce for Lit Two.”
“I’m pretty sure that was Ulysses,” Sarah says, as if it matters.
Joyce is a dick. It doesn’t matter. I have no idea if she’s right.
Rhodes pulls a small, professionally gift-wrapped box from under her pillow. She hands it over to Sarah with a sigh.
A small box that looks like it contains jewelry. My face reddens.
I looked at a few jewelry counters at the flea market for Sarah’s gift, too, but I couldn’t afford anything she would have actually liked. Aesthetic comes with a premium, apparently.
A moment of something soft passes between them.
I don’t like how it makes me feel.
It’s so easy to forget that their friendship is a real, live thing.
I can’t watch anymore.
My phone suddenly becomes a heck of a lot more interesting.
To my relief, a single tweet of a bird signifies a notification from the fan fiction website Slash/Spot, an old-as-the-world fandom database from which every queer ship pairing has set sail since the early days of Harry/Draco. The website itself is some kind of web 2.0 relic—the header looks like someone’s mom made it in Microsoft Word, and the color scheme reminds me more of a doctor’s waiting room decor than any of the professionally developed branding you see in higher-budgeted corners of the internet.
Normally this is a small detail that would bug me enough to deter me from ever using it.
But I came to understand what it meant to be queer on Slash/Spot long before I understood what that meant to my own identity, and who I would love, and the person I would ultimately grow into—someone I’m still growing into.
“Look!” Sarah whacks me on the arm. She holds a plastic rectangular cartridge out to me in her palm. “It’s a guitar pick punch!”
“Yeah!” Rhodes says, beaming. “I found it at a record store the last time I went home. You can even use it on old records.”
“Awesome,” I say.
Rhodes doesn’t know that Sarah sold her bass guitar at the beginning of the school year to cover her share of the school’s required art supplies. The thought either hasn’t occurred to Sarah yet, or she doesn’t want to tell Rhodes her gift is functionally useless until Sarah saves up to buy another one.
My attention goes back to my phone.
There’s a notification at the top of the page: user I-Kissed-Alice has shared a document with me. If there were a time on Slash/Spot before I-Kissed-Alice—Alice, as I call her, and she calls me Cheshire after my own username—I don’t remember it. There was no life before Slash/Spot, and the rest of it barely mattered before I met Alice.
It’s not just any document, though: She’s sent back the script that will be the next installment of our Alice in Wonderland fan fiction comic, complete with in-line notes and a few sketches for me to check before she starts laying out the panels.
I curl up into the headboard and position my phone so neither Rhodes nor Sarah can see.
This is a part of my world no one knows about, and Alice is at the center of it.
I want to be alone with my thoughts, and with Alice’s beautiful words.
When I see my Alice’s incredible pencil sketches of the Red Queen falling in love with her Alice, I want to pretend it’s actually us falling in love. Maybe it isn’t pretending at all.
With a flick of a thumb, the direct messages feature appears on my screen. My chat with Alice is at the top.
Curious-in-Cheshire 3:41p: Incredible.
I hit send. I’m not finished gushing.
Curious-in-Cheshire 3:42p: This is even better than I could have imagined.
Curious-in-Cheshire 3:42p: I won’t be home tonight, but let’s talk tomorrow, okay?
Alice isn’t online, so there is no answer.
Sometimes she’ll pop online a second or two after I message her, but she doesn’t this time.
With an overdramatic swoosh, Rhodes swings her long legs over the side of the bed and pushes herself to standing. “If we want to get dinner before we go out tonight, we should probably get going.”
She doesn’t wait to see if we’re following her. One minute she’s standing in the middle of the dorm room, and the next the door is slamming behind her and she’s already halfway down the hall with he
r eyes on her phone.
“You sure you want to do this?” I ask Sarah, who remains frozen in her spot on the bed next to me.
Sarah flicks at her septum ring with one chipped black thumbnail. “You’re both my best friends. I don’t want to think about my birthday without either of you.”
I hand Sarah her dad’s Walkman cassette player—the small, simple connection between Sarah and her obsession with terrible music from the nineties. With a quiet glance at the door, Sarah takes a second to pop the Antestor cassette into the cradle before she clips it onto her hip.
I’m the first to march to the door. Sarah’s reflection in the closet door mirror breaks my heart: She rubs her face with both hands and swipes under her lower lashes with her middle fingers to tidy the liner rimming her eyes. Her shoulders tug toward the floor, and with a frown, she grabs her keys from on top of the microwave to lock their dorm room door behind us. When my phone finally pings again with a Slash/Spot notification on the way to the car, I’m in no position to answer it.
CHAPTER 2
RHODES
We all have that one friend we make poor choices with, one who gives you permission to leave your problems in the rearview mirror and only focus on what’s in front of you. The kind that wouldn’t know a good decision if it slapped her in the face, that pulls you into her vortex of weird ideas, and family drama, and cassette tapes of nineties Christian metal bands because they’re the only topic she and her dad know how to talk about.
She’s my roommate and my “manic pixie dream girl.”
It isn’t flattering for either of us to admit I think of her that way, even if it’s only a 99 percent platonic MPDG situation and I’m not actually objectifying anyone.
But still: I know it.
She knows it.
And I also know that tonight I chipped off a little piece of her “manic pixie dream girl” heart earlier. I don’t know why I did it. I don’t know why I act that way, and I don’t know why I lash out at her when it’s Iliana I hate, and I don’t know what I’m doing here tonight at all.
