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 her 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.