Name: starphotographs
Story: Universe B
Supplies and Styles: Graffiti (Summer Carnival, Happy Queer People Challenge), Canvas, Novelty Beads (http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6mvbrp6UH1r110sno4_500.jpg), Glitter (http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/stridulation-sonnet)
Characters: Kelsey (POV), Rilla
Colors: Skyblue Pink with Striped Polka Dots 1 (“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.”)
Word Count: 3,079
Rating: PG-13 (PG but for the F-bomb, really)
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: Kelsey’s first love.
Note: I swear that actually was the poem of the day when I started. I’ve just been working on a bunch of things at once.


Love is the Fuse, Love is the Fire

I didn’t understand a lot of what people said when I was smaller, but there were a few things that I memorized, enough that they always rose above the static. One of them was:

“Kelsey, how are you going to explain that to your husband?”

That was what my mom said when I did something she thought was particularly weird, and it kind of confused me. In a different way than other things confused me, though. First of all, I figured if I was getting married, whoever it was would already know me, and would be marrying me because they already liked me. It also confused me because I always imagined myself having a wife when I grew up, and I didn’t know why my mom never thought to at least swap it out once in a while. It’s not like she didn’t know it was possible. When we went to see my grandma in the senior community, her across-the-street neighbors were two old ladies who sat curled up together with a blanket on the porch swing, and would sometimes give me cookies one of them baked, or play their guitars so I could twirl around to the music. And I knew it worked the same way for men, because my friend Barry’s parents were both dads, one who made elaborate veggie trays, and one who silently fought with me over all the cauliflower while Barry ate all the carrots out from under our noses. But, I guess my mom just figured I’d have a husband because she had one, the way doctors sometimes figure their kids are going to also be doctors, or whatever. Parents can have trouble using their imaginations.

Anyway, it didn’t matter, because when I got too old without starting to talk properly, I think she assumed I wasn’t going to get married at all. Then again, I didn’t assume I would, either, and probably hadn’t exactly assumed in the first place. But it was something I could see off in the distance, in the way of all little kids, who look at Adulthood through a haze and try to guess what’s out there by what they see around them. My grown-up job, my grown-up house, my grown-up friends. Someone to love. Things most adults I met had. I already knew by then that I wasn’t quite like other people, but that didn’t keep me from seeing a basic outline to life. All it kept me from seeing was what I would be like. I didn’t think I’d stay the same, but I also couldn’t see me changing much, and I didn’t know how I’d follow the pattern I’d noticed if I didn’t. I don’t know that I really thought about it much, though. For one thing, it all seemed very far away. I’d only just started school, so jobs were a long way off. My grown-up friends were all still little like I was, and who knows where they were? And I didn’t really have any idea what falling in love was all about. It felt like it was on the other side of some fence I couldn’t even see from where I was.

I finally hopped that fence when I was fifteen.

*****

More specifically, me and another girl found each other, joined hands, and hopped the fence together. Her name was Rilla Parry, and she was wonderful. She was unsteady on her feet, and clumsy with her hands, and bad at reading books, but smarter than almost anyone I’d ever met. The cane she leaned on and the glasses she looked through were made of matching blue-anodized metal, and she wore boy’s pants just for the pockets, in which she carried many handy things, so she was also incredibly cool. We met outside a certain door, the door to a room where a collection of faceless people wasted their time and ours trying to get me to speak out loud, and get her to read as fast as everyone else. I remember her walking down the hall when it was my turn to go in, and yelling back at me, give ‘em hell! I liked that attitude. The next day, she sat down with me at lunch, and I started learning all the other things I liked about her. There were a lot of them, it turned out. I liked that she got excited around animals, the way I always did. I liked how much she loved movies, and listening to her talk about all the different ones she’d direct when she was older. Even looking at her dark brown hair reminded me of things I liked. Wings; birds and bugs. Sneaking sips off my mom’s coffee when I was little. A Siamese cat’s shiny feet.

The one thing I didn’t like was when she got mad at people and shook her cane at them like an old curmudgeon, but only because she lost balance easily, and I didn’t trust my reaction times enough to catch her.

One of the things I liked most was that she liked me, without strings attached. No you-should or if-only-you’d-try. Rilla had been on the wrong end of that business too many times herself, so she knew it made people sound like jerks. That you had to let go and take people as they were, and decide if you liked them that way or didn‘t like them at all. And she really did like me as I was. I liked her as she was, too. Sometimes, it felt like we were the only ones. She didn’t care that I talked by entering things into my phone, because hell, everyone could understand me just fine. I didn’t mind that she walked slowly, or would rather listen to a book than read one. Instead of trying to fix each other, we worked together. We found the prettiest places to walk, where moving at her pace gave me time to study everything. I suggested she download the program I used to talk, and then started transcribing my favorite books.

I told her that I liked moseying around with someone who said interesting things and let me take my time. She told me that she liked hearing the books in my voice.

And that was love.

We realized it was love just after the beginning of summer, sitting together on the deck behind her house. Buzzing with the thrill of realization, we held each other close and touched our foreheads together, laughing. We sat like that for a while, then went back down to the grass to play with the cats.

*****

When I knew it was love, I figured I should take her somewhere special, the way people do when they‘re in love. So, one evening, I rode my bike down to her house, spending the whole ride thinking about the most interesting place I knew. I hoped Rilla would think it was as interesting as I did. I hoped we would have fun. But first, I had to figure out how to get both of us there. We stood in her front yard for a while, staring at my bike, trying to see how it could work. In the end it, was Rilla who finally figured it out.

“Just, like, put my butt in the crate.”

I looked at the crate attached to the back of my bike. I’d installed it to carry library books, and had never thought of it as seat before. But, it’s not like I really thought of it as not a seat, so I didn’t have anything to say against it. We, somewhat awkwardly, got Rilla situated, and then we were off.

The way to the Most Interesting Place was winding and shady and green, crossing the woods, weaving through trees. The kind of road that doesn’t have sides, so I had to ride on the real road with the cars. (Or would have, if there’d been any.) People are heavier than books, so I had to really concentrate to make sure I kept my balance. Rilla, of course, interfered with this as much as humanly possible. She kept poking me with her cane and laughing, until I finally got fed-up with it and let out at yell. I’d never been able to quite figure out how to move my mouth around words, but I could always yell, and that got my point across well enough. Rilla was laughing hysterically now, but at least she was leaving me alone. I had the kind of thought that starts out written, so you don’t have to translate; fucking goofball. It was a happy thought. I liked that Rilla was goofy, even if I didn’t appreciate getting poked while I was trying to steer.

When we got there, we had to figure out how to get her back down on the ground, and again, it was Rilla who figured it out.

“Dude, just dump me.”

“You’ll hurt yourself.”

“Will not! I fall off stuff all the time, and I’m usually okay!”

This didn’t sound like a good idea, but I respected her confidence. I tipped the bike, as gently as possible. Rilla tumbled out, landed on all fours, and pushed herself up on her cane. She was, as promised, okay. When no amount of practice can make you better at balancing, I guess you just have to learn how to fall.

The Most Interesting Place is a meadow, or about to become one. I think it used to be a gravel lot, but people left it alone long enough that tall flowers and reeds started growing up between the rocks, and now you only really find the gravel by the crunch under your shoes. No one bothers you, because no one thinks to go there. You can hear the freeway rushing by on the other side of the farm across the street. It’s one of those places where you walk and hear grasshoppers jumping away ahead of you. Above the grasshoppers, butterflies and bees fly between the flowers. Shiny beetles cling to the stems. Basically, it’s a city of bugs. I lead Rilla to the middle of the lot and sat down. She sat down next to me.

“…So, what now?”

“Just watch stuff.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Rilla quietly looked around for a while. I picked up a brown cricket, the kind that made me think of the color of her hair, and looked at it for a while. The cricket tried to hop away, but hopped straight at my face, so I had to dodge. Rilla laughed.

“…Lots of critters here, huh?”

“Yeah. I thought you’d think it was cool.”

“Well, you thought right! Do you know what any of them are called?”

“Not all of them, no. But we can see.”

In addition to holding my voice, my phone also held a lot of my books. Including a field guide to insects that I’d downloaded at the beginning of summer, when I thought it would be cool to start getting really into bugs. I showed Rilla the cover page.

“Neat!”

What we did for the next half hour was, Rilla would catch something, and I’d try to find it in the book before it escaped. I think we both learned a lot. And when we figured we’d cataloged a good portion of the little residents, she sat back down, and we rested against each other. Rilla drew lines in the gravel with her cane. I stared up at the few flowers that grew tall enough to clear my head. It fascinated me, the way the stem fanned out to a notched green wheel, how the white petals locked so perfectly into the notches, cupping the yellow middles. I studied this so long I almost lost the rest of the world, until Rilla nudged me.

“…Whatcha lookin’ at?”

I remembered that my body was there, felt the weight of the phone in my hand, and spoke.

“Just flowers.”

Rilla looked at them with me.

“…Kelse, that’s what I like about you. You notice so much about one thing that you can look at it forever. It makes me think that everything in the whole world must really be, I dunno, so amazingly beautiful, but people are too zoned-out to see it. I want to look until I notice everything you notice, even if it takes, like, a hundred years.”

She stretched out on her back, looking up at the stems and petals. I lied down next to her, our arms and bodies wound together, and we gazed upward, just Noticing. It was the time of the day that I always thought of as Cool Sunset. Not because the air cools down, though it does, but because the orange sun and long shadows bleed together and fade to a pale violet-blue. The crescent moon was changing from rock white to sunshine yellow, and I could already make out the city lights sparkling in the grey night side, like mica in granite. I tried to think of something I could tell Rilla I liked about her, but it was hard to pluck out and display a single part of a whole being. Rilla was Rilla. That’s why I liked her. So instead of saying anything, I leaned in and kissed her on the cheek.

The way I saw it, words had already wrecked enough good things in this world.

*****

Rilla and I did special things all summer. Sometimes, “special” meant what you’d think of as special. We went back to the gravel meadow a lot, and I rode us around to a lot of other places I thought were interesting. My family took her with us when we went swimming at the lake, and her family took me with them to their week at the beach. But sometimes, “special” was sitting together on the floor in the air-conditioned library, where I read every book they had about bugs and she read all the comics. Other times, “special” was going up to her room to get lost in movies, or laugh at stand-up comedians until we couldn’t sit up or breathe and one of us rolled off the bed. More often than not, it was long afternoons in Rilla’s backyard, watching her brother practicing bass guitar on the deck, or fooling around with the hose, or sitting in the grass, waving dandelions or tall stalks of grass for the cats to chase. Then watching the sun go down and talking about anything and everything, watching the moths start to circle the porch light. This one night, I counted ten different kinds.

What I’m saying is, everything was special when we did it together.

And on the last day of summer vacation, Rilla wanted to do one last special thing.

I don’t think many kids really look forward to going back to school, but for Rilla and I, the idea was pure terror. We’d just spent months in an alternate world, where we were just fine as we were. Perfect, actually. Appreciated for everything we were, and in spite of nothing. When we were together, Rilla didn’t walk funny, she just walked the way a Rilla walks. She didn’t need to parse words faster, she needed to listen to books and learn by watching. I didn’t need to learn to talk, because I talked just fine, and how I did it was less than relevant. And I wasn’t cut off from the world, I was wrapped up in it completely, too busy combing through it for stray bits of beauty to make time for certain less important things. We were whole people. We could be loved. And we’d be there to remind each other when everyone else was trying to tell us otherwise.

We’d be okay.

Still, it was a drag.

So Rilla wanted to do something big, something to commemorate our courage, our determination to hold fast to each other and ourselves, no matter what.

She hopped in my bike crate, a practiced skill by now, and told me where to go. Until the country roads turned gravel, and took us to a run-down barn with a big yellow banner; FIREWORKS! I tipped the bike, and she landed like a cat, the way she always did. We went into the barn and looked around for a while, and I realized this was going to be a bust. The big ones were expensive. Rilla and I looked our age. All I saw were things that we couldn’t afford and wouldn’t be allowed to buy. But, we pooled our money and hoped for the best. Barn Guy didn’t seem to have any qualms about selling explosives to fifteen year olds. He was nice, and I hoped he wouldn’t get caught someday and have to go to jail. We bought something big and bright and red, with a dollar left over for a box of sparklers, then, clutching our dangerous treasure, we mounted my bike and rode to the foot of a big hill. Then walked the rest of the way, me pushing the bike with Rilla still sitting in the crate, because she dared me to do it, and neither of us could ever refuse a dare from the other.

At the top of the hill, she clumsily and carefully lit a sparkler with a lighter she produced from one of the big pockets of her cargo shorts, and I lit mine from the tip of hers. We watched them spark and listened to them sizzle in total silence, as if this was a ritual. And really, I guess it was. When the sparklers burnt down to the metal, and the sunlight mellowed to a cobalt rim around the horizon, it was time for the main event. I carefully set the huge canister down in the grass, lit the fuse, and ran back to Rilla’s side. Then I plugged my ears so I wouldn’t have to hear the shrieking ascent, the part of fireworks I‘d always hated, even though I loved everything else. We waited until the fireball had lifted into the sky. I put my arms back down at my side, then took her hand in mine. The boom shook our ribs, and the sky filled with red sparks. Red sparks, flying out and falling in line, drawing their picture in the clouds. Writing a wordless message of hope, from us to us. Something we could both understand, more than anything else.

The shape of a great, burning heart.