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origfic_bingoLine not through the center; Swapped "Aliens" out for "AU: Affiliation Switch," because I don't seem very successful at making up AUs.
Three stories in my Sparks & Ashes universe (fantasy, focusing on girls working in a textile mill in a setting based on 1920s Japan), about the same characters:
Prompt: Stargazing
Rating: G
Hands scramble up the side of the dorm building.
I look up at the sound and see Rina's face as she hooks her nails onto the roof tiles and pulls herself up to where I am, splayed out on the roof of the dorm to get away from the summer heat. My heart sinks. Rina's in my dorm, Azalea 2, but I've been keeping away from her ever since she got to the factory.
Rich girl. You could tell by the way words rolled around in her mouth, by the way she complained about everything like we didn't know just as well that it was too hot or too cold, too little food, too much work. I think everyone hated her a little for that. Me too. But it was just a little till we found the proof of rats getting into the rice, and I was joking that I should've brought my bow with me and I'd go twang twang. She looked at me horrified, called me feral.
I didn't know what it meant. Knew enough to be insulted, though.
"Oh – you're up here. Does it bother you, if I sleep here? It's so hot in the dorm."
"Suit yourself." I don't have any right to shove her off. She's not worth arguing with anyway.
"If I were back home I'd be up in the summer house by now, where it's cool. There's a lake where I could go swimming."
This is why we hate her. Why we pick on her.
"It figures that you need a whole extra house just to be up in the mountains in the summer. Bet you've never even slept under the stars like this."
I'm thinking of hunting trips with my brothers. My toes picking along steep rock faces, slippery mud slopes. Staying out for five and six days at a time following bears and elk. A rough life with blood and grime in my hair, and still, summer days when I would jump into a mountain lake and fall asleep tracing constellations, I was in love with it. For the space of a heartbeat I lose my self-pity and think that was more precious than anything this girl had with her summer home and her servants.
"I have. I went to camp once. I slept outside and I shot arrows."
I can't help laughing.
"You shot squirrels, Rina?"
"Not squirrels! Squirrels? I shot targets!"
For a second that seems pathetic, pitiable, but I can't hate her anymore either.
"How on earth did you ever give up a thing like that? The summer house and the swimming and shooting arrows because it's fun instead of because you'd like to eat?"
"I had to." Her voice is thick. She says nothing more. But I think I spy something inside this breakable girl. The courage to say no to all that and yes to eleven hours a day of factory work – and, what surprises me more, the courage not to turn that into an excuse to monologue her self-pity at me.
Same as me, in the end. I had to.
I think she is a steelier person than I first guessed.
It would be almost impossible for her not to be.
Prompt: Caught in the Rain
Rating: PG-13
Content notes: Implied skeeviness
I won't say that I lost track of time. I just kept thinking, let me have a few more minutes before I have to go back. A few more minutes in this tobacco-choked bar with these boys who don't know how to take no for an answer. From me or from Rina.
They know how to take no from my pocket knife.
That got us thrown out of the bar and out into the street where the rain is coming down in torrents, streaking across my neck, back, arms. Too late to go back to our factory dorms. The gates are closed by now, and they don't let in stragglers. Rina takes the little jacket off her factory uniform and lifts it over her head, for all the good that'll do.
We rush up under an awning, a tiny rectangle of dry pavement. My matches are still in a dry pocket. I light her cigarette and then mine – two tiny points of orange in the dark mist, the windswept rain.
"If I wanted to have someone keep defending my honor with a ten-cent rusty blade I would date boys."
"Defend your own honor, then." I laugh because she doesn't mean it. She doesn't have any interest in boys, and she might not like my own silly stab at chivalry, but we both know what will happen to a girl alone out here. A girl like Rina, beautiful brown girl raised to think she'd be taken care of, with still no idea of the meaning of danger or hard work or biting down hard enough to draw blood and running like the wind to get away.
She slumps down on the ground, curling her knees and elbows up close to keep herself dry. She doesn't fit all the way under and I just stand there and watch rivulets of rain tracing across her legs.
It is so beautiful that my breath catches in my throat and I can't think of anything but us somewhere warm, safe, pulling off her wet shoes, wet socks, everything.
I'm an idiot. A romantic mooncalf idiot. Sitting outside in the rain is going to get you bronchitis, pneumonia, TB, and there's nothing pretty in that. And she's right, that stunt with the pocket knife was more mooncalf idiot stuff, and I don't even regret it.
I am trying to find the words to tell her so when she says, "I want –"
She shakes the water from her arms, flinging out her wrists, and is soaking again in seconds.
"I want an umbrella. I want a dry pair of socks."
I forget about trying to find the words. The words don't matter. It doesn't mean anything, when I can't even get her an umbrella and a dry pair of socks. It might not be tonight, but someday a car is going to roll up and someone is going to ask this girl if she needs a ride somewhere and the money is going to be enough to change her mind.
I can't give her what she needs. Ever.
But I am standing under the rain with the water pouring over my hair. I am reaching out my hand to her.
"All I have is a rusty knife and the truth," I tell her. "And they are both for you."
"The truth?" she asks as she takes my hand and pulls herself up.
"You remember when those missionaries came, those few Sundays ago, and they talked about putting on the armor of God? And back then I thought I'd much rather have a real helmet than some fluffy notion of being protected by faith. But then you were there and I thought that if it were up to me, I would be your helmet and your sword and your flaming arrows, and I'd defend you with a ferocity tempered steel can't match. And if it were up to me I'd be your umbrella and your dry socks."
"You just want to have your hand around my leg," she says, and I'm in love with her all over again that she can be joking about that in the middle of a rainstorm.
"I never pretended otherwise."
She shakes the rain from her hair and she's serious again, looking across into my eyes. "A rusty knife and the truth is enough for me."
Prompt: Mistaken Identity
Rating: PG
The air is full of the smell of cigarettes and her perfume. It's Rina, I think somewhere buried far in the back of my mind. But I'm too late; the bell on the shop door rings as she leaves. Whoever it was.
"Ma'am, that lady who was here just now --"
My boss turns back to me, takes the stack of calicos from my arms.
"You aren't here to socialize with our customers," she reminds me drily. No kidding -- I've been relegated to the back room with my hick accent and rough manners and maybe that incident where I started to chat up a girl who turned out to be some rich socialite's daughter.
I don't complain. I miss the mountains and my brothers, still, but I'm lucky to have any job better than working the silk reelers.
"Sorry, ma'am. I thought I recognized her and I was just curious who she was."
She softens. "I don't have her name. She ordered on her husband's account. But she wanted sixteen yards of imported silks, and they won't be in till Tuesday, so you can see her when she picks up her order."
"Thank you."
There's a part of me that sinks at husband but it doesn't really get into my brain. The next few days I go to have my hair trimmed, my nails painted -- little luxuries I can almost allow myself now, even though I laugh at this girl who has caught fish with a spear and eaten them raw, and who is now having her nails painted.
I haven't seen her since she left the factory. She never told me where she was going, though I guessed the worst; never told me why, though I guessed that too. It was a hard life. It didn't break her hands the way it did so many of us, but it broke her heart and I blamed myself for not being able to protect her more than I ever blamed her for running off.
Even if she's married, even if there's no space fo rme in her life, it's enough to see her again.
If it's her.
Tuesday I can't stay in the back. I keep dashing out to the front of the shop to sweep the floor, adjust the prints on display.
And then she's here. It's still her inside that ankle-length dress, that long hair with some gaudy clump of feathers and flowers pinned in the back.
"Rina." The words fall from my mouth like a spell. "Rina, Rina, it's me."
She draws back.
"I'm not sure who you are or who you're looking for but I can assure you it isn't me."
She gets her sixteen yards of imported silks from the horrified shopgirl.
Her husband accompanies her out of the shop, holding out his umbrella over her to shield her and her silks from the rain.
She's right; it isn't her.
My heart knots around an empty space.
The next two are paranormal, also about the same characters.
Prompt: Missing persons
Rating: PG
By the time it is eleven I have told it three times over: once to Dad and twice to the police who keep pestering me for some detail that I might have forgotten. I read their eyes. They don't agree. The older cop who thinks it's nothing, fifteen-year-old girl gone to a party or the mall with a friend, nothing serious; it's not even midnight yet. The younger one isn't so sure.
We walked home from the library together, bickering over the new Tamora Pierce and whether it was too old for me. And then she stopped on the sidewalk.
"Goddammit," she said. (I repeat this when I tell the story because they tell me to say everything I can remember, and because I wouldn't otherwise get to curse.) "Leon's got pneumonia. I said I was gonna bring him his homework and I forgot all about it."
"Macy and Leon, sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S-"
I know that Macy is a lesbian but she has been friends with Leon since fifth grade and I have been doing it just as long.
"You're so eleven years old," she sighs. "You go ahead, I'll be home later."
With that she gave me the house keys and the Tamora Pierce, and we were supposed to walk home together but I didn't argue because she was my big sister and she was going to win anyway.
That was before five. Six hours later she has not returned. Dad has called Leon's house. He has pneumonia, and tells Dad in a whisper that Macy hasn't been over. He's called Macy's other best friend Kate, and Meredith and Ruby too. They don't know anything. We call her cell phone all evening and she doesn't answer.
So it's eleven and the police have shown up. I eat the pizza that has gotten cold, and drink the Coke that has gotten warm, and think vaguely that I really wanted to see that episode of Gundam that was going to be on today.
While the police are talking with Dad there's a knock at the door.
Macy.
Macy with a thin fake smile, Macy looking like a ghost.
The police grill her.
"I don't remember."
"I just got lost."
"Nothing happened."
"I'm sorry."
I think she's going to cry, but she doesn't. In the middle of it I see her reach for the newspaper lying on the kitchen table. She fingers it like it's some kind of mysterious object.
After the police leave she stops saying anything at all. Not to me, not to Dad who keeps telling her that she can tell him anything. That he doesn't want to judge her, he just wants to make sure that she's safe.
Part of me says to leave her alone. Part of me says I can't.
After she goes up to her room, I undo the lock – it's one of those easy ones that you can click open just with a knitting needle.
She stands at the mirror on her bureau, staring at her own face. She's halfway undressed, jeans and a bra. Her hands fly to her chest as soon as she hears the door open, but I see it anyway.
Something like a grosgrain ribbon, dark red, stitched into the skin over her heart.
Or it's just my imagination.
Slamming the door shut behind me. Pretending I didn't see what I saw, or trying to convince myself I didn't, or making up stories – just a tattoo, just some freaky body modification I never knew she was into.
For three days she tells me I didn't see anything.
On the fourth we are home alone, watching Gundam, and at one of the commercial breaks she mutes the television and says, "I lived with the fairies for two years."
At first it seems like one of those lies that means "I won't tell you," like the stork that brings babies. But that's not Macy. Macy's blunt as a hammer, when she talks about the divorce I was too young to understand, when she talks about God and politics. Six months ago she muted the Avatar episode we were watching and said, "Ivy, I like girls," and for the next fifteen minutes I made her play "Cliff, Marry, Shag" with Azula and Mai and Ty Lee to actually get her to laugh.
When she says that she lived with the faries for two years, she is serious as death.
Prompt: Aliens
Rating: PG-13
I thought the beer would make me braver but it just makes me sick and jittery, like the first day I was back.
"Hang in there, Macy. Don't throw up on the new carpet."
"Screw you, Leon." I go into the kitchen and pour myself a glass of water, then leave the tap running to wipe my face. He knows I don't mean it. I hope he knows I don't mean it.
How long is he going to keep making excuses for me while I run off in the middle of class, snap at him for no reason, call him at 3 in the morning or don't answer my phone at all? Kate ran out of patience a long time ago. Leon, I can tell -- it's duty more than friendship most times, or undeserved hope that things will go back to how they used to be.
"Leon." I come back to the den and lie down on his couch. He takes one of my feet and starts rubbing the sole and it's that, more than the beer, that makes me brave.
"If I told you I'd been abducted by aliens. You'd think I was crazy, right?"
"You don't believe in alien abductions."
"Would you think I was crazy, though?"
"I wouldn't think you were abducted by aliens," he admits. "But if something happened to you -- hey, maybe it happened out in the world and maybe it happened inside your head. Ain't my job to judge that."
"You wouldn't believe me."
"Maybe I wouldn't believe you but that wouldn't make you crazy."
I'm so tired of arguing in circles. "It wasn't aliens." I undo the top button on my shirt.
Leon throws up his hands. "Hey now. I'm not trying to take advantage of a drunk lesbian."
"A drunk crazy lesbian," I say, and I'm drunk enough that it seems hilarious.
"My folks are so going to buy that excuse if they come in right now."
"Okay, okay." But before I can rebutton he notices what I'm trying to show him.
"What is that?"
"I don't know. That night months ago, that night I disappeared. I don't remember anything. It's all a haze. But I've got this, and I don't know how it got there, and I don't know if I'm crazy, and --" I gasp, and it's the wrong word. Of course I'm crazy. I think I used to live with the fairies. How much crazier can you get? "I don't know why I'm so crazy. I just need you to think -- to think there's some reason for me being so weird all the time. That it's not just me being an asshat."
Leon grabs me by the shoulder. "You didn't need to show me some ribbon sewn into your chest to prove that to me. I already know."
Three stories in my Sparks & Ashes universe (fantasy, focusing on girls working in a textile mill in a setting based on 1920s Japan), about the same characters:
Prompt: Stargazing
Rating: G
Hands scramble up the side of the dorm building.
I look up at the sound and see Rina's face as she hooks her nails onto the roof tiles and pulls herself up to where I am, splayed out on the roof of the dorm to get away from the summer heat. My heart sinks. Rina's in my dorm, Azalea 2, but I've been keeping away from her ever since she got to the factory.
Rich girl. You could tell by the way words rolled around in her mouth, by the way she complained about everything like we didn't know just as well that it was too hot or too cold, too little food, too much work. I think everyone hated her a little for that. Me too. But it was just a little till we found the proof of rats getting into the rice, and I was joking that I should've brought my bow with me and I'd go twang twang. She looked at me horrified, called me feral.
I didn't know what it meant. Knew enough to be insulted, though.
"Oh – you're up here. Does it bother you, if I sleep here? It's so hot in the dorm."
"Suit yourself." I don't have any right to shove her off. She's not worth arguing with anyway.
"If I were back home I'd be up in the summer house by now, where it's cool. There's a lake where I could go swimming."
This is why we hate her. Why we pick on her.
"It figures that you need a whole extra house just to be up in the mountains in the summer. Bet you've never even slept under the stars like this."
I'm thinking of hunting trips with my brothers. My toes picking along steep rock faces, slippery mud slopes. Staying out for five and six days at a time following bears and elk. A rough life with blood and grime in my hair, and still, summer days when I would jump into a mountain lake and fall asleep tracing constellations, I was in love with it. For the space of a heartbeat I lose my self-pity and think that was more precious than anything this girl had with her summer home and her servants.
"I have. I went to camp once. I slept outside and I shot arrows."
I can't help laughing.
"You shot squirrels, Rina?"
"Not squirrels! Squirrels? I shot targets!"
For a second that seems pathetic, pitiable, but I can't hate her anymore either.
"How on earth did you ever give up a thing like that? The summer house and the swimming and shooting arrows because it's fun instead of because you'd like to eat?"
"I had to." Her voice is thick. She says nothing more. But I think I spy something inside this breakable girl. The courage to say no to all that and yes to eleven hours a day of factory work – and, what surprises me more, the courage not to turn that into an excuse to monologue her self-pity at me.
Same as me, in the end. I had to.
I think she is a steelier person than I first guessed.
It would be almost impossible for her not to be.
Prompt: Caught in the Rain
Rating: PG-13
Content notes: Implied skeeviness
I won't say that I lost track of time. I just kept thinking, let me have a few more minutes before I have to go back. A few more minutes in this tobacco-choked bar with these boys who don't know how to take no for an answer. From me or from Rina.
They know how to take no from my pocket knife.
That got us thrown out of the bar and out into the street where the rain is coming down in torrents, streaking across my neck, back, arms. Too late to go back to our factory dorms. The gates are closed by now, and they don't let in stragglers. Rina takes the little jacket off her factory uniform and lifts it over her head, for all the good that'll do.
We rush up under an awning, a tiny rectangle of dry pavement. My matches are still in a dry pocket. I light her cigarette and then mine – two tiny points of orange in the dark mist, the windswept rain.
"If I wanted to have someone keep defending my honor with a ten-cent rusty blade I would date boys."
"Defend your own honor, then." I laugh because she doesn't mean it. She doesn't have any interest in boys, and she might not like my own silly stab at chivalry, but we both know what will happen to a girl alone out here. A girl like Rina, beautiful brown girl raised to think she'd be taken care of, with still no idea of the meaning of danger or hard work or biting down hard enough to draw blood and running like the wind to get away.
She slumps down on the ground, curling her knees and elbows up close to keep herself dry. She doesn't fit all the way under and I just stand there and watch rivulets of rain tracing across her legs.
It is so beautiful that my breath catches in my throat and I can't think of anything but us somewhere warm, safe, pulling off her wet shoes, wet socks, everything.
I'm an idiot. A romantic mooncalf idiot. Sitting outside in the rain is going to get you bronchitis, pneumonia, TB, and there's nothing pretty in that. And she's right, that stunt with the pocket knife was more mooncalf idiot stuff, and I don't even regret it.
I am trying to find the words to tell her so when she says, "I want –"
She shakes the water from her arms, flinging out her wrists, and is soaking again in seconds.
"I want an umbrella. I want a dry pair of socks."
I forget about trying to find the words. The words don't matter. It doesn't mean anything, when I can't even get her an umbrella and a dry pair of socks. It might not be tonight, but someday a car is going to roll up and someone is going to ask this girl if she needs a ride somewhere and the money is going to be enough to change her mind.
I can't give her what she needs. Ever.
But I am standing under the rain with the water pouring over my hair. I am reaching out my hand to her.
"All I have is a rusty knife and the truth," I tell her. "And they are both for you."
"The truth?" she asks as she takes my hand and pulls herself up.
"You remember when those missionaries came, those few Sundays ago, and they talked about putting on the armor of God? And back then I thought I'd much rather have a real helmet than some fluffy notion of being protected by faith. But then you were there and I thought that if it were up to me, I would be your helmet and your sword and your flaming arrows, and I'd defend you with a ferocity tempered steel can't match. And if it were up to me I'd be your umbrella and your dry socks."
"You just want to have your hand around my leg," she says, and I'm in love with her all over again that she can be joking about that in the middle of a rainstorm.
"I never pretended otherwise."
She shakes the rain from her hair and she's serious again, looking across into my eyes. "A rusty knife and the truth is enough for me."
Prompt: Mistaken Identity
Rating: PG
The air is full of the smell of cigarettes and her perfume. It's Rina, I think somewhere buried far in the back of my mind. But I'm too late; the bell on the shop door rings as she leaves. Whoever it was.
"Ma'am, that lady who was here just now --"
My boss turns back to me, takes the stack of calicos from my arms.
"You aren't here to socialize with our customers," she reminds me drily. No kidding -- I've been relegated to the back room with my hick accent and rough manners and maybe that incident where I started to chat up a girl who turned out to be some rich socialite's daughter.
I don't complain. I miss the mountains and my brothers, still, but I'm lucky to have any job better than working the silk reelers.
"Sorry, ma'am. I thought I recognized her and I was just curious who she was."
She softens. "I don't have her name. She ordered on her husband's account. But she wanted sixteen yards of imported silks, and they won't be in till Tuesday, so you can see her when she picks up her order."
"Thank you."
There's a part of me that sinks at husband but it doesn't really get into my brain. The next few days I go to have my hair trimmed, my nails painted -- little luxuries I can almost allow myself now, even though I laugh at this girl who has caught fish with a spear and eaten them raw, and who is now having her nails painted.
I haven't seen her since she left the factory. She never told me where she was going, though I guessed the worst; never told me why, though I guessed that too. It was a hard life. It didn't break her hands the way it did so many of us, but it broke her heart and I blamed myself for not being able to protect her more than I ever blamed her for running off.
Even if she's married, even if there's no space fo rme in her life, it's enough to see her again.
If it's her.
Tuesday I can't stay in the back. I keep dashing out to the front of the shop to sweep the floor, adjust the prints on display.
And then she's here. It's still her inside that ankle-length dress, that long hair with some gaudy clump of feathers and flowers pinned in the back.
"Rina." The words fall from my mouth like a spell. "Rina, Rina, it's me."
She draws back.
"I'm not sure who you are or who you're looking for but I can assure you it isn't me."
She gets her sixteen yards of imported silks from the horrified shopgirl.
Her husband accompanies her out of the shop, holding out his umbrella over her to shield her and her silks from the rain.
She's right; it isn't her.
My heart knots around an empty space.
The next two are paranormal, also about the same characters.
Prompt: Missing persons
Rating: PG
By the time it is eleven I have told it three times over: once to Dad and twice to the police who keep pestering me for some detail that I might have forgotten. I read their eyes. They don't agree. The older cop who thinks it's nothing, fifteen-year-old girl gone to a party or the mall with a friend, nothing serious; it's not even midnight yet. The younger one isn't so sure.
We walked home from the library together, bickering over the new Tamora Pierce and whether it was too old for me. And then she stopped on the sidewalk.
"Goddammit," she said. (I repeat this when I tell the story because they tell me to say everything I can remember, and because I wouldn't otherwise get to curse.) "Leon's got pneumonia. I said I was gonna bring him his homework and I forgot all about it."
"Macy and Leon, sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S-"
I know that Macy is a lesbian but she has been friends with Leon since fifth grade and I have been doing it just as long.
"You're so eleven years old," she sighs. "You go ahead, I'll be home later."
With that she gave me the house keys and the Tamora Pierce, and we were supposed to walk home together but I didn't argue because she was my big sister and she was going to win anyway.
That was before five. Six hours later she has not returned. Dad has called Leon's house. He has pneumonia, and tells Dad in a whisper that Macy hasn't been over. He's called Macy's other best friend Kate, and Meredith and Ruby too. They don't know anything. We call her cell phone all evening and she doesn't answer.
So it's eleven and the police have shown up. I eat the pizza that has gotten cold, and drink the Coke that has gotten warm, and think vaguely that I really wanted to see that episode of Gundam that was going to be on today.
While the police are talking with Dad there's a knock at the door.
Macy.
Macy with a thin fake smile, Macy looking like a ghost.
The police grill her.
"I don't remember."
"I just got lost."
"Nothing happened."
"I'm sorry."
I think she's going to cry, but she doesn't. In the middle of it I see her reach for the newspaper lying on the kitchen table. She fingers it like it's some kind of mysterious object.
After the police leave she stops saying anything at all. Not to me, not to Dad who keeps telling her that she can tell him anything. That he doesn't want to judge her, he just wants to make sure that she's safe.
Part of me says to leave her alone. Part of me says I can't.
After she goes up to her room, I undo the lock – it's one of those easy ones that you can click open just with a knitting needle.
She stands at the mirror on her bureau, staring at her own face. She's halfway undressed, jeans and a bra. Her hands fly to her chest as soon as she hears the door open, but I see it anyway.
Something like a grosgrain ribbon, dark red, stitched into the skin over her heart.
Or it's just my imagination.
Slamming the door shut behind me. Pretending I didn't see what I saw, or trying to convince myself I didn't, or making up stories – just a tattoo, just some freaky body modification I never knew she was into.
For three days she tells me I didn't see anything.
On the fourth we are home alone, watching Gundam, and at one of the commercial breaks she mutes the television and says, "I lived with the fairies for two years."
At first it seems like one of those lies that means "I won't tell you," like the stork that brings babies. But that's not Macy. Macy's blunt as a hammer, when she talks about the divorce I was too young to understand, when she talks about God and politics. Six months ago she muted the Avatar episode we were watching and said, "Ivy, I like girls," and for the next fifteen minutes I made her play "Cliff, Marry, Shag" with Azula and Mai and Ty Lee to actually get her to laugh.
When she says that she lived with the faries for two years, she is serious as death.
Prompt: Aliens
Rating: PG-13
I thought the beer would make me braver but it just makes me sick and jittery, like the first day I was back.
"Hang in there, Macy. Don't throw up on the new carpet."
"Screw you, Leon." I go into the kitchen and pour myself a glass of water, then leave the tap running to wipe my face. He knows I don't mean it. I hope he knows I don't mean it.
How long is he going to keep making excuses for me while I run off in the middle of class, snap at him for no reason, call him at 3 in the morning or don't answer my phone at all? Kate ran out of patience a long time ago. Leon, I can tell -- it's duty more than friendship most times, or undeserved hope that things will go back to how they used to be.
"Leon." I come back to the den and lie down on his couch. He takes one of my feet and starts rubbing the sole and it's that, more than the beer, that makes me brave.
"If I told you I'd been abducted by aliens. You'd think I was crazy, right?"
"You don't believe in alien abductions."
"Would you think I was crazy, though?"
"I wouldn't think you were abducted by aliens," he admits. "But if something happened to you -- hey, maybe it happened out in the world and maybe it happened inside your head. Ain't my job to judge that."
"You wouldn't believe me."
"Maybe I wouldn't believe you but that wouldn't make you crazy."
I'm so tired of arguing in circles. "It wasn't aliens." I undo the top button on my shirt.
Leon throws up his hands. "Hey now. I'm not trying to take advantage of a drunk lesbian."
"A drunk crazy lesbian," I say, and I'm drunk enough that it seems hilarious.
"My folks are so going to buy that excuse if they come in right now."
"Okay, okay." But before I can rebutton he notices what I'm trying to show him.
"What is that?"
"I don't know. That night months ago, that night I disappeared. I don't remember anything. It's all a haze. But I've got this, and I don't know how it got there, and I don't know if I'm crazy, and --" I gasp, and it's the wrong word. Of course I'm crazy. I think I used to live with the fairies. How much crazier can you get? "I don't know why I'm so crazy. I just need you to think -- to think there's some reason for me being so weird all the time. That it's not just me being an asshat."
Leon grabs me by the shoulder. "You didn't need to show me some ribbon sewn into your chest to prove that to me. I already know."
