Set in the same universe.
A girl. Summer camp. Blue hair and strong like an ox. We played catch-and-release in the shallows of Burr Pond. She slipped a hand beneath my back, lifted me like a bride out of the cool brown water. It was the first time anyone touched me like that. It was not the last.
A person, then a boy. Summer camp again. Dyed, swooping undercut and the posture of a contrarian. He was older, did not like me. On Discord, I learned to write about other kids in our year bending him over behind a tree, making him feel the throb of a cock he did not have. I learned about subspace and aftercare and Algebra I that year, fighting sleep when I was still young enough to stay up past a bedtime. The next summer, he read my writing aloud to the other CITs while I was printing Steve and Bucky porn for him on the office computer. Years later, during college applications, I kept careful count of where he might apply. I would never see him again.
A girl, then a person. Brown curls and a Greek nose I fell for, hard. Both of us had an immunocompromised parent, so we were stuck in COVID lockdown a year longer than our peers. For two years, we watched Star Trek over NetflixParty and ate spanikopita on their roof. We tried to kiss through KN-95s. Their father liked to shop at the sidewalk tchotchke vendors; African guys with wooden jewelry and women with blankets full of Goodwill outlet junk. He got me a wooden box and a gel bike seat and a lino cut print of two frogs. I keep the print in my pack, folded under the cover of whichever book I can carry. End of the world, and I still use a bookmark.
A boy. The summer before college. Cherubic hair and a cheeky smile. He walked me home at one in the morning every night, wore a book-style locket with photographs of us together. Things would not get violent until later. I loved him so much I debated ditching the Ivy League to watch him play League at his state school. He showed me edits of the COVID II truthers and Bosnian news set to chug jug and Subway Surfers. I’d laugh into his neck, his hand around my waist, feeling so happy I could explode.
A girl, my freshman year roommate. We pushed our beds together and made Megabed, slept together every night. I did not tell my boyfriend. We watched reels of the bodies in the Balkans with purple skin and blood in their eyes. They looked like the fledgling AI generated videos: low-quality, uncanny, absurd. We’d survived a pandemic already; we felt above it all, invincible, and the whole thing became a generational joke. My roommate almost dressed as the disease for halloween. She was sponging on purple body paint in our shower when she paused and locked eyes with me in the bathroom mirror. Her red eyeliner was sharp enough to cut. This might be too far, she said.
A crust punk, eight years older. My boyfriend had just twisted my arm and popped it back into place like a plastic doll’s. I was too embarrassed to go home, so I wandered the West Village looking for trouble. The punk saw me with my streaked face and veteran’s glare and took me to their apartment. They were kinder than I’d hoped. They tried to be gentle, but I slapped away each light touch, demanded cruelty until they obliged. After, they taught me to throw a punch with the arm that wasn’t swollen. It was more intimate than the sex. I broke up with my boyfriend a week later over text, and didn’t go home for a long time after.
Two boys and a girl, at a secret dorm-sponsored meeting for how to avoid exposure. University funding was already slashed, and the federal government was promising more cuts for any university that publicly acknowledged the outbreaks, so we assembled clandestinely in the common room. A nervous dean explained that small measures, though mostly ineffective, could help stave off the outbreak. She walked us through gloves, masks, finger cots, swim goggles. As the measures grew more absurd, the four of us poked each others’ soft flesh and smirked. After, we crashed onto a Twin XL with a satisfying slap of skin against scalding skin, a flagrant defiance of what we refused to admit: soon, this touch would be a thing of the past. Months later, I’d learn that one of the boys was the first in our college to deteriorate. But by then, I’d already be on the road.
A girl. Two grades below me, dark and fiery. We drove to the city to go home to our families, then heard stories of the devastation and turned around. We’d been traveling together for some time. That first time, we were in a Wawa in Pennsylvania with no clerk and a dusty counter. She marched the aisles of that desolate place shoving nonperishables in her backpack with the ferocity of a person dripping with life. It was dangerous to stay too long in a food supply zone, but we were on the side of a minor highway with no one else around. We shared cold Spaghetti-Os, scooping them out of the can with foil folded into a rough spoon. We can’t let this motherfucker beat us, she said. She tasted like shitty tomato sauce and spite. She bent me across the dusty counter and finger fucked me until I came. I ate her out in the same place, motes of dust merging with the taste of her unwashed cunt. It was unexpectedly cathartic to do this here, to blaze life into a place so hopeless and empty. I felt fiery, after. Like the taste of her had made me alive again, too.
The crust punk again. Both of us older. Them with a face scarf with a pattern of skulls; me with a new scar and sharper edges. I’d been on foot for months, since my companion fell for a charismatic savior type and stole my car, stranding me in an abandoned Jersey strip mall. The punk recognized me immediately, which sent my heart hammering in my cunt. It’d been so long since I’d encountered someone who’d known me. We hunkered down in the same parking garage, stayed on separate levels for three days until we knew our eyes were clear. Their hair was limp and their eyes were hollow. They lost everyone, they told me, in a voice that was more resigned to their resilience than proud of it. I let them be gentle, this time. I tried my best to be gentle in turn.
I couldn’t take being alone anymore, I slept with someone, was sick and tired of being careful and waiting three days to get close to a person and just decided ‘fuck it.’ I hadn’t seen anyone I knew in months. The next morning, I woke up with a pounding in my throat and pinpricks of hot blood blooming around my fingernails. My limbs were starting to turn, the creeping violet spreading up through my fingers and toes and creeping like an ink leech up my calves and forearms. The person I was with was only a little farther gone than I was. She looked at me, said nothing. I started hyperventilating, tried to clutch at the sheets, at her, but immediately felt drained. I stumbled out of the room and fell onto her floor, scrambling at the carpet as if holding something physical could protect me from it. Maybe there was a part of me that wanted to die. I was not like the fire girl, strong and fiery enough to survive out of spite, or the crust punk, too stubborn and cockroachy to die. I was a twenty-one year old who wanted to know people, who was too soft and good for this.
