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Lapis moved the curtain aside to peek out the window. She did a double take, quickly pushing the light fabric all the way aside to get a better view.
“Oh my god,” she muttered, then louder: “Peridot, come look at this shit.”
There was a note from the other room, the sullen twang of a B flat, a hollow, vaguely discordant thump that sounded like a guitar being put down not as gently as it should have. Another sound, one of their chairs being scraped back, and Peridot came over.
“Sorry – was I interrupting?” Lapis asked, and she shook her head grumpily.
Lapis suppressed a shiver as Peridot slipped under her arm to look out the window.
“It’s fine. I wasn’t getting anything done anyway.”
She could feel the younger girl’s body heat radiating through her light summer clothes, the top of her hijab barely brushing Lapis’s shoulder.
“So what’s outside besides the usual trees, grass and –“ Peridot stopped, her mouth dropping open. “Jesus Christ.”
“Yeah, pretty much,” Lapis agreed, dropping her voice to a dramatic whisper. “Although it may not befit you to take the Lord’s name in vain.”
Peridot snorted, elbowing Lapis in the side. She shook her head slowly as she continued to look outside at the house next door, which had been decorated apparently overnight with no less than seven oversized American flags, a large cross, and a wooden sign that proclaimed God Bless America!
“I always knew our neighbors were wacked,” Lapis said, stepping away from the window. The butterflies in her stomach subsided, though she told herself it was the absence of Christian patriotism being shoved in her face rather than close proximity to Peridot and her warmth.
“I mean, we’re two reclusive art students living in a barely remodeled barn, Laz,” Peridot said with a grin. “They probably think the same thing about us.”
She let the curtain fall back into place and went back into the two mismatched couches they called the sitting area, picking up her guitar and letting a couple notes vibrate through the air. She extended one short leg onto the crate-turned-coffee-table and leaned her head back, emitting a sigh of frustration so heavy it was nearly palpable.
“You need a break,” Lapis said. “Wanna come to the farmer’s market so we actually have something for dinner tonight?”
“Why not,” Peridot said after a moment of hesitation, leaning all the way over the back of the couch and smiling upside down. Her glasses nearly fell off as she straightened with nervous energy and hopped off the couch.
Lapis grabbed her backpack from the table and rummaged around inside, fishing out a few crumpled bills and a handful of change. Peridot came down from the loft a few minutes later with a similar yield.
“Twelve seventy-eight,” she said. Lapis grinned and held out her hand.
“Twenty-six fifty,” she said triumphantly, and Peridot whooped.
“Gourmet tonight,” she said, opening the front door and letting Peridot out first, “I’m thinking fresh pesto and –“
They collided as Peridot stopped abruptly, and Lapis swore as she nearly bowled her over.
“What –“ she began, and then Peridot bent to pick up a sheet of paper from their front step. Her eyes scanned it quickly and she handed it to Lapis, incredulous.
“Add to the burn pile, I guess,” she said, eyebrows raised as she headed for the car.
HAVE YOU BEEN SAVED? the paper bellowed, and Lapis allowed for a hearty eye roll before she continued to read. Most are unaware they are living in sin. However, it is not too late! The New Testament proclaims that everyone can be saved if they confess, repent, and believe – despite falling prey to sins such as thievery, copulation out of wedlock, homosexuality
Lapis crumpled the paper in her fist, scowling, and threw it vehemently in the direction of the house next door.
She got into the driver’s seat, slamming the door a bit harder than necessary, her cheeks flushed. Peridot, seatbelt already buckled conscientiously, looked over.
“Do you mind if we make a stop at the paint store on the way home?” Lapis asked. An idea was starting, familiar inspiration blooming in the forefront of her mind. “I have some stuff I need to get.”
* * * * *
The next morning, Lapis was up at dawn. She dressed quickly and headed outside, her bag of brushes and paint heavy on her arm. She had gotten seven sample-sized colors of housepaint for free, and she knew exactly how she was going to use them.
She hummed as she pried open the metal lids with a paint-splattered screwdriver. She and Peridot had talked about repainting the barn since they moved in, and Lapis had always hated the drab gray that was peeling off the outside wall like long strips of elephant skin. She had been out with a ladder, an old toilet brush and a hose last night, scrubbing away the dirt and loose old paint to prepare the wall for new.
By the time Peridot had woken up, gotten ready, realized Lapis was gone, and come outside to look for her, her work was done. With her hands on her hips and her back to their neighbor’s house, she stood and admired the seven stripes of color that radiated off the side of their barn. Peridot joined her, mouth agape.
“You painted a twelve foot pride flag on the side of our house because our neighbors left a stupid flyer on our stoop?”
Lapis nodded, unable to contain her grin. She wiped a smear of blue paint from her hand to her leg.
Peridot’s serious facade broke, and she cackled, holding her sides and wiping at the corner of her eye.
“They’re going to be so pissed,” she gasped eventually, patting Lapis lightly on the back several times, warm and sweet and congratulatory in the sun.
“That’s the idea,” Lapis said, something in her chest glowing. “Let’s go have breakfast, I’m starved.”
* * * * *
For two days they waited for a response, peeking out the windows every few hours. Bored, Lapis used the rest of the robin-egg blue housepaint to repaint a wall on her side of the loft, and Peridot whined about the fumes until Lapis mixed a pale purple and drove her outside by deciding to do a wall downstairs as well. She opened all the windows and laughed as she listened to Peridot strum her guitar, alternating between mournful minor chords and an angry blues riff that always ended with the accompanying lyrics fuck you, oh-ohhh Lazuli, fuck yoo-ouu.
That evening, she went outside with purple paint under her nails and two sandwiches on a tray. She sat next to Peridot on their scratchy little back lawn, admiring how the last of the sunset looked coming through the tall weeping beech that watched over the black-eyed Susans in the corner. Cicadas sang in monotone at the few dozen fireflies beginning to stitch through the dark abovegrass.
“Oh! Wow, thanks,” Peridot said, picking up her sandwich and humming appreciatively as she bit into it.
“You should eat more,” Lapis said without thinking, knowing how easy it was to forget food when immersed in painting or sculpting. She hoped it was the same for Peridot’s music and that the younger girl wasn’t neglecting to eat on purpose.
Peridot shrugged it off, her mouth full. Then she swallowed like she had forgotten something, her eyes wide.
“I forgot to tell you! Look what they put up over there, it’s fucking terrifying.”
Lapis stood up and shaded her eyes, looking at the neighbor’s house. Her mouth fell open.
There was a life-sized scarecrow decorated in painstaking detail to look like Uncle Sam, painted face accurate down to the bushy white eyebrows. It pointed menacingly in their direction, a red-white-and-blue top hat perched on its head. Yet another flag hung from an outstretched arm.
Peridot was laughing silently when Lapis sat back down, wide-eyed and shaking her head slowly. She opened her mouth, but then just took a bite of sandwich, at a loss for words.
“You know what this calls for, right?” Peridot asked, her eyes glittering. Lapis looked over and couldn’t help smiling at the four feet eleven inches of energy practically vibrating by her side.
“Retaliation.”
* * * * *
The next day Lapis woke up to something horrible poking repetitively at her ribs. She shoved the offending sensation away. It persisted, and she groaned, rolling over and cocooning herself in blankets.
“Lazuli,” a soft whisper, then louder, “Lazuli!”
She sat bolt upright so suddenly that Peridot squeaked in alarm, jerking backwards and blinking innocently behind her round glasses.
“Iss still dark ou’,” Lapis slurred irritably, glaring through squinted eyes in the lavender-tinted predawn light that crept shyly through the window. Peridot nodded.
“I know, I have to get outside before the neighbors go to work so that they’re guaranteed to hear me, and I thought I could use a little extra time to ensure the plan goes off flawlessly –“
Lapis laid a finger imprecisely over her lips in a shushing motion. The blanket slipped down a bit, and Lapis hiked it back up, feeling the cool air prickle her bare skin. Peridot stopped talking abruptly. Lapis couldn’t tell in the barely-there light, but she thought she saw a dark flush of color, flaming cheeks.
“Get to the point?” Lapis asked, less cuttingly than she wanted, and her heart was racing so damn hard at the feeling of Peridot’s soft and slightly chapped lips on her finger that she was certain she wouldn’t be able to sleep again.
Peridot grinned and pulled away from Lapis’s hand.
“What are the gayest songs you know?” she asked. Lapis blinked for a moment.
“Power of Two by Indigo Girls, She by Dodie Clark, Jenny by the Studio Killers,” Lapis rattled off, then smiled a little as Peridot blinked in bemusement. “Why’d you ask me if you thought you wouldn’t get results?”
Peridot shook her head silently and left. Her head stopped level with the floor as she descended the ladder, and she added a small, “Wow, thanks!” before disappearing below the edge of the loft.
Lapis sagged back into the nest of her bed. She touched her finger with her other hand, gently rubbing the spot where Peridot’s lips had been – the spot that, for some elusive reason, seemed to burn.
She knew it would be useless to try and get back to sleep, but she lay in bed for a while longer anyway before Peridot’s soft music drifted through the walls of the barn. She got up, pulled on a shirt, and went outside.
Peridot was leaning against the wall of the barn underneath the enormous pride flag, strumming her guitar and looking at tablature on her phone. The sun was coming up, painting everything with a strangely delicate new light, rose-toned and downy gold.
Peridot saw her and stopped humming under her breath.
“Lapis! Here, this is in perfect conjunction with my plan – quick, sit down, he’ll be coming out here any minute –“
Lapis sat next to Peridot in the dew-sweet grass, shivering as the seat of her boxers soaked up the dampness with brutal efficiency. Peridot glanced up.
“Cozy up, we have to put on a good show,” she said, and Lapis felt warmth blossom down her whole side as Peridot pressed against her. She sighed in sleepy contentment, her mouth opening in a jaw-cracking yawn.
“So wha – aaah – what’s this… retaliation of yours?” Lapis asked. Her head drooped, and it seemed too much effort to raise it again. Peridot repositioned her shoulder so she could still play with Lapis’s head cradled by her neck.
“I sit out here and demonstrate proof of my blatant protest of their homophobia by playing gay songs under our enormous pride flag. The message would have been sufficiently clear with me on my own, hence the plan, but your presence adds yet another layer of sapphic imagery.”
Lapis smiled a little at the proud explanation. She was always a sucker for sapphic imagery.
“Well-planned and meaningful composition,” she said through another yawn, “thought that was my job.”
“You already did your job with the flag, painter,” Peridot said smugly, strumming a few chords, the notes harmonious as dewdrops in the fresh air. “Now sit there and look gay.”
Lapis snorted. Her eyes slipped closed.
“Can do,” she thought she muttered, but she couldn’t be sure – everything was a bit dreamlike, a faded impressionist landscape of greens and sunrise hues, blurred through the squint of her eyelashes. Almost chalky with pastel strokes and colors. Peridot’s bare shoulder blushed warm under her sleep-soft cheek.
It could have been hours later when Lapis first started to wake, surfacing from some emerald-weeded and waterlilied pond jeweled by music she couldn’t differentiate from a dream. She was slowly aware of being curled against something warm and small, and of the song filtering down through the sunlit water of her consciousness – a voice that Lapis rarely heard, less nasal than spoken word and much huskier than expected from such a tiny girl.
She opened her eyes and was confronted by Peridot’s shoulder, the golden-brown expanse of her skin under the slim smile of her tank top strap. The song was barely audible over the sigh of the wind, but some lyrics got through.
though she came from the sea
her smile’s not for me
a moonshell girl, translucent pearl
my Lapis Lazuli.
Lapis tried to isolate the lurch in her chest but shifted by accident, her face slipping abruptly and her heart beating hummingbird fast.
The guitar and Peridot’s voice cut off with equal suddenness, and Lapis felt her move. A poorly disguised note of panic, though she kept her voice quiet.
“I – Lapis! Are you awake?”
Lapis pretended to stretch with a sonorous movement, as if she were escaping the syrup of sleep, and she must have done a moderately convincing job. Peridot relaxed as she hummed a noncommittally drowsy answer, straightening slowly against the wall. She faked a yawn and wiggled her toes in the grass in front of her, finally looking over at Peridot with a simulated tiredness.
“Aaah shit – how long did I sleep? Did I miss him?” she murmured, pointing her chin at the neighbor’s house.
Peridot looked relieved.
“Only by about an hour,” she said scornfully. “You’ll be pleased to know he reacted quite well to my ballads – other than his face bearing a striking resemblance to a pitted prune once he figured out my lyrics, there appeared to be no negative changes in his attitude.”
Lapis snorted.
“No pitchforks, no torches, no village mob screaming to burn us?” she asked, and Peridot shook her head.
“You can afford to joke, but we’re lucky,” she said darkly.
“Oh, lighten up, Miss Gloom-and-Doom,” Lapis said, resisting the impulse to kiss Peridot’s cheek - where in the blazing hell had that come from? - before she stood up, trying to hide her furious blush. “I can’t wait to see how they’ll top this one.”
* * * * *
The revenge was quick to come in the form of an obnoxious sign, proudly pegged into the center of the neighbor’s lawn – God Hates Gays & Liars.
“Whatever that means,” Peridot had said contemptuously when she saw it. Lapis loathed that sign, and now a hot little worm of anger burned whenever she looked out the window.
It took her four days to sculpt three detailed statues, each about eight inches high, and each depicting a different pair of women embracing in various positions, their nudity artfully displayed and accentuated with long, flowing lines of languorous motion. Peridot blushed heavily when she saw them.
“Wow – I mean, those are gorgeous, but, uh, pretty explicit, Laz,” she said when Lapis emerged, smelling baked by the kiln and her fingernails crusted with brown-red clay.
“I know. This should, ah, grant them a new perspective on what they’re protesting with all their righteous god-squad fuckery,” Lapis said, carefully gathering her sculptures.
“Wait – what do you mean? These aren’t for around the house, or gallery pieces? You’re not selling them?” Peridot questioned anxiously, following Lapis as she made a beeline for the front door.
“Oh, no,” Lapis assured her with a manic brightness in her eyes, “these are going straight on our garden wall. Those assholes will get a very personalized gallery viewing.”
She marched out the door, Peridot spluttering in her wake, and set the statues facing their neighbors on the low stone wall that divided their two properties.
The next day, the other house planted two beds of bright, unnatural-looking red-white-and-blue flowers around their sign and around their scarecrow. Peridot, her mouth twisted in unspoken distaste, set large pots of tall foxglove and marigold on the wall between the statues, partially blocking the view.
Nearly a week passed without retaliation, and Lapis had begun to relax until she went out to water Peridot’s flowers one morning. The watering can toppled from her hand.
One of her statues had been smashed, a thousand shards of clay scattered along the top of the wall. Some larger fragments had fallen to the ground, and Lapis recognized smooth brown limbs she had spent hours creating, a leg here, an arm there. Shaking with anger, she picked up the sign that had replaced the statue.
Love is Love, But God’s Law is God’s Law. Keep Marriage Sacred.
She clenched her teeth, a sound of furious despair leaking out of her mouth. She threw the sign violently and fell to her knees, head bowed, slowly picking up the pieces.
Peridot came out of the house, running across the lawn in fright. Lapis didn’t look up.
“Laz! Lapis! What’s wrong, are you – “ Out of breath, she spotted the ruined statue and the sign. She slowed to a stop, and then hesitantly put her hand on Lapis’s shoulder.
After a minute, she spoke again, her voice unusually gentle.
“We can file a complaint, maybe call someone? Destruction of private property on private property has got to be – “
“It’s not about the statue!” Lapis cut her off, feeling hot tears welling behind her eyes. “I guess – it was never about the neighbors. It’s the principle of the matter. That there are still people like this, backwards-thinking stupid damn people who think it’s not okay for us to love each other – or – or that we’re broken or dirty or – wrong,” she finished, feeling Peridot’s hand drop from her shoulder. She felt a brief flare of panic – and then a small hand was in hers, pulling her upright, and then gentle fingers were under her eyes, doing their best to blot the sadness away.
“Hey, hey. Hey,” Peridot insisted, touching Lapis under the chin to make her look down. “I know. Some people are shitty sometimes, and lots of people are shitty all the time. But,” and Peridot was leaning closer, leaning upwards, and Lapis’s heart was thundering in her ears, her eyes half-closed, lashes wet and still and sooty, “you have to remember that there will always be people like us, too.”
She closed the distance between them, and Lapis had room for nothing except the music that seemed to soar from around them, rising like a sunburst in the middle of the hot summer morning. There was a chaotic, tumbling happiness too, the world feeling overwhelmingly warm and bright and wonderful. The smell of cut grass and flowers in Peridot’s hair. Lapis thought they could have stayed like that forever if she hadn’t heard the small cough from over the garden wall.
She pulled back gently and turned her head.
Their neighbor, who Lapis had never seen before now, stood in the middle of his flower bed, a harmless-looking old man in baggy jeans and a red polo shirt. His mouth was open slightly, and an obviously forgotten hose hung from one hand, pouring a stream of clear water into a patch of already saturated grass.
Lapis found herself smiling sunnily.
She pulled Peridot tight against her, lifting her up and kissing her deeply. She felt a shimmer of pride as the startled sound Peridot made initially turned into a quiet, satisfied hum. Her arms wrapped around Lapis’s shoulders. Lapis closed her eyes, gently stroking Peridot’s back, and let herself be absorbed in bliss until she heard a series of progressively less subtle coughs, then an offended “Hmmph!” and a door slamming in the next house over.
They broke apart leisurely, Peridot grinning with the self-satisfaction of a cat as she slid back to the ground.
“We should have done that a long time ago,” she said breathlessly, her arms still around Lapis’s waist.
Lapis nodded and kissed Peridot’s cheek. Finally. It was warm and smooth.
“Can you help me take these statues in?” Lapis asked with a smile, touching the warm blush of freckles on Peridot’s face as she nodded. “I don’t think we need to worry about the neighbors anymore.”