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Amy would like to reiterate, for the record, this whole thing was not her idea. Granted, it wasn’t exactly Karma’s, either, but if there’s any blame to be placed here, between the two of them, it is not falling on Amy’s shoulders. Amy just wants to make that super clear. She's not the one on trial here.
So, when they’re hanging out that Saturday morning after the Homecoming rally and Karma offhandedly suggests that they practice kissing before going back to school the next week, Amy’s brain kind of stalls for a sec before rocketing back and forth between oh my god no awkward what if your mom comes in here and fuck yeah. She’s erring more towards the no end of that spectrum and probably the hesitation is showing on her face because Karma says something about how it’d be Amy’s fault, then, if no one buys it on Monday. Like they’re going to be publicly making out at school on the regular. Like that’s totally a thing Karma expects them to just do and not be a big deal at all.
For what’s got to be the billionth time since that stupid moment on the roof, Amy’s thinking she should have never let the words “let’s be lesbians” come out of her mouth. She then heaves the most put-upon sigh she can manage when Karma lifts her eyebrows and purses her lips and tilts her head just so in away that clearly says it’s on you if we go to suck face in full view of our peers and the Hester High student body at large doesn’t find our Sapphic performance authentic or convincing. Karma has very expressive eyebrows, okay.
That’s how Amy ends up on her back in her best friend’s bed with said best friend straddling her lap while Adventure Time reruns play in the background. Amy’s palms are sweating. She wipes them off on Karma’s 100% Organic Cotton duvet before settling them again on Karma’s hips and tries to ignore the fact that they’re trembling. Because she’s awkward and this situation is awkward and Amy plus awkward equals spaz, she opens her mouth and what comes out of it is: “You’re not as heavy as I thought you’d be.”
Seriously. Amy can’t make this shit up.
“Wow, Raudenfeld, you sure know how to make a girl feel special,” Karma deadpans. She’s smiling, though, in that Karma-way she has when Amy is being weird or clueless or pathetic and she finds it endearing instead of annoying. Fondly. Karma is smiling fondly at her, and it makes Amy’s stomach flip because she’s an idiot and there isn’t a *face/palm* in the world big enough.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that, you know how my foot likes to live in my mouth,” Amy tries. She’s resisting the urge to cover her face with both hands, but only just barely.
“Gross, I know, it’s fine,” Karma says. Because it’s always fine. Amy’s been apologizing for her whole awkward self for almost all the time they’ve known one another; she’s always been the one to say or do the wrong thing at the wrong time and Karma has always been the one to reassure.
(Except when it’s the other way around and Karma is the one who says stupid things like let’s see how this plays out and Amy just rolls with it because, hello, idiot)
Amy’s hands are on Karma’s hips, she re-realizes just then. Like, somehow in the middle of basically calling her best friend fat, Amy had forgotten that they’d been gearing up for totally platonic make-outs. For authenticity’s sake. Amy flexes her hands against Karma’s hips and watches the way Karma’s sides give a little under her fingertips. It’s… Amy wants to say – hypnotic? That’s probably weird, being hypnotized by Karma’s hips, but she’s kind of not blinking anymore and just sort of gripping and re-gripping her best friend intensely about the waist so Amy’s pretty sure this qualifies as a trance-like state. Eventually, Karma smacks both of Amy’s forearms and hisses that Amy stop tickling her and it breaks whatever stupor Amy was in.
“I feel like you’re not taking this seriously,” Karma accuses. She sounds disappointed, insulted, and mad about it. Her tone makes Amy feel vaguely guilty and eager to please.
“Okay, okay,” Amy rushes out. She tries to school her face into the most committed expression she knows how to make and the rest of her body into giving the most receptive and earnest vibes she can vibe, but the effect is probably ruined by her bed head and the One Direction concert t-shirt of Karma’s she borrowed to sleep in and is suddenly incredibly aware of. Harry Styles’ face is, like, stretched across one boob and Liam Payne’s is stretched across the other. It is a testament to Amy’s work ethic that she soldiers on despite this. “Let’s do this thing.”
“Okay,” Karma says.
“Okay,” Amy says.
There is a pause.
“Well…?” Karma says. She draws L’s out into two additional syllables.
“Well… what?” Amy thinks she’s starting to sound like a parrot. Maybe her palms are sweating again. God. Karma makes a get on with it face and Amy is pretty sure Karma could carry on entire conversations through careful and strategic head angles and eyebrow elevation. She’s thinking about Karma’s eyebrows too much. “You’re gonna have to meet me half way here, dude, you’re kind of pinning me down.”
“Oh. Duh.” Then Karma dips down so quickly that Amy is about 93.7% sure their faces are about to collide, and not in a good way, so she closes her eyes and braces for impact.
(Again, let it be known that Amy did not sign up for this. She didn’t just go bouncing up to Karma all like, some douche thinks we’re gay for each other, now put your mouth on my mouth so the cool kids at school will invite us to parties. Amy was totally fine with going home and watching HGTV. Yeah, okay, she probably could’ve been a bit more adamant in her refusal to Ellen with Karma’s Portia--or whoever, Amy has no idea who the du jour lesbians are these days, she doesn’t exactly keep up on these things--but it’s not like she hadn’t tried to say no. It’s not like she hadn’t said a whole bunch that it was an awful, stupid idea, but now Amy is actually appreciating just how awful and stupid an idea this actually is. Spoiler alert: very awful and very stupid.)
So, Amy closes her eyes, right, and she tries not to flinch (even though she’s worried Karma is about to accidently headbutt her), but nothing happens in the breadth of a second Amy expects it to and she opens her eyes again. Karma’s face is, like, an inch from hers and out of nowhere Amy’s heart starts jackhammering away in her chest like it’s trying to break through her ribcage. Before Amy can swallow, before she can even breathe, Karma closes the distance between them and presses her lips against Amy’s. The kiss is soft and chaste and does absolutely nothing to slow the racing of Amy’s pulse.
Here’s where things get a little fuzzy, where they enter a sort of gray area, where Amy becomes the kind of asshole who would change their facebook relationship status to it’s complicated. There isn’t an option for only-dating-for-the-cool-points status on facebook as far as she knows, or maybe Amy could just change hers to that: Amy Raudenfeld is in a fake lesbian relationship with Karma Ashcroft. Except no one’s supposed to know it’s fake, hence Amy’s super incredibly brilliant idea to establish this relationship’s legitimacy by planting one on her best friend in full view of their entire class under a shower of confetti.
It’s complicated because Amy is certain now (now being this moment in time where Karma is kissing her like it’s her freaking job) that she is what the kid’s call “catching feelings.”
Karma sits up and when Amy summons the will power to open her eyes again and look at her, Karma’s cheeks are flushed and her mouth pink and swollen. The thrill Amy feels at the sight of her—at having done that to her—is illicit and instantaneous; it’s a white-hot bolt to the pit of her stomach. When Karma slides off Amy’s lap and onto her side next to her, Amy doesn’t think about following her. She doesn’t decide to lean over and slip her hand into Karma’s ridiculously perfect hair, or to use that hand to keep Karma in place while Amy moves back in. She doesn’t actively decide to kiss Karma again, Amy just finds herself doing it; she’s doing the hell out of it. There’s a little tongue-action, and some lip-biting, and Amy’s pretty sure she pulls Karma’s hair a little bit. She’s kissing Karma and it is the complete opposite of platonic.
This is the thought she’s having when she pulls back so abruptly that their lips disconnect with a soft popping sound. Amy flops over on her back and tries to steady her breathing and not feel Karma next to her. Her entire face is hot in a way she knows means she’s blushing furiously and she can’t hear anything beyond the blood rushing in her ears, but she’s pretty sure Karma just said something. She didn’t actually hear Karma speak, though, so her stupid brain keeps cycling back to the first thing Karma said after the first time Amy had kissed her, which was “whoa.”
It’s playing on a loop inside Amy’s head, whoa, over and over. Then Amy, because she’s weird and stupid and pathetic, had looked back at Karma with what she’s sure was an embarrassing amount of relief and hopefulness and had been like, I know. Because she had thought Karma knew what she'd known then, she thought Karma had just felt what she’d felt, because how could she not? Amy had kissed her and it was like – like… finally, and Amy was sure that Karma had felt it too because they were always on the same page. Call her clichéd (because it’s a little after-school-special, she aware of that, she’s aware she’s being dramatic), but Amy had never felt happier or more certain in her fifteen years of life than when she’d kissed Karma, and she has literally never felt worse than the moments immediately afterwards when Karma had fucking winked at her, when Karma had grinned and said way to sell it.
Except maybe now. Now sucks pretty hard. Amy kind of wants to cry a little, or maybe throw up, and she feels her face twisting up in anticipation of the former (she hopes, god, please don’t let her throw up right now). Amy slaps both hands over her eyes like that will keep the tears in and also to shield her probably gross face from Karma because Amy’s sure Karma’s staring at her by now.
“Ow,” Amy whines. She slapped herself kind of hard.
“Dork, did you just smack yourself in the face? Smooth,” Karma says. Amy peeks through the spaces between her fingers to look at her, but she doesn’t need to, Amy could already picture Karma’s face from the warm, soft tone of her voice and it’s every bit as fond as Amy knew it would be.
Amy squeezes her eyes shut again and doesn’t say anything back. She’s not sure she can have a regular conversation right now. She doesn’t trust herself to respond like a normal person to anything Karma says with her stupid face and her goddam voice like that, like it’s totally fine that Amy is in the middle of an identity crisis and a heart attack and is still embarrassingly turned on right now. Like Karma has no idea. She has no fucking idea that she’s completely turned Amy inside out and Amy is pretty sure if she tried to open her mouth right now she might actually scream something like “PLOT TWIST: I’M TOTALLY GAY FOR YOU.” She keeps her mouth closed.
“Amy,” Karma says.
Her hand closes around one of Amy’s wrists and pries it loose from where it’s still clamped over Amy’s face. Amy’s other hand stays where it is, covering half her face like an eye patch, and under different circumstances Amy might do a pirate impression or make an obscure Pirates of the Caribbean reference just to see if Karma would catch it, just to make her laugh. As it happens, though, Amy’s more concerned about whether or not Karma can feel her pulse because she’s still holding on to Amy’s wrist and Amy’s heart is still pounding away like it has no respect at all for the amount of humiliation and suffering Amy’s already endured because of it.
“Amy,” Karma says again.
“What?” Amy says back (and she is seriously so proud of how steady her voice sounds, hardly teary at all. Way to go, vocal cords).
“Don’t freak out, okay?” Karma gives her this lopsided, small smile. It’s the one that's just for Amy, just for when Amy is toeing that edge between panic or pain or fear and just living her life like a normal person. It’s the one she uses when Amy is worried she’s going to fail her midterms, or when she falls off her skateboard, or when she thinks that just maybe she was the reason her dad left. It’s Karma’s I got you, girl smile. Karma’s thumb starts rubbing a soothing circle on the inside of Amy’s wrist and Karma keeps smiling. So of course Amy’s heart flips over in her chest, that traitorous asshole.
Karma leans over her again and Amy is certain for a delirious, wrenching second that Karma is going to kiss her again and Amy is also certain that she will not recover if she does, but Karma just rests her forehead against Amy’s, brief as anything, before sitting back and swinging her legs off the bed to stand up.
Karma had held on to Amy’s wrist for a moment longer than she’d needed to and lifted Amy’s whole arm up with her. It falls limply back to the bed and Amy stares at her own arm like she doesn’t recognize it. Like she doesn’t recognize herself, like she has no idea who she is any more. It’s kind of surreal. Everything feels kind of surreal. Maybe she’s having an out of body experience.
Karma snorts, says “Come on, lazy--” at the same time Amy says “What if I’m freaking out?”
Karma blinks (probably, Amy’s not looking at her face, but she at least pauses) and puts her hands on her hips. Amy watches her do it and is hit with the sense memory of Karma’s hips under her own hands, soft and pliant. She can’t decide if that’s better or worse than trying to meet Karma’s eye right now. Amy’s hands flutter uselessly at her sides. She looks up.
“I’m freaking out,” Amy tells Karma. Maybe it comes out like a confession and sounds very revelatory, but it’s only because Amy feels super serious and dramatic in this moment. What she means is: I don’t know how I feel about this. What that means is: I don’t know how I feel about you.
“Don’t,” Karma replies. Lightly, with a shrug of her shoulders.
(Don’t, like Amy could just flip a switch and stop her whole sense of self from derailing, just like that. Like Amy has a choice. )
“Don’t freak out. We’re gonna rock this bitch.” Karma crosses back over to Amy’s side of the bed and takes Amy’s shoulders in both hands. She punctuates her speech with shakes that rattle Amy’s head a little on her neck. “‘We’ being me and you, and ‘this bitch’ being the Hester High social-sphere as we know it, so don’t freak out because we’re gonna crush it.”
Amy wishes she could say Karma’s enthusiasm was contagious, but it isn’t, and this is still the worst idea in the history of Karma’s Bad Ideas (of which there have been many, make no mistake). But Amy can’t bring herself to say that because even if they’re, whatever, fake girlfriends now, they’re still best friends first. And Amy loves Karma, even if she’s not quite sure how anymore. And she really does just want her best friend to be happy, even if it might make Amy feel like shit. Amy can’t say any of that. The only thing she does manage to say is “yes” when Karma asks if she’s hungry and does she want waffles.
Amy says yes even though Karma’s mom is making the waffles and they’ll almost definitely be vegan and almost definitely be dry as hell.