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It’s finally summer in Inkopolis and it’s almost sundown— meaning it’s 8PM and 26°C. We see the crowded cityscape reflecting red, orange, pink and amber fragments of sky through blue-tinted flashing subway windows and glass-walled office spaces. We see a parking structure all awkward and jagged, miraculously balancing on a rooftop high above it all. And, tiny and insignificant, we see two cephalopod-human-hybrids in similar shirts dangling their feet over an edge. They’re far too old to be considered squid-kids, but they've yet to become squid-adults. They’re currently enjoying some vending machine drinks and a couple Ocean’s-7-Eleven dango skewers while a yellow arrow-shaped smartphone chirps out today’s Top 40 songs on some nautical equivalent to Spotify. Squotify, maybe. Though they’re both in the same situation, they’re obviously in very different conditions.
The taller one, the girl, is tapping her short, newly-painted nails on the smooth concrete beneath the pool towel they’d laid out to sit on, brow scrunched, eyes straining as she stares directly into the sun. She’s not stupid— she knows it’ll make her sight even worse than it already is — but she’s worn these heavily polarized glasses for years and knows they’ll keep her from going blind. She’s sort of panicking. There’s an elephant in the room— manatee? whatever the Inklish saying is— that she’s been avoiding for quite some time now. It’s making life harder and harder as the years pass like nothing. Maybe she just likes making things hard for herself. Then again, maybe she’s saving herself from making the worst mistake of her life. The best course of action here is of course to just shove everything down and gradually vent any emotion through violently slinging paint on people.
The shorter one— the boy— has been staring at the noisy highway ramp closest to them. His right eye’s shut as he peers across because his favorite aviators only have the left lens left in their frame. For the first three minutes he’d been counting the number of red cars that had passed through: seventeen total. He’s currently trying to see if he can tell what kind of hat each of the drivers are wearing. A girl in a convertible just drove past blaring rap, her tentacles tied up in a knot above her head.
Imagination wandering, he absentmindedly picks up a skewer and bites off the chewy ball of rice goo at the end. He believes the dark syrup on top to be red bean paste so confidently that he tastes sweet red bean for just a split moment before the heavy scent of synthetic chocolate registers on his tongue.
His eyes go wide, and his verbal reaction sounds something like, “Gyuhhh,” making the girl’s head perk up to look. The piece of dango falls from his mouth, down, down over the edge until it becomes a tiny white speck and disappears into the blinking grid of the city below. The noise he’d made echoes a bit through the empty parking structure.
Then they both burst into peals of sincere laughter, Dottie chiding herself for getting so lost in thought that she forgot how uncomplicated and wonderful the cause of her troubles was, Stripes finding humor in the fact that he’d been so disturbed by an unexpected topping that he’d spit out some perfectly good food.
“The fuck was that for?”
“I thought it was red bean! You definitely told me you got red bean.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t— hey, that’s mine! Look, you forgot to open yours,” Dottie snickers, reaching into their grocery bag and pulling out the little plastic package of red bean dango she’d bought him. It’s to pay him back for a smoothie he’d bought her from Crusty Sean’s two days ago. They both refuse to take the other’s money for anything, so they’re constantly buying each other things to make sure neither accumulates debt.
“I can’t believe you like chocolate dango more than red bean,” Stripes says as they trade the two containers. Inklings have very strong opinions concerning food. “It’s not right. Dango is good, chocolate is good, but they just don’t belong together. It’s like—“
“Like pineapple on pizza?” Dottie says, poking the sleeping bear yet again. Stripes just gives her a deadpan look until they both bust out in ugly laughter. Things had gotten ugly the last time she’d brought up that argument in middle school. It feels like a lifetime ago to them.
Fully relaxed, Stripes picks up his can of hot sugary tea, warmed by the vending machine and made scalding by a half hour of direct sunlight on a rooftop parking lot/decommissioned turf war stage. The song switches to an old one called regret by Dedf1sh that everybody likes again lately. Stripes swallows and goes, “Oh, I love this song,” proving her point. “Makes me feel like I’m waking up from an afternoon nap and can’t tell if time is real or not.”
“That’s real specific.” Inhaling and blowing out a breath to the song’s slow rhythm, Dottie puts her first down against what she thinks is concrete. It turns out to be the conveniently placed fake-chocolate dango she’d forgotten to put a lid on. Expecting a solid, dry surface, the shock of a squishy and sticky weight beneath her fist makes her yell, “Ow!” in surprise as she recoils.
“... Why did you yell like it bit you?”
Dottie feels like an absolute dumbass as she lifts her hand out of the mess and inspects the thick stripe of synthetic chocolate she’d gotten on her knuckles. She’d done that thing she always does where she first interprets any unexpected sensation as pain. “How do you know it didn’t?” Dottie counters, hoping to at least get a laugh out of him with a stupid joke. ”Maybe I’ve been allergic to chocolate this entire time. Maybe the toxins have already been absorbed into my inkstream and I’m seconds from going into anaphylactic shock.”
“Here,” Stripes laughs sweetly, holding out his hand and commanding, “gimme that, I’ll save you.”
She obliges, and he takes a couple napkins out of the aforementioned Ocean’s-7-Eleven bag. He looks around for a moment at their little picnic. His eyes fix on Dottie’s bottle of iced jasmine tea. “That’s just water, right?” he asks, pointing at it with the napkins.
“No, it’s tea.”
“I know, but— is there sugar in it?”
“No?” She never drinks sweetened tea. He knows this. They live together, for cod’s sake.
“Then it’s just water,” he insists as he picks it up and uncaps it before she can argue with him. “Leafy water.”
“Newsflash: every drink in the world is just flavored water.”
He holds the napkin to the open bottle and flips it upside down, wetting it with tea. “What about juice?” he asks, setting the bottle down again.
“Juice is just water that’s been passed through a tree.”
"Milk?"
"Water that's been passed through an animal."
“... Whoa, I never thought of it like that," he states genuinely. "You’re smart.”
Inklings react differently to liquids applied externally than ingested internally. When Stripes swipes the wet napkin across the syrup on Dottie’s knuckles, the chocolate is replaced by a vibrant teal— a shade Stripes had dubbed “Dottie Blue” a few years back— as the top layer of her skin dissolves into ink. Instantly, the cells start to regenerate, and in a matter of seconds her hand is tan and clean and good as new. Whereas ink feels like silk to the touch, water has more of a kick to it.
For some reason, though, Stripes won’t stop. As the song plays on and the cars pass innocently below them and the antennae on all the roofs begin to blink red, he continues to meticulously pat down the back of her hand with more and more tea, making spot after spot of teal which blossom back into into her skin tone in moments. The sun lights the clouds up all golden-orange above them. Dottie’s hearts are hammering, but she’s great at keeping a straight face.
In the middle of it, Stripes says, “You know what I just read online the other day?”
“Hit me.”
“Humans ate real chocolate like crazy.”
“Damn, seriously?”
“Yeah,” Stripes says like he can still hardly believe it. When the tea dries and it becomes apparent that he’s now just swiping an inkstained paper napkin across the back of her hand for no reason, he just keeps doing it. “Apparently it was really easy to grow the plant they made it out of for a really long time. Like, it wasn’t just for graduations and weddings— they had actual chocolate every day. But the article was about how the big three flavors were chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla. That’s why they— in the pictures of them we found on their old internet, they always have those weird tubs of ice cream that’re brown, white, and pink like the Shrimp Pride flag.” He’s practically monologuing.
“What’s so special about that?”
He confidently responds, “Vanilla isn’t real, either.” Once he realizes that the statement made no sense, he starts again with, “These researchers— they were running some tests on these fossilized million-year-old human bakeries—“
“They only went extinct twelve thousand years ago.“
“— billion-year-old human bakeries, and they found this liquid flavoring that they brewed out of seed pods they found hanging on orchids in the tropics,” he says, out of breath. He’s patting down the backs of her fingers now too. “And I guess they just put it in everything. It tasted like trash if you drank it by itself, but if you combined it with, uh, sugar or cow’s milk or something, then it would have this… like, indescribable taste. So they put it in coffee, ice cream, candy, pastries, soda, cakes, everything. Everybody was just buying orchid juice from the supermarket like no big deal. And that’s the stuff that our vanilla flavor is supposedly based off of.”
“Oh, weird,” Dottie marvels, imagining what in the world it could’ve tasted like. Despite getting a C- in the class, Stripes seems to have shown interest in Human Studies for the past couple of months.
“Then, of course, there was the Heat Age for a billion years or so—“
“Ten thousand.”
“— a trillion years or so, and all the plants and animals either burnt up or drowned when the icecaps melted. Then the Mollusc Era, etcetera. The chocolate and vanilla we eat today are just what scientists estimate are the closest to what those flavors were like back then. They’re both made in labs nowadays, of course. The earth hasn’t been suitable for tropical plants like cacao and orchids to live in at the scale they used to in... like, a quadrillion years...”
Mercifully, Stripes holds her hand up to his eye line and stares at it for a second before quietly saying, “There ya go,” placing it down and putting the teal-tinged napkin back in the bag. Dottie stares at him, pushes her sunglasses up onto her forehead and pokes at the new skin on the back of her hand, squinting as her eyes adjust to the dusky light.
“... The hell was that?”
“The hell was what?” Stripes parrots back, playing dumb.
“That,” she repeats. “You petting my hand a million times and telling me your weird supervillain backstory about vanilla. All that did was provide me with further evidence towards my theory that you don’t know how much any number above a hundred thousand is.”
Her guess is on the nose, as per usual. “... I thought it was weird how soft your hand was, so I was stalling so I could hold it longer,” he admits, which is a valid genuine answer. “It seemed a ton less rough than usual.”
“That’s ‘cause my mom took me to get a manicure the other day,” Dottie replies. Stripes gives her a look like she’s just shot him in the leg. “They painted my nails and took off all the dead skin, it felt really weird.”
“You get manicures now?”
“Dude, this was literally the first time I’ve ever gotten one in my life.” She has no idea what his problem is. “Tons of people we know get their nails done like every other weekend.”
“Still, I just… huh, I dunno, actually. Can I see again?”
She snorts incredulously, but she obliges. He inspects the polish, then quickly brushes his fingertips across the inside of her wrist. She flinches and crushes his hand in an iron grip because it feels super weird, and he laughs out a curse, wiggles his hand free and grabs hers firmly and comfortably. “Did they use a pumice or an exfoliant or something?”
Dottie realizes it had just been an excuse to hold her hand again. She flushes, clears her throat and says, “How do you know what an exfoliant is?” in her best impression of someone totally calm who isn’t losing her shit at all.
“Oh, my mom had to explain it to me over and over again when I was a kid ‘cause I would get so mad at the fact that I couldn’t bring rocks inside but she could leave one in our shower.”
“‘Our‘ shower?” she snickers, and he squeezes her hand hard in mock annoyance. His hand is so soft and warm, so vivid against hers with her calluses gone...
Alright, Dottie’s about to go absolutely apeshit. She cuts off Stripes’ passionate defense of having to share a bathroom with your family with a flourish of her hand out of his and a loud, “Seriously, what’s your deal?”
Stripes swoons and grins sheepishly as if he’s been caught; the world’s worst criminal. “I guess I just… I’ve never held anyone’s hand before.” That’s the real truth.
“What?” They’ve held hands a million times since they were kids. They fall asleep in each other’s arms biweekly. They show all their affection physically because cod knows Dottie can’t express herself through words.
“No, not like— I mean, in this kinda way,” he elaborates. Dottie gets more confused, and Stripes gets more embarrassed. “C’mon, I mean, like. Sunset, slow music, holding hands on a rooftop with the person you love most in the world.” It’s strange— Dottie completely believes what he’s saying since they love each other so dearly and openly, but hearing it phrased like that makes her feel like her entire body is buzzing, like at any second she could clip through the floor like a glitched-out video game avatar. He keeps going after a brief pause with, “You always see this kinda stuff in movies, so you think it might be overrated or something. But it really...” He’s smiling at her contentedly as he picks her hand up and holds it again, interlocking their fingers. His heart’s hammering in his wrists. “It really lives up to the hype, yanno?”
Dottie’s staring down at her sneakers and sweating buckets. “Makes you wonder what else does,” she chuckles lowly, hoping she’ll sound like she’s joking. Her voice comes out shaky. Stripes doesn’t laugh.
“... You’ve never, before, right?” He asks. Dottie can’t detect the nervousness in his voice. She thinks maybe he’s angry at her for something. He takes off his broken sunglasses, lays them on the towel and clarifies with, “Held hands like this, I mean.”
“Of course not,” she responds, because of course not.
“Have you ever... kissed? Anyone?”
Dottie’s head jerks upright, confident that Stripes’ll have a stupid grin on his face signifying that the question was just another joke she can smack him on the back of the head for. Seeing him staring down at his sneakers with his big blue eyes all panicked and his face nearly as yellow as his hair makes her hearts burst like balloon fish. Of course not.
“Do you think I have, like, a… a secret boyfriend across town or something? What the hell?” she says as she pulls her sweaty hand from his and wipes it on the towel, which does make him laugh, thank fuck. “I— I would. Tell you stuff like that.”
“Would you?” he asks, and she freezes. ‘Cause I know you hate talking about that kind of stuff and I never wanted to make you uncomfortable by prying is implied but goes unsaid.
In truth, she doesn’t know whether she would or not because the thought of kissing anyone but him hasn’t crossed her mind in years. She decides on, “Yeah, I would,” which seems to satisfy him. She’s a much better liar than he thinks she is. The phone is now pathetically blasting some cheesy new Turquoise October tune through its garbled speakers.
They eat their snacks and drink their drinks in contented silence for a while after that, listening to speakers far away and checking for texts from their families or from work. The sun finally starts to set behind the far-off mountain range. The orange slowly drains out of the sky, leaving pleasant darkness in its stead.
At some point Stripes gets a spacey, far-away look in his eyes as he chews his dango. He swallows, sets everything he’s holding down, kicks a foot out high and says, “Hey, wait, no, we’ve both kissed before.”
Panic floods her as she swallows a too-large bite. “... What?”
“The end-of-eighth-grade dance, remember?” He laughs. ”Yeah, they were playing Squid Sisters’ Maritime Memory, they released the single that month— I just straight-up put my face on yours for like a whole minute.”
It takes a second for Dottie to remember. When she does, her jaw drops. “Oh, whoa!”
“Weird how we both kinda blocked it out, right?”
“Yeah! I really thought we were just never gonna talk about that as long as we lived,” she laughs as it all comes back to her, his hand-me-down tux, the cod-awful itchy green sleeveless debutante dress her mom had made her wear, the noxious cloud of borrowed cologne around his neck. The song had played, the lights had been low, their first summer together had begun, she had asked him to dance. Out of the blue in the middle of the song he’d pressed his lips to hers and left them there for a while. Neither of them had known what to do next; they’d just stayed like that. It was excruciatingly awkward. Though they’d probably still been swaying to the beat, it felt like they’d been still as corpses for the longest sixty seconds of her life. She remembers how sweet he was and how scared she was of the sensation, how imaginary alarms and sirens blared in her head when she realized what was happening, how every part of her body was telling her to just morph into a squid and book it to the bathroom to cry and call her mom to come pick her up. As soon as the song ended, that's exactly what she did.
“Shit, you actually did that,” Dottie says incredulously, her face hot. “Why did you do that?”
“Linus told me to! He didn’t tell me he was just joking about it till I came home in tears.”
“Holy shit...”
“I was so mad at him that night that I went into his room, found a bunch of random blueprints and just tore them up without thinking,” Stripes recounts, nervously kicking his dangling feet like he’s peddling an invisible bicycle. “Turns out they were for a new Splattershot model Takoroka’d commissioned him to design. He’d been working on it all year. That’s why he has his own bathroom now and I have to use the downstairs one. I can’t believe I never told you any of this— he holds it over my head constantly.”
“... Unrest in the Bandson family,” is Dottie’s insightful response. She’d never considered the possibility that Stripes and Linus had ever seriously fought before.
“Seriously. It was the worst.”
Night has fallen. A few billboards flash awake, and they both absentmindedly watch an ad where Pearl from Off The Hook shakes a bottle of MolaMola Cola, throws it at a school of Salmonids and blows them all up; she grins at the camera with a victorious peace sign as the brand's logo appears and the fish explode behind her. Dottie and Stripes are simultaneously both relieved and upset that the other had forgotten about that moment: The cheesy lights projected in green-blue waves across the school gym's canvas-white walls, the specks of glowing plankton-confetti suspended in air, floating around them as if they'd been submerged... The sensation of his nervous palms descending onto her bare shoulders as the song began… His mouth tasted like mentholated chapstick, her earrings looked like little silver starfish.
“... Why, uh…” Dottie feels like she’s about to cut the wrong wire on a time bomb, but she has to get some answers before she has a stroke or something. “... Why’d you ask me that? In the first place, I mean.”
Stripes’ legs stretch out, then go still. Exhaling shakily, he stares out into nowhere and yanks at the collar of his rugby shirt as if to signal to the audience, I’m dyin’ out here!
“To be honest—“ his voice cracks, and he clears it quietly right after— “To be honest I was gonna say something about being each other’s first kiss,” he forces out, “and now I feel stupid 'cause I forgot we already are.”
No fucking way. “What were you… gonna say about that?”
“Say about what?” No answer. You couldn’t pay her to say that out loud. “... The first thing or the second thing?”
“First thing.”
“Oh, uh… ” he says, and she can finally hear the tremble in his voice she'd been oblivious to this entire time. “Just that I wanted us to.”
At once, all the white fluorescent streetlights flicker on overhead throughout the dark lot. They’re now on a sterile black and white island in a neon sea, a little chunk of their youth trapped in time while all the windows on all the apartment buildings start to turn yellow one by one.
“... You wanted us to kiss,” Dottie repeats, ears ringing. Somehow, in this moment, the little voice inside her head goes silent. The song playing on his phone seems to have drowned it out. Her face burns, her fingertips tremor, her nails tap the concrete again and again, but her mind is bewilderingly at ease. It’s only Stripes, after all.
“Society really hypes up hand-holding, and then it turned out to be totally great,” he quickly explains himself, “So, I thought, like… ‘What else does society really hype up?’ Ha, ha,” He swallows, no longer fully in control of the words coming out of his mouth. “That was stupid. Sorry.”
"You really— right now, at Moray Towers.”
“Yeah, that’s, uh, where we are.” He laughs ashamedly. He should’ve worn his hair up; even though the sun’s down, it looks like he’s overheating. “I shouldn’t have asked. I’m really sorry.”
Her hearts are practically humming at this point. Since she no longer possesses the mental capacity for words, Dottie responds by reaching over to his phone and pausing the music with a shaky hand.
Stripes is somewhat offended. "Do you wanna go home? I–"
She then moves in just a bit closer so she can hold him by the shoulders and tilt her head down to kiss him.
Their second-ever kiss is quick and precise and lasts for a fraction of a second. Both involved parties remember nothing but a split instant of unexpected softness, warmth, the faint mixed scent of red bean paste and imitation chocolate. That’s all they get before Stripes breaks it with a shuddering gasp and throws his arms around Dottie with the strength of ten suns, tucking his chin sharply into where her neck meets her shoulder.
Dottie nearly falls back under his familiar weight out of shock, but she keeps him upright by holding him harder and and copying his position so that they’re pressed together as close as can be. Both of them are shaking, and each of them are hoping that the other can’t tell. He hastily moves his face against hers and presses a kiss to her cheek, which feels like the gentle fin of some higher power finally gracing her with its warmth. She practically transcends.
“... I—“ Stripes’ voice is extremely weak, but it’s suddenly right in her ear, so close she can feel the shape of his words and the shakiness of his breath. “I want… I want everything to always stay exactly how it is right now between us. Like— Dottie and Stripes, hangin’ out, normal, regular, yanno? Except, I think— and I’ve thought for, a, a while now— that in order to keep us like this… in the future… we should, uh, start to tell other people we’re dating.”
The girl hiccups when she tries in vain to exclaim, “Yes!” The boy takes the noise as an objection, and his embrace starts to grow even shakier around her.
“Nothing else’ll change, though," he repeats, which is all she's wanted to hear for ages.
"Yeah?"
"I..." He glances around frantically. “... Wait, actually, I, uh, want a few things to change, like... I wanna be able to call you pretty more often without you hitting me… a-and if someone asks me if I’m dating anybody, I wanna be able to say, ‘yes’—“ aw, poor guy— “and I-I want you to be able to say yes, too, ‘cause… ‘cause… Well, because…”
But he’s already said it and shown it a million times before, so he doesn’t have to say it this time: She’s the person he loves most in the world. She nods her head yes again and again, nuzzling closer into him until he’s positive that they’ve understood each other perfectly.
The two squid-adolescents proceed to stain the other’s white collars with yellow and teal tears of relief and joy, respectively. Neither of them want the moment to end, but it does eventually when Stripes’ stomach growls and he asks very politely if they could stop hugging so that he could finish his dango. With the ensuing laughter and a couple of stained sleeves used as tissues, everything’s miraculously back to normal again sans annoying pop music.
When the sky’s fully black above the city and everything they brought’s finally cleaned up and folded and shoved into their backpacks, the structure seems different. Smaller than it was before, maybe. A lot of scary things are suddenly a lot less scary than they’d been when they were on the train here this afternoon. They finally know that they’re both on the same page, that their feelings are returned, have been reciprocated for a very very long time.
As they board the elevator down and leave for the train station, the parking lot becomes pure and white again beneath the streetlights and the stars. The only sign to us that anyone had ever been there in the first place is the old graffiti left by rowdy kids who'd used the lot as a turf war stage in its heyday. A coin-sized love umbrella had been hastily scratched four years ago into the concrete with ballpoint pen near where the two sat. It's a little faded by now, of course, but we still clearly see that it reads "D+S”.