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“The glory of first love, and all that. It's incredible, isn't it, the difference between reading about something, seeing it in the pictures, and experiencing it?" - Stephenie Meyer, Twilight
Sterling is late.
She hates being late, it gives her flashbacks to when she was younger and would wait at the bottom of the stairs for Blair to finish putting the finishing touches on an outfit; or back when she was in LA and had to get on the 405 for some god awful reason, and that familiar anxiety would build in her chest of just knowing for sure that she would not make it on time.
Sterling bounces on her toes as the subway pulls ever so slowly to a stop at Union Square. She all but leaps out of it, only stopping to let an elderly couple walk out in front of her. She may be late, but she still has manners.
After Grandma and Grandpa finally get out of the way, Sterling practically bounds up the stairs, the cool autumn air hitting her face as she sprints the couple blocks down Broadway, until she’s finally where needs to be.
She braces herself before she checks her phone. 7:05. She lets out a sigh of relief. Five minutes ain’t too bad, these things always start late anyway.
Sterling gives herself a solid ten seconds of making her breathing come back to normal, before she pushes open the door to the bookstore.
There’s something still calming being in a place surrounded by books. Even when Sterling is in her mid-twenties, and pretty confident that she is what an average person might call “cool,” there something about a bookstore or a library will always remind her of being a kid who was comforted by spaces filled with words belonging to so many different people.
“Are you here for the signing?” A Strand employee asks as Sterling walks in.
“Oh, I’m on the list,” Sterling says, trying to sound casual about saying a phrase that she thinks kind of makes her sound like a celebrity.
Except, unlike if she were a celebrity, the employee blinks at her a couple times before saying in a monotone, “name?”
“Oh! Right! Duh, sorry! Wesley. Sterling Wesley.”
So maybe not celeb status quite yet.
The employee gestures to the back area, where there have been a bunch of chairs set up, all filled.
“Sorry it’s only standing room, it's a popular one tonight. We should get started soon.”
Sterling gives a hearty thumbs up, that the employee eyes quizzically. Okay, so maybe she’s not what most people would consider cool yet, but she’s getting there. She slides into the throngs of people who were also too late to get seats and finally lets herself breathe. She did it. She made it.
The two girls next to her both look college age, Fordham or NYU if Sterling had to guess, judging only off of their haircuts and pins on their denim jackets.
“Have you read her essays before?” One of them asks the other, “or just this book?”
“Oh, I’ve been reading her essays since I was in high school,” the other one says, and Sterling has a simultaneous urge to laugh at the oneupmanship of these New York college kids and also a new feeling that Christ, she is old, if these girls were reading these essays in high school.
“That’s pretty impressive,” the first girl concedes, and Sterling thinks she might be trying to flirt, “I know she only got big a couple years ago with all the pieces on religion. but I’ve loved her writing ever since -”
“The Twilight essay?”
“The Twilight essay! That shit was unmatched.”
Sterling grins to herself. At least these pretentious girls have taste.
“I’m just obsessed with her, I’ll freak out when she signs my name,” one of the girls is saying and Sterling can’t help herself.
“I know her,” she interjects.
Both girls stare at her. Sterling still has to get used to the Northeastern way of not initiating conversations with strangers. She offers them a smile.
“You know her?” The first girl says skeptically, which, okay, maybe Sterling really has to rethink the idea that she is cool now, with the way these kids are eyeing her. “You know April Stevens?”
Sterling has to suppress the urge to roll her eyes at the first-name-last-name of it all.
“Yeah I know April Stevens,” she says with a grin before leaning closer, “who you do think showed her Twilight in the first place?”
There’s a section in the Covenant Christian Academy Grades 5-8 Library that few people know about. In the left corner, next to the window that overlooks the staff parking lot, the bottom shelf is full of beautifully covered young adult novels that have absolutely nothing to do with the Bible.
Not that Sterling doesn’t totally love reading things that are related to the Bible. She just likes a little variety sometimes.
“How’s the selection today, Miss Angie?” Sterling asks when she comes into the library one bright Tuesday in fifth grade.
Sterling doesn’t mean to brag, but she’s struck up a pretty solid relationship with Miss Angie the librarian, who always fills her in on the new arrivals.
Miss Angie looks up from her Good and Simple and gives Sterling a huge grin.
“Oh, Sterling! I have a very exciting update for you today.”
Sterling bounces a little on her toes. “In the section?”
“In the section. It took me a long time to get approval through, but the author is actually a devout Christian despite the more… salacious themes of the books.”
Sterling smiles. “You’re a real one, Miss Angie.”
She heads back to the section, settling herself in the comfy chair by the window, and pulls out one of the new books. Her hands gently glide the glossy black cover, before opening the book and letting herself fall into it. She loves it here, loves taking the stray lunch to sit in this chair with the company of only a book and absolutely no one else.
“Twilight? Have some standards.”
So maybe not absolutely no one else.
Sterling puts her finger in her place and grins up at April, who is looking at her with an acute combination of judgement and amusement.
“Hey, it’s romantic!”
“Is it?”
“I mean, it’s supposed to be. I don’t know, right now she’s kind of just describing how pale she is.”
“Groundbreaking literature.”
Sterling grins. April grins back. It’s nice, just the two of them in this cozy little space.
“You should read it when I’m done.”
“Why would I subject myself to that?”
Sterling leans forward.
“You’re the one who said that one can’t critique a work until one has consumed it.”
April smiles, half in concession, half ready to fight.
“That was only because Veronica Lopez had only seen Revenge of the Sith and said that it was the best Star War just because Hayden Christian is cute. Absolutely abhorrent, I swear if she had watched literally any other... Why are you smiling so much?”
Sterling didn’t even realize she was smiling so much, but she guesses she is. It makes sense; it’s fun, and a little thrilling, to watch when April goes on one of her rants, Sterling feels lucky to get to witness them so often. She shrugs in response and places her hand on April’s arm.
“By that logic, you’re reading Twilight.”
“Over my dead body.”
“It’s ridiculous how much brain power Bella expels out on Edward of all people. If she put half of the effort she puts into decoding his every whim into actually, I don’t know, learning something? Making an effort with her father? Figuring out what she likes that’s not some pretty boy? It would be far less of a snoozefest.”
“Shhh,” Miss Angie halfheartedly shushes from her desk, but it’s accompanied by a wink.
“Sorry,” April says before lowering her voice and leaning closer to Sterling, “It's just hard to keep quiet about a book so… idiotic.”
Sterling grins. “So you finished it?”
April looks down at her hands. “I’m halfway through Eclipse.”
“April!”
“Shh!”
“Sorry!” Sterling turns her voice into a whisper. “That’s just so fast. ”
“Well it’s not my fault that Stephenie writes so simplistically, I can read one of these a day.”
“I mean, you’re also, like, the fastest reader in our class,” Sterling concedes and April blushes a little at the praise. Sterling leans closer so their faces are almost touching before whispering, “you can’t put them down, right?”
April looks down for a second before looking directly into Sterling’s eyes. It feels intense suddenly and Sterling feels herself turn a little red just from the force of April’s gaze.
“You can’t tell anyone,” April hisses, but she’s smiling, “but I can’t stop reading them.”
“I told you so!”
“These terrible terrible books have a hold on me somehow.”
“Just wait till you get to Breaking Dawn, that’s when it gets crazy!”
“How much crazier can it get than everything that went down with Victoria?”
“Listen, when I tell you you can never guess who Jacob gets with in the end, I mean you can never guess.”
“Don’t spoil it!”
Sterling laughs. “Hand to God. Seriously, though I’m so glad I have someone to talk to about it.”
“I still don’t think I like it,” April clarifies, “but it’s addictive. Not romantic though. Obsessive and gross, but not romantic at all.”
“So what do you think is the romantic book, like, ever?”
April tilts her head in thought and Sterling tries not to let the anticipation show on her face.
“Pride and Prejudice,” April finally states.
“Bella loves that one too.”
“Oh, shut up,” April says hitting her arm lightly. “Have you read it though?”
Sterling snakes her head.
“You have to,” April enthuses, “I borrowed it from my counselor at camp last summer after I refused to go in the lake again after an… unfortunate incident with a canoe. Anyway, the book is very old and British but it’s - the romance would make Stephenie Meyer want to never pick up a pen again. I’m surprised she’s read it, honestly. It’s so… it’s intense, but not in an obsessive way, but in a way where Elizabeth and Darcy think about each other all the time, not always romantically, she hates him at first, and he is awful to her and her family, but at the end of the day, they are intellectual equals, who both want what’s best for their loved ones and they’re actually quite perfect for each other.”
“Wow,” Sterling says, unsure of what else to contribute. “I’ll have to read it.”
“If I have to sit through four books of this garbage, then it’s the least you can do.”
“Five movies too.”
“Sterling, no!”
“Shh!”
They both giggle at that, faces still pressed close together in the library, a moment that Sterling knows will become a memory. Or at least she hopes it will.
Sterling is in love.
Okay, that might be an exaggeration, but she at least really really likes high school English class so far. Their first assignment is making her feel giddy in that specific way where she knows she’s going to be good at something.
“I want you to write me a standard five paragraph essay about any book of your choosing,” Mrs Jones had told them, “just to see where everyone is when it comes to the persuasive essay. As long as you have a clear thesis statement and supporting arguments, it can be about Dr. Seuss for all I care. Just make sure you are telling me something.”
So, who can really blame Sterling for falling a little in love?
“What are you gonna write about?” she asks Blair when they leave class, shoulder to shoulder.
Blair shrugs. “I don’t know, some book I already wrote an essay on last year. Maybe that one with the guy that got smart then dumb again and there was a metaphor or something?”
“But, you get to write about whatever book you want! Don’t you want to do it about something that you love that wasn’t for school?”
“Nah,” Blair says, “that sounds like extra work.”
Sterling huffs a little. Blair is her literal favorite person in the world, but sometimes she wishes there was someone she could talk to about this specific kind of thing that gets her excited, someone to share in that excitement. She hasn’t really had that since-
“Just because Mrs. Jones said Dr. Seuss in her example, doesn’t mean you should actually write a paper about Green Eggs and Ham, Hannah B.”
April’s voice carries down the hallway, confident and sharp, and Sterling feels a hint of something akin to nostalgia at it. It emboldens her a little, they’re not in middle school anymore, maybe bygones can actually be bygones.
So, as April is about to pass her and Blair, Sterling asks, “what are you writing your paper about, April?”
April turns to look at Sterling, looking a combination of surprised and annoyed. It’s better than the way she usually looks at Sterling though, so Sterling barrels on, suddenly desperate for some form of connection.
“I think I might actually do mine on Twilight, there’s definitely a lot of arguments to be made about those books, both pro and con. Hey, do you remember when we-”
“Twilight?” April asks, with such disdain in her voice that Sterling immediately realizes that she’s made a huge mistake here, “that’s shockingly basic, even for you.”
“You read those books too!” Sterling snaps, defensiveness hopefully covering for the fact that she kind of feels like she wants to cry.
“Yeah, when I was ten. And even then, I knew I was too good for them.”
“But you-” Sterling starts, before realizing it’s pointless, that this April will do anything to insult her, and Sterling still doesn’t know why.
“But I what?” April asks, taunting.
Something about it gets under Sterling’s skin, so much that she finds herself straightening, the hint of warm nostalgia fading into something sharper and harder.
“You know it doesn’t make you more interesting than me if you write an English paper about Pride and Prejudice or something instead of Twilight. You think I’m basic? You’re just like every other girl who thinks they’re better than everyone else, when really they’re just boring.”
“Damn, Sterl,” Blair whispers at her side. Sterling had kind of forgotten she was there. Sterling had kind of forgotten anyone existed except April and the gaping hurt inside her chest that she’d thought being mean to April would fix.
April blinks for a second and Sterling thinks she’s gotten to her. But then her sneer is back.
“I’m not writing about Pride and Prejudice, but great job pretending you still know me, Sterling. Really outstanding work. Good luck with your little vampire essay.”
Then she’s off, Hannah B. trailing behind her. Sterling deflates. It almost feels like a total loss until she hears:
“Wait, didn’t you say you were doing your essay about Pride and Prejudice?”
“Shut up, Hannah B!”
So maybe April hates her, but at least Sterling still knows her.
“Remember your Twilight phase?”
“Uh…”
The thing is, of course Sterling remembers her Twilight phase, the way she was caught up in it all, that time she made poor 11-year-old Luke dress up as Edward Cullen for Halloween and he couldn’t get the gel out of his hair for a week, the way her and Blair and April watched all the movies over the course of one night and Blair and April both threw things at the screen whenever there was a kiss.
Sterling has absolutely nothing but immense fondness for her Twilight phase. It’s just that, at the current moment, lying on the backseat of the Volt, April’s knees on either side of her hips, a few buttons undone from her shirt, Sterling’s brainpower definitely isn’t on fucking Twilight.
“What about it?” she manages, not even looking April in the eye, just looking at the way a little bit of sweat disappears into the dip in the front of April’s shirt. God, who knew sweat could be so hot. Figuratively. It’s obviously literally hot, it’s sweat.
“Sterling,” April says, all low and teasing and maybe Sterling will die right here, “you still with me?”
“Absolutely,” Sterling murmurs, watching as a second drop of sweat disappears to join the first.
“Sterl!” April snaps her fingers and it’s enough for Sterling to tear her gaze away from April’s chest to look up into her face. Which isn’t much better, honestly, because April has that half-grin she sometimes gets and her face is flushed and her lips are puffy and Jesus Christ, Sterling has to get it together.
“Anyway,” April says, clearly amused, “I was saying that one of the reasons I never thought-” she gestures to their compromising position “-this was an option for you, was just how into those books you are.”
“That doesn’t-”
“I mean the compulsory heterosexuality of Bella choosing between two literally animalistic men, to lure young women to consume a culture that -”
Sterling pulls April in by the collar of her infuriating shirt to kiss her, because she has to, she just has to. April gives a startled little squeak into Sterling’s mouth and it just makes Sterling more warm and more convinced that was the right move.
“Wow, you really are into Twilight,” April pants when they break apart, several exhilarating minutes later.
“I’m really into you,” Sterling corrects breathlessly, “and honestly, also Twilight. Sexuality is super complex, I’ve been recently figuring out.”
April laughs at that, and then they’re both laughing, disheveled and content in the backseat, temporarily away from anything that might disturb this bubble they’ve found themselves in.
The summer after junior year, there isn’t much for Sterling to look forward to. Things in her family have calmed down to a simmer of minimal weirdness, while the outside world more than makes up for it, with a full ass global scale of weirdness.
In May, Sterling sees something trending that actually doesn’t feel her with dread.
She jumps out of bed, barreling into Blair’s room and jumping on her bed.
“Ugh, what,” Blair groans, putting a pillow over her head.
“It’s Midnight Sun!” Sterling shrieks.
“No, bitch, it’s 10 am and you woke me up!”
“Who cares? It’s the new book, all from Edward’s perspective and it was gonna come out, like, ten years ago but then it leaked and then it unleaked and now Stephenie is actually releasing it. This summer!”
Blair schooches up in bed, narrows her eyes at Sterling.
“Is this about fucking Twilight?”
“Uh, yeah.”
Blair groans and flops back on her pillow.
“I’m going back to sleep now, but I’m thrilled for you, Sterl.”
Blair doesn’t exactly sound thrilled, but Sterling lets her go back to sleep. Still, she buzzes with an energy she has to expel somehow. She wishes she could go dance, or go to the shooting range, or talk to someone who isn’t her family about this one thing that still somehow brings her joy.
She pulls out her phone, scrolls through her contacts, trying to chase the high. She doesn’t scroll very far because, well, the obvious person to talk to about this is infuriatingly at the beginning of the alphabet.
It’s not that - at the moment, it’s hard to define what her and April would be in relation to each other, having cycled through animosity to infatuation to something on the verge of being huge to heartbreak to mutual understanding all in the course of a school year. A couple of months ago, Sterling was starting to feel something akin to hope that they could at least be people who talked to each other in class, but of course a freaking pandemic hit before they could get there.
Sterling, in a fit of boldness, composes a new text message and puts in April’s name.
Hey April! How are you? Silly question to ask I know but-
Hey April! I miss you.
Hey pal!
Hi! Midnight Sun, am I right?
So you know how when we were kids you pretended to hate Twilight but you were totally into it? Anyway there’s a new one! Hope you’re well!
Remember last year when we were making out and you called me on my Twilight phase? Haha good times! So anyway, new book!
Sterling locks her phone and throws it down on the bed. Maybe she’ll go for a run or something. But, ugh, exercise. She ends up taking a long shower and rereading Twilight in preparation, phone untouched.
On the morning of August 4th, Sterling bolts out of bed and downstairs, where her mom looks up from her coffee at the figure of Sterling shooting into the kitchen.
“You’re up early,” Debbie says calmly.
“Did a package come for me?”
“If this is about those silly vampire books…”
“Just tell me if a package came!”
“It’s in the foyer.”
And she’s off again, grinning as she sees the package and tears it open. The cover is of half a pomegranate, so similar to the cover she had seen all those years ago in the library. She feels herself almost start to cry, clutching the book to her chest and grinning madly, as the morning sunlight filters into her house.
She finishes the book at 3 am. She totally would have finished it earlier, if her parents hadn’t insisted on “quality family time” which mostly consisted of all three of them ganging up on her to collectively roast her for reading hundreds of pages about Edward Cullen.
Sterling doesn’t care, though. She doesn’t even care that the book is objectively bad, repeating far too many scenes from the original basically word-for-word. She loves that she feels like she is ten in the school library, loves that there is something about this writing that makes her want to turn each page as quickly as possible.
Maybe it’s the giddiness at finishing, or the fact that she’s been up for 20 hours at this point, but before she can overthink it, she sends a text to April.
It’s nothing fancy, nothing that dredges up their history, good or bad, just a simple:
Did you read it?
When she wakes up the next morning, at a luxurious noon, she sees that her phone has an unread text and can’t help but smile stupidly for maybe too long.
AS: I absolutely HATE that I know what you’re talking about.
SW: That’s not a no!
AS: No, Sterling, I have not read Midnight Sun, as I actually respect myself.
SW: Boooooo
AS: Great point, it’s a wonder that you aren’t captain of forensics with that stunning argument.
SW: Ooh, you got me. But seriously, you should read it.
AS: I have yet to be convinced.
SW: Okay, how about this? I happen to know for a fact that you derive joy from making fun of a) men b) trends popular among our demographic and c) anyone with inferior prose to you. Well, guess what has all three???
AS: I’m not going to guess.
SW: M I D N I G H T S U N
AS: If I read it, will you stop bothering me about it?
SW: Only one way to find out.
“You’re in a good mood today, hun,” Sterling’s mom says at dinner that night, and all Sterling can do is nod down at her pasta and try not to blush.
“If it’s because of those doggone vampire books...” her dad says with a laugh and a shake of his head.
“Will y’all just let me have this!” Sterling almost yells, but she’s on the verge of laughing too.
Right now, she doesn't need to give the pertinent details as what else is making her in such a good mood. She doesn’t tell her parents or Blair that her phone has been going off about every twenty minutes with a dispatch from April.
Thank god, I had forgotten how absolutely boring this “romance” is, how kind of Miss Stephenie to remind me.
If this man MURMURS something one more time, I will burn this book, I swear to God.
This is verbatim, Sterling, VERBATIM. “My life was an unending, unchanging midnight. It must, by necessity, always be midnight for me. So how was it possible that the sun was rising now, in the middle of my midnight?”
The best comes aptly just before midnight, in the form of a two minute audio message showing up on her phone. Sterling laughs to herself before pressing play.
“I would have just sent a text, but I don’t think the written word can fully capture how absolutely offensive to literature as a whole that book was. Thank God I found a free version of it online, if I had paid money for this piece of-”
Sterling smiles through the whole message, not realizing how much she missed April’s voice, the intentionality of her syllables. Sterling immediately saves it to her phone before recording her response.
“I’m not trying to argue with you that it was bad, of course it was so bad, but the point is you read it. In one day too! So I win.”
“You absolutely do not win. This was not a competition.”
“But if it was a competition, I totally would have won. All I wanted was to talk to you about this book and boom, I got it.”
“So you wanted to talk to me specifically? How interesting.”
Sterling pauses before recording her next audio message. She plays the last one again, focusing on the way April says each word.
“So you wanted to talk to me specifically? How in-ter-est-ing.”
Sterling is pretty sure that studying April Stevens’ specific infections in an audio message about a book during what constitutes their first real conversation in months is a little unhinged of her. She’s also pretty sure that she doesn’t really care, not when it’s just so fun, not when she’s smiled more in the last 24 hours than she has the entire time they’ve been trapped inside.
“Don’t let it get to your head,” she says into her phone, “but you’re a pretty outstanding conversationalist.”
“You’re not so bad yourself,” she gets back. Then another audio message comes in. “I wouldn’t read that garbage for just anyone, you know.”
Sterling just grins stupidly at her phone for way too long, until she’s startled by Blair coming barging into her room.
“Are you talking to someone?” Blair asks, leaning in the doorway.
There’s a half-second where Stering considers not telling her sister, but she’s having a little too much fun to not revel in it.
“I’m voice memo-ing April about Midnight Sun.”
Blair blinks, speechless for a second, which Sterling is kind of proud of.
“You guys are talking again?”
“As of like, 20 minutes ago, yeah.”
“Is it awkward or anything?”
“No, it’s actually really great?” She pats the side of her bed. “Come listen.”
Blair listens intently to the voice memos, full concentration on her face. When she gets to the last one, her thinking face turns into a disbelieving smile.
“Dude, she wants you.”
“Do you think so?” Sterling asks, a little too eagerly.
“Oh yeah. I have literally never heard her talk like that to anyone. How in-ter-est-ing.”
“Okay, yeah, I noticed that too!”
Blair laughs, nudging her shoulder into Sterling’s. “Look, at you all smitten.”
“I am not smitten!”
Sterling is, in fact, quite smitten. They keep audio messaging over the next few days, and Sterling finds herself looking forward to the messages more than she ever thought she would, stealing away from doing a puzzle with her parents to listen to April’s opinions in the kitchen.
“Do you still think,” Sterling asks, “that Pride and Prejudice is the best romance ever told?”
“You remember that?”
“I remember a lot of things you’ve told me.”
“Noted. And yes, I do think Pride and Prejudice stands the test of time. I’ve been branching out a little this summer, given the stretch of time with nothing to do, into a more modern foray. The best of the newer novels I’ve read is probably one called Red White, and Royal Blue. The premise sounds silly, but it’s actually a really incredible story.”
It’s a little embarrassing how quickly Sterling downloads the book, eagerness to share her opinions with April overshadowing any kind of need to seem casual.
“Okay,” she says into her phone that night, once she’s read the first couple chapters, “you clearly have a thing for, like, aloof British men who are secretly softies inside. Henry is just a princely gay Mr. Darcy.”
“The British thing is just a coincidence. As is the men thing. But I will say, I believe there is something to be said for the tension of animosity turning into romance that both books capture quite well.”
“Well, as someone who is quite familiar with the tension of animosity turning into romance...” Sterling says teasingly into the phone. “I’m excited to keep reading.”
Her finger hovers over the send button, before committing. It’s not like she has anything to lose at this point, everyone is trapped in their house, the world seems like it’s going to end every second, why can’t she get flirty in an audio message with someone she has an extensive history with?
It takes the time for Sterling to read a full other chapter before her phone buzzes with a new audio message. She sucks in a deep breath before listening.
“Well, even though I do highly recommend these books,” April’s voice comes through, with a lilt to it that Sterling’s whole body innately remembers, “nothing compares to the real thing, does it?”
Sterling grins, holding her phone to chest. She immediately saves the audio and listens to it again and again.
She finishes Red, White, and Royal Blue in two days. It’s good, incredible really, the best fiction Sterling has read in a long time. She tears up a lot, she’s not ashamed to admit it, something catching in her chest when Alex figures out he’s bisexual, so much that she has to put the book down and just breathe for a minute.
Every so often she has to stop and remind herself of the improbable truth that April recommended this book to her. April Stevens, who wrote a paper in the fourth grade praising the Bush presidency, who had looked at Sterling with such fear in her eyes last fall, told her to read this book that is so fully queer and joyful and romantic and also staunchly politically opposite of how she knows April was raised.
When Sterling finally finishes the book, there are tears on her cheeks and she doesn't care, doesn’t overthink, just immediately presses the FaceTime button.
April immediately picks up with a, “Jesus, are you okay?”
Sterling takes her in. It hadn’t fully hit that she hasn’t seen April in five months at this point until she sees her face. She’s more freckly - she always is during summer - and her forehead is wrinkled in concern. She’s leaning sideways in bed, the tank top she sleeps in showing a smooth shoulder, the hollow of her collarbone, the -
“Sterling!”
“Huh?”
“Are you okay?”
Sterling blinks, clears her throat, hopes the bedside lamp combined with the phone camera doesn’t show that she’s blushing.
“Yeah, I’m fine, uh, why?”
“You FaceTimed me at two in the morning crying.”
Sterling looks at the time, then looks at herself on the screen in the corner.
“Yeah, okay, I can see how that looks not great.” She wipes her eyes. “I just was crying because of the book, and I also lost track of time because of the book, but then I wanted to talk to you-”
“Because of the book?” April suggests, a teasing twist to her mouth. God, how Sterling missed that.
“Something like that,” she says.
“So,” April drawls, sitting up further in bed, “better than Midnight Sun?”
“They’re not even in the same category.”
If Sterling thought she missed April’s teasing smile, it’s nothing compared to her genuinely pleased smile. She beams through the phone, and Sterling wants to beat up her past self for recording audio messages when she could have been looking at April’s face this whole time.
“Well, I’m glad you enjoyed it,” April says.
“Yeah, I really really loved it.”
“I thought you would.”
“You were thinking about me when you read it?” Sterling asks, before she can censor herself.
She holds her breath as April takes a minute, blinking at the camera, before an almost shy smile comes over her face.
“It was hard not to,” April admits.
Sterling could fucking float.
“Cool,” she says lamely, before hurriedly amending, “I, um, thought about you too. Obviously. But not just because you recommended it, even though - I was kind of surprised by the politics of it all.”
“It’s been a long year,” April says carefully, “things change when you’re alone with your thoughts. You should see the non-fiction I’ve been reading. That Foucault had some fascinating ideas. And have you heard of James Baldwin?”
Sterling just watches her, reveling in the way April’s face lights up when she gets exciting about what she’s talking about.
It becomes a habit for the rest of summer, and as senior year starts up again, the constant FaceTimes about books or movies or anything really. Sterling is pretty much over needing an excuse to call April.
She keeps telling herself that when things are back to normal, she’ll make a move, turn their calls into something more, move from flirty little quips to maybe asking why can’t they try again?
But things don’t go back to normal. And Sterling realizes this is the longest time where her and April have been talking every day since they were kids. So they keep talking, as senior year soldiers on, full of college applications and weird online classes and ever present knowledge that this is the last year she will live under this roof. A thought that fills her with both dread and an inexplicable excitement.
Blair gets scouted for track and field at USC and the idea of Southern California makes Sterling think of beautiful people and beaches and no one who knows her life, so she puts the most effort into her UCLA application.
“This essay is really good,” April says over FaceTime, “I’m honestly very impressed.”
“Seriously? My parents and a couple teachers said that too, but yours is the only opinion I really trust. Well, and the college admission people.”
“You’re a shoe-in,” April says with a smile that makes Sterling melt a little. “Play up the queer stuff, though, the admission people love that.”
“Really?”
“Well,” April says slowly, a grin coming over her face, “the early admission people Vassar sure did.”
“April! Are you serious?”
“Got my acceptance letter yesterday.”
“And you waited till now to tell me!?”
Sterling feels an energy under her, wishes she could take April in her arms, but they are through a screen as they always are these days. The reality suddenly hits her that if she’s at UCLA and April’s at Vassar, that’s four more years of that reality.
“I’m so happy for you,” Sterling says. She means it, she is happy for April, can just imagine her in upstate New York when the leaves change, getting into an argument with some tweed-clad professor and winning, hundreds of miles away from the place and the people who have hurt her over the years. It still causes something in her to ache though, to long for a different world where maybe April could have left here hand in hand with Sterling.
“We’ll still talk, right?” Sterling says, knowing she sounds lame and needy, but really not caring.
“Sterling,” April’s voice says, too soft for someone moving hundreds of miles away in a few months, “who else will call me when a new disgrace of a Twilight book comes out?”
Sterling is pretty used to celebrity sightings by the time junior year of college rolls around. It’s a fun side effect of living in LA, getting to text her mom when she sees a real housewife nursing a cocktail in West Hollywood; or waving to that guy with dyed hair from Riverdale walking his dog; and it’s honestly a rare day that she goes to Runyon Canyon and doesn’t see someone who had once been on The Bachelor.
She’s learned to be cool about it though, prides herself on being so local at this point that she is unphased by whatever B-lister is getting sushi at the same place as her.
But there’s always exceptions.
One spring night, about a month after she turns 21, Sterling finds herself in a sweaty bar in Silver Lake, at a dance night called “Gay Asstrology.” It’s a little too LA even for her, everyone talking about their rising signs and alignments and Sterling has to pretend like she was born when it says on her birth certificate, not approximately two weeks earlier at an unknown time.
“This makes so much sense,” Blair had said, the first time their birthdays had rolled around after they found out, “I never saw you as an Aries, you definitely vibe more with Pisces energy.”
“But now I just have to live my whole life pretending to be an Aries?”
“It’s your cross to bear.”
So it’s weird, is all. But still, she goes out, because the girl from her comparative lit class who invited her was pretty cute, and had promised that this night attracts “literally every lesbian in the greater Los Angeles area.”
And she wasn’t wrong.
Sterling is two overpriced rum and cokes and a couple sips of a flask in the Uber deep when she steps into the bathroom, the harsh light of it jarring her. She catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror while she waits, and she looks… drunk, but also kind of hot. She looks like someone who belongs here, glittery and queer and an LA girl through and through, not someone who still gets made fun of by her college friends for her “sirs” and “ma’ams” whenever they go out to eat, or who calls her mom when someone is a little too mean in class, or who still crawls into her sister’s bed when she has a hard day, or who, for legal reasons, lies about her zodiac sign and is more affected by it than she should be.
“Hey, uh, it’s your turn for the toilet,” someone says.
“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry,” Sterling says, turning around to look in the face of - “Holy shit, you’re Kristen Stewart.”
“Yup,” Kristen fucking Stewart says, pretty awkwardly, “are you, uh, gonna pee?”
Sterling isn’t sure if it’s the alcohol in her system or the fact that Bella Swan just asked if she was gonna pee, but Sterling knows exactly what she’s going to do.
Forgetting the fact that her body does, in fact, have to pee, she books it for the exit, calling a quick, “I love your work!” behind her, because she was raised to be a polite young woman.
She pulls her phone out before the bathroom door swings close, and goes to the ever-familiar name in her contacts as she fights through throngs of queer people dancing to get to the exit, pressing the FaceTime button as soon as she opens the door and the cool night air hits her.
It takes about 45 second of the phone ringing for April to pick up.
“Sterling?”
The screen is black for a second until a lamp flicks on, and there is April’s face, blinking confusedly at Sterling from 3000 miles away.
“You look really good,” Sterling says abruptly. It’s true, she looks great, even with her hair mussed from sleep and wearing an old t-shirt. God, Sterling missed her.
“Thanks?” April says, a bit of sleep in her voice making it deeper, and wow, Sterling is probably more drunk than she thought at the way she viscerally reacts to just that one word. “So why are you calling me at three a.m.?”
“Shit, sorry, time difference,” Sterling says, sitting down on the sidewalk.
“Where are you?”
“I’m at a club - bar - thing and!” Sterling suddenly remembers why she called. “Guess who I saw in the bathroom?”
“Beyoncé. The Virgin Mary. Hannah B,” April rapid-fires.
Sterling laughs. “You’re funny.”
“Well I’m a little rusty as I was woken up in the middle of the night by my sweet drunk friend, but I try.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” April says and her smile is so soft even through the phone that Sterling melts a little. “I’m up now anyway.”
“Kristen Stewart.”
“What?”
“That’s who I saw in the bathroom!”
“Oh,” April says, devastatingly unphased, “cool.”
“Cool? Cool? April, that’s Bella freaking Swan who was waiting behind me in line! How are you not freaking out?”
“I mean, you were always more into Twilight than me.” April laughs a little. “There’s no accounting for taste.”
Sterling knows April is joking, knows that it’s technically true, but something in her kind of wants to cry when April says that.
“I know,” she says, “you might not be as into it as me but you’re my… my Twilight person.”
“Your Twilight person?” April’s voice is still a little mocking, but gentler.
“Yeah, the person I want to talk to about this stuff. It’s been- it’s been ten years at this point and you’re still-” Sterling knows she’s dangerously close to something here, revealing just how much she’s thought about April in the past three years, even though she only sees her on school breaks and the occasional FaceTime. How she far too closely followed the saga of April dating some girl sophomore year on social media and felt terrible for the inner celebration she did when she saw that they broke up. How Sterling has definitely had fun in college, sleeping with new people, letting the occasional beautiful person take her on a date, but never feeling anyone enough for it to stick, and purposefully not questioning why that was.
But, in this moment, she’s drunk and sentimental and April’s face is familiar and kind in a way it hasn't always been and before Sterling can stop herself, before she knows what’s happening, it’s all just spilling out of her.
“April, I know we don’t talk as much as we used to but you’re the person I want to tell everything to. Not just seeing Kristen Stewart in the bathroom, but every time I pick up a new book or eat a new food or meet a new person, I want to know what you thought of them. And I know that’s crazy and childish and most people just move on from their teenage crushes when they’re in college but I can’t. I just can’t. A cute girl invited me out tonight, but the best part of this whole excursion was when I saw Kristen Stewart in that bathroom because I knew it was an excuse to call you. Isn’t that pathetic? I’m drunk and young and hot and sitting outside a club full of women and maybe a few men who aren’t gay that I could go home with but I would rather just talk to you on a phone across the country then do anything with anyone else.”
Sterling can’t bear to look at her phone when she finishes. She just looks at her feet, on the dirty LA street, mingling with cigarette butts and gum wrappers. She thinks she might throw up.
“Sterling, look at me,” April says firmly and Sterling has never been able to say no to that voice. So she looks. “You’re very drunk.”
“Yeah, duh, but I mean it, I promise-”
“Let me finish,” April commands, and okay, whew, April using that tone of voice really does something to her still. “You’re very drunk, and it’s very late, and I think we should ideally be having this conversation sober, but-” her mouth quirks up in a smile.
“But?”
“But what you’re describing isn’t fully one-sided.”
Sterling grins. “Really?”
“I may occasionally, or slightly more than occasionally, feel the urge to pick up the phone and have you as my confidant.”
“What’s stopped you?” Sterling asks, breathless.
“I don’t know. Life, I suppose. It’s awfully cliche isn’t it, holding a torch for the first girl you kissed.”
Sterling feels warm all over, and she knows it’s not the alcohol.
“I like cliche,” she says, “don’t forget how much I love Twilight.”
And when April laughs, over the phone and miles and miles away, it still sits in Sterling’s body like it did all those years ago, and she knows that this is right. That maybe it’s not the most romantic thing in the world to tell the girl you haven’t been able to get out of your head for years now that you haven't been able to get her out of her head while sitting on the sidewalk outside a bar in Silver Lake, but she’s so happy she said it, it’s out there.
“I could never,” April says, smiling big and bright and Sterling is pretty sure she’s in love with her.
Also, she should send Kristen Stewart a thank you card or something.
“Can I read it?”
“No.”
“Pleaseee.”
“Sterling. Absolutely not.”
“Okay, you know it only backfires when you use your stern voice on me.”
April rolls her eyes, but there’s no malice behind it. Sterling just grins at her, lifts her eyebrows, priding herself on her lack of subtlety.
“Not now,” April says, which heavily implies there will be a later, “the next draft of this paper is due.”
“Which you still have to show me.”
April sighs, long and purposefully dramatic. Sterling knows that sigh, she loves that sigh, that sigh means she totally won.
“After this draft, okay?” April relents.
“Ha! Victory!”
“You’re ridiculous.”
Sterling leans back on April’s bed. She doesn’t care if she’s ridiculous. She just cares that she’s here, spending her senior year spring break messing up April’s perfectly made bed and gently antagonizing her. She closes her eyes, wondering what herself ten years ago, five years ago, even one year ago, would have thought of this situation, if she ever thought that she would be here of all places.
A warmth fills her whole body at the thought, and maybe it’s that warmth, or the classical music April puts on when she writes, or most likely the jet lag, but before she knows it, she’s being woken up by a gentle kiss on the cheek.
“Did I fall asleep?” she murmurs.
“Very quickly,” April says with a breath of a laugh. “I have to go to class now.”
“No. Stay.”
“Go back to sleep, okay? I’ll be back before you know it.”
Sterling wants to protest again, but April’s hand is soft on her hair and she maybe slept for 30 minutes on the red eye over here, so there’s really no way she can keep her eyes open.
When she wakes up again, she finds a glass of water on the bedside table, and a stack of papers with a post-it note on top, April’s precise handwriting fitting far more words than should be able to fit. The whole set up makes Sterling’s heart do something that she’s sure her sister would make fun of her for.
Please hydrate, the note reads, and since you are so convincing, here is the most recent draft of my essay. Be kind, I’m still getting the hang of the first person sentimentality that these lit. professors eat up. Love you, and make sure you’re ready for dinner when I get back at 6.
Sterling grins. Not just at the words sitting on the table, but at the so very April combination of a “love you” followed by essentially a command.
She picks up the stack of papers, absently marveling at herself for sleeping through a printer running. She reads the title page and can’t help but let out a laugh.
Say It Out Loud: A Queer Reading of the Twilight Saga
By April Stevens
Sterling’s already in a better mood than she’s been in for months, being here and reading this and only one quarter of senior year left before they stop living the overly cliched long distance relationship, but when she reads the next part, it nearly takes her breath away.
When I was ten, as many ten-year-old girls have done over the past two decades, I picked up a copy of Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. My reasoning though, was perhaps not what Ms. Meyer or the publishers intended. I read those books, not because I loved them, but because I loved the girl who told me to read them.
“It’s about me.”
Sterling realizes that maybe she should have lead with a, hi, how was class, or a, hey I read your essay, or maybe, the feeling of you coming in the door while I am waiting for you is so new between the two of us and I don’t think I ever want to let it go.
April slowly sets her backpack down, takes off her jacket.
“So I take it you read it.”
“Sure did.”
“And your thoughts?”
She’s actually kind of nervous, Sterling can tell, as if there is a world where Sterling doesn’t love every word that April ever puts to paper.
“I loved it,” she says. Simple. Elegant. Accurate.
“Really? Because I don’t normally… they said they wanted personal and my forte has always been academic writing so I wasn’t sure-”
“Hey.” Sterling puts her hands over April’s, temporarily stopping their wild gesticulation. “I really loved it. You’re totally on track to be one of those girls who publishes a book of essays by the time she’s 25 and people like, won’t even be jealous of you because you’re so talented.”
April beams at the praise.
“You really think so?”
“Absolutely. You are just so good at writing. About me specifically.”
April rolls her eyes, which is a good sign.
“Oh my God, Sterling, it’s not about you. It’s about the complex lens one has to put on as a queer person constantly surrounded by heteronormative media that glorifies -”
Sterling ungracefully grabs her by the face and kisses her. She feels April’s smile against her mouth and smiles back, letting herself take her time, to revel in the softness of April’s cheek beneath her palm, April’s hand in her hair, the way, for the first time in months, they don’t have anything else to do than to be right here, with each other.
Several long minutes later, when they break apart, Sterling grins smugly down at April.
“It’s totally about me.”
April laughs softly, breathing in and leaning her forehead against Sterlings.
“Of course it is. It always is.”
“Who should I make it out to?” April asks, eyes teasing, as Sterling makes it to the front of the line.
Sterling pretends to consider.
“Gosh, I don’t know. What can such an accomplished author say to little ol’ me?”
April rolls her eyes, jots something down. Sterling glances down.
You were late.
Sterling gasps.
“How did you know?”
“I have my ways.”
“I’m so sorry, the subway was like stupid slow and they just chose not to go express today and there were some old people on it and-”
“Sterl.” April’s hand is warm and sold when it covers her own, a simple gesture to shut up that has been perfected over the course of knowing each other for almost twenty years and living together for the last four. “It’s fine.”
“You know I wouldn’t miss this for the world, right?” Sterling says.
April smiles brightly, teasingly. “You and every undergrad under 96th, I see.”
Sterling laughs, looking around at the crowd. She lowers her voice.
“You know they’re all, like, in love with you right?”
April grins. “Jealous?”
“Please. They should be jealous of me. Actually, I think they are.” She leans in closer. “You know what they said their favorite was? Of everything you’ve ever written?”
“My takedown of the way televised megachurches essentially function as pyramid schemes?”
“Nope.”
“My piece on how American politics still hasn’t recovered from the Reagan era?”
“Nuh-uh.”
April lets out a long sigh.
“It’s the fucking Twilight essay, isn’t it?”
“Ding ding ding!”
April covers her face, doing a poor job at disguising the smile creeping up her face.
“I’m never going to live that one down, am I?”
“Not if I have anything to say about it!” Sterling says cheerfully. She looks back at the line forming behind her. Oops. “I’ll let you get back to your adoring fans.”
“Oh, but you’re my favorite adoring fan,” April says, raising an eyebrow.
“You’re darn right.”
April gets a look that Sterling knows all too well as she leans in closer.
“Want to make them even more jealous?”
Sterling glances back at the two girls who she had been talking to earlier, and offers them a cheery wave.
“Absolutely.”
April leans in and kisses her, nothing too egregious, they are at April’s work event after all, but it’s enough for Sterling to get all warm and out of breath, like she’s sixteen again. She smiles against April’s mouth, thinks about the worlds that have passed in that decade, thinks about a world where she didn’t think it would be possible to ever do this in public, and now throngs of people who paid money just to see April are watching them like it’s just another Tuesday.
“Wow,” Sterling says as they part.
"Agreed," April murmurs, “I guess I really do owe you for making me read Twilight in the fifth grade.”
Sterling grins. "You'll just have to think of a way to pay me back."