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Betty read Harry Potter. Elizabeth read Proust.
Beth, after consultations with the English Lit TA she's crazy about, reads everything. Her brushes with the Weird of Silas has given her an unsatiable lust for sci-fi and fantasy. She reads a book about a woman who was once a spaceship, and relates to her confusion, her growing empathy, the gaps in her memory. She reads a book about a man stranded on Mars and wonders if she'd like the isolation. She reads a fluffy Rainbow Rowell book about a woman talking to a past version of her husband, and wonders who she'd call: Betty or Elizabeth.
She has lots to say to both of them, after all.
She raids Danny's shelf like a hungry child craving sweets. She reads classics and pulp and small-press fiction. She reads lesbian love stories and gay fantasy novels and small bibles on semiotics. She even, much to Danny's shame, reads her essays: feminist readings of classics, private excoriations of Jane Austen that nobody else has ever read.
Betty was tossed around from guy to guy and loved it. Elizabeth was lonely, all jagged edges, untouchable.
Beth is made of fire, pulling Danny to the side after football games and soccer games to press her against the nearest wall and kiss her like the world's ending. If Elizabeth wanted and Betty gave, Beth takes, and Danny is always generous.
Neither one wants commitment. Danny's heart was just broken, and Beth has enough trust issues to build an empire on, so their - whatever it is - isn't exclusive.
Hell, Beth drinks Kirsch under the table one night and drags him home to her roommate-less dorm, exploring the male body she'd never had the opportunity to explore in highschool. He grins and they have fun, and it's only when he's curled up in her arms that Beth wonders whether or not this is the first time he's explored the curves of this faithless body.
And when the two of them find themselves both awake at 3am, he cooks them a pseudo-breakfast and gently asks her about Danny. Warns her, with what seems like a pang of grief, about "almosts". Beth kisses him between bites of toast, not romantically but like smiling punctuation, and he always kisses her back.
Life isn't perfect. She still sometimes has to stop and shiver with rage at the life stolen from her, at the potential wasted. Her bluntness and arrogance - she recognises her arrogance now, after spending weeks talking to people who flutter up to her to say hi to "Betty" and flee after a few remarks - are still her major features, and everyone sees through the smile when she tries to bullshit niceness.
And her classes are pathetically easy. Even mathematics, which once upon a time she'd spent every waking moment for weeks studying for upcoming tests, is a joke here. She tries to return to normal, to her study schedule from high school, and finds it impossible; these classes are far too simple to devour her weekends and off-hours.
So she reads. She spends time with Danny, the occasional evening with Kirsch. And she spends a lot of time figuring out who Beth is.
Betty liked reality shows. Elizabeth didn't deign to watch television.
Beth watches The L Word with Danny in their underwear at 2am, eating pasta and laughing about LaFontaine's newest experiment disaster. She watches Firefly with Kirsch and his bros at 3 in the afternoon in the Zeta rec room, and her snark earns her an invitation to some of the brothers' secret hatewatches of Glee and Smash, where she finds fast friends. She makes her first trans friends among the snarky brothers of Zeta Omega Mu, gender becoming yet another Elizabeth-era certainty starting to fade.
And when she's alone, she watches Netflix documentaries on absolutely everything, because for the first time in her life she doesn't have a set direction and can't restrain herself to one path, one direction at all. She learns about midwives and lions, truck drivers and chefs, DNA and buried treasure. Political documentaries, nature documentaries, even human interest. Everything.
Elizabeth had a home gym. Betty flirted at the campus gym.
Beth tries sports, for the first time since she was a kid. First track, Danny's true love, and finds she loves the freedom, loves the speed and the safety of knowing she can escape if the darkness tries to ensnare her again.
She doesn't like team sports, which amuses Danny to no ends. Beth is contemptuous of coaches, whose game plans she rips apart with a moment's short analysis. She hates football... until she loves it. Which is how she finds herself playing running back on a Summer Society team without actually being a member.
She kickboxes, now. There's a small hum of fear behind her mental voice, a parting gift from her near-death experience at the hands of a vampire cabal. Her first kickboxing class triggers her so bad she almost breaks someone's nose, and it's only when Danny tells her that one of the students looked like a vampire named Will that Betty understands why.
But she's Beth Spielsdorf who wants what she wants, so she chooses another kickboxing class, and excels immediately.
Danny spars with her. It's almost better than the sex.
Betty was the Jagerbombinatrix, hopping from one night stand to one night stand. Elizabeth had been kissed a handful of times, all disastrous, and saw herself as a strict monogamist. If she ever had the time to date, which she didn't.
Beth finds herself drifting somewhere in between. She isn't dating anyone, not really, but she has two people that she keeps coming back to. Strong, vulnerable, playful Danny Lawrence, who pulled her out of her post-Betty shell. Kind, passionate, exciteable Kirsch, who makes her feel like she can do anything as long as she just fucking does it. Their bodies and brains are so different, but she knows they're both fiercely loyal and insanely lovable and totally flawed as people.
She teaches Danny patience. She teaches Kirsch fire. They teach her who she is.
And she knows, now, that both are carrying their near-fatal "almosts", those loves that were thwarted before they bloomed, or died before they could even be understood. Neither is rushing into commitment. Both knows she's entangled with the other, and neither pushes for exclusivity, because none of them are entirely whole and maybe, in this strange way, the three of them add up to something more than a single pairing ever could.