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Artemis goes to the shooting range when she’s upset. The sounds drown out her OCD until she can think straight again. Well–as straight as she ever thinks, which isn’t much these days.
When Artemis was twelve years old she had her first kiss in a game of spin the bottle. Her classmate was having a sleepover, and invited their whole class, and everyone was anxious and giddy and licking their lips, trying to get the flick of their wrist just right so it would land on the person they liked. Apollo had excellent bottle control, so he spent the whole night kissing Macy, the prettiest girl in their class. Artemis landed once on herself, which made them all laugh, once on Apollo, which made them all laugh even harder. And she landed once on a boy with nice eyes and soft hands placed on her kneecaps, and when he kissed her all she could think was that it was wetter than she’d expected, and made her want to brush her teeth.
When she told Apollo, he just shrugged. He liked kissing. He said she would too; she just had to find the right mouth.
But Artemis tried, letting boys and girls kiss her behind the school building, and sometimes the boys would slip their hands up her skirt, and the girls would brush against her breasts, and Artemis didn’t like any of it.
When she told Apollo, he just shrugged again. He liked sex; he lost his virginity to Macy at fourteen, at the Homecoming dance, in the handicapped bathroom. He said she might too, if she just found the right partner.
But Artemis got tired of waiting to find someone with a mouth that fit hers, so she chopped off her hair and dyed some of it blue in the upstairs bathroom while their mother was at work. She started listening to all-girl punk bands from the nineteen-seventies, because they made her feel wired and powerful, like electric shock therapy. She stopped going to class parties, and started taking extra classes at the town college, and she took up archery lessons because it looked hard, and then she took up shooting lessons, because that looked more dangerous.
They started to call her cool, the way some people said the word different, or confusing. They called her cool, and complimented her boots, the tall ones with all the laces, and they said they liked the arrow tattooed on her arm, the one Apollo talked her into without much effort at all, because secretly sheliked having something that so obviously saidPart of a match set.
They called her cool, but never asked her to hang out, because they thought she’d just say no. They never asked for her number because they were sure she’d never give it. She was the mysterious, interesting girl in their Modern Theology class, or their kickboxing class, or their city bus route downtown.
Artemis knew she wasn’t easy to love. She was too hard, too ruthless, too honest, too sharp. She was too hard on people’s feelings, because if they wanted compassion, they’d picked the wrong goddess. She wasn’t Psyche or Persephone, those soft-hearted girls who had fallen into love so quickly it turned their ankles, so the whole world could see. So everyone would know that there’s a girl who fell head over heels–now that’s a girl worth loving!
Meanwhile, Artemis heard the new kids asking about her in class, and the others explaining That’s Artemis. She’s cool, but she doesn’t date.
It made Artemis want to shoot bullets through the wall in the shape of a heart. It made her want to tear her hair out and scream:
When did sex become dating?
Why does not wanting to let them in between my thighs mean I don’t want them in my heart?
She learned the word for it in her Sociology class, and she swallowed it down like crushed glass.
Why should her love be worth half as much as anyone else’s? Just because she doesn’t give so freely, doesn’t mean she has nothing to give. It doesn’t mean she wants to be alone forever, one half-step higher than everyone else. Just because she doesn’t want sex, doesn’t mean she doesn’t want.
"I want you," Apollo tells her, when the gun range just isn’t enough. When the sting from the bow string hitting her wrist over and over, isn’t enough. When she feels like the world might not be enough, and she’s finally gotten tired of feeling so empty. "I’ll always want you."
He holds their arms up together, arrows running parallel in two separate directions. At the time, Artemis had liked the design–it made sense, that Apollo’s should shoot towards the world, while hers was aimed at herself.
But now it just looks like she’s going backwards.
"It’s not the same," she says, because it isn’t, and he knows, so he doesn’t say anything else.
There’s a group of girls at University that have taken to dressing like her. They wear big platform boots with steel in the toes, and dog collars, and they chop their hair at their chins and streak it green, red, purple. They stare at Artemis like she’s their idol, but when she catches their eye, they all scurry away like roaches caught in the act.
She’s never actually spoken to them before, so the next day she walks over, and folds her arm through theirs before they can run away.
"Do you know who I am?" she asks, and she smiles, but she hasn’t done it in a while, so she shows too many teeth. It’s too sharp around the edges.
"Of course," one girl says, cheeks going pink. Artemis tightens her grip until the girl shivers."You’re like, a queen around here."
"Close enough," Artemis decides, leading them through the hallway. The crowd parts as they pass, like some fucked up female Moses, wearing black leather and spikes.
"Stick with me girls," she says. "I’ll teach you everything I know."
She’s tired of being watched–she’s ready to be listened to. She can teach them to never look away when someone catches them staring–but to tilt their chin up in challenge, instead. She can teach them how to fight in clunky boots and mini skirts, how to write the quickest shorthand for Trig, how to read even the worst translated Latin, how to shoot arrows and bullets and words just as sharp, how to tell boys they aren’t wanted, while leaving them wanting.
She can teach them how to want themselves.