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Snowflakes dance outside the coffee shop window, falling every which way but down. Naked trees reveal their icy fractal secrets. Winter has resolutely arrived in Minneapolis, after a couple of fake-outs ending in a melt.
Jess yawns and inhales the steam from her soy chai latte before gulping more of its caffeinated goodness. She opens her tangerine iBook and settles in to work. She's not going to pay by the hour to use the coffee shop's sketchy computers, and she kinda might have cracked their WEP key about five minutes after they installed the wireless a few months back.
Her email is depressing: equal parts hyperventilating from her manager, who's a voice on the Denver end of a speakerphone; and recruiter spam, which starts to look more appealing every time she has to refute another sky-is-falling missive on what's purportedly her day off.
The bell over the coffee shop door is entirely unnecessary this time of year. Unlike most sensible buildings in this part of the country, this one lacks a double entrance; a cold inrush of air heralds the arrival of each new customer.
"In and close the door!" she calls. Mostly Jess wishes everyone else ever would just stay home and keep the cold from coming in, but she'll make an exception for her girlfriend.
"Long night in the datacenter?" asks Amy as she shrugs out of her hooded leather trenchcoat in a flurry of snow. Freed from the hood, her yarn dreads fall around her pale face; she's a marble statue of Medusa with snakes of primary-colored wool. She leans in and kisses Jess, lips cold, tongue warm.
"Yeah; a failed boot disk on the Usenet server. Had to rebuild." Jess sighs. "At least the binaries are fine, so people won't be complaining about missing parts." No dreads for her; corporate America (telco lifer edition) isn't down with that. A mousy-brown ponytail is as fancy as she gets.
Amy snickers. "And if dudes are willing to complain about warez newsgroups, you know it's actually porn they're worried about." She waggles her eyebrows and pulls her hot-pink PVC wallet out of a pocket before dropping her trench next to Jess on the sagging couch.
"No doubt." Keeping her eyes on Amy, Jess subtly scoots away from touching the leather. "And since Ma Bell's scattered children are freaking out about Y2K, this isn't the time for outages."
"Cause Corporate Girl has to care about legacy code," Amy says over her shoulder as she heads to the counter.
"Not all of us get to write Perl for a living, Startup Girl," Jess mumbles around a mouthful of vegan peanut butter cookie. Most places have soy milk, but decent vegan baked goods are where this coffee shop distinguishes itself from Starbucks.
Returning with a premade sausage and egg sandwich and a black coffee, Amy takes a big bite and then says, "You get to have fun with Slowlaris instead; yuck."
"We have some FreeBSD!" Jess protests. "Not everybody can telecommute to the Valley to sell pet food online at a loss."
Amy tries the coffee. "Ow! Way too hot. Hey, you wish the dinosaur you work for could have a sockpuppet mascot."
Jess sticks her (non-scalded) tongue out at Amy, then hides a smile behind her chai. Okay, they're about as different as two geek girls she's ever met. But opposites attract, or something? And attraction is definitely a thing. Even if Amy's currently eating meat, which, ew. Jess is glad when the sandwich is reduced to crumbs.
Amy leans forward to sip her coffee again, and Jess slides a chai-warmed hand between sweater and jeans, to the small of Amy's back. "Missed you this morning."
"Hey, not my fault you were at work instead of in my bed when I woke up." Amy's coffee is apparently drinkable now, and she gulps it.
"We could head back to my place and rectify that," Jess offers suggestively. "It's closer."
"Naw, I'm going over to Radio K to help with the countdown," Amy says. "I'll see you at the party tonight?"
Snapping the plastic lid onto her coffee (which Jess now realizes is in a to-go cup), Amy grabs her coat, and is gone before Jess can counter-offer, leaving her with an emergency retroactive Change Management ticket to file and a hollow feeling inside. Guess she's gonna need to make an appearance at that party; better nap this afternoon.
The New Year's party at Geek Haus is humming with energy when Jess arrives around ten (because that's how long it takes to peel herself away from work after she wakes up at seven; the less said about that particular fun, the better).
The creaking Victorian used to be a frat house, and there is still a large wooden omega hanging crookedly on the front porch. Jess has known a few of the revolving cast who've lived here (until the lure of startups or Everquest pulls them out of the U). The only one still in residence is Brian, that guy from her automata theory class who introduced her to Amy last summer.
First Friday in June when the Witch's Hat water tower was open for its annual tour, Jess and Brian climbed the 110 feet of spiral stairs and ran into Brian's exceptionally cute friend on the observation platform. That night stretched out, warm like sticky taffy, spilling over into the rest of the summer.
Amy is everything Jess isn't, and the tug of her presence has Jess in her orbit, like gravity. Like it or not; most days Jess likes it, but it would be nice to be arriving at the party with her girlfriend, who's already dancing in the basement-turned-nightclub when Jess gets there. Amy looks just a little surprised to see her, and Jess can't help but read more into that look than is there. Maybe. Whatever; she needs a drink.
Jess is pretty sure there's something in the homebrewed cider (other than the part where it's 80 proof and tastes like candy), so she's sticking to her friend Johnny Walker. The pounding techno beat makes this much more Amy's scene, but Jess is chill. Cold, actually; her dress has spaghetti straps and she broke the cardinal rule of Minnesota by going somewhere without a sweater. Pulling her coat out of the bedroom where she stashed it would be overkill, but she's considering it.
Brian notices Jess rubbing her arms, and brings over a wide creamy scarf that could almost be a shawl. He's got a decent sense of style for a straight boy. "Partying like it's 1999 doesn't mean being cold," he says, offering it to her. "Stolen non-human animal product okay with you?"
Jess accepts the scarf gratefully and wraps it around her shoulders. "I don't have a huge issue with wool. I mean, domesticated sheep kinda need to be shorn; it doesn't kill them or anything." If she's honest with herself, she started splitting this particular hair about the same time she started sleeping with a girl who has yarn dreads, but she's not going to admit that to a guy she barely knows.
As she drapes herself in the scarf, Brian notices the pager hanging off one of the spaghetti straps of her dress. "You on call?"
"The first rule of oncall is you don't talk about oncall," Jess jokes. "No, seriously, nothing's going to happen. I mean, we patched NTP last summer, but I guess we could have some upstream time servers that didn't... though yeah, I'm confident enough to be at this party, and I know how questionable the DSL here is."
Brian laughs and hops up onto the counter next to where she's leaning. "When we ran out to get more ice and olives, seemed like most people at the grocery story were partying like it was the apocalypse. If planes start falling out of the sky, how much will ten gallons of bottled water help?"
"What I want to know is why nobody's worried about the end of the epoch," Jess says. "You know, since time apparently began in 1970, along with decent music." That last is aimed at Amy, who's taking a break from dancing long enough to grab more cider.
"Everyone involved plans to be retired by 2038," Amy says. "If our IPO goes as well as you'd think, a long time before; remember when we got totally slashdotted?" She's apparently not cold, as her Bettie Page blouse is unbuttoned and knotted under her breasts. "And music sucked in the 70s."
Jess slides closer, plays with the knot instead of bantering. She's now considering one of the bedrooms for non-coat-retrieval-related reasons.
Brian eyes her hands, then picks up where she left off teasing Amy. "Says the girl who listens to Kraftwerk when she thinks nobody is listening. I've seen your Napster."
"Hey, Kraftwerk is valid," Amy says defensively. "VNV Nation owes a lot to them."
"You and your futurepop," Jess says. "They don't even have instruments!"
Amy rolls her eyes. "Whatever, Lilith Fair. Clearly a guitar and screaming are way better." She flounces back to the basement with Brian in tow, leaving Jess with a pashmina that doesn't match her dress and a sense that she missed something.
The kitchen is dead, but Jess stubbornly doesn't want to follow Amy downstairs. So she finds herself in conversations that she probably shouldn't be having.
"The awful truth," Jess explains to this wide-eyed EE major she thinks introduced himself as Charles, "is that there's no point to a degree. Not anymore. I mean, I'm taking one class at a time because work is paying for it, but really, look around you. Everybody's getting jobs based on what they can do. Shit, I should have dropped out before I did."
"And gone to California?" He sidles closer in an unpracticed move he probably thinks is smooth.
"Where I'd find the girl of my dreams with flowers in her hair?" With a wink and a step back, she tries to let him down easy.
"Er... flowers?"
She's lost him; Chaz or Charles or whatever clearly doesn't know his Zep. Kids these days. "Naw, plenty of startup action here. I just mean, I was trying to follow The Script. Never do that."
Kid looks distraught, and, judging by the can of Milwaukee's Best he's chosen, not actually old enough to drink. Shouldn't dash his dreams. Jess excuses herself; it's getting on towards midnight, and she's got a girlfriend to be kissing.
Amy is a shimmering vision in the black-light of the basement. She's got glowsticks twined in her dreads and tucked in her bra. The polka-dotted blouse hits the floor as Jess comes down the stairs, and Amy writhes to the sultry tones of some darkwave act with a female vocalist.
This much is well and good. But the writhing in question is happening with Brian's leg between Amy's thighs. Unsteady on her feet, Jess hears a roar in her ears; at first she thinks it's coming from the stereo, but then the aural haze recedes and she realizes it's just her heart racing.
The rear-projection TV is on, and it's showing Dick Clark in Times Square, looking about a hundred years old, plastic grin painted on. The garish light reflects off Amy, and for a second she looks as old as Dick Clark, but that's just a fleeting expression on her face that vanishes as the countdown starts.
Ten, and Jess has a moment of hope that Amy's going to turn and look for her. Nine, eight, seven and that hope fades. There are way more people here than she thought, and the pulsing crowd hides Amy and Brian for six, five, four. Then they surface, busted in the harsh light of the TV, kissing ahead of three, two, one.
As it turns out, Bono is wrong about nothing changing on New Year's Day. Amy leaves Jess a message on IRC (on the U's server, which they all still use, even though EFNet is a wretched hive of scum and villainy). It just says hey. Brian tries a little harder with an email (Subject: sorry) that Jess marks for deletion.
Jess doesn't message Amy back, because really, what is she going to say? "I'm going to assume the global odometer rollover made you cheat on me with a man who's actually more regretful than you are, so no harm, no foul." Not likely; this may look like freedom, but it feels way more devastating.
Whole damn scene was seven months of crazy, and last night just snapped it into sharp focus. Jess thought she was in love with Amy, and Amy is in love with Amy.
Jess slides out of bed and pads over to the kitchen section of her Dinkytown efficiency, stares into the fridge, and closes it without selecting anything. A glass of water later, she heads back to bed (well, futon), reaches for her iBook, and undeletes Brian's apology. (She draws the line at opening it, though.)
The email immediately above Brian's is one Jess almost deleted yesterday. Some Mountain View startup with a funny name raised a cool $25 mil in VC back in June (right about when Jess was falling for Amy instead of paying attention to anything happening on the left coast). They want Jess to scale their servers for maximum search awesomeness, and they've even got a chef who used to cook for the Grateful Dead. Wicked cool.
Fly-by-night gigs like Amy's pet food startup might allow telecommuting to the Bay Area, but this company would almost certainly want Jess to relocate. And hey, might as well fly out for an interview and see. It would mean really dropping out instead of the sorta dropping out she's now doing, but that's okay; she's spent enough time in the Matrix. Maybe she shouldn't have revealed it to the ears of youth last night, but college isn't where it's at. She opens the recruiter email and hits reply.
It's time to take the red pill.