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“Are you sure?” Ripp breathes out.
Ophelia seeks her answer in his face: his dark-blue, cloudy eyes, his impossibly-long eyelashes—so long they tangle in the corners of his eyes.
She nods. She is ready to give up her entire life for those eyelashes.
Ripp’s smile crinkles his eyes. He grabs her ass.
With a horrifying screech, the yellow school bus takes off from its parking spot in front of the Specter mansion. Their schoolmates are plastered across the back window. Tank’s eyebrows are so high, they are about to fly off his face; Lola is whispering into his ear. Chloe waggles her finger around her temple—are you crazy?—incredulous, but seemingly not mad.
“Well, at least my girlfriend is taken care of?” Ripp jokes.
Ophelia groans and buries her head in her hands.
She is definitively not in the mood for jokes. She knows what the sinking, leaden feeling that cascades through her body means. It has happened to her before. It’s horrible.
It’s love.
The conversation with Johnny takes place the next day. Before that, Ophelia gets to torture herself with an excruciating evening of dodging Johnny’s calls and messages (another experiment of Aunt Olive’s, she lies). In truth, she is immobilized on her bed in the weird open basement that has been assigned as her bedroom. Her sole company is the whirring of the arcane demonic devices that encircle her nest and her mind’s strained attempts to convince itself she is not a horrible person.
In other words, talking to Johnny is not unlike ripping off a bandage.
Ha.
There is no hiding away from it: breaking up with Johnny the day before they were set to go to La Fiesta Tech together might have been the worst thing Ophelia’s ever done.
She calls Ripp for a last-ditch date at the shopping center. Ripp’s contact blinks on the cyan screen, as if to mock her: unavailable, he is off digging holes.
Ophelia has no choice but to pack for university. She leaves in the night, soundlessly placing the lock in its nest as to not disturb Aunt Olive upstairs. Ophelia takes away zero empty promises, and perhaps it’s for the best after all.
Johnny’s time at university is nothing like he imagined. Not only because he blew his sole chance for a scholarship by not eking out enough laps at Dad’s training range. Not only because his girlfriend left him for his—their—best friend and he is stuck in the same dorm as his older not-quite-sisters. Not only because he still clings to the military buzzcut, even if there is no one here to admonish him when he grows it out.
He thought he would leave Strangetown behind once a young adult; yet, it or he or she is all over the campus.
The grapevine ripens with fresh rumors from back home. Ophelia and Tank have been placed in the same dorm and are getting along well (is she collecting Grunts now?). Jill has started high school and now hangs out with Ripp, who is still flunking his grades and miraculously not getting fired from his job. Mom and Dad made up at a neighbor’s party and talk of expanding the family.
Everyone’s life moved along, and Johnny is stuck in a box, a forgotten toy soldier whose owner has grown up.
As a newfangled young adult, Ophelia is perpetually busy: there are the intro lectures, the zany pack of classmates, the dorm room that is cozier than any place she had ever lived in. She lets the transitional whirlwind distract her from the inner turmoil. It is, hopefully, a new Ophelia!
The familiar shade of alien green at the dorm party becomes an understandable shock. Except instead of the white tank and camo print, Stella Terrano flourishes a pink floral dress. The skin and the fabric contrast like watermelon and mint in an ice-cold summer drink—refreshing and sweet. Ophelia, who’d already planned a trip to the Mirage Shopping Center for new clothes, finds her interest piqued.
Stella’s eyes are not like Johnny’s or Ripp’s; instead, they are wholly black, and she does not blink, even during kisses. As Ophelia loses her virginity, she is floating in the darkness of the infinite sky over the desert.
Tank, who is in the dorm room next to hers, must have heard them, because the morning after he hurries to the opposite corner of the cafeteria table. For a son of a serial killer (Ophelia is pretty sure), Tank is unexpectedly shy, but when he gets over it, they learn to read each other well—there is the same raincloud hanging over him and Ophelia, dead mothers and ominous older relatives. And a common fondness for the color black.
Tank thinks it’s love; Ophelia has the experience to know it’s a real friendship.
Several semesters later, with her term paper already mailed to her professor, she wanders to Johnny’s dorm during an umpteenth party. She would have gone unnoticed with her cup of the pink punch from the keg, but Johnny has always possessed an in-built radar for her. It works, all those years later.
Johnny has changed little since Strangetown—the same strained posture, the same meticulous haircut. He is not mad at her anymore, though he used to be, he confesses. She laughs at his jokes and at the smell of beer from his mouth.
Kissing would have been a bad idea, so they don’t.
It was much easier than she thought it would have been, she tells Stella later. Talk about a shift in priorities. A shifting paradigm, one might say. Stella, an intent listener, giggles and takes away Ophelia’s remaining worries (there are always remaining worries) with a watermelon-flavored kiss.
Indeed, it’s love all over again. Ophelia welcomes it.
By the time Ripp—the youngest of the bunch, the clown friend—reaches La Fiesta Tech, both Ophelia and Johnny have already graduated.
Time alone outside of the unit had Ripp rotting from boredom. The highlight was teaching Johnny’s little sister, Jill, how to kiss. He’d liked the way her new glasses sat on her button nose, and when they cut into his cheek during a makeout, he imagined that was how Ophelia’s specs would’ve felt, though the frames were different: Ophelia’s were wiry, Jill’s were white and plasticky. Once, Ripp and Jill brushed noses. He peered at her with through his eyelashes and found Johnny’s green eyes staring back at him.
Years later, now an LFT sophomore, he discovers in himself a longing for Father’s grilled cheese. He slaps together a sandwich in the dorm kitchen, but the butter tastes off. Nothing like the lard Father used back home.
He salivates at the thought and throws up a little.
Speed-dating is a sound way to avoid the disgusting insides of his own mouth; he now licks strangers’ mouths consensually. His phone contacts list expands like a tumor. Johnny’s number has always been there—in fact, it is the first one he’d added. It makes sense his fingers find their way onto the familiar path of cube-like buttons and dial by themselves.
Though they have not talked since high school, when Ripp meets Johnny again, it feels as if no time has passed at all. Maybe Ripp fell into a new habit, because it’s now his second nature to woo and to smile and to crinkle his eyes just right. Suddenly, they are drunk, and Johnny is with him on the couch, and he cannot tell if he is Johnny’s first, and he is so, so sorry for the whole thing with Ophelia. There are ways in which he can make it up. Johnny takes to them in stride. Johnny had missed him like Ripp had missed him.
After the date, Johnny has to drive back home to Strangetown. It’s a several-hours-long ride one way; Johnny shoulders it twice without flinching. Ripp is struck with the realization that they’re somehow good.
Ophelia is less partial to cars, but she visits Ripp, too. Unlike Johnny, she’d changed: silver piercings bud from her eyebrow and lower lip. Ripp notices a critical edge to her eyes. Not even a “that’s what she said” joke can crack her up. In fact, he almost feels something shatter inside her when he says it.
She is dating an alien girl now, much to Ripp’s delight. “Except aliens don’t care for human monogamy,” Ophelia corrects: her and Stella are not exactly in a relationship.
Ripp doesn’t need to be told twice.
They are kissing again, inevitably, invariably. Ophelia is cautious, but she cannot fight whatever had crashed them together a few years ago. She clings to him with a betraying reciprocity; she had to have carried a torch for him the way he did for her.
Yet in the afterglow, when he’s supposed to drown in the blissful proximity of another human, Ripp hears Johnny’s voice in his head.
After university, Johnny does not return home. He rents a cramped room in a cheap motel across the road—he can see his childhood bedroom windows if he squints. His parents changed the wallpaper to baby blue. The room has been renovated into a nursery for Johnny’s new brother.
Johnny finally grows out his hair and parts it in the middle. Ripp likes it enough to make the drive from LFT several times a week. They are caught up in a high, like the one you get from bubbles; you laugh so hard your feet leave the ground and you get to float. Johnny is disconnected from reality in much the same way.
Uncle Lazlo gets him a shifty job as a psychic phone pal. He hates it, but his other option would have been a convenience store clerk.
It's not a coincidence, Ripp says, that ‘jobs’ and ‘joke’ have the same amount of characters. See, they even start with the same two letters! He laughs with the security of someone with a paid dorm room.
Johnny spends the nights mumbling nonsense into the creaky plastic microphone to pay for the motel. He sleeps until the late afternoon, dips into the pool across the motel’s yard, and if he's lucky, Ripp comes over.
He’d tried hosting parties, but the hotel staff were unimpressed at the Chinese food containers scattered everywhere, even in the laundromat. There weren’t chairs anywhere else, Johnny tries to reason. He is met with a stare and has to acquiesce to his defeat.
Ophelia invites him over to the shack she is renting. Olive had reconnected with her son (who is, inexplicably, also Uncle Pascal’s internet boyfriend), so the house now goes to him. Johnny is excited to commiserate with a fellow youth without a place to call home. His walk crosses into a sprint. When he approaches the shack, Ripp is there, extricating his long legs (he’d had a growth spurt as a freshman) from the taxi.
Johnny and Ripp converse in glances during Ophelia’s house tour. Ripp is all smirks and winks; they had last seen each other yesterday, and what a romp that had been. Johnny tacks down a mental note: buy cleaner on the way back to the hotel to hopefully remove the new stains on the cheap couch in his room.
The nonverbal conversation seems to go over Ophelia’s head. Indeed, she is thinking of something else entirely.
“Me and Stella are getting engaged!” she announces, beaming.
There is a pair of rings tucked away, which she’s happy to show. By the way, a studio signed her as a performing act. She’s got a mortgage already.
The gleaming stones and Ophelia’s teeth blur: everything is bright in Ophelia’s new house. Too bright for Johnny. He rubs his puffy eyelids, and they ache with heat.
Ripp is gobsmacked. “But I... but I thought...”
Ophelia’s smile is on the verge of fading. “I’m really happy to have you two as friends,” she presses.
Johnny can tell her lower lip is mid-shudder. He brushes his shoulder against Ripp to get him to relax. The rest of the evening is numb and relatively painless, like a dentist visit.
When Ripp’s taxi arrives, he scoots to the other side of the seat wordlessly. Johnny nestles next to him.
“Have you seen Hannibal?” Johnny asks when they leave the boundaries of Strangetown.
Ripp stares at him incredulously. “Dude, I lived Hannibal.”
“She totally Alana Bloom’d us.”
They plod through the spanless, dark orange sands.
“You know what? Let’s get engaged too,” Ripp says after his fourth cup of shifty lurid punch.
Johnny sputters. “Only if you promise to never steal my girlfriend again,” he says. They laugh their asses off to the tune of shitty college rock roaring throughout the walls of Ripp’s dorm. The Shifting Paradymes had dissolved long ago after hemorrhaging members to corporate jobs and open marriages, but their craft lives on.
“I’m serious, though,” Ripp says after a pause between tracks. It is an unfamiliar band; the new track is hopeful, and the bassline goes right through Ripp’s spinal cord.
Johnny grabs his hand like Ripp is a telephone pole during a tornado. It hurts: Johnny is well-built from the grind of a teenage military recruit. Ripp palms the width of his forearm on top of his gray hoodie and brings their foreheads together. Johnny’s eyes are closed.
When Johnny opens them, Ripp sees certainty.
“Sure,” Johnny says. “Let’s get engaged.”
An embarrassing tear rolls out of Ripp’s eye and onto Johnny’s lap. He helplessly wipes it with his elbow. Without a word, Johnny hugs him tighter.
Once the song changes again to a grungy riff, Johnny finger-guns Ripp’s temple. “I’m going to say something now that’s going to blow your mind.”
Ripp smirks. “Go ahead, rip me apart.”
Johnny’s face contorts into a further bout of feverish laughter. “I want to fall in love with Ophelia again.”
“Well, good luck with that,” Ripp says. “You’ve been thoroughly replaced as her alien boyfriend.”
“She only has an alien girlfriend! I mean, what’s stopping her from having an alien boyfriend, too?” Johnny shakes his head. “But really, I thought you’d be jealous.”
Ripp shrugs. “Dude, this engagement doesn’t mean anything.” Johnny’s face falls, and Ripp corrects course, “Anything that you don’t want. You can bet I am still going to be going on dates with all sorts of people. If you’d be okay with that.”
“Actually,” says Johnny, “that sounds awesome.”
Ripp claps him on his shoulder. “That’s my man!”
They lay on their backs watching stars, tracing paths, and shaping plans. Ripp is going to graduate. Johnny is maybe going to win Ophelia back. Ripp and Johnny are going to find jobs—better jobs, in Johnny’s case—and they’re going to leave all of this bullshit behind.
“Sounds like a promise.”