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It’s the end of term and the twilight is cloudy and grey, wet from the afternoon rain. Instead of sitting outside by the park, her neighbours are drinking indoors to pretentiously classic rock. Their laughter, and the tunes, pleasantly filter in through the wall behind her.
Her last exam has been written, nothing left to revise.
One of her flatmates is packing up his things, periodically tossing one unwanted item after another into the common room as an offering. A half-filled notebook of maths notes, a book of Scandinavian poetry, and a pair of swim trunks litter the room, as yet unclaimed.
Her other flatmate is on her back on the carpet in front of her, a carpet of many stains (the one from the curry takeaway, the one from the red wine, the one from… she doesn’t want to know), that has known better days. “I can’t believe you don’t want this,” Lucy says, holding a doll with button eyes in the air above her.
Something brown flies past her and lands on the sofa next to her. She picks it up and examines the colours on the object. It’s a wood carving of a clown’s face. “What the fuck….”
“You want it?” Graham says from his bedroom doorway, his glasses askew. He fixes them with a nudge of a finger on the bridge of his nose.
“Fuck no, this is a hideous and terrifying monstrosity,” she says, laughs a little, and lays it clown-face down on the coffee table.
Stella is high as a kite and more relaxed than she has been in months, and she can’t stand up because her legs are made of gelatin and sponge.
Next to her, Lucy’s sister, with a cat-like movement, snatches a small flying book out of the air, and says, “Can you not stop throwing things that might hurt if they hit us?”
Graham says something in reply, but Stella doesn’t hear him because Lucy’s sister, whose name she did not catch, is taking a long drag on Lucy’s joint and closing her eyes, and her fingers itch suddenly to be run through that sleek, black hair.
***
“Stella, this is my sister,” Lucy said earlier, and Stella said nice to meet you and walked past them to make it to the university in time and didn’t have room in her mind except for the mind of a criminal and patterns of abuse.
On the exam paper she spilled everything she had learned from within her, letting it settle on the pages and in the part of her brain that was not quite so on edge.
Afterward she re-entered her flat with the relief of a mad race ending, and stopped at the threshold, taking in the scene she had forgotten about: Lucy on the floor, rolling something illegal at the table, as the three girls from next door poured themselves drinks in the kitchen. Lucy’s sister sat on the sofa and smiled at her warmly.
Stella smiled back politely, unfroze, and removed her coat to hang on one of the hooks near the door. “Well, the party started entirely without me, I see,” she said, hiding the fact that she had been looking forward to laying down on her bed and never getting up not a minute ago.
“Stella,” Lucy said. “Come and sit, you’re just in time.”
Stella set her bag down on a precariously rickety end table and rounded the coffee table to the sofa. “Is that Graham’s?”
“Mm-hmm,” Lucy affirmed. “He’s just been packing and he wants to get rid of all the stuff he has before his dad gets here tomorrow. Been stoned all day.”
“How was your exam?” Lucy’s sister asked, and at Stella’s raised eyebrows, added, “Lucy mentioned that was why you were in a hurry before.” In her denim trousers and pink top, her hair collected and no make-up on her slightly dark skin, it was hard to tell her age. Perhaps only within a year of Lucy’s and hers.
“Right,” she said. “It was all right, thank you. It’s good to be finished.”
“What are you studying?”
“Criminology and anthropology.”
Lucy held up the finished product in triumph. “Tah-dah.”
Holly, Polly and Carol came in from the kitchen with a bottle of wine and another of something clear and harder, and lowered themselves to the floor next to Lucy. Stella knew their names, but they looked so alike, with their blonde hair and black-framed glasses, that she frequently could not keep them straight.
The joint made a silent round.
Something flew past her face from the direction of the bedrooms.
Her throat burned and she waited for her mind to float.
A minute later, from beside her, Lucy’s sister spoke again. “I’m studying medicine, myself.” There was a pause. “Do you believe each person has a calling?”
Stella didn’t, but found it comforting when other people did. “I’m not an idealist, but it’s a nice thought.”
“It is, I suppose. If you think your calling is also what you want it to be.”
“Are those the drugs talking?” Stella asked, and turned to focus on her better.
She smiled. “I don’t think it is. I don’t know. I’m just wondering. What do you plan to do after your degree?”
Stella let her brain turn to liquid and float up the first answer it could offer. “I suppose I’ve thought of joining the police,” she said.
“I’ve thought of turning to forensics, myself.” Her eyes were very brown-black and deep.
Suddenly feeling overly tactile, Stella bit her lip and spread her palm over her own thigh, concentrating on how each finger felt. She took a deep breath. “Perhaps we’d work together one day.”
“Perhaps.”
That was twenty minutes ago.
The joint made another round, the girls returned to their flat where the record player wasn’t broken, and Lucy’s sister next to her, opens the book that’s befallen her.
Stella shuffles closer to her to see. Their shoulders rub and Stella feels it everywhere. “Emily Dickinson,” she says. “Interesting.”
“Hmm.”
“I’ll sort him out,” Lucy says about Graham, stands up and heads into his room.
“Well,” Stella says, “I’m sorry to say we won’t hear from them for a while.”
Her sister laughs in surprise. “Really?”
“Well,” she amends, “we may hear them, but we won’t see them.”
“Oh god, my big sis,” she says, and Stella has one detail about her answered.
“You are younger than us, then?”
“Just a year.” She flips to the middle of the book arbitrarily and reads: “Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me.”
Stella leans her head against her shoulder to see the page. “The carriage held but just ourselves and Immortality. God, that’s cheerful.”
“I like it.”
Stella closes her eyes. “The brain is wider than the sky, for put them side by side, the one the other will include with ease, and you beside.”
“That’s lovely.”
Stella feels the vibrations her voice where they touch. “It’s my favourite of hers. Emily.”
“If people could open their minds up to be as limitless as the sky.” She leans her head back, a little bit on Stella’s hair. “Do you know the stories of all the constellations?”
“Some of them,” Stella says, and tries to recall them all. “Cassiopeia, the queen who so bragged about her beauty that her punishment was to be placed in the sky so that she was upside down half the time.”
“Right. And her daughter, Andromeda, who was nearly sacrificed as a punishment to her mother.”
“I have some more poetry books in my room if you’d like to see,” Stella says, thinking about the volume of Yeats on her shelf.
“Sure,” her companion says, and they stand on unsteady feet, steadying each other with loosely linked forearms as they walk across the flat.
In the bedroom, Stella closes the door behind her. Lucy’s empty room separates them from Graham’s occupied one, and from the music next door, and suddenly every breath is very loud.
She pulls the tome from its spot and opens it arbitrarily, hands it to her friend who has sat down on the bed.
The high is dissipating, neither of them smoked enough to last more than half an hour, but her body is tingling and her mind is calm and the room is warm and darkening as the sun sets.
“To a child dancing in the wind.”
Stella crawls onto the twin bed behind her, presses her own back into the wall. “He is my favourite poet.”
She reads silently for a few seconds, Stella watching and listening. “Oh you will take whatever’s offered, and dream that all the world’s a friend, suffer as your mother suffered, be as broken in the end.”
“Hmm.”
“Are we closer in age to the child or the writer, do you think?”
“I don’t know. The child, probably.”
“That’s scary.”
“It could be scary. Or we could try to make it last.”
“Yeah.” A few seconds of silence pass as Stella watches the ridges in her spine, her own hands clasped to her sternum, and then her guest lies down next to her, on her back, lowering the book to the floor.
Stella stops fighting herself and inches slightly towards her. “I never got your name,” she whispers.
“It’s Reed,” she whispers back, turns her face toward Stella.
Stella smiles. “That’s a nice name.” She lays a gentle hand on Reed’s stomach, slowly spreads her palm. The muscles beneath twitch slightly, Reed’s breath hitches. “You can stay here tonight if you like.”
“Okay.” Reed rolls on her side to face her, and Stella’s hand slips under her shirt, around her waist. Her skin is soft and warm.
“Have you ever been with a girl?”
Stella feels Reed breathe a little harder as she says, “No.”
Stella leans in closer. “Tell me if you want me to stop.”
She closes her eyes, rubs their noses a little, then gently presses her lips against Reed’s, running her palm slowly up Reed’s ribcage. She slips a bare foot against her calf.
“I don’t think I want you to stop,” Reed whispers back, between this kiss and the next.
They don’t turn on any lights and the sun sets beyond the window as they peel back the quilts and then each other’s clothes, and then something quite else.
In the small bed Stella holds Reed afterwards and thinks about being tired, thinks about hiding, thinks about shame and how she’s dragged someone else into this with her now, and about how this can’t be bad, it can’t be bad. This is good.
Reed falls asleep quickly. Stella takes longer to follow.