beginning.
Janet opened her desk and reached in blindly, grabbing her old home economics notebook and a pencil. She turned to an empty page. A strange, tingling feeling flowed into her fingers as she wrote the first words.
I’d never come to an establishment like this one before. At first, I was so nervous I could barely see straight, but when I spotted the blond sitting in the back, looking lost and lovely at the same time, I knew I’d made the right choice.
As Janet’s pencil scratched across the paper, the tingling sensation crawled up to her chest. It was just like the night before, when she’d climbed onto that streetcar with Marie.
Janet lowered the notebook, gazing down at the pencil marks on the page. She’d just written the first sentences of her first novel. From here, the story could only grow.
A new set of lines began to take form in her mind. They were for later in the story, so Janet skipped her pencil down the page.
“There’s something I have to tell you, Elaine. Something I’ve longed to tell you.”
I was so breathless I could barely speak. “What is it, Paula?”
“I love you. I’ve loved you from the moment I first saw you.”
I closed my eyes and tasted each word.
Elaine and Paula would fall in love. Janet could see it as clearly as she saw her own reflection in the mirror. The tenderness the two girls shared would be deep, true and undeniable. Until, tragically, society came between them, as it always must.
A title drifted into her mind, too. Alone No Longer. Janet wrote it across the top of the page.
She kept writing, the words coming to mind faster than she could scrawl them out. She jotted down notes for later, too. Scenes she would write soon, about love and loss and heartbreak.
Sometime later, her grandmother knocked on the door, but Janet claimed a headache and wrote on. She wrote all through the evening and the night that followed, until her eyes refused to stay open and the pencil fell from her limp fingers. Yet even as she finally felt herself passing into sleep, that tingling sensation never went away.
Tuesday, September 19, 2017
“It’s for the best.” Paula shrugged. She’d told this story to other girls before Elaine, enough times that she could say the words without them hurting much anymore. “They wanted me gone as much as I wanted out. They’d just as soon have nothing to do with me, and I feel the same way.”
“Even so.” The night’s chill had crept in through the dark window. Elaine shivered in her thin blouse. She tapped out her cigarette, the ashes pooling in the tin with those they’d already smoked that evening. “It must’ve been hard, leaving. Knowing you were never coming back.”
“Plenty of people have it worse.” Paula shrugged again, but the movement took more effort this time. She suspected Elaine could tell she was putting up a front. Elaine, it seemed, could always tell what she was really thinking.
“I don’t know what I’d do if my parents ever found out.” Elaine shivered again. “Or the others back home. I suppose you’re right—that’s how it is for everyone—but that doesn’t make it any easier. What did your parents say when they found out? How did you tell them?”
“I didn’t tell them.” Paula let out a long, heavy sigh. “They found out. I’d gotten a letter, from a...a friend. I should’ve thrown it away, but I was careless. It was a sweet letter, the first sweet letter I’d ever gotten from a girl, and though I hadn’t seen her again after that, I saved the letter so I could remember. I was young, and, well—that letter was the thing I loved most in all the world.”
Elaine nodded. Paula took in a deep breath.
“Well.” Paula dropped her eyes, studying the tin of ashes. She’d never told anyone this part of the story before, but she wanted Elaine to know the truth. “What happened was, my mother found it in my dressing table. She was prowling around my things, probably looking for evidence I was up to no good—she was always sure I was bad news. That afternoon, she came down to the living room where I was doing my homework by the fireplace and shoved the letter in my face, asking why a girl was writing those sorts of things to me. Before I could even think of what to say, she threw it in the flames.”
“She burned your letter?” Elaine reached out to take Paula’s hand. Suddenly her touch was the only thing holding Paula to the ground. “The letter you loved so much?”
“Like I said, it was my own fault.” Paula drew a cigarette from the pack with a shaky hand. “I should’ve known better than to save it in the first place.”
“I don’t think it was your fault at all.” Elaine stroked Paula’s hand, leaned across the table and kissed her lips. Her mouth was warm and soft. “Someday, I’m going to write you a new letter. One nobody can burn.”
Abby closed her computer, the scene still echoing in her mind.
She traced her fingers over the stickers on the laptop’s protective case. It was old stuff, mostly—a rainbow flag, a Bernie logo from the primaries and a Hillary one from the general, the “Feminism Is the Radical Notion That Women Are People” illustrated quote Ms. Sloane had given her last year after she told off one of the guys in their workshop for submitting his third story about a superhot robot babe.
It all dated back to when she and Linh were still together. Maybe that was why none of it felt right anymore. Abby wasn’t the same person she’d been then.
She should probably peel off all her stickers with some Goo-Be-Gone. Start fresh. The way Paula had started over when she moved to New York.
Except...the past always followed you. Right? That was what Paula had learned, and Elaine, too. It was a miracle that Paula and Elaine had even made it out of the places they’d come from in the first place.
Or, well, it would’ve been a miracle if any of it had been true. Elaine and Paula were fictional, obviously. Even though they felt so incredibly real.
Abby wondered, not for the first time, if the characters were entirely imaginary. Marian Love could’ve drawn inspiration from people she knew, or even from her own life. Authors did that sometimes, right? Wrote carefully disguised stories about things that had really happened? Paula and Elaine felt too solid, too three-dimensional, to have come from nowhere.
Abby had finished the last page of Women of the Twilight Realm late the night before. At first she’d sat on the bed in a daze, overwhelmed by all the hours she’d spent in Elaine and Paula’s world. Then she’d realized it was the perfect moment to start writing her own story, when her mind was still totally immersed. She’d opened a blank doc and tried to write a meet-cute for her two main characters, but none of the words she wrote sounded remotely cute compared to Marian Love’s.
So she’d searched for
