Page 18 of Inkpot Gods

A flicker of something more sour than cautious crosses Erin’s face, there and gone in an instant. “I used to study theology,” she says, reclaiming her hand. “I finished a while back. I just stuck around town to deal with some unfinished business. And because my housemates would never remember that normal people run the dishwasher if they didn’t have me around to remind them.”

“Hey,” protests Smita. “You make us sound like we’re a bunch of slobs. We’re not slobs. We’re just…”

“Academics?”

“Yes. Academics.” Smita turns a pleading look on Lilianne. “You’ve gotten distracted by research and forgotten about the clothes in the washing machine, haven’t you?”

“I think just about everyone has.”

“Ugh,” says Erin. “I don’t understand how you people have managed to live long enough to reach adulthood.”

“Luck, skill, and a phenomenal bodyguard,” says Smita. “It was lovely to meet you, Lilianne. I hope I’ll see you around the campus?”

“I hope so too,” says Lilianne, managing, somehow, not to say that she’ll arrange it if she has to bribe the office to give her a copy of Smita’s schedule. People tend to view that sort of thing as creepy, and the last thing she wants to do is upset her new friend.

Or friends. Erin is still looking at her steadily, and her smile has faded; she’s just a predator now, studying the new gazelle at the watering hole.

“Yes,” she says. “I’m sure we’ll see you around. Smita, come on. We’re going to be late.”

“And I know how much you hate lateness,” Smita agrees. She hooks her arm through Erin’s, and the two of them walk off, leaving Lilianne behind.

She watches them go until the crowd closes up behind them, and they’re officially gone. Then she glances around, making sure that no one else is watching her, and takes off for the comforting chaos of Telegraph Avenue.

Telegraph had been one of the only tangible things she’d been able to explain to her parents when they’d asked her why she wanted to go to graduate school so far away from home. Half thoroughfare, half carnival midway, it’s a chaotic expanse of specialty stores and street vendors, the sound of voices and buskers playing all manner of stringed instruments drifting sweetly through the air. Due to city ordinances about street food, there’s just one semi-illicit tamale cart and another selling roast nuts; beyond that it’s all pizza, donuts, and noodles from the storefronts, served hot and steaming in Styrofoam containers.

She fell in love with Berkeley the moment she saw Telegraph Avenue, the vendors in chainmail and leather and layered skirts like something from a medieval market, the college kids wandering by, the parents of college kids clutching their purses and looking around themselves with wide, terrified eyes, like the tall man with the bushy red beard was going to mug them in broad daylight. There’s a booth selling wound-wire insects with two glass jars labeled GIVE ME YOUR NAME and GIVE ME YOUR GENDER. Both are half-full of slips of paper like wishes thrown into a sacred well.

She doesn’t stand out on Telegraph, no matter how tall she is, no matter how awkwardly she sometimes moves, or how obvious it is that she’s still getting used to the intimate embrace of her bra, wrapped around her ribcage like a lover’s arms. (Not that she’s had many lovers, or wanted many lovers; this is the only one she intends to take with her to the grave.) Everyone here is brand-new, even if they’ve been walking these tangled urban miles for years on years. Everyone here belongs.

About half the vendors know her already. They flash quick smiles or bob their heads as she passes them, even the busker with the electric fiddle and the leather bustier. Half the Avenue is in love with their fiddle-playing angel, and the first time she remembered Lilianne’s name, it was like the heavens opened up and shouted their approval from on high. The campus is a beautiful dream. Telegraph Avenue is well on its way to becoming a beautiful reality.

She walks two blocks down from the campus, then turns left, heading for a small food court, where she unlocks a near-hidden door set into the wall just past the ramen shop, revealing a narrow staircase up into the darkness. She climbs quickly, not looking back. Like Orpheus before her, she has long since learned the dangers of looking back.

Not that she has a true love to lose to the depths of the Underworld. Not that she ever expects to be called to katabasis. That isn’t the sort of thing that happens to or for or around girls like her. She’s fine with that, honestly. Extravagant childhood dreams aside, no one who wants to live dreams of life recast in Greek mythology. She’ll be content with what she has.

The stairs are just steep enough that even after weeks of climbing them, there’s a pleasant burning in her calves by the time she reaches the top. One of her roommates says that they’re lucky to live in a place that guarantees them a daily workout without needing to pay for a gym membership. Lilianne isn’t so sure about that. But she is sure that they’re lucky to have found off-campus housing for less than the cost of a kidney a month. The Bay Area real estate market isn’t just horrifying: to a girl from small-town Alabama, it’s literally unbelievable. The prices here are some fairyland shit, and her father looked like he was going to have an aneurism when she asked for help with her deposit.

But he helped her. Her parents have always been willing to step up and help her, first when she was a child, then when she was a terrified teen standing in front of them with her heart in her hands, informing them that they had never actually had a son, only a daughter who was finally feeling brave enough to let them see her properly. She credits them with everything she is today, with setting her feet on the path she’s walking now into adulthood, with showing her that anything could be possible if she was just willing to put in the effort.

(They also taught her that linear time is a mug’s game, especially when the world around you has been looping over and over again for the better part of half a million years. Why can’t two people meet in college and have a college-aged daughter twelve years later, with all the dense and delicious years of childhood sandwiched in-between? Why can’t that same daughter finish her first trip through the halls of academia and walk away with her desired degrees, then go back to start all over again with a different name, a different major, a different way of looking at the world? Time is an irregular quantity, happening at different speeds depending on the situation. Why shouldn’t someone with the proper tutors learn how to bend that variability to her own ends? It’s not much of an advantage in this world; every day still had to be paid for in its own way, with aging or with other currencies, and she’ll never be the age she should be in this moment ever again. But she gets to be the age she is, and she gets to press forward, into the sweet, wide expanse of the future. She gets to follow this road wherever it leads her.)

The door at the top of the stairs is closed and locked against the world. That doesn’t mean anything: this is Berkeley, and even though it’s a college town, it’s still a fairly large city, with a fair amount of crime. Leaving a door unlocked is unthinkable here, just like needing two doors locked between her and the world would be unthinkable back home. She undoes the deadbolt and lets herself inside, into the dim, cool, marijuana-scented air of the living room.

“David!” she half-yells as she closes the door behind herself. “I thought we had an agreement about smoking inside!”

“I’m gonna do it anyway, so you’ll be cool about it, even though you’re an uptight weirdo?” suggests the voice of her roommate, coming from the kitchen rather than the couch. She turns toward the sound like a sunflower toward the light, and watches as he emerges, a Hostess cherry pie in one hand. He’s shirtless, wearing a pair of dark blue sweatpants, and the geometric tattoos across his chest and upper arms are fully revealed, black ink on dark skin. They’re old enough to have healed and settled, permanent parts of his body, and still fresh enough that the lines are crisp and unblurred.

He makes an impressive sight, even in the gloomy clutter of their apartment, with blankets tacked up over the windows to hold the sun at bay and the natural clutter of four college students more interested in extracurriculars than in housekeeping. The garbage goes out on time thanks to Raven, who can’t handle the smell of anything that’s been out for more than a day, and none of them have time for pets. Their rather laid-back approach to cleanliness makes Lilianne grateful for the covered windows; as long as she doesn’t have to look at it, it can’t bother her.

Raven found this place first, and when people look at her and Lilianne like they expect the two girls to take care of the housework, she laughs her odd little rising-and-falling laugh and says that her parents never taught her how to clean. “My mother spent her whole life being groomed to be some man’s perfect trophy wife, and she didn’t want that for me, so she made sure I wouldn’t have the skills for the position if he showed up and wanted to give it a go,” she’d said, the first time she was asked. The second time, she’d given in, and everyone had regretted it, as the kitchen was almost worse after she was done than it had been before she started.

She still had to do her share of the chores, but discussions of shifting the lion’s share onto her shoulders had died with dirty silverware put away alongside the clean and old spaghetti sauce dried onto the plates in the cupboards.

Lilianne’s excuse is similar, but was delivered more quietly. She’s more competent with a sponge and bucket than Raven is; if nothing else, she’d started out as an agriculture major, and despite the amount of mud and animal manure agriculture involved, it required clean workspaces whenever possible. She worked for years to keep her chickens and goats healthy, to understand their relationships to their surroundings, and when she’d decided to pivot to something less organic, she’d retained the ability to do her own damn laundry.

Still, David and Snake are smart enough to understand that while pushing the work off on their two female roommates is shitty and patriarchal, they might be able to get away with it, but doing it to just one of their roommates makes them look like assholes. Do it to the cis girl and you’re saying the trans girl isn’t enough of a girl to be your maid; do it to the trans girl and you’re saying that she deserves less respect than the cis girl. It’s a lose-lose act of patriarchy, and the men she lives with backed down as soon as they fully understood that.

They’re a weird lot, the football star, the local girl, and the two professional students. Technically David’s a professional student too, playing for the Golden Bears and spending most of his days down at the school training center, but Lilianne and Snake are the ones who really dedicate their lives to their studies. Snake is an entomologist by training. He’d argue that he doesn’t get the title until he gets the degree, but anyone who coos to house centipedes like they were kittens and breeds his own cockroaches deserves to be called by the name of his profession. His dedication to the exoskeletal borders on the unreal.