We lay there, looking up at the spreading canopy of the tree. My back felt like it had been attacked with a cheese grater, and I was pretty sure my t-shirt was torn, but I knew I wasn’t actually injured… I was hurt, but not harmed.

Anyway, it had been a good feeling at the time, and now, as that slowly faded, the pain was almost a pleasant reminder. I didn’t understand why it had felt so good when Amaranth pushed me against the tree, but not when Puddy had hit me.

Amaranth seemed to have been right when she’d called me a masochist the day before, but that should mean that I enjoyed pain, right? I hadn’t enjoyed being slapped. Wasn’t pain… pain? I didn’t understand it, and wasn’t ready to ask Amaranth… wasn’t ready to say out loud I’d actually liked being hurt, or to revisit the topic of other people hitting me.

The morning was wearing on, and the campus was starting to wake up. Even though there was no classes, people were still coming and going through the world around us. Tomorrow was “the big day”, so I guess it made sense that there was a certain amount of bustle going on.

We heard it, but we didn’t see anybody. It was like they were in another world from us.

People at school kept to the paths, even during the day. I never really understood why. They were laid out in such a haphazard fashion, and most of the time you could get where you were going faster just by cutting across some open grass. If there had been even a single “Keep Off The Grass” sign anywhere on campus, I probably would’ve been afraid to test the limits of where it did and did not cover, but the only rule about the paths was a general admonition to stay on them after dark.

“You know I’m still a nymph, right?” Amaranth asked.

It surprised me, and not just because it was the first thing either of us had said. It just seemed like the most random thing to point out.

“What do you mean?” I asked, figuring there had to be more significance to the statement than I was getting. Of course I understood that she was a nymph. It was hard to miss.

There was all the nakedness, for one thing.

“I mean, there’s going to be men,” she said. “And probably other women, to be perfectly honest… but mostly, lots and lots of men. That’s not going to change just because we had–or because we keep having–sex.”

“Wait, what?” I said, shocked.

We’d kissed, yeah. We’d fooled around, maybe. We’d made out, definitely, though I felt awfully phony saying the phrase “made out”, even in my own head. I’d had my hand… places. That was it, though. What was she talking about, “we had sex?”

“I just mean, I don’t want things to be weird for you now that we’ve had sex…”

She’d said it again.

“Hold on. We kissed,” I said. “I… touched you, but we never… we didn’t… I mean, what we did… that wasn’t sex!“

I turned onto my side to face her. She had an incredibly bemused look on her face, but she said nothing.

“It wasn’t!” I insisted.

“Oh, okay, Mack, if you say so,” she said, rolling onto her back and laughing. Yes, we had officially upgraded her status from b-mused to a-mused. “You’re the expert.”

“It wasn’t!” I said again, rolling back onto my back. It felt like a huffy gesture, but what was she laughing for?

How could it have been sex? I was still fully dressed. She’d ground herself against me for a little while… or a long while, I wasn’t really sure… but we hadn’t, you know, rubbed our stuff together… or eaten each other’s pussies… which was what I was pretty sure sex usually meant, between two women.

To be honest, before Puddy’s visual aid with the doughnut, I hadn’t really been able to work out what exactly “eating pussy” even entailed. I’d heard the phrase plenty of times, but it had never clicked. I’d figured it involved the mouth, and (obviously) the pussy, and I’d figured that there was no actual eating involved (obviously)… but it still wasn’t quite as self-explanatory as “cocksucking.”

For that matter, I can still remember the day I first realized that was what a “blowjob” was.

Yeah.

I am lame.

“Well, Puddy talks about… clanging things… and using fists,” I said. I was really pretty fairly sure that my fingers had not just been touching Amaranth, but actually penetrated her… and honestly, I was now having an even harder time working out the image of somebody being “fisted”… it just didn’t seem possible. “We didn’t do anything like that.”

“Yeah, well, Puddy’s enthusiasm is kind of nice, in a way, but I get the feeling she didn’t have all that much experience before she came here,” Amaranth said. “Anyway, ‘sex’ is a pretty wide-open concept. It all comes down to intimate contact… preferably enjoyed by all parties… and generally culminating in an intense pleasure for one or more.” She took my hand in hers, and then looked down at herself. “And I definitely… culminated.”

“Oh, shit… I didn’t mean to… I mean, I didn’t know you…” I felt a sudden urge to wipe my hand off on the grass… again… or even run and find a bathroom to wash it off in. I’d tried thinking of the stuff on it as sweat. Considering where it had come form, that still made me a little bit uncomfortable, but the idea that it had anything to do with Amaranth’s… uh, culminating… was worse.

“Why did you think I was making so much noise?” she asked. She was laughing again. Or laughing still. That kind of ticked me off, but it let me forget about my hand, at least.

“I thought you were just enjoying yourself!”

She giggled.

“Oh, yes… quite immensely,” she said. “Sweet Mother Khaele, if I live a thousand years I will never, ever think to impugn your masturbation technique,” she said, giving a satisfied-sounding moan. “You clearly have a handle on things, in that department.”

“What do you mean, masturbation?” I asked. Yes, my hand had been on her… in her… but… I needed a sink.

And soap.

Badly.

“Well, what did you think you were doing down there?” she asked me. “Tapping out a secret prison code? Hmm… message received!” She giggled.

I blushed. I wasn’t sure what I had been doing, exactly. I’d put my hand… and she’d pushed herself onto it… and my fingers had seemed to know what to do all on their own… but that was… it wasn’t…

I looked at her, hard.

“You’re laughing at me,” I said.

“No! No, no,” she said, sounding shocked and hurt… and then she burst out in another fit of laughter. “I’m sorry, Mack… you’re just so… so… adorable right now. It’s like… like… baby’s first finger-bang.”

“I don’t need this,” I said, and started to get up.

“Oh, come here,” she said, lunging and wrapping her arms around me. She pulled me back down to the ground, embracing me from behind. “You’re freaking out. I don’t want you to freak out.”

“I’m not!” I said. “Well… maybe I am… a little, but you don’t have to laugh.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Really good sex always makes me giggly.”

She pulled me in closer. I would have thought that would make me freak even more, but it felt good to be lying in the grass in her arms, her bare breasts pushing against my back. It felt safe. She stroked my hair. Time passed. I calmed down. I forced my thoughts into patterns that didn’t include the word “lesbian”. It wasn’t easy.

“So… you’re saying that was sex,” I said, once I had a slightly better handle on things.

“Mmm, you catch on quick,” Amaranth said.

“Please don’t tease me,” I said. “It’s just that… I just had sex… with you.”

“Yeah. You should probably let me tell Barley… she kind of saw you first, you know?” Amaranth said. “And it’s not like she’ll get jealous, exactly… well, it’d be one thing if I felt you were the kind of person who’d probably end up doing her, too, but I think this probably takes you off the table for her.”

“I didn’t think I was on the table,” I said. “For either of you. And didn’t you say something about ‘too much masochism’, when we first met?”

“That’s what I thought, but you bring something out in me, Mack” she said. “I’m forward, but I’m never this dominant with anybody… but something about you makes me want to hold you down and… do things.”

She whispered the last two words breathily in my ears. I felt something stir inside me… like one snake uncoiling itself, while another one tightened around it. Things were moving. There was heat.

I gave a little gasping, moaning… kind of a… gaspy moan. That was no fucking flower opening, no matter what the romance writers said.

“But… what if I’m not supposed to be a lesbian?” I asked, trying to catch my breath. Maybe it seemed ridiculous, but I felt I had to take at least one more stab at saving my perceived heterosexual nature. “What if I’m supposed to be with men?”

“Well, I do think everybody should probably try sex with a man at least once,” she said. “If you can get into it, I mean. If you can’t, you shouldn’t force it. I just think people should try a variety of things before they settle into one.” I felt her shrug her shoulders. “Anyway, when you walk into a room full of people, who do you notice first… the boys, or the girls?”

“Girls,” I said immediately, and quite naturally. Then it hit me why she was asking. “But… that’s normal, right? I mean, I am a girl. I have more in common with other girls than with guys. It’s really natural I’d notice them first.”

“We’ll leave the question of how much you do or don’t have in common with the girls you’re noticing for another time,” Amaranth said. “Who do you have more problems talking to… guys or girls?”

That was an easy question, of course, but it smelled like a trap.

“Hold on, hold on,” I said. “Why would me finding it easier to talk to guys mean I’m less attracted to them?”

“I didn’t say anything meant anything,” Amaranth said gently. “I just asked the question.”

“Okay, well, yes… I have no problem talking to guys,” I said. “And maybe I sometimes get… flustered… when talking to like, really fashionable, really poised, really pre… really confident girls. But if I’m supposed to be attracted to girls, wouldn’t it make more sense to be the other way around?”

“Well, it would be more convenient,” Amaranth said. “If I know anything about human romance… and I pride myself in thinking that I know a little… it’s that it’s rarely tidy or convenient. Don’t you think your reaction to ‘really pretty girls’…”

“I didn’t say ‘pretty girls’,” I protested, though of course, I almost had.

“…is pretty much the same as an adolescent boy, noticing women for the first time?”

“I’m not an adolescent,” I said.

“Physically, no,” Amaranth said. “But emotionally… well, I have the feeling you’ve been repressed for a very long time. Now, you’re on your own for the first time in an adult environment, with nobody looking over your shoulder. If you didn’t get to go through your emotional adolescence before, you’re going to now.”

“How can you be a year younger than me and know so much more?” I asked. “Haven’t you basically lived in the middle of a field your whole life?”

“Well, yes,” she said. “But, firstly… I may have been on this world for less time than you, but I started my life by walking fully grown out of the field, so I’ve had a full seventeen years to get a handle on things. Secondly, living in the middle of a field gets awfully lonely when there’s not work to be done. The first time I saw a book, it was a paperback book in somebody’s back pocket. When I learned what it was, I started asking people to bring me them. I read anytime I wasn’t working, and sometimes when I was.” She laughed. “Some men actually prefer it if you ignore them completely.”

“When you say work…?”

“Oh, I mean sex,” she said. “From the day that I was new, that’s what I’ve done.”

“Do you ever… I mean, would you ever give that up, and just have sex with one person?” I asked. “Could you?”

“Oh, you’re sweet, Mack, but I love my job,” she said. “I’d give it up for you if I’d give it up for anybody, but it’s not going to happen.

“I didn’t mean me,” I said, blushing bright red. “I just wondered if it was possible.”

“Some nymphs married mortals, and became mortal themselves, more or less… it doesn’t happen very often, but that’s where you get part-nymphs from,” she said. “But, it wouldn’t be for me. I love what I do… and I love…”

“Everybody,” I finished.

“And you,” she added. She kissed the back of my ear. “How long do you want to keep lying here?”

“Until the semester’s over and it’s time to go home,” I said. Even that wasn’t true, though. Why would I ever want to go home?

“We can’t do that,” she said. “Can’t hide from the world.”

“Don’t I even get seventeen years to lie in a wheat field, reading books?” I teased.

“Amaranth,” she said.

“What?”

“It’s actually a field of amaranth,” she said.

“Amaranth is a grain?” I asked. I guess I should have figured that one out, from “Barley”, but I knew what barley was before meeting Barley. “Amaranth” was just too beautiful a name to belong to a food crop.

“Yes,” she said. “It flowers beautifully. It was Barley’s idea for us to use our crops’ names when we registered, since we’d need names among the humans.” She giggled. “I don’t think she realized how much more of a name ‘Amaranth’ is than ‘Barley’ when she did it.”

“What’s your name as a nymph?” I asked.

“I don’t have one,” she said. “Not one you can say in words. What I have is a feeling, like sunlight on your brow and a light breeze dancing across your skin. That’s how nymphs identify each other… feelings. We didn’t always belong to men, you know… once we were wild, but the rivers were dammed, and the forests cut down, and the wide open spaces fenced in. We learned to get along in the new world better than our sisters, the hamadryads and the naiads, did.”

She sounded sad, for once. Really, truly sad. I didn’t like the sound of Amaranth sad.

“I saw a dryad once,” I told her. “When I was in the first grade, on a school trip to the Oak Tribe Preserve. It was for naturalism class… we were looking for leaves and nuts and things. We had a check list… it was alphabetical, and I was going from the top down instead of, you know, just picking up whatever I came across. So, I was looking for an acorn, and I couldn’t find any, until I accidentally kicked one and sent it rolling down the path. It stopped at the foot of a beautiful woman… naked, with green hair. She handed it to me, and I got this feeling… I thought I’d imagined it, but I’ll never forget it. It was like looking at cool, green-tinged sunlight and hearing the wind rustling the leaves. There wasn’t any wind, though.”

“She was telling you her name,” Amaranth said. “She was introducing herself… saying hello.”

“She handed me the acorn, and then walked off into the forest,” I said. “I kept wandering around trying to see her again. We were told to stay on the paths, so I did, but I followed it everywhere, looking through the trees. I came back to the clearing an hour late, with nothing but that one acorn.”

Amaranth laughed.

“I didn’t tell anybody at school what I’d seen. It seemed… private,” I said. “I told my mother. She’s the one who told me that it had been a dryad, and that there weren’t very many of them left because we’d cut down most of their trees and made the rest live on preserves. That’s how she put it: ‘we cut down their trees.’ I cried, because I thought she meant that how it sounded, to a six-year-old.”

“Even as a child, you were determined to take guilt to yourself,” Amaranth said.

“She reminded me of my mother,” I said. “The dryad. They didn’t look anything like each other, actually, but there was something… motherly about her. And also, maybe it was because the only woman I’d ever seen undressed before that was my own mother, changing or getting out of the bath. Maybe I couldn’t help thinking ‘mother’ when I saw another nude woman. Sometimes, when I try to picture my mother, I don’t know which I’m seeing more of… her, or the dryad. It’s all tangled up in my head.”

“Well, then,” Amaranth said mischievously. “I guess now we know why you’re so fixated on my tits.”

“Huh?”

She just laughed.

“Tell me about your home,” I said. “I mean, I know it’s a field… but… what kind of a place is it in?

“It’s a wonderful place,” she said. “The farmers there follow a lot of the older ways. They’ve cultivated as many different nymph-fields as they could, and trade with anybody else to get more. Some of the grains we grow would normally be wrong for that climate, or in the local soil, but as long as we do our jobs, the fields flourish.”

“How do you… cultivate a nymph-field?” I asked.

“You need to transplant living plants and a bit of soil from an existing field,” she said. “It’s tricky, because you have to take enough, but not too much… or else the nymph who’s donating will weaken too much. Once the plants have taken root, the men folk have to sprinkle the ground around it with their seed, and if everything goes according to plan, then after several days of this, a nymph will walk out of the center of the plants.”

“And if everything doesn’t go according to plan?”

“Then it’s just a bunch of guys jerking off in a field,” she said. “Which is good, too, I suppose. I mean, fresh air and exercise… right?”

It was my turn to laugh.

“And so, the ‘work’ you do… it improves the crop yield?” I asked. “What about the food you eat? Where does that go?”

“It nourishes the soil,” she said. “This body of mine is smaller than the field, and therefore, quite a bit easier to feed.”

I tried to wrap my head around that.

“So, the food that you eat… it’s somehow transported back to your home, and converted into a form the soil can use?” I asked. It seemed incredible… most forms of long-distance sending that involved more than thoughts, words, or pictures involved huge amounts of energy.

“You’re used to thinking about practical magic,” she said. “This is divine, natural magic. I don’t need to transport or convert what I eat, because I am the field, and it is me.”

“And when you have sex, you, what… feed off the emotions it creates?” I asked.

“Mmm… nope,” Amaranth said. “The emotions we generate are ours to keep. I’d never think of taking them away from anybody. The sex is a powerfully symbolic act of fertility… it makes the soil and the crops more fertile by the simple fact of its being.”

“But, either way, the reason you have so much sex is because it makes your field grow better,” I reasoned.

“I have sex because it brings people joy,” she said. “And… it brings me joy, which is definitely worth mentioning. The fact that it serves a greater purpose is good, but it would be wrong to act as though the pleasure it brings is a mistake, or an afterthought… or a deliberate attempt to pervert its holy purpose. It is a privilege, what we do… not a duty, and never a burden.”

“They say that only the intelligent races have sex for pleasure,” I pointed out. I meant to sound conversational, but my voice made it a slight accusation. I’d been instilled with a very different viewpoint on sex, and though I didn’t quite believe in that viewpoint, I was still finding my thinking somewhat bound up in it. “In nature, it’s only for procreation.”

“I’ve heard that,” Amaranth said. “But I doubt it’s true. I don’t think, when a dog couples with a footstool, that he is seeking to further his lineage in the form of some dog/furniture hybrid. I think he’s simply doing what feels good. If you put a bitch in front of him instead of the footstool, it doesn’t really change anything.”

“But that’s just instinct,” I said.

“Instinct isn’t an enchantment that binds creatures like a golem,” Amaranth said. “It’s a good feeling about some things, and a bad feeling about others. The lower animals have sex for the pure joy of it, and are rewarded… assuming they found a mate instead of furniture… with offspring. It requires intelligence to have sex for any reason other than joy… or even worse, without joy.”

“Amaranth?”

“Yes?”

“Do you really love me?” I asked. I wasn’t sure what I wanted her to say. I still didn’t want for me to be a lesbian, but I didn’t want for Amaranth not to love me.

“I really love everybody,” she said. “And I really love you.”

“How can you possibly love everybody?”

“With all my heart,” Amaranth said. “That’s the only way to do it.” She moved her arm, clapping her hand on my left breast. My breath caught in my throat, though the gesture was only incidentally sexual. “Your heart is exactly as big as the world, so you can’t love the entire world with anything less than all of it.”

“Do you love Sooni, even after what I told you?”

“I love her, and I feel very badly for her if her closest friends had to be purchased by her parents,” Amaranth said. “Whom I also love very dearly… and feel badly for if they don’t know any better.”

“How do you love somebody you’ve never even met?” I asked.

“It’s very easy,” she said. “The real trick with some people is to keep loving them, once you get to know them.”

I snorted. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but when I looked back on it later, it was actually kind of remarkable that I was able to laugh at this as a joke and not just automatically assume she meant me.

“How long do you want to keep lying here?” she asked me again.

“Just a little while longer.”
End Of Book One: Welcome Weekend

“Well, I don’t got anything planned today,” Celia said in response to Amaranth’s suggestion. “Why not?”

“Let’s Mack and I take a walk,” the nymph clarified, putting her glasses back on and standing up.

I rose, too, but said, “I think I just want to go back to my room.”

I started to leave, but she reached out and grabbed my wrist. I stopped in my tracks, giving her a cold look.

“Are you going to start slapping me around, too?” I asked. It sounded snippy, and she didn’t deserve it, especially since there was no way in hell she could know what I was talking about.

“I just want to talk,” she said. “About a lot of things… but we can start with who’s hitting you already.”

“Bet it’s that big ogre warrior,” Celia said. “I heard her talking in the showers about you… she’s either got the hots for you, or she wants to kill you. I’m not sure.”

“I don’t even know Belinda, okay?” I said. “Anyway, it’s really not worth getting into…”

“If somebody’s hurting you, we are getting into it,” Amaranth said. She held my hand a little tighter.

“I’m not somebody that can be harmed just by a couple of slaps,” I reminded her.

“You might not be injured but you can still be hurt by them,” Amaranth said.

“Well, maybe I’m not such a big pussy that I can’t handle a little pain,” I said angrily.

“No, see, you totally are,” Celia said. “Why else would you be rolling over for somebody whose head you could probably just rip off the…”

Amaranth hissed at Celia. I mean, she actually hissed. Celia jumped, and blinked thin filmy membranes over her eyes for a second before turning and stomping off, muttering something about “taking that tone with me.”

“Come,” Amaranth said imperiously, pulling me by the wrist towards the side doors, out and across the patio seating area, and through the grounds. She ignored my protests and my half-formed questions. If I’d pulled hard, I could have jerked my wrist away from her. She wasn’t that strong. But it was another case where it was easier to go along with her than do anything else. She was my friend.

She pretty much dragged me all the way back to where we’d had our conversation the previous day, by the big tree. When she finally stopped there and let go of me, I saw an unfamiliar, strangely resolute look on her face. It scared me a little bit.

“Let me guess,” I said. “This is the part where you’re going to tell me who’s in charge in our relationship, isn’t it?”

“Oh, you just bet your bitable little butt it is,” she said fiercely. She put her hands on my shoulders and gave me a hard shove backwards. When you’re a skinny little shrimp, it doesn’t matter how much strength you’ve got in your arms and legs… if somebody pushes you, you are going to move.

I ended up sprawling on my back on the grass.

Amaranth stood over me.

So far, I’d had her chest in front of my face an awful lot… mostly because I’m shorter than her and I don’t always like making eye contact… and honestly, a nymph’s breasts are pretty big, and surprisingly well-supported considering there’s nothing holding them up… but from my vantage point on the ground, it was something else entirely that had my attention.

Up until that point in my life, it had never really occurred to me to look at another girl’s cooch before. Shocking, huh? I’m sure, at some point in the dusty past, when I was too young to care, I must have seen another girl naked… and of course, I’d showered with other girls in high school, but I’d kept my eyes resolutely to myself. I’d already been the school freak. I hadn’t needed to give anybody another reason to fear me.

And, of course, I had gazed images of guys on the ethernet, because I was curious about what they looked like… but, I mean, if I ever forgot what a girl’s no-no bits looked like, I could just take off my pants and sit down.

Although, to be honest, I’d never spent a lot of time looking at or thinking about what I had down there.

I mean… it’s dirty and gross.

Right?

That’s what I’d always been taught, and I really saw no evidence to the contrary. So maybe, like the nymphs, I had one less nasty thing my body had to do… as a natural consequence of not really eating or drinking… but I couldn’t look at that as a good thing, as it was just one more reminder of my freakish heritage. Plus, there was still plenty of other grossness to be considered, like the other thing I did once a month, besides feeding.

Yeah. That one.

I got no free pass in that area.

That’s why I never really understood girls masturbating… or honestly believed that it happened, outside of maybe a few command performances for a male audience. What kind of pleasure would be worth getting your hands that dirty? It wasn’t the kind of dirt that you could see, of course, but I was sure that I would feel it all the same, no matter how much I washed…

Did I mention my grandmother had a lot to say on the subject?

Anyway, there was nothing gross or dirty about Amaranth… just a couple neat folds in a mound of flesh, between a statue-perfect pair of thighs. Above it, a tiny patch of amber hair, neat and trim. It was the only body hair she had, anywhere. Did nymphs shave? I wondered. It seemed odd that they wouldn’t go “natural”, but… I couldn’t picture a hairy nymph. I wouldn’t want to.

I stared, okay? I just flat out stared. You would, too. She was an ideal given form. I don’t care how straight you are… or gay, if you’re a guy… you would have stared, too.

You might have even wanted to reach up and touch it, a little.

I realized that Amaranth was talking and I wasn’t hearing a word of it, about the same time she did. I turned my gaze up at her face… which was positively livid… just as she yelled, “You aren’t even listening!”

…and sat down, straddling my chest.

“You are in charge of you!” she said, pointing her finger in my face… her fingernail uncomfortably close to my eye. “Nobody else! Just you!”

“Okay, okay!” I shouted, though honestly, I was trying to remember what we’d even been talking about before she’d shoved me to the ground.

“I don’t care if you like being told what to do sometimes,” she continued. “I think it’s cute… but you will not use it as an excuse to shut down and hide inside yourself!”

“I don’t…” I started to protest… wondering where she got the idea that I liked being told what to do… but she was still on a tear.

“I like you, Mack, I like you a lot, and I want to help you,” she said, sounding a lot angrier than I think most people do when they tell somebody they like them, “and if I have to slap you around, and beat you down to do it… if that’s what it takes to get through to you…”

I braced for it… whatever it was. Emotionally or physically, she was about to let me have it. I probably deserved it, too. What had I been staring at her for?

“…then… then you’re on your own,” she said, sadly. She leaned forward, putting her hands on the ground above my shoulders to push herself up. I tried to turn my head to the side, but that just made my lips brush against one of her breasts.

Not a lesbian, I thought. I’ve got have at least one normal thing about me. Please. One normal thing. That’s not asking so much. My eyes were tearing up. I don’t know who exactly I was praying to, if that’s what I was doing.

She stood up, and turned so that she wasn’t hanging over me… which also made her face away from me. I kind of crab-walked back into a sitting position. Maybe it was just the angle, but I’d never really realized that you could still see a woman’s pussy from behind, when she stands with her legs slightly spread. That seemed weird to me. The things that go through your head when you’re ogling your friend’s genitalia.

Yeah, I was still staring.

“I won’t make you talk about who hit you,” she said. She was hugging herself, as though she were cold. It was a bright morning in what still felt more like summer than fall, but she was shivering. “Or why you’re so convinced that you’re evil, or anything else that you don’t want to talk about… though I will ask you to think about talking about these things. I don’t think they’ll bother you as much as they do now, if you can get them out of your head… but it’s your decision to make. I won’t force you to do anything, Mack… even things I know you want.”

If she knew what I wanted, she was one up on me.

She turned suddenly, and the fierce look was back on her face.

“But if somebody hits you again… if anybody hurts you, physically… you will tell me,” she said. “Me or Puddy. You’ve got friends, Mack. You need to trust us.”

“I do,” I said, getting to my feet and brushing grass off the back of my jeans. The mention of Puddy had thrown me enough for me to tear my gaze off… well, anyway. I was coming back to my senses.

She’s a nymph, I reminded myself. It’s probably some kind of magic.

“I’m serious,” she said. “Promise me that if anybody is hitting you, you will tell me or Puddy.”

My insides twisted into a knot. Even if I was any good at lying, I wouldn’t want to lie to her… but… the idea of telling her about Puddy felt like betraying a confidence. I was fairly sure it was over, but if I was guessing wrong and Puddy had another drunken outburst, I’d be obligated to tell… and that wouldn’t really be fair.

Amaranth stared at me, implacably.

“If anybody hits me, you or Puddy will know about it,” I said finally. This, I could live with. If anybody else gave me any problems, I could tell both of them about it… but it’d still be technically true if Puddy had a relapse. “I promise.”

“Well… okay,” Amaranth said. For a moment, I thought she was going to say something else. I guess my seeming agreement had taken her off guard. Great. Now I felt like a liar again. “That’s fine, then.”

“Can we talk about something else?” I asked.

“Yeah, okay,” she said. “Like what? Um… how about, what classes are you taking this semester?”

“I kind of had something specific in mind,” I said. “It’s about Sooni.”

“Oh, that eastern girl with the fox ears?” Amaranth said. “I like her clothes… and her fox ears are just adorable, with all that hair braided up in buns between them. Oh, and her accent…”

“Yeah, she’s a treasure,” I said. “But, do you remember at the meeting on Friday, how when it was the nekoyokais’ turn, she kind of… spoke for them?”

“She sort of introduced them, if that’s what you mean,” Amaranth said uncertainly.

“I don’t think that’s how she saw it,” I said. “Friday night, she kicked one–Kai–out of her room and made her sleep with the other two. Then, yesterday, she got angry with Kai and chased her out of her room again, only this time she was hitting and clawing at her, and Kai’s hands were all bandaged… and then she and other nekos took her into their room and…” I faltered. I’d been wanting to tell somebody about this, but now that I came to the point, I wasn’t sure I could.

“…and?” Amaranth prompted gently.

“I think they were beating her,” I said quietly. “Over, and over again…”

“Oh,” Amaranth said.

“That’s it?” I asked. “‘Oh?’”

“Um… please don’t take this the wrong way?” Amaranth said.

“Say it.”

“You’re… well, you’re a little sheltered,” she said.

“You mean, you think it’s something like your pain fetish,” I said.

“Yes, or like yours for being dominated,” she said. I didn’t bother to argue. There was something more important going on.

“She treats her like property!” I said. I told her of the conversation with Kiersta, in which Sooni had almost called Kai “her neko” instead of her friend, and of what I’d witnessed this morning, including Sooni’s boast about how much Kai’s family had been paid for her.

“Well, there are laws about slavery,” Amaranth said carefully. “I’m sure Sooni’s country has its own customs there, too. It’s possible that she’s not doing anything illegal.”

“That doesn’t make it right!” I said. My fervor seemed to take her aback.

“I know that, Mack,” she said. “And I’m not saying that it is right… but there are moral rights, and there are legal rights, and being morally right won’t protect you if you interfere with somebody else’s legal rights.”

“You don’t think we need to do anything about Kai?” I asked.

“I think we need to look into it, carefully,” she said. “You don’t want to make things worse for her.” She looked at me thoughtfully. “Sooni’s not the one… she didn’t hit you?”

“No,” I said. “She called me some names and said I should drop out. She told me Kai would be safer if I left and gave her my room… which, honestly, is probably true. If I had any place else to go, I’d probably consider it.”

“Oh, don’t say that!” Amaranth said. “It’s okay to have a hero complex, but not if you sacrifice yourself over it.”

“Hero complex?” I said, staring at her in disbelief. “What do you mean? I don’t have a hero complex.”

“You’ve been here two days… you have two helpless victims on your to-save list,” she said. Her voice was lightly teasing. “What’s it going to be Monday? Rescuing an elven princess?”

“I told you, I don’t like seeing people..”

“I know!” Amaranth said. “And honestly, Mack, that’s what I think I love the most about you.”

“You… love everybody,” I mumbled, dazed. Why was I dazed? I was too dazed to really think why.

“I love everybody… and… I love you,” she said.

It was like the world moved, but she stayed still… and then our faces were inches apart… and then we were… we were… then, one of us was kissing the other.

I had a lot of reasons to feel the shiver of excitement that ran up my body, from my toes to my head and then not quite all the way back down.

It didn’t mean anything.

It was my first kiss. and it was with a semi-divine anthropomorphic ideal of sex. You’d have felt something, too, I promise. It was just a kiss.

Just a kiss!

Then, one of my hands was on one of her breasts, which was being squeezed between us, and the other… the other was on her thigh. Between her thighs. We were still kissing. Her arms behind me, one pulling my head in… one on my ass, almost lifting me off the ground. Swept off my feet, I thought. She turned us around so that my back hit the tree trunk, and pressed herself against me. I hit my head. I could feel the bark through the back of my shirt, and against the seat of my jeans.

My mind staggered.

My mind reeled.

My mind may have giggled just a tiny little bit.

College.

Trying new things… that’s what college is.

It’s normal to try new things.

Normal.

She’s a half-demon, as I understand it,” Amaranth said placidly.

“But… don’t demons eat people?” Mariel yelled. She’d leaped backwards, knocking her chair over, and was looking at me with a horrified expression… the same expression I usually got when this topic came up.

“Humans, you mean,” Celia said. “Demons eat humans.”

“That’s actually not true,” Amaranth said very calmly. “Demons eat parts of humans… and not even that often. It’s always something specific… something like a couple of eyeballs a month, or a heart or a liver every new moon, or something like that. Sometimes, but not often, it’ll be something completely intangible, like beauty or youth… or a soul, but most of those can go for a whole year or longer without feeding. Mack, Mariel, sit down… please.”

I’d got up, meaning to flee. I couldn’t, though. I couldn’t sit down, either. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. All around the room, people had stopped eating, stopped talking… they were just staring. They couldn’t hear Amaranth’s awful monologue, but I had no doubt they’d all heard Mariel. Breakfast was not the busiest time of day, but the place was far from deserted.

“Am I the only one here who cares that we’ve been sitting at a table with a skysucking cannibal monster!?!” the sylph shrieked shrilly. Her voice had become painfully high, but was still perfectly intelligible.

“Hey, watch the ‘m-word’,” Celia said.

“Mack is a good person,” Amaranth said. “I’m sure she never eats anything that hasn’t been legally and ethically sourced. Right, Mack?

“I don’t know, that shit’s gotta get expensive,” Celia said. “If it was me, I’d just go out and kill somebody, you know? Lots of fuckers walking around with eyes they probably don’t even deserve.”

“Fucking… oh, just wait till Puddy hears what they put her in a room with!” Mariel said. “She’s mostly human… she’s gonna flip!”

“Puddy knows,” I said. It was the first words I’d managed to get out, and even though I barely mumbled it, the sound of my voice made the others look at me. Even Amaranth had mostly been talking like I wasn’t there.

“She knows?” Mariel squeaked. “She actually knows?”

“She doesn’t care,” I said, without a lot of conviction. The simple truth was, I thought Puddy’s “hey, cool!” reaction was insane or naive… possibly both… Celia was just too dumb to mind anything that wasn’t human, and Amaranth wasn’t nearly judgmental enough for her own good.

Mariel’s reaction was the reasonable one.

“Oh, well… I mean… oh,” Mariel said. She seemed deflated. All four of her arms fell limply to her sides. “Puddy really doesn’t care?”

“Nobody cares,” Amaranth said firmly. “Now, why don’t you two please just sit back down before we get asked to leave?”

Mariel righted her chair, but I couldn’t help but notice that in the process of doing so, she pulled it way far out from the table. She was shaking like she was going to pop. I just stood there, though. I wanted to leave before anything else happened.

Wanted to.

Couldn’t.

“Sit down, Mack,” Amaranth said again. She looked at me over the top of her glasses again. “Sit… down… NOW,” she said. The severity of her voice shocked me back into my chair. “That’s better,” she said, in her usual, pleasant tone. “You know, it’s your business, but if you didn’t try to keep it a secret, you wouldn’t have to worry about people finding out like this, would you?”

“I’d rather people just didn’t find out, period,” I said.

“That’s probably impossible,” Amaranth said. “You’d keep running into holy symbols, and besides, no matter what the policy on confidentiality says, there’s bound to be whispers coming out of the administrative office from whoever’s seen your admissions forms. It’s just too interesting to keep quiet.”

“Uh oh, here comes trouble,” Celia said quietly. Impressively, she managed this without opening her mouth. The sound seemed to come from her throat. I guess I should have figured she used different vocal apparatus than the rest of us… aside from her being able to pronounce the other reptile girl’s name, there was no way she could be forming the same sounds we did with her snake’s tongue and teeth.

I wasn’t so distracted by her impressive bit of ventriloquism that I missed what she was talking about… a man in a beige button-up shirt was heading over to us with an insincere little smile just beneath his moustache. He had the same sort of badge that all the servers and the cashier wore, with the MU crest and the Sloan Food Services logo on it. Where the others’ had their positions listed, his read “Manager.”

I also couldn’t help but notice the guards who were waiting just inside the entrance, nervously handling the hilts of their swords.

“Hi there! Can we help you with something?” Amaranth asked the manager sweetly before he could speak. This seemed to fluster him a bit.

He looked back at the guards, and then he spoke. Not to Amaranth, though… he ignored her and looked right at me.

“Yes, well… the thing is, your presence is causing a bit of a disturbance, so we’re going to have to ask you to leave, for the comfort of the other students.”

I didn’t trust my voice to answer, so I just gave a little nod and started to scoot my chair back. Mariel, though, was already on her feet.

“Oh, okay,” she said. “No need for a fuss! I’ll just go.”

“Excuse me, miss, but I was actually talking to…”

“The person who caused the disturbance,” Mariel said. “Right. Me. That’s me, right? I mean, nobody else was doing anything, so it must be me that you’re talking to, right?” Her voice was rising in pitch, volume, and speed. “Unless somebody else was doing something that I missed because I was screaming my head off, ‘aaaaaaah!’, like the crazy little sylph that I am, then I’m the one who has to leave, right? So I’ll just go. No need to use force. Am… Cele… um… I’ll see you girls back at the dorm.”

She grabbed her sequined purse… the exact same icy blue shade as her dress, which made me wonder if she had a matching purse for all her dresses… brushed a lot of stuff that wasn’t there off of herself, and then headed for the door. I’m not sure if “stomped” or “bounced” would be the best way to describe it. It was like watching a puppet storming off stage. The guards looked perplexed.

The manager’s lips all but disappeared into a tight little line that represented his best attempt at not frowning. He looked at the guards and shook his head. They left, still looking confused. Around the room, everybody was still staring at us. It seemed like nobody had even watched Mariel’s exit.

“So, was somebody else doing something wrong?” Amaranth asked pointedly.

“Er… no,” the manager said. “No… you, uh, ladies enjoy the rest of your breakfast, and try to… try not to…”

He left, unable to finish the thought. Conversation around the room resumed slowly, but was very subdued… angry murmuring, I guessed, at the fact that I had been allowed to stay.

“Well, that was nice of Mariel,” Amaranth said. “Especially after what she did.”

“She just wanted to get away from me,” I said.

“She could have let you leave, then,” Amaranth said.

“But… she couldn’t even look at me,” I pointed out.

“And she probably won’t be able to for a while,” Amaranth said. “Partly because she can’t help how she feels about demons… but partly because she’ll feel badly for feeling that way about you. If you give her time, she’ll come around.”

“That’s stupid,” I said. “If she hates demons, she wouldn’t have any reason to feel bad about hating me.”

“Do you really think you’re the only person whose feelings ever get that complicated?” Amaranth asked. “People generally have more than one reason for doing and feeling the things they do and feel, even if they don’t like to acknowledge it.”

“You make it sound like you think everybody is this messed up in their head,” I said.

“Only if you consider entertaining complex emotions and seeing things in terms other than black and white to be ‘messed up’,” Amaranth said, a little archly.

“Anyway, at least there’s not a lot of people in here,” Celia said.

“It doesn’t matter. Everybody will be heading back to their dorm and telling everybody that there’s a demon in Harlowe Hall,” I said. In fact, it seemed like the dining room was emptying out a bit faster than would have been normal, as if they couldn’t wait to spread the news. Or they just couldn’t stand to be near me. “Oh, shit… that girl, Twyla. She has horns. Everybody’ll think it’s her. Fuck, if anything happens to her, I’ll…”

“…carry it around for the rest of your life as one more stick to beat yourself with,” Amaranth said. “Right? That’s what you’ll do, isn’t it?”

“Horns… is that supposed to be a demon thing?” Celia asked.

“People think it is,” Amaranth said. “But, it’s not like there’s anything we could do about that.”

“Are you saying I shouldn’t feel bad if Twyla catches shit because of me?” I asked.

“Come on, Mack, she’s probably had to deal with that kind of prejudiced thinking all her life,” Amaranth said. “She’d probably get a few idiots heckling her or making signs at her even if you weren’t here. You need to learn to stop beating yourself up… you deserve better.”

“I don’t,” I said. “I really don’t. You guys act like it’s no different than being half-elf or anything else, but it isn’t. I’m… bad,” I said, and even this tasted like a lie. “Bad” was somebody who shoplifted. “Bad” was somebody who got a little drunk and lost control. I was worse than that. “I’m… I’m evil.”

“Please, you’re too big a wuss to be evil,” Celia said.

“You are the least evil person that I know,” Amaranth said. “Mariel calls you a monster to your face and you still manage to feel bad that she has to leave because of it. Most people just ignore Two if they don’t want her to do something for her, but you try to help her.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. She really didn’t. She was giving me credit for things I didn’t deserve, which only made me feel worse about everything. “I only help Two because I can imagine what it feels like to be her… to be stuck, paralyzed with fear and indecision, not knowing what’s allowed or expected of you… waiting for somebody to tell you what you’re supposed to do. I know that feeling. I hate it… and… I just can’t stand to look at her and feel that way.”

Infuriatingly, Amaranth simply smiled and nodded.

“That’s called empathy, Mack,” she said. “It’s called love.”

“It’s not love… it’s selfish!”

“You don’t think love is selfish? Life is selfish,” Amaranth said. “We get a good feeling when we help each other. We get to come our brains out when we fuck one another. There’s a reason why the only time you hear the phrase ‘for goodness’s sake’ is in children’s tales. Those who made us, in their wisdom, do what they can to reward us for doing what’s right.”

“Those who made you, maybe,” I said. “I’ve got a pretty good idea what made me.”

“You know, if you really don’t care, then there would be a simpler way to handle Two: kill her,” Amaranth said blandly. “Just strangle her in her sleep, or bash her head in. She probably wouldn’t fight back.” She gave a little shrug. “You know, I have the feeling that she might not even mind.”

I stared at her in horror. Where the fuck had this come from?

“Don’t say that,” I said in a hoarse whisper.

“Well, if you’re squeamish, you could just pick a direction and tell her to start walking and never stop,” Amaranth said thoughtfully. “Yeah, that should work. She’s probably got some ingrained commandments about self-destruction, but that would at least get her out of your hair for a while. Wanna look her up, when we get back to Harlowe, and give that a try?”

“How can you even suggest that?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Celia said. “I think it would probably work.”

Amaranth took off her glasses and looked at me. I’d never yet seen her without them. The difference was… I don’t know what the difference was. I could see her eyes more clearly, and it seemed to change the shape of her face a bit. That was the extent of the actual difference, but the effect it had was more dramatic… like seeing myself in the mirror after Mariel had made me up.

Somehow, Amaranth had gone from an innocent nymph to a naked woman.

I don’t know why the glasses mattered. Barley didn’t wear glasses, and she didn’t have this kind of effect on me. I was having a hard time thinking, though… it was the same familiar crushing paralysis… only, not that familiar.

“Do these ideas bother you, for some reason?” she asked. Her voice sounded breathy. Was it, or was that just in my head? I couldn’t look at her face… at any of her.

“Of course they bother me,” I said, turning my head away uncomfortably. “Two’s a person. You can’t talk about killing her… or getting rid of her… like that. What’s wrong with you?”

I really wondered this, too. Had she got into Celia’s potion stash? Had her earlier personality been an act?

“So… wait. Something has to be wrong with somebody, for them to act the way I’m suggesting?”

“Of course,” I said. If my mind hadn’t been so cloudy, I probably would have seen where she was going. “You’d have to be completely evil to treat Two like that.”

“But… you don’t treat her like that,” she said.

“No, I fucking don’t!” I said. I blinked in surprise. I didn’t. “I don’t,” I said again, quietly. Then, a little more confidently, “I really don’t.”

“Oh, hey, you’re not completely evil,” Celia said kind of absently. “Hoo-fucking-ray, we all learned something today.”

“Shush, Celia,” Amaranth said. “See, Mack, the courts aren’t one hundred percent agreed on the personhood of even living, flesh-and-blood golems like Two, but you’re instinctively offended when somebody treats her as an object. That’s not just ‘not evil.’ That’s something more.”

“You don’t understand,” I said, horrified. I could almost accept that I wasn’t evil, but did she actually think I was good? She was looking at me with so much admiration, admiration that I’d done nothing to deserve. I had to make her understand. “When I see somebody being hurt, I don’t even want to look. I just want to run away. But I can’t…” This reminded me that I still hadn’t told her about Kai’s plight.

“Of course you can’t,” she said. I still wasn’t able to look at her, but she managed to convey entirely through the sound of her voice both a sense of patient charity and a frustrated eyeroll. “Let’s take a walk, okay?”

“You know, I’m really glad I don’t use my butt for anything except sex,” Amaranth said cheerily as she set her breakfast tray down on the table.

It was just me, her, Celia, and Mariel… who’d explained that Puddy had a headache. Everybody else seemed to be sleeping late. It suited me fine. I’d rather it’d just been Amaranth, actually. I wanted to talk to her about everything I’d learned about Sooni… and maybe what had happened with Puddy. Though, that had been kind of private. If it was over anyway, like I thought it must be, there was no sense dragging it out into the open.

“Not that I don’t like a bit of pain,” Amaranth continued. “But, after being reamed out by a half-ogre and a centaur in one night, I can’t imagine that I would enjoy having to… oh, wait.” A slightly–only very slightly–embarrassed look crossed her face. “Mortals don’t like discussing one bodily function while performing another. I always forget that one.”

I was more than a little disturbed–having just added another item to my “people really do that?!?” list–but I hadn’t got any food, and Celia and Mariel seemed completely unconcerned. Mariel’s whirlwind arms were cutting pancakes, pouring syrup, and peppering scrambled eggs. She looked like she had enough food to choke a giant. I wondered where the hell it all went. Celia had eschewed solid food entirely for this meal… she’d got an even bigger glass of milk today, and another one with chocolate milk.

“So… hold on,” Celia said. “Which one is the sex hole… front or back?”

“Front,” I said.

“Either,” Amaranth said. “Though only the front one’s used in reproduction. It’s also quite a bit stretchier, but the back’s just got more depth built into it,” she continued in a horrifically cheerful conversational tone. “Some guys, there’s just no way of being able to take them all the way in any other way.”

“Sex as a multiple choice question,” Celia said. She shrugged, and took a swig of her chocolate milk. “Fucking weird.”

“It isn’t really,” I said. My world was expanding a little too quickly. I was busy trying to shove it back down into a size that would more easily fit inside my head. “Multiple choice. Normal people, uh, I mean, most people… you know, normally…”

“My boyfriend was always trying to get me to do anal with him,” Mariel said. “He was like, ‘it’s actually very pleasurable for both partners’, and I’m like, ‘Okay, smart guy… you first, then.’” She giggled. “I was actually bluffing, but he headed off towards the nearest human town and came back with a big purple strap-on… and after that our relationship was never better.” She shivered a bit, a dreamy expression over her face.

“Wait, you have a boyfriend?” I asked. This surprised me… she’d glommed onto Puddy so fast…

“Oh, yeah, and boy, was he pissed when I called him yesterday and told him that I’m a lesbian now,” she said. “I bet my dad’s going to be even madder.” She seemed pleased at the idea.

“So, you aren’t really a lesbian…” I said, a little confused.

“I don’t know. Maybe I wasn’t really straight,” she said. “It’s college, Mack… we’re supposed to try new things! Like you and make-up. Oh, which reminds me… I want to do your hair.”

“What, you mean, cut it?” I asked suspiciously.

“I mean style it,” she said.

“But, does that involve cutting?” I said.

“Um… frequently,” she said, wringing both sets of hands.

“In this case?” I pressed.

“In this case… that would be sort of a general yes-ish,” she said.

“No, thank you,” I said. I wasn’t unhappy with my hair. I was less happy at the thought of Mariel near my head with anything sharper than the allegedly soft eyeliner pencil she’d mauled me with the night before.

“Oh, but I’ve got some really cute ideas for you,” Mariel said.

“I think your hair’s cute as it is,” Amaranth said. “All kind of… scruffy, tousled.”

“Why not just shave the whole thing?” Celia said, rubbing her own smooth pate.

“Well, anyway,” Mariel said, “I hope you’ll let me, because it could be good advertising. See, I’m thinking of earning extra money as a stylist… you know, out of my room. I’d be pretty cheap, because my customers would be other students who maybe couldn’t afford to go to a full salon, you know? I’d probably just charge something like one silver for the basic treatment, and go from there.”

That was cheap?

“My haircut only cost me fifty copper,” I said.

She stared at me for about eight seconds longer than was strictly necessary.

“Oh, and it looks so good on you!” she said. “But, anyway, obviously I wouldn’t charge you, since you and Puddy are… you’re… hey, what exactly are you and Puddy?”

“We’re friends,” I said.

“Right,” she said, sounding unconvinced. Since she’d slept with Puddy both of the nights we’d all been there, I don’t know why she would have a hard time believing there was nothing else between us… or why she wouldn’t seem to mind the idea that there was.

Was I really so sheltered? Was there nobody left in the world who didn’t just want to find one person–of possibly even the opposite sex–and just, you know, date them? Sex optional, hold the strap-ons and double-teaming… and reaming… and doughnut-licking.

But, as long as the subject was sex, maybe I could clear up a point or two for myself.

“Um, so, Amaranth,” I said. “That guy who picked you up in the hall… with the half-ogre, I mean. Was he a satyr, or a faun?”

“Oh, Rorick? He’s a faun,” Amaranth said. “They both have goat-like legs and tiny feet, but if you look closely, the satyrs have toes, where the fauns have actual cloven hooves. There’s some difference about the facial structure, too, but it’s more subtle… satyrs are generally a bit rougher-hewn, with animal-like ears, and more hair on the upper body. Fauns are more sharply divided between goat and man. Then, of course, there’s the fact that satyrs have disproportionately large genitals, where as fauns are built exactly like humans in that regard. Still, if you have any doubt, it’s easiest to just check out the feet.”

“Wait, you mean… that was a normal human… sized… thing?” I asked, goggling at her. He’d seemed so huge in the hallway.

“Yeah, Rorick’s pretty close to average,” Amaranth said with a shrug. “Maybe just a little bit on the eastern slope of the bell curve. Not much over six inches, but I’d say when he was really happy, he might have got up to about six and three eighths, six and a half.”

“Hold on… you mean they change sizes?” Celia asked. Her hinged jaw had dropped.

I was thinking the same thing. Mariel was staring at us with an amused expression on her face. I was glad to know my ignorance made for good entertainment.

“Well, there’s a bit of give to it, you know?” Amaranth said. “It’s just more apparent with the larger guys. I tend to notice regardless because, well… I know cock.”

“And he… Rorick… isn’t one of the ‘larger guys’?” I asked.

“No, not especially,” Amaranth said. “Why?”

When I’d seen him, all I could think was, “That couldn’t possibly fit where it’s supposed to!” I mean, guys call it a slit for a reason. It’s a fucking slit! You can’t jam something like that into a slit. It’d be like… trying to deliver a package through the letter slot.

I’d read a lot of trashy romance… and trashier porno stories… that talked about women “opening like blossoming flowers” in anticipation of their lovers’ touches, or shit like that, but I always figured that was mostly hyperbole.

I’d sure never felt anything like it.

It’s not just that I was a virgin… I was extra virgin. Like olive oil. My only experience with vaginal penetration at that point had been gynecological. In case you’re a member of a gender that’s never had the distinct pleasure, let me tell you that it’s not an experience to seal forever in the scrapbook of your memories. My feeling was, if a trained healer who specialized in the female anatomy couldn’t poke around down there without causing that much pure physical discomfort, it was hard for me to imagine some guy like Rorick bludgeoning away with a six-inch meat hammer could bring any sort of enjoyment.

“You okay, honey?” Amaranth asked.

“I think you’ve turned me off sex forever,” I said.

“With guys, anyway,” Amaranth said, picking at her bowl of puffed wheat cereal. She opened a book she’d brought–something about pendulums, by the cover–and started leafing through it in her usual haphazard fashion.

“Yeah, with…” I started to agree, before realizing what she was saying. “Wait, no… at all. I’m not into girls. I like boys.”

“Of course,” Amaranth said agreeably. “You just can’t imagine yourself having sex with any of them.”

I glared at her.

“You told me that you believed me when I said I wasn’t a lesbian,” I said accusingly.

“Oh, I absolutely do,” she said. She looked up from her book, gazing at me over the rims of her too-thick glasses. “And when you tell me that you are one, I’ll believe that, too,” she said placidly. “Self-identification is important. You have to come to terms with some things on your own.”

“Personally, I don’t know what you’re complaining about,” Celia said. “At least if you’re a lesbian, you’ll never have to deal with some guy’s junk just sort of… hanging there… even when it’s not being used. The first time I saw a naked human, I thought he’d had some kind of hernia.”

“What, nagakin aren’t like that?” I asked.

“Our boys put their toys away when they’re done playing,” Celia said. “I never even saw my old boyfriend’s stuff. That’s fucking classy.”

I was learning way too much about male anatomy in one day. It was time for a subject change.

“Talking about reptiles,” I said. “What’s the name of that lizard girl who’s on the skirmish team? She’s the only one on our floor whose name I didn’t catch.”

“Oh,” Celia said. “You mean…” and she made a sharp, short hissing sound overlaid with some weird rattle from the back of her throat. “I talked to her a bit downstairs while I was checking in. She’s pretty cool.”

“I couldn’t begin to pronounce that,” I said.

“I heard Belinda and Rocky calling her ‘Hissy’, but you might not want to call her that unless she’s introduced to you that way,” Amaranth said. “She might not accept that level of familiarity from somebody she doesn’t know.”

“‘Hissy’,” Celia said, shaking her head. “I can’t believe she’d let a couple of mammals call her something so demeaning. If she lets a pinkskin do it, I’ll lose all respect for her.”

“Okay, I’ve had about enough of this ‘pinkskin’ crap,” I said. “I can understand Sooni and the nekos calling me pink, since she’s kind of a deep copper and the cats are furry, but your skin is the exact same texture and color as mine… and Rocky, whatever color or consistency her skin is, is actually more human than I am… so what the fuck exactly gives?”

“Are you calling me pink?” Celia asked. She stood up. “Are you… calling me… pink?”

“No! I’m not calling you anything,” I said. “I’m just saying…”

“I kind of respect you, Mack, but I will fucking bite you if you don’t respect me,” Celia said, sitting down. She slammed the table with her palm. “Fuck!”

“I just don’t understand,” I said.

“Epithets are often more about ideas than solid facts,” Amaranth said. “Most oppression is perceived to come from the humans of the Imperial Republic… who are mostly of a general pinkish sort of color.” She shrugged. “So, ‘pinkskin’ becomes the term for humans by those who resent them… as well as for anybody in sympathy with humans. Elves and dwarves are seen to be aligned with the humans, so they’re often lumped together, too, even though elves in particular generally have as little to do with humans as they can. Meanwhile, a race like the nagakin, which shows their human ancestry in their skin…”

“Oh, don’t you fucking start, too!” Celia snapped.

“…but has a more adversarial relationship, historically, are not usually grouped in,” Amaranth said. “Though, of course, you get differing levels of chauvinism, too… there’s some members of some races that would consider everybody at this table too human for their comfort.”

“Maybe by appearance,” I said glumly. “I have a hard time imagining myself as ‘too human.’”

“If it makes you feel any better, you’re way too fucking human for me,” Celia said. “Most races just don’t think that much about demons… it’s a human thing.”

“Holy fucking sky, you’re a demon?” Mariel screamed.

I got up early on Sunday. For the second night running, Puddy had spent the night in Mariel’s room. It seemed perfectly reasonable to me to think that they would end up a steady couple, and Puddy and I could just be friends. She’d probably already forgot her tirade about who was the “big dog”, and in time, I would, too. I wouldn’t hold it against her. She’d clearly been drunk.

Anyway, this was a new day. Yesterday had been my first full day at college and it had sucked, but nothing would really count until classes had started. That meant the pressure was off for Sunday, and as I’d woke up early enough to catch Mecknights when it came on at 5:30, it was already off to a good start.

I didn’t figure I’d have any trouble getting the TV in our lounge to myself. Who else would wake up so early on the last free day before classes?

Sadly, I had my answer as soon as I got out into the hall. The yokai girls were up and about: Sooni the bronze-skinned fox and at least two of her furry-featured cats were visible through the glass wall of the lounge. Their ears made them unmistakable from any distance.

New day, I thought, and it doesn’t matter how badly it sucks because it doesn’t count for anything… I can go in and sit down quietly. Maybe she’s not watching anything in particular. Maybe she’ll leave rather than share the lounge with a “pinkskin.”

Or maybe I would just go down to the basement and watch Mecknights on the big TV…

No. Puddy had told me I should stand up to others. I wouldn’t go all the way downstairs without trying. If Sooni wouldn’t let me put on my show, or if she was just plain horrible, then I’d use the basement lounge as my fallback. Thinking that made it easier, somehow. It didn’t matter if I went down in flames because I had somewhere to retreat to. I had a plan.

Sooni was seated on the couch, transfixed by whatever was on the TV. She wore a robe similar in design to the dressing gown I’d seen her in the day before, only much shorter, like the skirts the yokai had been wearing on Friday. I wondered if that particular fashion was to let their tails move freely, or just to show off their legs… or if, like Mariel, they simply had a very different standard of decency.

She didn’t notice me come in. The other two had pushed the table up against the back of the couch, and Sooni’s river of hair flowed out onto it. She had yards of it… way more than Mariel, even proportionate to her greater height. Every time I’d seen her before, it had been set in braids which had then been looped back on each other and piled in cones on top of her head. Most of it was braided now, but some was loose on the table, carefully laid out in long, curving lines to make it all fit. I think the loose strands must have been at least twice as long as she was tall.

Maliko and Suzi… the larger of the nekoyokai cat girls… were busily plaiting the rest of Sooni’s hair into tight braids. A pair of ornate, sturdy-looking brushes lay to one side. They worked quickly and skillfully… evidently, it was a job that they’d done before. At first I thought they were muttering something to themselves, but then I realized from watching their lips that Maliko was whispering short, simple words in Pax, and Suzi was repeating them. Boning up on her language skills before classes started on Monday, I guess.

I looked from them to Sooni, still who hadn’t seemed to notice me. She was still staring at the TV in mute, unblinking fascination even though it was on a commercial. Didn’t they have them where she came from? The sight of Kai–who I’d pegged as the least favorite of her three cat friends (if that’s what they were)–kneeling on the floor between her legs and looking at the TV with a considerably less serene expression made me forget the question as soon as I’d thought it.

She was wearing a ridiculous sea-green dress with an even shorter skirt than the yokai normally wore, made of ruffles that stuck almost straight out from her body. It was done up in the back with an overly large, overly elaborate bow which was matched by one on top of her head. The entirety of her face below the eyes was obscured by the back of a giant baby pacifier which hugged her face like a mask. I hoped it was a mask, and she didn’t actually have a giant rubber nipple holding it in her mouth.

“Why is she…” I started to ask, taken too aback to remember to be intimidated, only to be shushed by Maliko and Suzi at the same time.

“And now back to Pretty Neko Science Princess…“

Sooni leaned forward intently, putting her hands on Kai’s shoulders for support. I had never watched the show before; I was only halfway aware of it as “the show that’s on before Mecknights.” I fully admit that Mecknights is a kiddy show… this, however, was a baby show, a crappy imported animation with awful dialogue and the flimsiest rationales behind its science. I didn’t know much about it, besides that.

In fact, it’s a testament to how little attention I let my mind pay to the show’s existence that, upon meeting the three fuzzy-faced yokai, I hadn’t gone, “Oh! So that’s what a neko is!” I hadn’t cared enough to make the connection, but inside the TV were a lot of images of furry, cat-eared people waving their arms around and yelling things like “Where is Science Princess?”, while giant golems with clanking toothed wheels driving their joints destroyed a city of modern skyscrapers, a full dozen stories tall.

So, I knew what a “neko” was now, but I still had no fucking idea what a “science princess” was supposed to be, even after she appeared on stage in a puff of smoke, wearing an outfit that seemed to consist of a red miniskirt, a pair of handkerchiefs tied up in the back, and a tiara on her head. There was a curving sword on her back, like the kind that the real-life neko girls carried.

My eyes were mainly drawn to the princess’s sidekick, who was a small child in exactly the same outfit as Kai was wearing. Not just that, but the animated figure had the same white fur with black and brown markings as Kai did… as far as I could see, in the exact same spots. Even her disturbingly large eyes had a crude sort of resemblance to those of the girl on the floor in front of Sooni. The only real difference I could see between the two was that Kai’s fingers were wrapped in bandages.

“Come, Baby Kai-Kai… we must drink our science potion chemicals to give us great strength to defeat the evil gear-gos!” Science Princess said.

“Wait,” I said. “Did she just say…”

“Shh!” Sooni hissed, enraptured by the action inside the TV.

I couldn’t see why. Science Princess and her infant sidekick had just swallowed the green, glowing contents of a pair of oversized bottles which the princess had seemed to pull out of her billowing top (a feat made all the more remarkable by the fact that they had no lids or corks), and had both now gained several relative inches of height and a pronounced increase in muscular definition. Baby Kai-Kai crawled over to one of the “gear-gos” and lifted the whole thing up off the ground by holding onto one leg, then Science Princess jumped past, flashing her sword. The thing split cleanly apart into a bunch of different parts, the individual slashes on the giant monster waaaaaaay too far apart to all have been done by the same blade on a single pass.

The scene cut to a short, human-looking man with a big round head and a bulbous hooked nose, looking shocked. He cried, “This is not possible! No magic sword can hurt my gear-gos!”

Then, the view swung around to show the princess crouched on the ground between two of the giant things, with the bad guy still in the shot on top of a nearby building.

“Silly enchanter man,” Science Princess shouted up at him. “My sword is not magical, but is scientifically formulated to cause you pain when it cuts, as you can clearly see.“

Then, by way of demonstration, she swung her sword in two arcs from side to side, and the two metal behemoths split from top to bottom.

“Curse you, Science Princess! But Pretty Neko Island City has not seen the last of I, Dr. Technomagic!” the giant-nosed villain shouted from the rooftop, shaking his fist down at the heroes before running over and putting on what looked like a really bulky backpack. It had only just realized it was supposed to be a jet-pack, like what Skyknight wears on my show, when he activated it and went soaring off, away from view.

“Thank you, Pretty Neko Science Princess! You have saved our island city once more!”

“Luckily, the gear-gos were partly powered by science or my leverage detection circuits would never have led me here in time.”

I looked over at Sooni, unable to believe that she–or anybody with a brain–actually liked this shit, but she not only still had the same rapturous look on her face, she was actually mouthing all of the princess’s lines along with the image inside the box. I guess she must have seen this one before.

The episode ended with a party on the beach, and Baby Kai-Kai falling into a big bowl of gelatin fluff she’d been trying to eat from. Edifying stuff.

“Oh, Baby Kai-Kai!” said both Sooni and Science Princess as the episode ended, the fox girl pretty much strangling the hapless neko when she reached down and swept her up into an embrace by the neck, dragging Kai up onto her lap. Sooni was beaming a tooth-baring smile, but unlike all the times I’d seen her smiling before, a light of pure joy actually shone in her eyes. Kai looked like she wanted to die, but she kept her face pointed away from Sooni’s. I don’t think Sooni would have noticed, anyway. She was in her own world.

I just stared in horror at what was easily one of the five most disturbing things I’d ever seen. It actually ranked just below seeing the same cat girl cringing on the floor as Sooni swung away at her the day before. If that image wasn’t linked to what I’d heard from the nekos’ room afterwards, it might have been a tie.

As the end credits rolled… the end theme being nothing but the name of the show repeated over and over again… Sooni finally deigned to look up at me. When she saw the expression on my face, her own clouded over, and she pushed the costumed Kai away from her so hard that she stumbled into the cabinet that the TV sat upon.

“We always watch Pretty Neko Science Princess together,” she said to me, as if daring me to say something. “It is better in Yokano. The translators get so much wrong, but it is our favorite show.”

Behind her back, the other two nekos exchanged a look that pretty much told me what they thought about PNSP, but they didn’t say anything to contradict her.

“Does Kai always wear that outfit?” I asked, not sure I wanted to know.

“Oh, no,” Sooni said. “She has many more. I look up the episodes before they air, so that my Kai-Kai can match. She makes such a pretty Baby Kai-Kai!”

Kai had sort of just slumped down on the floor against the TV stand, and she tried to turn and hide her face against it while Sooni talked about her. Sooni wasn’t going to have any of that, though. She barked furiously in Yokano (which, I gathered, was the name of the language they spoke among themselves), and Kai leapt to her feet. She was visibly cringing behind the giant pacifier. I thought at first it was just fear, but I noticed the stiffness with which she walked back towards the couch, and the difficulty she seemed to have keeping her back straight. If I’d had any hope that I’d been mistaken in thinking that what I’d heard on Saturday was anything but a savage beating, there it went.

Suddenly, I was furious.

“What is she… your plaything?” I asked.

Sooni looked at me. The look on her face was shocked, a little offended, and slightly puzzled.

“She is my neko,” Sooni cooed, pulling Kai down onto the couch cushion beside her and laying a hand atop her head, just behind the giant bow. “She is my favorite. Nobody has a prettier neko than her. I looked all over Yokan to find my own Baby Kai-Kai, and here she is. Nobody has her but me.”

“She’s your pet? Your slave?” I asked disbelievingly, trying to get a handle on what exactly she was saying.

“My nekos are my friends!” she said, pulling Kai closer in a tight embrace. I heard Kai crying out in pain beneath the gag-like pacifier. “They love me!” Sooni declared, almost defiantly. “And I love them! Kai-Kai’s family gets three times what she is worth, because they did not want to send her away, but I wanted her so much…” As she said that, she shook her “friend” quite savagely. I could see fat tears spilling out of Kai’s eyes. “Anyway, what is it to you, girlkisser? Why are you even here?”

“Girlkisser,” Suzi repeated, tittering. She pronounced it more like “guhruh kissuh.” Would it have been worth the trouble to point out that I wasn’t one, to somebody who barely understood my language?

Anyway, I figured I would just lie and tell Sooni I had woke up early and wondered what was on TV. If she didn’t know how much I actually wanted it, she’d have less reason to be a bitch about it.

“I, um… I woke up and I wanted to watch Mecknights. I never miss it,” I said. Fuck! Fucking fuck fuck fuck! I needed to learn how to lie.

“That stupid show with the fire-arms and chained saws?” Sooni asked. “That show is for boys! Do you not know that?”

“I like it,” I said curtly. I wanted to launch into an eloquent defense of my favorite animation, or at least tell her how stupid hers was, but at the moment I was pretty glad of just having stood my ground and spit out those three words. Maybe it was the fact that I was standing and she was sitting, so she couldn’t look down at me. Maybe it was the fact that I’d seen her drooling like a zombie over a show clearly intended for eight-year-olds. Maybe I was just mad enough at the way she treated Kai–beating her half to death one day, then dressing her up like a doll–that I refused to be intimidated. Whatever it was, Sooni’s superior attitude just wasn’t having the usual effect on me.

“You may keep it, then,” Sooni said, rising gracefully. She glanced behind her. “Hair is done?”

Suzi said something in Yokano.

“Speak Pax, please,” Sooni said sharply. “You only have one day to practice…”

“Yes, Sooni,” Suzi said thickly.

“Your hair is braided,” Maliko added, with the seemingly obligatory giggle after it. I wondered if they had a punctuation mark for it.

“Let’s go change,” Sooni said. She started walking towards the door, pulling Kai alongside her. The other two quickly scooped up armfuls of the braids, climbing over the table and couch in order to prevent her hair from dragging on the ground or making her stop. Sooni seemed either oblivious to their efforts, or simply supremely confident that they would do this anyway. “I want to get the first coach into town. Shopping today, classes tomorrow.”

I heard Suzi asking “I can has cheeseburger?” as they filed down the hall. Little Kai (though she was at least two inches taller than me, and not much shorter than Sooni, she seemed tiny among the others, if only because she still hunched slightly in pain) half-turned and looked over her shoulder at me, but Sooni’s hand on her forearm kept her moving forward.

The opening music to Mecknights had already started. I was torn between a fierce desire to chase down the hall after the yokai girls (and do what, exactly?) and the feeling that I should just go back to my room and barricade myself against a world where girls like Sooni could buy anything they wanted, including, apparently, friends.

I thought of Amaranth, and her insistence that there were choices in life that didn’t amount to being victor or victim. I don’t know what she would have thought of me watching Mecknights, exactly, but I knew she wouldn’t approve of either of the above courses of action… submitting meekly to the cruelty of the world, or lashing out against it. I couldn’t see how sitting there and watching my animation would be any improvement… I still wasn’t doing anything about Kai… but, I figured, it might make me feel a little better.

Even though it’s just a silly, stupid fantasy show… it actually sort of did.

I’d bawled my eyes out into my pillow before getting Puddy mad at me, so I did pretty much look, as she put it, “fucking hideous.” Neither of us wore make-up, so she sent me to room 410, down by the stairwell, to get something from Mariel to try to cover up my general puffiness.

The sylph answered the door looking tired and worn, visibly leaning on the doorknob for support. She was wearing a long t-shirt decorated with silver stars that hung down below her knees, and nothing else that I could see. It struck me that half-naked, she was still less naked than she’d been in the slip dress she’d worn the day before. I don’t think she’d been wearing panties underneath the dress. That made me wonder if she had anything on under the shirt.

In an idly-curious-about-the-clothing-customs-of-sylphs way, I mean… not a gay one. The thing with Puddy had me a little turned around in my head, but not that turned around.

It also struck me that I’d never really seen Mariel standing face-to-face with me. She was only a little bit shorter than me. Aside from the half-sized race students… and Puddy, who outmassed me anyway… everybody on the floor was taller than me, some by a wider-than-human margin.

I wasn’t freakishly short, dwarfishly short. If there’d been more than a couple dozen people in my graduating glass, I might not have been the shortest one in high school… but I had been. I just wasn’t used to talking to people my age who were also my size. It kind of threw me, so I kind of just stood there, completely forgetting what I was there for.

“Oh, hi… um… Mack?” Mariel said. Her tone of voice made it sound like a guess. I nodded. “You look like shit!” she said cheerily. “Have you been crying?”

“Puddy said you could give me some make-up,” I said.

“Oh, sure,” she said. She scurried off and came back with an enormous kit bag that took all of her arms to carry. She tipped it forward, so that it flapped open towards me. “Just take what you need.”

I looked in uncertainly at the mass of jars, compacts, pencils, brushes, and things I don’t even have a name for. How could one girl need all of this stuff?

“I’ve… um, I’ve never used any of this stuff,” I admitted.

“You don’t know how to put on make-up?” Mariel asked. She sounded well and truly shocked, as though I’d just admitted that I didn’t know how to tie my shoes. “Haven’t you ever worn it before? Ever?“

I shook my head, wondering if I should explain myself or something.

And like that, the exhaustion vanished from her. She all but dropped the bag, yanked me inside of the room, and pushed me down into a chair in front of a brass vanity she’d brought from home. She dragged the bag over, and then all four of her lithe little arms went to work. I’d figured she would just brush some powder around my eyes or whatever it was you did, but instead I had what felt like cold mud daubed all over my face, powder pressed against that, other powder brushed and blended on top of that, my lips outlined in pencil and then colored in with bright red paint applied with a tiny little brush (which I totally did not get… what had ever happened to lipstick?)… all through this, she used two or three of her hands to move and tilt my head, sometimes actually grabbing a handful of my hair and yanking it until she got the angle she wanted.

I thought to myself, this must be what it feels like to be a sculptor’s block… all she needs is a chisel. That was when she went after my eyes with another pencil. It doesn’t matter how much damage you know you can survive… having something pointed looming that close in your view does not herald good times. I flinched and threw up my hands.

“It’s a soft pencil… stop being a baby,” she said, brushing my hands aside and coming at me again. When I yelped and started to get up, she gave me a slap with both her right hands.

It didn’t even begin to hurt, of course. Her hands were like a doll’s. It shocked me, though, after Puddy, and after seeing Sooni. Had I missed the memo where hitting was now the preferred means of interpersonal communication?

My hesitation was all she needed. She shoved me back against the chair and climbed on top of my lap, leaning all of her, oh, I’d say thirty-five pounds of weight against me. I was too stunned to do anything, so she got the eyeliner (soft, my ass) applied and then reached for a couple different shades of eyeshadow.

“Just think… a couple months of classes, and I should be able to do all that from a distance,” she said when she was finished. She climbed off of me and turned the chair so that I faced the mirror. I just stared. I wasn’t looking at my face. There had to be something wrong with the mirror. It was reflecting somebody else… the kind of girl I’d never have been able to talk to in a million years. Where had she come from? “Though, I wish I could so something with your hair… you either need to get it cut really short, or let it grow out all the way… it would take way too long to make anything of this mess,” she continued. “Oh, and your eyes are kind of veiny… hang on.”

Her eyes… which I had just noticed were silver, not blue as they had first appeared… seemed to cloud over, and she weaved her hands through the air in an intricate series of loops before snapping the fingers of all four hands at once. I both heard and felt a pop in the air in front of each of my eyes. Blinking away the shock, I glanced at the mirror… my red eyes looked like they’d been bleached. The swelling that had still been visible around the edges despite all the make-up looked gone. I reached up to touch, only to have my hand slapped by Mariel.

“Don’t, you’ll smudge it,” she said. “The make-up, not the glamour.”

“You mean, you could have just done that?” I asked her.

“You asked for make-up,” she said, giving a fluid shrug which moved up her body from her lower arms to her upper arms, and then back down again. “Besides… you look so pretty!”

“It’s just make-up,” I mumbled, tearing my eyes away from the reflection.

“Don’t say that, Mack,” Mariel said. “It isn’t just the make-up. Cosmetics are great… I mean, they really are… but they can only take you so far. For you to be really, truly beautiful, you need to have a great beautician.”

Modesty, thy name is Mariel.

“I should get going,” I said.

“You know, I think I’ll go over with you guys after all,” Mariel said. “I feel invigorated… and I always get a little hungry after I create.”

And, speaking of modesty, she wrestled the shirt off over her head… it gave her so much trouble that I don’t know why she didn’t just wear something with no sleeves, or two giant sleeves… and answered my earlier question on the subject of underwear. I didn’t try to look, but I’d been watching her fight with the shirt, and she was just in front of me. Non-human standards of decency, again. She didn’t even bother shutting the door before she did it. She walked over to her dresser, which was right in the line of sight of the hallway, and pulled out another of her cobweb-thin slip dresses. This one was a pale violet color, with an effect like layered leaves at its right-about-level-with-the-coin-purse hemline.

After seeing her wriggle out of the shirt, I noticed that the dress simply had really long shoulder straps to leave wide enough gap for both sets of arms. This kind of contributed to the barely-thereness of it, as it exposed her breasts almost completely from the side, and sometimes from the top when she leaned forward. It kind of made me wonder if the women of her race had a taboo about showing their bare bellies, or else why would they bother with the dresses at all?

“Tell Puddy I’ll be joining you, okay?” she said. “I just need a minute to do myself up.”

“Okay,” I said. “Do you know where Barley is?” It was Amaranth who I really wanted to talk to, but I knew the other grain nymph was Mariel’s roommate. I knew they had plans together… “plans” in this case being the word I used in my head to avoid thinking the words “fucking a centaur”… and, so much for that.

“Oh, she meant to meet Amaranth on the other side,” Mariel said, meaning the men’s’ half of the dorm. “She said they had, um, plans.”

The way she winced when she said it made me think she was using the same code that I had tried to employ. For as little modesty as she’d shown so far, Mariel could apparently still be shocked by the nymphs’ sexual frankness.

“Oh, okay,” I said. “I was just wondering.”

Puddy was leaning against our door frame when I came out of Mariel’s room, licking a pudding pop. She watched me walking back down the hall. I felt a hot flush creeping up my face. No… not just my face. It started much lower than that. I had to tell myself that it wasn’t me she was looking at, it was the make-up.

“Well, look at you, all tarted up,” Puddy said, smiling wolfishly. In the time that I’d been with Mariel, she seemed to have bounced back to normal even more. I was starting to think that the interlude before had been a passing aberration… or that I could make it one, if I could avoid making her angry. Smiling Puddy had been a lot of fun to be around, mostly. I could just keep her smiling, and it would be like nothing had ever happened.

“Rock!” was her response when I told her Mariel would be coming with us, and I relaxed a bit. I’d started to feel like I was dressed up for a date. It really didn’t take the sylph any more than a minute to get ready, but in that time she’d done an incredible transformation on herself. Her ankle-length silver hair suddenly had violet highlights, and was swept up in an elaborate… well, it’s usually called a beehive, but that sounds tacky compared to this. Whatever it was, it was secured with an amethyst-studded tiara.

Pure geek: I may know shit about jewelry, but I can identify precious and semi-precious stones.

“Everybody else should already be there,” Puddy said. To me, she added, “You don’t have to do anything. Just smile, don’t stare at the table or the floor… and talk if somebody talks to you, okay?”

I nodded. The way she talked to me reminded me of something.

“Is Two going to be there, too?” I asked.

“I told her to go, yeah,” Puddy said. “Shiel’ll definitely be there this time, too. She said she fell asleep before lunch, she’s still not used to being up during the day… and she’ll bring her goblin roommate with her. I think I talked the girl with the eyes and the girl with the horns into coming… and Celia, of course, and Belinda and Rocky, too.” I guessed that she meant Raquel, as the nickname worked for the permanently stoneskinned woman in a couple ways. “Be nice to Belinda,” she added. “I’m guessing if you sway her, her fighter friends will vote for you.”

“Okay,” I said.

It didn’t honestly sound too bad. None of the girls she’d named were the ultra-polished, ultra-poised types that could make me feel two inches tall. I knew Celia. I was nervous about running into her again now that she knew my secret, but maybe it would be better in a crowd than if I bumped into her alone in the hall. I’d talked to Trina, the triclops, a little bit before… and she’d been more embarrassed than I had. I couldn’t be afraid of her. Belinda was huge… but muscles didn’t intimidate me.

Puddy walked a little closer to me than I would have liked on our way across the campus, but she had her hands all over Mariel again. I supposed that was a good thing. Mariel enjoyed it. I wouldn’t have.

I had my knife out, clutched to my chest. I didn’t like actually holding it at the ready, but I didn’t want to get fined again for having it inaccessible. I kept it out all the way over to the student union.

It was nearing seven already when we got in, which suited me. Official sunset was about forty-five minutes away, and that was when the dining hall closed. This would not be a lingering ordeal.

It turned out to not be much of an ordeal at all. We found the table where the others were sitting easily enough… though the dining hall was a lot more crowded than it had been during the day, none of the tables around it were occupied. Puddy introduced me to the group–as Mack, of course–and I silently cursed the fact that I’d apparently been the only one paying attention to names when we’d all introduced ourselves the night before. I was starting to catch on to the fact that I was going to be Mack to everybody, forever, regardless of my preferences.

As we sat down and the others got back to eating, people gave suggestions to me, in the case that I won the election: try to get magic mirrors in the room, more classes devoted to racial studies, an actual non-human dean of non-human students. I really had no idea how much say the student senate in any of those things, to say nothing of the clout a freshman senator from the freak dorm would have, but Puddy had told me to smile and speak when spoken to, so I smiled and said I would try my best.

“I’m not that hungry,” was all I said when Twyla, the girl with the tiny little horns on her forehead asked me why I wasn’t eating.

“It’s a hunger strike,” Puddy said. “She’s protesting the treatment of Harlowe residents as represented by the ‘special meals’.”

That got an immediate positive reaction from Shiel, the activist kobold… and a slightly delayed reaction from Celia, who knew the real reason I wasn’t eating. The others kind of murmured their approval of my conviction. I was very uncomfortable with the lie, but Puddy positively beamed at me. I blushed and looked away… and noticed that Two was eating from a plate that contained nothing but bean sprouts.

I looked over towards the serving area, and saw that a corner of one of the salad bars was the closest thing to our table.

“Did you just go and get the food that was closest?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said.

“Do you know what a balanced, healthy diet is?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Starting tomorrow,” I said, not wanting to make her get up and start her meal again, “amend my previous instructions: when a variety of foods are offered to you, do your best to select a balanced meal with different food. When you can avoid eating the same things in a meal twice in a row, do so. Keep track of which foods taste best to you. Pick those ones most often, staying within a balanced and healthy diet. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said.

“And always eat dessert,” Puddy said.

“When it’s healthy and safe to do so,” I added.

“Always,” Puddy repeated. Her voice had a hint of a ghost of a whisper of an edge to it. I might not have noticed it, before. “Life’s too short not to.”

Two looked between the two of us. Her lip was visibly trembling. The conflicting orders appeared to upset her.

“Always eat dessert,” I said.

“Okay!” she said. She almost smiled. That made me feel better about it.

It was a compromise, I told myself. Part of any relationship. Any friendship. Besides, my advice to Two was practical, but Puddy’s might help give her some enjoyment. That wasn’t a bad thing.

Anyway, it wasn’t worth fighting over.

After a while, I was emotionally drained enough to sort of drift off, only to wake up when I became aware of the unpleasant smell of burnt cotton in my nostrils. It was a scent I’d once been used to waking up to, but it carried with it some pretty unpleasant memories and a pretty strong sense of shame. It had been a long time since I’d had such an “accident”, though, and since I didn’t think I’d even fallen properly asleep, it took me a while to realize why I was smelling it.

When Puddy had given me the burnt pillow, I’d left it damaged-side down on my bed, without ever really looking at it… now I flipped it over to see if it was just the outer covering, or if the pillow itself was damaged… yep, it was. There were holes burned clear through the fabric, and the pillow inside was visibly scorched.

I looked over at Puddy’s bed. There were no less than four empty Chardonnay bottles lying around it. How had she gone through that much wine in twenty-four hours? I didn’t drink, but it seemed like a lot to me.

The pillow that had been mine had been flung into the corner of the bed, back where the walls met. Puddy wasn’t around. If I switched them back now, what would she do? If she tried to make me take the burned one back again, I’d… well, I’d tell her no. Maybe. There was always the chance that she’d realize I wasn’t going to take the burned pillow and never say another word about it.

Yeah, right. That sounded exactly like what Puddy would do.

I took the burnt pillow–Puddy’s pillow, I told myself–over to the other bed. Setting it down, I started to reach for the other pillow… my pillow, I reminded myself. Mine.

“Just what exactly do you think you’re doing?” Puddy asked sharply, from the still-open door. I started, and looked up to see her standing there with her arms crossed, a very stern and un-Puddy-like expression her face. She had another bottle, mostly empty, in her hand.

Alcohol aside, she looked and sounded exactly like somebody’s mother… hers, I would guess, though I’ve never met her mother, so I couldn’t say for certain. The impression of motherliness was so strong, it wasn’t even funny.

It should have been, of course. It should have been hilarious. If life made any kind of sense, then somebody who owned a minifridge full of pudding pops would not be able to imitate their own mother for anything other than comedic effect. It just wouldn’t work.

It did work, though.

“I…” stammered a few times, but of course, I was frozen under her glare.

This was stupid. She’d took my pillow. It was her own fault I’d singed hers. If she carried gold around with her, then it wasn’t as though she couldn’t afford to buy another one.

“That’s your pillow now,” she said, pointing at the one I’d set down. “You burn it, you buy it, okay? If you’re going to be sharing my room, then that’s the rule.”

“You mean… if we’re going to be sharing a room,” I managed to say, picking the pillow up anyway.

“That’s what I said,” Puddy said, with an air of exasperation. She gestured at the pillow in my hands. “Now, go put that back on your bed.”

“Are you even going to use this bed?” I asked her. It seemed like a fair question in my head, but it sounded rather impertinent outside of it.

“It’s the principle!” she said. “I only have three of them: never eat anything you don’t want to… never let ‘em see you bleed.. and never, ever let anybody take what’s yours. So, you can just step the fuck away from my bed, and put that thing back where you got it.”

When I stood there doing nothing, she jabbed her finger at my bed. I slunk back towards it, putting the pillow back where it had been. She watched me, draining the rest of her wine in one long pull.

“Okay, so, I thought you might like to get a replacement pillow, so when I was at the union earlier I went to the commissary and looked it up in the catalogue,” Puddy said, with a “now that we’re all behaving reasonably” tone. She walked over to her bed as she spoke, setting the empty bottle down between the bed and her fridge. “Apparently, it’s three hundred and twenty copper for a new one. Can you believe that?”

She laughed. I didn’t.

“Two and a half silver for a stupid flat pillow?” I asked. “That’s fucking ridiculous… are they hand-woven by elves, or something? I’ll just get used to the burnt smell until I can get a cheapy replacement from the Walled Market in town.”

“Yeah, well, they’ll charge you for anything out of the room that has to be replaced when you clear out at the end of the year, so be ready for it,” Puddy said.

“You could help,” I said.

“Yeah, right,” Puddy said. “You already owe me fifty silver. Let’s not add any more to the tally until we figure out what you’re going to do about that.”

“I didn’t mean a loan,” I said. I sucked in my breath. “I meant… well, don’t… don’t you think maybe it’s at least halfway your fault?”

“How do you figure?”

“Well,” I said. “You kind of… um, in a way, you were the one who made me…”

“Didn’t we agree that I couldn’t make you do anything that you didn’t want to do?” Puddy erupted, stomping forward and striding up until she was inches away from me, yelling up into my face. “Didn’t you agree with me when I said that this morning?”

“But… that’s not what we were talking about,” I said, taking a step backwards.

“So, don’t try to push off responsibility for your actions onto me,” Puddy continued, jabbing a finger at me and completely ignoring my protest. Her breath positively dripped with wine. It smelled like she’d bathed in it.

“But, I just… I don’t really have that much money,” I reminded her.

“Oh, fine!” she said, turning away and throwing up her arms. “We can take it off of what you owe… but only one silver, because it was mostly your fault. Anyway, it’s almost time for dinner. You should do something about your eyes before we go over to the hall. They’re all puffy.”

“Yeah… I don’t think I’m going,” I said.

Puddy’s mouth dropped. She looked as though I’d just slapped her.

“I just… I don’t really feel like it,” I said.

“Oh, you’re going,” Puddy said. “There are people who will be waiting for you.”

“Let them wait!” I said. “Just leave me alone… I’ve had a shitty day.”

I sat down on my bed, hugging the scorched pillow to my chest. I didn’t need this. How was I supposed to care about a stupid student election and a trumped-up equality issue, after what I’d seen in the hall?

“We don’t have time for shitty days… the election is in two weeks!” Puddy said, aghast.

‘I don’t care,” I said. “I’m going to tell Kiersta to take my name out.”

Or, more likely, I’d just ignore the whole thing and let somebody else win. That would probably be easier.

“But people are counting on you to change things around here!” Puddy said.

‘You run,” I said. “You’re good at making people do what you want. I’d just crumble the first time somebody looked at me.”

“Oh, you would not!” Puddy said, so forcefully I was tempted to agree with her… as clear an indication of the problem as any, right?

“Yes, I would,” I said. “I try being brave… I try standing up…” I choked on a sob. I was picturing the poor cat girl curled up on the floor again… hearing the brutal sounds from behind the door again…

Puddy drew closer. I was actually afraid she was going to hit me, until I looked up and saw the tender expression on her face.

“But don’t you see, Mack?” she said, more gently. “You are brave.”

“I’m not!” I said… no, actually I wailed. I was losing control, breaking down. Maybe that sounds lame. If you didn’t see how hurt and scared Kai looked, if you didn’t hear the awful sounds…

I’d seen… I’d heard… but I hadn’t helped her. I didn’t stop it. I could have helped Kai, and I didn’t. I was selfish. I was bad. I wasn’t brave. How could Puddy stand there and tell me I was? Didn’t she know how bad I was?

“Oh, don’t cry,” she said. “Look, see? You tried standing up to me. You wouldn’t have before. You can’t expect to change all at once, but it’s only been a day, and you’re already changing for the better.”

“I didn’t… it’s not… you don’t…” I stammered, but I couldn’t seem to get a sentence out. I was still sobbing.

“No, listen,” Puddy said gently. She climbed up on the bed beside me, folding her legs beneath her. “I was the first friend you made here, and I know I can get a little… pushy,” she said, holding up her hand and shaking it a little as she said the last word, “and that makes it really brave.”

She reached out to touch the hair at the side of my face. I tensed up, but didn’t stop her. I felt that it was another one of those moments like with Amaranth. I could be a better friend by living with a little discomfort, so I raised up my face and just let her touch me.

Only, she didn’t touch my hair.

She smacked me on the side of my face with the back of her hand.

I gasped, in surprise as much as in pain. No, actually… it was mostly pain. This girl was strong. One sixty-fourth dwarf blood did that?

“It also makes it pretty fucking stupid,” she said sharply. She was close enough that I could smell the wine again. Her eyes were somehow distant and very, very intense. “You stand up to other people… but not me, or I will give you something to fucking cry about. You got that?”

I stared at her. You know how when you first meet somebody who’s like all zany, and you think, “Oh, wow, she’s, like, so fucking crazy!” and you just know you’re going to like them? Imagine that you have to live with that person for the length of a school year, and you find yourself starting to wonder if she isn’t actually fucking crazy?

Puddy had gone back into full-on Angry Mom Mode, but there was more to it than that. It was like I was looking at her and seeing somebody else looking back at me, somebody strange and alarming who had crawled beneath her skin from the outside… or else up from somewhere deep inside her. I don’t mean like she was possessed or something… I’ve seen that shit, and it’s different, trust me.

Strangely, I found myself wondering what Puddy’s mom was like… how much of what I was seeing came from her.

“You got that?” she repeated angrily. When I didn’t immediately answer, she slapped me again, reminding me that it wasn’t Puddy’s mom that I had to deal with.

“Why do you have to do things like that?” I asked her, wincing.

“Because in this life, if you’re not on the top then you’re on the bottom,” Puddy said. She stood up. “I like you, Mack… I really do… but when I came here I made up my mind that I’m not going to be on the bottom for anybody.” She crossed her arms. “I’d die first.”

I just stared at her. My own words from earlier came back to me, about pushing or being pushed. Was that what I had sounded like?

“Now, I am not going to go through this with you again at every single meal time,” Puddy continued. “We are going to the dining hall for dinner. Tomorrow morning, we are going there for breakfast, and then back again for lunch, and dinner after that. I could knock you down and fucking drag you over there, but I’m not going to. You either do this for me, or I’ll… I’ll just drop you. One-hundred-percent cold shoulder for the rest of the year. No friendly face waiting when you get back to the room. Nobody to talk to in the lounge. I don’t think you could stand that… could you?”

“I thought you were my friend,” I said.

Okay.

I know, as you read this, you’re probably thinking, “What about Amaranth? She was your friend! You should have told Puddy to take a flying leap. You could have switched rooms and hung out with Amaranth all year!”

Yeah, hindsight’s a ball of laughs, but when then and there was the here and now, Puddy was so in my face that she was the only I could see, and she’d pushed all the right buttons. Besides that, the idea of having another friend who I could count on to stand by me was still almost foreign enough to be incomprehensible to me at that point.

“Oh, I am,” Puddy said, and just like that her face took on a bit of the silly, friendly smirk she wore when goofing off or hollering at girls. Her eyes were the same vacantly angry eyes she’d had since she slapped me, though. It was… disconcerting. “I am your friend, Mack… and we’ll be really good friends, as long you remember that I’m on top, and you’re on bottom… I lead, you follow… I’m the big dog, you’re the little bitch. That’s the only way I work… and if you’re honest with yourself, it’s the only way you will, too.”

In that moment, I was afraid that she was right. I’d had a lot of big plans about changing and sticking up for myself and all that, but they weren’t working out so well, and honestly, it would just be so damned easy to just give in. I could be the same spineless loser I’d been in high school, and have a friend in the bargain. I might have hated her for it, but I couldn’t find it in me to argue with her.

“So, are we friends?” she asked me.

Worse, I think part of me kind of loved her for it.

“Yes,” I said. It was more of an exhalation than a word. It was an admission of surrender.

“Awesome!” Puddy said, and just like that, the scary person she’d become melted away. Puddy seemed perfectly normal… except for a tiny, knowing glint in her eyes when she looked at me. “So, let’s get you ready…”

I think the conscious part of her brain–the part that didn’t care about anything but pudding pops and girls–didn’t know or care enough about other people’s feelings to use them in any way.

On some level, though… some part of her was a master manipulator, with the sort of skill that has to be learned from birth… and that part of her knew that it had my number.

Amaranth and I parted ways shortly after we got to Harlowe.

A male half-ogre and a guy with furry goat legs–I don’t know if he was a satyr, or a faun… I can never remember what the difference is–propositioned her as we entered the first floor of the building from the nexus hallway.

Even after meeting Puddy, and after spending all day in the company of an incidentally naked woman, it still shocked me how bold they were about it.

They just walked up to her, looking past me as if I wasn’t even there. The half-ogre said, “Hey.” Just that. They were both very visibly aroused, the ogrish one’s already pretty tight jeans stretching to the breaking point, and… well… goats don’t even wear pants.

I stared a bit. I got about the same feeling from the sight as I had from picturing Puddy’s fist and Mariel’s, uh… body.

I suddenly felt very, very small.

Tiny, even… and fragile.

Very, very fragile.

Delicate, like a spun glass figurine.

The slightest touch could have shattered me.

Hey, I’d seen a guy’s thing before, okay?

Just… never in person, fully deployed like that.

Somehow, looking at images in a crystal ball didn’t give quite the same impact. It took me a few moments to process all of what I was seeing… and a moment later to go, “So, that’s what they mean when they say a guy’s ‘uncut’.” That, and there was a little slightly iridescent drop of sticky something on the tip of his… tip. Wasn’t that supposed to come later? No pun intended.

I was eighteen years old. I’d taken sex ed. I’d known how to get around the wall of flame on my school’s ethernet connection. How could I possibly know so little about all of this?

“Do you mind, Mack?” Amaranth said apologetically. “I’ve kind of got to take this.” And then, she actually put her hand around him… it… in public, even!, and gave it a squeeze. The little glistening droplet oozed a bit.

“Huh? Oh, okay,” I said, looking up at her… which meant I was also now looking at the goat boy’s face. He smirked and winked. I felt like everything down below was trying to squeeze itself shut. Human guys couldn’t possibly be built like that… could they? If so, I’d be dating only half-elves.

“You could… you could come, too?” Amaranth said. “There are two of them.”

Glancing over at the half-ogre was a mistake. I felt faint.

“Oh, well, maybe next time,” Amaranth said. I’ll give her this… she did seem to know how to interpret things when she’d rendered me incapable of speech. “I’m really sorry for leaving you like this, it’s just… it’s been all day, you know? I kind of need… well… um, I’ll see you around dinner time, okay?”

I nodded. Who was I to complain if she ran off? It was my fault if she was feeling unfulfilled. I watched her head across the first floor hallway towards the boys’–or men’s, as those were definitely men–stairwell. The bigger one had his arm around her neck, and she still had her hand on… well, on the other one.

They had both seemed so sleazy in their approach, but there was nothing dirty or tawdry in the way Amaranth responded. It was so natural, somehow. “I’ve got to take this,” she’d said… like she had a call on her hand mirror. I don’t mean to give the impression that she seemed bored with or resigned to it, either… because she didn’t. She just acted like it was the most natural thing in the world for her to go off with some guys. It amazed me.

Okay, so maybe for her, it was the most natural thing in the world.

But, still…

I made my way up to the fifth floor with images of the faun-satyr-whatever’s rock hard erection interweaving with the sight of Amaranth walking away from me. I had got the key into my door and opened it, when suddenly the door to room 416 opened behind me with so much noise and force that the images unseared themselves from my brain and I spun around to see what was happening.

Kai the nekoyokai cat girl stumbled backwards through the door, landing on her ass with her tail beneath her legs. She had her hands, which were swaddled in loose bandages, raised in front of her. She was trying to fend off Sooni, who was raining vicious blows down upon the cat girl. Even dressed in a floor-length silk dressing gown, Sooni still had her ivory-sheathed dirk on her sash.

Kai was sobbing hysterically, and stammering in that oddly musical language of theirs, while Sooni was yelling a stream of something that could only be insults. The door to the next room over opened, and the other cat girls Maliko and Suzi strolled out, looking down at Kai with a sort of bored amusement on their furry faces.

Just as I was wishing that somebody would do something, Kiersta came charging up the hall.

“What’s going on?” she yelled.

Sooni wheeled around to face her. As her head turned, I saw that she had cotton balls stuffed into her small, pointed nose… did she have a nosebleed? Had she been fighting? The look on her face was pure murder, but when she saw who it was that was approaching her eyes were suddenly very wide and bright, filled with a really convincing look of pity that hadn’t been there a moment before.

The R.A. was looking at Kai, though.

“Oh, Miss Kiersta… Kai has hurt herself, and I was trying to bandage her!” Sooni said. “But the bandages caused irritation, and she cried out.”

“If she’s hurt, she has to go to the temple or the student healing center,” Kiersta said. She sounded like she was almost hyperventilating. “It’s in the rules.”

“My nek… my friend will be just fine,” Sooni said. “It is a minor reaction to an alchemical preparation. She has had much worse before.”

Now protected from the wrath of her “friend”, Kai had curled up on the floor and was whimpering.

“If she’s in that much pain, I think she needs healing,” Kiersta insisted. I wondered how she could miss the welts and scratches on Kai’s arms, but I guess the whole spectacle was a lot to take in at once, especially for an R.A. dealing with a medical emergency the first full day back on duty. “I’ll take her.”

“There is more to tell,” Sooni said. “But it is personal, and I would not wish to cause embarrassment.” She raised one hand to her mouth and gave a little giggle. “If you will come into my room, please?”

Kiersta looked conflicted. I could imagine she wouldn’t want to show up at the healing center with an injured student so early in the year. I was pretty sure that, had I actually somehow found myself in her position, I would have jumped at a chance to pass on the responsibility for dealing with the problem.

So, even while I was silently railing at Kiersta not to be such a soft touch, I wasn’t surprised when she nodded.

“But, let’s talk in my room,” Kiersta said. Ah, the last refuge of the powerless: one trivial demand, easily fulfilled. I knew that tune very well.

“Yes. One moment, please,” Sooni said. She ducked back into her room, stepping out of the line of sight of the door. I wanted to look inside and see what she was doing, but the other two nekos glared at me and I shrank back. She came back out. The cotton balls were gone. It looked like she might have had her hand clutched around something small, but I couldn’t be sure.

I watched them head down the hall to the stairs, shaking my head. I had no idea what Sooni had been doing that had injured Kai’s hands (though I had little doubt it had been her fault), and even less idea what Sooni was going to say to Kiersta to change her mind, though I had little doubt that she would accomplish just that.

Girls like Sooni always got their way.

Meanwhile, Suzi and Maliko had picked up the cowering Kai and were carrying her into their room. Suzi looked up and saw me standing there, watching the events unfold.

“Fuck… you… pinkskin!” she said, and they both giggled obnoxiously. It sounded very much as though she’d memorized the insult phonetically. They got Kai inside and closed the door.

Sooni came back moments later, storming down the hall with a resolutely furious expression. She took the time to close and lock her own door before joining the cats in theirs. The door slammed and was locked behind her.

I had just turned to finally go into my own room when I heard a sound like a heavy branch cracking, overlaid with a wild, cat-like scream of pain. I jumped, and had barely recovered my nerves when it happened again.

It sounded like Kai was being beaten or whipped… hard enough for the blows to be audible through the door and across the hall. I winced with every one. It was a sick sound, and it gave me a sick feeling. I knew there had to be people in at least some of the other rooms. I knew they had to be able to hear it. Why didn’t somebody come out and do something? Why didn’t somebody go get Kiersta to intervene? As I was thinking these things, though, I was also moving. Almost unconsciously, almost against my own will, I was moving. One step at a time… one step for every thud and yelp… I was moving towards the door to room 414.

I reached the closed door… and didn’t have to find out exactly what I would have done when the next blow sounded, because it never came. The abrupt stop caught me so much by surprise that I actually lurched forward at the moment when the next beat should have occurred. While I wondered if they had really finished, the door in front of me opened just a crack, and into that crack stepped Sooni.

“Yes, how can I help you?” she asked in a falsely high sing-song voice, smiling down at me… why, oh why, did I have to be so short that nearly everybody could do this to me?

“I… uh…” I stammered. I don’t know what I would have done if she’d just kept wailing on Kai, or whatever she’d been doing, but it definitely would have been something. Standing face to face with her, with her beaming confidently down at me, I felt absolutely paralyzed.

“You are the fat, loud girl’s girlfriend,” she said.

“Puddy’s not fat!” I said angrily. Then, my brain caught up with the rest of her sentence, and I added, “And I’m not her girlfriend.”

“You are running for the senate position,” she said smoothly. She didn’t ask a question, so I didn’t say anything. She added, “Do you think you will win? Do you think this floor would vote for you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. It was the truth.

I wanted to yell at her to get out of the way. I wanted to turn and get Kiersta, drag her back here and make her see what was going on.

I just stood there, letting Sooni’s shiny black eyes bore into me. Her dark bronze skin gleamed in a way that reminded me uncomfortably of the moist sheen of the goat guy’s parts. I didn’t look away. Well, I didn’t quite meet her eyes, but I didn’t look at the floor, either.

“I think you should drop out, pinkskin,” Sooni said, finally.

“Out of the race?”

“Out of this school,” she said. “They told me there are no single rooms to be had at any price, because there are too many girls here. I see now that they were right: there is exactly one too many. One who doesn’t belong. You leave, and clumsy Kai can take your spot. If you stay where you are, then she stays where she is, and that… might not be the best thing for her. I fear she might not last the semester, if she keeps having these… reactions.”

“You’re actually telling me that if I don’t drop out and free up a space, you’re going to, what… hurt Kai some more?” I asked, though I knew that was exactly what she was saying… I just couldn’t quite believe that she was saying it. “Beat her to death?”

She smiled her canine smile and gave a little shrug.

“I might… but I might not,” she said. She giggled. “You will just have to wait and see.”

She stepped backwards and closed the door before I could really think of a response. I stood there in front of the closed door, waiting for the sounds of brutal punishment to resume. Instead, loud music came on. It wasn’t so loud that they could have been hurting somebody inside and not have it audible where I was standing. It was just loud enough to let me know that they knew I was standing there and didn’t care. I wasn’t worth noticing.

I felt like somebody had sucked out all my insides. If I’d stomped up to challenge Sooni with all the determination of an automaton, I stumbled back to my own room like a marionette whose strings were being cut one after another. The door was already ajar, so I just fell through it. I didn’t have the presence of mind to take my key out of the lock, much less close it behind me.

I just made it to my bed, where I collapsed… crying again… sobbing out all my impotent anger into my pillow.

I liked the MU library. For one thing, it had three stories and a basement, making it the largest one I’d ever been in. For another, they had rows of gleaming crystal balls along most of the walls, just sitting out for anybody to use.

In high school, we’d had to have a signed note from our instructors detailing exactly what we were supposed to be looking for, and how long we had. There was a duplicated hand-lettered sign stuck to the wall behind each row of balls that said, “Please limit use to 45 mins. when others are waiting.”, but other than that, there didn’t seem to be any restrictions.

I still might have managed to convince myself that maybe we weren’t actually allowed to use them… but Amaranth saw my hesitation and gave me a hard push.

While I gazed the ethernet, she brought over random books and flipped through them… also seemingly at random. She paged through them so quickly, I wouldn’t have believed she was actually reading them, except that from time to time she’d quote me a passage and then comment on it. She was keeping her voice down, but I still kept expecting somebody to come over and shush us.

Instead, the library staff was busy re-shelving books, and didn’t take much notice of us except that every now and again, one of them would say “hi” as they bustled past. Maybe they felt gratified to see students using the facilities before there were any homework assignments or papers due. Maybe they were actually that friendly.

It seemed odd that they themselves should already have so much work to do, but I guess there were summer sessions, too. College was brand new to me, but that didn’t mean it actually was brand new.

Amaranth talked, or maybe babbled would be the word, but it was a nice babble. I quickly learned that the nymph had thoughts and opinions on almost everything. Normally, I’d associate that trait with a more forceful personality like Puddy’s or Celia’s, but somehow, it was enough for Amaranth to simply share her thoughts with others… she just put them out there, and didn’t much care if she convinced anybody of anything.

That was weird to me. I’d been a lot more assertive once, and I still couldn’t imagine somebody holding a belief strongly enough to espouse it to the world but not having the conviction to back it up in an argument.

“It’s not a matter of conviction,” she told me when I, having exhausted topics to look up and caught up on all the recently updated threads on my Mecknight tapestry, asked her about this. “It’s a matter of respect. The world’s an awfully big place. There’s room for more than one opinion on most things within it.” She shrugged. “Plus, there’s always the chance that I might be wrong, or that somebody else might know something I don’t. How am I going to learn from them if I just shout them down?”

“Okay,” I said, “but… what if they’re wrong and you know something that they don’t? If you just let them walk all over you, then…”

“Oh, Mack… is that really how you see the world?” she asked, sounding anguished on my behalf.

She’d called me “Mackenzie” maybe twice, on our way over to the library, but once she got going she fell back into her original habit. I still didn’t like it, but I didn’t want to be pushy. Again, she was my friend, and she meant well.

“There’s a pretty wide field between letting people pushing you around and being the person doing the pushing,” she added.

“Is there really?” I asked. “I mean, it doesn’t really seem like it. And anyway, even if you try to find some middle ground, doesn’t it just take somebody else who comes along and wants to start pushing you around to force you to one extreme or the other? I mean, you either let them do it, or you push them back.”

Amaranth shook her head.

“I can’t imagine living my life like that,” she said.

“I don’t have to imagine it,” I told her.

“If that’s true, why do you let them?” she asked me. “Why don’t you push back?”

“I… well… you wouldn’t like me if I did,” I said. I looked away. This wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have. I wanted to be vague enough that she wouldn’t be able to judge me, but implicit enough that she’d know I was serious, and I wasn’t sure I could do either. “I can push pretty hard.”

“I’d like you no matter what you did,” she said. “I might not like the thing that you did, but I hope you will never let anybody push you into the ground because you’re worried about my opinion of you.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t,” I said. I felt like this was probably true; I’d been letting people push me into the ground since long before I even knew her.

“But, I’d like you even more if you smiled,” she said. “I liked making you laugh, before.”

“And then I ruined it by getting all tense,” I said.

“Yeah, when you made me come on to you and press my body against yours,” Amaranth teased. “You bitch.”

“I… okay, so maybe it wasn’t totally my fault,” I said, grinning ruefully. She wasn’t going to let me get away with much bullshit in the pity department, it seemed.

“And there’s that smile again,” she said. “Somebody’s going to kiss you, if you smile like that often enough.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, covering my mouth with my hand. I was trying to frown and it wasn’t working.

“I know so,” Amaranth said. “Because I want to kiss you right now.”

I rolled my eyes.

“You’re a nymph, you want everybody… we went over this before,” I said.

She looked at me over the tops of her odd glasses.

“I may want everybody, but that doesn’t always involve kissing,” she said.

“I’m not opposed to the idea of kissing… or other stuff. It was actually one reason I was excited to come here,” I told her. “I had this idea in my head that I’d get here, and because nobody knew me, I’d be able to get past all my hang-ups, and so I’d have friends…”

“You do,” Amaranth said.

“…and then I’d, you know, meet a guy,” I said. “Only, I still feel pretty much the same as I did in high school, and I have yet to even talk to any men… or any worthy of the name. I know it’s only been one day, but it seems like I’m setting a bad precedent for the coming year.”

“Well, the thing to remember is that’s not likely to change, if you just hang out in your room and the library all semester long,” Amaranth said. “Trying going to the main lounge in the evening, or just come up to boys’ side with Barley and me some time.”

“But I don’t want people to think I’m a…” I started to say, then stopped. How could I finish that sentence without insulting her?

“Slut?” she said, innocently. “Right, you probably don’t. At least not before you know how much you like sex. Still, if you just sit around downstairs alone long enough, some guy’s bound to come up and talk to you.”

“Why would they do that?” I asked.

“Because you’d be a girl, sitting alone, in a college dorm,” she said. “Not that you aren’t cute, but there’s nearly a hundred guys living in our dorm. Anybody is bound to be somebody’s idea of paradise.”

“How can you say I’m cute?” I asked. I wasn’t. My dark hair was not a shiny, lustrous black… but just a dull, flat one. My hips and breasts had got lost in shipping somewhere. I was bone-skinny and way too short, and I don’t think anybody’s ever had a face that was as just plain blah as mine.

“If you don’t see it, I can’t convince you by telling you,” Amaranth said. “But you try hanging out alone in the lounge, or anywhere else where there’s boys, and see what happens.”

“I hung out alone in the halls at high school all the time,” I told her. “I got some attention from boys, but they didn’t think I was cute.”

She gave her head a little toss from one side to the other, a quizzical expression on her face, as though she was trying to decide how to put something.

“Well, young humans have a weird pack mentality about those things, I’ve noticed,” she said. “You look at the girls in an average-sized high school, and none of them are really going to be model-pretty or, you know, tragically disfigured or anything. They all fit pretty well into the spectrum of normal physical appearance.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. “There’s always the pretty girls, who are popular, and the ugly dorky girls who aren’t, and the kind of plain girls in the middle who have to suck up to the pretty ones to be accepted.”

“At best, most of those ‘ugly dorky girls’ would just be considered plain, in the world outside high school,” Amaranth said. “To some extent, I suppose it’s that the really vain girls put more time and effort into improving their appearance, but mostly it’s just the collective talking. If you aren’t accepted by the pack, then to a certain extent nobody’s going to be willing to admit that they find you desirable… and to a certain extent, they really won’t. Perceptions are highly suggestive, and standards of beauty are mutable. The popular girls aren’t necessarily popular because they’re pretty; they’re considered pretty because they are popular.”

“That’s… insane,” I said.

“Okay, but think,” she said. “Have you ever heard somebody talking about a girl they went to high school with who was supposed to be really, really ugly, and they just heard she’s getting married to somebody really handsome and they can’t believe it?”

I had to think about it. It was kind of a weird thing to try to think about, but it seemed to me like maybe I had.

“I think so,” I said. “I can’t remember exactly when, or where, though.”

“Well, that’s not surprising,” she said. “Because it probably happened more than one time. That same conversation goes on, all over the world, all the time.”

“Yeah, but some people are, you know, late bloomers,” I said. “Or they get work done, or are really good at glamour.”

“Then there’s the pretty girls who move from one school to another and suddenly can’t get the time of day… or the ugly girls who move and suddenly find themselves the center of attention,” Amaranth continued, ignoring my objections. “I’m not going to say something trite, like ‘the message is that real beauty is on the inside’… because, that’s not the kind of beauty we’re talking about… and it makes it sound like there’s some kind of rhyme or reason to this, or at least a basic level of fairness about it.”

“So what is the message?” I asked. She had given me what I had to admit was an interesting theory of high school social dynamics, but I still wasn’t sure I could believe it. I’d seen the girls that were considered pretty at my school every day. They’d looked pretty damn pretty to me. And the rest of the ugly girls… well, I wasn’t really in any position to judge them, was I?

“The message is that, instead of listening to the memory of people you’re never going to see again, you should look to the here and now in determining your cuteness,” Amaranth said. “And that goes double for your self-worth.”

“I didn’t need anybody from school to tell me my worth,” I said.

“well, you sure need somebody to,” she said.

“You know, sometimes being told that I’m wrong for thinking I’m pathetic just makes me feel worse,” I said.

“But at least when I do it, you have my breasts to stare at some more,” she said, lifting them up with her hands and squeezing them together.

I really didn’t go around staring at other girls’ chests. I just don’t spend a lot of time looking at people’s faces, until I’d got comfortable around them… as I had with Amaranth. But as she drew attention to her chest, something tripped in my mind.

“Uh… on the subject of that,” I said. “What happened to the… cut… you had earlier on your… um, person?”

“Oh, well, Barley finally asked me to heal it before we went to lunch,” she said. “She tries not to judge… but I think it disturbs her, what I do. She understands all about pleasure. She doesn’t get the pain.”

“I don’t, either,” I admitted.

“You know what?” she said, her smile widening. “Neither do I, really. I just know that I like it. It makes me feel alive.”

“I’ve got enough pain in my life without seeking it out,” I said.

“That’s good to hear,” she said. “You should practice saying it every day. You ready to go back?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer that. I’d managed to push the disaster at lunch from my mind, but her question brought it front and center. Had Celia told the others? Was there going to be a nasty reception waiting for me?

“Oh, it’s okay!” she said quickly. I guess my panic must have shown. “We can stay here all day, if you want to. If you have to.”

She didn’t sound like she was doing some passive-aggressive, reverse-psychology thing when she said it… she sounded sincere. The mention of staying in the library all day, though, got to me.

“No,” I said, grimacing slightly. “No, I think I’d better go and face… well, whatever.”

It turned out I’d been worrying about nothing, though. Celia hadn’t blabbed. Puddy and Barley were nowhere around… when Puddy came back much later in the afternoon, I found out she’d been helping Barley “stretch out” for her date with the centaur later. If I’d been there, I might have suggested that Barley reverse the order there.

Also, if we had waited any longer to come back to the dorm, I would’ve missed a rather interesting bit of drama which played out right outside my door, in front of the room of Sooni the fox girl.

I didn’t cry.

I know it seems like the sort of situation where I might have, and I know I haven’t really showed myself to be that great in the emotional control department, but I’m telling the story and I say I didn’t.

It was Amaranth who found me. I’ve only got her word that the others were looking. It’s the sort of thing she’d do to make somebody feel better, I think. “Everybody’s been looking for you!” I know Celia wasn’t. I wouldn’t bet money either way on Puddy… but it was a harmless, easy lie. I’m not much for lies. I usually end up saying the truth or not being able to speak at all. When I do lie, I can’t stick with it for long. It’s got to do with how I was brought up, the things my grandmother taught me.

Yeah, okay. I did cry.

Fuck you, if you want to judge me for it.

Amaranth found me, sitting under a big tree on the far side of the campus from the union and the residence halls, in the midst of the actual school buildings. I hadn’t seen anybody go past since I’d got there. It was Saturday. Classes hadn’t started yet for the year. It was kind of like being in a place between places, in a time outside of time.

Yeah, I was feeling poetic. Bite me.

She found me, and asked me if I was okay, and I told her I was fine with all the sincerity Two had when I’d asked her the same thing earlier, and she told me they’d “all been looking for me”, and then she sat down against the tree with me. Not quite beside me, but close enough I could see her out of the corner of my eye.

“You might be a demon, but you’re not all those things that you said,” she said, after we’d sat for a while.

“I don’t want to talk about that,” I said.

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she said.

“You’re not ashamed of anything,” I replied.

“No,” she agreed. “I’m really not.”

“What’s that like?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I look at other people… humans, I mean… and I think it must save me a lot of time, not having to get over shame. I can’t imagine what it feels like, really. I mean, I can feel regret that I’ve hurt somebody, or I can feel abashed for somebody else’s rudeness, but that isn’t shame. Shame burns. I only get one really burning feeling, and it feels… well, wonderful.”

She shivered a little bit.

“I’m afraid all the time,” I told her. I’m not sure where that came from, except that we were talking about feelings. “You know that? I’m afraid of people finding out… of what they’ll think… what they’ll say, or do… but mostly what they’ll think. Does that make any sense at all?”

“Maybe,” she said slowly, like she wasn’t sure she believed it, but she was trying to think her way around to it for my sake. “Like, maybe you know, deep inside, you could defend yourself if somebody wanted to hurt you… and as for people talking, well, if it’s what you imagine people are thinking that gets to you, then nothing they say out loud can be as bad. So maybe it does make sense.”

“But it’s stupid,” I said. One part of me wanted to embrace what she was saying, but the same part of me that believed everybody pointed and stared everywhere I went wanted to deny her logic. “Everybody else in our dorm looks obviously inhuman, and they don’t go around scared of what people are thinking all the time, do they?”

“Puddy’s almost as human as you, and don’t you think she’s probably afraid all the time, too?” she asked.

“I don’t think Puddy’s afraid of anything,” I said. I actually believed this. That was why, in spite of everything, I liked her. “I think even maybe when she should be, she’s not.”

“You don’t think she’s secretly terrified of everybody around her?” Amaranth asked. “Because I do. I think she’s even more afraid than you are.”

“I can’t imagine anybody who’s as scared as I am doing and saying the things that she does.”

“You mean like, ‘hey, you wanna clang clitties?’” she said, in imitation of Puddy. She did this by deepening her voice, way beyond what was necessary, so that she sounded more like a muscle-bound jock than Puddy.

I laughed. I was clinging to my misery, but it was so unexpected that I couldn’t help it.

“Do you?” she asked, suddenly.

“Do I what?”

“Wanna ‘clang clitties’,” she said. I looked over at her and saw that she was grinning, but it was a different grin than her normal placid smile. Not wolfish or predatory, but hungry all the same. “Because I do, Mack… I really do.”

“I… um,” I said. I suddenly felt very shaky. I tried to laugh again, but couldn’t. “Why does everybody think I’m a lesbian?”

“I don’t,” she said. She leaned towards me, actually crawling over the grass to get her face right up close to mine. “If you say you’re not, then I’ll believe you, but I think fun is fun, and friction is friction, and if my body touches yours in just the right way, you’ll enjoy it all the same.”

I leaned back away from her as she came on, but she simply continued forward. The closer she stalked in, the more I leaned back. Before I knew it, I was laying on the grass looking up at her… suddenly very aware the fact she had a good seven or eight inches of height on me, and a good deal more flesh on those shapely bones. If I’d been able to think, then intellectually, I would have known that I had to be stronger than she was.

“So you’re not gay, or whatever,” she said, lowering herself down on top of me. “Don’t you ever want to do something that’s not about what you are or aren’t? Don’t you want to do something that’s just for you?”

I swallowed. Her weight was pressing against me, pressing my body to the ground. Her lips were centimeters from mine.

“Would this be about me, or about you?” I asked.

“It’s about both of us,” she said. She wiggled a bit, from top to bottom. I don’t know how to describe how it felt. “I would enjoy myself. I won’t pretend that I wouldn’t. But also, I love you, and I don’t know any better way to show you that.”

I felt really, truly weird hearing her say that she loved me. It was weird because she was a woman, and naked, and on top of me… and it felt kind of nice, because I couldn’t remember the last time somebody had said it to me… and that made it weirder.

“You love everybody,” I said. I focused on that thought. She was a nymph. Even without the sex, they did pretty much love everybody unconditionally. It didn’t mean anything. She loved child murderers and tax evaders, too.

“I do,” she said. “Including you.”

My muscles weren’t working again. If she’d been a big ugly monster, I could have thrown her off of me. I’m not trying to brag, by the way, when I say things like that. Most monsters aren’t a threat to me to begin with, so what’s to brag about? Monsters, no, but pretty girls… self-assured girls… naked girls… but I’m still not a lesbian. It’s not about sex. I suck at lying, so if I say it isn’t, then it isn’t.

I closed my eyes. That much control I had.

“Please get off of me,” I said.

In my mind, I could see the hurt expression falling over her face. Maybe she was right. Maybe I would enjoy it. Amaranth was my friend. She’d come looking for me after I’d run off. She was trying to help me. Would she feel so strongly about me after I rejected her advances? Was it worth risking her friendship just to prevent my discomfort? Even if it was just because she was a nymph and she had to, she loved me. Did I want to lose that?

“Please,” I repeated. I whimpered a little as I said it, I think. I’m not sure. It felt like a whimper moment.

I hoped she’d listen. I didn’t think I could say it again.

She withdrew. I wondered if maybe she understood, and she wasn’t hurt or offended… if maybe her face wouldn’t have the awful look that I’d imagined for it. I opened my eyes, and felt sick to my stomach. The exact same look I’d envisioned was on her face, and I’d put it there.

“No, wait…” I said.

What was I going to say? That I didn’t want to have sex with her but it was okay if she wanted to keep lying on top of me? That we could cuddle a little? Of course, there was nothing that I could say. She’d wanted to give me something that I couldn’t accept.

“It’s okay,” she said. She smiled the same serene, non-committal smile she usually gave the world, but I still saw the other face. She stood up and brushed some grass off of her knees. “I shouldn’t have… um… do you want to just go back to the dorm?”

“Not really,” I said.

“Do you want me to go?” she asked.

“No!” I said. I think I said it so forcefully because I didn’t want her to think I was rejecting her, just her advances.

“Well… what do you want to do?” she asked. I thought about it. Maybe I thought too long, because she said, “You didn’t really seem like you wanted to go to the cafeteria. What would you rather have been doing?”

“Ball gazing,” I said. “Or going to the library. That’s the sort of thing that I really wanted to do today, but that’s kind of ruined for me now…” As I said it, I thought about it. That was the kind of thing that I thought to myself all the time: can’t do that, it’s ruined now. It didn’t sound half as certain outside my head as it did inside it. My mood might have sucked at the moment, but it was still early afternoon. The day wasn’t wasted.

“Okay, which do you want to do, then?” Amaranth asked. “Or which first?”

“I don’t know, you pick,” I said. I wished I’d told her I wanted to be alone. No, I didn’t. “I can’t decide. I’ll do whatever you want.”

“If that were true, we’d be back on the ground,” she said. A ghost of the sad look flickered over her face.

“Whichever you want,” I corrected. I was mumbling again, but not so badly as to be unintelligible. “The library or the ball room. Whichever.”

“If you really don’t have a preference…” she said. “How about the library?”

I did have a slightly larger inclination towards the ballroom than the library, but I’d told her to pick.

“I really do like you, Mack,” she said. “I mean, as a person liking another, not just as a nymph liking another living being.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But… my name’s Mackenzie.”

“Oh!” she said. She blushed, again. That was twice in one day. I think I must have been blood red, myself. “I thought… well, Puddy said… um, it’s a pretty name. Mackenzie.”

“I don’t know if it’s pretty or not,” I said. “But I don’t really like being called Mack.”

“Well, maybe it’s just because it’s how I’ve been thinking of you all day,” she said, “but I think you make a good Mack.”