NOVEL NEXT North Broadleaf High
“So you’re saying that you managed to find the one isolated, private space on an airtight space station? I’d say this is ridiculous, but it is you, so I guess I can believe it.”
Quinn nodded. “I’ve had lots of practice,” he said, pointing to the leftmost fork in the passageway.
“Wait, don’t tell me you managed to find more drugs,” I said, struggling to catch up on sore legs. “Did you find more drugs? I’ll sit for you, so Miri doesn’t have to miss out this time.”
“Are you kidding me? The drugs here would be the worst. This is the space equivalent of a fucking truck stop; at least in a red light district you can get the artisanal shit.”
His logic was impeccable. Just because I could, I tried to smell if he was lying. It turned out that I had no idea how to do that yet. “So what do you really want? I don’t think there’s anyone around, you can tell me now.”
We were still in the same tile-and-metal corridors as the rest of the station, albeit narrower. Oddly, though, there were no establishments or businesses around, and without them there were no people to be seen either.
“Fair enough,” said Quinn. “I was thinking we could run a symposium, maybe set the gay agenda while we’re at it. You know, decide which food mascots to make nonbinary this month, steal some lesbians, that kind of thing.”
“Oh, wait, you were being totally—”
“Maybe when we’re done with all of that we can form a committee to hire more African-American cops, force corporations to sell hot dogs and hot dog buns in packages of the same number, and decide whether the dress is black and blue or white and gold. I understand if you’re too busy planning how to implant eggs in all of our politicians and replace them with Emissary infiltrators, though. I’m all for diversity of species.”
“Holy shit, Quinn, I get it, I’m sorry!”
Quinn stopped and glanced back at me, grinning. “Cathy. Dude. I want to talk to you, because you’re my friend. Also because I found a hangout spot and it’s really cool. We’re almost there, come on.”
I wouldn’t exactly call a plain, cramped room the shape of a right triangle and full of sandbags, of all things, a “cool hangout.” Then again, just the fact that such a place existed, had really good air conditioning, and had been found by Quinn was somewhat cool in and of itself. Miri was already there, with her Ariel out, leaning against one of the walls.
“Hey, Cathy. How’s it going?”
I shrugged. “Sore, I guess? I still hurt like hell after that fall. Like, everywhere.”
“That sucks, sorry to hear it,” she said.
“Is this not cool or what?” said Quinn, following me into the little corner.
“I give it a six out of ten,” I said, finding a pile of sandbags to crouch on top of. I was starting to figure out how to sit properly with my abdomen, and regaining the ability to fold my knees against my chest was a godsend. “I guess we’re just going to… talk?”
“Yeah, I dunno,” said Quinn. “We haven’t really been talking all that much recently.”
“I guess that’s true, isn’t it,” I said. “But I didn’t really expect that we’d still be able to talk at this point. I thought you’d be on your way back to Earth, and I’d be with my parents, going to stay with their relatives or whatever.”
Quinn nodded. “Same. But hey, we got an extension.”
“At the cost of my arm. Probably worth it, for my best friends and all.”
Miri put her Ariel down. “You still think of me as one of your best friends? After everything?”
“It’s not like I have very many friends,” I said sheepishly. Then, realizing what that sounded like, I added, “And yeah. We were friends before we started dating and we’re still friends afterward.”
“Of course we are,” she said.
“Plus, you followed me all the way out here, just because you were worried about my safety. What the heck does that say about you?”
“That I’m—”
“A really goddamn good friend, exactly!” I said, smiling. Then, upon seeing the way she grimaced, I remembered that my “smile” is kind of unnerving, and stopped.
“I kinda wish I had some weed on me,” Quinn said with a chuckle. “This would be the perfect time for it.”
“It would have to be edibles, though. I’m fairly certain the secondhand smoke would kill Cathy.”
We all had a bit of a laugh about that. “Oh, totally, of course,” said Quinn. “But seriously, how far are we from Broadleaf right now?”
“About half a quadrillion miles,” said Miri. I quirked an antenna at her in confusion. “I checked the star maps yesterday, just because I felt like it. We’re about five hundred trillion miles from home, give or take.”
Quinn looked like he’d taken a punch to the solar plexus. “Damn. Really?” Miri nodded. “I guess that makes sense. Broadleaf feels like half a quadrillion miles away, too.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“What I mean is that, everything that’s happened, it’s so… different,” said Quinn. “Back in Broadleaf the biggest danger was that I might throw myself off a fuckin’ bridge because life was too boring or that I’d accidentally spill rat poison on my weed or something. Everything was the same day after day after day, and on a lot of days the only person I’d talk to who wasn’t at school would be my fucking mom. Now I’m running away from cyborg nazi space aliens and going from planet to planet with you two! It’s insane, like something out of a TV show, and everything that happened before feels like freaking small fry now! I don’t even know how I’m going to go back after this…”
“I feel similarly,” said Miri. “There’s a… disconnection? Dissociation? Everything on Earth feels so small compared to this. So pointless, I guess.”
Quinn smirked. “That’s because a lot of it was pointless, Miri.”
“Not all of it! Maybe some of the school drama bullshit but… life stuff. Getting jobs and sending letters to colleges and all that stuff. Out here it feels like I could just go off to some random planet and spend the whole rest of my life learning about new civilizations and technology beyond my wildest dreams.”
“I… yeah. That makes sense,” I said with a nod. “For me, it feels like my whole life is divided into everything before my metamorphosis and everything after. It’s a sharp break, like snapping a wood pencil, so I can almost ignore everything that happened before.”
“Is it really that sharp?” Miri asked.
“Well, no, not really. But it’s still… I mean, my entire life was thrown upside-down. Everything I thought I knew turned out to be wrong,” I said.
“And that was when it became irreversible,” Quinn said, like he’d just solved some math problem. “Once you were a big weird bug person, there was no going back from that.”
“Yeah, exactly. And everything feels different, too! Literally! My sense of touch is different, I can’t feel pressure as much because of my carapace, and I can smell everything, and having eight eyes makes my vision weird, but because I can never go back, I’m starting to forget what being a human even feels like.”
“I’m sorry,” said Quinn.
It always annoyed me when people said that to anything vaguely bad. “You have nothing to apologize for. It’s not bad that I can’t go back, necessarily. I’m going to miss a lot of people, but that was going to happen when I went off to college anyway.”
“Oh fuck,” said Miri. “I don’t even know if I’m going to be able to go to college with how long I’ve been missing for. But, yeah, you’re right.”
“There’s no way that’s going to be a problem!” I said. “People get sick sometimes, right? And your grades were already so flawless that I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
Quinn scratched at his chin, looking like he was trying really hard to remember something. “You know, the way you talk about your metamorphosis, it reminds me a lot of how a guy I knew once described what transitioning felt like.”
I wasn’t sure how to react to that. It was a good thing, I guess, that I wasn’t the only person on Earth who had to go through something like that. Then again, it seemed like a slightly offensive comparison, given that I’d had no warning and hadn’t chosen what happened to me.
“Speaking of transition,” said Miri. “How’s gender going for you?”
“What?”
“You know,” Miri said. “You figured out you were… not male last week. How are you feeling?”
“Uhhm,” I said. Then, astutely, I added, “Errm.”
It hit me very very quickly that there was an expectation that I’d have a lot to say about it. A bunch of observations about my own condition, wisdom about the deep underlying philosophy of gender, a heartfelt exposition of my own profound internal feelings. Certainly it was what I’d come to expect during my scant pre-metamorphosis interactions with trans people, looking up their Youtube vlogs and taking sidelong glances at their autobiographies in ways that should maybe have given me some hints.
“I mean. It mostly feels like… an absence? Before I had this thing on me named ‘guy,’ and now that’s gone. I like the way the falthrranta has been reversing, that’s making me feel better about myself. But now that I’ve tossed my gender out the window I’m not feeling the need to replace it. My gender is beetle. But I still only like girls, for whatever reason.”
“Why would that change at all?” Quinn asked.
I threw up my arms. “I don’t know?! When something as drastic as what sex I am changes, I expect a lot of other things to come with it! But the only thing that’s changed is that now when I like girls it’s kinda gay, sort of, a little.”
“Are they gay now?” Miri said, looking to Quinn for some reason. “I don’t really think it’s come up since you two got high on New Malagasy, but I didn’t feel like that was a good time for it.”
“I’d have to go back to the ship,” Quinn said. “I left my Homo-meter in my cabin. With that we can find out exactly how gay Cathy is, to the nearest micro-Elton.”
Miri rolled her eyes. “Dumb question, sorry.”
“But it’s a valid question,” I said. “Though if you’re asking if this makes you retroactively kind of gay for dating me? Yes, yes it does. I have queered you and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Fuck yeah, there’s the spirit!”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Miri said, scowling at the both of us. “Do you seriously think I’m that fucking shallow?”
Quinn and I were both taken aback, left blinking at her. Quinn raised his hands. “Hold up: what are you talking about?”
Miri dug her nails into the palms of her hands, tucking her Ariel under her arm. “You’re just… you assume things about me. You put words in my mouth, and you act as though I would give a flying fuck if me dating Cathy would make me gay or not.”
“I don’t really think that’s true…” said Quinn.
“It absolutely is! For Cathy at least. It’s just like on the Helium Glider, after Nahoroth.”
None of this made any sense to me, in the slightest, and I felt like Quinn was missing something. I wanted to talk, to say something, to assure her that Quinn hadn’t meant anything wrong by it, but part of me knew that I’d probably screw it up and make things worse. As I tried to work up the nerve to say something, I remembered the newest trick in my toolbox. I could cut right through the bullshit and find out exactly what Miri was feeling, directly from her internal chemistry.
While Quinn and Miri argued it out, I straightened my back and focused my attention on the olfactory environment coming from Miri’s direction. The first thing that hit me was the intimate familiarity of her smell, as distinct from every other human; the smell of her breath as she curled up against me in the back seat of a car late at night, the gentle aroma of her shampoo when she would meet me at the gates of the school in the morning and smile to see me waiting for her, the scent of sweat on her skin in a school supply closet with the door barred. I couldn’t think about that. It was hard not to, but I pushed through. Once I’d gotten over the whammy of emotions, the deviations from the average were obvious. Miri was feeling a lot of emotions, all fairly strong, and the mix was difficult to sort out. There were the chemical signatures of emotions I didn’t understand, and others I was sure I must have been mistaken about. But it only took a few seconds to pick out what was probably the most important.
“Miri, are you embarrassed? You don’t need to be embarrassed about having dated me, no matter what species I am or what gender or whatever. We both thought I was a human boy at the time; it doesn’t mean anything else.”
Miri looked at me with a slight frown, taking a deep breath in, then out. “Go fuck yourself!”
“What—”
She stood up, glaring right at me until I was forced to look away. “I said, go fuck yourself!” Miri said, storming out of the room and leaving Quinn and me to swivel around like radar cops by the side of the road. As the door to our little hiding spot clicked shut, all the sound left the room.
Quinn’s mouth fell open. “What the hell…?”
It felt like my entire body had fallen asleep, and I was a few seconds away from the pins and needles. My face-plate was hot, and there was a twinge of stress-pain in the back of my mandibles. I had no clue where I’d fucked up, or how, or if there was any way I could fix this and make it up to her, but I knew I had to.
“I’ll be right back,” I said, then ran to follow her.
Fortunately there weren’t many side passages she could have gone down, because if there had been, I probably could have lost her. Wasn’t quite at the point of being able to track people down by scent like a bloodhound. I ran a quick jog, which was about as fast as I could manage; the moment I started going faster than a walk, my carapace started complaining about it, soreness and aches in my legs that flared every time my feet hit the floor.
Following the sounds of her angry footsteps on the metal, I found Miri sitting on a public bench about two minutes later. We were still far enough off the beaten path that there weren’t many people around, but a couple of Pioneers nearly shoved me into the wall as I approached her. Once I’d recovered from that, my attention went right back to her. Her face was red, and though she was being completely quiet, there were wet streaks going down her face.
“What are you doing?”
“I… I wanted to make it better, I guess,” I said with a shrug. “Can’t do that from across the space station.”
Miri sighed, throwing herself against the wall and sliding slowly down.
“If you’d rather I just leave you alone, I will.”
“Leave, stay, whatever. It doesn’t fucking matter.”
Taking that as a cue, I very slowly moved up to the bench, sitting down as far from Miri as its confines would allow. “I don’t know what about what I said upset you, but I’m really sorry. I hate seeing you hurt like this.”
“Do you? Do you really?”
“Of course I hate it! You’re—you were my girlfriend. And my friend. And a fucking person, whom I happen to like. Of course I care.”
A flicker of sadness passed over Miri’s face, quickly replaced by more scowling and anger and tears. “You never apologized, you know. For saying I think you’re ugly, or a monster, or whatever.”
“You never apologized for avoiding me in the first place,” I said. “And for making a joke about getting my head eaten by a lady bug. But I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for everything I said, and for all of the things I didn’t say too. I was a huge asshole to you.”
“I’m sorry for everything I said, too.”
I allowed myself to start breathing again; I’d been running on halting gasps and huffs for a minute at that point. “Does that count as making it better?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so,” I said, my antennae drooping over my face.
“What even gave you the idea that I was fucking embarrassed?” Miri said.
“So, uh. It’s a funny story,” I said, realizing that I was going to have to explain this all in words. “I’ve been doing some research after I noticed some weird stuff about myself and it turns out that Emissaries have a sense of smell so accurate that we can basically smell emotions. And that’s where I figured you were embarrassed.”
Miri blinked a few times. “So first of all, that’s kind of fucking weird. Second of all, you should be more careful, because… you were wrong. Very, very wrong. I’m not… ashamed to have dated you.”
“I mean, is it really all that much weirder than when neurotypicals read your facial expression or whatever?”
“Probably? I mean, smelling people is weird,” said Miri.
“I’m an Emissary, Miri. I have a pair of giant fluffy smell sensors sticking out of the top of my head. I’m smelling everything, all the time, constantly, and the more time I spend adapting to this, the more strongly I do that. At this point I can probably smell better than I can hear. It’s just another sense, you know?”
Miri suppressed a smile. “Fair enough, I guess. You still shouldn’t… I don’t know. You shouldn’t have said what you said. It stung.”
“Alright, I won’t make that joke again,” I said. “But what was so bad about the first joke I made?”
“It’s exactly what I told Quinn! Hell, it’s exactly the same thing that was terrible about the second thing you said! I am not as shallow as you think I am! And you keep acting as though I’ll have a problem with every single tiny thing,” Miri said, scanning down the hallway. “For fucks’ sake, I keep watch of you two when you’re high, how uptight could I possibly be, Cathy?”
I rolled all eight of my eyes. “I mean… you can be like that sometimes. Like on Nahoroth, when you insisted on staying in the spaceport like my freaking parents told us to.”
“Because I cared about everyone’s safety,” she said with a frown.
“I guess. But you have to admit that your way of caring for people’s safety is to start acting like your mom. Or Quinn’s mom. I’m not saying you’re like that, you’re better than that, but it’s… a trend.”
Miri went quiet and still, and even consciously trying to not peek in on her chemical atmosphere, I could taste something like fear or anxiety in the air. “Fuck. Fuck, why do I always run my stupid fucking mouth, I’m so sorry, please, I didn’t mean it, I—”
“It’s fine,” Miri said quietly. “You’re fine. It’s something I need to keep an eye on.”
I nodded, stretching out my elytra. Outbursts like that only happened when I was more tense than I thought I was. “Thank you. You’re way too good to me.”
Miri snickered. “Maybe I am, yeah. Would you mind giving me some time to myself, though?”
“Of course, no problem.”
I stood up, took a step away from the bench, and almost instantly realized that that had been a mistake. My legs and hips skipped right past the “pain” part, to shaky numb weakness. My heart was suddenly pounding so hard against the inside of my carapace that it hurt, and my whole body was overwhelmed by nausea. I tried to stand, to take a breather, to keep moving, but suddenly I was falling. If I hit the ground, I’d probably break something else.
Miri caught me, heaving me upright again. “Are you okay? What happened?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“Come on, let’s get you back to the ship,” Miri said, shifting herself under my uninjured arm. “I’m sure that your moms will take a look at it and get you fixed right up."
