NOVEL NEXT 40 of 62: Her Own Room
At the beginning of August, Caleb moved into a house in Greensboro with his friends, and turned over his bedroom to me. He took his bed and other furniture with him, so Britt and I borrowed her dad’s truck and went shopping. I bought a futon at a furniture store in Catesville and a small bookshelf and chest of drawers at the PTA thrift store. Then I started moving in the boxes of books from my bedroom at Mom and Dad’s house, which we’d stashed in various places around the house (mostly in the storage room and garage) after I got them back.
Sleeping in my own bedroom behind a closed door for the first time since I’d run away from home was utterly sublime. I gradually started decorating the bare walls, trying not to spend too much so I could save as much for college as possible. Jada had split in two again by then, and little plushie Jada advised me about where to hang the pictures and posters that big Jada and I had bought at thrift stores on our dates. I tried to put them where Caleb had already messed up the wall with his tacks and tape.
After some mild confusion when I talked about the two Jadas with Britt or Meredith, one night when we were snuggling but hadn’t fallen asleep yet, triceratops Jada said she wanted me to call her something else, and let her big self who was about to go off to college keep using their first name.
“What do you want me to call you?”
“Make up something cute,” she said. “Like a little girl who’s just gotten a triceratops plushie for Christmas.”
“I can’t do that,” I said. “I don’t want to start treating you like just a toy rather than my girlfriend. Part of my girlfriend. I can help you brainstorm new names, but you need to be the one to decide.”
So we talked about names for a while, and she finally decided on using her middle name, Desiree (with no acute accent). She then wanted to know my middle name, which I’d somehow never told her, so I did.
“Lydia’s a sweet name,” she said. “Kind of old-fashioned, but not in a prim and prissy way.”
Not long after that, Britt, Jada and I got together for our last date before Jada went off to college. We drove to Greensboro for an early dinner and then went to a concert by Bulletproof Sombrero at the Blind Tiger. It was the first concert I’d ever been to that wasn’t some obscure Christian band playing at a church, and I was super excited even while I was melancholy about Jada going off to college three hours away. The band had a lot of energy, dancing on stage in a silly way that showed they didn’t take themselves too seriously, and I only realized afterward how much I’d danced in unconscious response to the music when I felt how exhausted my muscles were. Work the next day would be hell, but it was worth it.
On the drive home, Jada asked me, “Would you consider splitting for a month and coming to college with me as a plushie?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I wish you’d asked me earlier so I could think about it longer. Are you sure you’d want me to be a plushie, though? You’ll want to make a good impression on your roommate, whoever she is, and she might think you’re childish if you come to college with a plushie dragon or whatever.”
“I don’t care what she thinks,” she said. “And she’d find out you’re my venned girlfriend sooner or later.”
“That could be a problem,” I said. “I’d have to keep a low profile and pretend to be inanimate until you get to know your roommate and know she’s not gonna rat you out to the housing administration for having an unauthorized third roommate.”
“Yeah, I guess so. Well, let me know — anytime in the next couple of days.”
“Anyway, what I was going to say was that you could venn me into an anime-style figurine or something. She’d know you’re a weeb, but she’s gonna find that out pretty soon anyway, and it wouldn’t make a bad first impression like a plushie might.”
“But I couldn’t snuggle a hard plastic figurine. That would be the main point of bringing part of you with me; if I just want to talk with you, I can call you on the phone.”
“Besides,” Britt said, “what if Jada’s roommate is into anime too and she asks what show you’re from?”
“Okay,” I said. “If you don’t mind the risk of looking childish in front of your roommate, let’s meet up at the library after work tomorrow. I don’t want to stay out any later tonight while we go through all that trial and error we went through splitting you into a plushie and a human. Come to think of it, I’ll try to get Sophia to split me. She’s a lot better at making animate dolls than any of us.”
* * *
So the following day after work, Jada, Sophia and I met up at the library. Desiree came with me. Sophia venned me into two animate dragon plushies of different sizes, giving me sight, hearing, speech and mobility on the first try. That venn was for a month, so if for some reason Jada couldn’t bring me home to merge with my other self and re-split within a month, the plushie would vanish and my selves would merge. I used a Venn timer app to figure out when the moon would return to the same phase and the Venn would expire, and was reassured it would be early in the morning a month later — a little earlier than I would normally wake up to get ready for work, assuming I was working that day, but not so early that waking up from a memory merge would be a disaster for my sleep schedule, or so late that the sudden memory merge would distract me while I was working.
Then after waiting in line again, Jada venned my larger plushie self into my everyday dragon-girl body. Jada and Desiree merged, and then I re-split them using forms from their history. We kissed goodnight, and my plushie self went home with Jada while Desiree went home with my dragon-girl self. I was finally going to see her home, I realized, though I wouldn’t really get to know her grandma and sister. I was supposed to pretend to be inanimate when other people were around until Jada was sure she could trust her roommate — something I was quite familiar with from my fourteen months as a statuette.
