IS IT COLD IN THE WATER?

Laura is talking to herself again, and the new girl is with her. They troop through the river woods behind Gino’s Variety as Laura complains about her roommate’s boyfriend, trying her best to be funny. The new girl is from Tinder but lives nearby, so Laura plans to tell people they met on the romantic bench by the breakwater lighthouse, or maybe at the little gay coffee shop near her job. They’re stepping down the muddy slope to the river when the new girl throws her arms out for balance. Laura is already reaching, asking if she’s all right. The girl smiles and says thanks in her pretty laugh but is down on the bank by now, smelling old clams and salt. When Laura lands on the bank, the new girl, who she thought was just being polite about this pretension of a date, is smiling in her muddy Converse. She squelches closer to take Laura’s waist and kisses her, big on the mouth like a grandmother. It’s not awful, because Laura hasn’t been kissed in a long time.

The new girl is named Angela, which annoyed Laura at first but turned out to be cute because Angela is cis. She chides her own surprise, but anyone who swipes right on Laura is suspect and Angela doesn’t speak to her dad anymore. Angela could pass for trans, she thinks, which is mean and makes her feel better. Naming yourself ‘angel’ is embarrassing, but a mother who coos it at her baby daughter is lovely. Another oppression for her community. Laura likes her own name most of the time. It’s hard not to feel like a dumbass if you don’t, since nothing else in the world is quite as much your own fault. She thinks sometimes it would’ve been better to call herself Misty, which is almost her old drag name and would’ve caused a giggle from her sisters at the only gay bar downtown. Laura is a serious name, though, which is why she chose it and stopped doing drag and only goes to the bar on Fridays and not even very often now. One of Laura’s best qualities, in her own estimation, is her honesty with herself; condemning herself for leaving her old friends behind, she feels a touch of pride. Laura is a respectable lesbian woman, and Misty is a slutty fag.

Angela is talking about her many plants, who all have racially diverse names, as they lean against her hatchback in the Gino’s Variety parking lot. Laura peeks inside the car; it’s a mess. The plants live by her bedroom window, Angela is explaining, the brightest window in her apartment but the smallest room. It’s a live-in greenhouse. Laura’s sedan was always a mess too, a beater Toyota, before she sold it for weed money and started riding her bike to work. Angela is inching closer. The stereotype is that lesbians own Subarus, but Laura hasn’t fucked anyone that self-actualized. Briefly she dated a girl whose Toyota was older than her, an art student with a mommy thing that Laura never quite fulfilled. Was that the last time she fucked someone? Angela kisses her again. God, it feels good, so Laura closes her eyes and forces herself to stay inside her body, testing the give of Angela’s lips, her body heating to a fever and holding the new girl to her chest and pushing, imagining her vulva under her tongue, kissing her back. The heat possesses her; she possesses the new girl. The new girl likes it. When Angela slides her hands under Laura’s shirt the heat vanishes and Laura is out of her body again, hearing the pleasure of being touched through a tin can. The new girl is so hot, though, she can’t stop now. Maybe if she performs well enough this time they’ll have sex again and Laura will find the strength to enjoy it.

✦

At home Laura waits to feel different. She traces the paisley bedspread until it’s tired and decides to take a shower. The shower feels the same but warmer. Her roommate Haley chocks up her long showers as a symptom of transfemininity, according to a meme she saw once. A ragged brown growth lines the tub. Eight months ago Laura got drunk, bad drunk, and shit herself in this tub. When she woke up, naked and rank, she waffle-stomped the turd and bleached the whole tub, giving her hands chemical burns and compounding her already brutal headache. After that she took up weed instead of booze. Now there is brown in the tub again. She squats to look closer and her ears explode under the water, like artillery blasting her plastic shower cap, drowning out the world in wet thunder. The calamity calms her. Up close mildew smells, so Laura touches her fingers together and launches her brain outside her body into a thick, white space as light trickles between her fingertips. It ripples into her palms and Laura watches herself wipe away the stains with a trail of pulsing color. She learned to clean grout this way after her drunken shit disaster, when even the smell of bleach made her nauseous for hours. The light is swallowed back into her hands. When Laura returns to herself the thunderous waterfall is too loud and she jerks away, banging her elbow on the plastic wall, and falls back on her butt. The tub is clean again.

Magic came to her young and hasn’t left so far. It is easy to hide because she only uses it alone. There is no explanation, and she has never told anyone. There are no schools for magicians, as far as she knows. Googling “real magic” is no help, though she does read tarot, which began as an attempt to glean something about her power (unsuccessful) and keeps it up because she is gay and dates gay people, who love getting their tarot read. She knows less about magic than she does about tarot. On her first day of third grade, globules of light began to drip from her fingers during a long sit on the school toilet, and again that night as her parents argued downstairs, and by the end of the year they were divorced and she could do it on purpose. If she unfocused herself into a thick, white space the light pulsed between her fingers, and if she stayed calm and held a single idea in mind she could puppet herself through something simple, like cleaning mildew off grout. On discovering this ability, she immediately tried to make herself a girl, which is not a simple idea, and so failed hundreds and hundreds of times. Even a small task, like growing her flat chest into something tactile, flickered and died as her own desperation for it pulled her out of the thick, white space. As she grew older her reflection began to send her there, the burgeoning stubble and thick shoulders catapulting her away from herself, and she thought maybe now she could fix herself, but the moment she held in her mind an image of what she wanted the pain of not having it, and maybe never having it, brought her back. The only way to stay there was to imagine she had no body at all. So mostly she used her inexplicable infinite magic to clean dishes and fix broken mugs and recharge the battery in her Switch. And she certainly never considered telling anyone, because every time she used it, a quiet guilt flared inside her. There are some things you learn about yourself early on that you quickly realize must be secrets forever, because they would scare people, who would then punish you. These things, which once seemed interesting, are by their status as liabilities gradually reanalyzed as bad things. Laura has a number of bad things, of which this is one. One could easily protest that magic is not a bad thing, and simply a part of her, which would be feared for no reason other than its unusualness, and may in fact be special and beautiful, but then again no one other than Laura knows how it feels.

When Laura gets out of the shower and puts on a camisole it’s dark and Haley still isn’t home. She stands in the bay window for a while, watching the parking lot two stories down as the last light fades and the apartment sinks into darkness. The streetlamps sputter on. She imagines the little figures looking up into the indigo of her window, her body half-dissolved in the void. None of them look up. Eventually she stumbles to the light switch and eats instant mac and cheese on a miniature vanity stool in her bedroom, looking at her cropped reflection in the single small, high window. She wonders if there’s enough light in here for a plant or two. She imagines Angela, entering her room in the hesitant, curious way of a second date, cooing and picking up the petite plant, asking Laura its name. Angela is the name of the plant. Angela, Angela as Laura leaves the empty bowl on her side table and flickers to sleep, watching Angela’s roots grow as the smell of her wet loam fills the room.

✦

One of the only respectable things Laura does is go to work. She works seven to three on weekdays, which alone is the envy of most of her peers, and she works for the city university as a receptionist. It’s the best job she’s ever had because it has health insurance and she doesn’t have to sell things. It also means that Laura has ended up as not only the receptionist, but errand girl and event coordinator for the whole biology department because the university is, like all universities, underfunded and understaffed. The work keeps her busy, she tells herself or her friends, and it’s not morally bankrupt, which is worth a lot. There are even good parts. Every morning she gets coffee at the gay coffee shop just off campus for herself and the TA who runs an eight o’clock lab and locks her bike outside the square brick building. The bike started as a solution to the $300 parking pass the university required, and that spring she enjoyed it so much that she sold her car. Now it’s getting cold again, and she is starting to think that was a mistake, but she’s already spent the nominal sum from selling the car on weed. 

The TA is always glad to see her. Patrick takes his lukewarm latte and asks about her weekend, putting down the tray of old potted plants he was taking to the compost. Laura intimates something about a date, but neutralizes the pronouns so she doesn’t jeopardize her chances with him. He’s probably trans, or at least queer enough to let Laura relax. Once he mentioned coming out to his parents, but didn’t say what he was coming out as. Their little conversations are her favorite part of the day but she keeps them short, assuming Patrick has other, better things going on. There’s a reality about Patrick that sets her at ease, an assumption from the moment he meets you that you are good, and worth listening to. It’s a pity he’s wrong about her, but it’s a nice quality in a man. He chuckles, boyish, when she admits how she presses the hot coffees to her nipples to keep them from poking through her shirt. Her body is easy like this, with him. Laura hardly notices until after, when she thinks about how strange it was to joke about her nipples. But she still smiles, thinking about it. Patrick liked it. The fear of having said something wrong is countered by the warmth of his laugh. She hopes that on the last day of class he’ll say goodbye. He’ll have an amazing life after she’s out of it. This is her honesty: admitting to herself that she’s jealous, desperately, of him. How humiliating, to envy a man for his kindness.

✦

The second date changes her life. Laura likes a fancy but affordable Italian restaurant downtown, the sort of place she’d take a lot a girls if she went on a lot of second dates. She makes up her mind to pay as she waits outside her apartment for Angela to pick her up, to compensate for her lack of a car. For a while after coming out she liked gussying up and letting butches drive her to dinner in their sputtering not-quite Jeeps, the subversive heterosexuality of it all turning her on as she giggled around their sharp corners. After a while it got old. The cis butches were put off by her dick, and the trans ones were too soft. Always a soft spot. Trans butches, for all the gender they do, still want to be girls. Cis butches just want pussy. It’s easier to be good at sex, anyway, on top. So she started dating femmes, and fucking femmes, and now she dresses up in tall slacks and a new-to-her leather jacket with a solemn top buttoned all the way up and stands outside her apartment waiting for Angela. She doesn’t wait long.

Sparkling brass hangs from Angela’s ears, matching burnt yellow eyeshadow that bats its eyes at Laura. She breathes and swallows. It’s been a long time since she was stunned by a beautiful girl in person. Easily, Laura swings inside and compliments her, low and sincere. Angela likes her eyes undressing her as they drive, and Laura likes the way Angela bites her lip seeing the stress of her shirt buttons. Against all odds, Laura knows she is hot. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t hate herself, but even she can’t deny so much evidence. She notices, as they cruise through the city, that she and Angela are hot together. That’s important.

The restaurant is mostly empty. It’s not even seven yet, but Laura likes to finish early and then talk for a long time through dessert. The food makes her confident, fats and carbs soaking up her anxiety. She never understood people who order just a salad at dinner. It makes you weak. She and Angela are seated on the far wall, old couples and young families loosely checkered around them. When the waiter asks what they can get You Ladies for drinks, Laura gets a martini and Angela a lemonade. For less than a moment Laura’s temples heat with fear, and then asks kindly if Angela would rather she didn’t drink (it’s no problem). Angela laughs and says she’s just a lightweight and she’s driving. Maybe a nightcap later, Laura says, and notes the menu before Angela can speak.

Laura talks less about herself this time and asks about Angela’s friends, including the plants. A first date is an easy question: do I hate you? A second date is much harder: do I like you? Laura has thought a lot about it. She already didn’t hate Angela, which alone is notable, but now seeing her halter top and swooping yellow eye makeup she likes her, which is the same as wanting her. Want is special, because unlike Need it is not an obligation, but a challenge. Laura enjoys a challenge, and is very good at them. She is good at the challenge of the university reception desk, she is good at the challenge of hiding things about herself, and she is good at the challenge of getting what she wants. Angela laughs, which sounds like she wants Laura too. Laura wonders what she will do to get her. Some people are put off by this game; for Laura and Angela, it is better than sex. Searching Angela’s eyes, Laura finds something challenging her back. She watches a decision get made.

“I can do magic, you know,” says Angela.

Laura eats a gnocchi. She asks if Angela can produce a rabbit out of a hat, and if so, why she didn’t bring a hat or a rabbit. For the first time, Angela doesn’t laugh her pretty laugh.

“I mean real magic,” she says.

Laura wonders if she has wandered beyond the tarot-reading crystal queers into the queers reclaiming ‘witch’ as a feminist thing who chant in circles to hex politicians. She is trying to decide if Angela is hot enough to tolerate this when Angela says:

“I can show you.”

There is nothing to lose. Show me, says Laura. Angela shows her.

First she moves her plate of spinach scraps to the side. Then she takes one fork and one spoon, licking them clean, and places them next to each other on the white tablecloth. She lifts her hands to her mouth and breathes out hot, wet air before hovering them above the fork and the spoon as rivulets of light begin to drip from her fingertips. Laura dry heaves. Light weaves between the tines of the fork and, twisting her hand like a dancer, Angela pulls the tines together into a bowl. The metal bends and flattens and smooths and then, as the light recedes back into Angela’s hands, there are two spoons sitting in front of her. She smiles like a magician expecting applause. Laura is trying not to have a panic attack. She trips out of her chair, lurches past the old people and straight-couples-with-kids to collapse into a bathroom stall.

Things are not better in the toilet. Laura doesn’t usually feel safe in bathrooms, and this is worse than usual. She is heaving loud, hearing herself like someone half-drowning. The blue tile and white paint ripple through her vision in time with her gasps. Her shoes have a little mud on them. Laura focuses on the mud, like she learned in therapy, trying to calm herself. It’s dry. It’s light brown. In her head she sees Angela’s fingers dripping with light again, tendrils of magic swimming around the fork and reshaping it to her will, the same magic that has sealed cracked bowls and unclogged drains for Laura in secret for her entire post-pubescent life, a secret she took the greatest care to hide that is now being performed in a lightly busy Italian restaurant under incandescent lights in full view of thirteen people at least. This is impossible to understand; her breathing slows, and Laura sinks into a thick, white space.

There is no way to know how long she is there before Angela comes into the bathroom. She hears her name echoing from the sinks and fumbles for words. Angela’s boots creak as she squats to look under the stalls, and then she knocks at Laura’s door. Miles away, Laura is wondering if she should come back into her body, but just as she is stepping through the doorway Angela’s fingers appear in her mind, glowing with power, and the indomitable fear catapults her away again. Angela is saying something, worried. She’s asking to open the door and waiting an appropriate amount of time before doing it anyway. As she opens the door, she says she’s opening the door. Her hands are normal. Laura notices for the first time little imperfect creases in her eyeshadow. A stray line of mascara sits on the bag of her left eye. She’s asking if Laura is all right. Laura begins stepping back towards herself, and confronted with the perpetrator of her greatest fear so vulnerable and kind she falls in through the doorway and starts to cry. Angela is holding her hands. She feels Angela holding her hands, and she cries. Sometime during the crying Laura decides to tell her. 

“I can do that, too,” she chokes, low and hoarse like a man. She clears her throat and sounds even more like a man. Angela’s eyes widen and she grips Laura’s hands, firm but soft like a mother. She tells Laura she’s never met anyone else who can do that, how happy she is to share it with someone. How most people don’t understand, how they don’t see the beauty in it but now Laura, Laura could understand. Laura is trying to stop crying. She did her shot yesterday, she says, as way of explanation for all the tears. Angela doesn’t understand, and Laura is going to say it again when she remembers Angela doesn’t know what Doing Her Shot means. She gives up and cries harder. Angela holds her in the blue and white bathroom stall and gets Laura’s snot on her nice blouse. Shh, she says, and rubs her back. Laura has never felt this much at once in her whole life. She tries to go back to the thick, white space and escape from this, the terror and love, but it holds her and she can’t think hard enough to stop crying. She’s heaving again, huge broken sobs that echo even in the tiny bathroom. Angela still holds her. Laura feels every second tick by. Something like years pass. Eventually she’s too tired to cry any more. She says after a long, empty silence that the waiter will think they left without paying. Angela tells her, cooing, that she left cash on the table. I was going to pay, Laura thinks. She wishes she had paid, instead of crying here like a child.

When Laura is quiet and still for a while, Angela asks her in soft voice if she wants to go home. They end up sitting in the car outside Laura’s apartment with the engine running since it’s gotten cold. Laura sips from a bottle of water that Angela keeps in the back for emergencies until she’s stable enough to ask how long she’s had magic. Angela shrugs. Forever, she guesses. She started to figure out how to use it as a kid. She describes centering her whole mind in her body, letting the world flow through you but not disturb you, letting the light glow from your fingers like holding your hands near the fireplace. Laura nods. She wouldn’t describe it like that, but she savors every word like something she’s been thirsting for her whole life. Soon Angela asks Laura how it feels to her, and Laura for the first time puts words to the feeling of disappearing into a thick, white space and watching herself like a puppet drip the light onto things just to make the world a little better. Angela sits for a long time as the heat of the car dries out their noses. Angela, with her eyes closed, tells her she wants to see her again with such intensity that Laura is almost scared. She realizes, as she watches Angela pull away from the curb, that she has no idea how powerful this new girl could be. A particular loneliness lifts from her, and is replaced with fear.

✦

Like every roommate Laura has ever had, Haley is afflicted with gestures toward friendship without a genuine interest in Laura’s life, so when she comes in swollen-eyed from crying the most Haley can summon while eating almonds is a Hey, you okay? Laura hates this, so she nods briskly and closes the door to her room behind her. She sits like an unfinished statue on the bed, grotesque and tense. The paisley threatens her. There’s a little spot on the bureau where the sun lands for a few hours a day, where she had imagined putting a plant to impress Angela. The wood stain here is bleached of color in a perfect bluish arc, the bureau nailed to the floor by an overzealous landlord years ago. Laura touches it. It’s dry. She doesn’t know what she expected. Three knocks come from the door.

“Hey,” says Haley, through it. “If you want to talk or something, I’m here. I mean, I have plans in like half an hour, but until then I’m here. If you want to talk. Or something.” 

Laura is thinking about the moment when Angela turned a fork into a spoon. She’d never thought to turn a fork into a spoon. On the whole, she used her magic to fix things, or clean them, or make them better in a secret, invisible way. But a fork made into a spoon? Angela already had a perfectly good spoon. She did it only for the sake of doing it. Laura’s fear bubbles up again, the same that had exploded in the restaurant and now teeters on the edge of her consciousness. It is terrifying, the thought of exerting her power just for the sake of doing it, risking exposure. But Angela didn’t seem to be afraid at all. It begins to cross Laura’s mind that she, too, could turn a fork into a spoon, but quickly she closes it off and returns to a generalized dread. Haley shuffles outside the door.

“Okay, well, I’m around,” she says. “For like thirty minutes. Okay. Um, feel better.”

Laura ignores this. She fingers the sheets, twisting them tight around her thumb like pulling up grass. She pulls and the sheets fall. She looks around her room for something to distract her. There’s a mason jar of weed in her backpack. She’s thinking about smoking it when she notices the empty mac and cheese bowl, still beside her bed, holding cheese gunk and her used fork. Gathering courage, Laura places the fork on her lap. She’s about to try to recede into the thick, white space when Haley stubs her toe and screeches beyond the door. Laura jumps and the fork falls into her backpack, onto her jar of weed and weed paraphernalia. Shaken, Laura zips her backpack and tramps past wailing Haley downstairs to her bike, piloting it down the porch steps and onto the shattered asphalt towards the river.

The woods behind Gino’s Variety are sometimes popular with college students getting high, but it’s chilly and a Wednesday so Laura is alone when she locks her bike to the sole streetlight in the lot out back. She and her backpack take the trail past the electrical block graffitied with a cartoon rat and down the muddy slope she’d climbed with Angela on their first date and parks her butt on the silty beach. Inside her backpack is the dirty fork and the weed jar, from which Laura packs a loose bowl. After a few hits the smell starts to settle over the beach and Laura finds herself at an easy peace. She takes out the fork. 

It’s still covered in cheese goop so she wipes it on her shirt, then cradles the tines in her hand. Each one is flat and sharp, stamped from sheet aluminum, and keeps some crud in the notch where the fabric didn’t reach. They’re the cheapest not-plastic forks you can buy at Target. Laura imagines turning the fork into a spoon, like Angela did, fearful and curious. Could she do it? Laura puts her other hand over the fork and closes her eyes. She’s just going to change it to a spoon, like Angela did. She just wants to know if she can do it. And then she’ll change it back. So she starts to feel for the thick, white space, hoping she doesn’t find it and can put this whole thing to bed, as Angela keeps drifting into her mind. After some minutes staring at the fork, thinking about how much better and braver Angela is than her, she starts to get angry. Laura hates being bad at things. It’s a challenge, after all. Laura closes her eyes again and lets herself drift back into nothingness and soon hot white droplets form on the tips of her fingers. From a distance, she watches herself touch the fork. Suddenly, though, it turns cold in her hand and she catapults back into her body, remembering the rest. Her light is a bad thing. This is a power best kept hidden. She’ll never be like Angela. She doesn’t even want to be, her honesty tells her. The fork wiggles menacingly. She shoves it in her backpack and tries to calm her breathing, the twisting fearful heat growing in her chest. She’s sweating again. The high hits her as the last rays of dusk disappear. Eventually, as Laura descends into a comfortable delirium there on the beach, she falls asleep.

She dreams about Angela. Wet loam fills her body as roots burrow from her feet, and Angela is with her, like a mother kapok tree, as Laura grows and grows from a seed out into the sun. The little pot in her room has taken over the world, filling it with plants and flowers and trees and dirt. Her window is shimmering in the sunlight. When Laura wakes up at dawn she remembers that there’s no little plant on her bureau at all.

✦

Laura rides her bike back through sunrise, weaving across the yellow line towards home, reeking of cannabis. She has an hour to get ready for work, so while she pedals she thinks about Patrick. Maybe he could tell her it was going to be okay. He said that a lot, with such certainty. Whatever he said it would make Laura feel better, she knows. She wonders what Patrick would think of her secret, whether he would say it was a bad thing. Invoking what she calls honesty she admits No, he would hate it, though a deeper and more honest part of herself knows better. When she arrives outside her apartment, wobbling on her fixie, Angela’s car is parked on the street. Laura, still a little high, crashes her bike into the grass. She hears Angela shout her name in panic. She’s okay, it’s just grass, so she lays there for a minute, a little wet from the dew, the bike tangled up by her foot, perfectly fine but overwhelmed by Angela appearing over her. She kneels, stripped of her makeup and earrings and wearing a plain grey sweatshirt. She’s so goddamn beautiful, Laura thinks.

“You’re so goddamn beautiful,” Laura says out loud, at the same time that Angela asks if she’s okay. There’s a confused pause before Angela speaks again. Her voice is quiet and husky, like she hasn’t slept.

“The light behind you—” she croaks, and touches Laura’s forehead. Laura doesn’t know what that means.

“Streams of light behind you when you rode up. Like ribbons. It was so beautiful.” Angela is looking at Laura the same way she did when Laura said she could do magic too, an admiration and love and craving all at once. She looks like a plant, Laura thinks, shakes her head, then looks at her glowing hands. Angela presses a hand into hers and the white magic curls like a ribbon, binding their fingers together like tines of a fork.

“I didn’t mean to surprise you,” Angela is saying as they watch the light tremble, “I only wanted to talk about the other night. You were so scared, and I was so excited I hardly cared, I just wanted to make it up to you somehow—so I thought I’d drive you to work or something. It was stupid.”

“It’s not stupid,” croaks Laura. She tries to say something else, about how Angela makes her feel understood and valuable in a way she had never dreamed was possible, while also being the scariest and most terrifying thing to ever happen to her, but she can’t find the words. She’s high, and the grass is so soft.

“I didn’t know anyone else could do that, is all,” Laura says after a minute.

“I didn’t either,” says Angela, in the grass.

“I always thought there was something wrong with me,” Laura whispers.

Angela pauses, and Laura can hear her thinking, like in the moments before she announced her ability to do magic in the restaurant. Then Angela says, “When I was a kid, I had a lot of trouble sleeping. I would spiral all night, thinking about how much I hated myself. I would cry without making a sound. When the magic came, I figured out that I could tie myself so tight to the bedframe I couldn’t move. I would struggle and struggle and eventually get so tired that I could fall asleep. It was the only way I could sleep at all, for a while. Sometimes, though, I would wake up in the middle of the night and have to pee, still tied to the bed. I couldn’t get free. So I peed myself. And after the first time, I learned to magic it away.” She pauses again and adjusts her head to stare at Laura. “I still do that, sometimes, when I get sad.” Something deep in Laura lets go. 

“Why did you hate yourself?” she asks.

Angela laughs cruelly. “I was so broken I pissed myself every night. You don’t think that’s insane?” Laura shakes her head.

“No, I don’t.” Looking at the sky, Laura searches for the fear that defined her and comes up empty. “I have a lot of bad things, too. Not just the magic.”

“Magic isn’t so bad,” Angela says softly.

“Maybe.” Laura swallows. “No one ever told me it wasn’t.”

“I’m telling you. And I think there are a lot of good things, too,” Angela says. Laura’s honesty rises, listing all the things wrong with her. Too hard, too dumb, too mean to the girls she used to call sisters back when she did drag. Too strange and magical.

“You’re so brave. And I’m always afraid. You saw me when I cried. It was stupid.” Laura turns her head towards Angela.

“It wasn’t stupid.” She stares into Laura. “It was kind. You cared.” Laura stares back.

“I’m glad you showed me your magic,” Laura says. “I do care. I think it’s beautiful.”

Angela kisses her. Being high and kissed is almost the best feeling in the world, better than sex and nearly as good as high sex. Angela reaches to cradle her face, her other hand locked in with Laura’s, feeling the ribbons of light that stream up and out into the sky as they rest on the lawn. Angela’s weight settles onto her. Her heart beats like a minnow. The last time they kissed, in the parking lot of Gino’s Variety, Laura had watched herself try to feel pleasure from outside her body. Now, high and ecstatic, as Angela’s lips hold hers, she is here, immediate, and in love. Angela kisses her hand. Laura always got compliments on how soft her hands were, even back when she was a boy, and Angela says it too. Laura takes her wrist in her soft hand and holds it like a mother. Angela, vulnerable, asks if it’s going to be okay. It’s okay, Laura says, and means it. God, she means it, and kisses her again. She smells like wet loam, there on the grass. It’s like magic.

✦

Angela drives her to work after all. They sit in the parking lot outside the square brick building, making plans in low voices to see each other again, until Laura has to leave and find her cold metal desk. When Patrick arrives, she realizes she forgot to get coffee, entranced by Angela lingering warm in her mind. He’s carrying a backpack and a stack of binders labelled Biochemistry. Nice binders, says Laura. Yeah, says Patrick, No more Ace bandages for me. Laura wonders if she was wrong about him; it occurs to her for the first time that maybe he enjoys talking to her, same as Angela. He’s almost out of the room when Laura, brave, asks if he wants to get coffee. He turns back, wiping the brown hair out of his eyes, and sets the binders down on her desk. He says yes.

They have twenty minutes. Laura orders two lattes and two pastries and they talk in the window of the gay coffee shop. She tells him about Angela, how she holds her hand so firm and soft, jokes about how Angela has to drive her around like some kind of bottom. He laughs. She pays attention, this time, to how he cares about her. The part of herself she calls honesty rears, doubting, but Laura is beginning to think it’s not honesty at all. Patrick says it’s cool, not having a car, riding her bike around. Laura says, I don’t look like an idiot? Patrick shakes his head. You’re immensely cool, he says. Now Laura laughs. Don’t forget beautiful, and a genius, but Patrick is serious. You buy me coffee every day, he says. It’s kind. Laura silently eats her pastry and imagines introducing him to Angela, the three of them talking over coffee about things they’re afraid of. Angela telling him about her magic. They watch a man in a too-big suit try to flirt with the barista wearing a lesbian flag pin. Hey, Laura says, do you want to see some magic? 

Patrick puts down his latte and grins. I love magic, he says. So Laura picks up the fork from her plate and wipes it clean on a paper napkin. Then she leans back, closes her eyes, and wraps her hand around the tines. Her mind drifts into a thick, white space as the smell of warm earth fills the room. Rivulets of light drip out of her fingers and hears Patrick, miles away, whisper Oh, Wow. From outside her body, Laura watches herself spread her light over the fork with her thumb and press it smooth, joining the rippling metal into one piece. Her fingers pull on the edges, bending them like clay into a gentle curve, then shaping a shallow bowl in the center. It shimmers in the morning light. It’s almost beautiful, how the metal sparkles under her magic. The light fades. When she returns to her body, her open palm holds a spoon. She is brave, after all. And if she can do this, what else can she do? There’s something like tears behind her eyes. She waits, staring at the spoon, until Patrick laughs. That’s amazing, he says. I had no idea you could do that. Laura nods. Me and Angela, she says. He takes another sip of his latte. Listen, he says. I want you to have something. 

He reaches into his backpack and lifts out something wrapped securely in a plastic bag from Lowe’s. We were going to compost these, he says, But I saved one. I think you’d take care of it better than me. He unwraps the bag. It’s a plant from the biology lab, sitting quietly in a terracotta pot, pale green leaves patiently waiting for someone to love. The tears waiting behind Laura’s eyes break free, and she feels her cheeks becoming wet. Oh my god, she whispers. Patrick widens his eyes. It’s okay if you don’t want it, he says, and begins to wrap it up again. No! says Laura, and the tears start falling into her coffee. I love it, she says. I love it. She pulls the plant to her, holding the rough clay in her palm. She strokes the leaves with her finger. I know just where to put it, she says, On my bureau, in the sun. Patrick grins again. I’m glad, he says. I think your magic will help it grow. Like you and Angela. Soft and strong. ◼