(Ed: As the summary says, this is a parody of alt-Flock fics, which always seem to turn into series of the kind where, if you dive in in the middle, there's no way you can make any sense of it. Thus the title and opening lines. This is not actually a Part Two of anything in particular. It's a oneshot. I considered writing a continuation, but never got very far. Also, it's not all that funny, and contains gay of the non-fangirl-attracting type: Platonic gay. Between girls. Whee.)
Whoops & Faint : What's a Nice Guy Like Me Doing in a Place like This?
In case you weren't paying attention last time, that's me up there in the title, with my partner Whoops first. Damn her.
But yeah. There's me (Faint), Whoops, Squeak, and Gin -- who insists his name is spelled Djinn. He does look a bit like the drink, though -- skinny and almost translucent -- but he is the one who figured we were the perfect crew to run away from home with. So it's his fault, really, and he deserves to be named after something that gets you drunk. Not like we've ever been lucky enough to get drunk, though we've wished it many times. We'd rather use our money for food. Food first, shelter second, booze last; that's how we work. Mostly. Sometimes it's picture books, because it's a bit suspicious when the teenager in glasses can't read a sign. It's all Gin's fault, the literacy thing : he claims we should know how to read and write. He can, thanks to his ninth-grade education (he ran away during winter break of his sophomore year).
If we're all illiterate, I suppose you're wondering how this got to you. That explanation comes at the end of the story, I'm afraid, so you'll have to stick around.
My name is Gin... or at least that's what everyone calls me, no matter how often I insist that it's Djinn. It's kind of fun being a drink, anyway; "hello, I'm an alcoholic drink, what's your name?" And I love it, because it means that no one could find me; anyone who cared would come looking for a kid dumb enough to go by what was obviously his real name. Not someone called Gin.
In my family, I learned to lie to myself easily. The younger brother made that necessary. Oh, he was a sweet kid sometimes, fit to break your heart... it was when he slipped into one of his depressions that things got worse. Or when he got angry. There had been times that I was afraid of him; a little boy, younger than I was. But I was in the palm of his hand, which wasn't so amusing when it carried to other people; someone would ask me to get something for them and I'd jump to it. Because if my brother asked for something and didn't get it, more often than not he'd go into a tizzy, and... Well, I never got bruises. Not from him, anyway.
See, growing up the way I did, with a younger brother who had me under his control, I got a pretty bad guilt complex; maybe you could call it perfectionism. I had to be perfect, or else I'd get yelled at, and I hated that. So if I failed at something, it was nails digging into my wrists, or biting my wrists, or clasping my hands so tightly they'd cramp up and I'd have to pry them apart.
So it was New Year's Day, between terms of my sophomore year of high school, that I got the idea to run away. Well, not the idea. It was more the decision to.
I've always kept a suitcase with clothes, food, money, and a Swiss Army knife in it in the back of my closet, the product of my little-kid fantasies of running away and living on my own. (Funny how I never worked out the problem of money beyond about two hundred dollars -- my allowance, saved up -- or getting a job.) Sometimes I go out walking with it, just to see sort of what it would be like.
This time, it was around six o' clock. Well after our dinner, so I'd just told my parents I was going out and bugged off. I had the suitcase between my knees, and I was sitting on a curb, looking up at the starry sky. There was a fat gibbous moon hanging up there, and I looked idly up at it.
I heard a raised voice -- "Well, then you do it, smart ass!" -- and my attention was shattered. I got up to see what was happening.
What was happening was that Faint couldn't get a fire going, and so she'd tried to get Whoops to do it, but Whoops wouldn't, so Faint kept trying but still couldn't manage it. So now they were arguing, the fire forgotten -- except by Squeak, who was diligently trying to light a fire, bless him.
Faint heard my footsteps -- hard not to, since I was wearing sneakers that scuffed a bit on the concrete -- and looked at me, pushing her glasses up her nose. I swear she immediately went for eye contact, even though she had no idea what I was doing or who I was.
And while she was looking at me, I suddenly saw myself as she must see me. Some kid with brown hair, cut shortish around the face, and green eyes, and pale skin. The clothes are kind of shabby, but not falling apart or anything; they're just geek-clothes, the product of a guy dressing himself who never quite figured out the rules of social acceptability.
But Faint saw more than that, what any fool could see. That's Faint's thing, and everyone knows but her, because she's been doing it all her life. She looks right into you, like people were just characters in a book, with everything open to her gaze. I swear that when I talked later about my family, Faint knew everything I left out, because she saw it the moment she saw me.
In the light of the streetlamp, she looked up at me for a moment, then stood up and said, "Hey, kid."
She didn't even need to offer further invitation. All it took was two words for me to throw away all that I had been before. Like I said, I jump when someone says for me to do something. Faint exploited that a bit.
From then on, I was the new kid of the four of us. They were almost one unit -- Faint and Whoops certainly were -- and I was the new addition. They handled me pretty well, I think. Besides, once they acquired someone who had real money that wasn't just crumpled singles and clean clothes and fresh food and even a knife, they were pretty well set to do what they did next. All they had needed until then was a guy who made them look normal. I was that guy.
Faint was the friendliest to me from the start; she figured she had to draw me in and keep me with them. Part of it was that she knew I needed out of my family, and part of it was practicality -- damn her practicality. Squeak warmed to me next; he was the youngest, and had been the new kid before me. We get along wonderfully. Whoops never quite got used to me; as the person you could best call leader, she hated when the attention was off of her.
See, we were all best at different things, and that's why we never split up like most groups do. Faint was the strength of it all, with an endless well of bitter gallows humor and dirty jokes to back her up. Squeak was the "charm the officer out of reporting the delinquents" bit, being that Faint and I could reasonably pass as his parents, while Whoops generally faked being his aunt or something; when he wasn't doing that, he was our innocence. Poor Squeak. Whoops was the leader, even though she wasn't much of a ramrod; she knew what to do. And me, I was the stuff guy. After the stuff in my suitcase ran out or started getting dirty, I started teaching myself how to get stuff for cheaper.
Like food, for instance. A lot of times we pick up on free stuff, but sometimes I have to take five or ten dollars and go to a store. We don't eat sandwiches; noodles are more of the order of the day. Noodles, rice, beans; we eat a lot of those. I can carry them in the suitcase, and they cook easy once we boil water to clean it. And then sometimes there's meat, but not very often; for us, it's a once in three months treat. Restaurants are right out, unless we get lucky.
See, for us, getting lucky is finding money. I remember we were in this one town for about six months maybe, almost long enough to be regular citizens. And we ate good stuff, because this guy kept leaving us money. I suppose he was the guy who leaves hundreds in the Salvation Army kettles every holiday, too. We never saw him, but every Sunday there were two twenties neatly rolled in the little toilet-paper roll box in the third stall down in the men's restroom in the local Golden Arches establishment. That comes to almost a thousand dollars, and at that point we were still living off my saved two hundred dollars -- although we had, shortly before, benefitted from my discovery of a false bottom in the suitcase, beneath which was about another hundred in fives, apparently from a former owner, as all the bills were before my time. (I eventually convinced Faint to save that hundred, and it's always been in the false bottom, though we've been close to using it once or twice. I did that because I knew that if I could somehow clean up and find a numismatist, there was about a thousand dollars, maybe closer to ten thousand or a hundred, waiting in that false bottom. Because there are a lot of rare things in that false bottom, see? So I saved it.)
But on our last Sunday in town -- because for us, deciding to skip out is a planned thing, really, and the cops were getting a bit suspicious -- I took us all out to lunch on the forty dollars there. It wasn't a good lunch -- we're cheap -- but it was lunch. Interesting lunch.
Faint had done the math a while ago -- because we'd been jealously rationing money for a while, and she wanted to count the spoils -- and figured out that we had a cool thousand dollars at least sitting next to me in the suitcase. Unfortunately, she had told Whoops, who is definitely our, ah, motherly side.
"You know, we could put a down payment on an apartment with that," said Whoops, biting into her sandwich as she finished the sentence.
"Where would we get the furniture and utilities, dumb ass?" asked Faint, dropping her voice on the last.
"Good point," said Whoops thoughtfully, and pointed to me with her sandwich. "Maybe he could get a job."
I wish I'd done a spectacular spit-take, but I didn't. I just said, "No! Of course not, Whoops, we can't afford that!"
"You could," said Faint pensively. "Even if they... shite. Background checks."
"Yeah, and they'd want a resume out of me." I took a big bite out of my sandwich. I was not wasting a good lunch at Subway, no matter how much the girls wanted to ruin my lunch. "Which I can't make up, can I?"
See, the reason we're on the run is because Whoops and Faint were in juvie, or some other kind of kid prison, and they escaped. Faint did something pretty bad, apparently, because there's a bad manhunt out for her arse. Whoops was her accomplice, so of course there's people after her too, but not as hard as for Faint. And Squeak had the sheer bad timing to get caught up in it. Maybe he was like me, and just decided to leave with them.
Then there was me, of course, and after I arrived, I sensed the circle had closed, somehow. That Faint wasn't going to take on another charity case, as she liked to call me sometimes in a joking way. That Whoops would kick any other intruder into the group out on his arse, and that Squeak wouldn't talk to anyone else.
Of course, I'll bet you're wondering about our names. Me, it's because I wanted to be a genie -- something that wasn't what I'd been. Whoops jokes about it being her first word, and Faint just likes her name. Squeak didn't seem to have a name when Faint and Whoops took him on, so they just called him the first thing that came to mind. I suspect, though, that my traveling companions used to have families, and like me, they don't even want a name to follow them. So they picked things that struck them as going together; I suppose that Whoops and Faint, having escaped at the same time, must have intended some kind of ridiculous pun around it. Squeak got stuck with the luck of the draw, and I got stuck as alcohol man when they couldn't be arsed to say it right. Or when Faint started making booze jokes about me. For a while I was "that tall drink of vodka", and then she progressed to further clear alcohols, finally hitting on Gin, where we stopped.
Oh, don't get the impression that Faint didn't like me. She did. Whoops maybe thought I was the outsider and didn't really like me, but she knew well enough that I damn well wasn't going back where I had come from. See, Faint loved me, and because she was Faint, she could do things that, from anyone else, would sting like a slap. Because she was Faint, and behind whatever witty quip or cruel joke she threw in your face, there was always that unconditional, pure love. She's kind of like a dog, that way, because no matter what you do, she still loves you, faithfully. Faint's a bit like a cat, too; the way you can't read her moods very well from the outside, and once you get to know her well you barely can anyway. So in the end you never quite know what you're dealing with, and everything you do is a guess, a leap into a minefield with a prayer that you'll live.
No. That wasn't Faith at all. That was my brother.
I suppose you've come to me to get the physical descriptions. Gin was very nice and told you what he looks like (or what he thinks he looks like, anyway), but no one else will spill. Because we don't have a lot of mirrors around us, so you'd have to go around asking us what the other three look like. Very tiresome.
Well, Gin is medium height and skinny, with pale skin. He has dark blond hair that he's been letting get shaggy lately, but it still hasn't reached his shoulders. And he has the most amazing green eyes. Some people with green eyes have very pale green eyes, like a tropical ocean; most have slightly darker coloration, more like the color of a dollar bill. Gin is the only person I've ever known whose eyes could be honestly compared to emeralds.
Whoops is taller than Gin, even though Gin must be a few years older than her, and she's always had a slight tan, for as long as I've known her. She has brown hair, which she insists on cutting every other month, and darkish-blue eyes. It's a little bit eerie, because unless you get within arm's-length of her, her eyes really do look violet.
Then we've got Faint, who is hilariously normal. Well, by American standards, anyway. Blond hair, light brown eyes, lightly tanned skin.
Last, me. Squeak. Brown hair, brown eyes, paleish skin. How thrilling, I know.
Well, now that I've given you what you came here for, I don't suppose you'll be leaving any time soon. You came to me because I'm the only one who would -- or could -- tell you what you want to know. Like how you went to Gin for the details of how we work together. You're going to the two underdogs, because apparently we're the ones who saw the most.
This is what I can tell you:
We were four kids on the run, and I don't know how we managed it for so long. We never got caught, and no one ever questioned us. It was like God decided to shield us from anyone who came our way. We were lucky, that's all, and it's a bit of a miracle that we didn't get caught for so long.
But I suppose you're after the story of it all, and that's why you came to me, because Faint won't talk and Whoops is gone, and Gin, while he has a talent for storying, wasn't there at the beginning. Thank you, by the way, for letting me borrow a copy of his account.
The responsibility for telling you about how we escaped belongs to Whoops and Faint, because I was very young at the time. I remember, though, that Whoops and Faint were already very close, and treated me like their younger brother. We slept when we could, and didn't come by a lot of food. Faint learned, though, and we got along.
Faint wouldn't talk, I suppose? Gin's too talkative for his own good sometimes, but I know he hasn't given you what you want. Neither has Squeak. So you came to me.
Go ahead. Stare. Guess why I wear the shades? You bastards just won't let me have them indoors, and now my secret's out.
Squeak lied me up a good one, didn't he? He usually does -- the whole bit about how my eyes are really just dark, dark blue, but look violet. We'd get away with it if you hadn't taken my damn sunglasses.
They're violet all right. Purple. Those with a taste for prose of an equal colour might call them amethyst. Undoubtably they'll go on my driver's licence now. As if I'd ever get a driver's licence -- this is all just formalities, isn't it? Before they haul us back?
Well, whether it is or it isn't, I suppose that's how you found us. Or part of it. But it's damn hard to keep running when just maintaining eye contact means outing yourself as a freak. And I figured there was only a matter of time, after Squeak said I'd gone. So I did what I could.
Of course I won't tell you what I did. Not until the story's finished. Which it isn't, and it may very well never be.
So, then. Where would you like me to start?
Of the original three, I came first. Faint might be a little older, but she came later. I'm sure of that. And she was the reason we escaped, the reason that we're here. That's why she's not talking to you. The guilt's starting to nibble on her sanity. It's already made an appetizer of her soul, and now it's tucking in to the finest dish of all : her mind.
Why did Faint want to get out? I can't tell you that. Perhaps she can, if you get to her fast enough. I know that I didn't want out at all. I was perfectly comfortable in my home. It was where I had been born, and certainly where I intended to die. Comfortable. Homes usually are.
Perhaps Faint wanted out because she knew there was something different, and she wanted it. Faint is one for wanting things, and what she wants, she usually gets. I wouldn't have gone with her had I not loved her, but I loved Faint, from the moment I saw her.
You're assuming. Never assume. Especially not with us. I loved her because she was Faint. Because in her, I saw something new, something different from whatever I was. And I wanted that difference.
See, what's the same about every person who's ever existed is that we assume. We assume, first, about ourselves. Whatever is constant in our being is normal. Perfectly normal. Raise a child who's obviously different in a vacuum, and he'll grow up assuming he is a perfectly average specimen of humanity.
Until you show him otherwise. Not with a mirror; the first thing we learn to get comfortable with is our own face. What you show him is another person. Someone who isn't like him.
See, Faint was that for me. Until then, purple eyes and brown hair were normal. So was anaemic-pale skin.
Faint had white-blond hair, light brown eyes. Tan skin. Almost my polar opposite as to coloring. My hair and eyes were dark, hers light. My skin pale, hers dark.
So yes, I stared. You'll note that we've gotten a little more the same over the years; just compare your photographs of us. I know you've got them. They may not be flattering, but they're accurate. I've tanned a bit, and Faint's hair has, impossibly, darkened with the sun.
When we met, I asked her what she was. Mind that. What. Not who. Because what she was was certainly not human. I was human. What Faint was I didn't know.
There was a moment of staring when we met. She looked at me. I looked at her. We were wild children, without benefit of human contact for the most part. We had words, of course, but we'd never been taught manners.
We had no names to give, and so after I asked the first question, she asked one of me in return:
"What are you?" she asked. And then she laughed. I believe that was the first real laugh I'd ever heard.
I stared at her, and had Faint not been Faint, the moment would have surely passed, and I would be there still. But Faint was Faint, and so, with a total of six words exchanged between us (and one laugh), we became friends, tied together come life or come death. I think it was the laugh that balanced the thing out. Had it ended with six words balanced evenly, we would have gone on separately in life. But the laugh indebted me to her. I'm not sure quite how, but it did.
There's a book in here somewhere, for one of you. Is it you... or is it that shy guy in the corner? Or the couple? I can't tell. That was always Faint's job, the telling. But I know that someone sees a book in all this, and that's why I'm doing my damn best to tell the story true the first time around. Because I don't care how much the story gets gussied up and twisted around for the book. I'll be dead by then, sure -- out behind the chemical sheds -- but I want to be sure that the story is told. It has to be told, and I'd like to be the one who tells it.
Because I was there for the story. And now Faint's leaving. Gin was never in a place to talk. And Squeak -- poor Squeak's fault was that he was too young. He trusted us too much.
So now it's time for the story. God, I wish I could write. But I can't trust this to Gin, wonderful as he is. I hope you've got someone with good ears on the other end of these miles of tape, because I want you to get every word I tell you tonight. Because I intend to finish tonight. I hope, also, that you've got coffee. For yourself. I won't need it, but you'll want to stay awake. Trust me.
You all settled now? Good. Where would you like me to begin?
All right, then. I'll bet it's in your files that I've got an unusually high IQ. That doesn't mean a damn thing, except that I figured out the test and fooled it. I also have a fairly good vocabulary for someone of my background, which means that I'm a smartarse.
I apologize. Where were we?
Yes. I never did any research into it, but I suppose that if you were to interview children from troubled homes, they would tell you that their home life was perfectly normal until Dad got caught with a chainsaw and bloody hands or Mum got taken away. My childhood -- such as it was -- was like that.
I remember Mum. She had brown hair like mine, and dark blue eyes. She wore her hair fairly short, but I liked it nonetheless. I never saw her wearing anything but her white labcoat and what she called her "work clothes", which were a pair of black slacks and a green shirt with a dark pattern of plants on it. She said that I could call her Mum as long as I did what she asked me. She didn't ask much, did Mum. Mostly 'can you move this'es and 'what do you see here's. She was nice.
Da was... well, he wasn't not nice. He was just Da. My Da. He had a short ponytail when I was very young, but at some point he cut his hair into a more conservative style. He had dark hair and dark eyes, and I remember very little about him.
They were my parents. I had uncles and aunts too, but they were my parents.
Aunt Mildred is the only one I remember by name. I had done something I shouldn't have -- I was about five or so -- and she slapped me across the face. I was angry, I was hurt, and the next thing I remember is a great deal of red, and Mum holding me tight and asking me if I wouldn't like a cup of tea. I remember that Da was angry with me after that, but under the angry was happy.
I was never like Faint, with the way she always knew things. Perhaps some of that rubbed off on me, I don't really know. I know that Faint never mastered the moving. Faint could never do that, but I could.
You have to understand that we weren't part of any cliche, any pulp-book story. I wasn't a failure because my eyes were purple. That was just part of what came out of it in the end. Mum and Da liked it... more accurately, they were adapted to it. None of us were ever destroyed because we were failures. There was no such thing as a failure.
Us? When I was younger, there were about ten of us. We were... close. Yes. Close. Not family, but we were good friends. The words won't cover the reality of what it was. I'm sorry. They'll have to serve, though.
But in all the pulps, the sob-story always goes that all the people they got attached to were destroyed because they were imperfect. That, I can tell you very confidently, is a complete lie. No one was ever destroyed simply because they were imperfect. Unless you went completely crazy and started attacking people, you weren't a failure. Even then, they'd medicate you down to a better level. Usually that worked, except for the really crazy ones, who just disappeared. And there wasn't any pain in it for them. It was like going to sleep. At night, they were there. In the morning, they were gone.
They treasured us, you see. Had there been more of us, they would have gotten more arrogant, begun discarding imperfections. But there were so few of us, and so they treated us like fine china, or diamonds. We were fragile to them, and so they tried as hard as they could to give us a simple, normal growing-up. They loved us. They loved us.
That's another of the pulp cliches. That they hate us, treat us like garbage. No, they knew what they were getting into. They knew that even an animal doesn't like being treated like an animal. Nothing likes being treated as what it is, so they treated us like the children we were.
So we escaped another cliche. We didn't hate them. They didn't hate us. They were our family. And we wanted so dearly to please them. Any child wants its parents happy. So we did as our parents asked, and they treated us kindly.
Of course, there couldn't be any excursions to ice-cream shoppes or pleasure-parks or the like. Because it was dangerous in the world. Faint and I could perhaps pass as normals, but some of the other children couldn't at all. So we were glad to stay inside, away from all the world. It was safer in here, and besides, our parents were here.
And you could get ice-cream if you asked, anyway, and just doing whatever it was you did was far better than surrendering yourself to gravity in the grasp of a machine. It's so much better when you do it yourself.
It was over ice-cream that Faint and I began to feel our way through manners. Our parents never tried to stop us. There was no need, because we were just two kids talking over ice-cream. They should have recognized, though, that Faint was a different thing than any other one of us. She was other.
I remember I had pistachio ice-cream. My favorite, of course. Faint had chocolate, and that's where the conversation began.
"Your ice-cream's green," she said with the friendly disdain only a child of seven can master.
"Your ice-cream's brown," I returned, and nibbled at said ice-cream.
"Isn't that weird?" she asked artlessly.
"Yours is weird," I said.
"Why are your eyes purple?" she asked.
"Why are yours green?" I asked.
You can see where the conversation went, I think. Nowhere.
It's going to be very hard for you to tell about what was between Faint and I. Try your best anyway. It's going to be hard for you to ruin it when the both of us are dead. Squeak would defend us, I think. Gin, not so much. He may be a nice boy, but he just doesn't have much loyalty. Not to me.
Gin told you that already, did he? I suspected he would.
It only remains, then, to tell the story.
Like anyone else's, my childhood is not one single flowing recollection of events. It's fragments. Like trying to look at a painting after it's been shredded by knives. More than anything, it's a work of guessing and intuition.
As I said before, I was perfectly content to remain where I was. It was Faint's idea to escape. At first I didn't want to, but at that point I'd begun to trust her. She was my first... not first friend, for I suppose that's the word you'd use for the children I grew up among. I don't know what word you'll want, then. Close friend, perhaps.
Faint wasn't like anyone else I had known. Most of the children were also content with our current situation. Faint wasn't, and she said it aloud.
"Don't you think there's something else?" she said to me one day.
"What do you mean?" I said. "Something else?"
"Like, out there." She gestured at the walls. "Outside."
"Of course there's something," I said. "But it's dangerous out there."
"How do you know?" she said, and tilted her head sideways to look at me. That was one of Faint's quirks back then, the head-tilting. I never knew anyone else to do it.
"Well, that's the truth," I said.
"Is it?" she said, and tilted her head the other way.
"Of course it is," I said.
"Or is it just what you've been taught?" she said, and tilted her head back the way it had originally been tilted.
I stared at her. I was seven, so you can't expect even I to have understood what she was saying. I'm simply not that intelligent.
Hullo again. It's nice to have you back here; it gets so lonely I could die.
No, that's Elvis. Did we leave off somewhere you'd like to pick up?
So I should just pick you up, then?
Well, goodbye then. It's too bad I couldn't tell you anything useful.
How did we escape? It was Faint, because no one but Faint could have got us out.
Ventilation? No. No one could have escaped by the ventilation system, because our air got washed before we ever breathed it. Steam-cleaned, maybe -- but nothing got past the cleaning system. The people who... who made us, I suppose you could say... they cared about us. And they were afraid to let us get sick.
So I don't remember escaping. I remember that the night we escaped, Faint and I lay in a field of wheat and blew clouds of our breath at the stars, veiling them; filmy scarves over sparkling eyes. We heard footsteps coming towards us; we leapt up, linked hands, and ran away.
I think it was the next morning that we found Squeak. He was so small then; a little boy with nowhere to go. So we took him in; I thought of it as retribution for unwise planning in our escape. Faint, of course, simply took him in. She was so trusting.
I know what Gin has told you. It's the truth. Both of these things about Faint are the truth. When we found Squeak, it was me and Faint against the world, young and bulletproof. We got used to him, and our concept of family included him; me, Faint, Squeak. Family.
When Gin found us, the concept fractured. Shattered. It wasn't just me and Faint with Squeak on the side. There was something altogether new here: me and Gin, Gin and Squeak, me and Faint. And Faint wanted me to herself; she didn't understand that I knew that Gin was troubled. He needed me... and she didn't understand.
Don't you dare compare the whole thing to Romeo and Juliet, or any other cliched love story. I don't know precisely what we were -- what we are -- but I know that we were never cliches. No real people ever are. If you're going to tell our story, tell it right.
You can call it a love story if you like, certainly, but don't you say that it was sexual, or that it was romantic. Because I'm still not sure what category -- if any -- it would fit in. There may never be any certainty. And all the memories twine together, into a single knotted strand, and it's so hard to tease out the different truths from the whole.
God must have been with us when we escaped. There's no earthly reason that we didn't get caught. We did foolish things, left an obvious trail, stood out in the memory of everyone we met. Yet luck must have been on our side, for we made it to the middle of the country without any interference from authority. The only representative of authority we met was a policewoman in a small town, who passed us by and pretended not to see.
We should have been caught, but perhaps there's nothing so odd about a lesbian couple in their teens fleeing a town with a small child in tow. No one asked the obvious questions; the only thing that dogged us through the miles was an ominous silence.
Once we reached the middle of the country, the fear began to drop away from us. We relaxed, and we started to wander. There are paths you can see, and there are paths that go behind things... or between them. We walked between the lives of the ordinary people, and only a few others saw us. People like us, mostly.
I won't tell you any names, because there was a sort of pact between all of us. I saw only what wanted to be seen. They saw what they wanted to see. We passed each other by in silence and in understanding. I'm not sure it can even be expressed in words, but that's how it has to be expressed.
Because you don't want the truth. All you want is the pretty story, because you need a pair of lesbians to round out tomorrow's pulp story. And you came to us. You came to me, because the dominant partner in the lesbian relationship you think you see won't talk and is losing her mind, and I don't intend to give you a pretty fairy-story about the two young girls who fell in love.
It didn't work out like that at all.
I hated her at first, because she challenged everything I knew was true. She fascinated me; all people are fascinated by what they percieve to be wrong and deviant. But then she began to change my own perception of truth, and when she came to me with an outstretched hand, offering me freedom, I didn't stop to reconsider. I took her hand and I never looked back.
In those years we were on the run, I came to love her. Or perhaps it was she who began to love me, or both at once -- I couldn't tell you, because, as I said, the memories are all twining together. But there was love between us. We were teenagers, trapped together as we fled before an invisible pursuer. Anyone in our situation would be expected to come to rely on their accomplice -- partner -- whichever word you choose to use. We just got caught up in the limelight.
It's okay. It's not your fault that I know. In the week before we were brought in -- when we knew it was hopeless -- I started hearing my name, seeing my face, on every street corner. We were famous -- for a week, we were in the eye of the world.
And we were famous as lesbians.
Oh no, I didn't mind. We were more worried about staying out for as long as we could. Who cared what they said about us?
I want you to know -- when I decided to go on the run by myself, I wanted more than anything else to take Faint with me. Because she was so fragile already -- like delicate china. I didn't want her to be here.
But I had to do what I did, and so I had to leave her behind. I ran, and I hope that, in the end, we'll be reunited, and I can tell her I never meant to hurt her so. That I never intended for us to be separated.
Please tell her I'm sorry.
So I see you've come back to me again. What's Whoops got to say about all this? Or should I just wait for the book?
Why wouldn't there be a book about this? Lesbians. Small children. A manhunt. Abuse. Rescue. It's the perfect story.
But where were we? More accurately, where would you like me to start?
That's easier than last time, because it wasn't so long ago.
Well, Whoops and Faint were trying so hard to outrun the people coming after us, but I think Whoops knew already that we were going to get caught. So she told us.
Squeak freaked out. You realize that all he really remembers is us, right? So when he was faced with what was almost the certainty that we would be separated, he nearly lost it.
Me? I knew I'd get off easy. Because all you've got is a fake name, and neither God nor man can get my birth name out of me. So I guess you'll find a place for me to go. I'll disappear. Because if there was any crime involved, I couldn't have been more than an innocent bystander at the time -- because it would have occurred before I even met Whoops and Faint.
Whoops took it maybe the best. She started making plans -- I couldn't possibly tell you for what -- and she kept herself calm. She refused to panic.
And Faint -- well, she left. It was like she just decided the world wasn't worth it, and walked away. You've got her body, I guess, but most of the time it's just an animal. Faint's not there anymore. Sometimes she comes back, but she's not there most of the time. The body is only a shell now.
Is that all you need? Goodbye, then.
So I see you've returned to me. I wonder what it is you want from me this time. It doesn't really matter; what questions you have, I will answer. In return I ask you: how is my china doll faring?
Then there's less time left than I thought. I'll have to finish the tale as quickly as I can so that I can -- do what needs to be done. Finish, that is, what little remains to be told. What do you want to know?
As soon as I knew we were going to be caught soon, I told them all. There was no need to keep it to myself for any length of time. Whether I told or not, we would soon be in the hands of those who pursued us.
I hadn't known what to expect. Squeak had the worst immediate reaction -- he pled and pled for us not to leave him, and no matter how we promised that we'd find him wherever he was, he wouldn't believe. Gin was the calmest -- after all, he hadn't escaped from anywhere except a house, and running away from your home is so much less worse than fleeing the place where Faint and I had been. And when my Faint began to fall apart, I knew what I had to do.
So I chose to run, to buy myself what time I could buy for the task at hand. I left her behind, and I prayed that she would not be too badly damaged when I returned. I did what needed doing, and I let you capture me. I answered your questions, and I told you the story. The tale is told now. Write your books. Make your movies for television. Sing songs about us. We'll be long gone.
Gin would say that my primary... ability is something he calls telempathy. I don't know what he means -- most likely my ability to know as soon as I see them what troubles a person -- but he is wrong. All that is secondary to what I really do.
I bid you all a fond adieu, gentlemen. May you live long, and may your books sell well.
Whoops did what? And you can't find Faint?
I should have suspected as much. I always had a funny feeling about them. Had they been characters in a book I was reading, I'd have figured out they were going to run away together by page three.
Happy finding. I suspect you'll have to go a lot further than Kansas, though, because knowing the two of them, they'll be nowhere on Earth.
Well... not this Earth.