April 4
Every weekend, from Thursday through Sunday night, there were parties. She couldn't remember which ones she'd attended, and which ones she'd skipped, so she was completely at the mercy of her own current predilections, to hell with the timeline. And after a couple parties, she was definitely not swayed to attend more. But her best friend Melanie, who would remain a good, close friend for many years to come, was insistent that she attend the St. Anthony Hall party , and specifically needed a friend to be with her in case Derek failed to attend.
Monica remembered many a great party at St. A's – mainly because Melanie went on to join the order – but most of those parties were all blurred together in her mind. Still, she closed her books for the night and dressed in the appropriate attire and headed out. At the very least, between the alcohol, the people, and the dancing, she'd probably be able to forget about John for a couple hours.
Derek was already there and waiting, and soon Monica found herself sitting alone in a corner. It wasn't that she was trying to remain unnoticed, or that she felt abandoned, or that she felt out of place, she just found in this moment of frivolity an opportunity to sit and watch this world circulating around her, a world that wasn't really hers.
A familiar face popped into her field of view. The girl smiled and sat nearby. It took Monica only a second to place her. "Lanie!" she exclaimed, but no sooner had she said that than she doubted whether or not they had met yet.
"Um, hi? Have we met?" Apparently they had not. Monica froze for a second, and then, as some of the more memorable moments she'd shared with Lanie flashed in her head, she relaxed and decided to go with it.
"Well, no, not exactly. But we should." She held out her hand. "I'm Monica."
"Lanie," she said, shaking Monica's hand while giving her a curious eye. "But you already knew that. How did you know that?"
Monica didn't answer, but instead smiled mysteriously. Did they meet here? She could not recall. But they had met, and they had hit it off, and Lanie had become her first female lover. Given that John was now devoted to his former life, she felt no reason why she should not at least find some pleasure in her own history.
She stayed with Lanie that night (and many more nights afterward), remembering to claim she was a virgin in the Sapphic sense, but not caring to prove it when words were no longer needed. It was a fling, it had never been more than a fling then, but right now it was a fling she desperately needed. There was nothing else she could do. Time was ticking by, answers seemed more and more out of reach as one possibility after another failed to have merit. Her grades were suffering, by her standards and in comparison to the ones that she'd earned the first time around, but she stopped caring as much. There was nothing to give her hope, nothing to ease the uncertainty. There were just Lanie's kisses and everything that followed.
"You seem so sad sometimes," Lanie said to her one night , running her long, thin fingers through Monica's mass of youthful hair.
"Do you ever get the sense that you are in the wrong place at the wrong time? Like if you'd been born 20 years earlier or 20 years later, life would make more sense?" asked Monica, tracing her own fingers down the pale white flesh stretched tight over Lanie's small, narrow frame.
"All the time," said Lanie with a bit of a laugh. "But it would be so much worse if I were trapped in the 60s, you know? At least here, I get to be out, and have a girl in my bed when I so choose. But I bet it will be a hundred times more amazing twenty years from now."
Monica looked at Lanie's face, with a trail of light brown freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose and her delicate cheekbones. Her light red hair was long and seemed to flow all around her. She tried to picture what Lanie would look like in 2002 and regretted not keeping in touch with her after school. What did the future hold for her? She imagined great things, of course: novels, travels, academic posts, adventures, and great love.