The past three years had marred Katara as a product of contradiction. Her parents' suffocating love led to an unsuccessful love life, in which potential lovers were many and true lovers were few. Her brother's overprotective nature only encouraged her to pursue bad ideas further. Like all university students their freshman year, her inexperience marked her as an easy target for the weathered romantics. For Katara, it was a student journalist named Jet.
He was a river with a strong current and deceptive shores, so appealing from a map but so different up close. Their demise and undoing was predicted the second their glances shook hands, meeting in midair amid snowflakes and leaves, late November three years ago. It was the paraphernalia of novels and theatrics, so perfect and sugary that it stuck and stuck and stuck, unhealthy and sweet, sweet but corrosive.
He had spoken first, his tone even but grainy, bobbing like the tip of a wave. "Where have I met you, gorgeous? A dream?" She had laughed obediently and covered her smile. In a bold act that she would be doomed to remember forever, he reached for her hand and pulled it down to her side, holding it in his for a while. "Don't do that," he said. "Don't ever cover that laugh, those teeth. Okay?"
Jet could charm a serpent-hound with his words and idealism, with the way he spoke about the future and the way he wrote about the past. He took his life experience to his journalism – wrote editorials about his childhood as an orphan living in treetops, his scholarship to Four Nations University, his conflicts as a success story, the fierce hope he held to help children who were in similar predicaments. But nothing was as convincing to Katara as his dark eyes, colored like tree bark with specks granite, as characteristic as his childhood spent in canopies and his young adulthood spent in the city. Jet's eyes undid her, undressed her, swallowed her whole – and she stood before him spellbound and stupid, young and gorgeous. "Please," she wanted to say. "Take me." She was unaware of the sexual context of this back then, knowing only that she wanted to be part of his world, this glorious, unreachable object of dreams, so close to the sky and so far from the ground.
She didn't know when she opened her legs for him – three months after they met – that she would regret it only weeks later at his graduation. She was a stranger to love; she had never held a boy's hand, much less kissed one, and the prospect alone of becoming something modern and dangerous became so appealing that it had dizzied her, made her cling to Jet despite his obvious downfalls. There was a danger in Jet that invited her to love him further, obsess over him, fall for the darkness and poverty he represented. Perhaps there was no darkness at all, and now, years after the fact, Katara could easily recognize her obsession as fear. She had always loved Jet more than he loved her, and that was the only sin between them, that was what had predicted and executed their red light. It was too easy to adore him and too difficult to stop – so he stopped it instead, graduating and moving to the east coast, lusting for big cities with skyscrapers taller than trees and windows as large as walls.
She didn't know why she remembered him now, but she did, possibly because Zuko was also planning to move. When she had known Jet, it was early her freshman year, before she had made any real friends. With no one to offer advice or give counsel, Katara had dug a hole for herself and, stripped naked and spellbound, gladly threw herself head first inside. The turn of events was expected. He had fooled her, taken her precious innocence away, and there was no way to regain her sanity than to give it time. Luckily, today, there were friends, advisers, potential lovers, and a roommate that also wrote the advice column for the school newspaper. When Katara got back to her dorm, she was relieved and excited to find Suki still awake, and she sighed, "Oh, thank God."
"Glad to see me?" Suki mused from her bed. She had insisted on the top bunk the day they met. She put her book down and turned to the waterbender, a loud yawn already at her lips.
"Got a second?"
"For you, dear, all the time in the world." Suki slid down the wooden ladder and reached for their mini-fridge. She tossed a bottle of coconut milk to Katara, who caught it unexpectedly with both hands.
"One day, that's going to hit my head and I'm going to forget who I am. And it'll be all your fault!"
"Perfect!" exclaimed Suki. "Amnesia is the only true cure to the Zuko drama."
Katara rolled her eyes at Suki's cheekiness. "Stop," she said. "He isn't that bad. He's just confusing me."
Suki crawled back up to her bunk and crossed her legs over the edge. Katara threw her satchel down, a denim and khaki piece that Sokka had brought back for her when he studied abroad in the Northern Earth Kingdom. Since then, Katara had decorated the piece with beads and feathers, and the satchel looked more like a canvas of tribal art than a vessel for books and pens.
Suki secretly envied Katara's intrinsic sense of style, her ability to seamlessly stream into high fashion, and Katara secretly envied Suki's natural beauty and unperturbed nature. Where the waterbender insisted on an hour of makeup time before class, Suki could roll out of bed with nothing more than her underwear and appear as clean and fresh as a goddess. But their petty jealousy was little more than admiration and curiosity. They loved one another like sisters, and in the past two years, Suki's decision to accept Sokka's dating proposal had brought the girls closer together.
They were not without their differences, though. Where Suki was an open book, Katara refrained from outlining her dating history in detail. Katara knew all of Suki's failed conquests and successful mistakes, disclosed by the brash girl over coffee and in between classes, her eyes brazen and mad, her lips tight. Suki was a master storyteller and she believed in confession, in setting the soul free, in being honest so as not to fall prisoner to your lies. So Katara knew it all, and yet Suki knew very little of Katara's history outside of Zuko. Until tonight, Katara had intended to keep it this way.
Now the waterbender fought with herself; the desire to weep over Jet was too strong, too attractive, and long overdue. She had been too ashamed to cry before, heartbroken and alone, too proud to run to Sokka or Gran Gran with the unthinkable news of rejection and guilt. Katara closed her mouth and pressed the soles of her palms to her eyes. She fell backwards on her low bunk, her mind as blank as the pillow. Suki grimaced at the thud and shook her head.
"What's that stupidity gotten himself into this time?" she asked, distressed. "We'll straighten him out before his cocky ass graduates in May."
"It's not his fault," Katara said, sitting up just long enough to take a sip of coconut milk. "I kind of overreacted and left him hanging at Omashu's."
"You didn't!" Suki hooted, laughing. "You bitch!"
Katara smiled and defended lamely, "I had to. You should have seen. I was too angry to sit with him without going at his throat like a crazy."
"He probably deserved it."
"I am unforgiving," admitted the younger girl. "I don't know what I expected out of this, but I still expected something."
Suki shrugged, her shoulders rolling backwards easily like little waves, and Katara marveled at how the girl could take a hopelessly complicated knot of a situation and untie it by untying the muscles of her body. How simple and how intricate her powers, thought Katara, suddenly wanting to replay the scene at Omashu's. Zuko would have stared at her calm response with a dropped jaw hanging foolishly over his lap. If only, thought Katara, she could have Suki's calm nerves for just one day. "We all have expectations," Suki admitted, her gaze drifting to the ceiling of their room. She looked on dreamily. "You might expect everything and you might expect nothing, but you still expect. That doesn't go away. It's human."
"Then I want to be an alien," lamented Katara. "Or a frog."
Suki couldn't help it – she laughed again, and her laughter urged a few giggles out of Katara as well. "Why a frog?" asked Suki. "There are sexier animals than that!"
"There are no sexy animals."
"Life isn't worth living if you can't do it sexily," joked Suki, lifting one of her eyebrows to give a mock suggestive look. "What will your fan club do if you go frog? Imagine. Total mayhem. Those poor boys are lost without you."
Katara grinned and sat up again, reaching for her satchel and rummaging for a book. Suki was a better friend than she was, the waterbener thought suddenly, and despite the lightened tone of the night, the idea made her heart as heavy as a stone. It wasn't fair. Katara had been so wrapped up in Zuko and his problems and desires and moods that she had drifted away from this hilarious mess of a girl.
Despite their shared friendship, the closeness they felt as sisters, Katara had never disclosed the truth about Jet, how he had damaged her, how she was drawn to boys who needed her to guide them, needed her to fix them. The most Suki knew of Jet was that he had interviewed Katara for an article in the paper, "Future Freshmen Figures," in which he had predicted that Katara would become one of the most powerful benders to graduate Four Nations since the infamous Hamma. In the article, there was a picture of Katara taken by Jet, her blue eyes grayed because of the black-and-white budget of the paper, her full lips pressed into shy, toothless smile. You can see the flash of the camera reflected in her eyes, but there is another spark there too, as bright as a coin. This girl is in love and she doesn't know it yet, dressed in her winter coat, posed outside of the school's bending arena in the snow.
The most Suki had said about the article was that Jet had made a spelling error near the end, substituting "power full" for "powerful," a comment made between sips of chai on a rainy afternoon in December, a year after the article had been published. Suki had found the copy under Katara's bed and mistook Katara's sentimentality for vanity. "You keeping this because your picture's in it?" the girl had asked, fluttering her eyelashes and pouting. "My name is Katara! I'm so gorgeous that I get my picture in the paper! Boy I wish this reporter knew how to spell! Oh well, at least he got my good side!" They had laughed then, Katara saying it was there collecting dust, a complete accident of messiness. But when Suki threw it away and headed for class, Katara had fished it out of the trash bin, wiped it off, and hid it underneath her bed again, her eyes wet, unable to read Jet's name under the photograph.
"You remember that article?" Katara started uneasily, hating the shiver in her voice. "The Freshmen Figures one, with my picture in it."
"Yeah," said Suki over her book. "The shot where you look like a deer in headlights. Or dear in headlines?" She added with her musical laugh, "I'm on a roll for puns today!"
Katara smiled back and forced herself to swallow. "You remember the guy who wrote it?"
Suki was silent at first. She purred a long, "Mmmmm," the ending of which Katara dreaded. Suki turned the page of her book thoughtfully, her eyes fogging over like a tea glass. "No," she said. "I don't think I remember him. Why? Does he want to do a follow-up article? Maybe get some shots of you without the coat?"
"Ha! Pervert!"
"Honestly. Think about it. Freshmen Figures? That'll be the true discovery of the student body." She winked and the action caught Katara off-guard somehow, as if Suki knew a secret Katara could never know, some esoteric ability or humor. She asked, as sweet as bird, "So when is he doing the photo-shoot? Who is this guy?"
"He isn't doing a photo-shoot," Katara replied anxiously. She blurted, stumbling on the confession, "I—I slept with him. Freshman year, I mean." Suki's silence prodded Katara to go further, and Katara couldn't stop the words. They rolled off her tongue with the sickly ease of oil. "He ruined me, Suki. He ruined me. I slept with him and he ruined me."
The weight of the words was enough; Katara crumbled, three years overdue but still as poignant as if the ordeal had passed just yesterday. She collapsed into her lap, her shoulders stooping inward as far as they would go, her back shaking with small, bubbling sobs. "He ruined me," she repeated. Suki jumped down from her bunk and wrapped her bare arms around the waterbender fiercely.
"Don't say that," she said at first, but when Katara continued crying she found she could do little more than stroke the younger girl's hair and rock her back and forth gently.
"He ruined me. I loved him and he ruined me." Her voice was strange to her, heavy like lead in her throat but light in her ears. She sounded like a little girl, nasally and uncertain, and Suki's motherly reaction only furthered the notion. She was winded, tired. This secret had stayed in her heart for too long, eaten away bits and bits of her in the way blood eats up gauze, in the way coffee eats at enamel. But now, her head in Suki's lap, she felt as clean as a sheet of new cotton. In her sobs, she smiled and laughed, and throughout it, continued crying. In her overlapping mania, she felt the curse of her old habits and delusions fade away into tears and grins. "I loved him," she told Suki in a defeated whisper. "I loved him and he hurt me, Suki. And no one ever knew."