So—first hours of seventeen, I’m beside the person I love more than anyone else in the universe.
And, yeah, I say that with full knowledge of the size of the universe. I know the options. There’s a whole sky out there, a whole starry map of minds and wings.
Jason’s the only one who’s ever believed everything about me without me having to convince him. The one who heard. The one who’s been beside me since we were five, and who never left.
He was holding my hand when I died. He was holding my hand when I wasn’t sure I was worth resurrecting, an alien, a lost singer who’d just almost destroyed all the people on earth.
He’s been next to me almost since the beginning, and he’ll be beside me at the end, wherever and whenever that is.
I’m thinking about Heyward. Let me stop. Let me not think about what might be starting to happen. Let me just be here—
Jason & Aza.
Just [{{ }} & {{ }}]
It’s simple, that “&.”
Except, it isn’t.
Nothing is.
I try to medicate by putting my face into Jason’s shoulder and pressing it against his skin. It’s nice there, looking at the insides of my eyelids.
I could pretend that I came innocently to his bed, where I planned to sleep holding his hand, but how likely is that? We’re red-blooded . . . blue-blooded . . . oh, I don’t know. An indigo- blooded Magonian, and a Jason Kerwin.
Which is to say, we’ve been having sex for a few months now. Sex isn’t quite how one thinks it’s going to be when one is hearing about it and thinking that it’s the ONLY CATEGORY on earth.
It’s only one of the onlys (as opposed to “only one of the lonelies,” which is what I used to call myself, because hello, admittedly, drama).
I thought love + sex would = electric dizzy, some kind of mixed-up pop song, plus great poets, stomach butterflies, blushing-Christmas-morning-meets-new-museum-full-of-previously-undiscovered-flying-insects situation. But in reality, it didn’t look like it was going to be any kind of triumph, the first time. There was no factoid expertise. There’s no learn-one-scrap-of-information-and-pretend-you-know-everything when it comes to sex, or at least, there’s not a successful version of that which ensures both parties have fun.
I knew exactly nothing about anything and neither did Jason. So, the first time, six months ago, it was . . . less than spectacular.
As in both of us were nervous—
and ow (mostly me with ow),
but also ow for him because I was SO nervous I flailed and whacked him ferociously in the nose (again, poor nose) and then we were both like SORRY I’M SORRY OH GOD VERY SORRY.
Sex is not unfraught in the first place. I had the added worry there’d be some kind of alien surprise. There wasn’t. It was just your typical weird and awkward and uncertain. At least, I assume it’s typical. I don’t know, but probably, even given every teenage movie ever made, no one starts out with candlelight and a bed covered in rose petals, and if they do? Well, it’s probably still a whole lot of kneecaps and um.
The second time we attempted, we both ended up taking a step back and asking questions of the universe because we didn’t understand what we’d done differently.
It worked. It felt like a random miracle that’d never happen again.
The third time EFFORT + STUDY = SUCCESS. The hoped-for fireworks. The two of us saving each other’s lives casually in the middle of the night. I know how that sounds, but sometimes it’s like that.
Sex isn’t always magic. That’s lies. Sometimes, regardless of love and like, sex is a bike ride on a bike that has a flat tire.
Sometimes you get somewhere.
And sometimes . . .
Sometimes I think about singing—
—which wasn’t the same, NO, but was . . . kind of . . . the same?
Especially singing with Dai. It was easy. It made the sky shake. It made the ocean rise.
And, unlike here, our song would never accidentally tangent off onto some long, wrong discussion about things like FOR EXAMPLE SURELY THIS NEVER HAPPENED, the item of legend that has fallen from the sky since at least the fourteenth century, which is called star jelly.
Run-on sentence. Forgive. Only way to get that out.
Star jelly. Seriously?! No, surely no one named Jason Kerwin would ever bring that unsexiness up IN THE MIDDLE OF HOOKING UP WITH ME, and surely I would never have to stop everything in order to do internet research, because dear god. Star jelly??
Yes.
Star jelly, it turns out, is little blobs full of random, probably poisonous bacteria, which exist all the time environmentally, but are apparently activated only by rainfall. They drop to earth in globs.
Oh, there are other names for it. Star rot, anyone? Star slubber? Because that’s romantic.
Or, if you speak Welsh (I do not; Jason, of course, does), pwdre ser. In Latin (also Jason) stella terrae, or star of the earth.
There’s a horrific school of thought that says that shooting stars are sperm trying to impregnate the eggs of the planets, and here, I die, because in that scenario, this star jelly is . . . well. Exactly what it sounds like.
Or, how about another horrible theory?—
The boy beside me opens his eyes.
“Stop thinking, Aza Ray,” he says sleepily. “I feel you thinking.”
“I can’t,” I say. “I’m made of thinking.”
So he figures out a way to, if not stop me, at least to put my thinking on pause. And it’s a pretty perfect non-flat-tire way.
Maybe this is how love is. I don’t know any other version. I try not to worry about a version in which something goes very wrong, in which we’re alive and not together.
But even as we’re kissing, I’m worried.
About singing.
About Heyward.
I’m worried and worried and worried.
At 5:30 a.m., as I’m slinking out of Jason’s house, I run smack into his mom. Eve’s sitting on the front steps drinking coffee. At least she’s not Carol, Jason’s other mom, whose attitude is far more depth-charged. Eve’s way more accepting of the inevitability of girlfriends.
She grins at me, her precision-wicked grin, a grin that doesn’t remotely belong on the face of anyone’s mom. Eve has gray eyes, dark brown skin, and dreads, which she rocks in varying ways, depending on what she’s doing in the world, be it talking to the UN or digging in the compost, with either cargo pants or a suit. Her expertise is the kind of thing that makes other scientists sit down and shut up, but people who don’t know anything assume she’s, like, a really killer gardener, rather than an expert on genetic modification, plant plagues, and world hunger strategy, among other things.
Jason comes by his brain honestly. Eve usually just factoid-slays everyone who misjudges her. And then hands them a giant organic pumpkin so they’re confused all over again. The Kerwin garden is legendary.
Eve’s casually like: “So, Beth, you spent the night?”
And I’m casually like: “. . .”
I didn’t spend the entirety of the night in Jason’s bed. Like, really, NONE of the night. Only the early morning hours. But she has the look that says we’re about to have a Discussion.
“Condoms?” says Eve, and I wriggle throughout my entire hidden self. “Protection” is the preferred parental euphemism, hello!
“Yeah,” I say. “Obviously. The prophylactics and the et cetera et cetera ET! CET! ERA!”
She looks at me for slightly longer than she should be looking. I realize I’ve just Aza Rayed that answer. I grab up the London accent I’ve been using.
“I mean . . . we’re definitely using the rubbers, so . . .”
Oh god. Did I say that? Is that what I said? Where did it even come from? Why would I use that word?! Why would I add a “the” to the already wrongful term?! Why would I be hunting British birth control slang in the back of my memory and find that?
Eve agrees. She’s giving me a look that clearly says You Have Broken the Code of Euphemism, Dear Son’s Girlfriend. Now: Further Questions.
It’s not like there hasn’t been, FOR YEARS, a giant jar of condoms in the hall closet, which they pretended they weren’t checking in on, so much so that when we actually did start having sex, we didn’t even use any of those, but bought our own secretly on the internet.
“The Rubbers?” Eve says. “Do we need to do a review? Because, kiddo, that sounds like a band, not birth control.”
I die.
Eve is staring at me, waiting for a real response.
“We’re using tons AND TONS of protection,” I say. This is the wrong set of words. I smile in a way that I hope is convincing, but which probably has never convinced any parent ever. “There will be no accidental babies!”
We could have parents who’d lose their minds over this. I guess they figure it’s better to have us having sex at home than, for example, in a certain person’s orange Camaro.
“Without fail,” says Eve, sounding exactly like Jason.
“Without fail,” I repeat.
She toasts me suspiciously with her coffee cup, and I walk home, texting Jason on the way.
He texts back the woeful and unsurprising lines: BOTH MOMS HERE NOW. IN DEPTH SEX-ED REVIEW, WITH FOOTNOTES AND READING LIST.
For a second, we’re, like, normal people who are normally in love, and normally being suspected of sins by our parents. There’s a script for this version. We both feel calmer when there’s a script.
I take one last glance at the sky as I walk into my house, but even though today is Aza Ray’s birthday/deathday there’s nothing to suggest that today’s anything but ordinary.
So why is every nerve in my body screaming that something’s about to change?