Spectral Evidence

Oh, I still think on Doll Tearsheet sometimes, unlike those fools the M-vale psych hoped I’d hold in my heart; think on her hard-bitten love for that brother of hers, the burden she’d fought so hard not to have to carry. I didn’t begrudge her attempts to skew fate, either. Everyone’d dodge a bullet if they could, ‘specially those can see it comin’.

But in the end, like Orpah—who I’d known far longer, and more intimately—she was just one more piece of collateral damage in my life’s long rampage. Sweet Maybelle Pine, for example, who was my helpmeet and accomplice in lockdown, and who I do keep a small part of my memory left clear for, if only to recall how good she’d been at her marital duties. or wonder, in turn, over how she could ever’ve been stunned enough to think she had to kill herself over me, when I’d gone so far out of my way to make sure she wouldn’t have to.

Some people just don’t like to be left behind, is all. While others—myself included—expect it. Because even when we’re cheek-to-jowl with “normal” people, it’s like there’s no one else there at all.

Didn’t have to be that way, though. Not anymore.

The bird, through whose tiny blinking eyes I aimed to glimpse the object of my desire, shook itself slowly awake, regarding me with that Let me do thy will, Lady fetch-stare. Then crept onto my palm so’s I could throw it up into the air and watch it flap off north-wards with its tiny beak open, scenting the air for any trace of my something-sister’s trail.

Mark me, Princess, I thought, hoping ‘gainst hope that Samaire Cornish might somehow hear me, if only in her dreams. I’m comin’. Straight as the little dust-bird flies, though maybe not quite that straight. Ain’t no chain gonna hold me down, and nothin’ in my way that’ll be left standing, after—that sister of yours very much included.

But first, I needed me a ride. So I paid my bill with the last of Tad’s cash, strode out to the parking lot’s gate, cocked my hip, stuck out my thumb...and grinned.

IMAGINARY BEAUTIES

…hitherto we have been permitted to seek beauty only in the morally good—a fact which sufficiently accounts for our having found so little of it and having had to seek about for imaginary beauties without backbone!—As surely as the wicked enjoy a hundred kinds of happiness of which the virtuous have no inkling, so too they possess a hundred kinds of beauty; and many of them have not yet been discovered.

—R.J. Hollingdale’s translation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Daybreak

Rice Petty was leant up against the University of Toronto Medical Sciences Building cafeteria

wall with Rammstein blasting in one ear, admiring the slick purple vinyl sheen of her own boots and wondering idly if she could get away with charging (yet another) new strap-on to her Daddy’s Visa, when Horatia Wint slouched in: all head to toe in black, a weird Renaissance-style sugar-loaf wool cap with a gold brocade top jammed haphazardly down over her ears, dripping melted snow from the January blizzard outside. She stood there a moment shaking her head, waiting for her glasses to unfog; as they did, Rice saw her eyes were both slightly squinted against even this dim light, and probably far larger than that heinous degree of prescription made them look—a pale, peculiarly penetrating shade of green, like mouthwash, or maybe absinthe. Her nose was snub, her jaw square, her mouth decisive. She didn’t look like she had any friends, or wanted any.

And: Oh yeah, uh huh, save some of that for me, please. Hey baby, hey baby, hey.

For Rice, it was violent pull at first (close-up) sight—like, lust, whatever. Certainly worth a walk-by, anyhow.

After relentlessly and heteronormatively fucking her way through high school, Rice had called dick break in university (with occasional time-outs to peg some random male bitch, here and there), and was enjoying the result; nice to have a different sort of reputation, if nothing else.

Meanwhile, though she’d also thus far coasted through her

courses by playing the hypercognate card—previously registering Horatia’s existence mainly through smart-dar, as potential competition rather than possible prey—Rice knew her own complicity in accepting that particular categorization had always been little more than a scam, a quick hit of public recognition without academic expectations. Sure, she had enough eidetic memory to ace any test she’d ever taken, but her study habits were for shit—and it was there, in the personal projects part of the equation, where the cracks were already starting to show.

Where Rice’d always excelled were the soft-skill areas of social intelligence: linking, cross-referencing, playing seat-of-the-pants mix-and-match games with names, faces, relationships, motivations. All the things that übergeeks like Horatia, the real deal in terms of sheer cerebral cannon-power, found either too boring or contemptible to master.

Notoriety clung to both of them in roughly equal amounts, an ill halo—automatic separation from the herd. It gave them something in common, a connection virtually begging to be built on. Add up the sum of these parts, and whatever alchemical combination you ended up with would probably blister paint, eat through walls, dissolve fools on contact: major damage in a Klein bottle, times two by infinity. And fuck knew, Rice had never felt up to resisting that sort of open challenge.

As Horatia scouted ‘round for a seat, eventually deciding on the caf ’s single least passers-by-accessible table, Rice pondered her plan of attack. She knew she must be having a pretty good face day, judging by the cat-calls she’d gotten on her way down-campus, and that gave her an extra advantage.

As Horatia popped her MacBook Air open, revealing a screen mostly occupied with some chemical equation roughly the size of Pi to 1,000, Rice did a complex, basketball-inspired shimmy through the crowd and slid right in next to her, so close she was almost in Horatia’s lap. “Hey,” she said, grinning. “Antisocial much?”

Horatia scowled without looking around. “Do I know you?”

“Rice Petty, major Chem, minor Bio. And you—you’re Horatia Wint, Girl Genius. Got the full ride on home-school, did 100 across the boards on your entrance exams, won that big…thing last year…”

“The Lasky Award for Excellence in Chemical Recombination Studies?”

“…Yeah, that’s it, comes with $25,000 and a lab grant; think we’ve got, like…Prions for Perverts together, or whatever.” Rice leaned a little further forward, deliberately invading Horatia’s space to see what she’d do in response, if anything (answer: wrinkle her nose and stare at Rice like she’d grown another head, apparently). Then cocked her skull to one side while resting her chin on her steepled hands, and continued: “But anyhoo, enough shop talk…you like cunnilingus?”

“What?”

“Well, I’m just throwin’ it out there, man. In my experience, though, most chicks do.”

Horatia considered her again, a bit longer, and more closely. “Why are you even talking to me?” she asked at last.

Rice shrugged. “‘Cause you’re the only one here?”

“This place is full of people.”