Pulp

She lowered her gaze, locking eyes with Marie. Marie’s breathing was rapid, but a smile danced behind her glasses. The madness of their kiss had touched her, too.

The sound of the streetcar made Janet’s heart beat faster. It was late, and the next car may not come for some time. They’d have to dash for it.

She longed to take Marie’s hand—that was what Sam would’ve done—but she didn’t dare. Instead, they turned and ran in a single movement.

This time, Janet didn’t beat Marie to the curb. This time, they stayed together.

They climbed onto the sparsely populated car and took seats side by side. They didn’t dare to touch, but they watched each other carefully. After another moment, they began to laugh.

Janet waited for her heart to slow, for normalcy to retake her mind. Yet as long as she waited, it never came.

Chapter 3

Monday, September 18, 2017

It was decided, then. Elaine would go to New York.

The prospect gave her a special pleasure. When she told others her plans, though, they gave her sympathetic looks.

“You know what they say.” Aunt Fay wagged her finger at Elaine. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder. The day after you get there, that fellow of yours will see what he’s been missing out on. We’ll be dancing at your wedding by spring.”

“I’m not going to New York so Wayne will propose,” Elaine tried to tell her. “I’m going to start a new life of my own.”

“Of course you are, honey.” Her aunt winked. Elaine didn’t bother arguing further.

Wayne was a nice enough boy, she supposed. He was polite to her parents, and he called Elaine “sugar.” When he drove her home after their dates, he kissed her quickly and pleasantly in the front seat of his car, and he didn’t try to fight her when she pushed his sweaty hands away from the front of her dress.

Even so, Elaine wasn’t disappointed that, after a year of going steady, he hadn’t yet offered her a ring. Elaine wanted more from her future than Wayne Ellis. She wanted more than her aunt or her parents or anyone in Hanover could ever understand.

Abby rolled her eyes and switched off her phone screen. So far, this Women of the Twilight Realm book was thoroughly predictable.

“You won’t believe how over-the-top these books are.” Her breath was coming out in pants. The fourteen-story escalator at the Tenleytown metro station had stopped running and Abby, Linh and their friends were climbing it with their rally posters over their heads. “This one is so corny.”

The health care protest they’d gone to downtown with the rest of the Genders & Sexualities Alliance had been awesome, with lots of quality chanting and creative homemade signs. It wasn’t actually over yet, but they’d had to leave early. Linh and Savannah had practice, Ben had a Black Student Union officers’ meeting at Panera, and Vanessa was supposed to go straight home to work on college applications.

“Is it the same book we started reading on Friday?” Linh shouted over her shoulder. She was ahead of Abby, even though she was carrying three signs and a leftover six-pack of bottled water.

Linh was on the cross-country team, and sometimes she ran up and down the stalled metro escalators to clear her head. It was pretty adorable. Last year Abby used to come to the station to watch sometimes, leaning against the pillar at the top of the tunnel with a fond smile. When Linh finished her workout she’d come up to meet her, looking all disheveled and glowy. They’d grin at each other for a few happy, wordless moments, until Linh’s stomach started growling audibly, and then they’d go off hand in hand to get smoothies.

Breaking up was the worst idea they’d ever had.

“Yeah, Women of the stupid Twilight Realm,” Abby called up to her. “So far it’s all about how this woman has to move to New York because her boyfriend—and pretty much every male character we’ve seen so far in her little town in the boonies—is a giant tool.”

“Was that the fifties version of feminism?” Ben asked from behind Abby. He was panting, too. Ben shared Abby’s aversion to extracurricular activities that involved getting unnecessarily sweaty. “Leaving town to find a less tool-ish dude to go out with?”

“Probably,” Linh called back. “As if fifties New York was full of enlightened, eligible guys.”

“Well, it’s a lesbian book, right?” Savannah shouted from the top. She ran cross-country, too, and she was the only one in their group who could keep up with Linh. “So soon she’ll find some enlightened, eligible ladies.”

“Dude.” Vanessa poked Ben in the back with their I Am Not a Preexisting Condition poster. “You can’t just pause halfway up the escalator. If I’m not home in fifteen minutes my mom’ll be waiting for me at the door with a stopwatch and the Common Application.”

They all groaned, Abby loudest of all.

“My dad’s worse,” Linh called back. “I’m supposed to write an essay every single night, and he makes me print out every draft before I go to bed. Then he slides them back under my door the next morning with notes in the margins.”

“Did you decide how many schools you’re applying to?” Vanessa asked. “My mom keeps saying I need to do all the Ivies. I tried to tell her everyone says that’s a bad strategy but she won’t listen.”

“What? That’s a bad strategy?” Savannah sounded alarmed. “That’s what my cousin’s doing. He said if you can get into all eight you get to meet Anderson Cooper.”

Abby sped up until she was behind Linh, her breath heaving and her wedge sandals thumping on each step. If she intervened fast enough, sometimes she could get her friends to stop with the college talk before they remembered they were competing for slots and started eyeing each other warily.

“I don’t want to apply to any Ivies,” Linh was saying. “My dad thinks I should, but I just want to go to MIT. I’m starting to think about Hopkins, too, though.”

“So anyway, I guess all these books are like that,” Abby interrupted. She tried to raise her voice so they’d all hear, but that wasn’t easy given how hard she was panting. “I read a bunch of plot summaries over the weekend, and they’re all ridiculous and tragic. Plus, lots of them are about these really young characters, some even younger than us, who get seduced by way older women. Like in their thirties.”

“Ew.” Linh wrinkled her nose. “That’s so gross. Not to mention illegal. Why would they even want to?”

“Because they don’t seem to realize it’s gross? I don’t know, it’s weird. I skipped ahead, and at least this Twilight Realm book isn’t that way—the characters are twenty-one and twenty-five, which I guess isn’t that sketchy. But all the stories are such clichés. The characters go to these lesbian bars in Greenwich Village and have melodramatic conversations about how terrible it is to be a lesbian, and then they go home and have melodramatic lesbian sex. Then by the end they either check themselves into an asylum or die in botched abortions or cult rituals or whatever. And if they do survive, most of them wind up forgetting they’re gay.”

“What, do they turn out to be bi?” Linh tilted her head hopefully. She was bi, and she was always talking about how impossible it was to find bi characters anywhere. Abby agreed with her—she used to identify as bi, too, before she realized that whenever she started to imagine kissing a guy, she usually got too bored to finish—but it wasn’t exactly easy to find lesbian characters most of the time, either.

“That would seem logical, right?” Abby threw up her hands. “I thought that was where they were going with it at first, but I guess maybe they didn’t realize being bi was a thing yet? Because all these women seem to suddenly discover that they were totally straight all along. Even though two chapters earlier they were getting it on with their thirtysomething lady friends and very obviously into it. I was thinking that maybe in my book, though, I’d have one of the characters have sex with her boyfriend and actually enjoy it, and realize that she is bi. Then she’ll have to stress over how to tell her girlfriend. That never happens in these books, so I think Ms. Sloane would like it. I’d be inverting genre tropes.”

Abby was completely out of breath by that point, so she stopped talking and turned around to help Ben as they emerged into the open air of Wisconsin Avenue. Savannah and Linh stood waiting at the top, watching as a pair of Secret Service police cars sped through the intersection ahead of them. Abby wiggled her eyebrows at Linh in what she hoped was a flirty way, but Savannah, to her chagrin, had already changed the subject back to college.

“You won’t have to miss the Maryland meet when you go visit Penn, will you?” Savannah’s tone made it clear that missing the meet would be a ridiculous thing to do. She was only a junior, so she was slightly less obsessed with college than the rest of them.

“No, I can do both. The meet’s not until that Sunday.” Linh turned back to Abby. “By the way, I meant to ask you. I’m trying to get my parents to let me go visit Penn on the fourteenth. It’s a one-day trip, up and back on Amtrak. Do you want to come? They won’t let me go by myself but they said if you went, too, we could go together. They already said they’d buy our tickets, and it’ll be fun. Your parents will let you, right?”

Linh was asking her to come on a trip? Just the two of them?

Abby wanted to say yes right away, but everyone had climbed off the escalator by then, and they were all watching. She didn’t want to look desperate. “Um.” She reached for her phone. “Let me check my calendar.”

“I hope you can.” Linh had that overeager look she got sometimes when they talked about college. Uh-oh. Maybe this wasn’t about wanting to spend time alone with Abby after all. “It’s time you started visiting schools. I know Columbia’s your first choice, but you should probably come up with a list of ten or so, don’t you think?”

Abby unlocked her phone and did her best not to react. Sometimes Linh came on kind of strong when there was something she thought Abby should do. Still, any time with her was better than none. “Let’s see, it looks as though—okay, yeah, I guess I’m free the fourteenth.”

“Uh, Abby, your calendar isn’t even up.” Ben had come up out of nowhere and swiped Abby’s phone from her hand, glancing up at Linh with a smirk. “Also, just FYI, you two aren’t nearly as subtle as you think you are. You might as well—Hey, wait a second, what is that?”

Abby grabbed the phone back. Ben had somehow switched her phone screen to her collection of pulp book covers. She seized the chance to change the subject.

“It’s one of those bizarro novels,” she told Ben, pulling up the Satan Was a Lesbian cover and holding it out for them to see. “They were all like this.”

One by one, her friends started laughing as they got a look at it, exactly as Abby had expected.

“That can’t be real.” Ben squinted down. “It’s got to be Photoshop.”

“Nope! It was an actual book.” Satan Was a Lesbian was the weirdest cover, and title, Abby had found so far. It showed a woman in mom jeans brandishing a whip at another woman in lingerie while the titular Satan watched gleefully from above. “But in my book, I’m going to invert the usual boring gay tragedy story. My main characters will wind up getting sent to a mental hospital that they think will beat away their gay, but it’ll turn out to be this secret lesbian commune in Vermont, and they’ll live happily ever after and adopt a bunch of cats. Except it can’t be totally conflict-free, so I’m also going to have one of their queer friends die a really gruesome death. She’ll get decapitated by her girlfriend’s ex or something.”

“You should have her get killed by Satan himself.” Ben pantomimed stabbing someone. “Herself, I mean. She can whack your protagonist with a magic Lesbian Satan death blade. Hey, the school’s calling you.”

He passed the buzzing phone back to Abby. The caller ID read Fawcett School. Weird. “Hello?”

“Hello, this is Ms. Jackson in the middle school office calling. I’m trying to reach Abby Zimet?”

“Yes, this is Abby.”

“Oh, good, I’m glad we found you. If you’re still on campus, could you come to the office, please?”

That was even weirder.

Something didn’t feel right about this, but there was no real reason to say no. Abby wasn’t exactly on campus, but she was only a block away. And at least this would get her out of having to go home and interact with whichever of her parents was in town today. “Uh, okay. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

Abby told her friends what was going on, and they all got ready to leave. Linh tried to catch her eye, but Abby pretended not to notice. Flirting was one thing, but she’d learned the hard way that it was best to stay quiet when it came to stuff that may or may not turn out to be actual problems.

Everyone split up and waved goodbye, tucking their signs under their arms. Abby tried to maneuver her sign without bending it. It said Women Deserve Health Care! If You Don’t Believe Me, Ask the Woman Who Gave Birth to You, and she wanted to save it for the next protest.

As she turned to start up Wisconsin, squinting in the bright sun, a groaning 96 bus rolled past her. Abby adjusted her backpack, took out her phone and pulled up the website she’d found.

She was already behind on her research for Ms. Sloane, so she’d Googled gayness in the fifties earlier that afternoon and landed on some ancient government report. It was a faded, scanned PDF, dated December 15, 1950, and titled Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government. Abby had put off reading it, since it didn’t exactly sound cheery, but now she picked a page at random and zoomed in.

There are no outward characteristics or physical traits that are positive as identifying marks of sex perversion.

Undoubtedly, the authors of this report had thought themselves brilliant to have made this point. Also they were apparently using “sex perversion” as a synonym for not being straight, so that was...interesting.

Abby glanced up as she crossed the alley in front of the Whole Foods, then turned back to her phone.

Sex perverts, like all other persons who by their overt acts violate moral codes and laws and the accepted standards of conduct, must be treated as transgressors and dealt with accordingly.

Well, that sucked.

Abby scrolled, looking for something more relevant to what Ms. Sloane wanted from her, but this document read like a parody of an old textbook. There was no way people in the fifties, or any other time for that matter, seriously sat around worrying this much about each other’s “moral codes.”

One homosexual can pollute a Government office. This subcommittee is convinced that it is in the public interest to get sex perverts out of Government and keep them out.

Abby sighed and closed out of the PDF while she waited for the light to change. She was almost back on campus, and this document had nothing to do with lesbian pulp novels. The characters in Women of the Twilight Realm didn’t exactly sit around reading government reports.

Besides, Abby had spent her entire life in DC. She knew how much the people in Congress loved to hear themselves talk. Some guy was running for Senate who’d said homosexuality was evil and should be against the law, but him saying that didn’t change the fact that gay marriage had been legal for years. That guy might believe Abby was going to hell for being in love with Linh, but that didn’t make it true. Abby didn’t even believe in hell.

She crossed the parking lot and reached the bottom of the short hill that separated Fawcett Middle School from Fawcett High. Abby had barely been inside the middle school building since she’d finished eighth grade. Walking down the green-tiled front hall felt like going back in time.

She was startled out of her nostalgia when she pushed open the office door and saw her eleven-year-old brother, Ethan. He was sitting alone in the waiting area in his dance class uniform—a white T-shirt and embarrassingly tight black leggings. His arms were folded across his chest, and when he saw Abby, he groaned.

“What are you doing here?” Abby’s mouth fell open. “Why did they call me?”

“Abby. Good, you’re here.” Ms. Jackson, the office assistant, gestured to her from behind a desk. “We’ve been trying to reach your parents. Do you have another number for either of them?”

She’d come all the way here for this? Abby tried not to let her frustration show. “Probably. Which numbers have you tried?”

They compared phone lists, and Abby read out the numbers for Mom’s work cell and Dad’s assistant. Ms. Jackson thanked her, then vanished into an inner office and shut the door. Abby carefully laid her protest sign by the desk, but she kept her backpack strapped to her shoulders so she could get out of here fast when this was over.

Meanwhile, her brother was staring at the ceiling as though Abby wasn’t even there. Ethan was in that weird stage halfway between looking like a little kid and an almost-teenager. All he cared about was dancing—he took regular classes with the rest of the sixth graders during the school day, plus extra advanced classes in the afternoons—and he didn’t bother to change clothes afterward, which didn’t do much to offset his overall awkwardness. It was as if puberty was being intentionally mean to him, and he hadn’t noticed yet.

Abby and Ethan had been pretty close when they were younger. They used to have a running joke about how they were a two-person superhero team. Their parents were the villains, especially when Dad was trying to limit their screen time or Mom was making them eat vegetables.

Once, when Abby was in fifth grade and Ethan was in kindergarten, he’d fallen from the climbing gym on the temple playground and his nose turned into a bloody mess. Abby had wiped off his face and hugged him until he stopped crying. When their mom got there, Abby didn’t really want to let him go. It had been kind of nice, feeling needed.

Lately, though, she’d been avoiding her parents and Ethan altogether. Mom and Dad were just insufferable—on the rare occasions when one of them tried to relate to her, they only made it that much more obvious that they had no idea what it was like being a teenager, much less a queer one, in 2017—and as for Ethan, he’d basically turned into a different person than the kid she remembered.

“Okay, so.” Abby put her hands on her hips, the stiff fabric of her vintage dress rustling. “What’s going on?”

Ethan shrugged and tilted his head back, avoiding her gaze.

“Don’t be a dick, Ethan.” At that, his head shot up. She’d never called her brother a dick before, but if he was going to act like a dick... “Did you get in trouble?”

“I didn’t do anything.” His eyes trailed down to his sneakers. “Mr. Salem started it.”

“Mr. Salem?” Abby didn’t hide her surprise. “What did he do?”

Ethan loved his dance teacher. When they used to have family dinners he’d always go on and on about what Mr. Salem had said in class that day, or what funny twist he’d added to the choreography, or how he’d told Ethan he was the most promising student he’d had in years.

Abby had seen Ethan dance. He wasn’t bad or anything, but she was still dubious about the authenticity of that last comment.

“He was being a jerk.” Ethan shrugged. “He kicked me out of class for being, like, two minutes late.”

“Well, yeah.” Abby remembered that from her own dance-class years. “You know you aren’t allowed to be late to the studio. Besides, I thought you always tried to be there five minutes early, since you’re a dance dork and everything.”

“I’m not a dance dork.” Ethan leaned forward and pinched the bridge of his nose. His face was red and blotchy. Shit—had her goofy kid brother been crying? “Anyway, it was only two minutes.”

“Okay, but what’s the big deal? School’s over. Why didn’t you just go home?”

Ethan looked away.

“So you are in trouble.” Abby tried to sound stern. “What did you do?”

“It isn’t some huge deal.” Ethan rolled his eyes. “I only told him it was a dumb rule. Then I kind of, um—” Ethan’s voice fell. “Threw my water bottle at his head.”

“What?” Abby’s jaw dropped. This was so unlike Ethan she might as well have fallen into an alternate universe. “Did you hit him?”

“Um. Kinda.” Ethan pinched the bridge of his nose again. “He moved, and it kind of—bounced off his shoulder.”

“That’s horrible!” Abby kept expecting him to say he was joking. Ethan was always thirsty, and he carried one of those huge metal water bottles everywhere he went. Getting hit with it would be incredibly painful. “You could’ve really hurt him!”

“Yeah. I know.”

“What the hell?” She couldn’t believe he was just sitting there, impassive. “Did you want to hurt him?”

“I only...” Ethan bent down so far all Abby could see was the back of his head. His thick brown hair pointed into a tiny V at the base of his neck. “I only wanted him to leave me alone.”

Abby didn’t understand. The Ethan she’d grown up with would’ve at least been sorry for doing something like this.

“Do you think Mom and Dad will both come?” Ethan didn’t look up. “They did that time I got sick in gym.”

“Yeah, well, your appendix ruptured. You had to be hospitalized. Water-bottle throwing probably isn’t on the same level.”

Ethan let out a noisy breath. “It’s like you want me to almost die again.”

“You didn’t almost die.” Abby rolled her eyes, but she was thinking, If you want to see Mom and Dad voluntarily in the same place at the same time again, almost dying is probably your best bet.

“Anyway.” Ethan wouldn’t meet her eyes. “They’re calling them both, right?”

“I don’t know. They’ll probably see who they can get to come. Dad was supposed to get back into town this morning, but he’s only staying one night before he has to leave again. Maybe they’ll call Mom, but she’s in—”

“Pennsylvania. I know.”

Abby sat down beside him on the bench, her backpack thumping heavily behind her. “She’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Yeah. Because Dad’ll be gone by then.”

Abby pretended not to hear the resentment in his voice. “They have to travel for work, Ethan.”

He shrugged and didn’t answer, even though he had to know it was the truth. Their mom was the president of a think tank, and Dad was a lawyer for the National Institutes of Health. They both worked long hours, and they were always having to leave DC for conferences and meetings and other stuff Abby had given up trying to keep track of.

“Everyone’s parents travel for work.” Abby fixed her eyes on her sandals. “It isn’t a big deal.”

“I don’t know anybody whose parents travel as much as Mom and Dad do.”

And a memory swam into Abby’s mind before she could stop it.

It was a week after the fight—the big fight, the one Linh saw—and everyone at home was being even quieter than usual. Well, Ethan and Abby were, at least. Mom and Dad, whichever one of them was home at any given time, were trying to act normal. Except they kept smiling too hard or sighing too loud, and making it that much more obvious that they were faking.

But their Tudor-style row house was a hundred years old, and the walls were thin. When you were upstairs, it was nearly impossible to have a conversation without everybody else on the second floor hearing you. Most of the time there was nothing to hear, since no one in the family spoke to each other anymore, but that night was different.

Mom was on the phone in her room. Abby could tell she was trying to keep her voice down, but it wasn’t working.

“No, no. Fine. Stay in New York if that’s what you want. I’ll be here, doing everything. Again.” There was a thin, pained note in her voice Abby had never heard before. As though she was actively trying to sound like she was suffering. “No, he’s fine, but I already told you she’s upset. You don’t remember? I think she had a fight with her girlfriend, and—yes, it was about that. What did you think? No, no, she didn’t say anything, you know she never tells me anything, but if you paid attention to anything other than yourself, maybe you’d start to realize—”