Chapter Thirteen

"I regret to inform you that if you attempt to disrupt our mutual acquaintance's affairs again, I will have to intervene. Physically, if I must."

The next few days flew by for Callana. The Gina had hesitantly agreed to take her to the restaurant again for one more shadowing round, and the Ron had actually agreed to take Callana on. In fact, she had even gotten her own uniform, making that her first pair of non-hand-me-down clothes she owned. After a few tries, she’d gotten… slightly better at handling customers, though they still gave her strange looks whenever she spoke. For some reason, the finer subtleties of Boraki seemed a lot more difficult to master than the basics. Forming sentences was one thing, but Callana had started noticing a whole host of unspoken rules. Apparently, you weren’t supposed to call people things like “the Gina” or “the Von.” “Gina” and “Von” worked fine, according to the Gina, but that was just rubbish. How were you supposed to know which Gina or Von you were talking about? Lots of people had the name “Gina,” so surely you could point to one and call them “this Gina,” vs. “that Gina,” but people kept staring at her when she said stuff like that, so she stopped after a while.

Didn’t keep her from thinking it, though.

In between her shifts—which seemed to stretch on and on, endlessly—Callana spent time at the apartment, hoping that the meager tips she’d been getting would help pay for the rent. At one point, she’d offered to simply detach the apartment from its building and encapsulate it in, say, a briefcase or a notebook so they didn’t have to pay this “landlord” person anymore, but the Von didn’t like that one bit. And when Callana had tried to fix the money problem by simply duplicating the money she brought home, the Nard practically shrieked that the “police” would get mad about “forgery” or some nonsense.

So, it seemed that she was stuck at the restaurant for the time being. Frankly, she was getting sick and tired of it. She could create money out of thin air, and she was stuck bringing the food to customers all day for hardly anything. This was too much. She was a god, by the Wills! Surely, she could come up with a better solution than cleaning tables and lugging plates around.

So, during her shift that day, she silently doubled each tip she’d gotten, even changing the “cereal numbers” the Nard had mentioned, so no one would notice. The Nard was such a stickler for things like that—but wasn’t he the one who had gotten a friend to make the paperwork for Callana to work at the restaurant? What a hypo—hyp… hypochondriac.

The Nard and the Von spent a lot of time together, now that Callana thought about it. They made lots of the physical touch with each other, and they even liked to touch their faces together and try to eat each other’s mouths for some reason. When Callana opened the door, she caught them sitting on the couch beside each other, shirtless, practically on top of each other. Noticing her, they seemed to panic and squirmed off to other sides of the couch.

“H-hey, Callana!” the Von said, wiping his face. “You’re… early.”

“The Ron… sorry, Ron closed up early,” Callana said. “The ‘health in-spec-tor’ came to see if the food was clean.”

“Yeah,” the Nard said, “gotta make sure all that food is clean. Yep. That’s what health inspectors do.”

“Yes,” Callana said, cocking her head. “That is cor-rect. Why are you not wearing the shirts? Th—Gina told me that was bad to do in the living room.”

“Oh,” the Von said. “Shit, sorry, Cal. Uh… I mean, it’s not as big a deal, since we’re guys, you know?”

Hmm. As time had passed, Callana had come to realize the strange dichotomy of forms the humans wore. The “guys” and the “women” were the two “genders,” or something or other. Every time the Gina explained it, she always said there were other options, but she never elaborated on it. Why did everyone assume Callana knew what they meant? They would act strange if she smiled when they were not smiling, and they would not laugh when she told them the jokes, but they did laugh when she wasn’t telling them the jokes; and every time they told her the rules of how conversations were supposed to work, they always mentioned that there weren’t actual rules. But they all seemed to know the rules intuitively, whereas Callana had to fumble around in the dark.

They thought she was stupid.

The Gina did not think it as much as the Von—and the Nard thought it much more than either of them—but it was there. She could tell. And in a way, perhaps she was. Yes, she could comprehend the shape of a thirty-dimensional hypercube, something that would break each of their brains in an instant, but that wasn’t everything. After all, Callana hadn’t seen a thirty-dimensional hypercube in several eons, but she had seen dozens of face-shapes that she didn’t understand just today. Some were easier to comprehend than others. When a human smiled, that meant they were happy—unless they were just pretending, or they were straining, or they were being mean, or they were talking down to you, or they were hiding their real feelings. The exceptions went on and on, and while the Gina and the Von and the Nard seemed to grasp all those nuances without breaking a sweat, Callana had to sweat a lot. A lot a lot. And by the time she figured it out, three new face-shapes would come up, and she’d start to fidget to comfort herself, and that would inevitably cause a new face-shape to pop up, so she’d have to figure that one out, too.

Humans were exhausting.

“Why do ‘guys’ not need shirts some-times?” Callana asked.

The two couch-dwellers exchanged looks. “I dunno,” the Von said, “sexism, probably?”

“Yeah,” the Nard said. “Societal double-standards, for the most part. When you question them, they kinda feel obviously bizarre, but I guess they just feel… normal, you know? Ingrained. I don’t think twice when I see a guy without a shirt on, but when I see a woman without one, it just feels weird, you know? And I guess that’s my internalized misogyny cropping up again. I’ve been writing an essay on it for my Social Studies class, and I found this really good book you might like on the subject! It’s called The Paradox of Breasts, by Schtievik Nonrova, and it tries to take an outsider’s stance on the whole thing; like, what if an alien came down and looked at all our customs, you know? That might help you grasp the issue a bit, since it might be… you know… relatable.”

Callana shrugged. She’d never tried reading a whole book before.

“You fuckin’ nerd,” the Von said. “Gay-ass lil’ college boy. Come here.”

He yanked the Nard up by his arm and dragged him off the couch, leading him off into his room. Before he shut the door, he winked at Callana. “We’ll be quiet, promise,” he said, then disappeared into the darkness.

Callana cocked her head.

What strange behavior.

That night, Callana sat at the foot of the Gina’s bed, rifling through one of the books she’d found on the shelf in the living room. This one was titled Forbidden Cherries, and according to the blurb on the back, it was the story of how “Hilda was always the good girl her parents wanted, until a forbidden, lustful desire budded before her, leading her to the brink of degradation!” From what she’d skimmed so far, it was about some lady who really liked staring at some other lady who kept on telling her that she was a “bad, dirty, naughty girl” for wanting to lick her in weird places.

Then, the Gina walked in, wearing her plush, purple pajamas with bunny ears on the hood. She took one look at the book in Callana’s hands and squeaked.

“Uh,” the Gina said. “Uh, yeah, that’s… how are you liking the book so far?”

“Hmm. I have never read the books before, but it is not what I ex-pec-ted. Do people lick each other this much in the real world?”

Silence.

“Gina?”

“Y-yeah, uh, not usually, but… I mean… sometimes? Usually, it’s just men and women… together, you know, but, uh… me and Von…”

“You… lick each other?” Callana asked. Odd, how that idea seemed so… distasteful to her.

“No! No, no, no… I mean, we used to, but we didn’t like it. I told you we used to date, but… I mean, uh. Fuck. Okay.”

The Gina shuffled over to the bed, taking a deep breath. “So,” she said, “this is a bit of a secret, I guess. So, don’t tell Ron or anyone who isn’t Von or Clenard or me about this, but I’m… not attracted to guys. That’s not considered a normal thing, and, well, you aren’t gonna find too many people who are fine with that here in Borakovon. Eston’s a bit safer than most cities, but not by much. Basically, in order to have a baby, you have to have a man and a woman. Well, I mean, there are a ton of exceptions, but that’s definitely the most common way of doing it. And because it’s so common, a lot of Boraki people think that you shouldn’t… love someone who is the same sex as you. But not everyone can love people of the opposite sex. I can’t. Von can’t, either. Clenard can, but he also likes guys, which is pretty rare, so he gets lumped in with the rest of us.”

Callana cocked her head. “Is that why this book keeps talking about how bad it is for the Hil—sorry, for Hilda to want to lick Schierne?”

“Yeah, uh, yeah, that’s right. We don’t really call it ‘licking,’ though.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“You can’t really write a book about… two girls liking each other without pretending like it’s wrong. The government won’t let you publish a book like that unless it ends with the main girl falling in love with some guy or, like, tragically dying in a fire or something. It’s schlocky, pulpy garbage, and it’s not great, but… you know, if you’re like me, it’s basically all you’ve got. Straight people—uh, men who love women and women who love men—get to have all the romance books they like, with sweet, sappy endings, happily-ever-afters, all the good stuff. But we don’t. We don’t get to marry each other, we don’t get to kiss in public, we don’t get to be happy. At least, not in the eyes of polite society.”

Callana stared at the book, closed it, and set it on the bed. “Love means you like some-one a lot, yes?”

The Gina snickered. “I’d say so.”

“More than you like the Von or the Nard. Agh—Von or Nard.”

“Not more, per se. Just different.”

“What does that look like?”

The Gina laid back, staring at the ceiling. “I mean, it’s one of those things you know when you see it. Or, you don’t know until you realize you’ve been fooling yourself all along. The one time I was ever in love… it was the best feeling in the world. But we had different needs, and, well, we couldn’t reach a compromise. Not all love is about sex—that’s the ‘licking’ part—but I had a higher sex drive than hers, and that left me pretty frustrated in the end. I don’t blame her for being her, and I’m glad she doesn’t blame me for being me. I’d never want to make someone uncomfortable around sex—you don’t mess with that shit. In the end, it just didn’t work out, and that’s okay. But those first few months were like a whirlwind. I’d never dated a girl before, and… by Brovar, I have no idea how anyone could think it’s wrong.”

Callana considered that for a moment. She thought of the Von and the Nard, the shapes of their bodies, the way they looked while intertwined. If she understood what the Gina was saying, they must have been having the sex. For a second, she considered what it would be like for her to be with one of them, but she chased the thought away. The thought of licking the Von was too strange. His body was too… blocky. The Gina, on the other hand…

She shivered.

That was a strong feeling—oddly powerful: deep, low, warm. A few of her brains probed around the sensation, while the others tried (and failed) to keep her face from flushing.

“Yes,” Callana said. “Yes, I do not think it is wrong.”

 The Gina smiled. “I’m glad, Cal. I don’t know what I’d do if you thought it was. I don’t know if elder gods can feel love, but… I think you’re a lot more human than I thought at first, so who knows?”

To her utter horror, Callana was pretty sure she knew.