…or, Purple Snow

Once she had something resembling food inside her, Violet came down some more. Not a moment too soon, either. I liked Violet. She was an interesting girl. She didn’t get more interesting when she was drunk and buzzed.

Barley was crashing hard by the time we got back to Pelinor. I let her into my room and she made a beeline for the couch while Marlot and Violet went to use the facilities.

“You can use the bed, you know,” I told Barley.

“Couch is fine,” she said. “It’s too early for bed. I just want a little nap. Wake me up in two hours?”

“Sure,” I said. I went over to the dresser and opened the dragon music box. It was noisy in the halls this early in the evening, and sound carried.

“Thank you, James,” Barley murmured. She pulled the blanket down off the back of the couch and rolled over, burying her face against the cushions. She was snoring in no time.

I left the room unlocked so she wouldn’t feel like she had to depend on me for her comings and goings. I didn’t think my dorm mates were thieves. Even if they were, I could have replaced everything in the room—including the room—with one of my earrings.

“So that’s Barley on a beer and a half?” I asked Violet when we headed back downstairs for a quick smoke.

“That’s Barley on three beers.”

“You aren’t going to tell me you weren’t drinking,” I said.

“No, I’m not,” she said. “We split a six pack. She just ditched her empties right away.”

“Ditched them where?”

“Just ditched them,” Violet said. “She sort of pushed them sideways through a bottle-shaped hole, and poof. Or not poof. Just gone.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I’m not usually a big beer person,” she said. “But it just blew my mind that somebody named ‘Barley’ had never tried it, so I busted out my piggy bank.”

“You don’t eat meat but you have a piggy bank,” I said.

“Only on Tuesdays.”

“Come again?”

“On Monday, it’s a frog,” she said. “Tuesday’s a pig, Wednesday’s a puppy, Thursday’s a lobster, Friday’s a cow, Saturday’s a hedgehog, and on Sunday it’s a cat. Oh, and it’s also a calendar. You can set an alarm and the animal wakes you up by barking or mooing or whatever. It’s cute, but hellaciously annoying to actually wake up to.”

“You have a shapeshifting piggy bank,” I said.

“Since I was nine. Khersentide present from my favorite grandmother.”

“You have a favorite grandmother?”

“Had,” she said. “But don’t act shocked. Everybody has a favorite grandmother.”

“I only have the one,” I said. “But I have an extra grandfather to make up for it.

“Anyway, you have a shapeshifting you,” she said. “And you’ve got a dragon on your back.”

“Not like you do,” I said. “What exactly do you put in your cigarettes, anyway?”

“This and that,” she said. “My mom’s always been big on herbal healing, so don’t.”

“What?”

“You were starting to think ‘of course she is’,” Violet said. I had been, though not exactly in words. I was annoyed that Violet would tell me what to think, especially at a sub-verbal level. “I’m not,” she said. “But don’t think shit about my mom.”

“Look, if you don’t want me to have a reaction to something, don’t tell me about it,” I said. “I tend to have opinions about things.”

“Okay, but my mom’s not some flake,” Violet said. “She just believed in being prepared. We lived way the fuck outside town for a while. Herbs were closer than the temple. She learned shit. I picked it up, not everything in her books was strictly medicinal.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Some of them make things go all soft and fuzzy, and some of them make everything sharper,” she said. “So I mix it up, depending on what I need to get through the day.” She gave me a look. “We gonna have a thing about this?”

“That’s about the same reason I smoke,” I said, giving my own cigarette a little flick.

“Cool,” Violet said. “You’re kind of sheltered, for a guy who spent every summer taking it up the ass.”

“I didn’t always take it,” I said.

“I know, I’ve seen,” Violet said. She grinned. “Your cock is kind of like a local celebrity.”

“You should see it sign autographs,” I said.

“Can I have one?”

“Not until it snows,” I said.

“Oh, man. Snow,” Violet said.“I can’t wait until winter gets here. I love winter. Everything’s different with snow. It’s like some primal elder god comes along and takes a dump on the landscape and turns it alien and inhospitable.”

“That’s an interesting visual,” I said.

“I used to go on these big long hikes after the first big snowfall,” she said. “Not like when you get a little powdered doughnut dusting, but when a foot and a half plops down overnight, you know? I’d sneak out early in the morning, like an hour or two before the sun came up so everything would still be frozen solid and not all mushy and slushy, and just look at everything in the moonlight. How it all changed.”

“Didn’t have a monster problem back where you lived?” I asked. I was picturing Violet—a much younger Violet—wandering around a dark snowy landscape, miles from town and out of sight of her own homestead.

“I didn’t go out in my nighty,” she said. She snorted. “Anyway, there were some lizardfolk in the woods, but you never saw them in the winter. And I could always tell when a beastie wandered into the area.”

“I guess that would be true,” I said. “But I don’t really see the appeal. I liked to play in snow as much as the next kid, but when you’re trying to get around it’s just cold and inconvenient. I couldn’t imagine just taking a walk in it.”

“Okay, but imagine that after you walked the same route through the woods for your field class for the whole semester, one day you were walking through the same woods and everything was completely different,” she said. “The trees are different. The ground is different. The air is different. All the noises are gone. The only sound is from your own boots, and even they sound different.”

“That would freak me out,” I said. “And now I’m probably going to be even more paranoid the next time I go into the deeper woods, thanks. But snow isn’t like that. It might cover everything, but the world’s still there underneath it.”

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Snow melts eventually. It always has.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean it always will. You could wake up one day and the whole world would be changed forever.”

“How can you think that and not be scared out of your mind by the idea?” I asked. I didn’t mean endless winter. I understood that she wasn’t talking about that specifically, either.

“I don’t see what there is to be afraid of,” she said.

“Say you went upstairs and went back into your room and the whole thing had been mirrored from left to right,” I said. “Everything’s there. Everything’s exactly where you left it, just flipped around. Wouldn’t that freak you out?”

“Shit, Jamie, rooms do that to me anyway,” she said.

“You’re a very strange girl,” I said.

“Yeah, buddy, same to you,” she said. “You gonna bone Barley tonight?”

“I haven’t really planned that far ahead,” I said. “Why?”

“I’m supposed to go hang out with one of my friends from class, but I don’t want to miss my favorite show,” she said. “I think Leeza will understand. She’s used to doing things vicariously, too.”

“Is my sex life really that interesting to you?” I asked.

“It’s the most interesting one within my radius,” she said. “I don’t pick up anything from Kira’s room. She must be doing something to block me.”

“Yeah, I’ll have to ask her what her secret is,” I asked.

“Oh, wouldn’t you like to know,” Violet said, smirking.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“You just said you can’t pick up anything from her,” I said. “Now she’s got some deep dark secret that you pried out of her mind? And by the way, if the emphasis is on ‘deep’ and ‘dark’, I think I’m ahead of you.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Violet said. “But the block is recent. It wasn’t up the first weekend.”

“And you learned something about her before she put it in,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“But you won’t tell me what it is.”

“It isn’t any of your business,” she said. “Being me means I’m going to learn peoples’ secrets. It doesn’t mean I have to spread them around.”

“But you see no ethical problem in teasing me with the fact that you do know something about her,” I said.

“Teasing boys is always ethical,” she said. “It’s a mandate from the gods. Anyway, it wouldn’t work if you weren’t so interested in her.”

“I’m not interested in her,” I said. “I thought she might be interesting when we first got here, but then I found out she’s a total bitch.”

“And you want me to believe that makes her less interesting?”

“It makes me less interested,” I said.

“Fair enough,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“Not true enough, but fair enough.”

“Remind me again why I hang out with you?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but the fact that you do kind of disproves the ‘bitchiness equals lack of interest’ theory,” she said. Her eyelids twitched and I felt a purple nudge in my mind, like a mental kiss.

“Ew, no,” she said. “Like a hug. I love you some, Jamie, but I don’t drink from the village well.”

“The village well,” I repeated. “Nice.”

“I’m just letting you down gently,” she said. “Seriously, it’s not you. I just don’t do skin to skin. And no, that’s not a telepath thing. It’s a me thing. I’d explain it, but there is no explanation. I wasn’t molested by my Uncle Frank. I wasn’t raped. I don’t have an origin story. Sex—real sex—is just too much at once for me.”

“Okay,” I said. “You don’t have to explain. I mean, I like you, but I’m not exactly hard up, you know?”

“Yeah, I noticed something like that.”

By the time we got back upstairs, Marlot had got a cups game started in the lounge with some of the guys. I jumped in when one of them bowed out. Violet watched for a while, and then drifted off, probably to hang out with the friend she’d mentioned.

I remembered my promise to wake Barley up at the last minute. She yawned and sat up to stretch, then looked down in confusion at the bra she was still wearing.

“Wow, I think I’m done drinking for a while,” she said. Her lip was curling in disgust. She reached to take it off, but her hands hovered around the straps like she didn’t want to touch it. “Could you help me out of this, James?”

“Yeah,” I said. I got it off of her and then hooked it over the back of my chair. I’d give it back in person later. Violet of all people probably would think nothing of having her underwear hung on her doorknob, but in a dorm half full of guys that seemed like a good way to make it disappear. “So, what do you feel like doing now?”

“I think I’m going to go out for a bit, actually,” she said. “I need to stretch my legs and find somebody to service. I was feeling a little overwhelmed before, but I think I need to get out there and find new people to fuck.”

“When do you think you’ll be back?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Probably tomorrow night or the night after. It depends on when I get worn out again. I don’t really need much sleep, physically. It was more the emotional exhaustion that was dragging me down. I think that nap should hold me for a while.” She gave me a kiss on the cheek. “You’re a sweet boy, James. Thank you so much for being here for me.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Any time.”

And that’s the story of how I learned the difference between a nymph and a girlfriend.