by Robin Talley
She tucked the tickets away in the drawer of her dressing table. The fourth piece of paper in the envelope was typewritten, from the Bannon Press office.
Dear Miss Jones,
Per the suggestion of Miss Wood, you are hereby invited to submit a manuscript for consideration by Nathan Levy, editor of Bannon Press. We have found success in publishing the novels of Miss Wood and similar works of Lesbiana by other authors, as interest in this topic has recently increased among paperback readers.
Our books, both fiction and otherwise, must speak honestly and candidly about the true nature of this topic, revealing its dangers and immoral associations (such as with other forms of criminality, witchcraft, et cetera). Our stories must end with appropriate resolutions for characters who engage in these practices. All manuscripts must be typewritten with one–inch margins.
Please send a whole or partial (100 pages or more) manuscript to the address below for review. Be sure to preserve a carbon copy of your original manuscript. Should your manuscript be accepted for publication, you would be granted an advance payment of $2,000. Bannon Press maintains all control regarding book titles, covers, advertising and the like.
Yours truly,
Sally Johnson,
assistant to Nathan Levy, editor–in–chief
Bannon Press
54 W 23rd St., 17th floor
New York, NY 10011
This letter was even harder for Janet to understand than Dolores Wood’s. Her eyes kept skipping from word to word.
Lesbiana.
$2,000.
Witchcraft.
Witchcraft? Did it really say witchcraft?
Janet checked again. It did.
Her eyes drifted back to Dolores Wood’s letter, and the drawer that held her bus tickets. Miss Wood must have thought Janet was older than she was. Eighteen-year-old girls didn’t accept bus tickets from people they’d never met, or venture off by themselves to faraway cities.
Besides, it was beyond her wildest imaginings that she might actually go to New York and meet Dolores Wood herself. That she might enter a bar and see other girls like Janet and Marie. Girls who “engaged” in “practices” like the ones the Bannon Press letter had mentioned.
Janet’s mind spun. She closed her eyes, and all at once she saw a story unfolding.
A nondescript bar with no windows on a quiet Greenwich Village street. The type of place workingmen hurried past without looking up. Those men wouldn’t notice the girls who walked in and out of the bar with their eyes trained down, their hands tucked discreetly into their coat pockets.
Janet could see it all perfectly. As though she’d visited this bar already, where girls danced with other girls, as though that were a perfectly normal thing to do.
Behind her closed eyelids, Janet pictured two girls sitting at a small, grimy table, slightly removed from the other patrons. One of the girls had dark, curly hair and glasses. The other had blond hair and reminded Janet of a girl she’d once seen on television—the daughter of a contestant on some quiz show. The girl on the program had worn bright lipstick and a lovely dress, and as she’d smiled and twirled before the cheering audience her skirt had billowed out, offering the briefest glimpse of her knees.
Something about that girl had captivated Janet in a way she hadn’t quite understood, but now she saw that she was exactly right for the story forming in her mind.
The blond girl in the bar had met the brunette that very night, Janet decided. It was the first time either of them had dared to enter the place. Which was called... Penny’s Corner. And the two girls were... Paula. And Elaine.
Their story was only just beginning.
Janet opened her desk and reached in blindly, grabbing her old home economics notebook and a pencil. She turned to an empty page. A strange, tingling feeling flowed into her fingers as she wrote the first words.
I’d never come to an establishment like this one before. At first, I was so nervous I could barely see straight, but when I spotted the blond sitting in the back, looking lost and lovely at the same time, I knew I’d made the right choice.
As Janet’s pencil scratched across the paper, the tingling sensation crawled up to her chest. It was just like the night before, when she’d climbed onto that streetcar with Marie.
Janet lowered the notebook, gazing down at the pencil marks on the page. She’d just written the first sentences of her first novel. From here, the story could only grow.
A new set of lines began to take form in her mind. They were for later in the story, so Janet skipped her pencil down the page.
“There’s something I have to tell you, Elaine. Something I’ve longed to tell you.”
I was so breathless I could barely speak. “What is it, Paula?”
“I love you. I’ve loved you from the moment I first saw you.”
I closed my eyes and tasted each word.
Elaine and Paula would fall in love. Janet could see it as clearly as she saw her own reflection in the mirror. The tenderness the two girls shared would be deep, true and undeniable. Until, tragically, society came between them, as it always must.
A title drifted into her mind, too. Alone No Longer. Janet wrote it across the top of the page.
She kept writing, the words coming to mind faster than she could scrawl them out. She jotted down notes for later, too. Scenes she would write soon, about love and loss and heartbreak.
Sometime later, her grandmother knocked on the door, but Janet claimed a headache and wrote on. She wrote all through the evening and the night that followed, until her eyes refused to stay open and the pencil fell from her limp fingers. Yet even as she finally felt herself passing into sleep, that tingling sensation never went away.
5
Tuesday, September 19, 2017
“It’s for the best.” Paula shrugged. She’d told this story to other girls before Elaine, enough times that she could say the words without them hurting much anymore. “They wanted me gone as much as I wanted out. They’d just as soon have nothing to do with me, and I feel the same way.”
“Even so.” The night’s chill had crept in through the dark window. Elaine shivered in her thin blouse. She tapped out her cigarette, the ashes pooling in the tin with those they’d already smoked that evening. “It must’ve been hard, leaving. Knowing you were never coming back.”
“Plenty of people have it worse.” Paula shrugged again, but the movement took more effort this time. She suspected Elaine could tell she was putting up a front. Elaine, it seemed, could always tell what she was really thinking.
“I don’t know what I’d do if my parents ever found out.” Elaine shivered again. “Or the others back home. I suppose you’re right—that’s how it is for everyone—but that doesn’t make it any easier. What did your parents say when they found out? How did you tell them?”
“I didn’t tell them.” Paula let out a long, heavy sigh. “They found out. I’d gotten a letter, from a...a friend. I should’ve thrown it away, but I was careless. It was a sweet letter, the first sweet letter I’d ever gotten from a girl, and though I hadn’t seen her again after that, I saved the letter so I could remember. I was young, and, well—that letter was the thing I loved most in all the world.”
Elaine nodded. Paula took in a deep breath.
“Well.” Paula dropped her eyes, studying the tin of ashes. She’d never told anyone this part of the story before, but she wanted Elaine to know the truth. “What happened was, my mother found it in my dressing table. She was prowling around my things, probably looking for evidence I was up to no good—she was always sure I was bad news. That afternoon, she came down to the living room where I was doing my homework by the fireplace and shoved the letter in my face, asking why a girl was writing those sorts of things to me. Before I could even think of what to say, she threw it in the flames.”
“She bur
ned your letter?” Elaine reached out to take Paula’s hand. Suddenly her touch was the only thing holding Paula to the ground. “The letter you loved so much?”
“Like I said, it was my own fault.” Paula drew a cigarette from the pack with a shaky hand. “I should’ve known better than to save it in the first place.”
“I don’t think it was your fault at all.” Elaine stroked Paula’s hand, leaned across the table and kissed her lips. Her mouth was warm and soft. “Someday, I’m going to write you a new letter. One nobody can burn.”
Abby closed her computer, the scene still echoing in her mind.
She traced her fingers over the stickers on the laptop’s protective case. It was old stuff, mostly—a rainbow flag, a Bernie logo from the primaries and a Hillary one from the general, the “Feminism Is the Radical Notion That Women Are People” illustrated quote Ms. Sloane had given her last year after she told off one of the guys in their workshop for submitting his third story about a superhot robot babe.
It all dated back to when she and Linh were still together. Maybe that was why none of it felt right anymore. Abby wasn’t the same person she’d been then.
She should probably peel off all her stickers with some Goo-Be-Gone. Start fresh. The way Paula had started over when she moved to New York.
Except...the past always followed you. Right? That was what Paula had learned, and Elaine, too. It was a miracle that Paula and Elaine had even made it out of the places they’d come from in the first place.
Or, well, it would’ve been a miracle if any of it had been true. Elaine and Paula were fictional, obviously. Even though they felt so incredibly real.
Abby wondered, not for the first time, if the characters were entirely imaginary. Marian Love could’ve drawn inspiration from people she knew, or even from her own life. Authors did that sometimes, right? Wrote carefully disguised stories about things that had really happened? Paula and Elaine felt too solid, too three-dimensional, to have come from nowhere.
Abby had finished the last page of Women of the Twilight Realm late the night before. At first she’d sat on the bed in a daze, overwhelmed by all the hours she’d spent in Elaine and Paula’s world. Then she’d realized it was the perfect moment to start writing her own story, when her mind was still totally immersed. She’d opened a blank doc and tried to write a meet-cute for her two main characters, but none of the words she wrote sounded remotely cute compared to Marian Love’s.
So she’d searched for more information about the book instead. She’d been hoping to find a sequel, but apparently Marian Love had never written another book, even though Women of the Twilight Realm sold millions of copies. In fact, she seemed to have straight-up disappeared off the face of the earth. And just like the other pulp authors, she hadn’t been writing under her real name anyway.
Abby didn’t understand it. How could anyone write a book that had such a huge impact, then vanish without ever writing more? How could Marian Love have resisted the lure of all those fans? Abby had kept writing fanfic for years, mostly because of the comments people left begging for more chapters, but the highest number of comments she’d ever gotten on one story was a hundred or so. She couldn’t imagine having millions of people read something she’d written.
She opened her laptop again. She’d skipped her lit mag meeting—Abby was the editor, but it wasn’t as though she had to be at every single meeting or the world would end—and come straight home from school. Her plan had been to spend the whole afternoon writing, so she’d have at least some chance of meeting Ms. Sloane’s deadline, but she kept going back to Women of the Twilight Realm and rereading her favorite scenes instead.
She kept staring at the cover, too. Now that she’d finished the book, it made more sense. Paula was the one in the tie, and Elaine was the one with the fabulous boobs. Though if the sex scenes inside were accurate, Paula’s boobs were pretty fabulous, too.
Plus, it had turned out to be so much more than a romance novel. The story definitely started out with what Abby’s fandom friends would’ve called “insta-love”—Paula and Elaine had sex and declared passionate love for each other the first night they met, and moved in together a few days later—but the obstacles they were up against were a lot more intense than in the romantic comedies Abby had seen. When Elaine tried to break up with her flaky boyfriend from back home, he arranged to get Paula fired from her job and basically outed Elaine to her parents, which led directly to Elaine’s father committing suicide.
Probably. That last part was kind of unclear. It could’ve been an accident.
Strangely enough, though, the book didn’t wind up being a downer in the end. Plus, it was honestly pretty fun just to read a novel that was all about lesbians. Abby hadn’t realized how neat it would be to see characters like her front and center in a story. Sure, she spent plenty of time with queer people in real life—all her friends were somewhere on the queer spectrum, since Linh and Ben were both bi, Savannah was questioning, and Vanessa didn’t use labels for sexual orientation but definitely didn’t identify as straight—but it still sent happy shivers down Abby’s spine to see the word lesbian used nonchalantly so many times in one novel.
Most of all, though, it was the romance that had swept her away. Sure, the book had its sappy, melodramatic moments, but there was just something about the way Paula and Elaine loved each other so deeply, even though they knew the outside world would never understand. True love, the kind they had, was strong enough to withstand absolutely anything.
And the ending—wow. Even with all the terrible things that had happened to Paula and Elaine, the end of their story still managed to be a perfect fantasy. The kind Abby loved most in the world. Despite all the challenges they’d faced, despite living in a world that would never understand them, the ending made clear that it was all going to be okay, because they had each other.
Maybe that wasn’t realistic, but who cared? Abby had already had enough reality to last her a lifetime.
Footsteps rang out on the stairs, and Abby groaned silently. Every board in their house creaked in anticipation before you even touched it. It always annoyed her on shows when teenagers snuck out of their houses. If Abby had ever tried that her parents would’ve caught her before she’d even made it to the landing.
She hoped it was only Ethan. He’d go straight to his room without bothering her. But as the creaking got closer, it was clearly too heavy to be her brother.
Abby closed her eyes, bracing herself.
A knock on the door. “Abby? Can I come in?” It was Mom.
“Okay.” Abby opened her eyes and arranged her face into a carefully bored expression.
“It’s good to see you.” Mom stepped inside slowly. She didn’t hold out her arms for a hug, the way she always used to do when she got home from trips. Abby had told her parents she was too old for hugs a while ago, but it still felt kind of weird that nonhugging was their new default. “I missed you while I was away.”
Abby hated it when her parents did their fakey-fake forced-affection talk. If they genuinely missed her, they wouldn’t leave so often. “What did you guys wind up doing to Ethan? Is he grounded?”
“He had to apologize to Mr. Salem, and he lost his phone and his computer for a week.”
“What, that’s it? He basically attacked someone!”
Mom sighed. “Punishments are for adults to decide, Abby. So, how’s school?”
“Okay.” Abby struggled to think of something to say about school. Mom always tried to act as if she was interested in her life, which meant she never gave up until Abby told her at least one story about her day. “We went to Starbucks during free period and Ben got into this big involved debate with the barista about Game of Thrones. Then Vanessa told them both to quit it unless they were ready to talk about the inherent sexism in the writing, and we all started fighting about Daenerys, and Linh and I were almost late for stats.”
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br /> Mom laughed and settled down into the desk chair, opposite Abby on the bed. “How’s it going with you and Linh being friends now that you’ve been back in school for a few weeks? I know it can be difficult after a big change.”
“It’s fine.” Abby wished she hadn’t told her parents about her and Linh breaking up. She doubted they would’ve noticed if she hadn’t spelled it out for them. Back in June, when it first happened, they hadn’t seemed to realize she was crying in her room every night. Of course, the whole thing had been their fault in the first place, but they never seemed to grasp that, either.
But Abby had gone over and over it in her head, and it was the only explanation. The weirdness between her and Linh had started that day in May, when Linh and Abby had sat motionless on the stairs watching Mom and Dad’s mutual meltdown.
Right after that whole thing happened Abby had been pretty messed up, so they’d gone to Linh’s house. There was nowhere else to go. It was a long walk, all uphill, and they’d left Abby’s house so fast to get away from the parent drama that they’d wound up leaving Linh’s backpack on the floor of Abby’s room. The backpack had probably had stuff in it Linh needed for school the next day, but they didn’t talk about that. They didn’t talk about anything, in fact.
Instead, when they got inside Linh’s house and saw that it was cool and dark and empty—deserted except for the two of them, the tasteful linen furniture and the cat purring in front of the restored brick fireplace—they’d started kissing. Then they went up to Linh’s room.
If Abby had known that was going to be the last time they had sex, she probably would’ve paid more attention to the details. She’d be able to remember exactly how it started, exactly what they were wearing, exactly who said what and when. Though she wasn’t sure either of them had said much of anything, come to think of it.
There was another fanfiction term—hurt/comfort. It used to be one of Abby’s favorite fic genres, back before she knew what actual hurting felt like.