The Kissing Booth Girl and Other Stories

by A. C. Wise

  Juliet(te) asks Juliet about it as they sit on the beach, sipping frozen margaritas through pink plastic straws. They’ve been up all night, extending their just-for-now, getting around to talking about the similarity in their names and classic English literature at roughly noon. Juliet snorts.

  “You think we’re the reincarnation of ancient doom, fated to play out some sad-ass love story with a bullshit end?”

  Juliet(te) is a little embarrassed by Juliet’s scorn, but she doesn’t back down. “Could be,” she says, slurping and looking sadly at the bottom of her empty glass.

  “Fuck that noise,” Juliet responds. “I don’t roll that way.”

  Juliet(te) looks up; a grin spreads slow. Hope blooms somewhere in the center of her chest, making her limbs warm in a way that has nothing to do with the intensity of the sun. Juliet’s jaw is set, her eyes on the horizon.

  “Amen!” Juliet(te) says. She jumps up and punches Juliet on the arm; her heart beats harder still. She’s never dared not to believe in fate before. “So what do we do instead?”

  “We do better,” Juliet says. “The day is young and ripe for adventure. We’ll build a time machine. Jump to a different world. Jump to all of the worlds. We’ll run away.”

  “You serious?” Juliet(te) asks. She’s feeling a little drunk. The tequila is playing catch-up. Her lips still feel frosted salty-sweet from the night before.

  Juliet thinks about it. “Why the hell not? Stranger things have happened.”

  “Fuckin’ A!” Juliet(te) punches the air. “Not forever,” she adds, in case her enthusiasm scares Juliet away. “Just for now.”

  “Just for now,” Juliet agrees, though she means it a little less than she ever has before.

  “Future,” Juliet says, “or past?”

  “Future.” Juliet(te) grins. “There’ll be time for yesterday tomorrow.”

  “Fuckin’ A.” Juliet borrows the phrase from her lover’s mouth, liking the way it tastes on her tongue.

  Juliet rigs electric switches and dials, geegaws and doodads. She doesn’t know anything about building time machines, but how hard can it be? She knows everything about tearing down and rebuilding motorcycles, after all.

  When the time machine is primed and ready to go, Juliet(te) does her make-up in the not-mirror of Juliet’s face. She smears her cheeks with glitter and her eyes with kohl. She stains her lips improbable shades, colors that linger in the cracks of her chapped skin. Juliet welds neon to the soles of her boots so they flash and shine, space-pirate-style.

  “Ready?” Juliet(te) asks.

  “Fuckin’ A,” Juliet says, and throws the switch.

  They hurtle through space, out past the rings of Saturn. They hurtle through time to a when where humans and aliens live side by side among the stars. They dock their improvised time machine on a space station with a thousand kinds of life speaking a thousand languages they don’t understand. They find a part of the station that doesn’t spin, and in zero-g, they fuck for the first time. They learn the ways their bodies fit together, and the ways they don’t. They laugh as they crash into each other, and crash into the walls, getting it right more often than they get it wrong.

  When they’re good and bruised, happy and sore, they web themselves in a hammock tethered to the wall. They feed each other dishes they don’t recognize, coming up with their own names for the alien spices that stain their fingers strange hues.

  “Where next?” Juliet asks, drifting on the edge of sleep.

  Part of her never wants to leave. This future is too perfect—and it still counts as just for now when you have a time machine. It’s not even tomorrow yet, Juliet thinks. That makes it okay to think about falling in love.

  Back on earth, they become maenads in a post-apocalyptic motorcycle gang, hoarding gasoline and devouring their enemies with mirror-bright teeth. Juliet’s skills come in handy, and she teaches Juliet(te) the art of motorcycle repair.

  When the future becomes passé, Juliet(te) tinkers with Juliet’s time machine, rigging it to take them from might-bes to never-weres. They become goddesses on a sun-drenched island in the Mediterranean, benevolent rulers of a land populated with centaurs and minotaurs.

  When their skins begin to itch from too much sun, Juliet(te) and Juliet become queens of an underground realm, co-ruling the land of the dead. From there, they slip beneath the waves, growing gills and shedding their skin. At some point, they learn to fly.

  “Do you need a break?” Juliet(te) asks one day, shaking free a storm of feathers from her sun-scorched skin. They dared too close to the sun, but both of them declined to fall.

  She’s afraid of what Juliet’s answer might be. Just for now has become a year, or maybe more. It could be centuries since they first met by the sea. It’s easy to lose track with a time machine.

  “I’m game for another round if you are,” Juliet says. She’s afraid of Juliet(te)’s reason for asking. The idea of letting go, even for a moment, is more than she can bear

  Juliet(te) raises her hands, palms out, in front of her. “I want to try something,”

  Like a mirror, Juliet puts her hands against her lover’s skin. Between them, there is warmth, and their pulse is a steady beat keeping time. They lean together until their foreheads touch. If they can build a time machine, a myth machine, why can’t they live inside each other’s skin?

  For an entire year, Juliet(te) becomes Juliet and vice versa. They circle each other, learning their bodies anew. Everything is different from the outside.

  Juliet dyes Juliet(te)’s hair the color of cold water and plums, tangling it up in a thousand complicated braids. She pierces Juliet(te)’s lip and her left eyebrow and her belly button. Because that’s what love (she still hasn’t used the word aloud, and so she manifests it physically in silver and niobium) does. It breaks you open and transforms you; it enters you and it makes you shine.

  Juliet as Juliet(te) lies nude on a tar-paper rooftop under the stars and makes Juliet(te)’s body come with fingers that aren’t quite hers. She does it again and again until she can’t breathe for the beauty of it all.

  Juliet(te) takes Juliet’s body to night school and flirts with boys. She earns Juliet a certificate in computer engineering and travels to Rome where she almost falls in love with a vestal virgin. She enacts all the scenarios of letting go she can imagine, the ways she and Juliet will fall apart in the end. She casts these futures like sympathetic magic. She does this to banish every single one.

  Juliet uses Juliet(te)’s body to learn yoga, something she’s always wanted to try, but has always been afraid. She takes up rock climbing, and quits it immediately. She drinks too much and induces insomnia, watching late-night television and eating frozen dinners that are terrible for her. She considers adopting a cat. She spends a whole month not speaking at all. She practices living alone.

  After a year, Juliet and Juliet(te) crash back into each other on the dunes above the ocean where they first met. Bruised and battered, starved and confused, they devour each other. Neither can remember where one starts and the other begins, or what they were so afraid of; they see there’s no need to let go. Juliet and Juliet(te) entwine hands and limbs, and lie exhausted side by side.

  “Are you me, or am I you?” asks Juliet(te).

  “Does it matter?”

  Anything is possible, even forever not being a terrible thing.

  Doomed love doesn’t have to die young. They can live on the edge of annihilation, refusing destiny in the name of their own narratives. They will burn twice as bright, and fly twice as far, setting the night on fire in the brilliance of their wake.

  “Keep running?” Juliet(te) asks.

  “Fuckin’ A,” Juliet says, slipping into sleep, still holding her lover’s hand.

  They travel everywhere—ancient Sparta, far-future Lisbon, the moons of Jupiter, and the deep undersea caves of worlds waiting to be discovered. They are myth, possibility, and actuality all rolled into one. They tell their own stories, rather th
an letting fate tell one for them, something Juliet(te) never thought was possible.

  They travel nowhere. They take up knitting. They plant a garden, nothing edible except to bees. They go to the market on Sundays, and consider learning how to keep the bees that have been lingering longer and longer at their house. They learn to enjoy silence and stillness, something Juliet never thought they would do. They learn to stop being afraid of standing still.

  It’s been only a moment since they met, and it’s been a thousand years, when Juliet finally speaks the word love aloud. She whispers it into the fire of her lover’s hair, and Juliet(te) offers it back to her in the same breath and heartbeat.

  “If you could choose any future, any past, out of all the ones we’ve visited, which one would you choose?” Juliet asks. She has a smear of honey on her chin from their pancake breakfast.

  Juliet(te) smiles because the answer is so simple (why haven’t others realized this?): “One with you.” The pad of her thumb rubs that smear like errant lipstick.

  Juliet and Juliet(te) wake to the crash of waves. They roll toward each other in their bed in their little cottage by the sea. Roses climb the walls, curling around the windows; everything smells of salt and glory, winter mixed with spring.

  As they have every morning since they met, they examine themselves in the mirror of each other’s faces, and smile at what they see. Their hair is the same storm-tossed shade of gray these days. Their wrinkles are very much the map of each other’s lives. Some people mistake them for sisters, for twins. Those same people look away with pinched mouths when the two old ladies reach for each other to lock gnarled hands, or giggle like teenagers, or kiss like the same.

  “Young love is grand, isn’t it?” Juliet(te) asks Juliet in their cottage by the sea.

  “Fuckin’ A,” Juliet agrees.

  One day, they may die in each other’s arms, perhaps in sleep, perhaps before bed as they each slip soft nightgowns over the other’s familiar body, but it won’t be tragic this time. As Juliet once said to Juliet(te)—fuck that noise. There are better stories to tell, and the only moment they care about is this one, right here, right now.

  Ro shoulders the courier bag, leaving the bike chained at the entrance to the Zone. Even here, at the edge, dampness permeates the air green like a receding tide. The pavement is patchwork. Brick and stone show through tears in the asphalt, wounds no one bothered to heal once the aliens moved in, once it was clear humans would never move back into the neighborhood and it became the Zone.

  Weeds grow in the gaps, flourishing in the damp. Ro places each boot carefully, avoiding the puddles reflecting sodium streetlights. On either side of the street, buildings stand with their doors shuttered against the gathering twilight. Some are ragged against the emerging stars, top layers blown away, evidence of the violence that emptied the neighborhood, made it unfit for human habitation, and eventually turned it into the Zone. But close to the ground, the world is still whole. If Ro doesn’t look up, it’s as though nothing has changed.

  Except the Zone is haunted by waiting. The sense of impermanence is palpable—like the refugee camps and shanty towns of the early century, the ones the government planned to empty after the last great flood, or hurricane, but never did. The Zone was meant to be a way station, a temporary solution until the Immies (the word tastes dirty even in Ro’s mind, hateful, ugly, but there isn’t a better one because the aliens have never given the humans their true name) could be fully integrated into life on Earth. And yet…

  Ro shrugs against the weight of emptiness and broken promises. At least Xal’s light is still on, welcoming. A bell over the door jangles; stepping inside, Ro can’t help smiling at this incongruously human touch. It’s like the shelves behind the glass counters, crammed floor to ceiling with human knickknacks and oddities no Immie could possibly want, and no human would come here to buy. Charming, but sad in a way, too. Lonely.

  It takes Ro a moment to pick out Xal’s form against the crowded shelves. Today, Xal’s flesh is the color of sand. It reminds Ro of the fish that disguise themselves from predators by lying flat against the ocean floor. There are variations, tiny glints of light. It is brown only in the way pigeons are simply gray, full of tones unseen until it is pointed out they were there all along.

  “Hi.” Ro sets the courier bag on the counter—this time full of gamboling ceramic kittens—and places the delivery slip on top.

  Xal doesn’t respond, which isn’t unusual for an Immie, only for Xal. Ro hesitates. Payment is stacked neatly on the counter, as always. Perhaps Xal simply doesn’t want to talk. Ro turns, hiding disappointment.

  ::Tone—Plea/Imperative: Ro. Wait.::

  Xal’s voice is changeless, only the tone-statement betraying the edge of panic. There are no human or even human-like features to convey pain. But now that Ro looks closer, it is written in the restless knotting of limbs hanging beneath the bulk of Xal’s body.

  Ro steps forward. Xal shifts, flickering in and out. Barely visible one moment, then sharply outlined the next. Sinuous lines gleam damp, twisting through a host of colors Ro can’t begin to name. Ro’s breath catches. There, an extra wetness, almost hidden by the tangled lines, a gash leaking fluid, smelling of salt.

  “What happened?”

  ::Tone—Statement/Fear: An accident.:: Ro hears hesitation in Xal’s tone; in a human, it might sound like a lie. ::Tone—Statement/Honesty: An attack. In the human district, not far over the line. Just looking.::

  Colors roll; Xal fades in and out again.

  “You were attacked?”

  ::Tone—Affirmative/Sorrow: Yes.::

  “What can I do to help? Is there someone I can call?”

  ::Tone—Alarm/Negative: No.::

  “Okay.” Ro holds up hands, palms out, hoping Xal will understand the human gesture and feeling helpless.

  Xal’s body clenches, shuddering, furling tight around the wound. A sound like keening, like an in-drawn breath, like music, traces Ro’s jaw and spine. Then the sound stops and Xal unfolds, becoming more solid.

  The wound already looks less, but still, a tremor ripples out from Ro’s center. Disgust. Ro clenches teeth against the reaction, a reflexive hatred for the uselessness of all flesh. It isn’t fair; Xal is wounded, Xal needs help, and this isn’t the time. And yet the bone-achingly physical reaction remains, rooted in the very thing causing the revulsion. Flesh. Ro shudders, stepping closer to the counter as if to step away from skin, from muscle, leaving disgust behind.

  ::Tone—Statement/Sincere: The pain is less. Ro. Thank you for staying.::

  A limb uncurls, a jerky, reflexive motion as though Xal is not entirely in control yet. It brushes Ro’s hand, braced against the countertop. A new sound, a new quality of pain, laced with surprise. Xal draws back, but not before the touch sparks—a snap like an electric shock and a taste like lemons.

  A scream locks in Ro’s throat. A sensation of dislocation without motion. A space of falling or flying, existing between the moment of contact and Xal’s touch withdrawn. Ro blinks away patches of violet light until the shop comes back into focus, bracing for a horror that never comes.

  The lightness of Xal’s touch, unlike anything human. Ro lets out a breath, coming back to center.

  Xal’s limbs are knotted in a new pattern now, anxious.

  ::Tone—Statement/Fear: Ro. Apology. Pain was not intended.::

  “No. I…” Ro’s breath—ragged—calms, but not fast enough. “It didn’t hurt. I don’t…”

  Flying. Falling. Ro struggles to process the sensation of Xal’s limb, solid yet ephemeral. The memory of the touch remains, like a lost tooth wanting to be probed. It is a moment of slipping out from under the weight of skin and bones, of being somewhere else, yet wholly here.

  Ro tries to draw back from the sensation, but there is nothing to withdraw from.

  ::Tone—Query/Fear: Not hurt.:: Xal’s voice again. Ro’s mind thrums to an absence, reaching again for revulsion where there is none.


  “No. I should just… I’m sorry.”

  Ro turns, bell jangling. The green scent of the streets is an assault, the slickness underfoot designed to trip uncareful steps. Even the shorter buildings lean in, edges all jagged. They outline an empty space, something that cannot be defined.

  On the edge of hyperventilation, Ro bursts out of the Zone. Leaving the bike behind, leaving everything. Not questioning the source of the fear, just running. Then stopping, leaning against a building, a stitch lacing between two ribs.

  “Ro?”

  Ro looks up, blinking, human buildings and a single figure resolving. Audra slows her bike, dropping one foot to the pavement. The courier satchel at Audra’s hip is empty; Ro remembers the bag left with the delivery in Xal’s shop, the bike chained to a post at the entrance of the Zone.

  “Are you okay? You look like you’re about to faint.”

  “I…” Ro falters, tries again. “Something happened.”

  “What?”

  There are no words. Only lemons and the snap of electricity. Ro rubs the spot Xal touched, chasing ghosts.

  “Come on.” Audra swings her leg over the courier bike, twin to the one Ro left behind. A tilt of her chin indicates the café across the street, glowing warm in the twilight. “We’re getting some tea into you. My treat.”

  Audra keeps a space and silence between them. Ro is grateful. But Audra’s gaze still slides in Ro’s direction, questioning. Inside the café, Audra pushes a cup of tea across the table.

  “What happened?”

  “I was making a delivery to Xal.” Ro hesitates, seeing an expression of distaste Audra is not quick enough to hide. “Xal was attacked, outside the Zone.”