Episode 78: Lovely Lyra (Acheron)

Ach looked down at the table and breathed. It was okay. Yeah, Spence left. Yeah, he was here alone with the angry guy from the fire and Uncle Zero was way over there in the other tent and the line. Yeah, he was about to die probably.

But he could breathe. Breathing was a choice.

There was an imaginary scrog that jabbed a hole in his sternum and then sat on him.

Breathing was a choice.

Someone came up, a shadow on the table.

“Hi?” she said.

It wasn’t the girl from before, with the low-cut shirt and the swaying coconuts she kept shoving in Spence’s face.

This was a new girl with hair almost as pale as Ach’s. Her hair was cut weird so it went off to the side and was short like Aunt Indigo’s, and she had on way too much purple eye shadow.

She had on dangly earrings that were so long they blended in with her necklace.

“Hi?” she said again.

“Hi?” Ach agreed. He blushed. Where was Spence? Ach wasn’t supposed to be talking to people, especially not weird girls with purple all over their face for no reason.

He took a moment to silently love that Talise liked her face enough not to make it all kinds of crazy colors.

She did marry someone with blue hair though.

“I’ve been waiting for your boyfriend to leave so I could talk to you,” the girl said.

This was it, he was going to die. Taken out by a skinny girl who could do who knew what kind of powerful wiccan magic and probably had a ton of people waiting in the sidelines to help her kidnap him.

“You have?” he asked. He didn’t have a sword, but he could probably use a table leg or something to defend himself.

“Yeah. He’s kind of…intimidating?” She blushed. “You look nice.”

That was because Spence had picked his clothes for him. He usually looked like a dead librarian.

“Spence dressed me,” he explained. “He’s good at fashion.”

She blinked.

“No, I mean you look like a nice person.”

Oh.

“Okay,” he said. “Sorry.”

“You know what?” She flipped her hair back off her face like Niels did, only her hair wasn’t long enough for it to flop back like his. “Never mind.”

She turned around and started to walk off toward the densest part of the smell.

He had a revelation.

“Wait!” He called. He jumped up and knocked the table over by accident. All his pencils went all over the brown grass. “Did you want to talk? About something?”

He hated being him. Where was Spence?

She turned back around and looked at the knocked-over table. She didn’t say anything, but she came back over and helped Ach set it back up and she even put the pencils back in a straight line for him.

“Yeah, I wanted to talk. That’s why I came over. To talk.”

He almost sat down again and then remembered she was a girl. “Do you want my chair?” he offered.

“No,” she said, like he’d offended her by asking. “It’s your chair; why would I take it?”

He thought that was a little obvious. “So you can be comfortable. Sitting is more comfortable than standing.” She’d already walked here from who knew where. She needed the chair more than he did anyway.

“You don’t want to be comfortable?” she asked him.

Of course he wanted to be comfortable. Nobody said, ‘I think I’ll be uncomfortable today for no reason.’ “Well…” he looked over at Rhyss, wishing Rhyss would give up his chair instead. He seemed like someone who could just gorilla a chair at the girl and she’d have to take it because Rhyss said so. 

Rhyss wasn’t listening. He was talking to some old guy about boring people stuff. The roads, and all the rubbery fake-road stuff someone had put down to repair the cracks.

“Well,” Ach said again. “There’s only one chair, so I thought you’d want it.”

She crossed her arms. “Because I’m a girl. You thought I’d want chivalry or something? I want equality!” She slapped her hand down on the table.

Ach tried to figure out what giving her his chair had to do with knights and horses. He sighed and looked down at his pencils. She’d put them in a straight line but she’d put them out of order. It made his shoulders itch, to look at.

“If there were two chairs,” Ach said really loudly, in case Rhyss was deaf, “we could both sit, but I offered you this one. Because…because…”

He didn’t have a reason that wasn’t, that’s what you’re supposed to do.

“Because I’m a girl so that automatically means I’m less capable of standing?”

Everyone was able to stand, pretty much as soon as they sorted that out when they were still babies. Ach had enough experience with babies to know, the ability to stand came young and made life harder for everyone involved.

He didn’t see what that had to do with girls and boys. Or chairs and knights and horses. He was so tired of people and his pencils weren’t in the right order and if Rhyss hadn’t lost his hearing he was probably going to soon when some pale kid shoved a pencil in his ear for being a happy jerk.

“No,” Ach said. He scrambled to think of what his mom would say. Queening was serving. Ach was a queen, sort of, or campaigning to be a queen, anyway. “Because…I’m hosting this!” He grinned at her. “Yeah! I’m hosting it. You’re my guest. Ha! So you have to sit there, because I’m accommodating your guestyness. Plates will probably start dancing soon.”

She snorted, sort of, only the sound didn’t really come out. But she did the body thing and the head-back and the air in. “I don’t have to do anything.”

“But don’t you want to sit?” he pleaded.

“No! I want to be treated like an equal!”

Oh, no. He knew this one. This was the crazy one that made girls think going off to die in a war was somehow better because they got to prove themselves. His mom went off on this sometimes, all about how she had to stay back and wait while his dad died, in the last war, and how in the next war she was fighting no matter what.

Uncle Nell hadn’t fought. His Meldrick dad hadn’t fought.

Ach was happy to volunteer not to fight in the next war, if some girl wanted to take his place for equality. He was fine being the side of equality that got to worry. He bet the whole library would get sorted while he worried.

There was no point talking to her about this, unless he wanted a lecture about how he thought he was better than she was just because he was a guy, and then he’d have to tell her that he didn’t really think he was better than anyone, he mostly just wanted people to leave him alone, and then she’d walk off in a huff and decide he’d told her to go away and then she wouldn’t vote for Spence.

He looked at the folding chair. He still didn’t sit in it, because he didn’t feel right sitting when she was standing. “What did you want to talk about?” he asked.

“Okay, so,” she said. “You know how Spence’s uncle freed everyone from the prisons?”

“Oh, well, actually, he didn’t free everyone from the prisons,” Ach explained. “Most people weren’t in prison, and most people who were in prison are still in prison. He really only freed a few people, and most of them are still in prison. I think there will be about thirteen hundred people released by the time he’s gone through the lottery. That’s not everyone.”

She stared at him for a minute.

“Oh my god, you’re serious,” she said.

Ach nodded his head.

“They let all the people like us out of the jails,” she clarified. “That’s what I mean, is that they let us go.”

“No they didn’t. They’ve only let about six hundred people out. There’s more than seven hundred left.” He decided if she wasn’t going to sit, he would anyway. He didn’t know what the point of this conversation was.

“Yeah. Fine,” she agreed. “So they let six hundred people out. And they’re disappearing.”

“You know,” he told her. He picked one of the pencils up so he’d have something to do with his hands besides want to strangle himself with them. “You know, Spence is into mysteries. You should tell him.”

“I am telling him. I’m telling you.”

Where was Spence? “I’m not Spence,” Ach pointed out.

“And you never talk to your boyfriend? Ever?”

She picked up one of the pencils and a blank piece of paper. “This is my name and address. If you tell Spence, and he decides we’re as worth protecting as we are freeing, he can find me there.”

She passed the piece of paper, folded in half, to Ach, and set the pencil back in the line. “Otherwise, I’ll see you Monday.”

She walked off.

She was wearing leather pants that made her body swish in a weird way when she walked. He wondered what Spence would look like in that kind of leather. It would probably accentuate his muscles.

He unfolded the piece of paper the girl had given him and read it:

Lyra Masterton

232 Tyler St

Clovercrest

Lyra. That wasn’t a very common name. If he was going to name a kid Lyra, he’d name her Lyric instead. That would be pretty. Or if he was going to have twins, maybe he’d have twin girls and name them Lyric and Limerick and then Talise could make fun of him.

They were nice names. Spence liked L names.

Too bad Ach was never going to have twins of his own. Spence said he knew a way, even with a pixie mom, but it felt too out of Ach’s reach. They had so many kids already, they were gay, it cost money and took months and months of time.

Ach put the paper in his pocket so he wouldn’t forget to tell Spence about the girl.

He rearranged the pencils by length and got to work ignoring the crowd.

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