Turtles All the Way Down(16)
Holly came by with the check, an unsubtle reminder that we’d overstayed our welcome. I put down the debit card Mom had given me—Daisy never had any money and my mom let me charge twenty-five dollars a week as long as I kept straight As. Beneath the table, I rubbed my thumb against the callus of my finger. I told myself that Daisy was probably right, that everything would probably be fine. Probably.
Daisy didn’t look up from her phone, but said, “Seriously, Holmesy. I won’t let anything happen. I promise.”
“You can’t control it, that’s the thing,” I said. “Life is not something you wield, you know?”
“Hell yes, it is,” she mumbled, still sunk into her phone. “Ugh, God, now this guy is saying I write bestiality.”
“Wait, what?”
“Because in my fic, Chewbacca and Rey were in love. He’s saying it is—and I am quoting—‘criminal’ because it’s interspecies romance. Not sex, even—I keep it rated Teen for the kids out there—just love.”
“But Chewbacca isn’t human,” I said.
“It’s not a question of whether Chewie was human, Holmesy; it’s a question of whether he was a person.” She was almost shouting. She took Star Wars stuff quite seriously. “And he was obviously a person. Like, what even makes you a person? He had a body and a soul and feelings, and he spoke a language, and he was an adult, and if he and Rey were in hot, hairy, communicative love, then let’s just thank God that two consenting, sentient adults found each other in a dark and broken galaxy.”
So often, nothing could deliver me from fear, but then sometimes, just listening to Daisy did the trick. She’d straightened something inside me, and I no longer felt like I was in a whirlpool or walking an ever-tightening spiral. I didn’t need similes. I was located in my self again. “So he’s a person because he’s sentient?”
“Nobody complains about male humans hooking up with female Twi’leks! Because of course men can choose whatever they want to bone. But a human woman falling in love with a Wookiee, God forbid. I mean, I know I’m just feeding the trolls here, Holmesy, but I can’t stand for it.”
“I just mean, like, a baby isn’t sentient, but a baby is still a person.”
“Nobody is saying anything about babies, Holmesy. This is about one adult person who happened to be human falling in love with another adult person who happened to be a Wookiee.”
“Can Rey even speak Wookiee?”
“You know, it’s a little annoying that you don’t read my fanfic, but what’s really annoying is that you don’t read any Chewie fanfic. If you did, you’d know that Wookiee was not a language, it was a species. There were at least three Wookiee languages. Rey learned Shyriiwook from Wookiees who came to Jakku, but she didn’t usually speak it because Wookiees mostly understood Basic.”
I was laughing. “And why are you using the past tense?”
“Because all of this happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Holmesy. You always use the past tense when talking about Star Wars. Duh.”
“Wait, can humans speak Shyri—the Wookiee language?”
Daisy did a very passable Chewbacca impersonation in response, then translated herself. “That was me asking if you’re gonna eat your fries.” I passed the to-go carton across the table to her, and she took a handful, then made another Chewbacca noise with her mouth half full.
“What did that mean?” I asked her.
“It’s been over twenty-four hours; time to text Davis.”
“Wookiees have texting?”
“Had texting,” she corrected me.
SEVEN
MONDAY MORNING, I drove Mom to school because her car was in the shop. I could feel the burning in my middle finger from the hand sanitizer I’d applied just before leaving, and so I was pressing the Band-Aid into my middle finger, simultaneously worsening and relieving the pain. I hadn’t texted Davis over the weekend. I kept thinking about it, but the night at Applebee’s passed, and then I’d started to feel nervous about it, like maybe it had been too long, and Daisy wasn’t around to bully me into it because she was working all weekend.
Mom must’ve noticed the Band-Aid pressing, because she said, “You have an appointment with Dr. Singh tomorrow, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“What are your thoughts on the med situation?”
“It’s okay, I guess,” which wasn’t quite the whole truth. For one thing, I wasn’t convinced the circular white pill was doing anything when I did take it, and for another, I was not taking it quite as often as I was technically supposed to. Partly, I kept forgetting, but also there was something else I couldn’t quite identify, some way-down fear that taking a pill to become myself was wrong.
“You there?” Mom asked.
“Yeah,” I said. Enough of me—but only just enough—was still located inside Harold to hear her voice, to follow the well-worn path to school.
“Just be honest with Dr. Singh, okay? There’s no need to suffer.” Which I’d argue is just a fundamental misunderstanding of the human predicament, but okay.
—
I parked in the student parking lot, parted ways with Mom, and then lined up to walk through the metal detectors. Once declared weapon-free, I joined the flow of bodies filling the hallways like blood cells in a vein.