Hannah envies the girls who got to go on birth control early, in ninth grade even, because of their skin problems. Now they all have great skin and no questions asked when they remind their mothers to pick up their prescriptions. Meanwhile, two days ago, Alfie Turner asked Hannah out—and if she can’t figure out how to have two forms of protection, then she won’t clear her personal bar for having sex. Clearing it would tell her she’s responsible and capable. It would indicate that she could take on greater things, solve bigger problems—which should be everyone’s personal bar for taking up resources. But no, Hannah and her 17-year-old mediocre skin—pimple here and there, but nothing medication-worthy—are having trouble figuring out how to supplement the condom on short notice.
Because waiting too long would ruin it. If she can’t figure out things fast, what’s the point? The world moves too slowly, and if the human race is going to survive, everyone needs to speed the hell up. A new UN Climate Report came out last week, and after Hannah spent all weekend writing an op-ed about it for the student newspaper, she’s pretty sure her older sister is the only one who read it. Even though the editor-in-chief claims they got 1200 unique visits on the Clayton High School Gazette website, and even though her mom emailed the link out to the whole family.
If Hannah asked her mother for contraception advice, she’d get a response that’s liberal and feminist enough: “It’s probably time for you to start seeing a gynecologist anyway.” But that’s it. Hannah wouldn’t get more-than-enough from her mother, which is what’s needed from mothers and non-mothers and everyone if Hannah wants a shot at spending time outside in her middle age without burning to a crisp. The urgency would be entirely on Hannah’s end, as it always is.
#
Last weekend, her dog slipped out of her older sister’s room, wedging Shelly’s bedroom door almost open-wide. The hum of Shelly’s voice suddenly became a set of clear words, while the silence on the other end got upgraded into an intermittent hum.
“Oh, well that really might be too generous,” Shelly said. Hum. “Yeah, well we’re talking about Hannah here.” Hum. “Wow, are you sure?” Hum. “Yes, I’m telling you, Hannah really is that crazy.”
Hannah slumped down in the hallway, sat on the floor while her sister laughed. She noticed a schmear of vanilla frosting on the floor from her mother’s 50th birthday cake, the reason Shelly was home from college for the weekend. She pssted at the dog, the one she named Toby Star in elementary school, and watched him lick it up.
#
Hannah’s first period class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays is AP Environmental Science and she sits two rows in front of Alfie. Now it’s Friday, and she wonders what she can do, if anything, to follow up on her mid-week performance—the one that inspired Alfie to find her in the hallway right afterwards, scratch his almost-greasy hair, and ask if she’d like to hang out. Her performance, which was also a very real and earnest act, began with smoothing her hands on the long plastic desk she shared with everyone in her row. She spread out her fingers and shuffled her hands back and forth on her finger pads, three times in and three times out. Then she raised her hand when Mr. Holloway took a pause.
“I was just noticing something I wanted to bring up,” she said, once her fingers found the perfect spot to rest. “I noticed that there’s no dedicated unit on nuclear energy.”
“Well there’s an appendix chapter in the textbook on alternative energy sources, so it is included in the…”
“I know, I’m just asking why we’re not devoting at least a class period to it this year.”
“The AP exam doesn’t emphasize nuclear energy, and I want to make sure you’re all as prepared for the exam as possible.” Mr. Holloway wears skinny ties and brings bottled Frescas to each class period. She caught him eyeing his cold Fresca on his desk by the window.
“Okay. But there are fourth generation nuclear reactors now, and nuclear energy still only makes up about 20 percent of our grid in the United States—I mean, come on. Don’t you think we’re effectively illiterate if we don’t understand clean energy?”
It was her phrase fourth generation nuclear reactors that probably did it. She very purposefully did not look behind her to witness it, but Alfie’s head probably rose up at that very phrase. In all likelihood, he stopped staring at his own fingerprints on the desk and instead noticed a slightly hypnotic ponytail attached to a very smart, well-spoken girl. How wonderful that boys were becoming more feminist, just in time for them to all drown from increasingly catastrophic weather events.
He had her number already, so they didn’t have to exchange anything after he approached her in the hallway, and they text a little over the weekend. Hannah already told him she wasn’t free this weekend because her older sister Shelly would be home again. Hannah has tried not to think about her sister’s voice on the phone, or how voices really do have a specific, casual quality when people think they’re in private. She’d rather appreciate that her sister is home, since she knows that’s the right thing to do, while there’s still time. Everyone is disappearing a little bit, every day. Global warming means that things will get a lot more crowded before they get more sparse—climate refugees flooding the more habitable places, wall-to-wall protests for aid, riots when resources get scarce. Still, the main thing Hannah pictures is emptiness. The world like a Salvador Dali painting, their beloved objects melting over dry, abandoned earth.
#
While Hannah lounges on the blue corduroy couch in her living room, she and Alfie decide via text to go see the new Avengers movie the following weekend. Shelly volunteers that she has already seen it. Hannah didn’t realize her sister had been reading her texts over her shoulder, but takes it as an opportunity to ask Shelly’s opinion. She spins and cranes her neck backwards towards her sister, who is tall even when she doesn’t tower over people on couches. “Is it the kind of movie that puts you in the mood for sex?”
Shelly frowns. “Are you afraid he’s going to put pressure on you to do it right after the movie or something?”
“No. I mean I don’t anticipate that or anything. But I’m trying to figure out if we should just go ahead and get it over with next weekend.”
“I thought you hadn’t gone out with this guy before.” Shelly flops down on the couch next to Hannah, rests her arm behind Hannah’s neck like they’re the ones on a date. “Alfie, right? I’m right, right—this is your first time going out with him?”
“Well it’s not like he’s a stranger. We’ve gone to school together for five years.”
“Okay. Sorry, I’m still missing something—why do you feel like you have to have sex on the first date?”
“I don’t feel like I have to. I feel like I might want to, that’s all.” Hannah crosses her legs up underneath her on the couch. She almost feels like explaining to Shelly that she meant what she said about getting it over with, that maybe if she could have sex she’d become a more competent person. That all she did all day was talk about climate change but she couldn’t get anything done. All she could get done was homework, all she could muster was a simple ploy to get a date, but that wasn’t getting anything done. “You never told me about your first time,” Hannah says, tracing the grain of the couch fabric with her index finger pad. Maybe it will be something embarrassing, maybe her sister will say that she herself was once crazy.
“Yeah, well,” Shelly says. “There honestly isn’t a whole lot to say. I’m sure yours will be fine too. And—well to be honest, I can’t tell if you’re being too casual or too—too plan-ful, or something, but if you think it’s going to mean a lot and plan out a lot of scenarios in advance, I think you’re going to be disappointed. I’ll just say that.”
“Yeah,” Hannah says. “Okay, but it’s normal to plan things out in advance, right? Doesn’t not planning for sex, in fact, give it more weight? There’s nothing in my life that just happens, so why would sex? I’m just here trying to normalize sex, trying to pencil it in.”
Shelly laughs. That half-mast position of her eyes when she’s confused—erased. “I have a friend at school who uses that word a lot. Normalize. You know I do miss you.”
Hannah closes her eyes and tries to reabsorb the sting of proto-teardrops. How happy she is to hear that right now—but everything always happens so fast. Shelly might get up again any second, might drift back into another room, another life.
“Am I right though?” Hannah asks.
“Have you told mom?”
“No. I’ll probably tell her after though.”
“You would use a condom, right? That’s really important.”
“God, I know that’s important. I’m very aware, the protection thing is definitely an issue.”
“An issue?”
“Well, I’m not on birth control.”
“Oh. Well that’s okay.”
“You’re on the pill, right?”
“Well, I was. But I stopped.”
“So you have extra packs?” Hannah is brave enough now to open her eyes all the way.
“What? I’m not going to—Hannah, I can’t just give you pills. You have to see a doctor.”
“There isn’t time.”
“Just make an appointment. As long as you’re on your way to getting the pill, it’s okay to have sex with just a condom a couple of times. Again, if that’s what you want.”
What she wants to know is if Shelly sees the same slippery slope that Hannah does—you make a compromise like this in your personal life and that turns into compromises in your political life, your vision for the world. Hannah clears her throat. “Is Environmental Studies a major at Wash U?”
“Yeah, I think it is. They made it one a few years ago, I think. You’d love it, they have a pretty big catalogue.”
“But are any of those Environmental Studies classes required, like across the board, for every student?”
“No, they’re not part of the core.”
Hannah shakes her head. Then she digs her nails into the couch, turning her hands into claws, wondering when she’ll ever ask a question out loud she doesn’t know the answer to.
#
Ultimately, Avengers doesn’t make them want to drop their pants in the theater, or in the car on the way back, or at Alfie’s house when Hannah drops him off. Instead, Hannah and Alfie have sex on their third date, while her parents are visiting her grandparents in Duluth and Shelly is back at school. Alfie drives himself over around eight and brings a tub of Breyer’s ice cream in an unmarked paper bag. He notes that the paper napkins and spoons in the bag are all biodegradable, and she chooses not to tell him that consumer responsibility is actually just victim-blaming. That’s the first strange moment, her biting her tongue, and the second strange moment arrives when they walk down the hall towards her bedroom. Toby Star follows them down the hallway, as he would with any guest in the house, his unclipped toenails clacking on the worn-out hardwood floor. Hannah would normally never close her door if she was home alone. Alfie waits politely inside her room, and Toby Star waits politely at the threshold, waiting for her decision. Hannah ends up pulling her door closed as softly as possible, as if it doesn’t count if the rejection happens silently. She avoids any eye contact with the dog she picked out ten years ago.
But after that, nothing is strange, per se. It’s all as she expected really, little rushes of discovery while thinking is this happening—yes it is—this is happening. When they are lying in bed, trying to figure everything out, she remembers that they left the ice cream out of the freezer. She tries to forget that it might be getting very melty. Shelly would understand, they both hate it when their dad microwaves ice cream cartons because it’s never as creamy when you have to re-freeze it all from its melted state. She’d rather bend a spoon scooping hard ice cream from the carton than find those weird air pockets in her next serving. She and Shelly have had this exact same conversation before, their laughter like carbonation when they realized how specifically they’re the same.
Hannah blinks to re-set her mind. She finds a good place to put her hands, up on Alfie’s shoulders, which are pale from the winter but also stronger than she expected. The physical thing about the sex is that she doesn’t actually see very much of Alfie; there’s really not much to look at with him pressing down on her—his face, at some points, but it’s too close to be in focus. When she stops thinking about the ice cream though, she thinks about how he is inside her, connected to her, actually united with her body, and that is a very good feeling.
Afterwards they each use the bathroom and then meet back in her living room. Hannah fires up an old season of The Office on Netflix, and Toby Star joins them on the corduroy couch. It’s completely dark outside now, and she feels bad that Alfie will have to drive home. She’s already feeling sleepy and warm and grateful that she won’t have to move very far to get back into her bed.
She scoots a little closer. “Thanks Alfie. It was really nice. I’m glad we did it.”
“Okay, so…you’re good? We’re good?”
She’s tired but she decides to try honesty. She likes Alfie after all, likes him even more after all of this, so she figures why not. “Well. Have you heard about this idea, of la petite mort? The little death?”
He gives her a look that’s more embarrassed than concerned, which she takes as a good sign. “Okay, it came up in English class last semester,” she says. “It’s the idea that sex is the little death. Or can be…if the release comes. I think maybe in that it transcends normal life, and you’re reborn, or something. So I was curious about whether it would feel that way.”
Alfie doesn’t respond at first. He looks around her living room, at the blaring TV and polished wood furniture and skylights that show a dark sky, no stars. She watches his eyes trace the pattern on the worn-out rug. “That’s interesting,” he says.
“Why?” She wonders if he’s going to ask if it happened to her, if she experienced it—but maybe she was just vague enough that he doesn’t understand.
“I guess I don’t know why,” he says. “But I like that I always learn things from you.”
#
The Wash U campus is covered in paper: utility poles covered in flyers, store windows filled with announcements, Post-It notes falling from hallway bulletin boards. Hannah thinks no wonder everyone’s parents are complacent. The world was filled with paper then and it’s filled with paper now. She sees a flyer for a band Alfie told her about. They’re performing in two weeks. Maybe she could come back with him, and they could split an Uber here and back. Campus isn’t that far from her house, maybe 30 minutes. Shelly could come home more often if she wanted, but Hannah also understands. Or at least, she’s trying to, with more fervor than ever since the night three weeks ago with the melted ice cream, the Toby Star shutout, and the great penetration. That’s what she’s started calling it to herself in the last three weeks, virginity being way too silly of a word, a word that oil apologists and mainstream procrastinators would use.
Hannah’s here on campus for the weekend to visit her sister. She’s come to campus a good number of times before. There were all those family bike rides as a kid, and more recently they’ve come for family brunches on De Mun Avenue. But it feels different staying overnight. Hannah asked before, nearly every weekend all fall, but stopped after the eighth no. This time Shelly brought it up in a group text with their parents, who immediately agreed. Now they think it will be good for Hannah to take a break and, quote, get a new perspective. When they returned from Duluth last month, Hannah asked whether the snow was less deep than last year.
“I don’t know honey, we weren’t there as climatologists. But you saw that picture of Grandma on the lake, right? She was so happy to be out there, she almost never makes it outside you know. There’s a ton of snow, you can see, here.”
“I saw that picture on Instagram already. I commented and asked you to measure the snow for me.”
“Hannah, I think the climate movement is going to go a lot better if we let the scientists lead the charge.”
“Don’t you think as anthropologists who study people, you should be authorities on the biggest crisis affecting human civilization?”
Her mother crossed her legs on the kitchen barstool where she was sitting and opened up the morning paper. “I think we all have to play to our strengths if we’re going to progress as a society, and measuring snow is not my strength.”
“That’s not the point. The snow measurement wouldn’t even mean anything, it’s just an example. Everything relates to the climate crisis, we should be talking about it all the time and it’s just weird that we’re not.”
Hannah’s mother stared at her. “I’m sure the university has a climate change protest you can join or volunteer at. Ask Shelly what’s going on at Wash U.”
“Climate crisis, not climate change.”
“What?”
“That’s how I’d like for you to refer to it from now on, actually.” Hannah’s mother rolled her eyes at that and Hannah stomped out of the room. She knows it was that last word, actually, that ultimately spoiled the conversation, and Hannah knows if she had used the word actually in AP Environmental Science that day, Alfie wouldn’t have asked her out. And then he wouldn’t have been glad to be with her.
But all the things she knows are negative things, things not to do or say or delay over. Hannah doesn’t want to go to Wash U. Her parents weren’t even that happy when Shelly chose to stay close to home. She overheard them worrying in the kitchen that she wouldn’t have the right experience. She doesn’t know what anybody means by that word. It seems to be more than just having the right things happen to you. It’s that rush you have when you know you’re making a memory, maybe. When you know the moment you’re in will reappear in some mental montage you return to over and over again as an example of the thing you are chasing. Nobody talks about how the chasing is torture, how you’ll ask a million questions you don’t care about—what was your first time like?—just to chase that feeling of being two sisters on a couch. Anything to get away from the bigger picture, where you’re both ticking time bombs, late to the party.
Shelly also used the word “experience” to describe what they’re about to do, which is attend a college party together. They’re on their way right now. It’s in senior housing, across campus.
“How’s Alfie?” Shelly asks, as they turn a corner into another quad. Each quad related to the next by a squeezing of space.
“I like him, actually.”
“What do you like about him?”
“He’s really nice. I know that’s boring.”
Shelly doesn’t really say anything, just nods her head and mutters an under-her-breath huh. They walk in silence for ten seconds before Hannah asks what.
“Nothing.”
“Really, what?”
“I just didn’t think being nice was the kind of thing you cared about most. I thought you were going to say something about him being a socialist or something.”
“Why do you think I’m a socialist?”
“You’re not?”
“Nope.”
“Oh, okay.” Hannah is grateful Shelly doesn’t press her for details. She’s not a socialist because that seems to be too exclusionary, and Hannah just assumes they’re going to need lots of money and greedy, power-hungry people to fix the climate crisis. It just makes sense to her that when they get the capitalists on board, things will start to get better. But she can’t articulate it any better than that.
Hannah’s chunky heels make a rhythm on the sidewalk if she listens hard enough. The tap-tap soothes her and she starts peeling off the white sliver at the top of each of her fingernails. “You don’t think I’m nice?”
Shelly stops walking for a second, looks down at Hannah’s face. Shelly’s wearing clean white sneakers like a lot of girls on campus, but she’s still taller than Hannah.
“I think you’re really nice, actually.”
Shelly’s words help with Hannah’s posture as they enter the party, which is down in a crowded basement. In one corner of the room, two tall boys are playing ping pong without a table. They’re trying to keep the ball in the air without bouncing, and she counts five back-and-forths. It doesn’t look like a drinking game, there’s no obvious cue for when they would have to driiiink!, but maybe she just can’t tell.
“Hannah, this is my friend Elise. Elise, this is Hannah!”
“Hi Elise,” Hannah says. Elise looks excited to meet her, as if Shelly really has said nice things about her. Sometime between the front door of the common room and this pillar where they’ve posted up, Hannah acquired some warm punch. Elise and Shelly gossip about their friend who isn’t there, the one who has been so antisocial lately. The punch tastes like a childhood birthday party in a cup. It’s sweet and sticky. It’s also got that edge, the one you feel when you’re not sure you’re having fun anymore, but you also don’t know when your parents are picking you up. She finishes it quickly and casually finds the back of the room where more punch is in a large plastic tub—it’s intuitive that the way to make the edge go away is to lean into it, have more of the punch. Cover up the sad, electric colored residue in her cup with more liquid. The way out is through.
She begins drinking the second cup on her way back to her sister and Elise when a boy in her path slips on a ping pong ball and lands on his back. Hannah stands there blinking, then looks around for her sister. The room is dark, and the bass sound produced by the student DJ is making it even harder to see, but maybe that’s not possible?
The boy tries to sit up but can’t. He looks like someone failing to do an ab exercise, or maybe just an injured person on a dorm basement floor. Hannah kneels, still scanning for Shelly. “Are you okay?”
He’s blinking too, like a blinking baby animal that imitates the first thing it sees: a girl who only moves her eyelids.
But then he coughs and wipes his mouth and gives a weak laugh like a handsome soldier in a war hospital, only his breath smells like Miller Lite and he’s wearing a lacrosse pinnie. “Well it’s not a great look, but luckily I think you’re the only one that noticed.”
It almost sounds like a line that could start something, the recognition she’s been waiting for. She’s the girl who notices, and maybe noticing is her superpower.
“Your face is bleeding.” It’s the next thing she notices, and it surprises them both, both of them about to write this off as just another random moment in a crowded room.
“Hannah!” It’s Shelly’s voice from the dark. “Hannah, I was looking for you—Harry? Harry, are you okay?”
Harry’s eyes narrow, maybe from pain but also to make sense of the scene in front of him.
“I was actually going to introduce you both,” Shelly says. “But maybe not now because you’re bleeding?”
He touches a hand to his head, and it comes back sticky, like blood, like punch. Hannah can feel how sticky it is without touching it, but that doesn’t make sense either. “Is this your climate activist sister?”
“Yeah, the one and only. Hannah, this is my friend Harry. His mom is Senator—”
“Hey, give me a chance for the girl to like me for me,” the boy croaks.
“Get over yourself—”
“I’m bleeding!”
“Oh my god, Senator Crowley,” Hannah interjects. “I mean—I assume. Yeah—wow you guys even look alike.”
“So do you and your sister,” Harry says, sitting all the way up now. “I read your op-ed about the UN climate report—”
“Harry, I think maybe we should take you to the health center.” Shelly’s leaning over Harry’s cut now, wincing.
“I think you’re right.”
Hannah and Shelly flank him, help bring Harry to his feet. Once they make it out of the party room and up the stairs and back outside into the cool, clean air, Harry starts insisting he can make it on his own, that Hannah shouldn’t miss out on her first college party because of him.
“Besides,” he says, looking right at Hannah, “we were meant to talk about important things, you and I—like what you want me to ask my mom about climate change. We can’t do that while I’m buzzed and bleeding. Better to hang out another time I think.”
“Harry offered that he could put you and his mom in touch,” Shelly explains. “It’s really nice.”
“Anything for a Roberts girl,” Harry says, waving his hand. Hannah recognizes him as a type of person she hasn’t met before, the fancy boy who’s slightly older, from a slightly bigger world. She hasn’t encountered her sister like this before either, the total delight in Shelly’s eyes so obvious. Hannah feels warm in Harry’s glow, but it’s Alfie who comes to the surface. Alfie who wiped ice cream off his chin with his shirt and then looked embarrassed. Who noticed her in class for exactly what she wanted to be noticed for, who texted her last week about a protest in Springfield they could attend. Who probably isn’t meant to last forever—but what a relief that some things aren’t meant to last. What a relief that some things are short by design, not because of human hubris. That not everything is like everything else. People move too slowly, except when they don’t. Like when Shelly shrugs off her languid delight, waves at this handsome boy, and takes Hannah’s hand, swinging it back and forth, announcing to the world that the night is theirs.
“I’ll get your number from Shelly,” Hannah says quickly to Harry as they set off, nodding her head in gratitude. “I’d love to talk to the Senator.”
Hannah’s words disappear as Shelly pulls her forward, and she makes a mental note to return to them, to make sure exhilarating moments like this don’t swallow her convictions whole. But the mental note is enough. Everything is horrible except when it isn’t.
Katy is a writer and above-average parallel parker from Washington, DC. She is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Her website is katygathright.co.