And now, a shit-ton of NaNo

[perpetual_motion]

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

By a 2-to-1 vote (by which I mean, two people voted for the winning option), you are getting the latest NaNo in one giant piece. Have fun!


1961 – The First Raid

We were six issues into Atomic Angie when we first got leaked. There was no warning, no smoke signal or alarm bell, just a sudden thudding on the door, and a yell.

Thud. Thud. Thud. “Police!”

“Run!” Wendy yelled, and the writers and artists and readers scattered. There was a back door the cops could see, and there was an entrance to the steam tunnels that we’d unboarded when we’d found it behind a shelf. Everyone ran for the steam tunnels. I stood next to Billie, Sally across the room, Wendy pushing a desk against a door.

“What do we do?” I yelled over the attempts of the police to get in the door.

“This,” Billie said, and swept all of our scripts into a barrel. Across the room, Sally did the same thing with the art. Wendy took a dark bottle out of her backpack, upended half of it into Billie’s barrel.

Thud. Thud. Thud. “We have a warrant!”

“Lighter fluid?” I asked when the oily, slick smell hit me. “We’re going to burn it?”

“We have to,” Billie said. “Where’s your steno pad?”

“In my purse.” It hit me, suddenly, that she might want to burn it. “Do you—”

“Go.” Billie ordered. “If you’re with us, you’ll be in bigger trouble. If they catch you, it was a boy, okay? Some boy you met; he was handsome and had a nice smile, and you wanted to impress him.”

“Okay,” I said. I reached out to her. She touched her fingers to my braid.

“Run, Jules,” she said quickly.

I let my fingers brush her arm, grabbed my purse, and ran for the tunnel. I heard the shelf slide into place behind me. How would they get out, I wondered. I took a left and nearly ran into a collection of readers—four girls looking terrified and lost, one of them on the verge of tears.

“We couldn’t remember which way to go,” one told me.

“Left, left, right, forward, left,” I barked. “You’ll end up out by the football field.” They looked at me, nearly shaking with fear. I shouldered past them and took the lead, grabbed the hand of the girl who was nearly crying. “Everyone grab on,” I ordered. “No one talk. The quieter we are at this, the quicker we’ll be.” I led them through the tunnel—left, right, forward, left—and I held them back when we neared the exit by the football stadium. There was a game going on. I considered the other options, the other directions.

“Let us go,” one of the girls hissed at me.

“Shut it,” I snapped. “If we go out at the wrong time, people will see us. We’re not supposed to be in the tunnels. If someone sees us, we’ll have to explain why we’re in here.”

They all got quiet, shuffled their feet, and I strained to listen again. There was a sudden cheer, and I realized we’d scored a touchdown. “Now.” I said and eased open the door to the tunnel. “While they fire the cannon for the touchdown, go now.”

The girls streamed out ahead of me. I looked around through the crack in the door, to see if anyone saw us. The crowd was looking at the cannon. If anyone was watching, it was doubtful they’d be believed.

A hand touched my back. I jumped, whirled, ready to fight. It was Billie, her hair wild around her face. “Hey,” she said, and her voice was slightly rough. She was panting a little. “Wendy and Sally took another way,” she told me.

I closed the door to keep us in, leaned against her and breathed deep. She smelled like paper and smoke, and a little like sweat. When I touched her neck, her nape was damp.

“Jules,” she said against the top of my head. She pressed her hand to my side, pressed her lips against my hair. “You shouldn’t have stayed as long as you did.”

“Sorry,” I murmured against her shoulder. “I just…they could have gotten you.”

Billie laughed, low in her throat. I felt it thrum against my cheek. “They’ll never catch us. We’re superheroes.”

I laughed a little, suddenly giddy with relief. I pulled away from Billie, looked at her face in the shadowy light of the tunnel. “I love you,” I said. It came out without my meaning it to. I put my hand over my mouth.

Billie looked at me, reminded me of the way the birds in the corn fields used to stare at me as I walked past, like they weren’t sure what I was doing there, but maybe I was worth knowing. “Jules,” Billie breathed out. She put her hands on my shoulders, pushed me against the wall of the tunnel, and titled my head up. She pulled my hand away from my mouth, leaned down, and kissed me softly. “You’re something else,” she said to me.

“I do,” I breathed out. “Really.”

“I know,” she said. She brushed my hair away from my face, kissed the side of forehead, above my temple. “ I love you, too.”

“Yeah?” I slid my hand between her jacket and her shirt.

“Yeah,” she said and hugged me close. “If we get raided again,” she said in my ear, “just run, okay? Wendy, Sally, and I are supposed to stay back. We’re the big three. You have to run. If we’re caught, you’ll have to step up.”

I wanted to say no, tell her I’d rather get caught with her than leave her to fend for herself. “Okay,” I said instead.

“Promise me,” Billie said.

“I promise.” I made myself say. “I promise I’ll run for it.”

Billie breathed out, and her shoulders dropped. “Okay,” she said. We stood there in silence for another few seconds, then Billie pulled away, straightened her hair, and tweaked the end of my braid. “Come on,” she said. “We’ll go out another way.”

I followed her down the tunnel. She reached for my hand, and I took it, lacing my fingers with hers as we walked, slowly, until we came to a tunnel exit behind one of the academic buildings. We stepped outside, and Billie squeezed my hand before letting go. We walked around the edge of the building, came up behind a tour, and followed it to the student union. Wendy and Sally were seated at a table, books and papers scattered in front of them.

“We said two,” Wendy said when we walked up. “Sally’s already halfway through the study guide.”

“Sorry,” Billie said, “we were waiting for the football crowd to thin a little.” She took a seat next to Wendy. I sat next to Sally.

Sally slid me a piece of paper. “Check Wendy’s work, will you? I can hardly read her writing.”

I looked at the equations on the page, translated them into the locations they actually meant. “Number three is wrong,” I said. Number three was an unused storage room in the basement of Francis Hall. “You’re off by two.” I was telling Wendy it was too close to the old location.

Wendy took the sheet, looked at problem three. “I was close, at least,” she said. She was telling me I was right.

“I didn’t get that for number seven,” Billie said, looking over Wendy’s shoulder. She was suggesting we use location number seven, a recently abandoned academic building that had been left behind because another building on campus had gotten a complete renovation.

“I could work it again,” Wendy said, meaning she wanted to discuss it.

“I got the same answer for number seven,” Sally said. I nodded in agreement. Number seven could work. No one went near it, and there was no reason for anyone to go near it.

“We should double-check our work,” I said, telling them we needed to evaluate the fact that we’d draw attention if we weren’t careful.

“I’m getting something to drink,” Wendy said, standing up. We all raised our eyebrows. “I’m actually getting something to drink,” she said.

We chuckled, the edge of it hysterical.

“Shit,” Sally said, watching Wendy walk away. “That was close.”

“There were some girls in the tunnels,” I said to her. “They forgot how to get out.”

Sally and Billie both stared at me. “You didn’t mention that,” Billie said sharply.

“I thought you saw them leave,” I countered.

“You got them out?” Sally asked.

I nodded. “Had to lead them out like cattle, but we made it.”

She gave me a considering look, glanced at Billie. “My Sidekick took off as soon as the cops knocked,” she said, half to herself. “You stuck around until Billie...” She gave Billie a measured look. “Oh, Bills,” she sighed.

“Shut up,” Billie snapped.

“If Wendy finds out, she’s going to lose her mind.”

“Then shut up,” Billie said. Under the table, she touched my wrist.

I looked between them, felt Billie’s fingers warm on my wrist. “Are we not supposed—”

“Big Three are supposed to keep a distance,” Sally said. “We’re going for camaraderie, not…” She waved a hand between Billie and I. “If Wheeler finds out—”

“Please, Sally,” Billie said, tone urgent. “She’ll take off next time. We’ve talked about it.”

Sally gave me another look. I wondered what she saw. She nodded. “Fine.” She sighed and looked at the papers in front of her. “We have to Wendy about the girls, though. She’s going to need to yell at them.”

Wendy walked back then, sat down in her chair, and gave the three of us a knowing look. “What went to shit?” She asked.

“Some of the readers forgot the tunnel sequence,” Sally said quietly. “Jules had to lead them out.”

Wendy looked at me. I met her gaze and tried not to look guilty or cocky or anything that would trigger her to react. “Nice work,” she said after a moment. She played with the straw in her drink, twirled it around to make her ice cubes click together. “You’re evac now,” she told me. “You stayed behind when the cops knocked—which you shouldn’t have, by the way—but you did, and it looks like that was good for us. If they’d found those girls, we’d be worse off than needing to recreate a few pages and scripts.” She looked at me again, staring at me like I had answers, and she’d crack my head open to get them. “You up for it?”

“Yes,” I said before I could think about it. “What about the writers?”

“You’ll still help Billie with those.” Wendy rubbed at her eyes. “We’ll have to find a few new ones, no doubt. We always lose talent when this happens.”

“I’ll need a new Sidekick,” Sally added. “I don’t want a Sidekick that’s going to cut and run so quickly.” She spared me a quick grin. “But aiming for Jules’s level of devotion may be a bit much.”

Wendy snorted a laugh, sipped her drink, and leaned back in her chair. “Get out your steno pad,” Wendy ordered me. We need a list.”

I made the list, possible locations, people to contact, and where to get new supplies now that the Project Resource Center was going to be off-limits. We talked quickly, quietly, gesturing to the papers in front of us so it looked like we were actually studying, as opposed to planning to break the law again. We were there for hours, and it was only the sudden rush of students coming in from the football game that made us break up and head our separate ways.

Sally fell into step with me after we’d waved goodbye to Billie and Wendy. “You’re sure?” she asked, eyebrows up.

“Sure?” I asked. “About what?”

“Billie’s been in four raids,” Sally told me. “She’s a target for them. They want her bad. If it gets out she’s with us, we’re all gone.” She breathed in. “Locked up.”

“You and Wendy have been in raids, too,” I reminded her. “Why’s Billie’s so high on the list?”

“She gets brash, sometimes,” Sally explained. “She leaves notes after raids, quotes Wheeler and Lee and Thomas Paine. The cops don’t know they all come from the same person, yet, but they’ll figure it out eventually. They’re not stupid.”

“This is the first busted speak around here,” I said, my voice wavering a bit. “They won’t connect it.”

“They might. Check the papers tomorrow.”

I didn’t sleep that night, stared at my ceiling and thought of Billie. Thought about what Sally had said. Thought about the fact that offering to evac would put me in even more danger to get caught. I rolled out of bed at half past six, showered, dressed, and walked down to the dining hall. The newspapers were in a stack by the door, and I picked one up before gathering my breakfast. I sat in a corner, back to the wall, and unfolded the paper, actually looking at the front page for the first time:

Commies’ Speak Busted by Local Law Enforcement

The sub-heading followed it up:

Evidence Burned, No One Harmed, Message Left

I looked at the picture. The Project Resource Center was in shambles, smoke was still coming out of the barrels in the picture, and the police tape was strung around two chairs to keep people away from the back wall. Billie had painted a message in letters two feet high:

Never Give Up.
Never Surrender.
Never Let Injustice Win.

I recognized it; Sandy Lee had left it as a message, somehow hung a banner across the St. Louis arch. The police in St. Louis had thought she was working from inside the arch. There’d been a flurry of messages through out the underground, passed from Wendy’s runners to Wendy. Had she done it? Was she in the Arch?

“It doesn’t matter,” Wendy had said after she’d read the letters aloud. “They think she was. That’s what matters.”

Sally had ordered the artists to reorganize Atomic Angie’s headquarters. “She’s not under the stadium,” she decreed, “she’s in the Arch. Atomic Angie works from the Arch.”

I took the task of rewriting the dialogue to explain it. Had lettered in the panels myself:

I work from the Arch.

I had started, and then added:

Because it’s everything about America. Adventure. Hope. Progress. It’s the Gateway, they say, to a land of bigger and better. I’m just trying for better. Trying for Hope. Love. An end to injustice.

Then I’d passed the panels back to Sally to draw in Atomic Angie’s logo—a bright yellow mushroom cloud with a shiny red ‘A’ in the center. She’d read the panels, smiled at me, showed them to Billie. When we’d closed shop that night, Billie had kissed me as she turned off the lights.

“Brilliant,” she’d said, looking me in the eyes. “You’re brilliant.”

I stared at the front page of the paper, at Billie’s carefully written message, and I closed my eyes and breathed deep and made myself feel the fear I’d pressed down. Let myself be scared for an instant.

“Hope.” I muttered to myself. “Love.” I opened my eyes and folded the paper in half, then in half again. I put it next to the edge of my tray. “Better.” I muttered. I ate my breakfast, drank my juice, and I threw the paper in the trash without reading the article. It didn’t matter, I decided, how much they wanted Billie. They wanted all of us. They weren’t going to get us. I was in charge of evac now. I’d make sure.



The Mad Scientists We Created

I left the office before Marla that night, saying goodbye over my shoulder so I wouldn’t have to look her in the eyes. I wanted to tell her everything, all the history, but the blood in my veins felt like salt in a wound, and I told her to have a good night, be safe getting home, and to call me if she needed to take tomorrow off to see the doctor about her hand.

I made it to the Monorail, fell into a seat in the first car, and watched the scenery go by. Seven stops from my stop, there was a billboard on the back of the Monorail shelter. It advertised enhancements at a cheap rate—anyone could qualify, it promised—I thought of Marla, and I flinched. Her hand was one of those, an enhancement. She’d lost her actual hand in an accident as a teenager, she’d told me once, and her parents, not wanting her to be ostracized for her injury, paid out for a super-specialist. Someone who would fix her, make her better.

Make her embarrassed at a low grade level for the rest of her life, I thought as more people got on the Monorail. Super-specialists were a last resort, still tainted by their history with the commies. They came about because Wendy wasn’t the only one to demand accuracy in the science in our books. It became part of the mantra, part of the showmanship. Different speaks tried to out-science one another. Wendy had always believed we started it with Atomic Angie, but the historians were still fighting over who was first. It didn’t matter, really, now that comics were on the up and up again, but I still saw articles sometimes, got copies of papers on my desk that talked about how important the real science in comic books had been for the advancement of medicine.

Robotics, cybernetics, they’d come from another Big Three, somewhere in California, at the base of the mountains. They’d made a hero missing an arm. She’d had a prosthetic, but she’d been an engineer, bored at times, and she’d started adding to her fake limb, giving it better movement, better flexibility, and then she’d wired it into her leg with fiber optic cords, made it work.

The authorities said every commie was the same, but they were wrong. Sometimes we were teachers, sometimes we were scientists, sometimes we were doctors, sometimes we were cocky college kids with overinflated egos and not quite enough sense.

The scientists and the doctors, they got together somewhere. I always pictured dark rooms with weird shadows, a dame with legs “up to here” leaning against a wall, a cigarette dangling from her lip. Nora Charles from The Thin Man, I thought. Or a dame from a Mickey Spillane novel. One of Archie Goodwin’s ladies, draped in silk and pearls. She’d be one of the scientists, but an outcast because of her beauty.

“We can do it,” she’d say in a throaty voice, blowing smoke from her nostrils, as a flashing red light makes her face pink, shines off her satin dress. “It’s not terribly hard.”

“You want to play God,” one of the men around the table would say. “We’re doctors.”

“I’m a scientist,” she’d say, give a low chuckle like she’d told a joke. “I play God every day. It’s not difficult.” She’d walk forward, drop a comic book on the table; it’d open to a splash page, the details of the cybernetic leg on stark display. “They’ve given us a map.” She’d trace a finger down the page, stroking it like a cat. “Let’s follow it, see where it goes, where we can go off the trail and into our own adventure.”

They’d look at her, all those men around a table, wonder if she was crazy, attention-seeking, or if maybe, just maybe, she was right. That they could do something stunning, amazing, something to push science faster forward than since the Renaissance.

“The said the world was flat,” She’d say into a long, complicated silence. “Let’s prove it’s round.”

And they’d agree, bit by bit, one nod at a time, and then they’d get to work, redrawing schematics, adding bits and pieces that were missing, adjusting the scale of the leg, of the wires, of the vessels.

In the end, they did it. When comics became legal again, the doctors came forward. We’ve done something amazing, they said. Comics helped up change the world. We can replace your severed limbs, your broken hearts, we can wire you like you were never broken.

Some people, like Marla’s parents, embraced what they were seeing, saw the hope in it. The labor of love created by scientists and doctors in illegal laboratories. Saw that their baby girl—their tall, blonde, blue-eyed baby—could have exactly the life she wanted. Could be just like everyone else and have two working hands, even have a hand that did a little more, that could be used a little differently.

But others, others ran in the other direction, screaming witch craft and treason. How dare they use science for such perverted means, they wailed. What about God’s plan, they yelled.

“What about being ostracized because of a stump?” Marla had shouted angrily back one day. We’d grabbed lunch together, three months after she’d started working for me. We’d happened to pass a group of protesters outside a Super-Science clinic, and Marla had been replaying some bit of information on her hand. One of the protesters had screamed at her, tried to grab her. Marla had twisted away like an eel, rolled her hand into a fist and tucked it into her pocket.

“There is no God,” she’d yelled at the woman who kept trying to grab her. “There’s the life you have to run yourself, the will to push forward and deal with stupid, hateful people who can’t appreciate ingenuity and love if it doesn’t come from a story in a book that’s been translated so much it’s probably mostly lies now.” She’d taken her hand out of her pocket, opened it, let her palm lie flat and vulnerable for the woman to see. “Prove it’s different,” she said. “Prove it’s not just as human from looking straight at it.”

The woman had glared, stared at the life line on Marla’s palm, her heart line, the whorl of her fingertips. “It’s different,” she said, eyes mean, mouth set in a white gash along her face. “I know it’s different. I saw it.”

“Prove it,” Marla had demanded. The woman had looked at it, at Marla, had looked behind at her fellow protesters. She had spit into Marla’s hand.

“You first,” she’d snarled and stepped back behind her groupies. The other women and men cheered, clapped her on the back. A few of them spit at Marla as we finished walking past.

“What can I do?” I’d asked before we’d walked back in the front door at Perpetual Comics.

“For them? Nothing.” She’d wiped her hand on a napkin, tossed the napkin away, straightened her jacket, and given me a smile. “Thank you for standing next to me.”

I’d shrugged, felt like blushing, had a hard time looking away from her flushed face. “Hey, I’m your boss,” I’d said. “And they’re idiots.”

We’d laughed, walked inside, and gotten back to work.

The Monorail jerked to an unexpected stop. I nearly fell from my seat, catching a pole to keep from tumbling at the last second. I looked out the window. The sun was setting, the buildings in deep shadow. The announcement speaker crackled to life.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” the conductor’s voice was calm, jovial. “There’s been a minor routing issue at the next stop. The main dispatch says it’ll be fixed within the next five minutes, and I ask that you give us those five minutes as patiently as possible. Thank you.”

The man next to me sighed. “Great.” He glanced back down at his book, then at me. “You have anywhere to be?”

I thought about my apartment, the stacks of books and comics, the rough sketches on my fridge from packets of stories that had gone nowhere, and the clean laundry I hadn’t put away. “Just home for the night.”

“Which they probably don’t think is that important,” the man said.

I quirked a smile. “He’s paid to sound like he doesn’t care.”

The man thought about it, smiled. “Maybe.” He held out his hand. “I’m Harold.”

“Julie,” I said, and shook his hand. “What do you do?”

“I’m a lawyer.” He pulled a face. “Terrible as it is.”

I chuckled. “I’ll take your word for it.”

“And you?” he asked.

“I’m a writer,” I told him. “Over at Perpetual Comics.”

His face lit up. “Wait.” He held up a finger like he was needing me to hold still so he could double-check a piece of amazing information. “Are you Julie Schwartz?”

“…yes,” I said slowly. “Have you threatened to sue me?”

“No!” He laughed, throwing back his head. “I’m just a huge fan. I love your work.” He grinned. “Of all the people! I think I’ve seen you on this train a hundred times!”

I felt myself smiling, felt my shoulders unknotting from my completely terrible day. “What do you read?” I asked.

“Monorail Girl,” he said, “And, as bad as it can be at times, I can’t give up on Water Witch. There’s some other stuff, but it’s not with your company.”

I laughed at his expression; he looked like he’d been caught out stealing something. “That’s all right. We know there are other companies.”

He smiled sheepishly. “Oh, good. Are you working on anything new right now?”

“Nothing I can talk about,” I told him. “Confidentiality agreements are in play for all books in progress.”

“’All’ books or all new books?” He asked.

“Every single book we have,” I clarified. “And you definitely sound like a lawyer.”

Harold gave a shrug. “It’s a job. I’d be in comics if I could write worth damn.”

I tried to imagine Harold at Perpetual, running between the writers’s offices and the editors. They’d eat him alive, I decided. Good Editor and Bad Editor gave good lip about fair employment practices and searching for talent, not gender, but we didn’t have a single man in the company that was higher than a janitor or art assistant. Even the personal assistants like Marla outranked the men.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” the conductor’s voice cut into our conversation. “We’re moving now. We’ll have you home just a few minutes later. Thank you for your patience.”

“I’ll be damned,” Harold said, “he was right about this.”

I smiled, suddenly exhausted as the Monorail moved forward. “They get one every now and then,” I said.

Harold got off on the next stop, giving me a wave. I watched him go, wondered what would happen if I took him to the office, marched him into Bad Editor’s office. “Look,” I’d say, “here’s a man. He reads comics. Really.”

Bad Editor would assume him some sort of homosexual, call him a “fairy” and “fag” when he was out of the room, ask what my point was. “We don’t want his type,” she’d say. “We want real men.”

And I’d be exactly where I already was, with a book on my desk I didn’t want to write, because the people wanting it were assuming that men like Harold didn’t exist, like comics couldn’t be for men.

I got off on my stop, took the stairs to the street, walked the half a block to my apartment and collapsed onto my couch when I had let myself in and locked the door. Get up, I told myself. There are things that need doing.

I fell asleep instead.



1960 -- The Second Raid

I was at home for summer break when the second raid happened. I’d tried to find a reason to stay on-campus, tried to convince my parents that summer classes were just as good as regular classes, that I could graduate sooner if I stayed and worked.

“You don’t need to hurry,” my father said. “You’ve got plenty of time.”

To find a husband, I’d mentally added and packed away my things during finals week. Billie’s roommate left the second day of finals. I had a final the following Friday, and Billie had one on Thursday. I told my roommate we were studying together, and I spent two days and nights in Billie’s room, not studying, curled around each other in the thin twin mattress.

“I wish I could come up with something,” I told her during the first afternoon. We’d closed the curtains, and the room was dim and slightly over-heated. I had sweat in the bends of my elbows.

Billie kissed me, ran a hand up my leg, and gave me a smile. “It’s okay, Jules,” she said. “You can mail us suggestions. We know the code.”

“I’m not worried about the story lines,” I told her, touching the freckles on her shoulders. “What if you get raided?”

“You’re great at evac, hon, but we can make it happen without you.”

“That’s not what I mean.” I sighed, frustrated, squirmed when Billie tickled my ribs. “Stop it,” I said, trying not to smile.

“Sorry,” she said, and kissed my ribs. “We’ll be okay,” she promised, and I saw that she believed it, but I had a knot in my stomach and couldn’t stop thinking about it.

“Be careful,” I told her days later as I closed my suitcase and put it next to my bed. My dad would be there in less than an hour. “It’s going to be harder to sneak into Pimton with almost no one around.”

“It means less people will see us,” Billie said. She reached into my open overnight bag and pulled out my comb. “Let me braid your hair before you go,” she requested. She sat me in my desk chair, combed out my hair. “It’s always such a tangle.”

“It takes too much time to fix,” I said. “I’d cut it short if I could.”

“You’d give yourself away completely,” Billie said. “Cut it off, and everyone who already suspects you’re a dyke will figure it’s confirmed.”

“People are stupid,” I muttered.

Billie laughed, finished plaiting my hair, and secured it with my mother of pearl clip. “Well, yes, but don’t say that too loudly. That’ll give away too much as well.”

She kissed me right after my father called up from the lobby; then she ducked out the door and down the back stairwell before my father could make it up in the elevator. “Write me,” she called over her shoulder.

“Sure,” I called in return, wanting to promise to do it every day.

A month later on a particularly bright Kansas morning, I walked into the kitchen in my yellow nightgown, sat down at my mother’s new Formica table, and glanced at the paper. It was on the front page, letters starkly black:

Another Commie Speak in College Town

As always, below the main headline, the full story:

Local Police Raid Second Speak on Campus in Six Months

I wanted to look away, throw the paper in the trash like I’d done the last time, in the dining hall. I unfolded the paper, skimmed the story, looked for names. There was nothing that gave us away. They’d gotten away. I breathed out hard, felt my lungs burn. I’d been holding my breath. The police had no leads, except that the ringleaders were expected to be college students and female.

“Oh, you’re up,” my mother said as she walked into the kitchen. She looked over my shoulder. “Good,” she said, giving the paper a nod. In my side vision, I saw her brow furrow. “Wait, is that your college again?” She asked.

I wanted to lie, but my mother was only ignorant when she wanted to be. “Yes,” I admitted. “There was a speak on campus, apparently.”

She pulled away, gave me a long look, her face paling. “How many is that now?”

“It’s only the second one, I think.” I’d gotten used to coming up with excuses and painting slightly skewed pictures to get to and from the speak without people paying attention to my details. I hadn’t had to lie to my mother about it before that moment.

“Hmmm.” Her cheeks flushed. “Such disrespect,” she murmured. She looked at me. “Maybe you should change schools,” she said. “I don’t want you around such things.”

My heart tripped in my chest. No, I thought. Not that. “Changing schools would be a pain, Mom,” I heard myself say. “Besides, this is happened all over the place. I bet they’ve got these things at all the campuses.” Her face paled again. “And I know better than to think they’re doing anything good or useful,” I added. “You and Dad taught me better than that.”

The furrow between her brows lessened. She kissed me on top of the head. “You do have a point.” She smoothed the hair on my crown and walked around me to the coffee pot. “Have you seen any of them?” She asked, saying them like she’d spotted a cockroach.

“Not that I know of,” I lied, “But I don’t search them out. They’re nothing but trouble.” I watched her pour her coffee, add milk, look out the window at her bird feeder, and then smile at me.

“I’m so proud of you,” she said sweetly, and I felt sick to my stomach.

Two days later, I got a letter from Sally.

Everything’s fine here. I’m just working on my research project for next semester and waiting for the new term to start. Billie told me to tell you hello if I wrote, and Wendy sends her regards as well.

My mother saw me reading the letter, asked who Sally and Wendy and Billie were.

“They’re my study group,” I told her. “We try to meet a couple of times a week and work on homework together.”

“That’s sensible,” my father said later that night when mother told him about the letter. “Quite a bit of sense for a group of girls.”

I smiled at him, swallowing down my irritation at his tone. “We try.”

He chuckled. “Well, girls always try.” He stood up to put his plate in the sink, kissed mother on the head. “I’ll be in my study,” he said.

“I’ll leave you alone,” Mom replied.

I felt like a stranger in my own house, lying to my mother, hearing my father’s casual dismissal of women so clearly for the first time in my life. I thought of the speak in Pimton, unusable now, the dozen people we had working for us, the readers who paid to read what we created. We’d come up with escape plans, distractions, an entire code based on math notes so that we could discuss possible locations without drawing attention. People sent us submissions disguised a song lyrics and poems and news stories.

And my father thought we had no sense.

“I’m going to turn in early,” I told my mother after we’d washed dishes.

“Okay, honey. Sleep well.”

I closed my bedroom door, kept the lights off, and sat on my bed, knees to my chin. I wondered what I was doing, acting like the hottest things in a brand new skirt. I was a girl from Hugoton, Kansas. I wasn’t a rebel, wasn’t an instigator.

I questioned myself for three days, considered sending Wendy some sort of coded resignation, and then a letter came from Billie:

Sorry I didn’t write last week; it’s been a horribly busy summer. I hope you’re doing well, and I can’t wait for the term to start so we can see each other again. You’ve been a terrific friend all year, and I’ve missed studying with you.

She signed it:

Fondly,
Wilhelmina

“She sounds nice,” my mother said. “She’s one of your study partners?”

I thought of Billie kissing me in the stairwell of the dorm, her hand on my back as we read through a script together, the way she’d braided my hair the night before I’d left. “Yes,” I said, the lie feeling like a weight on my tongue. “She’s a study partner.”

“You could invite her out for a week if you’d like,” my mother offered. “Your father and I haven’t had the chance to meet any of your friends from college.”

The idea repulsed me. Lying to my parents by words was one thing; asking Billie to lie with me with something different, wrong. “She’s very busy this summer,” I told my mother. “Maybe sometime next term.”

“When you decide, just give me a few days’s notice to get the guest room aired out.”

“I will,” I promised, and secreted Billie’s letter in my underwear drawer, tucked underneath my comics. The rest of her letters ended up there as well. I read them and reread them, wondered what she was actually doing with her time. I knew they were searching for a new location, but she couldn’t send me the numbers. There was no way to fit them in.

Sally, Wendy, and I are thinking of starting a poetry club.

She wrote to me:

I wonder how many poets are on campus.

How many people will write for us now, she was actually wondering. Two raids in six months was shaky work. I wrote Wendy, asking—in code, of course—if someone had ratted us out.

I haven’t heard about that band, she wrote back, but I’ll let you know if I find their album.

She was considering it as a valid possibility, and she was digging around. If we’d been ratted, Wendy would find out.

I spent the rest of the summer listening for the mail truck on our dirt road, seven miles out of town. I could hear him coming from a mile away, and I’d run out the door, down the driveway, and stand by the box as his dust-covered truck trundled the last few hundred yards. I couldn’t be there to help, to plan, to evacuate, but I could get the letters. I could keep up.



Meetings, Plans, and Other Basic Functions Ruined by Bad Editors

I went into work the next day feeling mostly asleep. I’d had dark dreams, not quite nightmares but very, very close. There had been lightning, Billie’s face in the forefront laughing about something while I watched Wendy walk away. Sally was nowhere to be found. I kept asking Billie where she was. Billie kept laughing.

“Morning,” Marla greeted me. She handed me a cup of coffee. “No messages yet.”

“Thanks.” I took a long drink of coffee, wincing as it burned my tongue. “How’s your hand?”

“Fixed it at home,” Marla told me. “The doctor ran specs from his office, said it’s working fine.”

“Why’d it surge?” I asked.

“Sometimes it happens.” She looked down, moved papers around her desk. Marla couldn’t lie to save her life.

“You want it?” I asked. “The story,” I clarified. “The Ballad of Billie Fraction and Julie Schwartz.”

Marla considered it for a moment. “It’s probably better I not know. If she’s going to work here, the less I know, the better.”

“Good point.” I took another drink of coffee, watched Marla settle her papers. “Thank you,” I said before I could back away from it. “You got her out of her very well yesterday. I appreciate the help.”

Marla stared at her hands, looked up at me. It was weird to see her that way, sitting so she had to look up at me. She had seven inches on me; I was used to looking up at her. I felt suddenly scared for her. I wasn’t sure why. “You’re a decent person,” she told me. “You don’t get angry very easily. I don’t know what she did to you. I don’t know if maybe you did something to her first, but I doubt it.” She looked at her hands again, flexed her right one. “Whatever she did, it made you madder than I’ve ever seen you.”

“It was…” I choked up, swallowed hard, and took a shaky breath. “ It was bad,” I got out. “It was—”

“I don’t need to know,” Marla told me. “You don’t have to tell me.”

I looked at her, looking up at me, face serious and compassionate and concerned. I wanted to kiss her suddenly, follow the curve of her ear with my fingertip and see if she’d lean into my touch.

“Crap.” I said out loud. “Crap.” I repeated just to hear it.

Marla’s eyebrows rose. She leaned forward in her chair, prepared to get up. “What?” She touched my arm. “Are you okay?”

“I…” I licked my lips, clutched my coffee cup. I’m in love with you, I thought, and I felt like someone had drenched me in cold water. “Shit.”

Marla stood, curled her hand around my elbow, led me into my office. She sat me in my chair, took the coffee cup from my hand, and placed it on the coaster on my desk. “Julie?” she asked. “You’ve gone pale.” She placed her hands against my cheeks. Her right and left hand were the same temperature. I knew there was a thermostat in her wrist that adjusted the temperature to the rest of her body. I’d watched her change it once when it had caused some overheating. “Julie?” She asked.

“She called me Jules,” I said, feeling like I was talking around cotton. “My father called me Jules, and I hated it, but Billie called me Jules, and it was wonderful. It was almost an endearment. That’s why…” I looked up at Marla, leaning over me, watching me with bright, worried eyes. “I can’t let anyone call me that anymore. My father’s dead, and Billie, she may as well be.”

Marla crouched, put her hands on my knees. “Tell me,” she said. “What happened; tell me.”

“You don’t want—”

“You look terrified and broken, Julie. I can deal with you any other way, but this won’t do at all.”

I’m terrified because I’m in love with you, I thought. I’m broken because I don’t want to be in love, not with you, not with anyone. It ended so badly. “She…” I shook my head, looked at my desk, stared at my coffee cup. Marla had painted my name on it her third day on the job. She got tired of hunting up a mug every morning in the break room.

“What?” Marla prompted. “What did she do?”

Everything, I thought. Nothing. The wrong thing. “It was years ago,” I heard myself say, feeling miles away. “1963. It was the sixth raid.”

“You don’t talk about that one,” Marla coaxed. “I’ve noticed.”

“It was…” I closed my eyes, saw my dream from the night before, Billie laughing, Wendy walking away, Sally nowhere to be found. “You’ve read up on it, haven’t you?”

“Everyone has,” Marla said, “but I’m betting your story’s not in the books.”

“It is, actually,” I said. My throat closed again. I picked up my coffee cup, stared at my bright blue mug, my lightly tanned hand, my badly bitten nails. I thought about what it would look like in a comic panel. Sally would draw it as separate panels, my hand reaching for the cup one panel, my fingers curling around the mug the second panel, my face, my hand, and the mug all together in the final panel. “My Big Three,” I said. “Did you know my Big Three?”

Marla shook her head. “I know you and Sally know each other from back then. Was she part of it?”

“She was the art person,” I said. “She had a great eye. You know Ba’s crazy panel shapes?”

“The scribbles and squiggles? Yeah.”

“Sally was the one to find her, was the one to tell her to make it work, and it was brilliant. We used it for Atomic Angie.”

Marla blinked in surprise. “You were on Atomic Angie?” she asked. “I think that was the first comic I ever saw. My sister had it; I never asked where she got it. I knew how bad it was to have one.”

You don’t, I thought. You don’t at all. “I helped create her,” I said. “I still have the original ashcan.”

“Wow.” Marla looked amazed. “I’d love to see it.”

“I’ll show it to you,” I promised. “It’s under glass, but I’ll bring it in, or you can come over.”

“Your Big Three,” Marla redirected the conversation. “Sally was one. Who were the others?”

“Billie wrangled the writers,” I told her. “I was her Sidekick. I was her girlfriend.”

Marla’s face went slack. “Oh,” she whispered. “Oh, Julie—”

“Wendy Ellis was our third,” I finished before she could try to comfort me. “Wendy Ellis was our location manager. Wendy was the one who kept us moving, kept the codes sharp, barked everyone out when a raid came. Wendy Ellis was the Queen Bee.”

Marla said nothing. She just stared. She knew the story. You couldn’t be in business without knowing the story. “I’m going to…” She trailed off, shook her head, clenched her hands on my knees. “I can’t believe…” She stood up, adjusted her shoulders. I watched the angry flush spread from her neck to her chin to her ears to her forehead. “How the flying hell can Good Editor and Bad Editor have her on staff?” she demanded. “She—”

“I know,” I interrupted. “We all know. Why they let her in the building, let alone on staff, I don’t know, but they did.”

“They can’t. She…” Marla shook her head, pushed her hair from her face. “This has to be Bad Editor. It has to be.”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” I shook my head when Marla gave me a disbelieving look. “It’d be innovative,” I said. “Bring someone in who’s been on the list, it’ll probably send sales through the roof.”

“Fuck sales,” Marla spat. “They can’t seriously think—”

“They do,” I said and saying it out loud made it real, made it understandable. “Sales go up when controversy goes up. Bring in Billie Fraction, and sales are going to soar. It’s innovative, and it’s money making. It’s the best of both worlds.”

“The whole point of the damned list— ” Marla started. She stopped, put a hand to her mouth, looked at me for a long, quiet moment. “What did you do after the sixth raid?” she asked quietly, like someone asking for the morbid details of a bad car accident.

“I stopped,” I said. “I stayed away until comics came back. I kept my nose clean.”

“God.” Marla slumped onto my loveseat. I felt horribly guilty, dropping all this news on her all at once. I wondered if I’d had the same look on my face when the news came out, when I’d realized what Billie had done. “Oh, Julie,” she said softly, and she stared at the floor.

I watched her, unsure what to say, how to comfort. I’d barely talked about it in ten years, barely let it touch me, but now it was hanging in the room like a drape, except that all the shadows were seeping out instead of in. “I was so in love with her,” I said to Marla, to the drape, to the general feeling in the room. “Maybe if I hadn’t been—”

“Don’t,” Marla snapped. “Just don’t. If you didn’t see it, it’s because it wasn’t there to see. She must have been good at hiding it.”

“Maybe. I think back on it—”

“With guilty vision, no doubt,” Marla interrupted again. She leaned across the small space between my loveseat and desk, touched my leg. “You’re not responsible. Being there doesn’t make you responsible.”

“I wonder if Wendy blames me,” I said. “Wonder what she thinks.”

“She’s dead, Julie,” Marla said fiercely. “The dead don’t care. The dead are the dead.”

I looked out the window, stared at the brick wall. “She shouldn’t have died. If I—”

“Jules—”

“Julie,” I corrected. I gave Marla a hard look. She’d never tried to call me Jules before.

“It’s a name,” Marla told me. “The importance behind it is what you give it. You don’t want me to call you “Jules”, then fine, but to not want it because Billie Fraction called you it first does you a great injustice.”

“Never give up. Never surrender. Never let injustice win.”

Marla raised her eyebrows. “I have no idea what that means.”

I shook my head, pushed my hair off my face, gathered it over my left shoulder and braided it quickly. “It doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “It doesn’t mean a damned thing.” I secured the braid with a rubber band, tweaked the end of it, gave Marla the best smile I could muster under the circumstances. “I’ve got a hundred things to do today,” I said. “Which means you have a hundred and ten.”

Marla cocked her head, looking ready to argue. After a moment, she nodded. “At least a hundred and ten,” she agreed. She stood up and grabbed my coffee cup. “I’ll get you a refill. Good Editor and Bad Editor want to see you in twenty minutes.”

“Damnit,” I muttered and dug through my papers. “Did they say why?”

“Do they ever?”

“There’s a rumor Billie’s going to outrank me,” I told Marla. Saying it aloud made it scarier somehow, like it was a spell I was casting to come true.

“Well, they’ll certainly rethink it when we quit in protest,” Marla replied.

I looked up from my papers, a half-finished script in my left hand. “What?”

Marla stuck her head back in the office, gave me a brilliant smile. “Like I’d work here if you weren’t here,” she said, tone lightly teasing and affectionate. “Who else would put up with me?”

“What’s to put up with?” I asked. “You’re the best.”

“You’re biased.”

“Entirely,” I admitted and watched her walk away. I wanted to run after her, crowd her against the break room counter and tell her she was wonderful. I sorted my papers instead. Finished scripts went into a folder for the meeting with Good Editor and Bad Editor; working scripts I put on the left corner of my desk, and general outlines and ideas I tacked on the board over my right shoulder.

“Coffee,” Marla said, placing the cup right of center, easily dodging around me as I finished shuffling papers. “Dinick caught me in the break room. She wants to talk to you about Alligator Girl.”

“The answer will forever be no.”

Marla grinned. “I told her you were booked today.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Am I?”

“Good Editor and Bad Editor didn’t give me an end time on the meeting. I believe negotiations are afoot on something.”

“Or they want to haggle over scripts,” I guessed. Everything was quiet for a moment. I finished sorting and looked up to find Marla watching me from the doorway. “What’s up?” I asked.

“Would they really make you work with her?” she asked quietly. “After what she did?”

“They don’t know,” I answered. “And I don’t plan to tell them.”

Marla blinked, shock settling on her face. “What?”

“I don’t plan to tell them,” I repeated. I sighed when Marla continued to look aghast. “Look at my book list, Marla. If it’s not something that’s already popular or needs a lift, it’s a wang wrangler. If I go in there and tell them I can’t work with Billie because she’s my ex, they’ll drop me off the popular and rising stuff all together, and it’ll be me, you, my tiny office, and a hundred variations on Alligator Girl“But it’s not about her being your ex,” Marla argued. “It’s about—”

“That’s what it’s about to them,” I snapped, my anger at the entire situation coming to a sudden, roiling boil. “They know what she’s done, Marla. They know exactly what she’s done. Her name’s in the book.”

“I haven’t seen the book,” Marla said, the set of her jaw spoiling for an argument. “I don’t know the details that are in it.”

“They’re all there,” I promised. “It’s a name and a copy of the testimony. In some cases, there are details about any aftermath. I’ve seen Billie’s pages; there are details. And even if their weren’t, her testimony’s intact. She names Wendy a couple dozen times.”

“Then how could they possibly think you would refuse to work with her because of your past relationship? How does it possibly become a lover’s quarrel?”

I gave her a hard look, knowing she knew the answer as well as I. She stared back, face impassive, forcing me to say it out loud if I was going to claim it. “Because I’m a black triangle,” I gritted out, my teeth aching as I pressed them together. “Because dykey little queers like me don’t have relationships; we have instances of attraction that are problematic because we don’t want to learn any better.”

“That is complete—”

“It’s not,” I cut her off. “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Marla. We both know it’s how they think. It’s how they’ve always thought.”

“Because they’re idiots,” Marla spat out.

“Because scientists keep telling them it’s true,” I countered. “Because it’s not even been two years since the American Psych Association decided that sexual preference doesn’t dictate a mental illness, and because every third medical journal argues against the decision to allow me not to be crazy.”

Marla looked down at her hand. I knew what she was thinking; she’d told me once. We could connect fiber optics and robotics to the human body and make it work, make a mass majority of people not freak out about it, but put one short, tangle-haired dyke in a room, and everything went to hell. She hadn’t phrased it quite like that, being entirely too polite by half, but it had been the sentiment. I put down my scripts, reached across my desk, and touched her wrist.

“I appreciate your support,” I told her. “And I’m happier than you can guess at how you don’t treat me like I’m going to give you the gay, but I’m too realistic not to know how they think of me. They give me dick books because they assume I want one. If I go in there and tell them I won’t work with Billie, and they find out she and I dated, that’s it for me. Everything will be wiped out, and it’ll be nothing but Alligator Girl and the like for the rest of my career.”

“Change companies,” Marla said, desperation making her run the words together. “Someone else will have you.”

“I’m under contract,” I pointed out. “I’d have to be fired, and if Perpetual fires me, no one’s going to pick me up unless I find some rat-infested room holding two other booted writers and a passable artist.”

Marla opened her mouth, closed it, crossed her arms and looked at me peevishly. “They’re idiots,” she said fiercely. “They really, really are.”

“Thanks,” I replied, the stark honesty in her face making me feel immeasurably better.

“And you can’t catch gay,” she added.

I laughed at that. “Well, yes, but I already knew that.”

“That’s not…” she trailed off, looked down, met my eyes for a bare moment and looked away. “I meant—” she shook her head. “Never mind.”

I rotated my shoulders as the whole feeling in the room changed. “Marla?” I asked, wondering about the sudden nervousness she was giving off. “You okay?”

“Fine,” she said. She took a step backwards, nearly fell over as her shoulder slipped off the door. “It’s nothing.”

“Marla?”

“You’re going to be late,” she said instead of giving up any information. “Good Editor and Bad Editor will have your head if you’re not there on time.”

I don’t care, I thought, but I could tell by Marla’s stance, the way she half-turned from me when I took a step forward, that I wouldn’t get anything out of her until she was damned good and ready. “All right,” I said slowly. I tucked my scripts under my arm, picked up my coffee mug, and took a step to the right to get around her, still half in my doorway. “I’ll be back later. Feel free to interrupt for anything. And I mean anything.”

“Got it,” she said, voice flat.

I glanced over my shoulder once I’d cleared the door of the outer office. She was easing herself into her chair, carefully, like she’d pulled a muscle or thought the chair wouldn’t hold her weight. She looked very young as she curled into her chest as she sat, and I realized that she’d only just turned 22. She’d only been working for me for a little over two years, that she still had a roommate and a questionably safe apartment in a wreck of a neighborhood because she was determined to scratch out a living on her own. Her parents were around but distant, I knew, and I wondered why, suddenly, as I slid into the elevator. They’d loved her enough to give her a new hand, and I wondered what made parents go distant on their kids. Marla was too level-headed and genuinely smart to have done anything stupid just to see what it was like. It wasn’t like she—

Shit.

I wasn’t entirely certain, as I exited the elevator outside the offices of Good Editor and Bad Editor that I hadn’t actually been hit in the head. I was dazed. The receptionist outside the offices looked up at me, finger poised over the intercom button.

“Do you have a meeting?” she asked when I didn’t introduce myself.

“Yeah,” I muttered. I looked at her without seeing her. It was only the way she tapped her pen on her desk, in an arrhythmic three-beat, that snapped me out of my fugue. “Julie Schwartz,” I said, my voice sounding far away. “My assistant said they set it up through her.”

My gay assistant, I thought, and thinking it like that made it true. It made it make sense. Marla was a lesbian. I wondered, as the receptionist buzzed the offices, if she’d known before a moment ago, if she’d even admitted it to herself. If her parents had gotten distant preemptively, because they’d sensed something was off about her but didn’t want to know what.

“Julie,” Good Editor said with a smile, “Wonderful. Come in. How’s Marla?”

She’s a lesbian, I thought. I sat on Good Editor’s couch and watched Bad Editor give me a bored once-over. “She’s fine, thank you. What are we meeting about?” I asked.

“Alligator Girl,” Bad Editor said, and her tone let me shake off the last of my shock and confusion.

“What about it?” I asked and switched gears to do battle.