I Kissed Alice - Anna Birch Page 0,2

the little twitch in one corner of her generous mouth means she isn’t indifferent at all.

Sarah gasps, and holds up a cassette tape with both hands as if it’s the Holy Grail. “Antestor! I don’t have this one!”

“Lucky you,” I say, “apparently somebody dropped off their old cassette tape collection at the flea market last week.”

Sarah cries out again as she opens the next. “The Finnegans Wake LP! I’ve been looking for this everywhere.”

“Is there really an entire album named after that God-awful James Joyce book we had to read in Lit Two last block?” Rhodes will never be able to match my gift, and the fact that she categorically refuses to glance up from her hands tells me that she realizes the same thing.

“I loved it.” Sarah takes on the snotty, poised mannerisms we’ve seen in Rhodes more than I ever care to admit. When Sarah does it, it looks more like a little girl clodding around in her mother’s heels.

“I read that Joyce wrote the whole thing in six weeks, and for some reason he was proud of the fact that he never changed any of it,” Rhodes says.

“I doubt that any of the guys in the Billy Saunter Band ever actually read Joyce, Rhodes.” I hope to God this isn’t the way the rest of our night will go. “If I remember correctly, you didn’t even read Joyce for Lit Two.”

“I’m pretty sure that was Ulysses,” Sarah says, as if it matters.

Joyce is a dick. It doesn’t matter. I have no idea if she’s right.

Rhodes pulls a small, professionally gift-wrapped box from under her pillow. She hands it over to Sarah with a sigh.

A small box that looks like it contains jewelry. My face reddens.

I looked at a few jewelry counters at the flea market for Sarah’s gift, too, but I couldn’t afford anything she would have actually liked. Aesthetic comes with a premium, apparently.

A moment of something soft passes between them.

I don’t like how it makes me feel.

It’s so easy to forget that their friendship is a real, live thing.

I can’t watch anymore.

My phone suddenly becomes a heck of a lot more interesting.

To my relief, a single tweet of a bird signifies a notification from the fan fiction website Slash/Spot, an old-as-the-world fandom database from which every queer ship pairing has set sail since the early days of Harry/Draco. The website itself is some kind of web 2.0 relic—the header looks like someone’s mom made it in Microsoft Word, and the color scheme reminds me more of a doctor’s waiting room decor than any of the professionally developed branding you see in higher-budgeted corners of the internet.

Normally this is a small detail that would bug me enough to deter me from ever using it.

But I came to understand what it meant to be queer on Slash/Spot long before I understood what that meant to my own identity, and who I would love, and the person I would ultimately grow into—someone I’m still growing into.

“Look!” Sarah whacks me on the arm. She holds a plastic rectangular cartridge out to me in her palm. “It’s a guitar pick punch!”

“Yeah!” Rhodes says, beaming. “I found it at a record store the last time I went home. You can even use it on old records.”

“Awesome,” I say.

Rhodes doesn’t know that Sarah sold her bass guitar at the beginning of the school year to cover her share of the school’s required art supplies. The thought either hasn’t occurred to Sarah yet, or she doesn’t want to tell Rhodes her gift is functionally useless until Sarah saves up to buy another one.

My attention goes back to my phone.

There’s a notification at the top of the page: user I-Kissed-Alice has shared a document with me. If there were a time on Slash/Spot before I-Kissed-Alice—Alice, as I call her, and she calls me Cheshire after my own username—I don’t remember it. There was no life before Slash/Spot, and the rest of it barely mattered before I met Alice.

It’s not just any document, though: She’s sent back the script that will be the next installment of our Alice in Wonderland fan fiction comic, complete with in-line notes and a few sketches for me to check before she starts laying out the panels.

I curl up into the headboard and position my phone so neither Rhodes nor Sarah can see.

This is a part of my world no one knows about, and Alice is at the center of it.

I want to be alone with my thoughts, and with