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20. Puddle of mulberry bubble tea (Izuna)

It was a day just like any other the day it happened while at the same time, it was as far from any other day as it could be. 

I wasn't sitting in the library this time but outside, in the park, on a blanket with a book and my notepad, completing my last essay for university which I would never hand in because I had lost my place because I was a porn star. The sun was blazing on top of my head, creating a pleasant warmth beneath my black hair that absorbed the sunrays. Once, when I was a teenager, I had cut my hair short and dyed it blonde alongside my eyebrows. It was a good look, I realised when I found a photo last year, especially with my glasses, but I remembered how surprised I was that the sun didn't have the same warming effect on my scalp anymore. 

I looked back on my assignment, or ex-assignment. We were doing children's books, and I re-read The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman that I'd chosen for my essay. Many didn't consider it a children's book but it truly was one, or at least that had been the intention of the author. But sometimes, the intention of a creator didn't match the outcome, just like SpongeBob was intended to be a cartoon for adults yet was widely accepted as a children's show. 

My essay was about what parts of the book pointed towards a juvenile audience, and what made it clear that a more mature pool of readers would appreciate it more widely. The most difficult part was trying to delete the second and third books out of my head when writing my essay; The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass dealt with much more mature concepts such as parental love, jealousy, religion and the hardships of growing up and realise what a fucked-up world the adult one was. 

Suddenly, a drop landed on my notepad, smearing the ink out. I looked up. The sky was a beautiful corn blue. I looked down again. It took me a while to realise that the droplet was a tear, and that tear was coming from myself.

I sighed, dried it off the page half-heartedly, rolled onto my back. Who the fuck didn't notice when they started to cry? As I stretched my arm to the side to pick up my mulberry bubble tea and take a sip through the straw, I saw the bench where I had met the longboarder. We'd taken each other's numbers and stayed in touch. We'd gone for drinks together on the same weekend, and I had told her about me and Tobirama. She had been incredibly upset that he'd treated me badly as well, but she had also displayed a softness towards me I wasn't used to. It was a very, very long time ago I had a friend.

"Have you ever made out with a girl?" she'd asked me.

I shook my head.

"No. I was never interested in girls."

"Wanna try?"

I did, in fact, wanna try.

We ended up making out for a long time on a couch. She had a masculinity to her that I was attracted to, so I did get hard and when I touched her under her skirt, I felt she was wet even through her underwear. When I pushed them aside to touch her she moaned softly in my ear, and what I did find didn't freak me out even half as much as I had expected it to. I honestly enjoyed myself immensely. She stayed over at my place, and we had our arms around each other, talking about past relationships and our experience in the porn world for hours. But nothing more than that. We had both wanted to try each other, and we had done that, and we agreed that we were satisfied. Now, we texted daily and I was grateful for her. She was grateful for me. It felt incredible. 

I turned back to my notepad, tore the pages off and crumbled them up; I saw no point in my stupid essay. Instead, I made a plan. I wrote a bullet list, scratched, re-wrote, then cleaned it up on a new page until I felt done.

Then, I went to the library to set my plan into action.

It was time to apply for the best university in the country for English literature.