Beach Day

3: Playing Catch-Up

She pats the grass next to her, under the shade of the strong, wide tree near the pond. "Sit with me, bud."

He considers it, and eventually makes the choice to sit, cleverly avoiding a clump of dirt that could be an anthill. (It isn't. Tiff already checked to make sure.) He takes a glance at the pages open on her lap. "What are you working on?"

"Just a landscape. I don't do a ton of those these days. It's a nice change of pace."

"Cool. It looks good."

"Thanks, bud." She wants to reach an arm around him, but doesn't.

They aren't strangers. They could never be strangers. They're blood. It's in the threads that connect them. She helped raise him, for crying out loud. She was the one who watched him after school, or when her parents were at the chapel for extra instruction (more nights than not), or when they just didn't want to be around their children and were doing god knows what. Andy could never truly be a stranger to her.

But maybe she has been away long enough that they don't know each other as well as they used to. In a way, that's an even more terrifying thought than the other.

"What else have you been doing?" he asks, still looking at paint-stained pages and all the places where the highlighters and lines have reached the edge of the paper. "Can I see?"

"Uh— sure. Be careful, there's some weird stuff in there."

There isn't anything she feels like hiding, she doesn't think. Nothing strictly verboten. Secret fanart from things she likes and portraits of her friends, sure— but nothing like herself bleeding out on the ground. She painted it after a particularly nasty nightmare and immediately tore it up. There's a reason that one was on scrap paper. (There's a reason it didn't mean anything, even if she shoved the pieces into the drawer under her bed. Her death is supposed to be stupid and meaningless. She has been living on borrowed time for years. That's the role she takes in the story.)

Andy flips through the pages, taking in bright colors and thick black lines, witnessing the deranged doodles of someone with far too few friends— someone who doesn't get nearly enough sleep.

"So, uh... How have things been?" she asks, like she's a shitty uncle at a family reunion. Like she doesn't know how to connect with him. Like this wasn't her life until they ended it. "Has school been okay?"

"School's fine. Mom tried to get me out of science again, but the school wasn't having it." He pauses, considers elaborating. "Because of evolution. And the whole... genes thing. Word got out that my teacher was going to talk about uh... I'm forgetting the word. The thing where there's more than XX and XY. Mom didn't take it well."

"Yeah, she really is one of those ladies, isn't she?"

It's an old joke, and not a particularly good one at that, but it's enough to warrant a smile. He takes the serious inquiry route anyway. "Like what? Like she doesn't like science classes?"

"I mean— yeah. I know the state of public education in Florida is sh— bad right now, but— She's the kind of woman who would cite basic biology as a way to cover the fact that she really just gets her ideals from conservative tradition and from the pulpit and hasn't thought for herself in her entire life, even though literally every form of science, both hard and social, disagrees with her. The scientific consensus is that there's way more than two distinct sexes, that sex is a bimodal distribution and far from binary, and that gender doesn't have to be linked to it, and—" She cuts herself off. "Sorry. Uh— My excuse is that... Science. And some of my friends are trans. I shouldn't work myself up."