HI PADDLES kandistars-

<3

Directly after the fight on Worm Day

Nova can still feel, still hear, the noise rattling through her teeth, the force of the garden gate smacking into its frame, the vines and weeds alike trembling in its wake--more likely, her wake. She hopes she didn't squish any bugs under her sneakers, at least not the ones Autumn cares about (Which is all of them).

As she stomps down along the road, which is gradually getting more and more busy with oncoming 5 o'clock traffic, Nova pays little attention to who honks at her for walking too far away from the shoulder or who comes speeding in a rush of dirt and the mild spray from a nearly-dried puddle. She could've taken a more meandering path on the outskirts of the patch of woods that lined the road, but she would get distracted and get lost. Her bag swings incessantly heavily on her shoulder, her right arm still smarts where the semi-healed slashes pulled under the weight of her books and the video camera--

Wait.

"Fuck," she hisses, tossing the backpack to the ground where the bottom is immediately encased in a sludge of mud and wet leaves. She kneels on the pavement, the tips of her toes just crossing the white line of the shoulder, and digs through the bag. Math book, notebook #1, old report card littered in Cs, notebook #2, zippered case full of markers and pencils. "Fuck!" she says again. The camera isn't there: it is sitting on Autumn's dining room table, empty as a decrepit seashell, its battery pack still loosely plugged into the wall because the wire is old and mis-formed.

Shit. There is no way she is going back for it, not after all that. Autumn probably wouldn't let her inside! Nova feels her throat constrict and her breath grow solid in her chest. How could she have said all of that? but how couldnt've she? all she knows how to do is get angry. She stands and swings her foot at the bag and sends it partially onto the forest floor, sticking with pine needles. It makes a dissatisfying shht along the ground.--Her heartbeat matches the sudden tempo of the hard wind tummulting against the trees and she is way too hot, her cheeks burn like infection and she tugs off the pink sweatshirt she's worn all goddamn day in their school where it was a million degrees and stuck with pollen because the AC broke ten years ago and her very being is problematic because who wants to look at a girl who has carved her own angst upon herself, and to be reminded of her own raw redness of her insides? And fuck the stupid garbage camera and the videos and the way Autumn instructed her to zoom in not too far on the Pennsylvania bugs when they look so cool way-close up and fuck the heat rising from the pavement, which produces a hard crack when she slams her foot down. Then she throws the hoodie to the ground and steps on that, screwing the sole of her shoe down, mud taking all the velvet softness out of the carnation-pink fabric. The jumping and stamping begins to hurt, bruiselike, the bottoms of her feet, which only makes her angrier.

She is breathless, feet equal parts numb and aching, by the time she stops, staring in between the trees, watching every few seconds the glittery-yellow searchlight-looking beams of headlights skip across them.

Nova breathes humidly through her nose, wipes her eyes on the back of her arm. The air rises, and whirls against the dense branches, then the clouds, which have been greying to purple all day, let out a near-audible sigh, and the rain drives down like gushes of molten shooting stars.

<3

When she gets home her shoes are impossibly softened with rain, her hair sticks like bubblegum to the back of her neck. The slightly colorized liner around her eyes is thin and running. She stands on the doormat like a dog who has just swum in the river and is now forbidden from the carpet.

"At least there hasn't been lightning yet, they're saying it should start soon," her mother says. "Give me those shoes. Why didn't you call us to pick you up?"

Nova dangles the sneakers by fraying laces. "Was too late by the time I left, t' go back." Her socks are near-black with dirt and mud, she sits gingerly on the floor to peel them off.

"I told you it was going to storm today, I told y' this morning."

"I forgot." She always forgets.

Mrs. Peña rolls her eyes at the ceiling, framed with dark hair streaked delicately with grey so that the coloration looks like frost. "And what happened t' your sweatshirt?"

"I tripped." She balls her dirty orange socks in her fist--or her iteration of one--and shuffles clumsily to her feet.

"It'll stain," she counters, looking at the wet and destroyed garment in her ringed hand. "You didn't hurt y'rself? There's holes here and--"

"No, they were there already."

In a way that warns her daughter against her bitter and irreproachable tone: "I was only making sure."

"I think I need a new one anyway, all the ones I have're too warm. It's spring. Shouldn' be wearing 'em anyway."

<3

Lisa has her feet up on the wall, tapping her toes to a Cream song. Her thumbs direct the little motorcycle in Road Rash, she nods her head every so often. Her frayed hair falls into her eyes, just touching tenderly the corner of her mouth.

"Li."

Lisa exhales but does not answer, involved in first the blinking red, grey, and green game, and secondly the guitar from her headphones. One more thing to pay attention to and she might throw the handheld console at the wall.

"Hey," Nova says, sitting on the floor so that her chin rests on the striped green bedspread. "I needa talk t' you."

"A minute," Lisa mumbles, losing concentration. She did not go to work today, complaining of a headache when it was actually an accumulation of many slights only perceptible to her, that weighed on her for the briefest of seconds too long and snapped something which was repairable (usually) by a few hours under a blanket and a mind-numbing simple video game. When that doesn't work, she's fucked. And Nova is fucking her over.

She pokes her shoulder. "Now? It's important."

"Don' poke me."

"Lisa, pleaaaaaaaaaaaase. It's about--"

"Ana, fuck sake, stop touching me, Jesus!" As predicted, the tiny black rectangle of the game clunks against the poster-plastered wall next to her, headphones falling around her neck, and Lisa aims a shove at Nova, who ducks.

"God, whatever!" Were she not near frustrated tears it would've had more of a bite. It would've even sounded mean.

If her sister notices the crackled, snapped strings in her voice, she doesn't care. "You're so fucking annoying!"

"Good!" Nova yells back.

Without no-where to import the sound, Jack Bruce's voice is low and filtered through the tiny speakers, lost to their mother's call: "What's going on up there?"

"Nothing!" They shout down in unison,

and Nova trudges into her bedroom and the pressure makes the pain in her feet flush again. "God-fucking-dammit!" she yelps, but she really doesn't mind it. She kicks her closed door with her toe instead.

<3

The next day around noon Nova finds the courage, sitting on the counter of the sinks in the biggest bathroom at school, to think. Her sandwich is unwrapped next to her, but she doesn't eat it, the smell of peanut butter is making her slightly sick although it is her favorite: the peanut butter mixed with Fluff, on the good brioche bread her father buys sometimes. She should've pressed Autumn for more, is what her first instinct tells her. Because, what else could there be? silence packed in boxes?

She re-wraps the sandwich and hops down from the sink. A sick, guilty feeling smothers the inside of her esophagus, mutates in her trachea like some alien molasses, and she gets mad all over again.

But then, she considers, she knows Autumn only wanted a minute alone. But--second 'but'--what was the point of that? Whenever Nova is alone, all her thoughts do is marinate and start to stink and stir her only because of the sludge they create. She looks in the mirror, but peers over her shoulder at the red hearts someone has scribbled thickly all over the second-stall door. They mock her, now.

But--third--no-one thinks quite like she does. She is well aware of that. So why should she use her own blueprint on Autumn, when she would never do that anytime else? What it comes down to, she realizes, staring at the blurring hazy white lights that almost make her black out, is trusting that Autumn knows what she wants.

At least, she is pretty sure that's what it is.

The last sink drips incessantly, sweating cold crystalline water that is pure for just a sliver of a moment. Pt-pt-...pt-pt

Nova twists her hair around her fingers, lacing them. She didn't understand anything. Why Autumn could be such a bitch, why Nova would ever think that about her girlfriend, why she should feel badly for thinking it, if she was even her girlfriend at all right now. She understood even less of these deductions which grew more and more poignant and precise while straying further and further from the core of the matter. Funny how things could move in two directions at once, keeping a linear pattern that extrapolated outwards simultaneously, at the same pace. She wondered if the design could work to bring things together, too.

The garish inked hearts catch her eye again. Probably not.

<3

The next afternoon, a Friday, in the hazy, full part of the afternoon after school, before evening, when the sun is golden and removed, and the air feels thick and real, Nova is lying on her bed facedown, feet on the pillow, listening to the breeze come in through the window where it never closes, or locks. It whistles like an obscene, prolonged gasp, like out of a stage-play. That is, she hears it whenever she catches a break from her own breath hot and sweaty against her mouth, her damp hair, her clogged nose, mouth watering with tears as though she's just vomited. Every time she thinks she's done, another tiny sob boils from her throat, jolting through her stomach and becoming fuller the more she holds it in her cheeks. After a while her chest takes on an ache like an overstrung limb, like a stump of a tree battered by pests from the inside. She sniffs for no good reason, the pressure building in her head, the base of her skull, instead of clearing it.

Nova walks out of the bathroom feeling dazed and unreal, like the first few minutes after a come-down, when she's not sure what she's thought or said, done or undone. She just knows that for the moment her tongue and eyes feel a little warm and fuzzy, like staring at the sun or tasting pollen in the cup of a tulip. And the overhead lights of the hallway blur her  tunnel-vision, tinged a wooden yellow. She touches the doorframe, cool congealed paint that has never felt dry despite last being painted some twenty years ago, clouded and infused with the moist touch and tantalizing expulsions of all kinds of teenagers. The paint is claylike so that she can dig her nails into it, where they have not been bitten down.

When she swings around the corner she nearly collides with two glasslike lenses and two identical pigtails of bright red hair. Autumn's soft mouth starts like a rabbit's whisker, then straightens in surprise. "Uh," she vocalizes in a low current, her voice which always runs on a separate wavelength to all other noise. She might say Nova's name, she might say anything, but Nova doesn't stop to hear it.

Face buried in her blanket, swollen tongue against it, she holds her breath and tastes her own house. She listens to Dulce trotting about on tiny paws in her cage, sniffing at her hay and squeaking mildly to herself. Not for the first time, not even for the first time today, she wishes she could live the guinea pig's life.

Lisa raps two knuckles on the doorframe, shaking a mint tin that does not hold mints anymore, in a crop top and baseball hat. "Hey. We're goin' 'a the park, y' wanna come?"

She doesn't look up, just swallows painfully and moves her face so that it suddenly feels cool when she's not touching the blanket. "Who?"

They frown. "Me an' Jackson. You don't wanna smoke?"

"You guys're just gonna suck face anyway," she points out sullenly.

"Not while you're there." They try to smile. More sharply, like the tone of their voice will force her chin up so they can see her: "Are you crying?"

"No."

A reluctant pause. "You are crying. What the hell happened?"

Nova tucks her face back against the bed; "I said I don't wanna go, leave me alone."

"Is it about Wednesday?"

She sets her jaw, though Lisa can't see. "What happened then?"

She hears them sigh, and, eventually, walk away dragging their fingers against the wall.

Only then does she stir, sitting up and wiping her face with the back of her arm. She smooths the parts of her hair that are tangled, bites on a thumbnail, kicks the heels of her feet against the bed, making the matress shake on the metal frame. Dulce squeaks, Nova lowers herself to the floor and curls a toe against the carpet, like she is feeling it out.

"Hola, Dulcita," she sings to the little silky black rodent, who bops her head up at the sound of her name: "mi corazón." Nova pokes her hand into the cage to stroke her fur a few times, watching how those tiny eyes and paws work blandly and inquisitively in unison. What a soft, compact creature.

Nova frees herself from the guinea pig cage and taps downstairs, where she veers through the crowded hallway and into the kitchen.

The walls are brown with aroma and the corners caked with salt and flour and on occasion a dead ant. It always smells sweetly like wet dust and cigarette smoke from the screen in the window and the rotting ashtray outside, respectively. One summer roses grew through the screen, blossoming yellow insides and royal purples above the corner with warm sodas and extra candles, matches, the odd lighter. She rips a paper towel from the roll near the stove, flips the sink on cold. She wishes she had the camera back. She wishes she could say anything she wanted, she wishes she wasn't so stupid. When the water is freezing to the point of a solid kind of pain when she runs her hand under it, she dampens the corner of the towel and presses it against her eyes, sniffs.

When she wipes her eyes again they feel raw, like the inside of a beating heart, slightly sticky with cold. She balls the paper towel and shoots it into the trash can, but she can't even feel good about making it; she already knows what she has to do even though the thought fills up her chest and throat with panic and dread, the two blending and expanding.

She picks up the phone, leaning her head on the wall so she can see where the screws hang it on the wall.

What the hell is she even supposed to say? Certainly not the truth, whatever that means.

She taps the numbers of the phone before pressing them. Her finger rests on the 9. Then the 9, 7. 9, 7, 3. She presses the 973, then goes back to poking without dialling for the next three numbers. Then the next four. Then she hangs up, but picks up the phone again and stares at it. The dull yellow, like a coffeestain, seems to blend with the greying white wall, so that each looks scratched and chipped with movement and stain. She can't think.

"Ana!"

She picks her head up like a deer at her father's voice. "Wha'?"

"Your...friend is here."

She snorts to herself, but steps into over and looks down the hallway to the front door. "¿Verdad?"

The red blur of the door in the sunlight and the silver noise off the street sift into one annoyance that she can blink away, and disregard.

"Uh, hi Autumn." Her voice doesn't sound right, it sounds small and dispersed. She takes her father's place at the door and fiddles with the deadbolt, twisting it back and forth.

Autumn doesn't look anything, except slightly surprised. She might've been preparing to flinch away from a slammed door in her face. She wears a green and blue skirt over her sneakers, her brown shirt is smooth and loose at the hem, like she was pulling at it but has since stopped, and it was not quite back to its regular shape. Not very astoundingly, she carries the video camera in both hands. But at her elbow she is balancing a black cooler zippered tightly, clearly full.

"Hi. I brought this."

Nova stares at the camera, then her socks. "Yeah."

"You wouldn' let me give it t' you at school." A judgement builds up behind her words, but she does not allow it to permeate them, only her sternness surrounds them like an eggshell.

Nova doesn't know what to say, her mind a cluster of static, her throat hot and wet.

"Um, d' you wanna go to the baseball field?"

Nova migrates to the bottom lock of the doorknob. It's harder to move, it pulls her wrist uncomfortably. "Why?"

Autumn gestures with the cooler. "I brought food and stuff. And a blanket on my bike." She points down the porch steps to the sidewalk.

"No, I mean...why? I was...stupid."

"Kinda." Autumn presses her tongue at the back of her closed teeth. "Will you come with me anyway?"

"Uh, sure."