A shy reference librarian, and a college student who was disowned when she refused to submit to conversion therapy, meet in a bookstore. He's been waiting his whole life for her. Meanwhile, she's starting her whole life over. What ensues between the...
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"Oh, it's beautiful down here! And you say there are swans on the lake when the weather is warmer?"
"Yeah, we have swans. If I'm still living here in the spring, maybe we could have a picnic, and I could show you the swans. The trees around the lake are all in bloom. It's like being in a postcard."
"What do you mean, if? Why on earth would you want to move?"
"It would be nice to be closer to campus. Also, my rent is four hundred fifty dollars, even though it's only a one-bedroom apartment, and I don't even have any air conditioning. My mom would rather I just stay here because it's safe and quiet, but it's so far away from everything." She grimaces. "Then there's the type of people who live here. It's not like Portland, where my dad lives. You'd think people out here never even heard of goths before. If I hear one more person ask me if I'm Amish, I'm going to scream. Just because a person dresses in black does not mean that person is Amish."
"But you have swans!"
She laughs. "And a long bus ride. I'm going to need a car if I keep living down here."
I don't quite see eye-to-eye with her on this one. I've never had my own car, and I've endured longer bus rides to get to work, from neighborhoods that were considerably less scenic. Swans were never part of any neighborhood I ever lived in, for that matter, not even when I was a child living with my parents, in a historic gaslit district, in a large Tudor revival house. Swans would certainly have gone well with the place, but we didn't have any.
"If I come down to visit you in the spring, and we have a picnic by the lake, can I kidnap one of your swans?"
"You don't know much about swans, do you?"
"Uh..."
"A swan probably has way more hit points than you do. If you don't get bit all over, you might get a broken bone or two from the swan's wings."
"Birds have hollow wings. That can't be right."
"They still bite. They're nasty. Please don't try to run off with one of our swans. I like you. Besides, can you imagine what kind of havoc the swan would wreak on the bus, assuming you could fit the swan through the door? I presume you'd be taking the bus home."
"Well, yes."
She pulls out her keys. It was a short walk from the bus stop because her ground-floor apartment is in the "downtown" of her suburb. Her apartment building, a Victorian house that's been subdivided into four units, is quaint. The view from her building's front porch is quaint. Everything here is quaint. She lives in a sugar confection of a town that belongs on a Holly Hobbie print, or maybe in a dentist's office as an advertisement for what to avoid if you don't want cavities.
We don't have class today, I don't have work today, although Magister does, and it's not gaming day, so when she asked if I'd like to come over and watch movies and pop some popcorn, I said yes.
