The Long Winter #9
Orientation part 9
“Hi, Ash!”
Penny bounced up the sidewalk to her friend sitting on a bench near a flower garden near the Institute’s science building, Hampton Labs, with her phone out. The sun was shining and the birds were chirping and everything was as cheeful as the PMer girl’s vim. The blue-haired girl looked up and answered with an annoyed smirk that did little to lessen the joyfulness of this early fall day.
“Are you always this perky?”
“Pretty much, why?”
“You’re going to make an interesting friend.”
“Thank you!” Penny plopped down beside her and opened her bag. “Like, I got the thing you were asking about. Do you know how to use it? Not that I’m like, trying to seem eager to show you or anything, but—“
“No, I looked up how to use it, but if you really wanted to show me I’m perfectly willing to bring you back to my room right now.”
Penny laughed. She pulled a little plastic thing that looked like a ray gun from an old sci-fi TV show and handed it to Ash.
“Seriously though, this thing really works?” Ash turned the tool over in her hands. It was light and the handle hinged, allowing the user to adjust his or her hold on it.
“It works so very well. I’m down to using it twice a year.”
Ash glanced at Penny’s legs. They were the smoothest legs she had ever seen. Did she tend to her pubic area with the same attention to detail? Ash caught the suspicious gleam in the PMer’s eyes when the blue-haired girl was finally able to tear her gaze from Penny’s skirt, or more specifically, whatever it was beneath that skirt.
“Wow. This is going to change my life. And my girlfriends’ lives.” Ash turned her sparkling blue eyes on Penny. “Are you sure you don’t want to join their ranks?”
“I’m sure. I have a very strict monogamy policy.”
“You hang out with the breeders too much, there’s not nearly enough kink in your life.” Ash’s eyes flickered down at the tool in her hands. “Well, maybe there is, but I feel like we’re missing out on a whole new magical world together.”
“I’m not going to jail for murder and I’d kill you for cheating on me, so…”
Ash chuckled and rolled her eyes.
“So are we like, working together this afternoon? Or do you have a date?”
“No, no date. You have me all to yourself, so if you want to make me study instead of helping me rid myself of annoying hair with this incredible tool, we can… we… we can…”
Ash trailed off and the sparkle left her eyes. She shoved Penny’s tool into her bag.
“What’s wrong?”
“Don’t look.”
“What? Where—“
Penny swung her eyes in the direction in which Ash was looking and immediately spun back towards her friend. She was over there. She had been everywhere. And she had spotted them.
“I told you not to look,” Ash said, scowling at the half-Asian girl.
“I’m not sorry, I’m the victim here. She’s been stalking me, everywhere I go she appears, like this huge, like…”
“Yeah, I get it.” Ash sighed and leaned back as Geri lumbered near.
“Ladies!” Geri settled herself down on the bench. She leaned against Penny, her flesh oozing down over Penny’s back, and put her hands on Penny’s shoulders, her fingers falling much too far forward past Penny’s collarbones on her fair skin above the line of her sundress. “Are you two going out? You know Ash is famous on campus, if you’re hanging out with her you’re definitely fucking each other.” She leered at Ash. “So how is she? Is she everything she appears to be? I’ve heard amazing things about Mexican Latin-X girls!”
Ash frowned back at her and Penny glared.
“Asian! I meant Asian.”
“Geri, I said I’d message you about Friday, and today's not Friday, we're working today—“
“Yeah, yeah, like I believe that. Listen, I have the whole afternoon free, and I’ve planned it out so we can have as much fun as possible together all the way to tomorrow morning, when we can go down to The Creamery for breakfast coffee and plan our next date together. But first we’re going to head down to the beach and tease the boys playing volleyball in our skimpy bikinis and then we can pick out each other’s clothes and help each other change before we walk down Washington St. and go shopping, there are some really cute boutiques, I know the owners of a few of them and I’ll bet we can get some discounts. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I’m sorry, Geri, we have to get to the labs to do some work for Professor Fairchild,” Penny said. “I was being honest when I said I’m really, like, super busy this year. The work load at the Institute—“
“Aw, you don’t have to lie to me,” Geri said with a coy smile. “If you guys are going to go get busy together this afternoon you can just tell me. It’ll just be fodder I’ll use when I jill my nubby today and it’ll make me work that much harder to blow your mind when we finally meet our destiny!”
With that, Geri leaned forward and kissed Penny on her cheek before she rolled to her feet and waddled away. Penny stared at Ash, her face twisted with disgust and horror at the feeling of Geri’s unnecessarily wet lips on her cheek. She pulled a tissue from her bag and wiped the residue from her face as she mimed throwing up. Ash nodded, a look of sympathy on her face, and when Geri was out of sight she reached over and patted Penny’s shoulder.
“You’re going to survive this. She’ll find someone else to harass and you’ll be free.”
“Yes, but when? She’s been everywhere! Ever since she accosted me last weekend she’s always around. I don’t know how she does it.”
“I’ll look into it for you. I don’t have many friends, I mean—“
“Oh, so you’re not as popular as you like to make me think you are!”
“I’m extremely popular, you bitch. But so far as actual friends go, I was thinking to include you in a very small, very exclusive group. Of course, you can go ahead and become a huge bitch and get kicked right back out of said group before you even join.”
Penny laughed and grabbed Ash’s hands. “I was only teasing! I’m sorry, I mean, I’m not really sorry, I just got kissed by that horrible woman, but—“
“You’ve said enough, Pretty Penny, you can relax, I was only teasing you too, but if you keep rambling I might have to become serious.”
The two girls laughed together and they rose from the bench to head for the lab.
Through Ash, Penny had become aware of the attention they received as they walked around the Institute. Unlike Mt. Plains High School, her classmates at the Institute seemed much more curious about her sexuality and her dating status. And indeed, they received several stares on their walk to Hampton Labs. Some were, of course, curious, students who had never seen a homosexual couple in person before (even though Penny was certainly not dating Ash), especially one including a foreign female of mixed race heritage. Others (generally young men) openly ogled them. When Maddie pointed out that she might be masturbation imagery for some of the lonelier boys they studied with it bothered her until Ash added that she should be proud of it. Not everyone got to be the focus of someone else’s fantasy. Instead, it called to mind those digital video uploads from the end of her final year of high school, and the teasing she had endured, and the desrious looks from some of her teachers. But at least, at the very least, none of them had looked at her with outright hatred and disdain. Unlike a few had at the Institute.
Penny did her best to ignore them. She always felt them when she walked by, felt the heat of their scowls on her back, and when she was with Ash (the only other confirmed lesbian enrolled at the Institute) it seemed worse. As they passed through the doors into the lab she was prepared for the dapper boy who usually occupied the airy lobby to look up at them and glower (she had caught him several times before), but instead they made it up a flight of fine tile stairs to the shining hallway leading to the robotics laboratory before a girl she knew as a teacher’s aide in her final year of studies stopped in the middle of the hallway to openly glare at them. Penny did what she could to keep her shoulders from hunching up. Walking beside Ash there was no way she could quail under the tall girl’s open hostility and scurry off in the opposite direction. She was grateful not to have that girl as a TA in any of her classes.
“Here,” Ash swiped her card over the reader and the door beeped and slid open with a swoosh. She let Penny in first and then stopped halfway through the doorway to show her middle fingers to the girl who had glared at them. She was smiling and there was a bounce in her step as they made their way to their workstation. She laughed. “Fuck those homophobes!”
The robotics lab was broken into two rooms. The first was the computer lab, home to four big tables with three computers on each one facing a digital board at the front behind a lectern onto which a professor could set a laptop or tablet for a lesson. The far wall was all windows looking down on a workshop, a two-story-tall room with several bays set up for working on robots of various sizes. One of them was occupied by a large, bulky, humanoid robot, and another with a car, a silver Toyota RAV4 fresh off a showroom floor. Penny cast one short glance out at the workshop before plopping herself down in one of the fancy ergonomical chairs and giving Ash a dour look.
“How can you be so easygoing about it?”
“You did see me flip that bitch off, right?”
“Well, yes, but you look like you think it’s a big joke…”
“That’s because it is a big joke. Look, that bitch is going to find stupid-ass reasons to hate other people no matter what the cultural norms are. Maybe in another country, or another reality, she’d be like, fine with teh gayz but fuckin’ hate black people. Or men. Or football fans. Or mathematicians. Who knows? In fact, maybe she’s not actually a homophobe but she hates Asian bitches. Or wait, what is that douche-turd’s name, the one with the senator daddy?”
“Ugh, Braden…”
“Right, “Ugh,” good name for a fucktwaddle like him. Anyways, maybe she thinks you’re Mexican, too. Maybe her dad left her mom for some exotic babe from more tropical climes. You don’t know.”
“You seem to know.”
“I don’t, but I do have an active imagination. That’s one of the reasons I haven’t pulled you into my bed yet. I can simply imagine it and everything’s fine.” Ash spared a moment as a program opened up on her computer to smirk at Penny. Penny frowned back and tended to her own machine.
“I’m simultaneously flattered and grossed out.”
“Good. There’s no point in our friendship if we’re both completely comfortable with each other all the time.”
“So you want me to gross you out, too?”
“Sure.”
“Hm. I’ll have to think of something super gross to tell you.”
“Don’t strain yourself, sweetie. Honestly, I can’t imagine you doing anything too gross. You’re too innocent.”
“I’m a pervert I’ll have you know.”
Ash laughed. “Right! Of course you are.”
“I am! If you asked my girlfriend, well, that is my ex-girlfriend, she would tell you. My best friend, too.”
“Leah?”
“No—“
“Maddie?”
“No, back home—”
“And this girl would corroborate your story?”
“100%. We used to watch each other play with ourselves.”
Ash stopped looking at her computer and turned all her attention on Penny.
“You what?”
“When we were younger, before we had boyfriends or girlfriends, we used to sit on the floor of our rooms with our feet together and our legs open and play with ourselves.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No way. How old were you?”
“Eighth grade.”
“You were old enough to know what you were doing, then.”
“I’ll admit, we were pretty innocent about that stuff, it was just mutual exploring, but we only did it together because I asked her to. More like, I guess I sort of, like, pushed her into it. I liked doing it, like, really liked it, but after, I don’t know, like a couple of months she seemed to get weird about it and we stopped. I knew I was kind of a pervert about it but since I felt bad I kind of buried it all down inside until I started going out with girls. Then it all came back out.”
“That’s crazy. I love hearing this about you. Wait, you just said, “started going out with girls?” That implies that you went out with boys before.”
“My friend teased me about being a lesbian for like two years before I finally like, came to the realization on my own. I had one boyfriend I really cared about, he was a great guy.”
“Was? What, did he turn into a monster when you started realizing you were gay?”
“No, he was killed.”
Ash winced, and then reached out and put her hand on Penny’s shoulder.
“I’m so seriously sorry, I didn’t know.”
“No, it’s okay. We mostly dealt with it, my friends and I, we were all friends with each other. I want you to promise not to say anything about it to anyone else. I dealt with it, we all did, but now that I’m here I don’t want to be known as the tragic girl who lost her boyfriend and turned gay because of it. Besides, at that point we were already broken up.”
Ash laughed and slapped Penny’s shoulder, leaned over and hugged her. She promised to keep Penny’s secret safe and then rolled back to her own workstation and they settled back into their work. Ash had a punky good nature to her that made Penny feel she could trust her. Marv’s soothing voice echoed the sentiment and they continued working even as Ash goofed around. The blue haired girl was less focused than Leah, constantly making faces and becoming a nuisance, but since it was a sunny afternoon Penny let herself get distracted and after a long while they were walking back out of the building and into the last gasp of summer weather, laughing together. Penny pretended not to notice Geri staring at them from the University campus across the street, and the two girls hurried back to the dorm and the long deck across the back where they could eat bowls of ice cream and pretend they had worked extremely hard that day. With the sunshine warm on her face Penny was glad for this one last day. When winter set in, she knew it would be long and dark.