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She rolled her chair away from her computer, turning on the modem so it could run through all of its startup feelings and she could post the story she had just written online before she had to eat. She could tell by the noises her mom was making in the kitchen that dinner was almost ready.
Her skin felt tight and warm and alive. It had never felt that way before. She knew it was because of the story she’d just finished. Two girls, in love, and God , how it had felt to write the scenes where they kissed. She’d been racing home every day after school to write about the girls and about their kissing and about how they were falling in love on this quest. She had known when she started writing that it would be a romance and it would be between two girls, and this had made her feel like she was carrying a ball of pure electricity inside of her rib cage every minute of every day. She wanted to dive her hands into the earth and make the whole world gay. She wanted to see if Tressa Fay would practice the kissing scenes with her, even though they had only just come out to each other and, when they had, they’d mostly cried and talked about if anyone would ever love them.
wanted . She just wanted and wanted, and all of that want had gone into this story, so that now, at the end, when her two characters in love came to the part of their quest where they found the lost dragon, prepared to have to capture it in golden chains—in fact, had been ready to write a battle scene where they did capture the dragon in golden chains and bridle it to fly back home—but when they entered its lair, the dragon, to both the girls’ and ’s surprise, started talking to them with a low, mellifluous voice. Soon, the three of them were caught up in an amazing conversation about the secrets of the universe and about love, and then the dragon had offered his smooth onyx claw to them, and when the girls touched it, they’d both shivered and been mesmerized by the amber gaze of the dragon, who they knew would be a part of their lives forever.
felt split apart and restless and amazing. It was the best story she’d written, but also, the first story that had taken off on its own, like she hardly had any control over it. It made her think about a girl in her dance class, Emma, who had gotten permission to get a tattoo as a minor from her stepmother and gotten it on her ass . The tattoo was of two dolphins in a pink-and-blue yin-yang symbol, and had tried not to stare, but now she thought about tattoos of dragons, with girls in crowns, and rainbows.
Waiting for the computer to finish connecting, she lay down on her floor. She was certain that any minute, a portal would open up beneath her body and she would fall, fall, through a shaft of gay rainbow light into another universe—one where she would meet her characters, including the dragon. Or through a purple, swirling black hole where her body would twist and the entire world would be queer, all through time—everything would have always been queer, always, love in every possible combination and the world filled with thousands of uncolonized villages full of exciting people to meet, and she would do nothing but make out and have sex and write novels.
That was the world she wanted. It was the world she wanted for everyone . It was possible. She knew it was. She knew it was so possible that, somewhere, it was already happening.