Robin Talley - Pulp

“Ew.” Linh wrinkled her nose. “That’s so gross. Not to mention illegal. Why would they even want to?”

“Because they don’t seem to realize it’s gross? I don’t know, it’s weird. I skipped ahead, and at least this Twilight Realm book isn’t that way—the characters are twenty-one and twenty-five, which I guess isn’t that sketchy. But all the stories are such clichés. The characters go to these lesbian bars in Greenwich Village and have melodramatic conversations about how terrible it is to be a lesbian, and then they go home and have melodramatic lesbian sex. Then by the end they either check themselves into an asylum or die in botched abortions or cult rituals or whatever. And if they do survive, most of them wind up forgetting they’re gay.”

“What, do they turn out to be bi?” Linh tilted her head hopefully. She was bi, and she was always talking about how impossible it was to find bi characters anywhere. Abby agreed with her—she used to identify as bi, too, before she realized that whenever she started to imagine kissing a guy, she usually got too bored to finish—but it wasn’t exactly easy to find lesbian characters most of the time, either.

“That would seem logical, right?” Abby threw up her hands. “I thought that was where they were going with it at first, but I guess maybe they didn’t realize being bi was a thing yet? Because all these women seem to suddenly discover that they were totally straight all along. Even though two chapters earlier they were getting it on with their thirtysomething lady friends and very obviously into it. I was thinking that maybe in my book, though, I’d have one of the characters have sex with her boyfriend and actually enjoy it, and realize that she is bi. Then she’ll have to stress over how to tell her girlfriend. That never happens in these books, so I think Ms. Sloane would like it. I’d be inverting genre tropes.”

Abby was completely out of breath by that point, so she stopped talking and turned around to help Ben as they emerged into the open air of Wisconsin Avenue. Savannah and Linh stood waiting at the top, watching as a pair of Secret Service police cars sped through the intersection ahead of them. Abby wiggled her eyebrows at Linh in what she hoped was a flirty way, but Savannah, to her chagrin, had already changed the subject back to college.

“You won’t have to miss the Maryland meet when you go visit Penn, will you?” Savannah’s tone made it clear that missing the meet would be a ridiculous thing to do. She was only a junior, so she was slightly less obsessed with college than the rest of them.

“No, I can do both. The meet’s not until that Sunday.” Linh turned back to Abby. “By the way, I meant to ask you. I’m trying to get my parents to let me go visit Penn on the fourteenth. It’s a one-day trip, up and back on Amtrak. Do you want to come? They won’t let me go by myself but they said if you went, too, we could go together. They already said they’d buy our tickets, and it’ll be fun. Your parents will let you, right?”

Linh was asking her to come on a trip? Just the two of them?

Abby wanted to say yes right away, but everyone had climbed off the escalator by then, and they were all watching. She didn’t want to look desperate. “Um.” She reached for her phone. “Let me check my calendar.”

“I hope you can.” Linh had that overeager look she got sometimes when they talked about college. Uh-oh. Maybe this wasn’t about wanting to spend time alone with Abby after all. “It’s time you started visiting schools. I know Columbia’s your first choice, but you should probably come up with a list of ten or so, don’t you think?”

Abby unlocked her phone and did her best not to react. Sometimes Linh came on kind of strong when there was something she thought Abby should do. Still, any time with her was better than none. “Let’s see, it looks as though—okay, yeah, I guess I’m free the fourteenth.”

“Uh, Abby, your calendar isn’t even up.” Ben had come up out of nowhere and swiped Abby’s phone from her hand, glancing up at Linh with a smirk. “Also, just FYI, you two aren’t nearly as subtle as you think you are. You might as well—Hey, wait a second, what is that?”

Abby grabbed the phone back. Ben had somehow switched her phone screen to her collection of pulp book covers. She seized the chance to change the subject.

“It’s one of those bizarro novels,” she told Ben, pulling up the Satan Was a Lesbian cover and holding it out for them to see. “They were all like this.”

One by one, her friends started laughing as they got a look at it, exactly as Abby had expected.

“That can’t be real.” Ben squinted down. “It’s got to be Photoshop.”

“Nope! It was an actual book.” Satan Was a Lesbian was the weirdest cover, and title, Abby had found so far. It showed a woman in mom jeans brandishing a whip at another woman in lingerie while the titular Satan watched gleefully from above. “But in my book, I’m going to invert the usual boring gay tragedy story. My main characters will wind up getting sent to a mental hospital that they think will beat away their gay, but it’ll turn out to be this secret lesbian commune in Vermont, and they’ll live happily ever after and adopt a bunch of cats. Except it can’t be totally conflict-free, so I’m also going to have one of their queer friends die a really gruesome death. She’ll get decapitated by her girlfriend’s ex or something.”

“You should have her get killed by Satan himself.” Ben pantomimed stabbing someone. “ Herself , I mean. She can whack your protagonist with a magic Lesbian Satan death blade. Hey, the school’s calling you.”

He passed the buzzing phone back to Abby. The caller ID read Fawcett School. Weird. “Hello?”

“Hello, this is Ms. Jackson in the middle school office calling. I’m trying to reach Abby Zimet?”

“Yes, this is Abby.”

“Oh, good, I’m glad we found you. If you’re still on campus, could you come to the office, please?”

That was even weirder.

Something didn’t feel right about this, but there was no real reason to say no. Abby wasn’t exactly on campus, but she was only a block away. And at least this would get her out of having to go home and interact with whichever of her parents was in town today. “Uh, okay. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

Abby told her friends what was going on, and they all got ready to leave. Linh tried to catch her eye, but Abby pretended not to notice. Flirting was one thing, but she’d learned the hard way that it was best to stay quiet when it came to stuff that may or may not turn out to be actual problems.

Everyone split up and waved goodbye, tucking their signs under their arms. Abby tried to maneuver her sign without bending it. It said Women Deserve Health Care! If You Don’t Believe Me, Ask the Woman Who Gave Birth to You, and she wanted to save it for the next protest.

As she turned to start up Wisconsin, squinting in the bright sun, a groaning 96 bus rolled past her. Abby adjusted her backpack, took out her phone and pulled up the website she’d found.

She was already behind on her research for Ms. Sloane, so she’d Googled gayness in the fifties earlier that afternoon and landed on some ancient government report. It was a faded, scanned PDF, dated December 15, 1950, and titled Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government. Abby had put off reading it, since it didn’t exactly sound cheery, but now she picked a page at random and zoomed in.

There are no outward characteristics or physical traits that are positive as identifying marks of sex perversion.