Riley can almost remember when she knew she couldn’t get out of this alive. She is sitting under a single lamp, hours after lights out in a dorm she despises, freezing her miserable ass off and crying over a laptop. And she is remembering. Staring at pictures that burn like the sun, her and a blonde stranger and a ghost boy. There are others, too, the girl-bot and smooth talking boy wonder, but they are not important here. They, and camera boy, still call, still look at her with pity on Friday nights. Camera boy keeps making sure she’s showered. Boy wonder pleads with her to call her mother. To call her blonde stranger, her blonde sun. The memories hurt too much to look at, so she cries over homework she never finishes. But tonight she is tired and it has been exactly 4 months and she is sad, dammit. So she is sitting in the cold, and the world she once owned is coming to her in pieces, in snapshot pictures.
She thinks it began with skiing, but no, it began with subway systems, didn’t it? Or was it apples and drowning? Maybe it began when the universe did, exploding into existence and destiny with white hot intensity. She does know that she first saw it in eighth grade, when she wasn’t a chump for a minute. It first worried her when ghost boy tried to give her forever and a jelly bean and she didn’t care. But she first knew that she wouldn’t survive the fallout of whatever it was at graduation.
The blonde stranger was still Maya, and the ghost boy was still Lucas. They all still had names back then, in the shining light of possibility. Maya is in a stunning red dress under her robe and Riley wants to kiss her more than she wants to breathe so she kisses Lucas and pretends he is not too large and calloused. But then he is gone, on a boys night with Farkle and Zay, and Isadora is attending a meeting for a fellowship grant for something Riley does not understand and it is RileyandMaya for the first time in months. Riley is desperate for contact so she is bumping and brushing and hugging and Maya is all cheek kisses and sweet eyes. And then they are in Riley’s room and Maya thinks it is too hot so she is dancing in her underwear and Riley is trying not to explode.
Riley does not explode but she does trace Maya’s sleeping face in the moonlight later, down to her pale collar bone, where it dips like the fountain of youth, never ending and coveted. She knows by the way Maya sighs in her sleep that Riley is royally screwed. She will burn, or drown, or whatever Icarus metaphor works best here, and she won’t make it out alive. That this will be the longest summer of her young, stupid, naive life.
She is 100% right. It is one of the longest, hottest summers on record and she is too hot and too confused that the only thoughts she can form are memories, even then. She wears her father's red Phillies cap nearly everyday, they read Catcher In The Rye as their final book of high school and she's thinking of middle school innocence again. She aches for it, and so digs up her father's red hat again. She's always been one for bitter irony.
They spend all their time together, the six of them. Maya declares it their last chance to be together, the last time to find out how they really feel. Riley thinks Maya might look at her for a second too long when she declares this, but it is only wishful thinking, only the world's most dangerous pipe dream. They get ice cream and coffee, they go on weekend beach trips and drive up the coast to get out of the city in the beat up van Farkle bought. It smells like feet and fast food and it’s Riley’s third favorite place in the world. The only problem with these days is Lucas, who would prefer to spend their last summer of friendship and freedom in a dark movie theater alone, or in a darkened bedroom alone, or alone anywhere he can get her. He wants them to be ‘progressing normally in their relationship’, but Riley still feels like a 13 year old, quiet and scared when he drapes himself over her so she sits shotgun in the van while he pouts in the back, and tries not to cower at how much she feels what she thinks is love but feels like fear consumes her when she thinks about loving him forever.
She loves him still and he is safe still and all of what they are has been stagnant since freshman year and she tries to pretend she likes the expectations and the way she cannot change. But his arm around her shoulders feels more and more like the weight of a world she can't carry so she shrugs it off quickly, and claims she saw a wasp. She pretends not to notice the disappointment in his eyes when she let's Maya's arm stay for nearly an hour.
Maya’s touch aches like golden sun, heavy and pure, being sullied by its proximity to imperfections. It is constant, always a brush or a tug or a stroke, but it is never enough, always just a brush or tug or stroke, gone in a second, bouncing to the next brightest moon. The next closest orbit. She fawns over Isadora when she finds shells on the shore and launches into Wikipedia article style explanations of their origins. Touches Zay on the arm or the shoulder when he tells tall tales of summers long past, when Lucas would swoop in from horseback lessons to save Zay from pool fights, just in time. Every time. She rode piggyback down the beach on Lucas, giggling and trying to tip them over. She piled on Farkle if she felt he was going to get burned if he stayed in the sun a moment longer. Riley thinks Maya may be in love with every one of them but her. Hindsight has never proved her wrong.
Riley refers to the Palisades as Oh, Shit. Mostly because that was what she woke up saying every night for nearly a month. She blames Farkle, and that damn van that actually made it there under constant threat of engine failure. Or the Polaroid she got from Shawn. Maybe she blames Lucas’s grandfather for coming into town and keeping him from the trip. Or the fact that there was only a two person tent, and of course it was RileyandMaya, while the others slept peacefully in the van. Maybe she could blame the strange relationship that had become of the other three, Zay somehow incorporating himself into Farkle and Izzy until they were caught all kissing in the back of Farkle’s van in June. They are strange and happy and perfect, somehow. But Riley cannot use them as a buffer while they are so busy swimming the galaxies that are their emotions.
So, she goes swimming. She wears her purple swimsuit and floats on her back, trying to calm the discordant cacophony of Maya in her head. A thousand of layers of her voice, telling Riley that she was loved, and important, and desired. Hours of the world’s most soothing laugh track lived just inside Riley’s skull. She is so caught in this world she’s created where she can kiss girls freely she does not hear the approaching footsteps until Maya jumps on her, sending them both underwater, whirling through a breathless world of dancing light and impossible softness. These moments of choking make Riley realize, with sharp, cold clarity, that she has been underwater since she was six. She has been drowning in dappled sunlight and pillows and soft, sweet blonde for years, and she will not catch her breath.
They come back up for air and Maya is laughing, laughing, laughing. She is a pealing bell, and for a moment she sounds like religion, dragging Riley toward the rocky shoreline. Riley still can’t breathe can’t breathe can’t breathe, so she pulls away and keeps swimming for a bit, relishing at the name she can give to the burn in her lungs. A name, for the first time in years, that isn’t Maya Hart Maya Heart my heart. She burns in the cool water until Maya shrieks from the shore. Fear courses through Riley like electricity, her whole being crackles as she races toward rocks and the screaming, Maya’s screaming. The white in her head clears when she sees Maya, leaned over the edge of the water muttering an incoherent string of swear words under her breath. There are 7 large, red welts on her arm and an angry buzzing in Riley’s ears. It takes a moment to realize this is not her fear, but wasps. They hover for a moment, suspended in time and completely still, before they break into a sprint.
They are back at the campsite before the wasps know what hit them, laughing hysterically at their own escape. There are pine needles in her hair and a cut on her arm, but Riley can’t be fucked to care at the moment. The adrenaline is still coursing through her and it is almost enough to blurt the word vomit about love she has been building for eons. But her brain reminds her she does not know life without the ache, it is her security blanket. She is too afraid again, so she steadies her breathing and goes to look at Maya.
Riley meant to check her wounds and laugh at Maya's ability to aggravate even Mother Nature, but Maya's hair is a curtain of dirty blonde in her face and she is is a bikini that matches her eyes and there are rivulets of water all over her and Riley's hand is on her back not her shoulder and she is kissing Maya with no memory of getting there but Maya is kissing back and Riley never wants to stop.
In her mind this moment is always in slow motion. It is a movie moment, the initial incident and climax all at once. Maya becomes the blonde stranger in this moment, switching from one name to the other with the ease of blinking. Riley remembers it in an earnest, begging way. She is always trying to rewrite it, but her heart refuses to loosen its vice grip on the truth, her own being keeping her in a puddle of pain. It plays out like this, every time. One breath of purity and her own voice yelling not to do it from an unseen pocket of terror.
Maya wants Riley to leave him but he is her Prince Charming, and there are no fairy tales with two princesses. Riley is young, and dumb, but most of all she is afraid and everything is changing. The world closes in on her and the sun leaves with Maya, shaking it's head at her. It rains for months, she feels like. It rains and there is no Maya and soon no Lucas and she is alone in a cold dorm room with another damn wasp, trying to write and feeling tears freeze on her cheeks.
Everything else after is a blur, a fastforwarding of the drive back and the weeks of shutout. A yelled conversation with herself, burning red desperation and anger, mascara and lake water clinging the stupid red hat and every other item that stranger had ever left, scattered like the polaroids and Riley’s thoughts. In the story where everyone loses their name, Riley is the shell. She is the echo of that fight, the last time she heard that voice, less song than siren, warning cry to stop all this change. This exactly what comes to little girls who break script. Yelling, screaming, losing what she loves most. Those words, hate and fear.
If she had it to do over now, she would have never stopped kissing Maya. She never would have loved Lucas, as perfect as he was. She wouldn’t have gone to those damn woods, or worn that hat. She would have loved Maya properly from day one, she would have never let go. She would run an extinction on every wasp in the universe. She would have never allowed Icarus so close to the sun, she would have put two women in Eden. She would have built every statue in the world in Maya’s image. She would have been the artist. She would have gone to Topanga Canyon with May. Anything to be happy.
Riley’s pity party is broken by the knock on the door. For a moment she thinks it is the wasp, come to claim her at last, but it has not moved and cannot knock, you asshole, it’s a bug. It’s probably camera boy, making sure she has not yet died from liver failure or pure sadness. She opens the door, and has to adjust where her eyes settle, instead of a tall, thin frame there is something smaller and blonder. Something soaked and huddled, a cold fall rain giving them the appearance of a girl emerging from water, dripping. The blonde stranger lifts her head, and switches roles in a millisecond. Maya. Her Maya. Riley thanks whatever god heard her and pulls the sun back into her life. It rises on Maya at 5:30 that morning, turning her gold. Riley hears the collective sigh of every single wasp’s dying breath, and touches Maya’s shoulder.