intermission: spring break 2084, part 1

Flashback, Spring break, 2084 - their native dimension.

April and Beau are 21, Summer and Vicky are 20. 

April ran out first into the water, thigh deep, warm and lapping around her knees. The sky was clear and blue and hot, and they were on spring break.

They were in college and there was a war going on. There was a war going on, and they were treating themselves to passed midterms and a spring break vacation. Summer always told April she didn't think about things enough, she didn't pay attention to what was important in the world, politics and war and real things. April didn't want to. Real things were too scary. Real things were too scary even before the war started. And now nothing was right or normal, no matter how they framed it, so when Vicky suggested spring break, April knew it was just what they needed. Summer said it felt so trivial. Maybe it did, after everything. But Vicky had rich and guilt-ridden parents, and they were paying for the trip -- even Summer's ticket -- so who would decline?

You had to let go of the past. You had to keep your spirits up and move forward. April didn't know much, but she knew that was the only way to survive.

Behind her, they were asking each other, should they swim before drinking or drink before swimming? Anyone would guess they were just the average, ordinary spring breakers. Maybe they were. Maybe all along, what they never knew was that everyone was fucked up and sad and disappointed and clueless in their own way. That was what it meant to be a grown-up.

"Swim before drinking," Beau insisted. "It's safer."

April had her clothes off in a flash, tossed them onto the beach and raced them out into the water. Beau coming up along side her.

"Last one to the buoy is a rotten egg," Beau said, splashing up along side her, all six-foot-three of legs and arms.

"It's not fair," April said. "He's taller."

"Everybody's taller than you," Summer said.

---

Then they had their drinks after swimming, just before they started to sunburn. Beau and Summer pounded a couple shots and called dibs on the pool table. Vicky and April sipped their cocktails at the bar. "Oooh, he's lovely," April said, noticing a cute young man with dark hair and blue eyes. "You should go talk to him."

"Why should I go talk to him, he's smiling at you?"

"We'll talk to him together then."

"Hi," Vicky said. "What's your name?"

"You have nice eyes," April said.

"Do you dance?" Vicky asked him.

"Where are you from?"

"What's your star sign?"

The boy seemed startled at first, but quickly eased into the attention. There was an old jukebox in the corner playing random songs, nothing they really knew how to dance to, but that didn't mean they couldn't try. He danced with them both, one on his hip, the other under his arm. 

"You girls are both so pretty," he cooed in their ears.

Vicky was drunk, because it didn't take much to get Vicky drunk, but as much as April had been avoiding the party scene in the past few months, she wasn't quite there yet. Tipsy, just barely -- that pesky hard edge was nice and fuzzy -- but she was not drunk.

And so she recognized the situation for exactly what it was, and exactly where this was going. How many of these kind of guys had she hooked up with before? How did it always end? In some bathroom? In the back seat of a car? On a couch in a strange living room? On a floor? In a closet? In an alley where some poor homeless person was trying to get a good night's sleep?

April whispered, "I don't think he's your type, Vick." But Vicky was lost to the world, in his dreamy blue eyes, perhaps.

"Vicky, sweets, I have to tell you a secret." April pulled her aside and he stood by while April leaned to Vicky's ear. She had no clue, so April had to break the news. "He wants to have a threesome."

Vicky was scandalized. In a funny way.

But after Vicky stopped laughing, she didn't walk away, which might have been a testament to April's influence on her lately. The "old Vicky" would have ran for the hills. But this Vicky kept talking to him, moving in closer to dance again.

Yes, she was very drunk. And it wasn't that April didn't find Vicky beautiful, or that she hadn't done this exactly thing a million times for Max, or that she didn't like girls, or threesomes, or anything like that. She was just... different. Things were different now. She promised things would be different. April wondered if maybe this guy wasn't her type anymore.

"You guys have fun," she said, and turned to see what Beau and Summer were doing.

She found Beau and Summer playing pool, three shots down and Beau was winning. April loved how she fit perfectly under his arm, and she loved how when she slotted herself there, his hand gravitated to the small of her back, like was taking her in. So safe and warm.

"I'm winning," he said.

"He cheats!" Summer called out from the other side of the table.

April wanted to swim some more, Summer wanted to drink, and Vicky was preoccupied with her new friend, and Beau didn't really care what they did one way or another. So April pulled Beau back out to the beach again.

She stepped out to knee level when Beau came bombing past her into the water, dragging her deeper by the hand. 

She could swim now, wear tampons, have sex. It had been long enough. Plenty long enough. She only needed to wait four weeks, and it had been four months. There was no risk of infection now. She'd started her cycle again just like she was supposed to. Everything was fine. She felt fine. And yet she felt different, nervous, and fickle. At some point, she had to have sex again. She wasn't going to become a nun. Without the flirting, and the kissing, and the partying, who was she? She was fun, and flirty, and wild, and carefree. Who was "April" if not all of that?

She dug her fingers into the band of Beau's swim trunks. "Are you taking these off?"

"No way," he said and furrowed his brow in that old and stuffy way that made him look thirty-five and not twenty-one. No, they weren't teenagers anymore, but she was already bent over in the water pulling down her bottoms. "Put these in your pocket then." She untied the laces on her top and threw it at his head. Then she swam away.

He called out, "What if I don't give them back?"

"Then I'll have to come get them then, won't I?"

She swam out first this time, doggy-paddling as fast as her little arms would take her. She didn't care about the bathing suit. The water felt smooth and cold gliding over her skin. She felt free, like she could be anything and anyone she wanted to be. She could be different and the same all at once.

A few minutes later he swam out, and threw his trunks at her head.

"Where did you put mine?"

"In the pocket of mine," he said, wrapping his hands around her waist.

"And where is yours now?"

"I don't know, down there, somewhere."

Four years ago, this was almost exactly how she helped him lose his virginity. They'd been together hundreds of times since then, on and off, in good times and bad, in between girlfriends and fights and other assorted disasters. He kissed her shoulder first, pulling himself closer to kiss her neck. She wanted to. She could have. She was allowed. She turned herself around to kiss him back. The kissing was so easy. But then she remembered the look on his face when she came out of the clinic, flushed white and feeling her legs weak as paper. She wasn't even sure she could walk herself to the car. So he reached his strong arms around her and she felt weightless. But in his eyes that day, he was so sad, and scared, and tired. And she wasn't sure if he was saving her, or if she was killing him.

She stopped kissing. "Wait. I haven't actually... I haven't done this since..."

"Oh," he said. "Really?"

"Geeze," she squealed at him, launching herself backwards in the water, her face bobbing under the surface and swallowing some water. She hadn't realized he'd been holding her up. He tried to take hold of her again but she paddled away from him to the shallower water. She shouted at him, "You fool! Haven't you been with me like, constantly? When would I have done it? And with who?"

He shrugged. "I dunno, you always found a way before."

She couldn't believe he said that. But mostly she couldn't believe it was true. "Give me my suit back."

"April, I didn't mean it like that. There was a guy, a couple weeks ago, at the bar. I just assumed..."

"That was kissing, not fucking. I didn't even let him feel me up. Give me my suit back."

She reached for his suit, but he held it back from her. "Wait, talk to me," he said. "I mean I hoped you wouldn't, but I didn't know. I didn't mean to say it like that."

"But you thought it like that?"

He didn't say no. And that he couldn't say no broke her heart. She told him things were going to be different now, and he didn't believe her. She didn't know who she was supposed to be now, or what she was supposed to do, but she had kept her promise. "Fine, don't give me my suit back then."

She turned around and started for the beach, stark naked, bare butt shining in the moonlight. She pulled up a sandy towel from the beach, wrapped it around herself and walked up the beach alone.

---

notes: FYI, some of these flashback scenes to their LH-dimension lives are actually taken as-is from my working drafts of the Lakeside Heights books. This spring break trip would have happened a few months after the LH blog stories ended. ;)