Ex Astris

When our shift ends, Diana grabs our paychecks and asks if I’ve ever been high before. I haven’t, which only serves to encourage her more. She smiles wide and talks too loudly, asking if I brought my car to work and if my parents would care if I came home smelling like skunk. 

“Nah,” I shrug, “They don’t give a shit.”

“That’s what I like about you, Olive.”

“That my parents don’t care about me?” I ask, barely even pausing to unlock the car as she skips by me, “Or that I give you free rides?”

She manages to smile wider, wrestling her mane of loose, dark curls into a ponytail before hopping into the passenger’s side. Even though we do this every week, and her pot has yet to affect me, this routine remains the same. She gives directions like she’s trying to get us lost, giggling through tales of arson and heartbreak between lefts and rights. 

I indulge her. I always do. You see, where I am limited by death and fear and silly things like that, Diana has mastered the art of youth. 

She says that Diana is the name of the Roman goddess of the hunt, the moon, and wilderness. Sometimes, when the traffic is ugly enough, I can see all the ways that Diana and her godly namesake are similar. Most days, Diana is little more than a girl I met in seventh grade who spends her days drunk, high, or both.

She works the same shift as I do, at least on Saturdays. The rest of the week we spend on other sides of our Olympus. Her, with her pack of proud huntresses and smoke-filled woods, and me, lazily spinning a broken pen around my fingers to watch it splatter ink across my physics homework.

Those are the days that she is unrecognizable. She chokes out monsters with her bare hands, staining her favorite crop top with hydra guts and transphobe blood. All throughout our school there are stories about her and her huntresses, razing the concrete in search of our local chimeras and pedophiles.

But neither Diana, nor her huntresses are immortal. Not forever, at least. Two of them have been sent to rehab, five have mandatory school counselor meetings, and one is living in Diana’s basement. The rest juul in the back of their classes, waiting to kill more monsters.

After work, though, Diana is not a monster killer, goddess, or immortal. She’s the girl I met back in seventh grade who didn’t know who else to turn to. She tells me secrets in between smoke and stories, and I listen. I always listen.

I know we’re lost once she directs me past Wrigley Field a third time, insisting that she recognized Niobe’s tear-stained stone. She calls it a landmark, glancing towards me with an obsidian glint in her eyes. Despite what people say about me, I can read between the lines. She doesn’t do it often, but I know a threat when I see one.

I can leave whenever I want. You remain for the extent of your entertainment value. This isn’t love. I do not love. 

She doesn’t say it aloud, nor would I ever ask her to. Instead, I nod, unbothered, and answer just the way she likes, “Remind me the story of Niobe. I always confuse her and Actaeon.”

The darkness stays, but the violence leaves her stare as she regales me with tales of her bloodshed. With her focus turned towards her own wrath, I have time to find our bridge. This is an area of her woods that I find to be a sort of common ground between us, where we sit together peacefully without the discomfort of our unnatural coexistence.

She splays out on the dirt, propping her head up on my lap with a half-grin. We share her blunt beneath the bridge, noisy with the highway overhead, and she tries to teach me how to smoke right.

(Breathe in, hold it. Kinda force it down your throat and—no, not yet. Don’t let it go yet. Hold it until you can’t.)

It doesn’t work, it never does, but I indulge her once more. Every Sunday, I listen to the highway and keep my mind busy with questions of how we keep ending up here. Me, coughing out curses, and her, tracing my palm and trying to teach me how the Romans loved her namesake.

“Olly, do you believe in past lives?”

She’s high. That’s what I always have to remind myself before I answer. “Sure. Maybe.”

Diana arches up just enough to expose the scab that stretches from the center of her choker to the left sleeve of her white work tee. The rumors going around say that it’s from a knife fight, but last time I asked, she told me it was the byproduct of a nervous tic she couldn’t seem to shake. I’m not sure which answer is the more honest of the two.

“If you were a boy, I think I might’ve fallen for you,” she tells me, deep in thought.

I raise my eyebrows in amusement, waiting for her to elaborate. She turns and props herself up onto her knees so she can cradle my face between ash-soaked hands. Back pushed against the wall of a column, I let her. Just like I know that she could leave, she knows that I let her stay. That might be why she’s so insistent in reminding me. She traces my features with her stare, humming prayers that no god will ever hear.

“You could be Orion and I’d be Diana,” she says, releasing my face and holding the blunt for me to breathe in again.

I try, but just like last week, I end up hacking too hard for any of it to mean much of anything. “Orion, like the belt?”

“The constellation,” she corrects with a frown, shifting to sit cross-legged in front of me. “There’s a whole myth about him. How Diana never loved anyone except the hunter who could keep up with her and still… respect her and shit.”

“And that’s … me?” I asked dryly.

There’s a tense pause before her gaze flickers from the blunt back to me. I open my mouth to soften my tone, but she beats me to it with a sharp grin and a barked out laugh. “You put up with all of my shit.”

“I’m well aware, Di.”

“Yeah,” she laughs, her hand lifting to fidget nervously with her ponytail, “But you also see me while you’re doing it.”

“Oh, I can see you? What a ferocious hunter that makes me,” I drawl out, mostly just to hear her laugh again− and really, who wouldn’t? 

She’s the face that poets dream of and I’m mortal. It’s the fate of all mortals to love what they cannot have. It’s a realization that I’ve grown to accept. The fact that I don’t fit in with her sexual orientation is just icing on the cake, honestly. It’s all I can do to nod along, placating her frenzied mind despite the painful reality of our situation.

“Do you like me?” she asks, in between giggles.

“Sometimes,” I answer, “When you’re not making fun of me for coughing.”

She throws her head back in a thunderous laugh that would make her father proud. Leaning back, she takes a moment to calm down before she answers quietly, in a muted shade of awe. “I’ve never met someone like you before.”

I don’t know what to say to that, so I don’t say anything at all. I wonder if all crushes hurt this badly or if this isn’t a crush.
Noticing my struggle, she amends her statement playfully, “Someone so bad at smoking.”

The highway above us roars, drowning out any answers I could’ve come up with. All we can do is stare at one another, waiting for something to happen. Not that either of us know what we’re waiting for.

But this is how it always goes. We stand around, chasing a high that I’ll never grasp, and she tells me about love and mythology.
“I’ll drive you home,” I offer.

“The high might still kick in,” she counters.

I’m not sure if I’m disappointed or endeared by her. “I don’t think it will.”

The cars wail, mourning the goddess turned girl and her unpaid vices. They sing their dirges, watching the two of us attempt to keep up what little words are left.

Before I can insist on driving her home, she makes her move. She turns her head to the side dejectedly, letting the residual smoke foam across her jawline as she asks, “Next week?”

A beat of hesitation rings across the bridge as I do the math in my head, calculating how long I can keep this up before I’m little more than a ghost.

“How does Orion die?” I ask, before I’m done solving for the last variable.

Diana’s attention snaps back towards me. It’s awful and refreshing all at once, to have someone want to see me. 

“Depends on the storyteller,” she admits, “Some people think that Apollo, Diana’s brother, got too jealous of Diana giving Orion all her attention. Then, he tricked her into accidentally killing him.”

“Sounds like an asshole,” I joke weakly.

She cracks a half-smile, but somehow the mood remains tense. “Other people say that Gaea, the Earth goddess, heard Orion boasting about how he could kill any living being because he was such a good hunter. So, to protect her children, or some bullshit like that, she sent a scorpion to poison him.”

“What do you believe?” I ask, uncomfortably aware of the distance between us.

For the first time since I met Diana, sitting outside our school without a ride home and sobbing because if her parents find out they’re gonna kick her out and oh, fuck, what is she gonna do, she doesn’t have all the answers. She was lost and vulnerable and I was too young to know what to do about her tears, but I could listen. 

“I don’t know,” she whispers and, for a brief, awful second, I know what she means when she talks about past lives. She looks at me like she knows me and is powerless to fight that. “All I know is that, in every myth, Diana loses him. She makes him into a constellation to visit every night, but she still loses him.”

There’s nearly an entire minute of silence before I can answer back shakily, but sure of myself. “Well, thank God I’m not Orion.”
It takes two steps, one to muster up what little courage I have and another to pull her towards me.

As far as first kisses go, it could’ve gone better. She jerks away on instinct, but quickly pushes forward to meet me. I go in too strong and end up bumping our foreheads together in a way that I know she’ll complain about later. Somehow, through all the frenzied movement, she kisses me back, one hand gripping the back of my shirt and the other buried in my hair like she’s afraid I’m going to leave.

But I’m not Orion and she’s not a Roman goddess. We’re just two girls, one who needs to be heard and another who’s willing to listen.

I laugh against her lips and, even though she still looks a bit concerned, she laughs with me.

I’m not leaving. I try to tell her, without saying it aloud. You have me for as long as you want me.