General Chemistry Ii

List of Characters

Jack: Our point of view. Smart, corny, neurotic, Jack has few friends at school outside of his study group. White. Lifeguards in the summer and has a big dick.

Pri: Jack's ex(?). Brilliant and reserved, she plays varsity soccer with her best friend Liv. Indian-American. Short and athletic with ass for days, darkly tanned with thick black hair.

Liv: Pri's best friend and Jack's study buddy. Funny and dynamic, she plays varsity soccer and does what she feels. Jewish. Tall with a heart-shaped face. She has a deep tan, small breasts, and sprinter's legs.

Marco: Liv's boyfriend and long-time friend. Charming and almost offensively handsome, he teaches tennis and studies literature. Colombian-American. He's fashionable, with a lean, muscular body.

Sylvie: Liv's long-time frenemy and Marco's ex. Grim and sarcastic, she's pre-law at NYU. Pale, Jewish, and tiny, with a cute face and a bull ring septum piercing.

Kay: Sylvie's friend from NYU. Laconic and up for anything, they study film and play volleyball. White and non-binary, they're over six foot and covered with tattoos. Bleached pixie cut and dark eyelids.

Grace: Liv's friend from college. Perky and energetic, she's All-State softball and loves to party. Chinese-American. She's muscular but feminine, with thick legs, big breasts, and fun tattoos.

~

Kay leapt to meet the volleyball, their raised hand momentarily blocking the sun. The light formed a halo around their long, lanky body, and they looked every bit like a valkyrie descending to land the killing blow on some peasant Briton. They grunted as their palm smashed the ball, rocketing it into the sand beside me.

It didn't kill me, but it was close.

"You win," said Yara with a tired wave. She was, apparently, one of our new Dutch friends.

"Yo, that's sixteen," said Liv. "It's to twenty-one."

"No, that is too much." Yara looked at us, her teammates, for argument. We didn't offer any. She was angular and lean, with a blonde undercut and a serious mouth. "On behalf of my team, we surrender."

I hunched over and wiped my face into my shirt, taking some space from the others. They laughed and congratulated each other, reaching under the net for handshakes and low fives. The past week's heat had finally abated to something almost pleasant. The sand was soft, the sky was clear, and the beach was crowded. Physically, I was a bit winded. Psychically, I was total shit.

The other Dutch girl, Isa, made a silly, worshipful bow towards Kay. "She is too powerful. I look at the tattoos and I think we should have known." With her thick accent, the word "think" came out

tink

.

"They're non-binary," I said without thinking. A little louder I said, "Kay is non-binary, so say 'they' instead."

"Ah ha!" Marco hooted. "We finally broke him! Another cis white for the coalition. That's a two-vote swing, baby."

Liv laughed and clapped while Kay just shrugged.

"Ah, we don't have this in Nederland," said Simon, the last of the Dutch. The sturdy, sunburnt boy had scooped up the ball and was hugging it to his chest. He was Isa's boyfriend and not, I realized, her brother.

Isa gave him a dirty look and said some choice words in their language. "

No

," she clarified. "Of course we have it. This stupid boy is from the forest. He doesn't know anything."

Simon made a face and raised his hands, as if it meant nothing to him in the end.

We were all of us playing except for Sylvie. She was slouched in her folding chair, reading a book beneath a floppy sun hat, ignoring us.

We'd bumped into the Dutch in the parking lot and Liv had attached to them quickly. So quickly, in fact, that I'd worried we were stalking them until I found out we'd been invited along. It seemed like Liv had been waiting for them, or someone like them, to shake things up. Maybe it was because they knew English, or because they were the same age, or maybe it was just the fact that they were tall and attractive. Maybe Liv was on the hunt.

As the volleyball game dispersed, I thought that maybe she'd bitten off more than she could chew. There was a subtle scramble, the two teams intermingling, and when the obviously queer Yara approached Kay with a smile and a dirty joke, Kay smiled back. Liv closed quickly in defense. I'd known that Liv had become infatuated with Kay but when a rival entered the frame it became painfully obvious. Both girls crowded the volleyball star, dangling off Kay's arms like desperate ladies-in-waiting.

Marco watched Liv grimly, whether out of second-hand embarrassment for his girlfriend or something more, I didn't know

.

He looked like he was about to do something about it when Pri hip-checked him. Her energy had been weird all afternoon, almost bubbly, shouting and rump-slapping the entire match.

Grace sidled up to join them and immediately clocked what I had seen from a distance: Pri was flirting outrageously. She'd grabbed Marco's forearm, laughing too hard at a joke, and made ditzy, pouty faces when he flirted back. If she'd batted her eyelashes any harder I'd have thought she was having a seizure. Grace nodded along to the madness with a pinched smile.

At the opposite end of the net, Isa and Simon had stepped aside. In the way that Spanish was flowy and dramatic, Dutch was bouncy and almost fun, and it took me a moment to realize they were still arguing. They'd angled themselves away from the group, though that didn't do much to hide their body language.

When I glanced back, Grace was already making her escape. She joined me at the edge of the scrum and mimed an anime-style sweat drop down the side of her face. Her t-shirt was soaked and clinging to her body. On the front was Goku flying on his little cloud thing.

"Before you start," I said. "I don't know what's up with Pri. Smooth exit though."

She made a sliding motion with his hand. "That's me: fucking smooth." We watched the others milling about. "Yeah, but it's not just her. Liv is like a total simp right now."

"Well, Kay seems to be handling it, if 'handling it' is being an enby hoe-slaying pimp I mean." We both laughed at that. I hesitated. "I feel like we haven't talked in a bit. How are you doing?"

"Goood," she said. "Sweaty."

"I mean like... how are you feeling? You haven't said anything."

"About the thing?"

"About the thing."

The thing was, of course, the big reveal: Liv and Marco, Pri and I, fucking each other round-robin style for months. The word of the day was polyamory. Grace considered me for a moment.

"I would have said it was none of my business, but after what happened... You know, it's like we were all playing a game, except ya'll had secret rules the rest of us didn't know about. Mean, kinda nasty rules. I don't feel, like,

betrayed

, but it feels shitty."

"I'm sorry," I said. "I should have said that before. I'm sorry. It's been eating me up."

"Yeah, obviously. Your face is like a dog taking a shit." She pushed a sticky strand of hair off her cheek. "Sorry, that's one of my dad's weird sayings. It sounds better in Chinese. Everything's just kinda weird now. I'm thinking about moving my flight up either way."

She was leaving.

My stomach felt like a brick. I didn't realize how tightly I'd been holding on to the idea of Grace. Ten little daydreams a day where yes, Pri dumped me, but I found this beautiful girl at the same time, that I didn't actually have to feel sadness or loss because I'd already moved on.

"Whoa." She patted me on the back. "You gotta chill out, dude. I'm watching ulcers form in real time."

Despite everything, I laughed.

"Okay, enough holding your dicks!" yelled Liv, cutting through the noise. She pulled her sweaty t-shirt over her head. As usual, she wasn't wearing a suit top, and her little tits wobbled as she threw the shirt towards our stuff. "Everybody in the ocean!"

A silly cheer went up, and the group began to strip down to their suits. Hair was tied into ponytails and khaki bottoms were flung.

"What's up, Jacky?" yelled Liv, waving wildly. "Get your ass in the water."

"I don't feel so good." I worked my mouth, searching for an excuse. "Probably just... hungry."

Grace had already ditched our awkward conversation and spun back towards me in mid-stride. "Oh, I'm hungry too!" she yelled, backpedaling in the sand, thighs shiny with sweat. "Get me something wherever you go!"

The others yelled out similar requests, not even bothering to look back as they ran for the waves.

"I saw a good place for pizza!" shouted Pri at their retreating backs. She'd already gotten her phone from the bags. Sylvie pulled her hat lower, looking conspicuously annoyed at all the yelling. "Pizza? Pizza okay?"

Liv double pointed at the two of us. "Sure, whatever! You're the best!"

Pri and I looked at each other for a moment, then she smiled and hooked her thumb towards the boardwalk. "Saddle up, cowboy." She turned to Sylvie.

"No," said the sour girl in the sun hat.

~

The walk was weird from the start. In spite of her earlier energy, Pri didn't seem to have much to say. Hands in the pockets of her shorts, she watched the crowds go by, humming a nameless tune to herself. Occasionally, she'd give me a smile and knowing glance, as though we had both witnessed some little slice of life worth remembering. We took a moment to shake out our flip-flops before the boardwalk began.

"My dad asked about you," I said. I'd never thought of my dad as all that perceptive but he'd caught her name out of the ether somehow. Hell, that was weeks ago.

"Did he really? That's cute. I hope he's doing better."

I shrugged and nodded, not wanting to get into it.

She leapt messily onto the sidewalk, filling her flip-flops with more sand than she'd just removed. She didn't seem to care. "Astha asked about you."

"Astha asked about me?"

"Echo..." She laughed as she started ahead. "Yeah. I said--Well, I avoided the question actually."

"Your sister knows about me?"

Pri had always been a fast walker and I shuffled to catch up. The boardwalk was packed with people: barefoot kids screaming, families huddled around trash cans eating ice cream, some teenagers playing German rap from a shitty speaker. A crepe vendor shouted gleefully at us from behind a two-wheeled cart, mostly at Pri. She smiled and waved at him.

No one was supposed to know about the white boyfriend. Or ex-boyfriend. I'd never met Astha, and though Pri had said she was a good sister, she'd also said she was a good daughter. If Pri's parents had found out about me I couldn't even imagine the fallout.

"She doesn't

really

know," said Pri when I finally caught up. Something about my face made her laugh, and she gave me a look like

Are you nuts?

"But she made some pretty spooky guesses. Not sure that matters any more."

"Why would that not matter?" All this tension, all these weeks of misery and weirdness, and the secret was closer to coming out than I'd ever realized. "After all this--" I gestured between the two of us, not really sure what to call it. "--you don't think it matters if Astha knows?"

She rolled her head around, her neck popping and cracking noisily. "I guess I just don't really give a shit today." She laughed again.

"Are you high or something?"

"Uh... yeah, maybe. You got me!" She leaned in and whispered, "

I have Sylvie's vape

. She left it on the table after the big blow up and I just... haven't got around to returning it."

"I was kidding," I said. I could count on one hand the times Pri had smoked weed. "Pri, you don't think you're acting pretty fucking weird?"

"Oh, come on. We're on vacation. I can't get high on

vacation

now?"

"That's not really what I mean--"

"Don't worry," she said, like it was some kind of wisdom. "Be happy. Have fun. Like, how was Sylvie? You didn't actually

do it

, did you? I feel like she'd be really rough." She clawed at the air like a tiger.

A line of tourists on rented bicycles came at us, ringing their bells. For a few seconds Pri and I were split apart, the cyclists dividing us like a school of fish. She looked at me expectantly when we came back together.

"C'mon, it's me." She bumped me with her shoulder. "You're really not gonna tell me?"

"I'm not, no."

For a fraction of a second she almost looked angry, then it faded. "Fine, be honorable or whatever. I guess I should appreciate that. You must not have done a very good job though. She's still being all Sally Solitude."

I just walked, jaw set. There were too many people around, too much noise, too much to take in.

"Don't be such a moper, oh my god." She rolled her eyes. "I never knew you took sex this seriously."

"I shouldn't have done that," I said. "This whole thing is getting out of hand. We need to stop, I dunno--"

"Wow, don't be such a hypocrite."

"What the fuck? How am I being a hypocrite?"

"How are you a hypocrite? What the f--!" She caught herself yelling and glanced around, annoyed. "The place is over here, by the way." The pizza shop was half a block from the boardwalk, a neon sign hanging. Softer, but with no less steel behind it, she went on. "You're really gonna have sex with Sylvie, with Liv, with

me

even though we're on break--

Don't

say a word about what a 'break' is. I'm not in the mood for your pedantics.

"You're gonna fool around with everybody... you're going to jerk off in front of us and sex shaman people and mope around in the most obvious bid for attention ever, but when I get a little loose, not even

doing anything

, I'm just smoking weed, and suddenly 'we've gone too far! What about our morals!' That's so selfish and honestly super fucking annoying. And, you know what else?"

Looking flustered, she cut off the thought. She held up a palm at me, like

Sit, stay

, and went inside the shop.

For a minute, a very real minute, I stewed. Sixty seconds, more or less, is a long time to stand in silence after you've been verbally torn in half. I thought I'd been putting on a good face for everyone but, looking back, it was a frail attempt. One word answers. Endless shrugging. Staring pensively out at the ocean. I was acting like Sylvie.

Pri came out of the shop looking calmer. She walked straight up to me, pulled my face down with both hands, and kissed me. It was brief, nothing special by our standards, but it was nice.

"I like you," she said. "I care about you. But you're being a little bitch right now."

"But your sister knows about us--"

"Shut up," she said. I did. "You're the one who said that this place is a fantasy. It's not real, right? You don't want to face whatever is going on between us, fine, but it goes both ways. I need this. No, I

want

this, and I'm sick of being told that 'wanting something' is not a good enough reason to get it."

"What is 'this?' I don't even know what you're talking about."

"

Whatever I want

, Jack. I'm literally going to do whatever I want. Like this." She fished Sylvie's weed pen out of a shallow khaki pocket and took a hit, blowing the vapor into the air dramatically. I gave an apologetic look to a dad walking by with his kids. "I'm probably gonna drink too much and eat too much. I'm not gonna stretch

at all

. I'm gonna screw Marco. I'm gonna do whatever I want. That okay with you? Do I need to run my plans by my big, strong man so I don't hurt myself?"

"No."

"Okay. You got anything you want to say?"

"No."

"Great." She looked over her shoulder. "Damn, that was fast."

Quickly inside, then out again, she stuck all four pizza boxes in my hands before taking off. I felt like a kid falling behind his mom at the mall. Between the boxes and the sun, I started sweating like a pig. We stopped at a mini market for water bottles and a brief blast of air conditioning, then again at some clothing racks outside a boutique. I rested the boxes on a windowsill and watched her thumb through dresses.

"What do you think of Grace?" she asked. She pulled a dress out before I could answer. "This is cute. Oh, not for a hundred euros though..."

"Uh, she's nice."

"Mhm," she said, waiting for more.

"What do you want to know? I didn't know her that well at school. She's more... thoughtful than I realized. And she's fun, but I knew that."

Pri pulled another dress, blue with white flowers, and held it over herself. With her other hand, she pulled her ponytail up into a pile. "You like the way she does her hair? I never do it like that."

I realized, in my dim sort of way, that she was mimicking Grace from a few days ago, from the night we got drunk and naked in Liv's room. The dress was almost identical, and although Pri's was curly where Grace's was straight, the pinned up hair was the same.

"I guess I like yours down, but maybe I'm just used to it that way..."

"Yeah, it's good to try new things though." She put the dress back with a clang. "She likes you, you know. And not just your pleasing personality. Do you like her?"

"What are you doing?"

"Sorry, I can be done here. I can't really afford any of this stuff."

Whatever else I might have said I pushed it down, not wanting to stumble into the emotional fog of war.

I knew Liv wouldn't have come up with the offer-Jack's-body-to-Sylvie thing alone. Pri was behind it, Pri who loved to play the matchmaker, who loved the idea of the sex shaman. Lending me to Syl was an outlier. I didn't believe that Pri really saw her as an issue. As a threat.

Grace, on the other hand, was actually interested in me, and I was interested in her. She was beautiful, and in all the ways that Pri was difficult, Grace was easy. Pri was practically throwing the girl at me. Even though she couldn't have been more casual about it, I couldn't shake the feeling that she was trying to resolve the problem of our relationship. Like she was trying to blow things up. Like she was trying to replace herself, to use a switcheroo and make her escape.

Saying that to her now would be like stomping a landmine, convinced you were fast enough to outrun the blast.

"The pizzas are making me sweaty," I said.

"Oh, sorry. Let's get out of here."

~

"I don't know, man." Grace puffed out her cheeks. "Just give me Entertainment again."

I offered the card to Pri but she shook her head. I cleared my throat and read. "What George Harrison song sounded too much like

He's So Fine

by the Chiffons?"

"Oh, fuck off," said Grace. "Who?"

"You don't know George Harrison?" asked Marco.

"He was in the Beatles, I'm not dumb. But

He's Fine

...?"

"

He's So Fine

," I said. "The Chiffons."

"Fuck that. Pass."

The birthday group was arrayed on the back patio, enjoying the ocean view but not enjoying the absolutely ancient edition of Trivial Pursuit in front of us. We'd pulled the outdoor furniture into a rough circle, the late-afternoon breeze rippling the potted ferns and tousling our hair. Sodas, snacks, and discarded game pieces littered the glass table. Marco, hunched over like a grooming ape, steadily picked the pretzels out of the bar mix. Liv had disappeared at some point, not that she was missing much.

"Okay, who's up?"

"Me," I said. "History. I guess."

Grace plucked a card from the box and, pulling her v-neck a little lower, fanned her chest. She'd taken some time to tan this morning and, despite our warnings, caught a bit too much sun. A bra was too painful for her and the shirt clung to her sizable, sunburnt breasts. They were gorgeous, full, round tits, hanging low from their weight, her nipples very faintly outlined. I looked up, hoping no one noticed my staring.

"How did Lawrence of Arabia die?" she asked.

"Er, I said History?"