1.6k modern fantasy short story. Originally written in 2018.

Sidney does not so much walk out of her last final as let the crowd bear her along. The auditorium empties step by step, incrementally, and she feels like putting her knees up and collapsing on the person behind her so their weight carries her forward. She almost could—she’s immersed in a sea of elbows and backpacks, of unwashed hoodies sprayed with cologne and unwashed hair twisted and into high buns.

There are only three sets of stairs for hundreds of times that many students and it’s good, isn’t it, that there are so many leaving with the buzzer? That almost no one finished early? Each step is a plateau that takes an eternity to cross, and after all those eternities she can have lunch and a nap. She can spend two days thinking of nothing but her soft body and the rest it’s due, and maybe that will clear her head and turn her back into a normal person.

The doors at the top of the stairs open into the lecture hall’s basement. The buzzing fluorescent lights ahead are nothing like daylight, but they’re so much brighter than the auditorium that she can pretend. The crowd shuffles and murmurs, faces upturned, and Sidney thinks of moths drawn to light. Then she thinks of DNA fragments tenuously drawn to positive electrodes across gel too viscous to squeeze through.

That was what she got wrong on her practical yesterday. She screwed up the calculations and used way too much agarose powder and too little buffer. Her matrix turned out more like solid concrete. When she ran her electrophoresis despite that, her results were five lanes of two tiny bands of tinier fragments and a cloudy mess.

Then, to cap it off, she spilled ethidium bromide on her wrist. She resents that she’s too drained from panicking over her grades coming out in a few days to panic about the possibility of cancer in a few decades. Is it justifiable that her priorities are this twisted, or is that yet another failure on her part?

She crosses the threshold into the hall. The ceiling expands overhead, but the crowd’s so tight and the air so stagnant that she could close her eyes and be back on the stairs. Ten yards of relative freedom and then she and seemingly half the crowd press into the woman’s restroom. It’s not even one of the clean ones, it’s the dingy basement bathroom that smells like old piss and mold, but everyone here who isn’t dehydrated is hopped up on caffeine and nerves.

Sidney pulls out her phone four times to reaffirm that she’s not getting any signal as the line crawls. She waits. She lets eight other girls pass her. She waits some more. She washes her hands and face, reapplies moisturizer and foundation and concealer for the bags under her eyes. She waits, and waits, until the crowd thins to a trickle. Until two stalls open up at once, then three. It’s been almost thirty minutes since her exam ended. Fifteen to go. Her phone’s clock works without any kind of network connection, right? Time seems fake. She still hasn’t seen the sun today.

Empty, the bathroom seems cavernous. Sidney sprays perfume that smells like fresh linen on her neck and hair, and then also her armpits. Can’t hurt. She waits. This is the best place to be right now; there’s never any surveillance in bathrooms, and only the desperate pick this one, down in the damp bowels of a now-empty lecture hall.

Nothing happens when the small, dim numbers on her phone screen switch seamlessly from 10:44 AM to 10:45 AM. She could’ve been reading the textbooks she had downloaded on her phone this whole time, except no, absolutely not, she’d rather start counting the tiles on the walls. She gets as far as fifty-plus in a row above her head when her plans to multiply for the area are thwarted.

A rent tears itself in the air with a sound like water striking a hot pan. It’s only visible when looking directly from the spot Sidney was standing, leaned against a chipped sink. She tilts her head and it vanishes. She straightens up and it stretches with her, like the antumbra around a bright shadow, or an aurora playing in UV. Maybe her second big cancer risk in twenty-four hours. This time, she’s happy to not care.

The closest thing she has to a best friend steps out of the breach. Her heels click on tile with the ringing of bells, despite that, by all appearances, she’s shod in rubber flip-flops. She’s heralded by the saturation of the air around her with the incongruous scents of honeysuckle and burning incense. Her shirt says Aeropostale across the chest. She’s added the flair of two tight braids to the bun twisted high on her head. The hand she extends to Sidney has a full Starbucks cup.

“You’re my hero,” Sidney breathes, reverent, and seizes the cup. Tall nonfat caramel latte with honey and whipped cream. Both of their favorites, except this one is decaf. Sidney pouts around the rim as she gulps.

“If you choke and end up barfing on yourself, I’m gonna be mad, babe,” her friend chides. “You’ve just finally been freed; today’s a bad day to end up in the clinic.”

“You worry too much,” Sidney says, like the hypocrite she is. “I could’ve done a venti. I could’ve done a venti with an espresso shot.”

“Yeah, like you haven’t been doing nonstop shots of caffeine all week. ‘Here lies my dearest beloved, Sidney, dead from cardiac arrest at twenty-two.’  Now come on, we’ve got plans.”

Sidney turns to the door and her friend seizes her shoulder. The touch is warmer than the coffee and electric with intent. For a moment, it’s like Sidney doesn’t just feel her hand, but each of the shifting muscles in the arm extending from it. Her entire back breaks out in goosebumps.

The hand retreats. “That was…wow,” Sidney says, doing her damnedest to not drop the coffee as she about-faces on shaking legs. They don’t touch often.

“Sorry.” Her friend’s face is all benevolent patience. Times like these, Sidney wishes she had a name for that face. “I thought we could travel in style today, to celebrate.”

“You mean—” Sidney squints at the space where air and light disappear into void. She points. “So, just checking, that absolutely won’t give me cancer?”

Her friend laughs and extends a hand with gleaming nails, perfect ovals tipped in crescents of white. “Would I invite you if it did?”

“Invite me where, though?” Sidney crosses her arms. Her friend consistently thinks the petulance is cute. Like a cat screaming for more kibble. Similarly, Sidney’s aware that she can’t make her friend do anything. If they’re going into the portal, well, they’re going into the portal. “I refuse to end up in the afterlife now. If you were gonna do that to me, you should’ve gone for it before I had to take six finals.”

Her friend flips a hand dismissively. “I haven’t forgotten your finals. How does a celebratory lunch sound? With fresh air, because you’re overdue for some.”

“Do your magic powers let you track my sunlight intake? Is that your schtick, teleportation plus solar meters plus your uncanny ability to turn up with Starbucks at the perfect moment?”

“You’re not getting a straight answer to that question.”

“Not even as a post-finals treat?”

“Your post-finals treat is right this way.” She winked and held out a hand again. Sidney grit her teeth and took it.

How could she not? Her curiosity would carry her everywhere in life. When all was said and done, that’s probably why her friend loved her so. Why else would something like this woman waste time with her?

#

This is a classic case of a story in need of a plot. The only hook presented here is the identity of Sidney’s friend, which is a mystery I don’t want to tie up with a neat bow. So I need another source of conflict. Likely an antagonist. And I’m just not invested enough in a generic modern setting to create more characters for this.

I have, however, already recycled a few ideas at the core of this into two different WIPs. Iterations of Sidney and her friend have found more lively homes.