And when she opens her eyes the next morning, she's not in the camp's bunks anymore. 

She's in a soft, comfortable bed, alone in a room. Birds are chirping cheerfully outside; the smell of cooking bacon wafts in. The vanity is carved with roses, almost ostentatiously feminine, and there's an old-style phone-- like it's from the 1950s-- and makeup. The closet is full of dresses.

There's no color anywhere. Everything is in shades of gray.  

....what. 

Well. She assumes she's dreaming. It's a nice dream even if it is greyscale. She gets dressed in one of the dresses, which for some reason fit, and spends some time playing with the makeup, which is sort of hard to do in greyscale but she can get it to look like something adjacent to her preferred aesthetic, and then leaves the room. 

"Hello, Raine," says a woman who for some reason is wearing high heels and pearls while she cooks bacon. "Did you have a nice sleep?"

"...yeah," she says. "I did." She's still kind of half waiting to wake up but this is — good, she thinks. 

"Well, eat up," the woman says, "you have a big day at school today. And the dance tonight!"

And Raine gets a plate of bacon, eggs, toast, and fruit. 

...okay. Sure, whatever. 

She eats about half of it, which is about twice as much as she'd eat in an average meal at camp, and — that's weird, actually, in her dreams she doesn't have a sense of taste. 

School, she supposes, however one gets to school. Maybe it'll be enlightening as to whether she's dreaming or not. Maybe it'll be enlightening about a completely different set of things. 

Apparently how one gets to school is by carpooling with Raine's next-door neighbor, who smiles at her awkwardly and blushes as soon as he sees her. A grayscale person blushing is a really striking thing to observe.

...cute. As long as she's in — wherever it is that she's in — she might as well take advantage; she sits as close to him as the car will allow. 

Eeep.

"Hi," he says. "Um. Are you looking forward to... school... today?" His voice gets a little high at the end as if he realizes that he has asked something very stupid.

"I think so," she says as cheerily as she can manage. "School's school." It's almost certainly going to be better than camp, but that's not saying much. 

"How's the dress you're working on coming along?"

The... what? 

Okay she can bullshit, she has bullshitted about school projects a hundred thousand times, "It's coming along!" 

"It's really cool that you can just like... make dresses. I keep accidentally hitting my thumb with a hammer in shop."

"Eh, is it really your sewing project yet if you haven't bled on it?" 

Nameless Carpool Boy seems slightly more comfortable. 

"I dunno, I generally prefer my blood being in my body. Mostly because when I see it I start getting nauseous. --I thought girls would be like that too?"

She considers making the obvious joke about girls and blood, and elects not to because she does not in fact have a period. 

"Probably some are! For me it's like, okay, my blood has literally gone into this project, it is my creation, all it needs is sweat and tears." 

"Sewing is more hardcore than I expected."

"Most things are when you get into them, I think." 

"I don't know, most things aren't hardcore at all. I'm a math person and there is nothing really hardcore about math. It's just memorizing a lot of stuff."

"I feel like I've known people who were hardcore about math! But yeah, I did say most." 

"Honestly I think most things are probably pretty boring. I'm glad sewing's not one of them."

She shrugs. 

"I'm sure for some people it is. For me it's basically impossible for making things to be boring." 

"Maybe I would feel that way if my chairs didn't keep collapsing whenever people sat in them."

"Fair enough!" 

If school teaches you how to make things Raine is more excited for it than she's been for school in.... honestly, ever. 

Helpfully, someone has pasted her class schedule into her notebook. (The notebook is not bright pink but has an aura as if it would be bright pink if colors existed.)

Her classes are:

1. Fashion and Design II
2. Home Living
3. Physical Education
4. Literature III
5. Painting
6. Concert Choir
7. History III

What a good schedule! What a good set of classes. Assuming she can figure out where any of them are she is HYPED for this set of classes. 

The class schedule helpfully has room numbers, and the school is logically laid out. She arrives in Fashion and Design II as soon as class starts.

Everyone else in the class is a cis girl; like her, they appear to be wearing 1950s-style dresses. No one remarks on Raine's appearance. 

The teacher briefly lectures on the selection of appropriate accessories that coordinate with your clothing, then reminds the class that the midterm is an inventory of your clothing and how often you wear it, accompanied by a short essay about what this means about which clothes and accessories you should buy or make in the future. Then everyone takes out their current project-- a wool dress-- and starts sewing. Raine's is half-finished and clearly tailored for her. 

This is... bizarre. Not that she isn't happy about it, but it's bizarre. Also she's a little bit confused about how difficult it can possibly be to coordinate when everything is greyscale but that's a separate and unrelated issue. 

Sewing is nice, she can sew, she's good at this. (She's really, really missed it being a good thing that she's good at this.) 

The girls gossip while they sew!

Mostly they gossip about who is going to dance with whom at the dance tonight. From this, Raine can pick up the identities of the cutest boys in school, that girls don't ask guys for dances, that it is rude to refuse to dance with someone who has asked you, and that "going steady" is different from "dating" in some important but unclear fashion.

She listens to the gossip and wonders what the hell is up with this place and also attempts (unsuccessfully) to divine the difference between dating and going steady until it is time for Home Living. 

"Hello," the Home Living teacher says. "Today we're going to begin our unit on your vocational future. The first thing we have to talk about is"-- she writes her next sentence on the board-- "why is it important for girls to plan for a career even though they're going to become homemakers?"

Oh fucking hell. 

Did she not get enough of this. 

'Well, what if they don't become homemakers,' Raine does not say out loud. She keeps her mouth firmly shut, as she has gotten very good at doing. 

A class discussion ensues! Proposed reasons include "you might want to work once your children have grown," "you might want to work if you're not blessed with children," "a career can help you meet men if you don't marry your high school sweetheart," "you might want to support yourself until you get married," "having been in the working world makes you better able to understand your husband," and "having worked outside the home makes you more interesting which improves your relationship."

Notably absent are "you might not get married" and "your husband might not be able to financially support you."

What if you don't get married. What if your household needs two incomes. What if you don't want children. What if your husband would rather be a stay at home parent. She doesn't bother to wonder what if you marry another woman, given everything. 

None of these seem to occur to the girls of Home Living class.

(Everyone other than Raine in Home Living class is also a cis girl.)

Eventually, the teacher says, "but even if you have a career, your most important job is homemaker. Can anyone give me a reason why homemaking is so important?"

She's not really sure how to feel about that. 

She'll try, "because you might want a career for various reasons, but everyone needs a home?" 

The teacher smiles at her.

"That's right, Raine. Everyone needs a home-- and it makes a big difference whether it's a welcoming and comfortable place to be. You and your family are going to spend most of your life there, after all. I would go so far as to way that making a home is the most important job in the world because of the huge effect it has on the happiness of people you love."

Men, Raine does not say, will presumably also live in homes. (The girls' side of camp had spent time with toddlers; the boys' side had not. Only mothers, no fathers. Not that Raine was complaining about not having to be around small children, of course, but.) 

The class discussion brings up the benefits of tasty and nutritious food, the importance of raising kind and intelligent and happy children, the role of a home as a place for a man to rest before he goes out into the working world, interior decoration and fashion as ways to practically express artistic impulses, and hospitality as a way of helping others!

She doodles in her notebook and resists the urge to press her fingernails into her arm, bites the side of her tongue instead. 

And eventually Home Living is over and she gets to go to Physical Education!

Physical Education is also a class of only girls. She has to change into her gym clothes.

Her classes can't all be only girls, can they? 

Whatever. She puts gym shorts on under her dress, takes the dress off, and then puts her shirt on without anyone at any point being able to tell what is or is not in her underwear. 

For PE they're playing softball!

The boys are playing football next to them, shirts versus skins. They are very clearly attempting to show off for the girls, many of whom are more interested in the boys than in sports.

Raine, due to testosterone, is very easily the best at softball.

She's not particularly invested in sports but it's nice to be good at things and softball doesn't have too many unpleasant memories attached to it. 

On the one hand, some of the boys are cute, and being able to stare openly is an extremely welcome change. On the other hand, Raine has -- after seventeen years of being expected to be a normal boy who likes normal boy things, and several months of ex-gay camp -- developed a nigh-pathological loathing for football and all things associated with it. 

How does she feel about the member of the skins team who, instead of playing football, keeps walking around on his hands near the girls?

(When he does bother to play football he's very good at it.)

Positively! She feels positively. Not bothering to play whatever sport you're supposed to be playing is a big mood and being able to walk on your hands is very cool and, additionally, she's a gay teenage boy faced with abs. 

They're very nice abs!

Literature class has boys in it! Specifically, it has Mysterious Nameless Carpool Boy, who smiles at Raine.

Oh good, they have any coed classes at all. Does Nameless Carpool Boy by any chance have his name written on his notebooks where she can figure it out without having to admit she doesn't know it. (Also, please please please let this class be on a book she's read.) 

Mysterious Nameless Carpool Boy is named Lee.

Not only has she not read the short story they're discussing, she's never heard of it or its author!

The short story is about a teenager who gets in a car wreck and tells his father. His father congratulates him on being honest and says that he should be more careful in the future to avoid damage to the car. The teenager is proud of telling the truth.

...that's not a short story, that's an after-school special. 

Everyone in class thinks it is a short story!

They discuss the theme of Honesty and how it is always good to tell the truth to adults.

Ahahaha it is never good to tell the truth to adults. Not that she's going to say that out loud. 

Also, how is this the story they are reading in a high school literature 3 class. Not that she's going to say that out loud either. 

Painting and Choir are similar to Fashion and Design except that they're painting and singing, respectively. Both classes are coed.

In History they're working on their family genealogies. The shirtless boy from Physical Education is there. He smiles at Raine while he's reporting on the lives of his great-great grandparents. (Everyone in this town, it seems, has incredibly dull great-great grandparents.) 

She smiles back. 

Raine has actually done genealogy projects before, because middle school is hell. She's not totally sure if her family history is supposed to be the same here but she will happily write a report about her maternal great-great grandfather the horse thief and how her paternal great-great grandmother was banned from seven bars. 

Class ends before she gets to see the teacher's reaction to this!

She's carpooling home with Lee.

She does her best to look like she just had a totally normal day at school and not an experience that was incredibly freeing and really upsetting and extremely confusing all at once. She is probably not super succeeding at that but she can't really tell which direction she's failing in. 

Lee, conversely, keeps nervously looking like he wants to say something and failing. 

"You okay?" she tries after a couple of minutes. 

"Fine! Fine. I'm fine. Um. AreyougoingtothedancetonightmaybeIwillseeyouthere." 

"I am! And I will probably see you there, if you're going?" 

"Yeah I'm going." Intense grayscale blushing. "Maybe you would like to. Um. Dance with me? If you want to and you're not too tired and--"

"That sounds nice!" 

(This is admittedly at least half because there are two (2) boys at this school whose traits Raine has any idea of and Lee is the only one whose name she knows but it is nonetheless true.) 

Lee has used up all of his courage having these two sentences of conversation and is going to spend the rest of the ride STARING OUT THE WINDOW.

She will not poke him. She will thank whoever is giving them a ride when she gets out of the car and then she will flop onto her bed and try to think about the day and what happened in it in a way that makes literally any sense at all. 

No one disturbs her!

Incidentally, she's alone in a bedroom with a door that locks for the first time in months and there were some very pretty shirtless boys during P.E.

....yeah. Yeah, fuck, there really were, and she is. She takes full advantage of that opportunity, and then starts looking around her room to see if there's anything it looks like she was obviously planning on wearing tonight. 

There's a fancier dress hanging over a chair!

Today is Friday so she doesn't have to do homework if she doesn't want to. 

Yeah she's super not going to. She will, however, make further use of that locked door, and at some point it will be time to get dressed and go to a school dance, whatever those turn out to be like when you're a girl in wherever this is. 

Her dad drives her to the school dance! He instructs her in a paternal fashion to make sure to be nice and dance with everyone who asks. Also, she shouldn't dance too close to anyone. She's still young and not ready for a serious relationship. Now is a time for having fun, not for getting excessively involved with anyone. Her dad remembers when he was Raine's age and going to dances in the school gym. High school is the best years of your life and he's so glad that Raine is getting a chance to enjoy them. 

She readily agrees to all of the instructions she's given, thanks him for the ride, tries very hard not to think about how last time she saw her actual dad he was driving her to ex-gay camp, and gets out of the car and — 

— okay c'mon brain, given everything she's seen and everything she just heard it is not going to be a mosh pit filled with weed smoke and the occasional group of friends hanging out in the corner, it will be something that bears absolutely no resemblance to that, but like, still. 

The theme is The Beach! There are palm tree decorations; the wall is covered with blue construction paper on which someone has painted a bunch of fish. (They're quite good.) A parent volunteer is serving pina coladas and other tropical mixed drinks; presumably they're virgin. The DJ is playing Rock Around The Clock. A few dozen teenagers are dancing, all in heterosexual couples; some of them seem to have gotten the memo about not dancing too close.

Huh. Weird. She ignores the drinks — not because she doesn't like piña coladas but because some habits dont break in twelve hours — and hangs vaguely near the set of people who aren't currently dancing. 

One of them breaks off. 

"Hello, Raine," he says. "Want to dance?"

At some point she will have to figure out his name. 

"I'd love to," she says, and she'll be following his lead, right, it'll probably be fine that she's never done this before? 

Mysterious P. E. Boy is a very good dancer, which means that he can easily compensate for her lack of familiarity with fifties dancing. 

It also means that he can grab her hands and slide her between his legs.

If he can figure out how to do that without her having any idea what they're doing or indeed that this is a thing people do, holy shit that's really hot. 

Raine will keep dancing with Mysterious PE Person right up until he decides to stop. 

Unfortunately for her, the social convention is that you only dance for one song with each person!

When the song's over, he smiles at her and says, "Can I get you a drink?"

"Please." Social convention is terrible! 

He brings her a pina colada. "You look really pretty tonight."

(Lee is lurking near the edge of a social group compulsively eating sliced bananas and looking VERY uncomfortable.)

"Thank you," she says, and wow okay apparently she was hungry actually? weird. "You look great. — I mean, you always look great," probably this is a safe assumption to make? 

He laughs. "Thank you. --You're rather forward."

"Well, if it works," Raine says as if she were doing this on purpose and had any idea what the local flirting norms or indeed any flirting norms were. 

"I suppose you'll have all the boys lined up to ask you to dance," he says. "Forget always having a date on Saturday night, you always have one in the afternoon and then you have to hurry home to change."

"Mm. Sounds exhausting." She is not very subtly looking Asher up and down, even though probably he doesn't speak 21st century gay. 

"All you have to do is go steady with someone and then he'll take you for granted and not take you out at all and you'll have so much time for doing your Home Living homework."

"I'd like to think I'd have better taste than that." 

"Ah, you have high standards. Only the most devoted boyfriends for Raine. You're not going to go to Lover's Lane for anything less than a dinner and movie and flowers."

How about she just laughs and pretends to be as in on the joke as this person assumes that she in fact is! 

Someone calls "Anthony!" and he says "I should probably go see what that's about. Dance with you again later?"

Oh thank the gods she has his name. "Sounds great!" 

Three more guys ask her to dance! None of them are quite as good at dancing as Anthony, unfortunately. 

In between she can lurk on the edges of conversations with people who recognize her. The female-only conversations are mostly devoted to intense analysis of who's dancing with whom. The mixed-group conversations are devoted to football, flirting, complaining about classes, and movies. (No one seems interested in any aspect of movies other than the special effects, which are discussed with great enthusiasm.) 

She fakes her way into and through conversations, tries to learn as many people's names as she possibly can, and observes the flirting as closely as she can manage. 

The flirting is Very Gender. If you're a girl and you're interested in a guy, you twirl your hair and bite your lip and act shy; if you're a girl and you're not interested in a guy, you act determinedly oblivious to his intent until he goes away. If you're a guy and you're interested in a girl, you compliment her and tease her and brag in a way that is probably supposed to be subtle. 

The guys she dances with all flirt with her at least a little.

Yeah, okay, she probably could have guessed that. More importantly she can totally do that, or at least she can know what message exactly she's sending when she fails to do that. 

She joins in and flirts back, at least a little. 

Lee hangs out near the edge of conversations eating handfuls of chips so that no one asks him why he's not talking and staring longingly at Raine!

Eventually he works up the nerve to walk up to her and mumble something while staring at his feet.

She can glean from context cues what the thing he said probably was. 

"Yes." 

The fact that it is extremely rude to ever turn down a dance did not actually prevent him from being anxious that this might happen!

Lee's dancing strategy consists mostly of being extremely conscientious about not stepping on Raine's feet. This takes up all of his energy and leaves him with very little for the actual dancing part.

Raine is still not great at this but after taking the following part with a half dozen people she can be sort of maybe approaching halfway decent? And she can try to lead from the following, pushing Lee into whatever positions he needs to be in. 

She is very good and getting to touch her hands while dancing is very nice.

When the song is done he tries to think of a nice compliment to express the depths of his affections and winds up landing on "your hands are soft."

Ack that's such a stupid thing to say--

"Thank you," she says, and very deliberately looks over at Lee through her eyelashes. 

Being flirted with is an entirely new experience for Lee and he is completely silent for three seconds with an expression that can't decide whether it's terror or bliss.

"Um. Do you want to. Go out sometime?"

"That would be nice." 

He bounces! And then he remembers that bouncing is unmasculine and stands still and hopes that this doesn't make Raine hate him. 

He casts around for something to make Raine forget about the bouncing. "Um. Do you want something?"

Oh no he's very cute. "I think I'm alright? -- you're very cute," because maybe it is forward but frankly he seems like he needs to hear it. 

He bounces again which is objectively really embarrassing and he's going to be embarrassed by it later tonight but right now he's too happy to feel embarrassed. 

(Maybe they will get to hold hands and it will be very good.)

"You're very cute too. Um. I guess you know that. Sorry."

"Thank you! You don't have to be." 

Lee casts around for a topic which is hard because as far as he can tell everything in the world is incredibly boring except for Raine and babies and men are not supposed to be interested in babies. 

He eventually lands on, "is Home Living as bad as Workplace Skills?"

"Wouldn't know, I've never been in Workplace Skills, but it's pretty bad. It is genuinely unclear to me whether or not the teacher realizes that men also participate in making places nice to live in, on account of they also live there." 

They can sit down on chairs maybe? 

Lee is pretty sure that women mostly are the ones who make places nice to live in, but he doesn't want to argue with Raine. She's a girl, she knows more about how houses work than he does. 

"Mostly we're learning about how employers base whether they hire you forty percent on enthusiasm and so it's really important to learn to be enthusiastic about work! Also today the teacher threw a baseball and a raw egg against the wall to demonstrate responding positively to failure."

Sitting down in chairs is a thing they can do! 

"How on earth does that demonstrate that?" 

"Well, you see, if you're tough you don't break like the baseball, and if you're weak you fall apart like the raw egg?"

"...that's concerning and terrible and I'm sorry!" 

"I really don't know where they got it from! Also I'm not really looking forward to pretending to be enthusiastic about paperwork for forty years but that's separate."

"Yeah, that's. Also concerning and terrible. I'm sorry, that sucks a lot." 

Oh no he made Raine sad. How does he stop making Raine sad?

"So no one is throwing raw eggs against walls in your class?" he tries.

"No, no throwing eggs against walls. And no incredibly concerning and anticompassionate metaphors or at least none today, so on the whole I'll call myself lucky." 

"And you get to plan your dream wedding and honeymoon in a couple weeks! While we get to write an essay about How Does The Way You Communicate Affect How People See You."

Why the everloving fuck is that something they do as a unit in a high school class. "Yeah, that'll be really fun. The essay sounds like it could be kind of interesting, honestly, if looked at through literally any lens other than career skills."  

"Well, you know. That's the important thing men do. Have a career, provide for their families."

(He sounds vaguely sad about this.)

50s gender roles are so!! Bad!!!! 

"It's still not the only thing you'll ever do where communication is important? But yeah I do get the point." 

"Still think planning a wedding would probably be more fun."

"Probably, yeah." She's still annoyed that this is in a high school curriculum but she's fully capable of hiding annoyance at lesson plans; she tries to figure out a way to ask if the stories in lit are always like that without revealing that she's only experienced one day of the class. 

"Maybe we can go out for ice cream tomorrow afternoon? At, um, one maybe?"

"Sounds like a plan!" Raine says, and she has not seen anyone else doing cheek kissing so she's not going to even though she bets she can get Lee to make a very cute face about it. 

"Do you mind if I steal her for the next dance?"

Lee ABSOLUTELY DOES mind actually.

"I'll see you tomorrow," she tells Lee, and then turns to Anthony and smiles. 

For the rest of the night, Anthony dances with her more than he dances with anyone else. Lee continues lurking by the snack table. Lots of boys flirt with her. 

She will flirt right back with them, in the extremely gender way that girls here do that, and she will continue to flirt with Anthony in her usual way since he seemed to appreciate it, and at the end of the night she will go home and flop on the bed that is apparently hers and try not to worry that she's going to wake up and be back at camp. 

When she wakes up, the world is still in black and white, she still has a closet full of dresses, and her mother has made her a huge stack of pancakes. 

"Have any plans for today?" her mother asks. 

No but I might go for a walk later. 

"I'm meeting Lee this afternoon." To work on a project. To study. For tutoring. She doesn't say any of those things because she doesn't know the landscape well enough to competently lie yet, and also because her parents are observably treating the idea of her dating a boy very very differently here, but mostly the first thing. 

"Oh, that's nice!" her mother says. "He's a sweet boy. What are you planning to do?"

Sharing details of her life with adults is horrible and she hates it. 

"Go out for ice cream." 

"That sounds fun," her mom says. "Don't forget to get your chores and your homework done this weekend. I know boys are fun, but your education is going to pay off for the rest of your life."

It's kind of not, since apparently girls here become homemakers and presumably boys do not choose their spouses by what grades they got, but she's not going to say that. 

"I won't. Forget, I mean." 

She's going to play around with makeup for a few hours half for the fun of it and half to experiment with working in all-greyscale, and when it's time to meet Lee she will.... leave her house in an attempt to do that? Hopefully if she's just sort of standing in the front yard he will come and meet her. 

When she leaves the house, Lee is there waiting to pick her up.

 "You look really pretty."

"Thank you!" 

Raine has no idea where anything is and will just follow Lee's lead as regards them getting to wherever one gets ice cream? 

One gets ice cream at the soda fountain! According to the menu, it sells some things Raine recognizes (fountain sodas, milkshakes, ice cream, banana splits, burgers, sandwiches, french fries) and some things she does not (chocolate malteds, egg creams, ice cream sodas). The sodas cost six cents; a scoop of ice cream, a nickel; a burger, a princely fifteen cents. 

In general, the soda fountain resembles something out of a fifties nostalgia flick: the black-and-white checkered floor, the chrome swivel stools in front of the long counter, the plastic diner seats full of girls in poodle skirts and guys in leather jackets. (Anthony is one of the guys with a leather jacket; he waves to Raine.) Elvis Presley croons on the jukebox. 

Lee is far too anxious to say anything on the walk over. "What do you want?" he asks. 

The idea of liking food still feels weird but, in fact, food sounds good.  (She waves back at Anthony and does her best to get over how bizarre everything is.) 

"A vanilla milkshake and fries to share?" 

He orders and pays for both of them and is internally disappointed that she doesn't want the burger and he can't show off his generosity.

When they sit at a booth he says, "I'm not very good at. Um. Talking? But I like listening to you talk?"

"I can talk!" She considers several topics, such as 'what the fuck is going on with my life,' 'why is there so much gender all over everywhere,' 'why are all the adults here so weird,' and 'are lit and history class always like that,' discards them on the basis that they're probably not a great idea, and settles instead on a summary and discussion of The Witches by Roald Dahl, which she borrowed from a bunkmate and (thankfully) finished last week. 

At the conclusion of The Witches Lee has a visibly shocked expression on his face. 

"...I've never read a story like that."

"...like... which part of it?" 

He opens his mouth and closes his mouth and finally says, "there are things in it that aren't real?"

What. 

Raine is VERY SURE that the concept of fantasy and science fiction had been invented by the 1950s. What would it even mean -- does this place not have mythology, or fairy tales, or, hell, religion -- 

".....do you want to hear more stories that have things in them that aren't real?" 

"...yes? Are they all scary like that?"

"Not all! Not even all my favorites. If you'd rather have a non-scary one I know lots of non-scary ones." 

God, fuck, as soon as she gets home she is going to write down every story she knows well enough to retell.

"I don't know," he says. "I haven't heard stories that are... scary... before. I didn't know they could be scary."

If stories here are literally all like the one from lit class, she might actually be totally incompetent to judge scariness or non-scariness. 

....whatever, she can try, she will go with The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees, which is a deeply weird short story but is neither novel-length nor horror nor dependent on massive amounts of cultural context that Lee doesn't have. 

She gets a few minutes into her summary before Lee says, "what's slavery?"

.....oh boy. 

"Uh, forcing people to do hard labor under very poor conditions with harsh punishments and no pay," she rephrases. "...and possibly I should stop telling this one and instead think of something that'll require less background explaining to make any sense." 

"...why didn't the bees leave?"

"Um, sorry, we can talk about something else if you want."

"No, this is a fine thing to talk about -- the bees didn't leave because they didn't have anywhere else to go. Some of them try to start another hive away from the wasps, but that's later in the story." 

"I'm glad we don't have any talking wasps in Pleasantville."

"....yeah, that's fair." 

She finishes her summary of the story and reaches out for Lee's hand. 

No, she doesn't, because Lee says "what's an anarchist?"

Fair of him. "An anarchist is someone who believes that there should be no government and nobody should rule over anyone." She reaches out for his hand anyway? 

His hand!!! is being held!!!! it is the best thing that has ever happened!!!!

"...why would anyone not want there to be a government? Do they not like parades?"

"Well, if they were a bee, and their government was the wasps...." 

This story is also really scary but his hand!!!! is being held!!!!

"...That doesn't seem like it's an objection to governments. Just to wasps."

"Or maybe they're a bee and they think that the power structure among bees is unjust! Wasps are not the only form of government that ever does anything anyone might object to." 

"...why would you object to what the government does? Outside of your stories, I mean, the governments do bad things in your stories."

"......I'm not sure I can answer that question in a way that makes any sense right now, sorry, give me a while to think about it?" 

Lee gazes at Raine with unchecked adoration. "You're so creative."

...it feels really weird accepting praise for stories she didn't write. 

"Thank you." Handsqueeze. "I know another story that I think won't require as much explaining as this one, mind if I tell that one instead?" 

"Go ahead! --I'm sorry I don't know anything."

"No! No, it's fine, you know things, there's just -- a lot of context I'd forgotten most people here wouldn't have because I'm bad about forgetting that." 

And with that she will launch into a summary of Sunbird by Neil Gaiman. 

Lee watches her with fascination and gasps at all the right places. 

When she's done, he says, "You're amazing."

"— I didn't write it. I read it and can retell it but it's not my story, I didn't invent it, I didn't invent any of these." 

"...but then where did it come from? There aren't any stories like that at the library."

Yeah okay she actually just needs to explain.

"....they don't come from Pleasantville at all. I don't think you'd be able to find anything like that anywhere here, which means I need to write down everything I can remember but that's not really the point. The one about the witches was by someone named Roald Dahl, and the one about the bees and the wasps was by E Lily Yu, and the one I just told you was by Neil Gaiman." 

Now he looks really confused. 

"Not... from Pleasantville? There are... places other than Pleasantville?"

Well that implication isn't terrifying at all!

"Yes. I don't know how I got from there to here and I don't know how I'd go back but there are other places." 

"But you've been here forever. We grew up next door to each other."

".....yeah, I don't get it either. From my perspective I woke up in someone else's life yesterday. Someone very similar to me, judging by the classes she's taking and the clothes she owns, but I'm not from Pleasantville and it has been an incredibly weird two days." 

"You're from... a different place? With slavery and anarchism and witches and talking wasps?"

"No. I'm from a different place where people tell stories about things that aren't real all the time. — there are, admittedly, anarchists." 

"I'm glad there aren't any witches or talking wasps or slaves! Those things were frightening."

Raine has no idea how to respond to that so she's just going to squeeze Lee's hand again instead of trying. 

"...do you think the other Raine is in the other place now? The one you came from?"

"I don't think so? Fuck, I hope she isn't." 

"......was it a bad place?"

"...I was in a bad part of it. Lots of parts are very very good but it's very big and the different parts are very different from each other." 

"Like, you have to drive for days to get to the end of it?"

"You cant drive across the whole thing, there are oceans in the way, but if you started in the right place you could drive for weeks before you reached the ocean and had to take a boat or plane to the next part." 

"...........wow." He is unable to process this for a few moments. "What's a plane?"

"It's a vehicle that can fly and goes very fast, people use them if they're going somewhere far away and especially if they're also going across an ocean." 

"I didn't know oceans were a thing you could go across. --I guess you can in your world and not in Pleasantville."

"I guess. Christ. You can drive across your whole world on the scale of days, that's terrifyingly small." 

"Not days. If you drove through Pleasantville from one end to another the longest way possible it would take, I don't know, maybe six hours? "

"That's so much worse!" 

"Why?"

"...I guess if you had never had the idea that worlds should be bigger than that or you should ever be able to leave a town and go somewhere else or that there should be more than one kind of place in the world it wouldn't seem like it was a problem? But I did." 

"We can go somewhere else! We can go camping and to the beach. That's the part that takes so long to get to. --I have to say I would not really mind if it went away."

"No big cities, though, and the furthest away from other people you can possibly get can't be more than three hours' drive away. — anyway, sorry, we don't have to keep talking about my existential crisis at how tiny your world is." 

"......huh," Lee says. "I know you've lived next door since we were little kids-- the stork brought us at the same time-- and I know I've had a crush on you since I was five... and I know you like art and what classes you're taking and that you're very popular and go on lots of dates... but I don't have any memories about you. I don't know what we talk about in the carpool or what you said in class. I can't remember any conversations you've been in, or what games we played together as kids, or whether you've ever had a solo in choir. And when I think about it too hard my brain just. Slips away."

"So probably there's no Pleasantville version of me in my world being very confused about everything, that's good." 

"...yeah it would be bad if the girl I had a crush on disappeared and then was replaced with someone else from another world no matter how nice you are. I guess someone wanted to make you feel welcome?"

"I guess! And it's better for me than the alternative I guess but it's a hell of a way to go about it." 

He really really wants to ask for another story but instead he says, "Should I walk you home so you can get started writing down the stories before you forget?"

"I don't think I'll forget anything in the next few hours that I would have remembered otherwise, but we can start walking home if you want?" 

Then Lee will keep asking for stories and occasionally explanations all afternoon!

(Things Pleasantville does not apparently have, according to his questions: politics, violence between people over the age of ten, factories, farms, conflict of any kind.)

That's bizarre and kind of creepy but Raine is so happy to tell him about the Hobbit. 

From his questions about the Hobbit, Raine learns that Pleasantville also does not have mountains, caves, addiction, or meaningful income inequality, and Lee seems to assume as a matter of course that the treasure will be shared between all dwarves who live there equally. 

He is, however, familiar with the concept of archery and riddles. He makes a very gratifying face about the conclusion of the riddle game, and seems to find Hobbiton rather homey. 

Well, they don't know that that isn't true of Dwarves, and in fact the Company did canonically sign a contract guaranteeing each of them an equal share of the treasure, so that's not far off. 

Also, Lee is very cute and keeps doing cute things with his face. At the end of the story, when Bilbo is back home and proven alive and his sword is on the mantelpiece, she leans over and kisses his cheek. 

Lee does not know at all how to make sense of this occurrence so instead he just gazes at Raine with an expression full of wonder.

"You're very cute and very good," she informs him, and does it again. 

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa this is kind of terrifying but also the most amazing thing that has ever happened to him???

He's very good. 

Raine holds his hand as he walks her home, and when she gets home she sets to writing down a list of titles of stories and poems she can and should write down, and then she looks at the length of the list and decides to figure out in the next week whether she has access to a typewriter, and then flops on her bed again and stares at the ceiling and has another existential crisis about the concept of a world so small you can cross it in six hours by car, and then gets up and — isn't sure what her chores actually are so she puts her shoes in the corner to be the shoes pile and the clothes she's worn since arriving in another corner to be the not-dirty-yet pile and 80/20s making her bed by smoothing out the top blanket and then, once the manufactured task is over, goes right back to the existential crisis. 

Dinner is meatloaf, mashed potatoes and gravy, and peas; Raine discovers that apparently she has plans to go to a movie with her friends Saturday evening. The movie is two hours of extremely pretty dancing with elaborate costumes and no plot, sort of like a cross between Cirque du Soleil and ballet.

On Sunday morning, she discovers religion exists in Pleasantville by means of having to go to a church service. They sing beautiful hymns and pray. Sunday afternoon she is supposed to vacuum the house and dust and do her homework; Sunday evening is apparently family board game night. (They play Clue-- which is about finding who gave Mr. Body his secret birthday present and what and where it is-- and the Game of Life.)

School continues much as it was. Fashion and Design, Painting, and Choir are fun, if you set aside the weird experience of painting in black and white. History class only involves genealogy, which she will apparently be expected to memorize for the test. Literature class teaches short stories with almost aggressively bland and conflict-free plots: in one a family has a nice day at a beach; in another a teenage boy has to choose which of two girls to go steady with, talks about it with his parents and friends, and picks the one he is most compatible with. P.E. continues to be softball and enlivened by the existence of hot shirtless boys. 

In Home Living class they talk about their futures. (Everyone expects to get married; most want kids, but some don't, and the teacher does not seem to object to this.) They set long-term and short-term goals, write an essay about their interests and aptitudes, and learn about different careers they could choose. (The primary options seem to be nurse, teacher, and secretary.)

Most afternoons, there's something planned after school that Raine's invited to: a football game, a trip to the skating rink, hanging out at the pizza parlor. If she goes, boys flirt with her and girls make an effort to include her in the conversation, but no one seems to mind if she's quiet. 

Lee talks to her during the carpool and says hi to her in the hallways, but doesn't make an effort to talk to her; they chat a bit during the football game, but they're surrounded by other people and can't talk about anything secret. He falls down a lot at the skating rink. Notably, no one is making much of an effort to include him in conversation.

If she asks for a typewriter, her mother gives her some money, tells her to go to the store to buy one, and comments that it's so nice to see Raine taking an interest in a potential career and not just boys.

Hanging out with her parents is..... weird. Profoundly, incredibly weird. She is against church services but doesn't put up a fight about it; in general she follows her instinct to tell her parents as little about herself or her life as humanly possible. 

She flirts back with some but not all boys, talks to her classmates as much as she feels capable of and listens the rest of the time. Movies are fun; skating rinks are fun; pizza parlors are surprisingly fun; she only goes to the football game to talk to Lee. 

She does not memorize genealogy, because frankly she has better uses for her ability to keep things memorized; she does take notes, because she'll need them in order to cheat. Instead of paying attention to the mind numbing stories in literature class she tries her hand at writing her own stories; she doesn't share them with anyone, even Lee, because the people around her might not be able to tell how clumsy they are but she can. Painting in black and white is weird but she gets used to it; choir is lovely; fashion and design is fun, and she's getting better at doing makeup in black and white. She continues to beat the other girls at softball and watch the boys do their thing. In Home Living she writes about her aptitude for storytelling and sewing and making things, suggests that maybe she could be a writer or she could sew things for other people as well as herself, and otherwise keeps very quiet. 

She buys a typewriter and writes down everything she can remember every night until her wrists scream. 

It goes.... well, it goes. Lying to adults is second nature at this point, and being well-liked is a lovely change. 

And on Thursday afternoon, as classes are ending, Anthony catches Raine by her locker and says, "Want to go out to dinner with me Friday night?"

...hmm.

Anthony knows she just went on a date with Lee to the soda fountain, because he was there and saw them. Anthony joked about her having multiple dates every day, and it didn't seem then or in retrospect like anyone in particular was the butt of the joke. And, furthermore, nobody in Pleasantville has meaningful conflict, so probably Anthony did not just do something that would be hurtful to Lee by local standards. 

"I'd love to." 

"It's a date," he says, and blows her a kiss before backflipping down the hallway.

How... do you... okay whatever Anthony is just unrealistic and that's fine. 

On Friday afternoon she contemplates dressing as weirdly as she possibly can purely because it feels weird to dress like all her classmates, does not do that even though Anthony would probably think it was funny, and meets Anthony outside. 

Anthony shows up at her door like a gentleman, but unlike Lee he has a car.

"You look lovely."

"Thank you. — you look great." 

"Coming from our local fashion expert? I'm flattered."

(He's wearing a leather jacket, tight blue jeans, and a shirt that clings, and generally looks like the bad boy character from a TV show aimed at ten-year-olds.)

"Just you wait, next week I'll start drawing extra eyes all over my face and nobody will be able to tell whether I'm being ironic about it or not." 

It is sort of odd, Raine notes, how strongly his pants can give the impression of being blue jeans without actually being able to be blue. 

"You'll start a new trend. They'll have to teach eye drawing skills in Home Living. Maybe switch classes with the art teacher for a while."

He drives confidently to a location without actually asking her what she wants to eat.

That's a little awkward but she can point out the lack of railings on that bridge if they get there. "You have such faith in me." 

"Maybe I just recognize talent."

Apparently they're going to a burger place!

Anthony opens the car door for her and pays for her dinner without asking. His during-dinner patter is funny, charming, very complimentary of Raine, and almost entirely devoid of content; he seems to have been on a lot of dates and have gotten this down to a science. 

Hmm. 

This is... nice, she supposes. He's handsome and charming and funny and complimentary and is clearly aware that she has traits. 

It's just that it's, well, mostly empty of content. 

....Anthony thought it was a good thing when she was less incredibly gender than she could have been. After a perfectly lovely dinner, she smiles at him the way boys here smile at her, and does not look up at him through her eyelashes or twirl her hair around her finger, and opens his car door for him. 

...He laughs genuinely.

"Always the unexpected with you. --Wanna go for a drive for a bit before you get home?"

Oh good. 

"That'd be nice. — it's nice when you laugh and mean it." 

He laughs again. "Criticism noted."

It's a good laugh. 

Possibly at some point during this drive they'll stop and she can kiss him, to see if he'll have a response to that at all? 

The conversation on this drive has cute Asher childhood stories, now with Actual Content. 

After a plausibly deniable amount of time, they seem to be arriving at a dark, secluded section of road, where a handful of other cars are parked. Asher says, "hm, seems like I've accidentally driven to Lover's Lane."

"Accidentally, huh." 

She wouldn't have guessed that this would be the sort of town that had something named... that... but she doesn't pretend to understand the place. 

He's driving very slowly. "You know. We could park here for a bit. Since we're here anyway and everything, might as well. I know you wouldn't in a first date normally, but if you're just taking advantage of an accident--"

"Or," Raine says, "we could not lie to ourselves and each other, and park here on purpose." 

"That works too." He parks the car. 

Possibly Raine should be in his lap kissing him now. Possibly that is what should be happening. 

This lasts for ten seconds before Anthony says, "Backseat."

Backseat! Backseat is good, and — 

— ohhhhhh shit Raine has a dick and Anthony is definitely gonna notice if they have sex and this is not actually the same as a hookup with someone who knows you're a gay guy maybe she can just blow him? will that work? yeah okay that'll work, she has a plan and can handle this fine. 

When they're in the backseat he pulls her onto his lap again and strokes her hair and says "you're so beautiful."

uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh what. 

Like not that this isn't nice, but, what. 

No, he is pretty sure of what happens in the backseat at Lover's Lane. It is that he holds her hand and presses kisses all over her face while telling her how much he liked it when she opened the car door for him.

That's... cute? That's very cute. Anthony is very cute. Which is why Raine is going to try, again, to make out with him properly. 

This is not really at all what he expected but he is totally willing to go with it. If Raine likes French kissing then French kissing shall happen.

French kissing can indeed happen, and also Anthony should not be wearing a shirt. 

Yeah sure Raine can have whatever she wants as long as she is this opinionated about it. 

(He feels... strange. Good strange, though.)

Raine is opinionated about many things. For instance, that Anthony's abs are incredible and she needs to spend some time kissing her way down his chest. 

Whimper. 

He feels really really good in a way he hasn't ever before and he's-- not really sure what's going on but not inclined to care-- there's kind of a lot going on-- he wants something and he doesn't know at all what it is but in the meantime maybe Raine should be shirtless and he should kiss her chest too. His pants are bizarrely uncomfortable and he would probably have some kind of opinion about this but everything is very distracting and whatever is up in the Pants Situation it is not Raine kissing him or Raine being shirtless so it can't be that important. 

Hmm, but consider that instead of taking her clothes off, which she already decided she isn't going to do, Raine can take Anthony's pants off too and then there will be even more places she can kiss him. 

Anthony is very thoroughly distracted from shirt removal and indeed from anything that isn't Raine's mouth kissing his thigh, which he is pretty sure is the most important thing in the world. Also the uncomfortable-pants situation fixed itself without his intervention, which is good, because now there is nothing in the way of him closing his eyes and throwing his head back against the seat and moaning and letting Raine do whatever she wants to him. The fact that Raine can do whatever she wants to him is the most interesting and wonderful fact that Anthony has ever learned and he wants to think about it extensively. 

If he's going to keep making sounds like that, maybe Raine should take his underwear off too, and then kiss him some more. 

Raine has the best ideas. Raine is so good at ideas. Anthony would say that but his verbal centers are not really working right now so she's going to have to settle for a "Raaaaaine."

It has been much too long since Raine last had a chance to suck a dick. And going down on someone this gorgeous, while wearing exactly what she wants and as much makeup as she chooses and while he moans the name she chose, is — good. Very, very good. 

!!!!!!!!

Anthony has changed his opinions. The pants situation is not unimportant. The pants situation is in fact the Most Important Thing. Raine's mouth is WARM and WET and DOING THINGS and he has never wanted anything as much as he wants her mouth to continue to be warm and wet and doing the exact thing it's doing. (Unless she has thought of a better thing for her mouth to do? This seems pretty implausible but honestly ten minutes ago it seemed pretty implausible that anything would ever matter to him as much as it matters that her lips keep moving right now.) He wants to convince her of this-- she might stop! it is totally within her power to stop! and that is the most horrible thing he can think of-- but his brain is half-melted because of how amazing her mouth is and he can't really formulate thoughts or reasons or arguments and so all he can say is "please" and "Raine" and "don't stop."

She doesn't stop, why on earth would she stop, this is so good and she's missed doing it so much and there is no reason at all for her to stop, Anthony's hands and voice and dick are very very good and Raine appreciates them very much. 

The thing Raine is doing with her mouth started as the most intense pleasure Anthony had ever felt, and then it doubled, and then it doubled again, and it just keeps getting better, and the part of Anthony that is still capable of coherent thought wonders where it is going to end, is he just going to feel more and more intense bliss for the rest of time and never do anything except sit here with Raine's mouth there exploring more and more exotic vistas of ecstasy, and the rest of Anthony thinks this is an extremely good plan.

Unless-- he's totally at Raine's mercy-- she could pull away right now and leave him desperate and wanting and unable to think about anything and there's nothing at all he could do about it, it's the best thing he's ever felt and at any moment she could stop and he would never feel this way again-- this is such a fascinating thought and several entire parts of his brain come back online to think about it and then he imagines himself begging and pleading with her to keep going and then his vision whites out and none of his brain is capable of thinking anything and he is pretty sure he loses consciousness for a second and when he comes to he does not particularly want Raine's mouth there anymore. He feels so warm and happy and unable to move and like someone has removed all his bones from his body leaving him a quivering, jellylike mess. Raine is very good. She is so good and he loves her and wants to marry her and give her everything she wants in the whole entire world.  

Raine swallows and presses her face into Anthony's thigh. 

"You're very good." 

"Wow."

He feels like he's floating in a warm pool.

Can she get herself off really subtly without Anthony noticing, because if she doesn't do that he is definitely gonna notice the dick situation, how about she just continues to bury her face in his thigh and be as quiet as she can while she does that. 

mmmmmmmmmmmm Raine has hair and it is soft and pettable and this is so good????? He wants to do normal Lover's Lane things now but unfortunately that would involve moving which is impossible so instead he just has to appreciate how nice her hair is.

Anthony petting her hair is very good and she bites hard on her lip and — 

— now her hand has come all over it which she has to deal with, this is why we don't think with our dicks, maybe she can just lick it and it'll be fine? yeah sure okay that works — 

and then she moves up into Anthony's lap. 

Anthony is much too happy to be paying any attention to whether Raine is licking her hand. And now she is in his lap and there are cuddles which are good and important. Cuddles are extremely good to start out with but apparently even better without clothes on and when this thing has left you all boneless and floaty. He has also heard that cuddles are better when you are In Love and he is pretty sure he is In Love. At least whenever he looks at Raine he has this surge of overwhelming affection and closeness and he thinks about how she's so beautiful and clever and perfect and she has a mouth that is warm and wet and did things, Maybe they will go steady and then they can go to Lover's Lane every Friday and Saturday and then when she graduates they can get married and then her mouth will do things all the time and it will be the best.

Yes. Post-coital cuddles are so good and Anthony is solid and warm and very good for cuddling and it has been much too long since Raine got to cuddle someone without being watched by someone who wanted to fix what wasn't fucking broken and she is soft and happy and melty and safe and Anthony is good. 

He needs to tell Raine how pretty she is.

"You're so pretty," he announces. "And good. And nice. And smart. And pretty."

"You're pretty, and soft, and good, and pretty." 

Mmmmmm cuddles.

(Asher is gazing at Raine adoringly but he sure is not taking any steps to try to see that she gets off.)

Honestly, given things, probably better than the alternative. Raine is so happy about cuddles and being looked at adoringly and having Anthony's hands in her hair. 

"What was that?" he says.

....oh. Of course. Pleasantville. 

"That was a blowjob." 

"It's really nice. How did you get the idea for it?"

uhhhhhhhhhhhh. 

".....y'know. One thing led to another." This is an impressively blatant nonanswer but she's not going to come up with a better one and she should really talk to Lee about it before she tells more people. 

"What sort of thing?"

"....just, y'know, things. There are places that feel really nice when I touch them so I figured it would be nice for you if I touched them on you." 

Gosh! Raine invented touching those parts because Raine is extremely smart. 

...He thinks about the implications of this.

"Oh, do girls like it too? I can touch yours if you want but you'll have to show me how."

....cute. Also she hates the implications of this on Pleasantville as a whole but like she will yell about it later. 

"Girls like it too. — I actually did it myself this time, with my hand not with my mouth, but I can show you some other weekend?" 

His Raine is VERY SMART AND GOOD. And it makes sense that you can do things with it with hands, because Raine can't bend to put her mouth between her legs. It seems weird that hands would be nice, as they are neither warm nor wet and those were the best features of Raine's mouth, but probably things are different for girls. It is a very convenient way for things to be different for girls because it means that she gets to feel all warm and soft and cuddlesome without him having to do anything, and when they are MARRIED he will just get to have lots of blowjobs and not have to worry about her at all. Still, it will be nice to be paying attention while she does it.

"Sounds like a plan."

Raine, who has no idea of any of this thought process, is just enjoying being cuddled. 

"Do you want to go steady with me?"

......fuck she really needs to ask Lee what that means. "I'll... think about it?" 

Honestly very reasonable.

"Mmm okay." He kisses her cheek. "You're so pretty."

(And this is basically how it continues until it's late enough that Anthony has to drive Raine home.)

She kisses him goodnight at the door and gives herself a night off from typing in favor of screaming about how the itty bitty small town colorless universe she's in apparently didn't have any concept of non-procreative sex until she came along to introduce it, and manages to fall asleep but not until it's much later than she should really be awake. 

In the morning, Raine's mother says, "Lee called, he says he's going to be studying in the library this afternoon if you want to have a study date."

"A study date with Lee sounds great!" 

When she goes she takes everything she's typed up so far and asks a helpful-looking mailman for directions to the library. 

The helpful mailman is very helpful, and Lee is doing math homework in a corner of the library.

He looks up at Raine like he didn't really expect her to show up.

"Hi."

"Hi," and she sits down and pulls the pages out of her bag. 

Bounce bounce.

"Do you have stories?"

"I do have stories!" 

She has The Cambist and Lord Iron, and she has Ilse Who Saw Clearly, and she has Bluebeard and then she has Bluebeard's Wife, and she has Under One Roof, and she's been turning over how to tell The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas so that it means anything; she has a handful of her favorite Greek myths; her notebook is full of very loose plot notes of various movies and novels that she hasn't attacked actually retelling yet, and she has as much poetry as she had memorized and dozens of songs with lyrics that make good poems. 

Raine is very good but stories are STORIES. He immediately starts reading with enthusiasm and peppering Raine with questions ("what does 'insane' mean?" "why wouldn't a school have enough toys for all the kids?" "why does the cambist exchange money for other money?" )

By the time he finishes Under One Root he looks strange; by the time he squeals in shock at the end of Bluebeard, as horrified and surprised as you can only be when you've learned about the concept of murder from the story you're currently reading, he's decidedly pinkish; and when he bounces in glee about the cambist's clever exchange (after clarifying what a "prison" is) he has turned bright colors. 

".....what just... happened?" 

He stares at his hands.

"I don't know. My hands are different. The size is the same and the shape is the same and the shades are the same but they're just... different... somehow..."

"They have colors. Nothing here has colors except somehow for you, and I'd know if it was stories specifically that did it because then I'd be colorful and instead I am observably black and white and grey. — you know I was not really expecting things to get weirder." 

"Colors," he says, rolling around the word in his mouth. "What colors am I?"

(Lee's pants and buttondown shirt are also colored! Inexplicably, he is wearing colors that match.)

"Your hair is brown and your eyes are brown and your skin is kind of pinkish and your shirt is blue and your pants are bluish greyish and your shoes are —" she checks — "green." 

"I can't see most of those things! --I'm going to go to the bathroom and look at myself in the mirror."

"Kay!" 

She wonders absently if the clothes he isn't wearing have also changed, and then remembers that she was going to ask him what going steady meant and now it'd probably be weird. 

He comes back.

Bounce bounce bounce. "I'm COLORS! Colors are really pretty."

"They are! -- where I'm from almost everything is colors and it's so good." 

"Wow!!!!"

He keeps looking at his hands in fascination.

I want to show you sunsets, and snow at dawn, and neon signs on wet asphalt, and candy apples and blue morpho butterflies and fire and moss and cherry trees and stained glass windows, Raine thinks, and doesn't say, because it would kind of just be taunting him. 

"....totally unrelatedly to anything, what's the difference between dating and going steady, I haven't been able to figure it out just by eavesdropping and there isn't really anyone else I can ask," she says, because she's pretty sure that if she puts it off any longer there will be a romcom-style miscommunication and she just is not about that life. 

"Oh!" he says. "Dating is what you're doing with me or Anthony-- a boy and a girl spend time together doing something fun and getting to know each other, he pays for her, you maybe hold hands. Going steady means that he gives you his letterman's jacket or his class ring or something, and he calls you every day, and he takes you out twice a week, and neither of you is allowed to date anybody else. Adults don't really like it when you go steady, you're supposed to date around and get to know people,but people do anyway. You're not really supposed to kiss or cuddle someone unless you're going steady with them but some guys are ungentlemanly and some girls are, uh, loose." (He blushes red about the last word.)

"Not getting to kiss or cuddle anyone is terrible and I've had enough of it so I will be ignoring that part. Thank you." 

Lee is strongly considering the possibility of being ungentlemanly. 

Instead of proposing something disrespectful he says, "why do you ask?"

"Anthony asked if I wanted to go steady with him and I wanted to check what that meant before I decided." 

"Oh."

"— I'm going to tell him no." 

"I mean, you don't have to, I don't-- um in your world it seems like sometimes people don't get married but here everyone gets married? I mean it, like, literally everyone? I'm going to-- find someone at a dance or fall in love with my secretary or get introduced to someone else single-- and it's going to work out fine so you don't have to date me because I might not get dates from other people. I'm going to get married no matter what."

"....okay but in the meantime I will get to hang out with you and possibly cuddle you and definitely tell you stories and watch you bounce about things and get you to make that face, the one you had at the conclusion of the riddle game, and tell you about my world and watch you make faces about it, and I am not actually going to give that up because Anthony has abs." 

A significantly happier "oh."

"See? I was right. Watching you make faces is good and important." 

Squirming! Extremely happy blushing!

"Thank you. Um. You too?"

Happy beaming!! 

"— oh, you know what I bet Pleasantville doesn't have, is good poetry," and she pushes Lee Caged Bird by Maya Angelou. 

"...why are the sentences broken up like that?"

"....fuck, do you not have poetry at all — no, that can't be right, you have songs with words — you know how songs are broken up into lines? Poetry does the same thing." 

"...so it's like a song without any music?"

"I'd be more likely to say that a song is poetry set to music, but yeah, pretty much." 

"Huh. Are you supposed to read it out loud, like a song?"

"You can? You don't have to and supposed to isn't really a thing but it usually adds something." 

With great concentration he reads it twice, once without his lips moving and once with, and then he starts crying.

Raine stands up and hugs him. 

"...yeah. Yeah, it does that." 

"The bird is so sad."

She nods and reaches out for Lee's hand and... elects to explain that in a good poem it isn't just literally about the bird at a different time that is not now. 

"...I don't think songs are supposed to make you sad."

"...some of them are. Lots of them are. And poetry is mostly supposed to make you feel things, there's no one feeling that all poems are trying to make you have." 

He thinks about this. 

"...I think in Pleasantville we are supposed to be happy all the time. So maybe that is why we don't have poetry. Because it would be hard to have poetry that only makes you have happy feelings."

"I'm honestly not sure people in Pleasantville are supposed to have strong feelings at all. Which — I don't know, it's probably better for some people, but I'll break myself if I try to live in it." 

"I mean, you're supposed to love your wife and your kids, and be happy when the high school wins a football game, and have fun camping or playing cards or roller skating, and feel a sense of accomplishment about your garden or your job or your paintings. And those are all feelings. And-- it's kind of bad for me now because I don't really like most of the things teenagers like, but that's just because I'm not married yet."

She taps her fingers on the table. "Yeah, but — my parents give me sort of generically parental advice and have demonstrated absolutely no knowledge or awareness that I might have individual traits? And that might be the kind of relationship you can be sort of vaguely okay in but it's not really what I think of when I think of being strongly happy. Youre supposed to have a sense of accomplishment about something you've made but I am literally right now at this moment observing that Pleasantville doesn't have real art. You're supposed to be happy when the high school wins a football game but I don't actually mean that when I say strong feelings, you don't get to see really new things or go really new places, or I mean you personally do because of me and colors but the general you doesn't?" 

"My parents are loving and supportive and know me? I think it might be hard for your parents to give you specific advice because your parents met you two weeks ago."

"That's... fair. Also I am in the habit of never telling adults anything about me or my life if I can possibly avoid it which can't be helping. Everything they say to each other still feels very generic, though, and that's not because they only met two weeks ago." 

He shrugs. "Some people are like that? I guess I wouldn't know whether love is, uh, more intense in your homeworld than in Pleasantville. I've only ever been in Pleasantville."

"Yeah, fair, and I haven't seen much of Pleasantville." 

"I think-- they're trying really hard to get us to fall in love with each other? That's why you're supposed to date around and make sure you find the right person. But some people don't find someone they can be in love with. If you're getting married when you're old, like 23 or something, it's probably just... you found someone you like well enough and can make a life with."

"Casually mentioning that twenty-three is old enough that you probably settled for what you could get is really not helping!" 

"...um, I'm confused and I don't know how to put into words what I'm confused about."

"So in my world, when people get married, which most people do, they've generally spent some time as adults figuring out what they want to do with their lives first. And this is better, we used to do it the Pleasantville way where everyone got married right out of high school and it just sucked so much for so many people, and also the Pleasantville way is really distressing to me personally because a lot of people have hurt me a lot to try and make me into the sort of person who gets married like people do in Pleasantville when I wasn't and didn't want to be before, and in combination this really does not make me happier about the Pleasantville setup." 

"People shouldn't hurt you-- I'm sorry--"

"Yeah. Yeah, they shouldn't. And everything about this place makes me very sure that people are going to if I act like I want the things I actually want rather than the things they want me to want and I hate it." 

"You don't... want to get married?"

(He sounds like he doesn't doubt Raine exactly but this is a preference as confusing to him as "I would like to spend the rest of my life stepping repeatedly on rusty nails.")

"I have literally never been the kind of person who gets married. If literally everyone else gets married no matter what, I don't know, maybe I'll choose the white picket fence over being alone my whole life, but if I could actually choose I would live in a city with a population of more than a million and at least five different art museums and I'd have an apartment that I shared with three friends." 

He doesn't know whether to say "that's so many people" or "that's so many art museums" or "but maybe I want to marry you" or "you wouldn't be alone, you'd live with your parents," and so instead he says "I'm sorry that you're here."

"In a lot of ways it's better than where I was, especially short term? But long term I miss having meaningful options. 

...also colors. I miss colors. And good stories that I haven't already read well enough to retell and good poetry that I haven't already memorized and music that sounds anything like the kinds of music I like. Also not looking just like all my classmates but I can actually just fix that one if I decide the attention is worth it." 

"At least... I'm colors now?" he says hopefully.

"Yeah, you are colors now." Hug? "Just, you know, the caged bird sings of freedom." 

Hug!!!! 

Unfortunately, Lee is very distracted from Raine being sad by her being loose in the public library. (Fortunately no one is watching.)

If she knew about this thought process she would snarl about Pleasantville some more, so it is probably better that she does not. 

"Thanks," she says after a moment, and lets go. 

Lev would probably have THOUGHTS about Raine saying WEIRD THINGS but instead he was HUGGED and now he is having a furious internal conflict about whether he should be ungentlemanly with Raine in the future.

Cons:
-it would be bad for Raine and he only wants good things for her
-there are probably reasons you are not supposed to, like that you're not supposed to fall for people who might not fall for you back 
-he doesn't know where he would do it because he doesn't have a car in which to visit Lover's Lane

Pros:
-Raine is doing it with Anthony anyway so it's probably not going to be worse if she does it with him
-He already has kind of stupidly intense feelings about her and hugging her won't make it worse
-He really really wants to

He decides to delay this decision by saying, "um, do you want to get dinner afterward?"

"Yeah, sure, dinner sounds good." It actually does, which continues to be a really weird feeling. 

"You're not supposed to go on really long dates with guys you're dating," he says. "You're supposed to have a different date for Saturday afternoon and Saturday night-- I mean, you could also just not have a date one of those times, but you're not supposed to stretch the date out unless you're going steady with someone. And in general you're not supposed to have a date with the same person twice in a row, I guess the Saturday afternoon/Saturday night thing is a special case of that? People won't gossip about it but your parents will get annoyed. It's like not doing your chores or forgetting your homework at home or something."

"....there are so many rules and I understand so few of them. I think I'd rather not do things that'll annoy my parents if they're easy to avoid but I'll see you on Monday?" 

"Okay. Um," he says nervously. "You're allowed to see people in groups between dates and I tried to do that with you but I'm kind of-- bad-- at that-- so I thought maybe I could study in the library and if you wanted to talk you could also do your homework in the library and then that's not like a date-date, it's just. Happening to be in the same place. And I don't have to try to talk when there are other people around."

"...okay. I think I still don't really get it but I'm okay with not getting it. And I can try to frame it as 'we did homework and then went on a date' to my parents?" 

"Yeah, I don't think you'll get in trouble with that if, you know, you actually did your homework. Parents like it when you do your homework. So you should probably do that now."

"...uh, I didn't actually bring my homework, because it's a sewing project and also because I've been doing the written stuff in lit class instead of paying attention, but I can say I studied for history." 

"...you're going to tell your parents something that isn't true?"

"...uh, yeah? I've been doing that literally since I got here by, y'know, claiming to be their daughter and not an interloper from an alternate dimension. Also telling adults the truth about my life has universally had terrible results and I never do it if I can possibly avoid it." 

"...I guess, but..." Lee is able to work with lying about novel things like interlopers from alternate dimensions but is VERY CONFUSED about lying as it applies to things he's used to like homework.

"If it helps, my reasoning about not actually studying for history is that I have way more important uses of my ability to memorize things than genealogy and I don't want to forget poems because I was using space in my head for my classmates' family trees, I have an actual reason." 

"But if you don't study for history you'll make a bad grade."

"No, I won't, and even if I would get a bad grade I actually just care more about keeping August by Mary Oliver than I care about history class." 

"Because you're... really good at history?" he tries.

"....yes," because like hell is she going to tell someone who makes that face at the idea of lying to adults about her cheating plans. 

...This is very confusing but Raine's face looks kind of unhappy so he is not going to ask any more questions. Instead, he considers the possibilities for looseness created by the previously unthinkable "lie to adults" plan. 

"Um," he says. "My parents are going out on a date night tonight, and my sister is going over to the sitter's, and they'll probably be gone soon. So if you wanted we could just... go to my room... and hang out... and not tell our parents?"

Meanwhile, Anthony has had some thoughts about blowjobs. 

Immediately after the blowjob it seemed like Raine was the best and smartest and nicest and most beautiful person in the world and he loved her. But he woke up in the morning and he was quite fond of her but... did not particularly want to go steady with her yet, since they'd only ever been on one date. Also immediately after the blowjob it seemed like a great idea to go out on dates with Raine all the time and have her give him blowjobs, but upon sober reflection this does not seem like such a great idea. Blowjobs are nice but so are dances and football games and cuddling with other girls, and if he spent all his time trying to get blowjobs he would not be able to do the other things. 

So it seems like blowjobs are very fun, but also change around your priorities a lot immediately afterward. He should remember to not make any important decisions immediately after getting a blowjob. 

Honestly, it was really nice that he had the experience, but now that he's had it he'd be pretty fine if he'd never had one again. You know, he's experienced the endless vistas of ecstasy once, and he's really glad he got to do that, and he's definitely planning to go out with Raine next weekend and experience it again, but if things don't work out he's pretty content with that. Discovering your baby on your front door is-- he's informed-- one of life's happiest moments, but you wouldn't want to discover a new baby every weekend. 

Blowjobs do seem pretty convenient though. Maybe when he gets married he will tell his wife about them. Anthony is pretty sure that having a 'I love you, you are so good and important and everything about you is amazing' button you can press whenever would be really good for marital harmony. 

Maybe she'll tell the other girls about it? That would be neat. If all the girls knew how to give blowjobs he'd definitely have them on his date activities roster less often than dancing or burgers but way more often than, say, roller skating or football. 

"That sounds great," she tells Lee, and does not hug him again even though now that she's been reminded that snuggles exist and she can have them it's kind of difficult. 

Maybe he will be VERY bold and touch Raine's feet under the table while he reads the rest of the poetry and songs she's written down.

Cuuuuuute. Cute cute cute. 

(She has Annabelle Lee by Edgar Allen Poe, and The Old Astronomer by Sarah Williams, and Autoclave by the Mountain Goats, and The Boy In The Bubble by Paul Simon, and Commissioning a Symphony in C by Cake, and Gather by Rose McLarney, and Inland by Edna St Vincent Millay.)