Leah leaves the gym sweaty and sore after her seventh wrestling class. Jen catches her at the door and gives her a piece of paper with the address written on it, and a quick explanation of the borough.

“It’s east of Saint-Rem, just on the other side of Parc Saint-Viateur,” she says, switching between accents and causing Leah to totally miss most of the information. “Kind of a shitty part of town, but the street is nice.”

Leah goes to the library before home, and after asking the librarian for what books could help her, she takes out a driving atlas to find the street in question. It takes her a while, but she finds it, and figures out how to get there on foot.

She is beginning to realise the sheer scale of the city she is in. How do they feed themselves? How do they dispose of waste? How many environments did they displace to build this sprawl of a city? She is almost tempted to ask for the answers to these questions, or a book to explain them, but is worried about seeming too clueless.

Instead, she decides to read another book on Africa, to study her supposed homeland a bit more – in case anyone decides to ask an innocent question, or a prying one. Leah doubts anyone suspects her ruse, but she still does not want to fall behind. Embarrassing enough that I accidentally chose a country that is so wildly outside my realm of experience, but that the ethnic group is more Welleslassi or Bairish…I can barely even remember at this point why I chose this lie, but I’m regretting it deeply the further along I go.

She skims through the chapter on Morocco. Maghrebi tea…couscous…soccer…oh great, even they speak French…I’ve seen a few references to the language ‘Arabic’ before, what does it sound like?

She looks through the dictionary section, and pulls out one with “Arabic-English” on the spine. Flipping it open to look inside, she reads two entries before closing it immediately and re-shelving it. No chance I will learn that in a day. Screw that, I’ll just hope there’s nobody at the party that speaks Arabic.

She doubles back home, washes down, and spends a bit more time reading from the fiction section of the bookshelf.

When it’s time to go, she carefully traces the path she memorised from the library, swinging by “the sack” on the way – by extrapolation, she had figured out that it was one of many pronunciations of the name of the local alcohol store.

A store only for alcohols, products made by hundreds of different companies. Add that to the list of concepts I ought bring back with me. The thought makes her melancholy. She pushes it away and focuses.

She asks one of the employees if they have mead, and though it takes him a few tries to understand what she means, he eventually points her to a bottle. Leah buys it with the special card left by her neighbour, and resumes her trek to Jen’s place.

She arrives a little later than the advised time, but still earlier than anyone else. Jen welcomes her in and gives her a quick tour of the apartment.

“Will you need a place to crash?” Jen asks, returning to the living room.

“Huh?”

“Or will you be able to get home? We might only finish up around one a.m.”

“Oh. It’s a bit far to walk, on unfamiliar roads.”

“Aight, we’ll set up the couch after the movie.”

Leah nods as though she understands. They unfold the couch into a wide, short mattress, and set some folded sheets beside it for when they become necessary.

The rest of the group arrives shortly, and the party starts off. Not knowing what to expect, Leah lets the girls take the lead.

Bri and Amber show up, and greet Leah fondly. Soph arrives next – Jen’s former classmate from college, now a “music major” at a university in a nearby city, and only out for a short visit. Annabelle is last to arrive – a bit of a Welleslassi look, but paler, and with a very Bairish nose.

“Oh dude, you’ve never heard my real name?” Annabelle asks, when Leah greets her. “Right, of course not; work. My name is Hiroe.”

“And for that matter, you can call me Kira, or Di,” Bri puts in.

“I’m fine with Amber, but my real name is Gloria.”

“Well I’m…Leah,” Leah says uncertainly, and the girls laugh, moving through the apartment familiarly and setting up food and drinks. There are five bottles on the counter by the time everyone has arrived and settled in.

The girls gossip and relax, all dressed in shorts and tank tops and sock- or bare-footed. Leah feels it’s very similar to how she and Mary talk, but on a larger scale – and occasionally somewhat raunchier.

“So he’s down there, doing the alphabet thing – ” Jen says, laughing through the words.

Hiroe shakes her head disapprovingly. “Oh my god no…”

Amber gives an exaggerated sigh. “Don’t they realise it’s super obvious?”

Hiroe nods. “I think they want us to know, like we’ll be proud of them for it.”

“Right?” Jen says. “And I’m so close to telling him to stop and just go, but like, he was so sweet? I really liked him at the restaurant, but now we’re here and he’s just…mehh? I didn’t want him to feel bad, so I just let him, and kind of like, shifted to try and get him to hit the right places…”

Kira scoffs. “When you get to that level of effort you’re better off ditching him for a vibe.”

“But I liked him, and I figured that if we kept dating, I could just sorta…nudge him in the right direction. Anyway, does that count as a woman trying to ‘fix’ a man?”

A chorus of yeses and nos.

“Look,” Hiroe says, with a tone and posture of certainty. “The difference lies in whether you’re fixing a single behaviour, or a whole mentality. ‘Fixing a man’ means like, teaching him that there are ways for him to express emotions healthily, not teaching him how to do the dishes. Bad sex isn’t a mentality, it’s a behaviour. Therefore, you’re not trying to ‘fix’ him.”

“I think we’re ignoring the real issue here,” Kira cuts her off. “He was doing something you didn’t enjoy, and instead of telling him that you just sat through it quietly?”

“I’m bad at confrontation,” Jen says defensively.

“Saying ‘that doesn’t feel good’ isn’t confrontation, dude. I’ve got enough confidence issues already without learning that there are grown-ass adults out there who are too shy to just come out and say what they do and don’t enjoy during sex,” Kira says.

Jen shrugs exaggeratedly, and a little defensively, Leah thinks.

Hiroe joins back in. “Just shifting isn’t communicating with your partner. You’ve got to say what you want.”

“Well it should be obvious that the alphabet isn’t a good idea!” Jen says. “Nobody likes that! It’s too unpredictable.”

“Unpredictable?” Amber asks, making a face over the rim of her glass.

“Yes!”

“The alphabet is unpredictable?”

“You don’t know where the tongue’s going next.”

“A-B-C-D-E-F-”

Jen waves a hand in Amber’s face to silence her, and the blonde girl laughs. “I know, but I can’t keep track when it’s his tongue moving around. I’m not fluent in pussy Braille!”

The room dissolves in laughter for the next minute. When things settle down a bit, Kira pipes up again. “Pussy Braille aside, I think it’s a little generalising to write off the alphabet thing as a whole. I mean, it’s not bad.”

“What are you talking about?” Jen asks, apparently sincere.

“I mean…” Kira shrugs. “You were saying that no-one should ever use it, but like, maybe some people like it?”

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Hiroe and Amber make a face. “Not valid,” Hiroe says. “I love you Di, but just…no.”

“What?”

“You actually like the alphabet?”

Kira blushes a soft burgundy, a colour partially induced by the fourth glass of wine she is drinking. “So what if I do?”

“Bruh.” Hiroe shakes her head. “Bitch no.”

“So like, you like random movements? Sporadic?” Amber asks.

Kira seems to regret speaking. “No! But…I like a variety of things, and the alphabet…like, you’ll get to a spot where suddenly ooh – ” She squirms demonstratively. “ – and then you tell the dude ‘keep doing that one,’ and – ”

“Ohhhh,” Hiroe says, and Jen nods along, looking relieved. “Okay, yes. Using it as a sort of sampling of what feels good? Okay.”

Kira holds a hand out and nods emphatically towards Hiroe, but is apparently too flustered to continue talking.

“That’s even assuming the dude remembers where he is in the alphabet at that point, and knows which particular part of the letter was good,” Jen says, still with notes of disapproval.

“We’re ignoring the ultimate authority,” Hiroe says. “Where do you stand on the alphabet thing, Leah?”

Leah draws her confused mind more firmly back to the conversation at hand. “I’m not sure what you mean…” It reminds her uncomfortably of when the five used to poke fun at her earlier illiteracy, but she has understood enough of the conversation to know it means something very different here.

“Is the alphabet a straights-only thing? Like is it just dudes being bad at sex with women? – Kira excluded.”

Kira rolls her eyes.

“Or do lesbians do that too?”

Leah feels her blood turn cold, and has to force herself to keep breathing normally. “Umm…”

Jen slaps Hiroe’s arm lightly. “Dude, if she doesn’t want to talk about it, don’t force her to, god. Let the innocent stay innocent.”

Amber laughs. “Pfft, Leah’s not innocent. You can tell by – ”

“You can’t tell if someone’s a virgin or not! That’s b.s.” Kira cuts her off with a wave.

“Okay, then how about I get a vibe from her?”

“You wish,” Jen whispers.

Amber turns, colour rising in her cheeks. “Hey!”

Leah gets up to pour another glass of mead, and the girls all giggle wildly.

Soph is in the kitchen, slicing some cheeses for a thing called “charcuterie,” which Leah recognises vaguely from her one time in Probesc. “She’s always been like that, it’s not just working at the strip club that makes her say that stuff,” Soph says, tilting her head back to the living room to indicate the larger group of girls.

“Jen?” Leah asks.

“She enjoys any opportunity to tease people – verbally, I mean, tease her friends verbally. Although, I’ve never seen her at work, so I don’t know if maybe she teases there too.”

Leah smirks, refilling her glass partway. “Why don’t you ever visit the club?”

“Pfft, too shy. Besides, I’m always worried that the other customers will assume any woman in the building is fair game. Don’t they ever treat you badly?”

“Badly? No. I mean maybe they do, but I don’t speak French, so I wouldn’t understand them if they were.”

“Oh, are you just an anglophone?”

“Just?”

Soph raises her hands in apology. “Not in a bad way, I’m just curious.”

Leah feels her memorised facts about Morocco slipping away as she flails about, searching for relevant information. She looks around the brightly lit room, and hears the laughter in the background. The electricity hums loudly, and the fan in the next room whirrs and buzzes. Everything is so different, and for a moment she feels so overwhelmed by the foreignness – even the mead tastes wrong – that she is tempted to just abandon the whole facade and run off home.

She takes another sip and shrugs. “I also speak Algic.”

“Oh, that’s in the Turkish language family, right?”

A bit of mead dribbles down Leah’s chin and she wipes it with the back of her hand. “What?”

“I don’t know anything else about it, but I know it’s one of the major language families…Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, Caucas, Sino-Tibetan…I can’t remember it all, I learned it in a course a couple years ago. So what does it sound like?”

Leah tries to remember the last time she spoke it. I used to speak it sometimes with Kimry; each of us speaking our own dialect and understanding less than half of what the other said, but just enjoying the sound. The caravan merchant in Bair spoke it a bit, he used to try and corner me into conversations. Before that…the faire; even when we travelled beyond Algi we pretty much only ever spoke it amongst ourselves. She drags her mind back to the present.

“Na Ievo do hai sebrossed. Do…shevoi na…hatset? Divol hatset. Eta Do noi evartet.”

Soph listens with an interested face. “And what does that mean?”

“Just that I’m impressed I still remember it after three years away from home.”

“Three years?!”

Leah shrugs it off, though her stomach roils a bit. Too much honesty; time to backtrack. “I’ve been travelling, but I’ve apparently settled down here.” She pauses to take a sip. “Never expected that.” Understatement of my life.

“Well cool! Hope you like it here, it’s a great city to live in.”

Soph’s tone is so sincere and welcoming that Leah gets swamped by a wave of guilt and belonging. She hides it behind another sip of her glass.

“Hey you two! Movie in fifteen?” Amber leans her head in to ask.

Soph gives a thumbs up. “M’kay, I’ll put the pizza in just before we start. Appetisers first!” She brings in the charcuterie board.

Amber smiles over at Leah. “You ever had pizza before, Leah? Sorry, dumb question.”

“What’s a pizza?”

Amber and Soph both stop dead in their tracks. Amber recovers first, and rushes back to the living room.

“This is gonna be Leah’s first pizza!” she yells out, and all conversation immediately shifts to this utterly shocking reveal. Comments ensue about how it shouldn’t have been a frozen one then, that so-and-so’s crust recipe is the best, and that maybe Leah is innocent after all.

Leah keeps quiet on her second question: ‘what’s a movie?’

*

Leah’s question is answered quickly.

She had seen video ads before, on large boards over the roadways or on small glowing screens on desks; they moved, and sometimes even made sound. They baffled her, but since no-one ever mentioned them, she never asked.

This was that, times a million.

Between Vivitha’s ghost stories and being raised on monster stories, Leah does not find the content to be too horrible, and having killed people in pretty gory ways herself the gore is mediocre. The intimacy is, of all words, uncanny to watch, but mainly in the fact that the others are not bothered by it.

What most shocked her was how easily the other girls watched it. There were only a couple moments where some of them got a little squeamish, and Amber had grabbed her arm for a second at one of the ‘jump-scares’ as they were called, but other than that the content seemed to be familiar to them all.

Leah re-evaluates her view of this society, where guards and soldiers are non-existent and violence is easy to watch. What horrors must the common person have seen for this to be entertainment, and yet protection unneeded? Are the horrible things all in the distant past, or have I just failed to notice the ‘protections’ yet?

As the night progresses and the bottles near empty, they switch to “self-care mode” and take out the face masks. Leah finds it similar to having slices of raw meat on one’s face, in terms of texture, but much lovelier in terms of smell.

They mellow out, lying across the couch and the ground. Amber has taken a glass of mead and is commenting on its flavour, appreciatively. Kira is asleep.

“We gotta wake her up, she needs to catch a bus,” Amber says, and she and Leah poke her until she wakes up. “Beauty sleep’s over, Di.”

Kira peels the face mask off and scrunches her face a few times. “I’m never sure if these things actually work, or if they’re a scam.”

“One hundred percent a scam, but they make you feel special,” Jen says, recumbent.

Kira nods wisely. “Ah, like a man.”

All the girls wake up again enough to laugh.

Amber walks Kira and Soph to the bus stop, while Jen and Leah make up the couch, sweeping away pizza crumbs as they go.

Jen wishes her a good night, and as Leah is settling down Amber arrives back in the apartment. Leah looks at Amber in confusion. “What about the bus?”

Amber kicks off her shoes and stifles a yawn. “Oh no, I was just walking the others to the bus stop; there are no buses running to my neighbourhood this late, unless I want to spend two hours on transit, transferring, doubling back and forth.”

With no further preamble or warning, Amber settles into the couch-bed across from Leah. In the darkness, surrounded by the rattling hum of the fan, they continue the conversations of the night at a whisper.

“How did you find it? Your first North American girls’ night.”

Leah smiles. “Loud. Drunk. More blood than I expected. So much sex talk.”

“Ah, well who else can we talk to about that stuff? Even if you find a guy who tries to listen, you always worry that he’s humouring you, or tuning you out, or lying. I dunno, maybe I’ve just gotten some rotten guys in the past. Or I just have trust issues. My ex preferred the second explanation.”

“Ex?”

Amber shrugs. “Well, my last hook-up, not really a relationship. He didn’t last long. Heh.”

“Oh.”

“Oh?”

“He.”

“Oh no yeah, I’m bi. Never mentioned that?”

Leah turns to look at her. “Bi?”

Amber snorts quietly. “Bisexual, yeah? I date both. What do you call it where you’re from?”

“We don’t.”

Amber falls silent. “Oh. Right.”

“Never realised that was an option.”

“Heh, are you learning something new about yourself.”

“Hmm…” Leah stretches. “Nah.”

Amber giggles, but quiets down quickly. “So yeah. Just a guy. That was a while ago though, I’ve been taking some ‘me time.’ You?”

Leah stares at the ceiling, then curls over on her side to sleep, ending up facing away from Amber. “I left someone behind.”

“Oh. Oh holy fuck Leah, I’m sorry, that’s horrible. Is she going to come join you here?”

Leah snickers sadly. “If only. But I doubt it.”

There is silence. They fall asleep.

*

Leah wakes up with her hand resting on Amber’s hip.