Jane was standing with her arms dangling out of our dormitory on the fourteenth floor, exposing her still-wet nail polish to the gale-force winds that were shrieking between the school buildings. The sky was dark, holding something like a hurricane in its swollen black clouds. She whistled Dixie over the roar of thunder and yelled, “When you die, what do you want on your headstone?”
She never asked a question she didn’t already have an answer to. Discussion was not for the formation of new ideas, but for the sheer entertainment of old ones. “I don’t know,” I said, barely able to hear myself speak, though I leaned over as far off the edge of my bed as I could. “I don’t know if I want to be buried. I kind of want to decompose.”
She frowned. “You and your Earth Mother shit.” Rain began to smack against the sidewalk, and she didn’t so much as recoil. It dripped off the roof just beyond the tips of her fingers, where red sludge remained pooled, waiting. “Cemeteries are…well. They’re so romantic, don’t you think?”
If there was any one institution that nurtured necrophilia, it was parochial school. Mass was always centered around death—there was so many sins to atone for and so many to commit, and the waiting line before Saint Peter wound around the block. Angelic Disneyland Fast-Passes were only available to those who paid careful attention to the time bomb that was mortality.
“Just think about it. The dim shadow of mausoleums, the only breathing that of you and the perfect girl-slash-boy…”
I flinched. She was flagrant in many ways, the first and foremost of them her homosexuality. She was a lesbian before the dawn of time, I was certain—an activist marching from the womb with a rainbow flag in her fists. It wasn’t apparent at first glance. One of her many sadistic delights was to ensnare straight boys and then accuse them of heterocentrism when they fell at her feet, begging for a movie, a dance, a grope.
Apparently, I was the only one who had problems with girl-slash-boys. Sex with any prefix was something I elected not to dwell on.
“You creeper.”
“Na-o-mi,” she said in the way she always did when I said something ignorant. “You’re the creeper. Rotting? Who does that?”
“Nomadic tribesmen who don’t have the resources for embalming?”
She sighed. “Touché.”
When she ran her fingernails together without clumping or running, she closed the window and the rain was muted, thunder muffled. “Anyway, you want to know what I want on my headstone?”
“What?”
“’I can has cheezburger, plz?’”
“What?”
“You know. Like lolcats. Except lol-dead-Janes.”
“Dead Janes are so not an lol-thing.”
“Na-o-mi,” she said, standing in front of the mirror and running a brush through her hair. “Just think of it. The cheeseburgers that people provide in honor of the dead will provide food for local wildlife, and—just think—a hundred, two hundred years from now, people will come to make rubbings of my grave and think that twenty-first-century Americans actually spoke like that. Basically, I’ll be fucking with the minds of generations to come.” I simply stared at her.
And in the way that usually accompanies cunning movie villains, lightning lit up the sky outside of the window, searing my eyeballs back into my brain. The lamp above our desk flickered and went out with a small pop.
She grinned. “Isn’t that brilliant?”
There in the dark, her skin shone beneath weak light and her eyes sparkled with whatever brightness that was going on behind them.
Between her talk of death and her Make Love, Not War sweatshirt, I found the most problematic problem in the history of problems.
I was in love with Jane.
Houston, we have a problem.
