Chapter Text

“Girls,” said Elsa quietly into the dark, and my entire world inverted.

It all started earlier that evening. It was our one special summer, that sunset summer after graduating high school when everyone is bound tight together in solidarity by swiped beer and the knowledge that the parting of the ways approaches. We had nothing to do but work in coffee shops and landscaping businesses all day and eat ice cream all night, then fall asleep drunk or high or completely stone-cold sober under piles of blankets and our friends’ warm limbs in the woods. In the morning we ate pancakes and recounted loudly our wild tales, which disturbed the senior citizens who were the only other people present at ten ‘o’ clock on a Wednesday morning at our favorite diner.

We knew that not only summer but the precious feeling of that summer, the closeness and the camaraderie, the slow satisfaction, would end come September, when we scattered across the nation to begin our college careers. Going away to college changes you, hopefully for the better. But that summer I dreaded leaving because I loved who I was then. That summer, for the first time since I was a child, I felt like a free spirit. But I knew it was going to end, and for that it was all the sweeter.

It ended earlier for me and Elsa. She was off to visit her family in Norway, and then to college up north. But unlike the rest of us, she was moving, permanently. There was nothing tying her to our hometown, not after what happened to her parents. It really was commendable that she managed to stay all on her own for the last two years of high school – though she never really talked about it, we all sort of guessed that she didn’t want to go through the hassle of moving out of the country to be with her family after everything else that had suddenly turned her life over.

Everyone kind of knew there was something wrong with Elsa, even before her parents passed away. She was like a ghost. Everything would be normal, or as normal as they ever got with her, and then she would disappear from school for a week. She never talked to people any more than she had to, except for me and a few others. I still have the image in my mind of her sitting at the lunch table in middle school, hunched in on herself like she was trying not to touch anyone or anything around her. Or maybe like she was hoping she could fold herself up so small she would disappear.

But Elsa was lovely, too. She had the most bizarre sense of humor, one so hit-or-miss you would either be in stiches on the floor or not even realize she had told a joke. She was sensitive, so obviously delicate that not even the most sarcastic teenagers made fun of her, either in her presence or out of it. She did nothing to warrant criticism, and made it seem unintentional. But she was socially conscious in all the right ways too; she, even after she was orphaned, talked with concern of people who were poorer than she.

Someday she wanted a big, sprawling house in the countryside, she told me, filled with cats and birds and sunlight and children. She loved to read and write but needed me to edit her literature essays because she couldn’t spell to save her life. To be honest, I loved being needed.

She was beautiful, too. Elsa seemed to miss all kinds of social cues, but the sight of her sheepish smile used to melt any annoyance I felt when she was absentee at my birthday or refused to eat cookies I had made for her when she discovered they didn’t contain chocolate.

I think the three things Elsa was most passionate about in life must have been reading, solitude, and chocolate.

She never really had an interest in other people; she didn’t listen to gossip because she simply didn’t care. Her friends were few in number, and she held them in great regard though they felt she was something of an acquaintance since she never socialized. We all sort of presumed she was simply not interested in sex or romance at that point in her life; once she was directly asked if she were asexual but merely spluttered embarrassedly until I rescued her. Whenever the topic of sex and love came up around the lunch table (you might imagine it frequently did – after all this lunch table was located in a high school and occupied by high schoolers) and Elsa was present, I strove to change the topic of conversation because I sensed it made her uncomfortable. “Elsa doesn’t want to hear that kind of stuff!” I often told Hans indignantly when he recounted the risqué gossip of the day (though I voraciously ate it up).

All of this was discomfiting to me because, naturally, I was madly in love with Elsa.

I kept in my mind a tally of the times anything had ever indicated she might feel the same way.

Item one: once in ninth grade I baked a batch of chocolate cupcakes and brought them to school. Gathered in the library before classes began, everyone took one. When Elsa bit down into hers she let loose a pleasured moan: “Oh, Anna…”. This was incredibly out-of-character for her and frankly shocked me. I came to the conclusion that she, innocent girl, did not know what such a vocalization sounded like to the ears of ordinary, sinful mortals.

Item two: once in tenth grade we engaged in a play-fight after school and she pushed my shoulders into the brick wall. I swore she was going to kiss me. Or rather, I prayed she was going to. Nothing happened. Item two can be dismissed as fantasy.

Item three: during the summer after tenth grade, one night we had a bonfire at Kristoff’s house. I left first because I had soccer practice in the morning. I made Elsa sit on my lap to her protest. When I got up to leave, she said “I love you.” The fire was loud and her voice, as always, was low. I probably misheard. Besides, friends say “I love you” to each other all the time.

In summary I was living a life of fantasy, cherry-picking moments and trying to mold the world into a shape more pleasing to me. I was fixated, I was obsessed, and I was fabricating a narrative that was completely fictional.

Then Elsa said, “Girls,” and blew my mind.

For the two years after that night at the bonfire, I made a distinct effort to get over Elsa. She simply wasn’t interested in me. And that became apparent as she withdrew; we rarely talked and she no longer came when invited to my get-togethers, even when I offered chocolate. I moved on, developed more unattainable girl-crushes, and was devastated when they were straight/taken/not into me/any combination of the above. Essentially, I lived your average high school lesbian’s lonely life and mostly forgot about Elsa in the most major capacity, though we still sometimes spent mornings sipping hot chocolate in the library before class. We had been friends to varying degrees since we were ten years old, and that wasn’t going to change because of a creepy crush on my part.

The summer after our senior year was very short for me and Elsa because she left for Norway halfway through. We had a going-away party of sorts, though it was very small since Elsa detested parties. I had a suspicion the guest of honor would not show up since she so hated social gatherings, but I confirmed with her before going - I had considered staying home, if she had planned to do the same, since I was so tired from working all morning.

God, am I glad I decided to go.

It was at Kristoff’s house again. I was reminded painfully of the bonfire night, two years in the past and still so salient a memory. And, again, we had a bonfire and s’mores. We played “Fuck, Marry, Kill” – surprisingly, quiet Elsa got very into the game, and I heard her say “fuck” more times that night than I had in the previous eight years of knowing her. She became particularly invested when the options were Disney princesses.

“No, I’d fuck Ariel,” declared Elsa, squishing a marshmallow between two graham crackers. “And kill Pocahontas.”

Olaf gasped, looking devastated. “Why do you have to kill Pocahontas?”

“Because, duh, I’m gonna marry Mulan.”

“Duh,” we all chorused. Mulan was our unanimous pick for bride, no matter the options.

“Do I have to fuck a princess?” complained the very gay Olaf.

“How could you not?” I asked incredulously, to a chorus of laughter.

The talk changed from hypothetical fucking princesses to hypothetical unproven rumors concerning the sexual activities and drug use of our classmates; this was of course a topic of conversation only taken up by nobodies who wished they had more sexual activities and drug use of their own to discuss and experience. Elsa went silent again, watching the sparks of the dying bonfire float up to heaven. I, too, was mesmerized.

When the fire was almost completely extinguished, Sven spoke up, emboldened by the darkness and the closeness and our imminent parting. “Guys,” he said seriously. “I don’t know what I’m going to do in college. I’m such a loser.”

“No you’re –“we all started, but he cut us off.

“Seriously,” Sven said. “I’ve never even kissed or dated anybody. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Me neither,” Elsa contributed softly, self-consciously, watching her elegant hands lace and unlace in the flickering light. “I have zero experience.”

“I swear it’ll be okay,” said Kristoff reassuringly. Somehow, coming from him, it sounded sincere. He probably had the most experience of that kind of all of us, and he put his expertise to well-intentioned but usually unfortunate use in giving us impractical tips and setting us up on truly awful blind dates. “It’ll be okay,” said he. “I have a feeling that the girls will be all over Sven at college. Quiet mysterious type, you know.”

Sven started to protest but was cut off. Kristoff continued, “And Elsa will find the – wait, Elsa, do you like boys or girls?”

“Or both, or neither,” I said magnanimously, trying to keep my voice from sounding like a tightrope. I knotted my hand in the bottom hem of my sweater and repeated silently to myself boys, boys, boys, readying myself for the answer that would knock away the last vestiges of the fantasies I had tried to kill off over the last few years. It must have taken her only a moment to respond, but it felt like an eternity; I held my breath.

Boys, I thought.

“Girls,” said Elsa, her words carrying softly and with surprise into the night along with the fire’s last sparks, and everything exploded.

I was in shock. Girls, I thought dumbly. So she might -? I began the slow and painful process of revitalizing in my mind every hidden moment, every dusty piece of evidence that I had once collected to allow myself the luxury of imagining that Elsa might be as into me as I was into her. Once I had coveted and collected them to convince myself my feelings were reciprocated; then I had thrown a sheet over them, dismissed them as fantastic workings of my idle mind, and mostly forgotten, moving on to other hopeless straight-girl crushes.

Now I started remembering and reappraising. There was hope.

Olaf demanded, “How come you never said you were gay?”

“One more for the team!” I crowed, hiding my inner turmoil, and giving Olaf a huge high five. There was a giant stupid grin on my face which I tried in vain to erase. I did not look at Elsa.

Why had she not told me? I had come out of the closet very early, before high school, not so much out of any quality of bravery as an inability to keep my mouth shut. As a result I’d had a reputation as “the gay one” for a long time; this neither positively nor negatively impacted my life, since our school was quite accepting of these things, and merely eliminated the fuss of explaining to every new acquaintance that, no, I didn’t want to be set up with her brother.

Here I was, her gay best friend, and she had never so much as hinted as to her sexuality or to finding anyone attractive. It was no wonder we thought her asexual.

Olaf and Sven pressed forward on the topic, though I hovered around the fringes. Elsa could be feral – push her too hard, become too direct with her, and she would flee for the woods, disappearing from any meaningful role in my life for weeks until she could be sure whatever the issue was had blown over. As the conversation progressed, I began to see why Elsa had not said anything.

“How did you know?” Sven asked. “I mean, when did you find out?” I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Didn’t everyone find out the same way – discovering butterflies in your stomach when the beautiful girl in gym class gets too close to you, or being unable to take your eyes off her bare legs?

“I, well, I’ve been…” Elsa started haltingly. I almost swallowed my tongue, shocked that she was actually trying to answer rather than slamming the door shut like she usual. There was something special about that night, something about knowing that the next morning she would get on a plane to Norway and we would most likely never see her again. All consequences were burnt to nothingness. She continued, “I’ve been in love with someone. Ever since seventh grade.”

“Seventh grade?” I gasped. “But that’s – six years.”

Elsa was sheepish. “Yeah,” she admitted, blushing. “I’m lame.”

No one even tried to counter that.

“Who?” demanded Olaf with his usual tactlessness.

“Not saying.”

“We won’t tell anybody!” wheedled my friend. “What happens here, stays here!”

“Still not saying.”

I tried to meet Kristoff’s eye but he did not look at me; I could not be sure if his avoidance was intentional. He knew that I had once liked Elsa, but I had phrased it utterly in the past tense, and said that I was over her. I hadn’t lied – I was over her. So why did I so eagerly hang on to every word said that night, my stomach hardening into a little lead ball with every sentence that came out of Elsa’s mouth on the topic?

Elsa was still talking. “I didn’t ever think I’d, you know, have a girlfriend,” she said with no trace of self-pity or sadness. She pronounced it matter-of-factly, as if the condition of being single were so intrinsic to her that it was written on her birth certificate. “Even if I thought that the attraction was mutual, I’d never have pursued it.”

“Why’d you think you’d always be single?” I demanded, unable to stop myself. The heat of anger seeped into my voice and colored its edges orange. “You’re wonderful!”

She shrugged. There were too many people huddled around the last embers of the campfire. She’d open up to me later, maybe. Not that there really was a later to be had, with her boarding pass already printed and her bag already packed.

The cool light of the moon and the warm lights of the house met on the planes of her face, making her eyes glimmer greyly and her skin pale, ghostly, otherworldly. I became aware of those gym-class butterflies making their presence known in the pit of my stomach, and wanted nothing more than to grab her and kiss her, to feel the gentleness of her mouth. Elsa’s mouth had always preoccupied me, and not just because I had thought about kissing her so often – her upper lip was fuller than her lower, which was unusual and lent a little exoticism to her Nordic face; perhaps it would not be attractive on people in general but it was certainly attractive on Elsa. Tonight I wanted to kiss her and in doing so confess without the words that seemed not to be coming to me, to admit to my feelings and make those sad, harrowed eyes soften.

But there were too many people around the dying ashes of the campfire.

Elsa did not further elucidate her reasons for consigning herself to hermitage. Maybe she couldn’t find the words; maybe it was too personal. As close as I was to Elsa, we rarely talked about her personal issues, though everyone was aware she had more than enough to go around. The closest we ever got to discussing her parents was several months after it happened, when she finally returned to school. I’d said, “I’m sorry,” and she’d pretended not to hear me. The only time we’d ever talked about the future, our hopes and dreams, our fears, was one day when we skipped class and sat under a cherry tree. It was odd – I probably knew the most about Elsa out of every person in her life, and even that was a pittance.

Mysterious, we called her. She always used to object to that description.

When I tuned back in, Sven and Olaf were still grilling her about her tragically unrequited love. Normally I would have stepped in at this point to whisk her away from prying questions and save her the discomfort, but today my ears perked up to catch every halting word. What’s more, she seemed surprisingly willing to answer the type of inquiries she had avoided for the last six years of our overlapping lives. It was, I suspect, once again the inebriating effect of knowing a plane awaited her in the morning.

“She just,” Elsa explained carefully, her beautiful voice tentative but neither fearful nor sad. “Made me happy.”

“Awwwww,” we chorused.

Sven said, “Seven years,” incredulously.

“I never liked anyone else,” admitted the blonde girl. “Not in that way.” There was a rustling – assorted whispers of mixed awe and pity at Elsa’s devotion.

Seven years, I thought. In my mind’s eye I transported myself back to middle school and built up our lunch table. Elsa and I always ate with the same group back then, though we didn’t really talk until our second year of high school. We were tangentially friends. I went around the lunch table in my mind, putting faces in their seats and highlighting each young girl as I went past. Whom, whom could it be?

“Jessica,” I guessed.

“No,” said Elsa.

“Ella.”

“No.”

“Are you going to tell me if I guess?”

“No.”

Then a thought drifted across my mind like a tumbleweed and I gasped. There was a girl amongst our group who was beloved by boys and girls alike; she was always the subject of showers of anonymous Valentine’s candy. Once I had liked a girl who had liked her; she was, of course, solidly heterosexual. Of course, I was incredibly jealous of her popularity and bemoaned each time a new youngster fell into the clutches of her deep-set, mournful eyes.

“It’s not Anastasia!” I cried, dread filling the cracks in my voice.

Elsa looked affronted. “No,” she reassured me, knowing of my precarious relationship with our vivacious friend. “She’s great but – no.”

I sighed with relief and settled into my folding chair, looking thoughtful out at faces I could barely see in the dark. People were talking: about the past year, about our upcoming transitions to college, about Elsa’s trip to Norway. What was the weather like? What foods would she eat (she was notoriously picky)? I didn’t care to listen to the responses.

The last two girls at our middle school lunch table were me and my then-girlfriend, who had moved away the year following. Unless I was making a fallacy by assuming Elsa would have fallen for someone in our group of friends, the only candidate for her long-suffering true love was – me. I hardly dared to believe it. My heart beat double- or triple-time against my ribcage; I made myself breathe deeply, sure that my friends could hear my elevated level of excitement.

I was uncharacteristically quiet all night; likely my friends assumed that I was depressed about Elsa’s departure the next morning. But I was not – I was scheming. How to get her alone, how to extract that vital piece of information and close off the last regret, the last tie to our younger years that left me hanging as if over a chasm, as if held up by a dainty string of floss? My thumbs rubbed nervously against each other as we chatted and prepared for bed. Olaf wore hot pink boxers with not an ounce of shame.

I laid down in my sleeping bag on the mattress on the floor, careful not to intrude upon Olaf’s dominion next to me. I kept time with my racing heart, counting out a hundred beats, then two hundred, then three in the pitch darkness. My head tilted towards where Elsa lay stretched out on the couch, my eyes as wide as I could stretch them, desperate to let in any glimmer of light that would let me see if she were awake or asleep. When I was sure that enough time had passed and Olaf’s breathing had slowed to a moderate, even rhythm, I crawled sideways out of my bag and edged through the sliding door to stand in Kristoff’s mother’s garden, lit by moonlight.

My feet taking pleasure in the softness of the grass there, I leaned against the siding of the house and waited, my ears on alert for the sound of the door or the glimmer of blonde hair in the half-light. I imagined it a hundred, a thousand times – Elsa dainty in her oversized shirt, picking her way through the plants to come stand with me. Elsa, eyes wise, coming silently to kiss me up against the side of the house without a word. Elsa crying that she had to leave the next day, Elsa laughing with glee that we had come to this open understanding even so late in our relationship. Elsa’s skinny arms wrapped around my waist.

I imagined it so many times that I hardly believed it when it happened.

“Hi, you,” she said with the utter calmness of someone about to die from nerves. “Can’t sleep?” Her hands were clasped in front of her, her knuckles so white that they appeared to glow in the moonlight. She was greyscale in this light, ephemeral. I wanted to reach out and sweep her into my longing arms, but I had not the courage.

“Hey,” I said, not answering her. “Ready to go tomorrow?”

Her expression did not change. I imagined that perhaps her shoulders sat a little more depressed at the thought of tomorrow. But her words contradicted my imagination: “I’m excited. I really want to travel, you know. To see the world.” She gestured fancifully into the air at her own trite words.

“What about leaving your beau? Or belle, I suppose.”

She stiffened.

“I think I know who it is,” I said, a smile beginning to play at the corner of my mouth. But I was nervous; what if I was wrong? Why didn’t she just tell me, right now? It was so, so obvious how I felt – why couldn’t she spare me the torment?

“Mmmmh,” Elsa muttered noncommittally, her eyes dropping to the grassy floor and her bare feet making toe-shaped indents in the loam.”

“If I point in her direction, will you tell me?”

My friend, my dear friend, looked up at me again with a mix of intrigue and terror in her eyes. She was paralyzed, I think. She was so, so unused to talking about her feelings with anyone that I don’t believe she knew how to put words to the whispering, clotting, churning feelings inside of her – much less taking the enormous step to force those words to come to her mouth in the presence of others.

I pointed one declarative finger to the west. “Is she there?” I asked.

Elsa shook her head, blonde hair falling to frame her face. She looked so precious, so earnest, so exposed. I wanted to stroke her cheek, to touch her moonlit skin and see if it were real, see if I could really touch the apparition that had floated in and out of my life for so long. I could not believe Elsa, shy Elsa, who I used to think about every night before going to sleep, was really standing there outside of Kristoff’s house in her nightclothes, talking to me about a lesbian crush. It was unreal, and I licked every second off it off my silver spoon with eager clarity.

I pointed to the east. “Is she there?”

Another negative response.

I pointed upward to the blue-black sky, fighting to keep my face straight. “Alien girl?” I asked. “Galifreyan?”

Elsa giggled and said aloud, “No.”

Then I turned my finger inward; this was the moment, but I had gone so far that I could not possibly turn back. I pressed my finger solidly against my chest, over my heart, and forced myself to meet Elsa’s eyes.

“I think she’s probably here,” I said softly. I couldn’t believe my own daring. The night had been warm, June being kind to us, but my nervousness made my skin feel frigid and I resisted the urge to wrap my arms around myself.

Elsa looked at the ground, her chin tucked so far into her chest that it seemed she was trying to bore a hole right into her heart and escape from this awkward situation in the most tragic way possible. “You might, um,” she breathed in a tiny voice. “Not be so wrong, then.”

I whirled around comically, looking behind me with wide eyes. “Where?” I cried as loud as I dared with a house full of sleeping people only feet away. “Is she invisible?”

Elsa giggled and found herself able to meet my gaze. I smiled softly, tenderly, drifting my eyes over her every feature and trying to catalogue it, trying to etch into my heart how much I loved every piece of her at that moment. Suddenly struck with an urge to be close to her, I grabbed both her soft, un-callused hands in mine and pulled her along with me.

“Come on,” I said, and pulled her out into the backyard. I ran as fast as I could with her dragging along behind me, hands still clutching mine, and came to rest at the foot of a huge oak tree. “I always liked this tree,” I told her. “I call him Oliver.”

“Hi, Oliver,” Elsa said, deadpan. She reached out a hand and pumped one of his low-hanging branches as if shaking a hand. “Nice to meet you.”

We sat at the base of the tree and, as I was just about to open my mouth and spill out all the energetic thoughts clambering for access to my vocal cords, Elsa asked, “How did you figure it out? I mean, when did you - ?”

“Elsa,” I said flatly. “You’re hella obvious.”

She blushed. It looked gray-purple in the nighttime light.

“No, I mean – I kinda thought sometimes, but I didn’t want to, you know, believe it until tonight. When you said you liked girls.”

“Yeah, well,” she said. It was impossible to read her voice. She sounded bitter, maybe, or regretful, or just resigned. “I never thought there was a reason to tell anyone.”

“But –“ I protested, throwing my arms dramatically wide. “Love!”

“I never thought I would be with anyone,” she repeated.

“But why? You’re pretty, you’re funny, you’re smart-“ I was cut off by Elsa scoffing. “Hey,” I continued. "I may not be the most objective party, but you have so many wonderful qualities. I mean, I’m awesome and I like you. Don’t you trust my judgment?”

“Whatever, Anna,” groaned Elsa. When I opened my mouth to continue my tirade about Elsa’s magnificence, a most marvelous thing happened. She loved me, I was sure now. I was her best friend, the living person who was closest to her. I was also somewhat annoying her with my overwhelming positivity at that particular moment. And even the most solitary people need someone to confide in – someone to share a secret with so that it might weigh less heavily on their minds.

I opened my mouth, and Elsa hit me with a snowball to shut me up. The snowy projectile made impact with my throat (I would guess that she had aimed for my opened mouth) and began to melt coldly down my chest.

“Why, you!” I roared in mock outrage, and sprang to my feet. I was quick and strong, athletic, and I had been the playground champion of girls’ snowball fights when I was in elementary school. What I lacked in accuracy I made up for in fervor; I was ready to show Elsa who was boss.

But when I went to grab a pile of supplies for my weaponry, my hands brushed only soft grass, dotted with unblooming dandelions ready to tell me how many boyfriends I would have. I looked at the early summer greenery, at the melting snow dashed across my chest, and finally at Elsa. She raised her hands to make a small circle, her deep blue eyes boring into mine, and rotated her wrists. A particle of dust, or leaf, or air, lit by moonlight, danced within the sphere she made with her spinning hands; then another joined its brother, and another, until each successive bite of natural material cohered with the others and reflected the white glow of the moonlight.

It was not reflecting, I realized, when the object was nearly the size of a fist. It was white. It was snow. It was June, for Christ’s sake.

“Elsa,” I breathed. She flattened out her palms forcefully and the snow broke apart, dissipating into the grass. She looked at me, waiting. I too, was waiting, for the right words to come to me. Perhaps I was waiting for Newton to appear and explain the last law of thermodynamics, one I hadn’t yet learned in school, one that would explain what I had just seen happen with my very own eyes. Perhaps I was waiting for the Doctor. Perhaps I was waiting to wake up from a dream, or for Hans to pinch me and tell me he was never tripping with me again.

“Elsa,” I repeated. “Dude. That’s so cool. I mean, literally, so cool.”

She was too surprised to laugh. She looked helpless.

I didn’t want to push her, my little, wild creature. So I walked slowly, calmly toward her with my hands where she could see them, and when she didn’t flinch I slid down the big oak trunk beside her and took a seat with my feet folded beneath me in the dirt. When I felt a suitable amount of time had passed, I dared to open my mouth again.

“So, uh, Elsa?” I said quietly, not even trying to disguise the awkwardness of my voice. “Do you mind, er, explaining?”

“It’s just something I always had,” she said. She didn’t sound happy about it. Something I had, like a disease. She had magic! “I can make snow and ice. I can change the temperature. It happens when I’m upset, or angry, or scared.”

“You can – control it?”

“A little. I can make small things like snowballs, but if I try to do something big or a bunch of things at once – it all sort of…blizzards,” Elsa explained, flatly, as if she were asked that question every day. “And the most powerful stuff, the scary stuff, happens when I’m not trying. When I’m just – overwhelmed.”

She seemed a little overwhelmed right then. But I couldn’t stop myself. “Why do you talk about it like it’s some awful thing?” I demanded, put my hand on her knee. She did not move one inch; from her practiced stillness I could tell that she was trying very, very hard not to flinch away, and I appreciated it. “It’s magic, isn’t it? Actual, legit magic?”

Frost began to accumulate on the blades of grass around us. I shivered and leaned into her, not considering the possibility that my touch would frighten her and make it worse. But she did not shy away; after a moment she softened into me as best she could, awkwardly wrapping her arm around my shoulder. Her hand hung limply; she, I could see, had no idea how to proceed; she recognized her own ignorance, and was ashamed - which compounded upon itself to make her the most awkward hug-giver in existence.

But she looked down at me, and I out over the lawn. I could feel her eyes etching her gaze into every inch of my face. I was still waiting for an answer, but with Elsa long pauses were just part of conversation. One often had to wait upwards of a minute, or even five, for an answer to a serious question. Sometimes Elsa got lost in her own head and would never respond. Other times, she was just formulating the correct response and got caught up in semantics, or became indecisive about what she wanted to say.

She was a painfully deliberate creature. I loved her.

“It’s magic, isn’t it?” I whispered again, trying to pull her out of her reverie.

“No,” said she harshly. “Well, I guess it is. Whatever magic is. But, Anna, don’t you see? It makes me afraid of everything.”

“It makes you -?”

“I’m terrified to exist anywhere people can see me in case, I don’t know, I’m having a bad day and boom! I make it snow and everybody finds out,” Elsa said. “Imagine what the kids at school would say.”

“Oh God.”

“Or the authorities,” continued my beautiful blonde witch, sounding like she had read one too many spy novels. “I’d be shipped off to God-knows-where for testing or whatever. Probably for the rest of my life. You have no idea how hard it was to keep the road from icing over during my driver’s test. All I could think of was – if this guy finds out, I’m going to be locked up.”

“They wouldn’t lock you up.”

“Anna,” Elsa said seriously, fixing my eyes with her incredible blue ones. “People like us get beaten up on the streets every day because we’re a little unusual, and I’m a lot more unusual than that.”

It took me a long time to figure out what she meant by people like us. Teenage witches with snarky sidekicks (a population comprised of me, Elsa, Sabrina, and Salem)? Blondes who dare to be friends with redheads? Then I remembered the first revelation of the night, one that was dwarfed by its successor.

Elsa meant gay people. People like us. Us. Us – both gay. Because Elsa was gay, like me. Because I was in love with Elsa and she with me. We were madly in love with each other. We, us – together.

I was filled with a buttery warmth so delicious it was almost painful. I wanted to squeeze her to me, to wrap her body so tightly in my arms that she would sink into me, that our skins and hearts and brains would meld and she would be subsumed into me, so that I could have her forever, so that she would never worry.

“Anna, why are you smiling like that? Did I say something dumb?”

“No,” I said. I just remembered how much I love you, I thought, but it was too early to say those last three words aloud. “I just –“ I reached out and grabbed her hand, running my thumb along its edges and planes and valleys, relishing the smoothness of her wrist. I delighted in finally, finally being able to touch her without guilt cracking like a whip over my head – because now I knew she felt them too, these feelings that threatened to drown me. I poured myself a bath of my delight and sank into it.

I brought her hand to my face and, slowly, watching her eyes, I pressed my lips to it.

I had never thought it could be erotic to touch someone else so simply. My mouth touched things all day, to a much more intimate degree than the barest kiss I had just laid upon the back of Elsa’s hand: food, my own hand, pillows, et cetera. This surface was like any other, really, despite its warmth and texture. But all the same a warmth, a friction between relaxation and giddy excitement, melted its way through my insides and down into my core, where I was surprised to become aware of it. It wasn’t as if anyone were kissing me, I thought. How could my own action, so mundane, precipitate such a response?

It was not the physical act that plucked at my strings. It was knowing that what my lips brushed was a part of Elsa, this beautiful girl who somehow loved me, who had somehow managed to love me for a full one-third of her short lifespan. It was knowing that I kissed her hand with grace, that I revered this skin, as I revered every inch of my friend. I pressed my love and worship into the back of her hand with my lips.

“You liked me for a long time,” I said aloud, my voice so quiet as to seem hoarse. As we sat against the oak tree, I felt my voice resonate from a deep cavity in my chest, quiet and playful and intimate in a way I had never heard before. Every word came out of my mouth shaped with the care of a jeweler. “Six years. Six years ago I was a different person.”

“You got older,” said Elsa. “You changed, I changed. You grew out of that stupid phase, with the –“

“Don’t you dare! We don’t talk about those dark times!”

“Alright, alright,” Elsa laughed lightly. “You changed in some ways, but you’re still Anna. And you only got more and more beautiful.”

She blushed. She looked like she couldn’t believe she had said that last bit aloud. I couldn’t believe it, either.

My heart raced ahead of me, looking up at the stars that night with Elsa sitting at my side. I wanted it to last forever. We could do this, we could make long distance work. We’d loved each other for years – weren’t we meant to be? I had money saved up from my summer job – I could fly up and see her, or she could fly down to see me at university. The wedding would be on a cliff out West, overlooking the Pacific with the sunset fading into the water as guests nibbled on cupcakes from a cupcake tower (in lieu of a cake, since that way we could provide many flavors to choose among). We would invite our English teacher, who loved us both and would be overjoyed to find out two of her favorite students were getting married. How many kids should we have? I wanted perhaps two, but I knew Elsa dreamed of a large family. Maybe, in the back of my mind, I wanted a big family, too…

“It seems kinda shitty,” I said, slowly, tentatively. “That we only got, you know, tonight. Both of us waited for a long time.”

She almost-whispered, “Yeah.”

“We could…” I trailed off, before gathering my courage again. “We could do long distance. Don’t you think?”

Elsa looked at me with those amazing blue eyes. She looked at me like a dog looks at its master, like she would follow me to the ends of the Earth, like in that moment she would do any ridiculous thing I asked of her. It was incredible. “Yes,” she breathed. “Let’s try.”

Elsa was an incurable romantic. She believed in true love’s power and all of that; it turned out that I did, too. That night (and nearly a week following) I was giddy, euphoric, transcended to a higher plane of existence. Everything seemed so big. The stars speckling the night sky whispered of possibilities, of other places and experiences yet undiscovered; suddenly my life was bigger than silly old me – it was a spectacle, a dramatic, painfully-unrequited love story with a happy conclusion. I was no longer living for myself; I was living for a dream, for a beautiful girl halfway across the world, for something as grand and old as love.

When I kissed Elsa goodnight on the cheek, her face nearly split with the thousand-watt brilliance of her huge, goofy grin. She didn’t move; she sat stock-still, frozen, looking like all her dreams were suddenly coming true in front of her very own eyes. My heart bubbled. I wanted to make her smile like that forever; I wanted to fulfill her dreams until we were old and decrepit, sitting together on the porch with a house full of books and cats and dust.

It would have been nice. That night it became all I ever wanted.