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‘I saw a ghost in my statistics prac’ was a weird way to start your day.
It was too 9am for this.
Neptune shuffled into one of the side rooms of the Statistics building, thermos clutched more for moral support than for sustenance.
She had to look twice, because on that first look she thought her brain had jumped to a pattern that wasn’t there, but— there, sitting ramrod straight at a desk and trying to hide in the middle of the room somehow, with shaggy blonde hair and a goddamn button up shirt. It had to be Venus. And once she was close enough to see his face properly, it couldn’t be anyone else.
Even if she had expected him to be several years dead.
It would have been nice if she could have found this out, you know, earlier, or at least at a time where it wasn’t illegal to be awake.
She looked across the rest of the room. No other ghosts— Fido wasn’t chewing a pig’s ear in the corner, and her grandpa hadn’t dragged a rocking chair and a copy of Business Daily in here. Just a bunch of random college students, a tutor who was having a fight with the onscreen timer, and a projector with big block letters saying: “We are collaborating :) Pick up a question paper, and find a partner.”
Neptune swallowed a groan. No good came from tutors who used smiley faces.
Maybe about half the desks were taken. She could just pick up a set of papers and sit down, and wait for someone to pick her just so they could have a chair. But why would she do that, when there was someone she knew who was easily swayed, and looked much more awake.
She walked over to Venus. Come to think of it, forcing someone to pick him was probably why he’d put himself in the middle, instead of tucking himself into a corner. Smart play. Annoying play. Even if she was thinking about doing it herself.
“Hi,” she said. “Surprised to see you still breathing.”
Venus looked up at her, managing to look pleased and nervous at the same time. “Uh. Hi. It’s nice to see you again.” He blinked at her, as it took him a second to parse the second bit. “Um. Sorry about that?”
She rolled her eyes. “Venus. You are the only person I know who would apologize for continuing to exist.”
Venus looked down, and shuffled the question sheets on his desk. There was a knowing smile behind his fringe. “I can’t apologize for doing that, can I?”
“No, you can’t. Now, do you want to join in a partnership of shared suffering, for old time’s sake?”
“Oh, I would love to!” he said, far too enthusiastic about both 9am statistics tutorials and shared suffering.
She sat next to him. The awkward paper shuffling silence lasted objectively for a few seconds, but that was plenty long to drive even the strongest to small talk. At least she could throw him the Hated Question. “So, what are you in for?”
Venus helpfully wrote both of their names at the top of the sheet. “Broadcast engineering.”
“Like, with radios?”
He nodded.
“Yeah, that sounds about right.” It suited him. The nerd.
Venus looked up at her, pencil dancing above the page. “And you?”
“Business.”
“Oh.”
Neptune shrugged. “Well, they’re always hiring.” She pulled her smile wider. “I’ve been here a week and I’m already plotting mass murder. Viva le revolución, the only thing the workers have to lose are their chains.”
Venus’s anxious pencil movements went from tracing the air half an inch above the page, to a pattern of eyes, to catching himself doing that and going back above the page. “Have you heard anything from Jupiter?”
“She got a scholarship from MIT. Full ride. She’s studying pre-med.”
“Oh! That’s good for her,” Venus said.
“I give her a year before she crashes and burns in a flaming heap.”
The stats tutor clapped their hands once, nervously. “I think that should be everyone?” she said to the half empty room. “If you don’t have a sheet or a partner, go grab one, otherwise, get a start. I’ll be here to help and answer questions.”
And for the first time Neptune looked at the sheet for the questions and not Venus’s doodles.
The title was ‘An Intuitive Feel For Statistics.’
The questions started fairly basic. If 50% of people are women and 10% of people are blonde, how many blonde women are there? They worked through them— or rather, Venus worked through them while Neptune made encouraging noises and checked her texts. (There weren’t many, because it was the time of day when all the early birds had grabbed their worms and decided to go have a mid morning nap as a reward for a job well done, while everyone else sensible still slept.)
The questions slowly changed. Went from bare calculations to wanting justifications for your answers in sentences, like this was turning, Fly -like, into an English class.
10. 150 million people have the first name Mohammed. 193 million people have the family name Li. Assuming the world has 8 billion people, how many people are named Mohammed Li. Explain in your own words why your calculation is wrong.
11. Fermi estimation is a process of estimating unknown quantities, made famous by the physicist Enrico Fermi. You break down your question into smaller estimations, and multiply these together. This is often more accurate than directly trying to estimate the unknown quantity in the question.
For these questions, you will not be given numbers. You must estimate on your own. Justify your estimations.
11a. What percentage of people become the devil? How many would there be at this school?
Venus drew a tense little eye next to the ‘a’.
Someone had to put him out of his misery before he wound himself up anymore. “It’s one percent,” Neptune said.
“What?”
Neptune glared out into space, and hit the projector. “It’s always one percent in these questions. For something that’s rare but,” She went into a sing-song voice, “More Common Than You Think. It’s always one percent. Always. Even when it isn’t.”
Venus scribbled down ‘1%’ and politer version of Neptune’s reasoning. Something about it being a useful baseline for calculation, about being probably in the right order or magnitude.
She kept talking as he kept writing. “So there’d be, what, one thousand at this school?”
“…one thousand in the city.”
Okay, yeah, the college probably did not have one hundred thousand people in it. “Right, okay, so that would be one hundred at this school? You could start a club.”
Venus looked hard at her, with that expression he had when he told Group South what they were really made of, when he railed about how unfair the world was when he knew only one person was watching. His voice was too quiet for his vehemence. “But if you walk into a room, you’re still probably the only one. How many rooms have you been in that had more than one hundred people in it?” He scribbled on the page, a calculation of how many people you need to expect two people who had become the devil. “There’s about one hundred in my physics class.” The pencil stopped. “And how many people in that room wonder how you failed at something so easy, something they succeeded at without having to try.”
“You should take some economics classes. The lectures are, like, five hundred people. You’re bound to meet a few more,” Neptune said.
The hardness faded. “Somehow I don’t think I’d fit in.”
“Oh, they’d eat you alive,” Neptune said, smiling. “But they might pay you to do their homework first.”
***
Venus’s dad loomed over him as Neptune typed her number into Venus’s phone. The Dad held his shoulder. It wasn’t affectionate. It was a towering mass of disappointment, being grounded through Venus like he was a faulty power plug.
Venus was still lightly steaming, and probably too stunned to properly notice.
(That was a nice lie. Even then, they both knew that Venus knew. Knew the disappointment, knew what this would mean for the rest of his life. It was nicer to pretend it was all too much for him to even try.)
She handed the phone back.
Venus took it, taking two tries to grab it.
“Don’t get any ideas,” The Dad said.
“Don’t worry, sir,” Neptune said, with her sweetest smile. “He’s been nothing but a perfect gentleman.”
The Dad made a dismissive noise.
Perfect gentlemen rarely became the devil.
Venus handed the phone to Jupiter, and she put her number in. “There you go,” she said, handing it back.
The Dad made no comment this time. Guess Jupiter’s reputation preceded her. Or maybe Neptune’s did. Hard to tell.
The Dad pulled Venus by the shoulder towards the car. Venus stumbled after him, still looking half blind.
And that would be the last time she’d ever see him, if the world ran like it ought. No texts, no phone calls, no further evidence of his existence. Oh, sure, he’d say he would. That was just how camp goodbyes worked. You’d hug and maybe cry and promise you’d stay in contact forever, camp buddies of life— and you never, ever did.
Two weeks later, her phone buzzed, and it was a shock when there was a ‘♀’ at the top of the notification.
…Who the hell started a text with ‘dear’???
…Venus did. That question answered itself. Of course he wrote like a heartbroken World War I soldier writing letters to his sweetheart. ‘My dearest, I have trench foot now, so I simply must pass away. I hope you understand.’
…his dad might be reading this. He hadn’t said, but he’d be the type. And he’d send Venus to camp, so he’d be the type to give Venus hell for associating with someone Who Said Swears, Oh My Gosh Goodness Gracious Gravy.
She wasn’t just going to dump him in the shit. She deleted it, and tried again.
There was a pause for typing, only five seconds.
They’d eat him alive if they did.
Venus ignored the bait. Guess that one only worked on people with some self esteem.
A text from another friend showed up, asking about how much exactly she wanted to punch her calc teacher. She typed out something quick. They were easier to respond to on autopilot than Venus. Venus needed honesty. He needed someone to tell him the unvarnished truth.
And she had to give it in a way adults would like, from several cities away.
And that’s why you never care what your parents think. Her thumb hovered over the back button— did Venus need to hear it more than his dad needed to never see it? She deleted it. He was a smart cookie. He’d figure it out. Someday. Sooner or later.
***
She went back to her normal, non-camp life, where Venus didn’t ever come up. You know, Mr Johnson blowing his top, bizarre boyfriend drama that could have been avoided by simply not having boyfriends. The usual stuff.
Two weeks later, she got another text from Venus. It was lunch time. She hid under the drama stage, away from where the teachers bothered to look, let alone confiscate contraband calling devices.
Neptune squinted at her phone, a reflex even though Venus couldn’t see her.
Neptune pursed her lips, like someone had stuffed a lemon in her mouth. Those old middle school health classes flashed across her mind, with that sing-song ‘labels are for jam jars.’ The assignment had been the worst. Everyone was given a roughly scrubbed hypothetical jam jar, and you had to explain why your jam jar-slash- hypothetical friend should go talk to a trusted adult. But you were never allowed to say the obvious reason, that your grape jelly was suicidal in the way a PE teacher would write.
Not that middle school health classes ever gave anyone good advice.
Neptune glared at the back of the audience seating, because she couldn’t glare at herself. What sort of question had that been? What was she going to do with either yes or no?
Venus sent a few more texts over the weeks. Kaomoji drawings of cats and butterflies. She could never tell if he searched them up somewhere, or made them himself. But it was transparently trying to just— keep in touch. In contact. To say things when he wasn’t having a crisis that could only be soothed through his Good Ol’ Camp Buddy, Neptune. …She couldn’t complain. It was a nice thought, and it wasn’t like she disliked cats made of slashes. There just wasn’t much to say about them.
***
And Good Ol’ Camp Buddy Neptune kept on triage duty. Her phone buzzed at 10pm. And she guessed it would be Veronica, but no, it was Venus.
She didn’t even need to ask what ‘what’ was.
She remembered the rising waters, the taste of acid and bile in the back of her throat. The sun going dim behind clouds, as feathers crumpled and crushed and eyes turned bruised and bloodshot.
The minutes stretched out with no reply. Maybe he’d gone to bed. Maybe she should plug in her phone and pretend to go to bed herself.
She got halfway through typing If you’re going to blame anyone, blame the camp when Venus replied again.
Neptune just… waited. What could you say to that? “There there?” “Consider becoming a monk and stop wanting things, I think that would be the easiest option for you.” “Sorry, kiddo, you don’t get out of being your own person and wanting things that easily.”
Neptune rolled face first onto the pillow. Venus… Venus had his charms, but oh my god. He was so much nicer drunk than late at night.
She woke up, in yesterday’s rumpled clothes, still holding her phone. She checked it.
No reply from Venus.
A tired sense of relief filled her, that he hadn’t had another breakdown at 3am or something.
***
The weeks rolled by, and that didn’t mean anything, because Venus could go silent for weeks.
It’s just— two months went by, and there was not a single kaomoji cat. And she reread the messages again, with the foreknowledge that this was the last one she got for months—
Say she knew it from life experience. Say she knew it from seeing Venus tell them to run, it was too late, as he was pulled up into the air in a shaft of light. Say it was the stupid middle school jam jars.
Venus was probably dead.
Tampa was probably going to win the Superbowl. The supreme court was probably going to decide a case, if they ever got around to it. Some poor sucker at some camp or other was probably going to become the devil.
Venus was probably dead.
She couldn’t know. Venus was a good little Christian boy who would never be tempted by the wiles of Facebook. Looks like his family was, too. Venus Morningstar was gone from the internet. No obituary, no sign of life.
And maybe she had a part in it. From the text, from camp, from— whatever. It wasn’t like she could ask.
She just went on with her life knowing he was probabilistically dead.
***
Veronica’s parents made the inexplicable but helpful life decision to go traveling during Halloween. And for a few days afterwards, too. Enough time to wash away any evidence.
Real nice of them, really.
“Please don’t make this too hard to clean,” Veronica had said when she invited Neptune to the Halloween party.
“Aww, you make it sound like I’m untrustworthy.”
“I do know you,” Veronica had said.
A generous stash of candy in plastic pumpkins sat on the porch, with a scrawled “please take one” sign written on the back of an art assignment sheet. Something to do with live figure drawing, from the blacked out penis on the back side.
It wasn’t a stupid loud party. Loud enough already that Veronica’s parents might be upset if they knew, and maybe by the end it would bother the neighbors, but it wasn’t a frat party.
Good. She refused to go there on principle. If she wanted to feel like a piece of meat, she could go stuff herself in a deli fridge, and if she wanted to perform stupid for other people’s entertainment, she could dress as a clown and join the circus.
…That would have been a good costume. She’d gone for the devil. She was an adult choosing her own costume, she could pick the taboo thing. Just to see how people reacted.
Not that she actually looked like the devil, because that would have taken a fashion design student to make, and she was going for the degree with prospects. No, that cartoon with a horned headband and forked tail belt. The devil was only a sexy devil because she was herself.
She made her way around, saying hellos to people she knew, slowly inching her way towards the drinks table. Even if it was not a frat party, they were still required to have those red plastic cups. About half had beer, and the other half had something pink that smelled like sugar and artificial fruit. …Artificial fruit it would be. She picked up a cup, and looked around to see where her friends had gotten to, and—
…how the hell had Venus ended up here?
He looked hilariously out of place. In a sea of fairies and firemen and Sexy Econ Majors, he was just in a corner, wearing long black pants, a long sleeved t-shirt, and a black scarf. Like someone who was trying to go for goth but only had a vague description to go off.
…this, she had to find out. And also stop him from hurting himself. Venus was too suggestible when he was sober, let alone drunk.
Up close, she could see he had already flushed bright red. The other conversation stuck in a competition to be loud enough to hear over the dulcet tones of Spooky Scary Skeletons meant they had to be close to even talk. “How did you—“
Venus looked to her, looked to her cup, and back at his own, and started laughing.
Well, that changed her question. “What?”
Venus held up his cup. “And I didn’t even have to trade away my three worst nail polishes!”
Neptune sipped it again, and took a sip. That taste was burned into her memory. “ Pernicious Rouge—“
Venus giggled again.
“You were told this was a costume party, right?”
Venus put his scarf over his mouth. “I’m a ninja.”
The horn headband dug in behind her ears. She’d have picked something different, if she knew he was here. But if she took it off, it would only make it more obvious. “And I’m here to take your soul.” She did a little twirl, the tail following limply along.
“It suits you!” Venus made a startled face, all the more dramatic for how red he was. “ — I MEAN. THE COSTUME SUITS YOUR BODY. SUITS YOU. AS AN OUTFIT. NOT. NOT AS A STATEMENT OF YOUR BEING.”
“Aww, Venus, you’re sweet enough that I almost believe you.”
Venus relaxed a little.
She smirked. “Almost.”
It was impressive how much blood Venus could fit in his cheeks. He was turning into a tomato ninja.
“How did you end up here, anyway?” Neptune asked.
“You know Veronica?”
“Yeah, she’s a friend from high school,” Neptune said.
“One who doesn’t like problem sets very much.”
She could guess where this was going. “Sounds like her.”
“So I’ve been… helping.” Venus looked guiltily to the skirting boards and ankles surrounding him. “And when she mentioned the party—“
“You looked so Bambi-eyed and sad she felt she had to invite you.”
“Something like that,” Venus said quietly.
“Oh my god, Venus, you don’t even like parties!”
“I wanted to try one!” he said with drunken confidence.
The sun rose. Deer were bad at crossing roads. Venus didn’t like parties, even if he didn’t know it yet. “You’re just standing here in a corner drinking shitty alcohol, and you could have held out for something good—“
Venus looked at her. “She’s going to have to ask me for help again.”
“You’ve become Machia- Mac- a criminal mastermind.” Neptune smiled. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”
***
The party didn’t wind down, or wind up— why did those two phrases mean the same thing, anyway? It wound different.
A group split off to watch Lucifer Hill II. The falsetto screams of the actors bounced their way through the rest of the house. Someone set up beer and-or Pernicious Rouge pong. People slunk off to closets or just— went somewhere else.
Neptune headed out in the backyard. The chill air raised goosebumps on her arms. The yard was painted in a mixture of bright lights and shadows. Orange glow of the street lights, scattered light from the house windows, a bright LED shining like a spotlight from on the outside porch.
There was a swing and climbing set tucked into a corner. Long grass grew up around it, and the paint had chipped, but it was still basically sturdy. It looked like it hadn’t been used for years. She did the math in her head, even as it swam a little. Veronica was the youngest.
And there, a little shadow sitting crosswise on a child’s swing, was Venus.
Neptune walked over, and draped herself over the combination ladder and monkey bars, the bars chaperoning gap between her and Venus.
“Shouldn’t you be with your friends? They’re here. Or—“ His eyes lit up with drunken deduction. “Are we friends?”
“We were cabin mates. That counts for something.” I saw you go up and up and up, like an angel or a prophet or something a human should not be. I hit you with my radio until you stopped moving. I watched all morning to make sure you didn’t survive the devil just to die of falling out of a tree. And it should have been me. You just wanted. I wanted to tear that place apart. “ You know, I did really think you were dead. That was actually shitty of you.”
Venus looked up at her, wide eyed and actually guileless. It made her want to forgive him as much as it annoyed her that he hadn’t even put it together.
“You told me all dramatic that you won’t ever bother me again. And then I never heard from you again.” She slid herself further through the bars. “That’s what dead people do.”
“Oh.” Venus shuffled uncomfortably, making the chains of the swing squeak. He opened his mouth again, and then cut himself off. ‘Why would you think I might have died?’ was a question even he knew the answer to. “I’m sorry. I lost the phone.”
“Sorry, still not hearing your apologies.” She flipped her hair over her shoulder, and smiled. “You’re just going to have to own faking your death.” It was like Schroedinger’s cats, or a coin flipping in the air. Both a joke and not a joke, depending on how Venus chose to take it.
“I’m owning it by apologizing,” he said, over enunciating with the sober seriousness only accessible to the very, very drunk. He held out his hand. “Here.”
“What?”
“Your phone. I’ll make it up to you.”
She handed it over, and he punched his new contact number in. He gave it back. “For proof of life. Whenever you want.”
Okay, now she couldn’t actually be mad. “I’ll be upset if I don’t get any more punctuation cats.”
Venus smiled, and kicked off the ground. The squeaking grew louder. He winced, and stopped himself with his feet. “I still feel that way, you know. About— missing being the devil. I thought growing up would get rid of it, get rid of that childish desire to— not be yourself. That’s what being grown up is. Is that weird?”
“Everyone’s weird, or lying about it. No adult actually wants to be themselves.” No one wanted to be themselves. Not even babies. Fact of life. The child’s ladder was a barrier between them, no matter how far she draped herself through it, but that didn’t stop her from trying. “Lying doesn’t suit you.”
Venus looked down at the bare dirt, still too hard for grass to grow even if it was years since someone last swung here. “It was— as close to what I wanted as I could get.”
Which was an improvement from camp, when he couldn’t even admit there was some unfillable pit of need, a light darting around that he refused to look at. “Do you know what it is now?”
Venus took in a breath, and looked out to the porchlight, the house light, the street light above them. “I think I do.”
“Maybe you can get what you want. That’s also what being grown up means. You finally get to pick the self you hate the least.”
Venus stayed silent.
“Even without the devil’s help,” Neptune said.
“It wouldn’t be her fault, this time.”
Everyone else called the devil ‘he.’ God was the loving father, the devil that smiling rake who seduced young girls down the wrong path, even though they didn’t really need genders. Even Eve didn’t get the respect of properly being the devil, she was just seduced by him. It wasn’t her decision, just something that snake put her up to.
Neptune took the horns off her head, and passed them through the bars to Venus. “Make it this devil’s fault. If it makes it easier.”
Venus laughed. “Now you’re the one being too nice!”
***
Every Thursday, at 9am, she received a punctuation cat with an Inspiring Message. They varied from twee (“hang in there!”) to Actually Inspiring (“if at first you don’t succeed, hit your head against a wall and then try again.”) He had to have some sort of alarm. It was— kind of impressive, honestly. Venus had no way of knowing he had timed it perfectly with her worst lecture, but that was nice, too.
The months rolled on to the end of semester finals, and to winter break. It ground Neptune’s soul out. Not the studying— that was hard and stressful. But not in a way that made her want to stab anyone.
No, it was the unofficial dress code for lectures. The way everyone pretended to be smart just by using the right words to say nothing at all. The way everyone looked at her like she was failing their standards by weird accident and not deliberately. People kept giving her advice. She was going to kill them with her mind.
And now she wasn’t in the constant stream of classes and assignments and lectures and tests, the movement the one thing propping her up and stopping her from slipping into some sort of printer-based spree violence— Something had to give. She had to make them know that no, she was being a problem deliberately and with gusto. That she actually didn’t care about what they thought.
She had to make herself know that she was doing that.
She wasn’t losing the game, she was refusing to play because it was dumb .
Anyway, she was an adult. She had spent too much of that brief moment doing sensible, non–life-wrecking things. She was not going to let Venus have all the fun, if he even listened to her.
She bought the cheapest pair of clippers off Amazon. She pulled up a youtube tutorial, watched it twice to make sure she had it down pat. And she stood in front of the bathroom mirror and shaved off half her hair.
The clippers buzzed in her hands as they bit into the strands. This would have been easier if she’d put it into braids and cut it short already, like they’d said to. She wasn’t stopping now, though.
The weight falling off her felt strange. She’d never felt it until it was gone. Guess that’s what it was like when you’d had a weight on your head for years. Since she was a toddler, old enough to have hair that was actually long, and small enough she could be held down to brush it.
Hair dropped down to her neck and got stuck there, ticklish. This is something people do in the middle of a breakdown. This is something I should do drunk and crying. It shouldn’t have been calculated like this.
And there was a part of her that felt like crying, about the finality of it, that it would take years to grow back, that she couldn’t just go back from this—
—but the other half of her loved it. She couldn’t get scared and hide it. She had to stick to her message.
It wasn’t like she didn’t like her hair. She was six, when she decided she liked it long, and that she would brush it herself. If it was just her, she’d grow it to the floor.
But unfortunately, she was not the only human on the planet. She hated how everyone else was about it. It was fake mandatory: the worst kind of mandatory.
All those devotionals her older sister left out in the hopes she’d get bored enough and read them (and worse, she had) called it her crowning feminine glory . Brad from Macroeconomics kept making jokes about pulling it, like he’d never passed kindergarten.
It needed to be off. If people were going to be weird about it, no matter what she did, she was making it weird on her terms.
She turned the clippers off. Set them down with a clunk. And ran her hand along the shaved side. It was soft and downy under her hands. She expected it would be pricklier. She felt her scalp under her hands, not just the impression of it from under hair.
It wasn’t as good as what a stylist would do, but it looked like— not her, not yet. She still looked like an alien version of herself. But a version of herself that she hated less.
She cleaned up the cut hair, and got dressed for going out. The hair cutting was a normal stupid thing to do.
Now she was going to jeopardize her immortal soul.
She told her roommates she was going to a class Christmas party (were those even a thing? Whatever, they didn’t question it.) Took her bike out and rode it away.
…maybe wearing black on the longest night of the year while bike riding was not the smartest plan. She dodged cars, and only nearly died twice. Result!
The place she was didn’t look like anything. A normal residential house, a bit worse for wear, but in a usual ‘we are not actively selling this house’ way. HOA-approved lawn stubble. A sad pot of rosemary by the front door. A wooden back gate, with a hand-painted ‘Welcome’ sign.
Made sense not to be obvious. Either that, or this was a creative lure of a serial killer.
She chained her bike to one of the street trees, and walked in through the gate.
It wasn’t illegal to try and find the devil on the radio. Freedom of religion, and all that. Plus, trying to ban that would ban HAM radio, and no one wanted to fight the guys who built radio towers in their backyards. Also, weirdly hard to ban without banning humans preaching on the radio. Which would have been hilarious enough she almost wished it was actually banned.
But then she couldn’t do this.
Nothing legally stopped a group of people all gathering to hear the devil speak.
Someone stood at the back door, wearing an all black suit— tie, shirt, the works. It looked like he’d fallen head first into a goth’s vat of hair dye, which suited him because, well, he was one himself. “Ah, a new face. Nice to meet you.” He shook her hand, so much like a church greeter.
She shook it back. She was sweaty, and nervous, and she knew that made her look bitchy. Coming to talk to the devil and getting greeted like she was going to the First Church of Fucksville did make her bitchy.
He waved her through, down to the basement. Apparently some of the bigger places had actual buildings. Even here, in a college town— well, people joked about going, to scandalize their parents, but at the end of the day, they still feared the hell fire a little too much. It was just the ones who would actually flip God off to his stupid smug face and—
—guess that was her, now? That felt good. Good like the lightness on one half of her head.
She walked down the stairs, and dodged the bare bulb. The basement was— weirdly cheery, for a devil coven? Sunday school core, except all the crafts hanging on the walls were made by adults. Less crosses, more pentagrams. The same amount of “[insert divine entity here] loves us.” They even had the circle of cheap plastic stackable chairs like the First Church of Fucksville. A bunch of goths and metalheads milled around holding plastic cups of coffee and tea.
It was not illegal to find the devil on the radio, but they made it hard. So little kids and dotty grandmothers can’t do it by accident, they say. Any radio you buy, that wasn’t meant for fighting, had pre-set channels that went silent as you clicked between them, to cut out as much of the devil as possible.
So you had to make them. Which you know, seeing as they taught scouts and bad kids how to make radios, was a bit of an own goal.
In the center of the chairs was an exploded radio in the process of being reconstructed. Even if any scout or camp kid could in theory do it, to get a half decent sound, you’d want a radio nerd, like—
—And there he— she?— was. Looking bright and gold and out of place, not even wearing black, Venus tinkered with a set of pliers. She’d grown her hair out even longer. She’d rolled up her sleeves to rearrange the guts of a walmart radio, stringing galena and copper and silencing the muting device. On the meat of her upper arm, there was a tattoo of unfurled wings.
She snapped the plastic cover of the radio closed. It didn’t achieve much. It was pretty thoroughly vivisected at this point. “It’s done.”
The goths formed a prayer circle —ugh really?— and Neptune was shuffled into it. She put one hand in that of a sweaty rando. (At least she was also sweaty, so he would be equally uncomfortable.) The other hand was pressed into Venus’s. …Okay, that wasn’t so bad, even if she’d been in too many prayer circles with her before. This close, she could see the fold in the wings, where Venus had messed up applying the temporary tattoo.
The radio hissed as it switched between channels. Golden oldies, static, God himself, static, someone talking about corn tariffs.
Then they hit it.
“The forecast for today: 50% chance of someone falling in love. 25% chance of a story you’d never tell your grandkids. 99% chance of someone learning something important about themselves.”
Neptune never heard the devil, back when Venus did. Venus hadn’t talked much, just— glowed and revealed everyone’s secrets, which they pretended afterwards they’d never learned. (Like how to talk about Venus.)
But somehow, it still sounded like a voice she'd heard before. It sounded like someone speaking through- speaking with?— honey, and storm clouds, through fireflies and dark water. She could hear the smile as it spoke. “Now, for those just tuning in—“
And then there was music. Part Dies Irae, but on electric guitar as much as organ. That ‘timeless’ folk from the sixties about loving everyone, mixed with those raps about being badass that they kept playing behind sandwich commercials. Those club songs that tried to find exactly how explicit you can get and still get radio play, which this was technically achieving.
A hum of a storm over water, moths fluttering against a porch light, still musical for all it was natural.
The prayer circle stopped being for prayer, and started being a dance. At first, a tentative ring around the rosie. It grew in tempo, grew in enthusiasm, until it was too much.
The circle split into a myriad of spinning groups.
Neptune and Venus stayed together. Spinning and spinning and spinning, taking each other's weight as they careened around the invisible axis between them. Venus laughed, loud and wild, and it was infectious.
The noise from Neptune’s throat was a wild cackle of glee. About the music. About the people. About ‘screw God, the Devil rules!’
Venus’s hand was warm in her own, hot and fleshy and solid and glowing and— it wasn’t alright. Venus shouldn’t be fleshy. Neptune shouldn’t be fleshy, except as a means to an end. They weren’t meant to be meat. They just— were, anyway.
Escape would be a miracle— and this was as close as they can touch that, now.
They’d both let the devil out of their hearts.
But this was still something. Not enough, never enough, Neptune could gorge on it and never be full. But she could have this. They could have this, hand in hot little hand. This adulthood, where they could do what they wanted to their meat and no one could stop them.
Where they could dance to the devil’s music, and as long as no one else knew, they could do it for the rest of their lives.
Tears blurred Neptune’s eyes, halfway between happy and sad and angry but— they were good tears, overall. She’d make them be good. By sheer force of bloody will, if she had to.
In the blur and the flickering fluorescent lights of the basement, Venus’s face glowed like the lights that had chased her.
The music faded out. Neptune and Venus slowly spun to a halt. Venus pushed her fringe out of her eyes where it had got stuck down with sweat.
Neptune was just as damp, the long half of her hair sticking to her neck, along with all the cut strands she had missed while cleaning up.
Venus gave her a shaky smile.
“You need to work on your rhythm,” Neptune said, because honesty of speech was too much after that honesty of body.
Venus seemed to understand. “I’m sorry, I’ll make sure to practice.” The smile was something shier, no longer a broad grin, but— it was honest too. And better than Neptune had seen her— ever, really.
The devil spoke again, that same water-and-light voice. “That was ‘Non Serviam’ played by everyone in the world who blasphemed and meant it. Now, remember kids,” she said with a smile. “God made you special, but I love you very much—“