Raisa...

Life is a puzzle, sometimes.

A sprawling mystery that starts with your very first word and ends with your final breath. And we all play a part in it. Whether you're studying the laws of physics or seeing how many hours you in a row you can stay up gaming without sleeping, I'm convinced that every single person has something they feel compelled to figure out that no one else has the answers to. Let me be clear. No one mystery is necessarily greater or more important than any other. It's just that some are more magnetically baffling and inexplicable.

Case in point: How I went from not having talked to a girl my age since elementary school to juggling two different conversations with them at once.

On one hand, there was Anne-Marie, with whom an initial vent about her English homework had devolved into a one and a half hour ironic debate on the merits of using child labor to staff and run a military dictatorship. And on the other hand, there was Raisa, with whom I'd been exchanging favorite Instagram foodie pages and hobby worldbuilding channels between deciding on the details of our date.

It's surreal to think that I didn't even know one of them existed as of this morning. I guess we just run in different spheres, and the world's bigger than we realized. Anne-Marie probably feels the same way about me. Except that unlike with Anne-Marie, Raisa's vibe has been the furthest thing from ambiguous. In 30 minutes, come rain or shine (or the 50% forecasted chance of snow), we're going out to pick up a new comic print run at the mall together. It's eminently obvious. At least, if the words, "What do you think I should wear for our date?" are any indication.

"Whatever you feel like, honestly," I reply, my fingers still a little shell shocked by the context of their call to action. "My nicest piece of clothing is a Doctor Who cosplay jacket from when I was still in middle school."

She reacts with a heart, and posts a picture of an outfit carefully laid out on her fluffy pink. "This okay?"

I'm a little shocked that she's even looking for my approval, honestly. Though admittedly not quite so gut-punchingly trendy as every last inch of what Anne-Marie usually wears, I can easily picture Raisa looking good in the light blue jacket with white trims and a pair of slate snowpants. I have half a mind to tell her as much, but the vacuum where my balls should be pulls my response back to a respectful thumbs up.

And indeed, when I finally see her standing there in person under the pillowy silver sky, she looks like something out of a still life painting.

Her outfit is plain, yes. But there's an aura to her. That same, equally subtle and unmistakable confidence that surrounded her when she first approached me. Except now there’s no lunchroom, no Jims, and no amount of times that I can rub my eyes free of snowflakes only to wake up back in my bed with ruined trousers and a ringing late alarm. That is to say, she’s gorgeous in a way beyond her looks.

My nerves wig out, and I bury my nose in my phone as I approach. But I’m once again glad that I turned off notifications, because it’s still the same unending freakout among the boys’ group chat.

“Dude, I’m calling it. She’s the same girl from before,” Ricardo argues.

“Your mom she is!” Brown Jim pipes in.

“Yeah, like I said a billion times,” White Jim types, “My theory is that she’s actually a guy. Her shoulders were way too square for a girl’s.”

I raise an eyebrow, with half a mind to remind them that I’m still in that chat. And then I realize it doesn’t matter. A) Because I shouldn’t give them the satisfaction of a response, and B) Because while I’d sooner roll over in my grave than bring it up to them, I care a bit more about what’s in someone’s head over what’s in their pants.”

I’m the last real romantic, I know.

And maybe a bit of a sadist, because I take immense satisfaction in the fact that I’m putting my phone away and living my life for once—And they’re stuck debating whether or not having leg hair disqualifies someone from being a real woman.

“Reporting for duty, general,” Raisa says, giving me a vulcan salute.
“At ease, soldier,” I reply, “This is shore leave, not a scouting mission.”

She giggles like a wind chime. “Aye-aye.”

We set out for the glass-ceilinged arcade under a light dusting of snow upon the crumbling, brown earth. The air is thick like custard with a mist baked yellow by the awakening of old-timey streetlights. Haphazard yet kinda neat, it all reminds me of the way my dad slaps spoons of powdered sugar onto his geometrically-perfect buttercakes. Raisa seems just as wholly taken in. At first, she tries in vain to angle the sight in her phone camera like a true artiste. But she relents to savor the sights with her eyes when the drifting frost keeps fogging up the camera.

It’s pretty hard to focus on anything in particular when I’m this close to beauty in motion, so I find my eyes wandering. And, inevitably, they wander to her legs.

I hadn't really noticed it earlier, but Raisa has a strange gait. Her left leg spends a longer time on the ground than her right, and a quick glance confirms that she steps much more shallowly and inwardly with her left boot. I don't know how to bring it up without sounding weird, and come to the conclusion that there's no need to bring it up unless she does. Plus, it's undeniably kind of charming—that irregular rhythm with which her smile bobs up and down.

We step under the glass canopy, and I try to hold the door for her, failing to realize that it’s automatic. She laughs, and I follow her into a fluorescent market boulevard that thrums with the fury of house-husbands rushing to mop up the mark-downs from last week’s Lunar New Year sale. Consequently, everything is still trimmed with red and gold all the way to the comic store.

“You think they’re going to reboot this series after the movies?” Raisa asks, handing me the latest casualty of cinematic universe tie-in stories.

“Not until they milk it hard enough to run an ice cream parlor.”

She frowns at the thought and slides the comic back into its shelf. With a deadpan delivery, she turns to me and says:

“The difference between this and ice cream is that consuming the latter makes me want more of it.”

I guffaw. “Where’d you learn to roast like that?”

“I grew up with three brothers,” Raisa flatly replies.

So I look her dead in the eyes and say, “I feel sorry for your nose.”

She laughs all the way to the register.

We walk out of the store with our treasure tomes in tow, and start towards the second-floor promenade. I subtly suggest we should take the elevator, but Raisa leads us up the stairs.

“So I guess that explains the geek stuff,” I think aloud, “Three brothers, like holy hell.”

She’s silent as we reach the top of the stairs. I am out of breath, she is not.

Raise looks at me with that increasingly familiar deadpan.

“You think I can’t be a loser without a man’s involvement?”

I freeze. Her tone was a bit too real for me to tell if it’s a joke. My hand instinctively crawls to the back of my neck like a wounded animal.

“N-no, I just meant-”

“I’m kidding,” she replies, in that telepathically-esoteric, girlish way that lets you know she partially wasn’t.

It reminds me a lot of Anne-Marie. Actually, I only think I’ve even started to recognize that there’s a slight difference in the way boys and girls speak because of her. My only other feminine metric up until this point has been my mom, and comparing other people to her is like trying to measure a stick of dynamite by how many lit matches you can stack beside it.

“I’m sorry,” I admit, as we stroll onto a skybridge. “I’m just a bonehead, ignore me.”

She smiles at me and cocks an eyebrow. “I suppose I’ll have to forgive you, considering how cute you look when you apologize.”

Cute.

My heart reacts to those words with the controlled self-demolition of a squirrel diving under an eighteen wheeler. I struggle to keep up with the speed of her reasonable wobble, and she notices.

“What’s the matter, tiger got your tongue?”

There’s that confidence again, pulling me out of my head and back into the moment.

“Nah, it’s just the last time a woman said I was cute, it was my grandma back when I was five years old.”

She tries to cover her mouth with her hand, but a laugh bursts through. “That long, huh? Guess you’ve got a good memory.”

I feel a hollow ache below my bladder—the precise location where I pissed away the last of my masculine pride.

“Hey, a guy takes what he can get. It’s not like it happens that often for us.”

Raisa looks unamused with my blubbering. “You know, it’s not all that peachy for girls, either.”

“Is it, now?” I ask, in a manner that’s genuinely not trying to take the piss for once.

We walk over to the second floor railing and get a good view of the artificial canyon below. Its cliffsides stretch out into the crowded horizon, alternating between seamless white paint and patches of glossy glass. There’s something humbling about staring out and seeing so many people below you. Really makes you feel like a philosopher. I guess I’ve figured out why Anne-Marie does it, after all.

“Yeah,” Raisa says, casting a wistful glance into the sea below. “It’s hard for us too.”

“Mhm,” I reply. “I mean, for one, I can’t even imagine the amount of effort it takes to put on makeup every day.”

She smiles, but continues in the same lowered tone. “It’s not just the makeup. As a girl, it sometimes just feels like the whole world is trying to pull you apart for simply existing, y’know. Your looks, your interests. The way you talk, the way you walk. To a lot of people, you’re a list of looks and properties before you’re a person.”

My mind flashes through all the classless conversations I’ve overheard of the boys comparing the breasts and asses of girls they passed in the street like they’re nothing more than apples and oranges at the grocery store. Typically, I’d just roll my eyes, or maybe try to change the subject. But it hits differently when you’re face to face with someone’s struggle—like a burning meteor of shame evaporating my self-satisfied pond of passive empathy.

“And if you’re not worth looking at,” Raisa continues, “You might as well not exist.”

The last sentence punches a jagged chasm through my diaphragm.

I don’t even care that my voice cracks as I respond, “I feel that. I really do.”

“I know. That’s why I feel comfortable telling you. That’s why-”

She stops herself, on the verge of a minute nothing that might have been tears, or might have been a laugh, but that’ll stick in my head for years to come either way.

“It’s okay,” I say, “We don’t have to talk about the heavy stuff.”

Raisa nods, only seeming half-convinced.

I put a hand on her shoulder and do my best impression of a dashing, silver-age space captain. “I mean, look at this place. We’re in a palace of joy and light, and we’re waxing poetic over a puddle of our own tears. It’s quite unbecoming of us starfolk, you hear?”

She allows herself a chortle, and then gazes up at me with snowflakes in her hazel eyes. “Yeah, you’re right. Let’s go have some fun.”

So we hit up the pretzel stand. And then we dip the pretzels in ice cream right down the road. We marvel at how well the salt adds to the flavor as we wander through a big-name clothing store. I get lost and find myself in the women’s clothing aisle, and she comes across me staring at a mannequin with a floral bikini dress on it. She gets this funny idea in her head that she’d probably look terrible in it, and I unanimously vote it down, mentioning offhand that I bet even I’d look good in it.

She encourages me to try it on as a joke. I try to reclaim some of my ego by taking it as a challenge.

We sneak into the women’s dressing room together, right under the nose of someone from our grade who isn’t paid enough to care. It’s scratchy and painfully tight as I put it on, but when I come out she has this look of painfully unironic admiration. She says I look nicer than I thought, and I feel a strange kind of way that I’m going to write down in my journal and try not to think about too much. The two of us creep back out, this time getting flustered and having to dash away because our peer catches us in the act.

We laugh and trip over ourselves all the way back to the mall entrance. There, Raisa’s smiling at me, holding not an inch of her charm back. It’s a piercing kind of joy that I try to let shoot through me. But something holds me back. In the utmost corner of my mind, there’s something I can’t quite explain. It’s like an itch. A dumb, useless impulse that makes me swallow what little is left of my pride and say the quiet part out loud.

“So, I’ve been wondering…” I start.

Raisa looks at me, with this sparkly, putridly hopeful gaze.

And I ask:

“Why did you ask me out?”