The Incident With the Bathtub and the Boobs

August had spent the remainder of the school day trying, and mostly succeeding in warding off any grim thoughts about his relationship with Olive – with Olivie – with Liv. It hadn’t been easy – he’d always been very adept at doomsaying, and Liv had many good reasons to hate him now. Being wishy-washy, avoiding any kind of confrontation. Staring. They said girls felt the male gaze on them like the lashing of a serrated whip. And whilst he wasn’t exactly the most masculine specimen, he was as hot-blooded as your average guy.

He hated that. He hated the way his body reacted to just the idea, let alone the sight or touch of hers. He hated still being in love with her.

The air was cold that afternoon, and the wind had picked up speed once again. It had rained twice since sunrise – as per the English habit – and a third shower was imminent. By the time August reached the bus stop, the first drops were already touching down, mean white buckshot peppering the pavement. The hailstorm didn’t wait long to follow.

August glued himself tight to the tempered glass panel, flinching everytime a bigger pellet slammed into the plastic ceiling, threatening to break through. It never would, but he couldn’t know for sure; he’d seen plenty of videos with shattered windshields and cracked skulls. Reflexively, he thought of Liv, wondered if she was safe against the sudden wrath of the elements. He pulled out his phone, and just as he was about to fail his fingerprint scan for the fifth consecutive time, it buzzed. Once to startle him, twice more to make a point.

Ollie: about what you said earlier… you were right… about everything…

Ollie: i was selfish and impulsive and presumptuous and deceitful and it hurts to admit that i havent once considered how youd feel about any of this … like you werent my closest friend

Ollie:maybe this was all a big mistake… i’m so sorry

August had read all of that from his notifications, the pit in his stomach growing deeper with every word. No no no, this wasn’t what he meant at all. He wasn’t trying to throw himself a pity party, nor make her second guess herself. He tapped in his passcode – why did he make it 10 digits long? – and rushed to type back a reply, only to stop when the three dots popped up on Liv’s side of the conversation. Then vanished, then reappeared, then vanished once more. A digital stutter. August dreaded what Liv was going to send next. She had never, never hesitated to speak – oh, what did he know. It’s not like she was anything like she used to be.

But that didn’t matter. She was, and would never stop being his dear friend.

Two more texts flew in, obviously composed in a rush

Ollie: god it feels sos wrong typign this all otu… cna you just ring me?

Ollie: wait unti lyo uget home tho , its hell otuside and i dont want u to get hurt talkign to me… id never forgive mynself

August gulped, then with shaky fingers, he put his phone on silent, then stashed it in his chest pocket. Misty-eyed, he watched the hail pelting down on awnings, tree branches, sewer grates and windowsills, breaking into a cold liquid sputter. Frozen solid, partially melted, or just plain old water, it didn’t matter; rain remained rain.

* * *

It was 11pm and Liv had yet to hear a peep out of August.

She shut her eyes tight, let herself fall back on her bed, then rolled onto her stomach. She was prepared to loosen another sigh into her pillow, and she would’ve done so, had a jolt of pain not made her jump. Her chest – hurt. And not in the dull, heartachey way it did all evening.

Mimi had warned her that, even if a lot of things got taken care of right out the bat, her transition wouldn’t happen all at once. Some changes – most changes actually – would have a delayed onset, and would play out in much the same way they would if she had actually gone through the correct puberty. Liv had accepted that back then. She was glad to, even. Probably because she wasn’t expecting that, when the growing pains will come, they’ll swing at her hard, and all at once.

Her pastimes – meaning, coping mechanisms – she found them impossible to enjoy. Computer games? Keyboard too big. Read a book? Sudden crying spells. Playing the guitar? Bleeding fingertips. And don’t even get her started on working out. She couldn’t even squat the bar anymore, let alone curl any of her dumbbells, and bodyweight exercises made her bones crack in ways she didn’t think possible. Really, all she could do was run on the treadmill, and that was fine – for all of fifteen minutes. It wasn’t that her stamina was poor now; in fact, she could swear she was somehow less winded than usual. But suffice it to say the hot rash on her inner thighs was making things hard to enjoy.

But it couldn’t be helped, really. Form-fitting gym shorts were the last item she thought to add to her mile-long shopping list.

Slowly, she oozed out of bed and headed towards the ensuite bathroom. Even if working out had ended up being a colossal failure, she still felt icky – sweaty, crusty and sticky all over. She stripped off her now oversized t-shirt, but before she could toss it in the hamper – well, there was one thing Mimi told her that she’d been eager to test. And it was embarrassing. Her face was pink when she brought the white cotton to her nose and took one sniff, then another just to make sure.

She picked up no scent. At least nothing close to the rank miasma she had expected. All she got instead was a faint whiff, something sweet, a mixture of peach and coconut. It was so insignificant, the scent of a woman as it were, but it mattered to her. When you had so much of everything growing up, it was the little things that mattered the most.

That isn’t to say she was unhappy with the big things. Liv pressed the button on the rear wall, and the tub slowly began to fill, the steam fogging up the mirror in which she’d been studying herself for the past week. Smooth hairless legs. Thin alabaster arms. Soft, full lips breaking into an uncontainable smile.

The faucet turned shut on its own. Liv queued up her ‘Prog beats to chill and study to’ playlist – mostly Pantera and Muse, with a queer dash of Franz Ferdinand – then let the hot, soapy water claim her.

How long had she been dreaming, yearning for a body like this? It was hard to tell, but not too hard. There had been signs, just not obvious ones. She’d always felt weird about her chest being bare during swim class, and there was something about looking at girls in mini skirts and bodycon dresses that left him more envious than horny. Which made all the more sense when she realised she was, for all intents and purposes, gay. Well, straight now. She was still working on internalising that.

Liv would never forget the day she’d figured all that out. She was thirteen, in her second year at Wellington’s Boys Academy, and her best friend at the time was a Finn by the name of Eino. He was thin, but athletic, brunette for a change from the norm, and his aloof nature would make it all the more special when he’d lower his guard around Liv. His laugh was beautiful – a light chuckle, warm and melodious like a summer song. The reason why she’d grown to be so witty, always with a joke up his sleeve.

It was spring and the capricious weather had led to lacrosse practice finishing prematurely. Most of the boys had filed out of the locker room, allowing Liv to change into her uniform without any yet-to-be-identified discomfort. She thought she was alone, but she wasn’t. The sound of running water had gotten lost beneath the soft pitter-patter of the rain, so when Eino emerged from the shower buck-naked, Liv was shocked.

And she couldn’t look away. The slick cut of his muscles, the damp hair clinging to the sides of his face. His manhood. Her mind took a sharp turn left from the realm of innocence, sinking deep into fantasies, base, degenerate fantasies that hitched the breath in her chest and made her squirm in her seat.

That was her mistake. She made it obvious. So obvious that once Eino noticed the lascivious glint in her eyes, he recoiled. Scared, appalled, disgusted. He retreated to the other side of the locker room, on the other side of a divider wall, slipped on his uniform, then left without a word.

Later that evening, her parents had called her down to the dining room. The mood was stiff, the air heavy with the heady aroma of slow-cooked beef and shame. Her father could hardly glare her way; her mother did most of the talking. There was something conciliatory in her tone, perhaps she had realised that it was irrational to ask her daughter to deny the shape of her attraction, unnatural as it might seem. Alas, that’s what she ended up doing. That’s what she had to do.

Think of the family, she had said. Though it wasn’t about continuing their lineage, passing on the enlightened, thoroughbred genes she was carrying. It was the present they were worried about. The tarnished reputation, the stain her ‘lifestyle choices’ left on their clan’s crest, the stigma it would bring.

Back then she had promised it would never happen again. Though she must’ve not been convincing enough, because slowly but surely from then on, her parents had grown cold and distant. When she turned sixteen, they’d shipped her to a three bedroom flat in Chelsea to live on her own, far from the estate she once called her home. The only ties she retained to her birthgivers were the name on her passport, and the bank account they kept full.

She hadn’t taken well to the separation; having to keep her sexuality under wraps didn’t do her much good either. Her grades had always hovered around the low-end of average, and they had shortly plummeted. It had gotten to the point where she’d had to take as many revisional courses as she had subjects on her timetable. Luckily, most were easy enough to pass. The science exams were just rote memorization, and once you knew how to solve a maths problem, you could solve the whole paper. The essays, on the other hand…

At first, Liv was reluctant to accept any help. Rumours about her, ahem, proclivities had been circulating around campus, most of them shut down by the disciplinary committee, but that didn’t stop them from having the desired effect. Safe to say most people, both guys and girls, were reluctant of him, and a few were even openly hateful and belligerent. So when his councillor forced him to enrol with the AMITY scheme – a fancy word for student tutors – he wasn’t thrilled.

That was how she met August. He was mild-mannered to a fault, couldn’t hold eye contact for the life of him, and his philosophical musings would often turn into waxing ramblings, without any clear point to make. But sometimes, they did have a point. And those were the soliloquies Liv loved to listen to.

It was evident when August did and didn’t care for the topics at hand. He denounced Kant’s absolutist ethics and Plato’s essentialism with strongly-worded, well-structured critiques; on the other hand, he took three hours to make a case against Nietzsche’s popular classification as a nihilist – only to end up calling him a modern sceptic.

“What’s your favourite philosophical text?” she had asked him one winter day, when the ice coated the window panes in frozen flowers.

“Ummm, huh. That’s a tough one. I never thought about it, really.”

“Think now. We’ve got plenty of time.”

“Actually, you still haven’t written a word for your coursework. You know, the one that’s like 25% of your –”

Liv leaned her chin on her elbow and shot him a knowing glance. August bit down on his tongue, cleared his throat, then turned his head to the ceiling. He took a moment to think, the sun peeking in and out of the clouds to shower him in a pensive glow, then finally issued his answer.

“I guess it’s probably Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116.”

“That’s not –”

“I know, I know, but hear me out,” August said, his voice gaining depth and volume. “Whilst the poem makes a clear case about the purity of love and its resilience in the face of adversity, it also presents the poet in a crisis of ideology. Reading it, you get the feeling that Shakespeare isn’t confident in his stance. So much so that he needs to convince the reader that he’s right, so that the reader could convince him too. Which, I don’t know, I find fascinating, but not in an obvious way.

“Think about the subject at hand, love. Shakespeare takes an almost puritan view on it. Makes it into an absolute value, whose worth unknown, although its height be taken. But here’s the thing, love, real love – it’s not like that. It may not bear out even to the edge of doom, nor may it stay unshaken whilst tempests look upon it. And it’s not at all pure.

“And I like that,” August said. It was then that Liv realised how, for once, August had been searching for eyes. And when he found them, his own glistened in kaleidoscope sparks. “I like a messy love story. I like how love has its ups and downs, its pitfalls and its peaks, how love makes us act like fools enslaved to its whim.

“Love is love, even when alteration finds. Because it means that, when people change, their love changes with them. And I think that’s beautiful.”

There came a low, buzzing noise, persistent through the fog of remembrance. Liv opened her eyes and straightened herself up. She had dozed off in the bath, long enough that now the water was lukewarm at best, and most of the suds had dissolved. Instinctively she reached for the phone, meaning to check the time, only to realise that it was vibrating and that August was calling her.

Liv fumbled. Her wet fingers grasped for purchase on the slippery screen, skidding past the green receiver with no hope of pressing it. But a couple attempts later, she had managed to pick up.

“Hello?” she said, excited and somewhat confused. On the other end, August was – sobbing? She could only hear his breathing, faint and rushed, like air would just not stick in his lungs. Though it could very well be her speakers being flooded. She peeled the phone away from her ear and tapped the screen to light it up – only to realise her mistake.

Instead of answering normally, she had turned a regular call into a video chat. Taking up the whole screen was August’s face, a pale shadow illuminated with confusion and an unmistakable blush. In a small rectangle in the bottom left corner, Liv could see what her camera was displaying. Her equally red face and her naked breast, barely covered with a transparent blanket of bubbles.

“I – I – I –” they both repeated, minds blank and jammed like the needle of an old gramophone. It was during this period of stammering that both August and Liv had turned their phones flat on their bellies, in a conscious effort to hide their assorted embarrassment from one another.

“I’m so sorry,” Liv muttered as soon as her mental paralysis elapsed, her voice cracking with shame. “It was an accident, I didn’t mean to f-f-flash you.”

“No, I’m sorry!” August replied in the same shrieky tone. “It’s so late, I thought you were sleeping and I –”

“I was! I think I’ve fallen asleep in the bathtub!”

“No way, are you – wait. You should probably get out? I’m pretty sure that’s how you get pneumonia.”

“Right. Ummm, can you stay on the line for five minutes?”

“Sure. I’ll – rest my eyes, I guess.”

“Grand, in a bit!”

Liv leapt out of the bath, and towel-dried herself in record time. She’d done a stellar job of it too, friction burns notwithstanding, so that soon enough she was under her covers, wearing nothing but a charity-shopped nightgown and clutching her phone to her chest, as if it were a freshly-hatched baby chick. The kind you whisper to, so as not to scare it.

“Are you still there?” she asked softly. On the other end, August flinched.

“Hm? Oh, yeah. Yeah, sorry. I’m so tired. You wouldn’t imagine how busy the bus was on the way home, then my sister called saying she needed someone to pick her up because she was scared. Then mum said he’d be late, so I had to cook tea and –”

“Why did you call, then? You should’ve just gone to bed. It’s not like –” Okay thinking back on it, it was like she was going to weep herself to death if he hadn’t called her. The beautiful breadth of a girl’s emotional repertoire. “I would’ve been fine, August. Sorry if I made you worry about me.”

“Well, it’s not just that. I – god, this is not gonna sound right no matter how I say it – I just didn’t want you to start hating your… umm… girl self.”

“What.”

“Right, shit. Well, here goes nothing. I know that I sounded a little – pissed at you. And I’d be lying to say I wasn’t. But it’s not because you’re, well, you. I like that! I like that a lot, and I think that’s where the problem comes from. Because there we were being friends for so long, a bond forged in the fires of fellowship and camaraderie, and then suddenly,” August sighed. “There’s a bunch of new feelings that I can’t quite explain. Good feelings, but also wrong feelings. You get me?”

“Yeah,” Liv said, shrinking in her shoulders. “I think I get the gist.”

“And so, I suppose when you take the socially inept me and bombard him with a salvo of emotional turmoil, surprise reveals and now this – the result isn’t pretty. It’s an anxious mess that can’t exactly word right. So, I guess to answer your earlier question – I called to say sorry. For many things, but mostly for not being more understanding, I guess. Mulling things over, it’s kinda obvious why you wouldn’t tell me. We’re close, but not that close and I imagine you’d have been more comfortable talking about this with a girl rather than some stinky old guy. Plus, with all the rumours, and the stuff you’ve mentioned about your family, and then your grades –”

“August?”

“Hm? Yeah?”

“I love you. Please shut up now.”