Among Others

things in the world, it’s true, but there are also some great books. When I grow up I would like to write something that someone could read sitting on a bench on a day that isn’t all that warm and they could sit reading it and totally forget where they were or what time it was so that they were more inside the book than inside their own head. I’d like to write like Delany or Heinlein or Le Guin.
    I only just caught the bus back to school. I could see it at the bottom of the hill, and I wanted to run to catch it, I remember how it feels to run full pelt, and I wanted to do that, to lean down and just take great running strides. I almost did take one step like that, but when I put my weight on my leg wrong it feels like being stabbed. The bus driver saw me coming and recognised the uniform and waited. Lots of other girls from the school were on the bus, most of them from other forms. They nearly all know, or think they know, that I walk with a stick because my mother sticks voodoo pins into a doll. I got a seat to myself, but then Gill Scofield, who’s in my chemistry class, came and sat by me.
    “What have you been doing to make you late?” she asked.
    “Reading,” I told her. “I forgot the time.”
    “Not meeting boys?”
    “No!”
    “Don’t sound so shocked, that’s what half the other girls on this bus have been doing. More than half. Look at them.” I look. Lots of them have the skirts of their gym slips folded down, and their lips are suspiciously red.
    “That’s so tacky,” I said.
    Gill laughed. “I want to be a scientist,” she confided.
    “A scientist?”
    “Yes. A real one. I was reading the other day about Lavoisier. You know?”
    “He discovered oxygen,” I said. “With Priestley.”
    “Well, and he was French. He was an aristocrat, a marquis. He was guillotined in the French Revolution, and he said he’d keep blinking his eyes after his head was off, for as long as he had consciousness. He blinked seventeen times. That’s a scientist,” Gill said.
    She’s weird. But I like her.
    S UNDAY 7 TH O CTOBER 1979
    Finished Triton . It’s amazing. But the more I think about it the less I understand why Bron lied to Audri.
    I used today’s letter writing time to send a “Good Luck” note to cousin Arwel Parry and a congratulations note to Uncle Rhodri.
    Why did Bron lie to Audri?
    M ONDAY 8 TH O CTOBER 1979
    On the one hand, Gramma and Grampar never mentioned sex at all. They must have done it, or they wouldn’t have had Auntie Teg and my mother, but I don’t think they did it more than twice. Then there’s the way they talk about sex in school and in church. And there’s no sex, hardly any love stuff at all, in Middle Earth, which always made me think yes, the world would be better off without it. Arwen’s just a sop to propriety. Or just a vessel for future half-elven High Kings of Gondor and Arnor. A prize. It would have been better for him to have married Eowyn—who was a hero, after all, in her own right—and just let the Numenoreans dwindle. (After all, look at us now!) So sex, necessary evil to produce children. That’s normal.
    And when you look at those girls on the bus, and my mother and her boyfriends, and the girls who creep into each other’s beds at night and, well, ach y fi .
    But on the other hand, I do have sexual feelings. And Triton , and Heinlein, and The Charioteer have made me think that actually sex itself is neutral, and it’s society demonizing it that makes it icky. And the whole sex-change thing in Triton , there must be a sort of spectrum of sexuality, with most people somewhere in the middle, drawn to men and women, and some off on the ends—me at one end and Ralph and Laurie at the other. One of the things I’ve always liked about science fiction is the way it makes you think about things, and look at things from angles you’d never have thought about before.
    From now on, I’m going to be positive about sex.
    W EDNESDAY 10 TH O CTOBER 1979
    If the school was going out of their way to try to detach us from magic, they couldn’t organize things better. I wonder if that was someone’s original intention. I’m sure nobody here now knows a thing about it, but Arlinghurst has been running like this for more than a hundred years.
    We do no cooking, we’re completely cut off from the food we eat, and the food is incredibly awful. Yesterday, for instance, dinner was spam fritters, totally tasteless mashed potatoes, over-boiled cabbage.