InsaneJournal

Every Wednesday night, Lyra was surrounded by beautiful people. Seriously, stunning. Fit, also – and this was the most important element of all of them– cool.

Just so goddamn cool.

Lyra's first experience with a group of gorgeous girls had been in high school and it had not been a positive one. Hells no. Lyra wanted to be friends, Lyra really, really wanted to be friends and she used the strongest tool in her personality toolbox to try and make them talk about her: she showed off. It had worked— sort of. They did talk about her, but not, it was painfully obvious, in a way that was gonna get her invited to the parties where there’d be alcohol and hard drugs. Not that fourteen year old Lyra had wanted to do the hard drugs, but she had to be missing out on something, never having had the chance. Fourteen year old Lyra had been a quivering mass of FOMO.

The girls could smell it on her. The FOMO. How much she wanted. And they’d all been deeply embarrassed by it. No one but Rosario wanted to be friends with embarrassing.

She'd had more luck with sorority sisters, weirdly enough. Maybe it had been the fact that she'd slept her way into their world through Archer but Lyra liked to think that the girls were just more evolved. Hailey still thought she was weird, but… weird in an endearing way? And they had been close enough that Hailey listened to her when she orchestrated Xander's double dumping. But there was still… something. Lyra hadn't forgotten the speed in which Hailey and Sav had ditched her when they decided they didn't like Avery. And none of them really understand her drive to build houses or work as a carpenter's apprentice. Their drives were different. Their aims loftier, at least when it came to paychecks, and like, renown. Hailey had suggested once, gently, that maybe what Lyra really wanted to do was architecture?

Like, architects could make a name for themselves? (She’d said, question mark hovering at the end of her sentence.) Builders just wore out their backs.

Lyra was still friends with Hailey on Instagram, but they hadn't hung out for ages. Sav's life was entirely focused on her engagement to Ricky and she hadn't liked a post of Lyra's in months. But Lyra hadn't been to a party on campus in that long either and – since the need to espionage the fuck outta any Goldenhawks was dead in the water, it seemed like so too were the friendships.

But then there was trapeze.

Every single person at trapeze school was a show off. They were loud, unrestrained, some of them were downright unhinged, and the more effort any of them put into anything the more the rest of them cheered it on. Around the sorority girls, Lyra'd always felt like the weirdest one. Here, there was absolutely no goddamn way of achieving that title.

Mackenzie was deeply into ley lines and auras and butterfly pea flower lattes. Pol was a neon haired, non-binary parent of two. Soledad was a thirty five year old army vet with a prosthetic foot and the most astonishing upper body strength and she bought in vegan baking every other week. Fern's legal name was Rachel and she legit turned up in wings each Wednesday (angel, fairy, moth, you name it) and everyone knew her name was Rachel because she kept forgetting to answer to Fern. Honestly, Lyra could have told them all that Saint Patrick was her father and she'd been kidnapped by fairies and they wouldn't have even though she was that crazy. They probably wouldn't believe her, sure, they'd just accept it as a weird quirk like Mackenzie's insistence on aligning her chakras before climbing into the harness.

There were some days, even, when Lyra… well… she kinda worried she was a little boring. Like sure, she got married in Vegas, that was pretty wild, but she hadn’t done a heap of interesting things since then. She wasn’t gonna bring up the hospital incident and she wasn’t ready to try and turn Jem stories into hilarious ones and no one else was as fascinated with how bits of wood fit together as she was and it wasn’t like she and Aves were wracking up adventures, lately. Like, she wasn’t bored, but it was hard to make married life with someone who seriously dug you into a story that’d make anyone double over in laughter, and every Wednesday she did have to fight the knowledge that she didn't really have anything to offer that would make the likes of Pol and Soledad think she was cool.

Well, aside from being utterly fearless in the air.

She had that down pat.

Few things beat the rush of swinging through the air upside down. She’d admit that the thrill of doing something that made Avery either laugh or look at her hungrily then kiss her was pretty damn good, right up there, couldn’t be beat, but speeding through the air…

But falling...

Honestly – and Lyra would rather get a reputation as an occasional klutz than admit this to anyone – but sometimes at the height of her swing she let go on purpose. Sometimes she’d be flying toward someone else to be caught and she’d bungle her timing just enough that their hand stood no chance of reaching her. Sometimes. Mostly she didn’t! Just… in the later part of her course, once she’d nailed the basics. And yeah okay, it had started in the last month or so, so; after St Patrick’s Day, but that didn’t mean anything. It was just. The way her stomach just dropped. The jolt of pure adrenaline when her body realised there was nothing gonna catch it. Holy shit.

And there always was a net there. Of course there was. A big, elasticy net she’d bounce to resting in, laughing, usually; laughing after an exhilarated scream. It was incredible. It just felt a little fucked up to admit, and like, people might worry, and that’d just take the whole thrill out of everything. So she wasn’t gonna admit it.

(Here was another thing she wasn’t ready to admit: As the year cycled back toward May, Lyra couldn’t stop thinking about the Mystery Spot. She couldn’t stop thinking ‘bout what it would be like to go back there. Step through that door again. The idea wouldn’t leave her mind and it didn’t scare her as it once did. Well, it did scare her but… it also crept in like a goblin when she was almost asleep and wrapped long fingers round her shoulder, drawing her attention toward it. Come back, it said, and she had no goddamn idea if it was her over-active imagination or…)

But all that was only sometimes. Most of the time she didn’t bungle anything, she tried really hard to get the timing right, to build up her strength, and her grace, and get the beats perfect for their end of term performance. The strength and beats were doing well, the grace was still a little way off, especially next to Viviane.

And oh man, speaking of insecurities, next to the utterly poised, lithe beauty that was Viviane, Lyra felt ridiculous. Holy shit, the woman was probably the most beautiful person Lyra’d ever seen in real life, and she was top of the class. If she wasn’t also genuinely nice, she’d be a bit of a struggle to be around.

At the end of their two hour session, Lyra was cooling down, one arm crossed in front of her body with her other arm hooked over, forgetting to count out her stretches because Viviane was still swinging. Most of the class was doing the same thing, watching her final sweeping tricks as they drank from their bottles and rubbed at bruises and blisters. She was a total joy to behold.

If Lyra wasn’t a married woman, there might be some feelings happening for that stomach, that smile. Like, Lyra didn’t want to think about what’d happened last time she fell for a stomach, but, dayam, Viviane.

That’s how she put it as Viviane landed (perfectly) and came walking back over to the edge of the gym toward her own drink bottle. “Dayam Viviane,” she beamed, shaking out her own sore fingers. “You killed it. It dead. RIP it.”