There are times when I don’t know what makes this worth it.
Ms. Bits waits until I’m almost done with my shift to call me into the back office. I’m exhausted after eight and a half hours of standing (minus a half-hour lunch, but somehow I never got my breaks… again), but I have enough energy to keep wearing a smile while I pull myself back there. The eighth hour of smiling is easier than the fourth. All the muscles in my face have frozen in place.
That smile doesn’t last past Ms. Bit’s first question, though. She asks, “Do you want to continue working here?”
Maybe it’s something in the tone of her voice, but this already feels like a prelude to firing me. It turns out those muscles in my face aren’t so frozen after all. “Wh—what? Of course I do. I love working here, and I do kind of need this job—”
The first part of that sentence isn’t true—with all apologies to the Mrs. and Mr. Cakes of the world, but food service is not my calling—but the second part definitely is. I’m barely making rent as it is. I’ve been in worse financial holes before, so I’m not living in a state of constant panic like I used to, but the ground underneath me is still shaky.
Coral Bits’s back office is only a little larger than a closet. The Sushi Shack, like most of the restaurants in the mall’s food court, doesn’t have much space to work with. One of the three fluorescent lights overhead is out. Ms. Bits’s filing cabinets are jarred open and poorly organized. One thing she should have had the space for, though, is another seat. The only chair in the room is the one behind her desk. Anyone she calls back is left to stand, and I doubt this is an accident.
Ms. Bits places her elbows on her desk. “I haven’t been feeling that you’ve been as enthusiastic about work as you used to be.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” I swallow. “Even before I started working here, this was my favorite restaurant in the mall. I love serving sushi, and everything else we make, and— and seeing so many people every day—”
“There have been reviews on our app that mention you,” Ms. Bits says. “And, watching you, I don’t know that I disagree with them.”
I struggle to keep my voice level. “Reviews?”
“Two said that you got their order wrong,” she tells me. “Another said you weren’t smiling when you took their order.” She sets her phone on the desk and taps it.
“Who the f—” I stop myself just in time, and pull my wits back to regroup. After a moment, I say, “That’s just a handful of people.”
“I’ve watched you take orders. I think I agree. You’re not as enthusiastic about this as you used to be.”
It’s exhausting, staying on my feet as long as I do. And I never got either of the fifteen-minute breaks I’m legally required to get. My feet are still aching.
“We’re always supposed to be smiling, Sunset. It’s in the ads.”
I can’t argue with her on that point. I think I was always smiling. My face certainly hurts like it. But maybe I slipped, sometime when I wasn't paying attention.
“I make it a point of pride to get every order correct,” I say, and I can’t keep my lip from trembling because that much, at least, is true.
Ms. Bits narrows her eyes, a little bit. I swallow.
This is not exactly a screaming fight, but my heart is beating like it is. Ms. Bits has seen dozens of high school summer workers come and go. (Hundreds, maybe. I have no idea how long she’s been here.) Fired a good number of them. Her reputation with some of the others, the kids who’ve been on more summers, is that she doesn’t care about us. Never listens to us, and treats us like she treats the drink machines.
For some reason, I had thought, until now, that these were exaggerations. She’s not even making an effort to see things like I might, or to help me. Three reviews on our stupid app, and she’s made up her mind.
“I’ve seen kids on the way out too many times before. They stop caring, usually a few weeks before school starts again. I can’t have that here.”
“I do care. And I need this job.” This is the only job I know how to get that didn’t look too closely at my citizenship paperwork.
“Make an effort to do better,” she tells me. “But I’ll be honest. I’ll be surprised if I see that you’re still here in a few weeks.”
I can’t meet her eyes. My chin is trembling. The only thing I can do is back out of her office when she inclines her head to the door.
I would like to say it’s a surprise that I would spent the evening feeling awful, but I've been feeling under attack for months now. I just wasn’t expecting a blow from this angle.
It started with getting scholarship applications back. Then college applications. Rejections, all of them. To say I was shocked would have like saying that Princess Twilight can really put away her hayburgers—a true statement that nonetheless fails to capture the horror of the sight. At least that was true to begin with. With each form letter, the shock wore down a little bit more, and a little bit more, until all that was left was a pit in my stomach.
That, I suppose, is a kind of acceptance. But I still don’t understand. I’m a smart cookie. No false modesty here. I was Princess Celestia’s personal pupil. Even on this side of the portal, my grades are great, and my extracurriculars—and I’m saying this in all seriousness—are worth killing for. Fencing, animal shelter volunteer, math tutor? Come on.
To get back nothing... it’s like crashing into a brick wall. It keeps knocking the wind out of me. I’m exhausted just thinking about it.
My first, second, and now third plans have all fallen through. I have no idea what I’m going to do next or how. Every time I think about it, I just get tired. Some of those rejection letters are still sitting on my desk. I have no idea what to do with them.
Someday, I’ll make a new plan. Some day that isn’t today.
Or tomorrow, most likely.
It’s been like that for months now.
Twilight is working at an electronics store this summer. The uniform doesn’t really work on her, but the tech support duties are enough like solving a puzzle that she can be happy there. At least, she told me, she could if it weren’t for the customers. I spot her as I walk past. She’s caught in the middle of a conversation with a customer, a real Harshwhinney-type, and looks like she wants nothing more than to escape. She sees me, and smiles thinly. I smile back, just as thinly.
I’m close to charging in to save her from the conversation, and stop myself just in time. The last time that happened, Twilight’s manager yelled at me, and then yelled at her for paying attention to her friends rather than the customers.
It’s all right. If I went in, I’d have to talk to her before I go. I don’t know what I could tell her, or anybody. Nothing I could say would help.
Every time I talk about my problems, I feel worse about them. And so I don’t talk.
*
There are times when I can’t be honest with myself, about myself.
There are pieces of myself that I can pick up and parcel away. I’m good about not thinking much about the future while I’m at work.
Another thing I locked away: the way I reacted when Twilight told me she got into Starswirl University, and her first-choice astrophysics program. She applied way early, of course. Having obsessively researched programs since about the age of twelve, she knew exactly what she was going for. She got it. And I was happy for her. You have to believe me when I say that. I was happy. But…
But.
It wouldn’t be another month until I got my own rejection from Starswirl, but my first few unexpected rejections had already come in, and I had a deep pit growing in my stomach about the rest. That was the evening my denial broke.
That night, alone in my apartment, was the first time I cried over all the letters that had been stacking up.
The other girls were, of course, having (courtesy of Pinkie Pie Industries) having an impromptu party for Twilight at the coffee shop. That evening was the groundbreaking for all of the plans they’d have to make soon: how they would all stay in touch after going to different schools, where they thought they’d get in. Right before I left, Fluttershy chose that moment to announce she’d been accepted into Canter U’s veterinary program months ago and hadn’t wanted to bother anybody by saying so, and then Pinkie Pie just about exploded, and—
And I had to get out of there. I had a good excuse: my endometriosis was flaring up again. I got lots of sympathy from the other girls, and some extra ibuprofen from Rarity, but I think Twilight knew what else was going through my mind. Maybe it was something I said, some way I acted around her, because her eyes seemed shadowed whenever I looked at her. Both at that party and for days afterwards. Sometimes they still do.
The endometriosis cramps were like glass shards grinding in my belly, and gave me a good reason to be crying that night anyway. But I wasn’t fooling myself. I knew what I was crying for, even if the feelings were too complicated to put into words.
Even with so much distance between then and now, I still don’t have those words.
It isn’t certainly isn’t jealousy. It’s— a fear of being left behind. Of helplessness. Hopelessness. The anxiety you get when you’re a ten-minute walk from a bus that’s due to leave in five minutes. It’s the last bus of the evening, and it’s all your fault that you’re slow but at the same time you’re going as fast as you can and don’t know how to go any faster, and everybody is staring at you as you dash by because you look like a goon when you run, and—
It’s like that. Except without adrenaline to mix in with all the other bad brain chemicals, and stretched out for months.
“Desperation” is maybe the closest single word. What I’m desperate for, though—I don’t know. An escape, maybe. Escape from all the problems I wrap around myself wherever I go. Escape from myself.
*
There are times when I just don’t belong in my body.
The human range of vision is tremendously narrower than a pony’s. It was one of the most uncomfortable things about crossing over. The first few weeks I was here, I felt like I was wearing blinders. Or like everything was zoomed in. It took my brain too long to adjust. I’m still not sure it’s entirely there.
In Dr. Meadowbrook’s biology class, I read that, if a person is given glasses that turn their sight upside-down, their brain will adjust. In just a few weeks, they’ll begin seeing everything as “normal” again.
There was no word on whether this holds true for equine brains. Of course, I can’t ask. Even Twilight Sparkle, polymath that she is, isn’t a doctor. (Rather, she told me that she’d have to cut open my brain to start to find out, and we both passed on that.)
There are moments when, no matter how long I’ve been here or how many months it’s been since I last stepped through the portal to Equestria, my brain freezes. I forget how to operate my body. The higher pressure the situation, the more likely I am to falter.
One week and six days after I pass my driver's license test, I’m coming home from picking up extra hours at the Sushi Shack. I've been trying to prove myself to Ms. Bits, and the license has added a lot of flexibility to my schedule.
My only car is a thirdhand old van, a gas-guzzler that was owned by Treehugger before she sold it to Sandalwood, who sold it to me for seven hundred bits and my help composing a song. It smells about as you’d expect given that history, but I don’t care. It can get me places.
But staying out late means driving in the dark. I’ve never driven solo this late. The buses stop running after 9:30, and I was only able to pick up those extra hours because I have the license.
I have to take a left turn across two lanes of traffic that, in daytime, would have been packed. Under the streetlamps, everything just looks deserted and desolate.
I must think I have more peripheral vision than I do. I’m halfway into the first lane before I catch the headlights in the side of my vision. Even now, I could save things. Those headlights are coming down the next lane over. My foot is poised above the brake.
In that flash of panic, my body becomes alien again. I try to move my front hoof— my arm— and tangle up all my signals to my limbs—
I don’t remember hitting my head on my door in the crash. Just a flash of light, and the world turning frost-white as my windshield shattered into a thousand glass beads.
It feels as if that one instant lasted hours, and all the hours afterward last seconds. I barely remember them. The van is a total loss. I know that from the moment I stumble outside, see the front left quadrant of the hood caved in. Next thing I know, I’m standing under orange streetlights, arguing with the lady I hit. Then I’m holding my head in my hands, trying not to show how I felt. Trying to keep from showing weakness. Brushing away tears when I’m not facing her.
For some reason, I’m terrified of admitting fault, though the accident is my fault and I know it. The shock drives an icy wedge between the part of me that knows what I’m being like, and the part of me that just acts. The part of me that was there, unchanged, since I’d come through the portal all those years ago.
I must be acting like my head had been jarred unscrewed. The responding police officer takes me to an urgent care clinic without asking. The nurses there don’t do much but keep me under observation for two hours. Eventually, I insist I can get a Ryde home. (The cost of the Ryde alone eats up all the wages and tips from those extra hours.)
I don’t have health insurance. My car insurance is barebones by financial necessity, and I know it won’t cover this. I can’t even think about that. I just have to get home. Have to get to bed, where I can at least try to sleep in the four hours I have left before my next shift.
When I try to sleep, all I can do is stare at the afterimages. The shock of the impact, bright behind my eyes. The windshield turning an opaque white. The urgent care’s fluorescent lights above my bed. The dash lights of the Ryde driver as he stared into the yawning gulf of his own night making ends meet.
And all those images are underlined by the feeling, strongest at the moment of the crash but present ever after, that this body isn’t mine. That I don’t belong in it. Or here at all. And that I'm fooling myself otherwise.
I’m an idiot to have ever expected to sleep. And it’s a good thing I can’t, because I forget, until it’s almost too late, that I only have three hours to sleep. I need to factor catching the bus back in.
*
There are times when I know I don’t deserve the friends I have.
I can’t tell them what had happened. I can’t tell them that the van was totaled. We all work at the same mall this summer, and so I can’t avoid them, either.
The next time I see any of them—Rainbow Dash at the shoe store, and then Applejack at the smoothie stand—I put on a mask of a smile and walk past them. I’m perpetually late to my shifts at the Sushi Shack, and they understand when I moved on. And that I look tired.
I am tired. I’m always tired. Missing a night of sleep didn’t change the status quo all that much.
I can’t keep it from them forever, though. They know how anxious I was to get my driver’s license. I made them help me. I can’t just— just keep taking the bus, never mention the van again, and expect them not to notice.
When I get off my shift at the Shack, I’m hoping to get out of the mall fast. Maybe I can find a quiet bench to collapse on while I wait for the bus. (Not that this city’s anti-homeless architecture, putting curves in the back of the benches and making them all U-shaped, makes this easy.) Instead, I find Twilight waiting for me—and heading up a group of my friends.
I don’t even get a grace period. But I should have expected that. Twilight’s brother wasn’t the officer who responded to the crash, but he has friends all over the CCPD, and he must have heard.
My gut seizes up. For a moment, I’m just like I was the instant of the accident—feeling like I’d been wearing blinders, and someone had just ripped them off. And my body is bracing for impact.
Twilight is as the head of the little posse, but Applejack speaks first. “Sunset,” she says, “can I offer you a ride home? I thought you might want a chance to talk about—”
“Why didn’t you call us?” Twilight blurts.
Applejack doesn’t look miffed at the interruption. She shrugs, like she was working up to asking the same thing anyway.
“I’m fine,” I say. “I didn’t get hurt, and—”
Twilight reaches to touch my wrist. "My brother said they took you to urgent care.”
The violence of my reaction surprises me. I yank my hand away, and take a quick step back, preventing her—or any of them—from touching me. “I said I’m fine. I don’t need all of you clustering around me like I lost a grandma.”
Twilight jerks her hand back like she’s touched a hot kettle. The worst thing is, I don’t even feel bad about the look she gives me.
“Let me give you a ride home,” Applejack says. “It’ll be faster than waiting for the bus, and I’m heading in that direction anyway—”
“Just let me go,” I snap, and shove me way through them. Harder than I intend.
I know the wrong thing to do is charge past them. I know that. Just like I know that the wrong way to feel about this is what I’m feeling now, this nauseating swill of heat and rage. It burns behind my eyes.
All the adrenaline of the crash is back again and I don’t know why. It’s all I can do to keep from snarling until I’m out of their sight. My hands shake.
For as tired as I’d been getting off work, when I get to the bus stop bench, I can’t imagine sitting. I’m too full of bitter energy. I feel like an empty aluminum can, tossed on the side of the road.
When I close my eyes, strange afterimages—the lights from the crash—dance behind them.
It wasn’t just that, at the moment of my crash, my body stopped feeling like my own. Something in my brain jarred loose.
I’m right back to where I’d been before I came through the portal. I hate being myself now just as much as much as I did then.
*
There are times when I know I don’t have a future on this world.
And I don’t mean that there are times when I think that I do. I mean that there are times when I can avoid or put off thinking about it, and times when I can’t.
I like to think I fit in pretty well on this side of the portal. I have friends. I go out for coffee. I stream video games, and other human things. I’ve learned more about people, ponies, and magic than I ever did on Equestria.
The longer I stay here, the more exhausted I get.
It’s not a magical effect… I don’t think. It's not because I'm so far from home, at least not in any material sense. I don’t have anyone or anything to blame for the exhaustion but myself. Probably the same thing would have happened if I’d stayed in Equestria (if I’d survived staying in Equestria).
The energy I used to have leaves a void behind. Sometimes that void fills in.
Sometimes rage comes in, and nothing and no one around me meets my standards—least of all myself. Before I totaled my van, sometimes I would go out and sit in it and scream. When Pinkie lost my new phone after borrowing it for five minutes, or Rainbow Dash flunked on an exam I helped her study for and I could tell she’d been crying and trying not to show it... I had a place I could go and feel a little bit better.
I couldn’t take the van anywhere—not legally, not with just my learner’s permit—but I still had it. It was nice just to have a place to get away from my apartment’s thin walls. The van was nice and safe and anonymous, especially at night. Safe in a strange, animalistic sense. Even if I hadn’t had neighbors, it wouldn’t have felt right to scream where I slept.
At least I felt something.
The worst times were when nothing at all filled the void. Without the van, my urge to get away to scream vanishes. And my mood becomes blacker and bleaker than ever.
I’ve been in this place before. The quieter my moods get, the more dangerous they are.
The last time I was in this place had been the night before I’d abandoned Princess Celestia. Right before I imploded. I committed a soft kind of suicide by throwing my life away, and vanishing into that portal.
I used to be very emotionally invested in my magical studies. I swore at my books. I paced up and down the library aisles, muttering obscenities and magical formulae to myself. I researched a soundproofing spell just to have somewhere, like my van later, to scream or cry every once in a while. I won’t say I was happy, because I wasn’t, but I felt things. When there was a void, the void filled in. I felt like I could fit there. Like there was a future I could be a part of, even if my role wouldn’t have one hundred percent the one that I would have chosen for myself.
Until the end. Until Princess Celestia and I started growing apart. Until I realized that maybe I couldn’t fit into her future.
I stopped pacing. I stopped cursing at my books. I stopped, I thought at the time, feeling.
Everything was bleak, and black, and dull, and exhausting.
I feel the same way now.
My building’s mailbox is just inside the front door. I used to check it every day when I first got here and needed to work overtime to establish an identity. Now I only have the energy to look at it every three to four days. After the accident, I go for a week without checking it.
When I finally sort through it, and find the bill and the legal threat from the driver who struck me, I’m not surprised. I’m not anything at all. I don’t feel anything except dull acknowledgement. Of course everything would be worse than I expected.
The tiredness I feel today is just a little blacker than yesterday’s tiredness.
I can’t pay this lady’s bills. Not while working the job that I have (and am barely keeping). Not while paying rent. Not while buying food. And not while trying to figure out finances and aid for a college I don’t even think I’ll get.
Ten thousand bits for the car, and two thousand in medical expenses. Her car wasn’t even totaled, and she was fine afterwards. Fuck.
But I can’t fight it. The crash was my fault.
I can’t imagine a way forward. There’s just a blank.
That makes it easier to set the letter aside and act as though I never saw it.
The future won’t be any less hopeless, either way.
*
There are times when I just can’t.
There are times when I see how I can be better.
I’ve never wanted to talk to people, or ponies, about my problems. I don’t have the words. The few times I tried it, when I was younger, I always came away feeling worse in the end.
Having that journal with a direct line to Princess Twilight was a big step toward changing that. But even then I found myself slipping back into bad habits—like only writing about my problems when they became emergencies, or when it was too late to do anything about them.
I kept myself hidden. It was hard—is hard—to escape the conviction that, the more vulnerable I make myself, the more I’m going to get hurt.
I’m constantly acting like I’m going to get hurt. Most of the time it’s a bad assumption.
It takes a great deal of effort for me to bring things to the other Twilight, the human Twilight, now.
I bunch my knees, hug them to myself, and lean against my bed’s headboard. Twilight frowns as she looks over the letter I gave her. A moment later, she starts pacing. A moment after that, she’s pushing papers and unwashed coffee cups and orphaned USB cables out of the way to clear a writing surface.
“Pen, pen, pen,” she mutters. “Where do you keep your pens in all this?”
“Is it that bad?” I ask. She isn’t working very hard to keep the disapproval out of her voice.
“Your desk is very… your desk,” Twilight says, thinking that was what I meant. “I don’t understand how you find anything.”
“I never have trouble,” I say, though the instant after I do I realize it’s a lie.
She finally finds a pen underneath a Tirek’s Revenge II mousepad I forgot I have. She clicks the pen, hovering it over the paper as if she’s not sure where to start. My stomach drops away as I realize that the issues she’s seeing are too large for notes and minor corrections.
I keep thinking about the way I treated her and the others the last time I saw them all together. I can’t make myself bring it up, though. Twilight doesn’t either. If she wants to hurt me in payback for pushing her, this is her chance.
“It’s a very well-written letter,” she says. “It, um, has a lot to say about Starswirl University. But what does it have to say about you?”
“I don’t understand,” I say. “It’s an application to the university.”
“And you’re definitely proving you know a lot about it,” Twilight says. “You write about all of its sciences programs, mention some of its professors by name… even I don’t know this much about the student life programs.” She frowns. “Rentable giant hamsters balls? I… never mind.”
“Don’t let Pinkie find out when she visits you,” I say.
Horror flashes across Twilight’s eyes. “No... no, no, no, I’m going to have to plan around that.” She clicks her pen more frantically, and then shakes her head. “But that’s not the point. I barely get to know you at all in this letter.”
“This is exactly the same kind of letter that got me into Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns,” I say.
“That was in Equestria,” she points out.
“So? The idea’s the same. Show that I’ve done my homework. And demonstrate how much the school means to me.”
“Yes, but there’s nothing in here about what would make you an attractive candidate.”
I’m beginning to understand what she’s saying. I don’t want to hear it. “In Equestria, it’s hard to get very far being self-centered.”
No, I’d always had to hide that part of myself. And starting to let it show was what had first driven a wedge between me and Princess Celestia.
“In Equestria,” Twilight repeats.
“…But not here,” I finish, lamely.
She nods. “I’m not going to make a moral judgment on which approach is better. But if you’ve already been rejected, they won’t take your application again this year. But you can apply again the year after that. If we can get you into another good school, you could transfer over. We can start by writing a letter that details all your accomplishments—”
“What accomplishments?” I ask.
“Don’t say things like that.” She clicks the pen faster to express her frustration with me. “You’ve accomplished a lot. Like saving the world from evil interdimensional musicians. Saving the Equestria Land theme park and Canterlot Mall from— from— giant ladies. Stopping a time loop that everyone was trapped inside but no one knew about except you…” She trails off. “Oh.”
“I can’t write about any of that,” I tell Twilight. “Might as well tell them I’m a magical unicorn.”
“What about Camp Everfree? You helped put on a gala to raise enough money to save the camp.”
“Okay, maybe that’s one thing. But it still sounds just as ridiculous as the others when you say it aloud.”
“Two. It’s two things. Not only the gala, but we put together the dance video with the Crystal Prep students to help pay for more repairs.”
“That’s not the point, Twilight,” I say. “The point is that I don’t fit in.”
Twilight hesitates. She clicks the pen a few last times, as if for good measure, and carefully returns it to the desk.
I pull my knees tighter to my chest. “Didn’t fit in over there,” I say. “Fit in even worse here. It’s always going to keep me on the outside.”
Even if I were to get into Starswirl University for my sophomore year, I don’t think it would solve my problems. I would still be me. To whatever extent I could fit in, it would be an act. Just like with Celestia’s school. Same old disaster mare underneath.
“You fit in great with us,” Twilight says.
Despite everything else I’m feeling, I smile. “Yeah,” I say. There’s a part of me that wants to add for now, but I’m strong enough to keep from saying it.
“Thank you for sharing this,” Twilight says, folding up the letter. “I know how hard it is to open up about… these kind of big things.”
“Mmm.” I rest my chin on my knees, and stare forward. Not really looking at anything.
Twilight sits on the edge of the bed. “The first step in making any kind of plan to solve the problem is to be sure you can identify what the problem is. If it is a singular problem. We’ve done that now. Even if it takes us weeks or months to figure out the rest of the plan, we’re on our way to it now.”
“Thank you, Miss Tech Support,” I say, with a smile. Her words aren’t as comforting as she probably wants them to be, but they’re still nice to hear. I know she means them.
“I don’t mean to imply that you’re broken,” Twilight says, quickly. “Not any more than the rest of us are broken. I certainly was broken when we met, but then, whoosh, pow, laser beams, and so what I’m trying to say—”
“Twilight,” I say, with all the kindness in my heart, “shut up.”
She nods. She looks almost relieved that she doesn’t have to keep going.
I lost track of the time. I have to get to the bus. My next shift at the Sushi Shack starts in forty-five minutes.
Following it, I’m just as tired as I always am, but, after that conversation with Twilight, smiles come a little easier. It’s just the energy I need for eight and a half hours of dealing with customers and coworkers.
Even Ms. Bits notices the change. She finds nothing to complain about this shift.
*
There are times when the world feels manageable. Or sometimes even livable.
I don’t like how much effort and help it takes to get to that point, but, every once in a while, I can get there.
Shining Armor’s brow furrows as he reads. I sit on the other side of the booth, knitting my hands together, trying not to fidget. The coffee shop is bustling, full of raised voices and beeping credit card readers and ceramic dishes clacking together, but my whole world has shrunk to Shining Armor and the legal threat he’s reading. I have the same plummeting feeling in my stomach that I got when Twilight read over my application letter.
Shining Armor sets down the letter and takes a long, deliberate draught of his coffee. I have no idea how he can stand to have something so hot. This summer's heat is record-breaking. But I rarely see him without a cup in his hands these days. His work at the CCPD takes a lot out of him.
I can’t even imagine it. The Sushi Shack alone takes enough out of me.
I wish growing up didn’t mean feeling tired so much of the time. It’s been part and parcel of the experience for everyone I know.
“I am not a lawyer,” Shining Armor says, fixing me with the full weight of his stare to make sure I take his disclaimer seriously. “This is not legal advice. If you ever take my words in front of a court, I’ll be… very disappointed. This is just my opinion as a private citizen.”
“I understand,” I say solemnly, and just manage not to add get on with it.
“That said, I think this lady is full of it. You were at fault, but, from her end of it, the accident wasn’t that bad. That SUV of hers is built like a tank. Billing for a broken headlight, for body repairs—that I can see. But look at the other things she’s trying to pin on you. Battery replacement? Tire inspection? Air filter change? It looks like she’s just using this as an excuse to get maintenance done and charge you for it.”
The breath I let out feels like I’ve been holding it in forever. “That’s what I thought it seemed like. I don’t know enough about cars to say so. But what about those medical bills?”
“Those are a little harder to disprove,” Shining Armor admits. “But if you push on them a little, I bet they’ll come crumbling down, too. It was kind of her to send you a bill with enumerated items. If I were you, I’d send back a check for just the headlights and body work.”
“What do I do if she fights me on it?”
“Then things will get a little more interesting. But I don’t think she will. She probably just sees you as a scared teenager she can push around.”
“I am a scared teenager,” I say.
“What I mean to say is—she sees an easy target. And I don’t think you are.”
Just hearing that feels nice. Like hearing it might make it come true.
“If she does go after you,” he says, “she’ll at least know that you’re someone who will fight back. And that might make you not worth the effort.”
I nod. I have an iced tea, and it’s one of the only things giving me life right now. Maybe it’s the caffeine, but I feel a little less tired now than I did at the start of the conversation.
Paying for his coffee feels like the least I can do in exchange for him coming out to meet me, but he waves my money away. “Always happy to help a friend,” he says.
The best part about him is that he really means it. I hardly know him, and, most of what I do know, comes from Twilight. But he’s here for me.
So—I haven’t resolved my issues. But I have a plan.
The longer I stay on this world—heck, the longer I live anywhere—the more I come to realize that nothing is ever really resolved. Things that I thought I left behind years ago, and burned every possible bridge between me and them, can still come around and bite me. I even hugged Princess Celestia recently. A year ago, I never would have dreamed it.
The important thing is to keep moving forward. I’m not expecting to find any resolutions for anything, outside of death.
And I’m not ready to die yet.
I'm so lost in these thoughts that it takes me too long to notice that Applejack and her big, ugly farm jalopy are waiting for me by the front of the coffee shop.
“Twilight said you’d be around here,” she says. At first, I think she’s rolled down the driver’s side window to speak to me. But now I’m not sure the jalopy has a driver’s side window. “Want to let me give you a ride home?”
I think I’m ready for that. I smile and climb aboard.
Like most of the Apple family’s things, the jalopy is sturdier than it looks. My late, lamented van was so unsteady that it rocked whenever I stepped on or off it. The jalopy feels like an immovable object. Okay, maybe not the best trait for a vehicle to have, but comforting for a girl who’s just had a bad experience with cars.
The ruckus of the engine starting gives us an excuse to put off the conversation until it’s settled into a fine purr. “You been doing all right?” Applejack asks.
“I’m fine,” I say, and then immediately mentally kick myself. “I mean, not really, but I’m getting there.” Today I am, anyway. There’s always up-and-downs, steps up and steps down. Like riding a sine wave.
“That’s good,” Applejack says, cautiously. For a moment, she's distracted by the fine art of pulling the jalopy into traffic.
Once she’s through laying on the horn at someone making an illegal U-turn, she says, “I was pretty worried the other day, after we heard about your accident.”
I have a white-knuckled grip on my door. She looks over, notices my expression, and winces. “Still a little jittery? I should’ve thought about that. Shoot, the other day, when I asked—”
“I know what you were trying to do and I appreciate it,” I say. “And I’m really, really sorry about how I turned you down. If you’re mad—”
“If I’m mad? I thought I must’ve done something to tick you off.”
I press my lips together, shake my head. All this time I’d been living in my head, thinking about how I’d treated her and the others, thinking how mad they should have been…
I could have just asked them. Even with Twilight, I hadn’t.
Applejack purses her lips. I look at her. She glances over at me, and then back to the road.
She shrugs. I shrug.
Applejack and I have both said enough to understand each other. We drive on in companionable silence.
I glance over my shoulder. The back of the jalopy is full of farm equipment and the like. Fence posts, a post-digger, rolls of chicken wire, a bag of dog feed, a cardboard cutout of a purple horse (what?), and an old rattling toolbox.
“Applejack,” I say, “you’ve been working on the farm most of your life—”
“All of my life,” Applejack interrupts.
“—all your life,” I continue smoothly. “Plus school. And now the smoothie stand in the summers. How do you manage it? Where do you find the energy? I’m tired enough just doing what I do.”
“Who says I’m not tired?” she asks.
“You do a good job of hiding it if you are.”
“That’s just acting,” she says. “Sometimes, it’s just a matter of getting through.”
“Simple. Profound. Very Applejack.”
She takes her eyes off the road just long enough to give me an arch look. “It’s true, though. Getting through can be the most important thing in the world. And I know what I’m getting through for.”
The farm. Sweet Apple Acres. And her family. Applejack was practically born knowing what she wanted to get out of life. It was instilled in her by everyone around her.
“What about Sunset Shimmer?” she asks. “What are you getting through for?”
I used to know the answer to that. I was a lot more ambitious. Sometimes I think I lost too much of that.
There are some answers I could give her. I’m not sure any of them are right. I’m still going to need some time to think about this.
And to figure out if the answer is a what or a who.
*
There are times when the future is unimaginable. In both good ways and bad.
Without my van, I had to find new places to go to get away from my apartment. I’ve given up on finding someplace quiet to scream to myself, and more often I just don’t have the energy for that anyway.
But I still need to get out of my apartment on my off-days. I can’t stay there sixteen hours a day. And I need to get to someplace where I’m not likely to run into the other girls.
The roof of my little apartment building is the next best place. Nobody’s supposed to be up here. The day I moved in, the building superintendent explained, in no uncertain terms, which parts of the building were off-limits to tenants. The fire escapes and roof access were at the top of the list. He was worried about liability. He knew I was too young to be renting an apartment on my own, no matter the age I’d filled out on my paperwork. He was afraid that I was some rich high school kid finding a place in the city to throw a bunch of parties, and would end up doing something that would land him in court.
But that was years ago. He doesn’t come around to check on me as often as he used to. The roof access door has warped. The lock doesn’t fit neatly in its frame anymore. It’s easy to get past it, and get up.
I sit on the edge of the roof. My apartment building isn’t very large. Three stories tall at the front, and two at the back. Even still, that’s enough for a person to seriously hurt themselves. If they wanted to.
I make sure to sit over the back entrance, just in case. A little square of the building juts outward underneath me here. It’s only about one story to the next level of the roof.
I don’t feel like jumping, but I don’t want that to ever change.
This isn’t a good place to scream, but it’s a good place to think. There are plenty of things to idly look at, or listen to. But none of them can disturb me up here.
There’s distant sounds of traffic, an occasion horn honking—none of it on my street. Airplane contrails overhead. An electronic billboard. People having fun at the park a few blocks away. A mix of the mundane and things that, back in Equestria, I couldn’t have imagined.
I’ve only been back to Equestria a few times since coming here, and I never really stayed for long enough to take in the sights. Sometimes I wonder what I would see if I went back to, say, Canterlot. Would it be the same place I left? How many things that I never paid attention to before would I see differently now?
Part of me is sure that the next part of my life is already mapped out, and it’s heading straight into a gutter. But I couldn’t have imagined any of this back then. I’m not sure what makes me think I'm any more prescient now.
I wouldn’t have imagined her.
I don’t know how Wallflower originally found my spot up here. Maybe I told her. One of the things that it’s hard to understand about depression is that it turns your memory into a fog. I can hardly remember what I was doing yesterday, and keeping my work schedule straight is more trouble than it should be. I could have told her and blanked it.
Or she could have just seen me up here. The fire escape staircase reaches the roof. It’s difficult to climb without getting inside the building first, and she doesn’t have a key.
Somehow she manages it. She can be determined when she wants to be. She never talks about how she does it.
I hear her crunching across the roof gravel before she says hello. Most days, I don’t even turn around. There's only one person who knows to find me here.
She sits next to me. I catch a glimpse out of the corner of my eye, and almost startle. For a second, I think it’s not her. She’s not wearing one of the brown-and-tan sweaters I’m used to seeing her in. This time she’s got… a gray sweater.
I relax. She always wears sweaters, no matter how hot the weather. There are parts of herself she doesn’t want to show in public. Even I’ve only seen them twice. Wallflower is the type of person who’s uncomfortable whenever she steps outside, anyway. I’m not even sure she notices the extra heat. She never mentions it.
But there are a lot of things she doesn’t mention.
“Hey, lady,” she says.
“Sorry, only Wallflower Blush is allowed up here,” I say.
“Why do people always say things like that when I wear new clothes?”
She went so long without being noticed by anybody that she just didn’t… think about her clothes. Why not wear the same clothes for a week straight if nobody will remember you afterward?
Now that she’s starting to poke her head back out into social world—without deciding it was embarrassing and erasing everyone’s memory of it afterward—she’s remembering what it’s like to be looked at. She doesn’t like it, at all.
I’m not judgmental about it, and I try very hard to make sure she knows that I’m not. But… it is nice to see that some things are changing.
“Let’s just say that those of us who love you best know that you’re a creature of habit,” I say.
When I glance at her out of the side of my eye, I see the sweater is a hoodie. And it’s got a logo on it. The N7 symbol from the Romance Effect games. That’s great. Advertising to people the kinds of things she likes.
That’s a… not insignificant step for her. I didn’t even know that she played those. That’s something else we’ll be able to talk about sometime. And she’s also coordinated it with a pair of black jeans I haven’t seen before, either.
“I guess,” she says. “Most days, I see you in your Sushi Shack uniform. Didn't get called in to fill a shift today?”
“Nope. It's an actual day off."
“I didn’t know you got those.”
“Well, whenever Ms. Bits asks me if I want to pick up an extra shift, I don’t feel like I can say no. I need to prove to her that I want this job.”
“You ever feel like Ms. Bits is scaring you on purpose?” Wallflower asks. “So she can keep you scared? And off-balance?”
“All the time.”
We’ve talked about this before. Wallflower is convinced that Ms. Bits is an abusive employer, and that she’s been exploiting me. I can’t say Wallflower is wrong.
I just don’t know what I can do about it. It’s hard to imagine any other job I could get would be different, and that’s assuming I could get a job. Most places don’t want to hire students with half a summer vacation left. Even if I intend stay there during the school year, working evenings and weekends, I’d have a hard time convincing an employer to trust me enough to put in the time and effort training me.
And that’s without mentioning (again) the hassle of immigration paperwork. As far as the federal government is concerned, I hardly exist. I’m a stateless individual. I was lucky there weren’t as many barriers to getting into the school system as there was working.
Wallflower watches me. She waits for me to talk about it if I want to. And I don’t. I change the subject.
“Needed to get away from home?” I ask.
“Like usual,” she says. She bunches her knees in front of her and hugs them. “Summer is always rough.”
“I know. That’s one of the reasons I’m glad you can visit.”
She doesn’t talk about herself much at all. That used to trouble me. Now I kind of like it. Aura of mystery. Plus, now that I’ve gotten to know her a little bit, I think I understand why there are parts of herself that she wants to keep hidden away. Or, at least, not show every often.
Same, lady.
I know enough. Wallflower Blush knows what it’s like to burn her bridges behind her.
She sees a lot of the world in terms of abuse and exploitation. And cycles of abuse. Once, and only once, she told me about what life with her parents used to be like. They came close to disowning her when she came out of the closet.
When she found the Memory Stone, one of the first things she did was erase her parents’ memory of her. To see what it would be like to be free of them. To not have to deal with their horseshit for a little while. She would take away her memories to get a little peace, and then bring them back. Each time she did that, she took them away for longer, and longer…
She hadn’t realized, at the time, that the Memory Stone had a three-day time limit. If someone’s memories are erased for longer than three days, there’s no bringing them back. They’re gone for good.
Her family is still supporting her, as they should. They just don’t realize it. Wallflower has her own bank account with enough money for rent and food to last at least through the end of the year. When she still had the Memory Stone, she got everything she’d need to access one of her parents’ checking accounts, and then made them forget they’d ever had that account.
She knows, now, that what she tried to do to me was just a perpetuation of that abuse. Trying to “teach me a lesson.” Treating me like her parents had treated her. Exercising power in the only way she knew how.
She’s trying to get better. But she still doesn’t trust herself. I know how that feels.
School gives her an excuse to get out of her apartment. Even if it’s awkward, even if it’s rough, she needs it. In summer, she’s tempted to stay inside all day. I’m proud of her for taking the effort to force herself outside. And glad she chose me.
“What are you up here waiting for?” Wallflower asks.
“You ever watch Ponar movies?”
“Not since I was a kid,” Wallflower says. “Living toys are friggin’ creepy.”
“But you know that moment, about three-quarters of the way through, when the protagonist has their big emotional epiphany and figures out how they’ve been looking at things wrong? And what they need to do next?”
“No,” Wallflower says. “I said I don’t watch them.”
“Well… that’s what I’m waiting for.”
Wallflower shrugs. “It seems like you’re awfully good at the whole epiphany-having thing from this angle, anyway.”
I furrow my brow and look at her.
“At the Friendship Games, that moment when you figured out how to use magic to save the school,” Wallflower says. She wilts, a little bit, under my attention. I look away to let her continue. “And when you figured out what I was doing to you, and how to get through me.”
“That’s a fair point,” I say. “Those did feel like epiphanies then.”
“They don’t now?” she asks.
“I’m still the same person, aren’t I?”
“Are you?”
I look at her. She’s able to meet my eyes for a few seconds before she has to look away again. Right. Sorry. There are different rules for communicating with Wallflower Blush, and it takes me a while to get back into the mode.
“I feel like I am.”
That little smile is back. “Let’s just say that those of us who love you best know that you’re different.”
“Just this once, I'll take your word for it,” I say. I take a moment to appreciate that smile. “I’m glad you’re getting out."
“It’s nice to know I can visit you,” she says. “When you’re not working.”
Wallflower has been visiting frequently enough over the summer that, whenever my next two-week schedule is posted, I send a picture of it right to her. And text her whenever Ms. Bits calls me in for extra hours. That way, Wallflower knows when she can come over and not have to call me in advance. She hates phones. She’ll call, for me, but the last thing I want her to be is uncomfortable. When she’s uncomfortable, I’m uncomfortable.
And, more and more, when she’s comfortable—I’m comfortable.
I’ve never felt like that about any other person before. Or any pony. Attached to them in that same way.
She hugs her knees to her chest. She looks like I felt a few days ago, watching Twilight read my application letter. Socialization is still a shock to her system. It usually takes her ten to fifteen minutes of it to loosen up.
Eventually, though, she lets out a long, slow breath. She releases her knees, and lets her feet slide to the rooftop.
I offer her my hand. She accepts. Her palm is warm and sweaty.
I used to think the sweat was from social anxiety. Maybe some of it is. Most of it. But not all.
Ten years ago, I couldn’t have imagined a world outside of Equestria. Six years ago, I couldn’t have imagined exiling myself there. Four years ago, I couldn’t have imagined having friends like mine, or how they would change my life. And, just this past spring, I couldn't have imagined meeting anyone like Wallflower Blush. Or how I’d feel about her.
She squeezes my palm. “I know the past few days haven’t been all right.” Not a question. Not an are you okay.
“Not really,” I say. “But I can see them getting better.”
She’s more sensitive to me than, at first blush, it might seem. “You want to head downstairs and talk about it? Maybe watch a movie?”
“Not sure which order. But that sounds good.” I stand. So does she, her hand still in mine.
I’m still not sure what I’m getting through all this for. I don’t think Wallflower Blush could answer the same question about herself.
But maybe we’re getting a little closer to the answer.
