We crept into dorm rooms, met in the back gardens of pubs that didn’t bother to kick us out, joined illicit parties on the massive flat-topped hill where the Iron Age fort once stood. We weren’t the only girls most of the time, but Abilene was the constant, the leader, the instigator.
By fifteen, she had the tall willowy body of a model, with soft budded breasts and long red hair. She was loud and vivacious and pretty, she drank more than the boys, played lacrosse like her life depended on it, and always, always had a circle of people around her.
In contrast, I was a thing of shadows and corners. I spent most of my free time in the library, I often ate alone on the grounds with a book resting against my knees. I ignored sports but chose dance and creative writing as my extracurriculars instead. I was shorter than I wanted to be, my body lagging behind Abilene’s in the things boys liked to see, strong enough for dance but not quite slender enough to look good in the leotard. My chin had the slightest hint of a cleft, which Abilene and I would spend hours trying to hide with makeup, and I had a beauty mark on my cheek that I loathed. My eyes were gray and felt flat compared to Abilene’s lively blue ones, and all of this would have been fine if I had even one ounce of the charisma Abilene so effortlessly exuded, but I didn’t. I was quiet and spacey and dreamy, terrified of conflict but sometimes thoughtless enough that I accidentally caused it, fascinated with things that my peers cared nothing for—American politics and old books and coral reef bleaching and wars fought so long ago that even their names had all but turned to dust.
The one thing I liked about myself at that age was my hair. Long and thick and blond—golden in the winter and nearly white in the summer—it was the thing people noticed first about me, the way they described me to others, the thing my friends idly played with when we sat and watched TV in the common room. Abilene hated it, hated that there was any one thing about my appearance that showed her up, and I learned within a few weeks at Cadbury that her sharp tugs of my ponytail weren’t signs of affection but of barely controlled jealousy.
Despite the hair, Abilene was still the monarch and I still the lady-in-waiting. She held court and I anxiously kept a lookout for teachers. She shirked her homework, and I stayed up late typing out assignments for her so she wouldn’t fail. She partied and I walked her home, balancing her on my shoulder and using my phone for light as we stumbled down from the hill, her hair smelling like spilled cider and cheap cologne.
“You never kiss the boys,” she said one night when we were fifteen, as I guided her down the narrow lane back to the school.
“Maybe it’s because I want to kiss girls,” I said, stepping over a patch of mud. “Ever think of that?”
“I have,” Abilene drunkenly confirmed, “and I know that’s not it, because there’s lots of girls at Cadbury who would kiss you. And still you never kiss anyone.”
Keep your kisses to yourself.
Eight years later, and I could still see Merlin’s dark eyes, hear his cold, disapproving voice. Could still remember the eerie feeling of portent that came over me when he predicted the death of my parents. If he believed people would suffer if I kissed someone, surely there was a good reason.
An important reason.
And besides, it was such a small thing to give up. It’s not like I had boys knocking down my door to kiss me anyway.
“I just don’t feel like kissing anyone,” I said firmly. “That’s the only reason there is.”
Abilene lifted her head from my shoulder and hiccupped into the chilly night air. Somewhere nearby a sheep bleated. “Just you wait, Greer Galloway. One of these days, you’re going to be just as wild as me.”
I guided her around a pile of sheep shit as she hiccupped again. “I doubt it.”
“You’re wrong. When you finally cut loose, you’re going to be the kinkiest slut at Cadbury.”
For some reason, this made me flush—and not with indignation, but with shame. How could she know the thoughts that flitted through my mind sometimes? The dreams where I woke up throbbing and clenching around nothing?
No, she couldn’t know. I hadn’t breathed a word of those things to anyone, and I never would.
Like my kisses, I would keep those things to myself. After all, I was happy like this. Happy to take care of Abilene and dream of college.
Happy to pretend that this was enough.
3
The Present
“And so if we turn back further than Geoffrey of Monmouth, back to the Annales Cambriae—that’s the Annals of Wales for those of you not up on your medieval Latin—we see the earliest mention of the Mordred figure, here called ‘Medraut.’”
The clack of keys on laptop keyboards echoes through the small classroom as the students furiously type out notes. The bulk of the undergrads here are actually pre-med or poli-sci, only taking my Arthurian Lit course to fill out their humanities credits, but that doesn’t stop them from striving for the highest scores. Georgetown isn’t cheap, after all, and a lot of the students here need to keep their grades up to retain scholarships and grants. And I empathize completely; only a couple months into this lecturing gig, I can still vividly remember the late nights and coffee-fueled mornings as I finished up my Master’s in Medieval Literature at Cambridge. Sometimes it’s still hard to believe I’m actually done, actually back in the States, actually doing a grown-up job with a nice leather briefcase and everything.
“Mordred is only mentioned as dying alongside King Arthur here,” I continue, moving from behind the podium over to the whiteboard, “and we are given no information as to his role in the battle, whether he was fighting against or alongside Arthur, whether he was Arthur’s son or nephew or simply just another warrior.”