Work Text:
Sometimes, Piper wonders if the anger is permanent.
There are days when it’s blinding, when it’s all she can feel. As hard as she tries, she can’t scrub it from her skin, and those days she thinks maybe it is built into her, like she was made to be nothing but furious. It’s like this: some people look at the world with rose-colored lenses; hers are tinted red. It’s always been that way.
She was born screaming and hasn’t stopped since.
They’re smug when they catch her in the act of pulling the fire alarm. Like they’ve won something. They don’t get it—she doesn’t expect them to, doesn’t try to make them understand—she wanted to get caught, wanted them to hear her , wanted to look them in the face while she did it.
That’s the point .
“Piper,” her counselor says, folds her hands and leans across the table in between them. Her nails are perfectly manicured and painted with a sunset—deep blue closest to the cuticles, then purple, pink, orange, yellow. There are little white dots like stars where the colors are the darkest. “You’re a very smart girl,”
She doesn’t need to be told this. She knows already; she is smart and stubborn and angry, and this is why people are afraid of her. This is also why she knows there is a but coming—it’s never just you’re a very smart girl—there’s some contradiction every time. She plays a guessing game of what will come next. Will it be A, you need to apply yourself? Or B, you just have to stay out of trouble? Maybe C—
“—but you’re holding yourself back.”
There it is. She keeps talking, but Piper doesn’t look up, her eyes trained on those sunset nails. They’re drumming quietly on the table, and it’s mesmerizing, like watching pieces of the sky dance.
“What is it that you want?” her counselor asks finally, half encouraging, half exasperated. “Your goals, your aspirations? What do you want to do with your life?”
It’s not that she hasn’t thought about it; she has, but she comes up with a different answer every time. There is always one thing that’s the same, though. “I want to get out of this shitty town,” Piper says, like it’s that simple. “Where did you get your nails done?”
They put her in summer school.
Oddly, she’s okay with this. Maybe it’s because of the recent development of discovering that most of her friends are liars and have been using her for some time now. Maybe it has more to do with the fact that lately, her house is almost always empty. Whichever way. This is something to focus on, and Piper does her hair and wings her eyeliner and makes it a point to convince herself that it will be good for her.
And then she sees Jana Tetrazzini sitting in the third row, applying her favorite Cherry Cola Lipsmackers, and all bets go out the fucking window.
Her hair is different—this is the first thing that Piper notices. They haven’t had a class together since high school started, and somewhere along the way Jana’s traded the dark locks that used to tumble down her back for highlighted curls that don’t quite make it to her shoulders. If they were friends, she would say it looks nice.
But they’re not . They’re anything but—rivals, competitors, enemies, take your pick. Piper harbors hatred for a lot of things, and Jana veers towards the top of that list.
“Look who it is,” she says, leaning on the desk in front of Jana’s. “What are you doing here, Tetrazzini?”
“Getting an education,” Jana responds vaguely. Her voice is cold. “What are you doing here?”
“Getting punished with your presence, apparently.” Piper smirks and turns on her heel; she’s perfected the art of waiting just long enough to watch Jana’s expression twist and leaving right before she can retort. It takes practice, but they have years of experience when it comes to tormenting each other.
She picks her seat carefully: diagonal from Jana, in the row in front of her. It’s close enough that she’ll be in Jana’s line of sight at all times, but Piper won’t have to look at her. Maybe it’s petty, but she’s taking all measures to quell the frustration that’s already pooling in her stomach.
Jana Tetrazzini will not ruin her summer.
Here’s what starts it all: by some cruel stroke of fate, they’re partnered up for a project in Algebra.
Piper thinks making a poster about quadratics is wildly unnecessary, and she tells their instructor this to his face. She’s not gentle in her words, she never has been, but he maintains his calm demeanor and tells her to go back to her seat.
(It turns out Mr. Heywood is as stubborn as she is, in his own quiet sort of way.)
It’s not easy, working with someone who makes her snap with as little effort as Jana does. She’s an open flame next to Piper’s already-primed explosive; they spit insults at each other and bicker about stupid, little things—who should solve which problem, whose handwriting is better for the poster, who’s remembering some useless event from middle school correctly.
“You’re impossible,” Jana says acidicly once, after an argument over which one of them messed up the scale of their graph escalates into a shouting match. “Working with you is like handling a time bomb .”
Piper very eloquently tells her to fuck herself.
Maybe the worst part about this is that Jana knows her, knows exactly what to say to get underneath her skin. Some days, Piper wishes they were strangers. It would be easier that way—then she’d care less, then they wouldn’t be so damn competitive, then she could just sit here and factor equations and tune out her voice.
Then maybe she wouldn’t hate it so much when she notices the way the light catches in Jana’s eyes.
(Oh, but, things are not always so difficult. Not always.
There are small moments here and there: Piper walks Jana through the steps to completing a square, they make fun of their History teacher together, they flick balls of crumpled-up paper at each other and laugh like they could be friends. In those moments it’s different, it’s easy. It works.
They work.)
“Wait, so x is 2 and 6?” Jana says, and Piper scans the problem.
“No, because 6 is extraneous.”
Her brow knits in confusion, pencil tapping against her lip as she frowns, and it’s weirdly endearing. Piper stops herself from smiling and instead sketches a hasty graph of the equation in the margin. “See, you have an x-6 term in the denominator,” she explains. “Since you can’t divide by zero, if you plug in 6, you’d get an answer that doesn’t exist. Which would give you an asymptote.” She points to the dotted vertical line in the picture.
“Oh.” Jana nods slowly and copies down the answer in her neat script. “Thanks,” she says after a moment, and then looks at Piper, suddenly earnest. “Seriously, thank you.”
Piper shrugs a little. “No problem; it’s just math homework,” she replies.
Jana bites her lip and tugs a hand through her dark hair, tousling her curls up just a little, and Piper fights the sudden urge to glance away. “But thanks for, y’know,” she tries, “for not making me feel stupid.”
Oh. “You’re not stupid, Jana.”
Jana gives her a long look, a mixture of surprise and relief and something else that Piper can’t quite place in her expression, and then huffs. “I know that, Hart. Shut up,” she says without any real venom in her voice, and shoves Piper’s shoulder lightly before going to turn her assignment in.
They both pretend she isn’t hiding a smile.
It’s strange, she thinks, because she and Jana have known each other all their lives, but really they haven’t known each other at all. There’s things she learns in those first three weeks of their summer session that she had never bothered to learn before. Like this:
Jana snorts a little when she laughs —really laughs, not in the haughty way she does when she beats Piper at one of their games—and has a dimple on her left cheek, but not on her right. She dots her i’s with stars. She loves oranges but hates orange flavored candy because it reminds her of the medicine she had to take when she got her appendix removed; the tiny scar on her nose is from when she was twelve and her cousin tried to give her a nose piercing with a sewing needle. And she’s an artist.
Jana doesn’t call herself that, but Piper sees it. She fills the corners of her homework pages with flowers, big sprawling petals in full bloom and vivid detail. She draws planets on her forearms, on her ankles, she turns stray marks into works of art, and sometimes she will leave her sketchbook open with the pages splayed out for Piper to glimpse the magic inside of it.
It’s breathtaking. Her fingers have this way of moving a pencil, fluid, like it’s not even touching the page. If Piper’s hands were made to break things, she learns, then Jana’s were made to create. Jana’s were made to make masterpieces.
Hating Jana should be easier than this. She’s done it all her life. When they’re together, though, Piper doesn’t feel angry. Somehow, Jana’s fire evens out her own, burns bright enough for both of them. When they’re together, Piper thinks maybe she could be something other than smoke and gunpowder, something more than fifteen years old and restless and furious. Like she could be something better .
Some days, they’re together even after school ends. Piper doesn’t want to go back to her empty house, and Jana is trying to avoid the constant criticism of her parents—she doesn’t say as much, but Piper puts the pieces together. It’s easier for them both to just exist here instead, sitting on the curb outside of the school building with the summer sun hot on their cheeks and their bare knees just barely brushing against each other.
They share songs and watch videos and laugh until their sides sting. Jana peels a clementine with careful fingers, hands her half. Her brown eyes have gone golden in the sunlight. Piper tries not to think about how stupidly intimate it feels in that moment, just to know that they’re tasting the same thing, that the music flowing through the tangled wires in between them is theirs alone to share.
The sky turns pink and they stay, asking each other questions back and forth.
“Cookie or cream? And what’s your biggest secret?” Jana asks two in a row, because she’s a cheater.
“I’m gay,” Piper says. It’s suddenly, alarmingly easy to say after so long of only half-knowing and never voicing it aloud. Later, she’ll spend hours wondering if she imagined Jana’s hopeful smile. For now, she just adds, “And also, cream.”
Next to her collection of doll heads, Piper keeps a collection of the things she learns about Jana. She likes cats more than dogs but she’s allergic to both. She watches horror films religiously but can’t stand the sight of blood. She hates snow. Loses things easily. Wants to get out of Swellview, go somewhere tropical. Florida, maybe.
Sometimes Piper will open that drawer and breathe these things in like they’re air. Sometimes she will splay them out around her and marvel in what a work of art Jana is.
Sometimes, she will wonder what it would be like to love her.
She finds Jana crying in the bathroom during lunch one Tuesday. There’s a soft sniffle and a broken sort of sob, and Piper knows it’s her because she can see her signature pink high top vans peeking out from under the stall door. She’s torn between leaving and calling out. She’s not a touchy-feely type of person, knows Jana isn’t either, but she can’t just go. In the end, Piper sort of lingers there in the doorway.
Jana emerges from the stall a few minutes later without a hair out of place, nothing to give her away except a thin rim of red around her eyes. Piper wonders fleetingly if she’s had practice doing this. If Jana notices her, she doesn’t say anything—not, at least, until she splashes water on her face and lifts her gaze to meet Piper’s in the mirror.
“What?” she says, in a snappy sort of tone that Piper hasn’t heard in weeks.
She has a long list of questions that starts and ends with are you okay? Except, there’s this flinty, volatile sort of look in Jana’s eyes, one that Piper recognizes, one she’s seen reflected in her own a million times before. So she doesn’t ask.
Instead, she says, “Let’s get out of here.”
“What?” The irritation in Jana’s voice shifts into confusion. She turns to actually look at Piper, drying her hands on her shorts. “And go where?”
Piper shrugs. “Wherever the fuck we want,” she replies lightly, fishing her car keys out of her pocket and dangling them in the air. “I’ve got these, remember?”
Jana looks at her for a long time, and for a moment Piper is sure she’s going to say no. She’s going to protest, argue that they’ll get in trouble for ditching, that Piper isn’t even old enough to legally drive. But then she doesn’t. She just crosses her arms and says, “Fine. But if we crash, my family is suing yours.”
The AC in her dad’s car is broken. The air that blows in through the open windows is dry and hot. Piper’s sweating, her t-shirt soaked and the hair at the nape of her neck sticky against her skin, and she doesn’t care.
It doesn’t matter, because the school is disappearing behind them, because her Spotify playlist of summer favorites is blasting through the radio, because Jana’s in the passenger seat and smiling like the fucking sun.
It’s so awfully cliche, like the montage of a cheesy coming-of-age Netflix original movie. The kind of scene Piper makes fun of. And yet here she is: throwing her head back and singing along to the music like nothing else matters, like she’s got the world laid out in front of her. Like she’s fifteen and restless and falling in love.
(And fuck, she thinks as she looks at Jana. Maybe she is.)
They end up at a little bubble tea shop close to the edge of town. Piper didn’t know it existed, but Jana has clearly been here before—she has her order ready when they walk in the door: winter melon with passionfruit seeds. Piper goes for a simple brown sugar milk tea. They take the table for two closest to a window, sipping tapioca pearls through their straws, and for a little while the conversation is light, easy, but stinted.
It’s not until Jana’s halfway done with her drink that she finally says it. “I came out to my parents last night.”
Piper isn’t sure how to respond to this. Maybe congratulations are in order, but then she thinks of Jana crying in the bathroom stall and wonders, hesitates. “How’d it go?” she asks carefully.
Jana shakes her head a little, the bridge of her nose crinkling up like she’s trying not to cry again. Instinctively, Piper reaches across the table and takes her hand, not giving herself the chance to second-guess the action. Jana lets her, doesn’t pull away.
“They’re not—they didn’t kick me out, or say they hate me, or anything.” Her voice hitches a little in her throat, and then she continues bitterly, “They just. They said I’m too young to know, and not to tell anyone. Not to act on it.”
The anger hits her hard and fast, almost makes her flinch with the impact of it. It’s painful in its familiarity and it feels foreign under her skin. Piper hasn’t brimmed with fury like this in a long time, not since the early days of summer school, but suddenly she feels like someone has doused her in gasoline and lit a match, like she’s been shoved to the verge of imploding.
And maybe she’d blow. Except, oh, she’s still holding Jana’s hand. She’s still clutching Jana’s long, delicate fingers—the ones of an artist—and if there is one thing that Piper refuses to let get caught in her blast radius, it is Jana.
So she swallows the fire, lets it burn its way down her throat. “I’m so sorry,” she says, and it’s quiet, a ghost of the explosion in her chest. Jana’s gaze dips away. Piper fights the urge to reach over the table and cup her cheek, and instead, she says, “Hey. They’re wrong, okay? You have nothing to be ashamed of.”
Jana looks at her like she doesn’t quite believe her, so Piper keeps going. “I’ve never known you to hide from anything. You don’t have to hide this. You can kiss girls and boys and whoever you want; it doesn’t change you—doesn’t make you any less than the amazing, badass person that you are. You’re Jana fucking Tetrazzini,” and she is suddenly and inexplicably breathless, “and you’re a masterpiece.”
Then Jana smiles just a little, squeezes Piper’s hand with a breathy sort of laugh. “Thank you,” she says, soft and earnest, the same way she was weeks ago on that day when Piper taught her about asymptotes. Her brown eyes glitter in a mixture of unshed tears and the sunlight spilling in from the window. “I think I needed that.”
(And inevitably, they’ll go back to talking and joking and ribbing each other, something warm in between them now. And Jana will be okay.
Piper’s there to make sure of it.)
After school the next day, Jana thrusts a rolled-up paper into Piper’s hands just before she leaves. Piper doesn’t want to wait to see it, unfurls it right there to find her own face staring back at her.
Jana has sketched a portrait of her.
In the picture, her head is tilted just barely to the side, her hair curled over one shoulder and her expression caught somewhere in between challenging and soulful. It hits her abruptly—this is how Jana sees her, not as angry and troublesome and explosive, but like this . As something to be created all over again in pencil and paper.
There’s a blue post-it note attached to it, words in Jana’s neat print. Piper thinks her heart stops beating. I know art when I see it, it reads. And you, Piper Hart, are the real masterpiece.
(Sometimes, Piper will stare at that drawing and imagine Jana’s hands bringing it into existence. She’ll close her eyes and picture her hovering over the page, her fingers tracing over Piper’s lashes, her cheekbones, the curve of her mouth—
And then she’ll bury her face in her pillow and struggle endlessly to catch her breath.)
“Henry,” she says one day, during their Star Wars marathon, “how do you know when you’re in love with someone?”
Henry chokes on his bright blue soda, coughs and swipes the back of his hand across his mouth. “What?”
Piper gets it—the question is sudden and wildly out of character for her, but it’s been balancing on the tip of her tongue for what seems like forever now. She’s been burning quietly for far too long; she has to know. She thinks Henry might understand. Not because he’s had a million girlfriends—she doesn’t care about that—but because of the way he is around Charlotte and Jasper. Piper has watched the three of them be together for her whole life, knows the way they are with each other, all open palms and knowing looks and shared laughter. They don’t say it, not out loud—but they don’t have to. It hangs in the air when they’re with each other, clear and tangible and permanent.
(She wants something like that; wants to build it with Jana.)
Henry reaches for the remote and pauses the movie. “Piper,” he says, teasing, a grin spreading across his face, “you’re into someone?”
“No, I’m asking because I’m trying to write a romance novel,” Piper replies with sarcasm dripping from her voice and heat crawling into her cheeks. Henry huffs and rolls his eyes. “Shut up and answer the question, dork.”
He shrugs a little. “I think it’s different for everyone,” he says vaguely, and then his expression goes soft. “I guess—it’s like this, right? You sort of see them everywhere. You want to know everything about them, even the stupid little details that they don’t think you’ll care about. You feel like as long as you’re with them the whole world could end and you’d be okay. You’re the best version of yourself when you’re around them.”
Piper doesn’t know how she was expecting him to respond, but it wasn’t like that. The words hit her hard, curl in her stomach as she plays them back and thinks about how she feels when she’s with Jana. Like she doesn’t have to be so angry, burn so bright. Like she doesn’t have to scream anymore, because someone is already listening.
Henry’s staring at her now, so Piper looks up and says, “Is that how you feel with Charlotte and Jasper?”
“Hey, don’t change the subject.” There’s a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth, which is enough of an answer. “So who is it? The person you think you’re in love with?”
Piper hesitates. It feels strange to say it aloud, this secret that she’s kept close against her chest for weeks, but then, it’s Henry . “Jana,” she replies finally.
“ Tetrazzini?” His mouth all but falls open. “You hate her.”
“I don’t hate her . We’re friends now. It’s called growing up, Henry.”
He snorts a laugh. “Clearly you’re more than just friends,” he taunts, eyes glinting, and she shoves his shoulder roughly. There’s this warmth in her stomach, though. He laughs. “Okay, listen, Charlotte and Jasper and I are going to the Swellview Summer Market for the Fourth of July Fair next week. You should come with us. Invite Jana. It’ll be fun.”
She considers this. The fireworks and the food and the stupid couples doing stupid, coupley things that she doesn’t care about—except when she thinks about doing them with Jana. It could be nice. Could be perfect. “Okay,” she says finally. “Yeah, I think I will.”
He beams. “Sweet. So, I can unpause the movie now, right? This is the best part.”
Piper spends a week trying to build up the nerve to ask Jana to the fair. She’s not afraid of anything, never has been, but she’s starting to learn that when it comes to Jana, everything she knows about herself goes out the fucking window. She spends a week with the words lodged in the back of her throat.
Finally, on Thursday, they’re packing their stuff away when Jana shoves a binder in her backpack and says, “Are you doing anything for the Fourth?”
It’s conversational, a question for the sake of asking, Piper can tell by her tone—but it’s still an opening. “Actually, yeah,” she replies, fighting hard to keep her voice neutral. As if she’s not about to absolutely burst inside. “My brother and some of his friends are going to the Summer Market Fair, do you wanna come with?”
She says it like she’s just asking Jana to hang out, like they’re just going as friends and nothing else. But fuck it—baby steps.
“Yeah,” Jana says, and grins. “That sounds awesome.”
They’re meeting each other there.
In the car, Piper fusses over everything: the folds of her denim skirt, the wing of her eyeliner, the red, white, and blue flowers that Henry has weaved into her hair. Charlotte looks at her from the front seat and tells her she looks amazing a million times, looking stunning herself with her lips a bold shade of red and white stars scattered across her cheeks. It does little to quell the anxiety building in her stomach.
Henry and Jasper keep giving her this look.
When they arrive, the park is decked out for the occasion: red, white, and blue streamers strung between the lampposts, fairy lights wrapped around the trees. There’s a buzz in the air, the kind that feels like summer and excitement and the promise of something wonderful, and really, the whole scene is gorgeous.
Then Piper’s eyes land on Jana, and her vision tunnels.
She’s wearing this short navy sundress, a row of white buttons trailing from the collar to her waist, and Piper’s mouth feels suddenly dry. She can’t help but think that it’s so fucking unfair of Jana to come looking like that. Like she knows exactly how to make Piper’s world stop in its tracks.
Henry’s hand lands on the small of her back, and he gives her a gentle shove. “Make good choices,” he says, half-laughing. Piper doesn’t even take the time to glare at him.
“Hey,” she says when she and Jana are standing in front of each other, and then she’s breathless all over again. There’s a little red heart painted underneath Jana’s eye that she can’t tear her gaze away from.
“Hi,” Jana beams, giggles a little. “You look so cute .”
“You’re one to talk,” Piper says swiftly, heart thudding, and then Jana slips her hand into Piper’s like it’s nothing and tugs her towards the ring toss booth.
“C’mon,” she grins, glowing in the golden light that’s spilling over the scene, and Piper remembers the burning question she’d asked Henry a week ago and thinks, oh. This is it.
This is how you know.
The last rays of sunlight are disappearing from the sky when they settle down for the fireworks. Piper spreads a blanket patterned in yellow flowers over the grass, glad she brought her own—somewhere through the crowd of people she can see her brother and his best friends curled against one another on theirs. Invariably.
Jana’s tongue is still blue from the cotton candy, and she hasn’t stopped smiling the whole night. She leans back on her hands. Her thigh presses against Piper’s, impossibly warm, making the heat of the summer night that much more vivid. “I don’t give a shit about patriotism, but fireworks ,” she says, and the light of excitement behind her eyes is the same one she gets when she’s drawing or telling a joke, “fireworks are the best.”
Piper bites her lip and tastes the cherry popsicle that they’d shared still lingering there. The thrumming in her chest has accelerated; while the crowd waits for the show to start, she’s waiting for something else.
“Thanks for inviting me out here tonight,” Jana says suddenly, earnest all over again. Her voice has gone soft. “I’ve had a really great time.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” Piper breathes. Their fingers are threaded together, and Piper’s thumb brushes against Jana’s wrist and finds her pulse, beating strong and fast under her skin. Suddenly she can’t wait any longer. “Jana,” she says, “can I tell you something?”
“Anything you want.”
Somewhere above them, a million miles away, the first firework goes off. The blast rings in her ears, douses the sky in sparks. She watches their reflection in Jana’s eyes.
“Jana,” she says, “I really want to kiss you.”
Then they move at the same time, crash into each other. Jana’s lips meet hers, hot and sharp, and they’re kissing while the rockets fire above them, while the world around them cheers. Jana pulls back suddenly. Her eyes are blazing, matching the inferno in Piper’s chest.
“Was that okay?” she asks, almost too soft to hear underneath all the noise.
Piper nods. “Let’s try again.”
And then Jana’s hands come up to cup her jawline, rest on her waist, and it’s easy and it’s right because it’s Jana. She knows Jana, knows that she’s afraid of wasps and that her middle name is Elena and that she’s cried every time she’s watched Titanic and that she’s here, now, and that’s enough. Their lips slot together like they were made just for this.
Maybe they were, Piper thinks. Because, god, she’s had a time bomb inside of her ribcage before, knows what explosions feel like, but she’s never been caught in one like this. This—them—they’re something different. Something better. They’re fifteen and restless and kissing each other under the summer sky.
They’re flint and gunpowder, and the two of them can make their own fireworks.