Archive of Our Own

Dear whoever, 

My name is Janis. I’m 10 and I live in Hawaii. Not the fake tourist part, the real part. The part with rusty trucks and aunties who could beat God in a fight and beaches you don’t tell tourists about because they’ll ruin them with selfie sticks and loud opinions. 

You probably think we live in grass huts and eat pineapples like that one stupid cartoon where everyone wears a lei and says aloha every four seconds. We don’t. I eat Egos. Egho? Whatever. Waffles from the freezer. 

Also, I punched a boy in the face today because he said my drawing was scary. Which it was. On purpose. It had blood and tentacles and an eyeball that was screaming. He cried. I didn’t.

Do you like art? I like drawing sharks with big teeth. I also like frogs. And girls. (Don’t tell the teacher I said that part. She already pulled my mom aside last week and used the word concurning)

Okay bye,
Janis ‘Imi’ike

—

The letter smelled like coconut lip balm and rebellion. Regina read it under the table at lunch, eyebrows knitting so hard she was in danger of spraining a personality trait.

“Who sends a letter like this?” she muttered, staring at the frog with boobs sketched in the corner. It had a speech bubble that said, kiss me and perish, mortal.

Gretchen leaned over, chewing a Lunchable. “Did your pen pal finally write back?”

Regina didn't answer. She was too busy rereading the line I punched a boy in the face today like it was the most romantic sentence she’d ever seen.

—

Dear Janis (if that’s even your real name),

My name is Regina George. I live in Evanston. It’s cold here and people are boring and everything smells like wet wool.

I have never punched a boy in the face, but I have made one cry just by telling him his shoelaces were ugly. So basically, I understand violence.

I do like art. I only draw horses. Sometimes unicorns. That’s because horses are majestic and dramatic, and you can’t tell me otherwise. I bet your shark drawings are cool. I’d like to see one, unless it tries to eat me. In that case, I’ll sue.

Also, what does “I like girls” mean? Like… you want to kiss them? Or you want to be one of those girls who screams when she sees her friend in the hallway and jumps up and down? Both?

Write back immediately,
Regina

P.S. You spelled “Eggos” wrong. I’m judging you, but kindly. Maybe.

—

Janis read that last line while hanging upside down from her bunk bed, red marker in her mouth and a Garfield Band-Aid on her eyebrow.

“Regina George,” she whispered, the name rolling off her tongue like the beginning of a dare she fully intended to follow through on.

The girl had glitter ink, an emotional kill count, and the audacity to correct her waffle spelling.

Janis was absolutely going to be her problem for the next forever.

While most pen pals fizzled out after the obligatory two letters (one intro, one thank-you-for-the-glitter-sticker), Janis and Regina kept writing.

Through school projects and snack drama. Through crushes and rage and puberty and questionable music choices. Through braces, breakdowns, and one particularly cursed summer when Janis mailed Regina a dehydrated pufferfish with a tiny crown glued to its head (”I named him Gerald. Put him on your desk. Let him judge you.” ).

They wrote when they were happy. They wrote when they were sad. They wrote when they didn’t know what else to do. Their letters were time capsules, battle cries, love notes, curses, confessions.

What started as a school project turned into something ridiculous. Something electric. Something neither of them could name yet.

By the time they were twelve, the letters had lost most of their fluff. The horse doodles had been retired, the glitter pens had dried up or exploded in pencil cases. The handwriting, once bubbly and hopeful, had devolved into a glorious scrawl of chaotic loops, ink blotches, and occasional death threats in parentheses. 

The margins were jungles overflowing with scratched-out thoughts, aggressive underlines, and deeply cursed side notes like “don’t read this part unless you’re in a good mood or currently eating cheese.”

Janis wrote on notebook paper, sometimes stained with marker or what might’ve been hot sauce. One had a coffee ring shaped like Satan’s thumbprint and smelled vaguely of Sharpie and mangoes. Sometimes she included tiny comics starring murderous frogs and obscenities and badly drawn cartoons of Jesus breakdancing.

Regina wrote on expensive ivory stationery with her initials embossed in gold, but by the time she mailed it, it was always crumpled, the corners worn from being tucked under her pillow, written at night during peak honesty hour.

—

Dear Regina,

Do you remember when I said I like girls? I didn’t really know what that meant then. Like, yeah I thought the girl from the swim team looked like an angry angel and I desperately wanted her to throw me into the deep end. I figured everyone felt that way. I figured we were all living in a universal state of girl-induced chaos and neck-stepping fantasies.

Apparently, that’s just me and like seven very specific Tumblr users with screen names like sapphicdoombrat69 and frogs4feminism who reblog quotes from Sappho and post blurry photos of girls in thrifted cardigans.

I looked it up. The word. Lesbian.

Isn’t that the worst sounding word? It sounds like a disease. Like, “Sorry ma’am, you have… lesbian.” Cue the dramatic gasp. Cue the fainting. Cue the immediate prescription of emotional processing and questionable haircuts. But also… it fits. Like pants that actually have pockets. Like yes. This is where I’ve been trying to put all this damn feeling. Right here. Lesbian.

I haven’t told anyone else. Just you. You’re the only person who doesn’t make me feel like I’m weird or broken or fake. I don’t know why. Maybe because you’re equally weird and loud. Or maybe it’s because I’ve been writing you letters so long that my heart doesn’t know how to speak its truth to anyone else.

But you get it. I think.

Anyway. If this freaks you out, you can just say your mailman lost my letter and I’ll pretend I believe you.

Your favorite gay person (probably),
Janis

—

Dear Janis,

First of all, I already knew. You once drew a vampire ballerina and wrote “devour me” under it. That’s not straight behavior. That’s lesbian behavior with extra sauce. If you had not come out to me, I was going to have to stage an intervention and/or make a PowerPoint.

Second, I’m glad you told me. I don’t think it sounds like a disease. I think it sounds like you. Thank you for telling me.

If anyone tries to make you feel bad about it, I will board a plane, fly across the Pacific, hunt them down in my finest pink leather jacket, and slap them with a wet pool noodle until they cry.

Don’t test me. I have the pool noodle.

Also: your mailman is hot garbage. He always creases your envelopes like they’re trash. Rude. Unforgivable. I hope he steps on a Lego.

Talk soon.
Always talk soon.

Love,
R

When Regina was thirteen, she sent a letter that smelled like vanilla and lies.

It arrived two weeks late, and by that point, Janis had already chewed through two pen caps and drawn six increasingly unhinged comics of her mailman being eaten by a sentient mailbox.

Inside was a single sentence and a glitter heart sticker (unironically used, Regina was clearly spiraling).

I have a boyfriend now. His name is Kyle.

Janis stared at the page like it had slapped her across the face with a fish. She reread it twenty-seven times and then dramatically fell off her bed. Her mother walked past the door, peeked in, and sighed.

“Your ancestors are watching you act dumb,” she said. “Do better.”

The follow-up letter came five days later, written in Sharpie and smeared in some kind of caramel. Maybe tears. Maybe a melted Twix.

Dear Janis,

Okay wait. Don’t die. I repeat: do not hurl yourself into the sea, launch yourself off a cliff, or set fire to your emotionally charged shoebox full of our letters in a blaze of sapphic fury.

It’s not like that. Let me explain, before your gay little heart does a backflip into a volcano.

My friends dared me and I didn’t want them to say I was weird so I said yes. To being his girlfriend. Even though his eyebrows look like two caterpillars fighting for dominance.

I don’t like him like that. I barely like him at all. He asked if I wanted to kiss and I told him I had asthma and couldn’t handle the proximity of other people’s faces. Which I don’t, by the way. But it was that or "Sorry, I’m too busy having a crisis about how kissing you would be like pressing my mouth to a tube of expired mayonnaise." I panicked again. It’s kind of my thing lately.

And here’s the part I’m afraid to say but saying anyway: I just didn’t want you to think I was some boy-obsessed mall zombie who doesn’t care that you trusted me and told me the most important thing ever. Because I do.

I care. A lot.

You trusted me with you, and the idea of screwing that up is making me consider biting a wall. I’m trying to figure out how to be a person in a world that keeps yelling about what kind of girl I’m supposed to be.

Please don’t hate me.

Still your girl (unless that makes things worse),
Regina

At fourteen, Janis kissed a girl named Luna in the art room. Luna tasted like cinnamon gum and impulsive decisions. She was the kind of girl who wore mesh over tank tops and had stickers of bats on her phone case, and Janis, already a threat to emotional stability, went entirely feral by contact.

She sent a letter that night, words exploding out of her like fireworks too close to the ground.

Dear Reg,

I KISSED A GIRL

LIKE. ACTUALLY. WITH MY MOUTH. ON HER MOUTH. THERE WAS LIP CONTACT.

I think I died. My brain turned off and my hands forgot how to be hands and tried to become interpretive jazz instruments, and my soul? My soul packed a bag, climbed into a glittery rocket ship, and whispered “wow, we’re REALLY gay” as it launched into the upper atmosphere screaming the lyrics to a Hayley Kiyoko song.

It was soft. And kind of messy. And Regina, she smiled after, which made me want to jump into the ocean and never come back because I felt things. My body just… folded. My knees said, “Nope. You’re on your own.” I had to grip a desk to remain tethered to this earth. I think I briefly forgot the alphabet.

Regina.

REGINA.

What the hell am I supposed to do with this now? Am I supposed to just live like this? Go back to algebra class like I didn’t just get legally converted into a full-time homosexual?

You told me to always tell you everything, and I’m being a responsible disaster and doing that, okay? This. All of it.

Also, Luna has cool eyeliner and a tongue piercing. I think she could ruin my life.

Wish you were here to yell at me about my taste in girls. Yell soon. I need grounding. I need screaming. I need you.

Love (and probably in a new, gayer way than ever before),
Janis

—

Dear Janis,

Okay. First of all, I’m fine. Just sitting on my bed. Absolutely fine. Smiling like an idiot into a pillow I may or may not have just screamed into. So, like, really fine. The kind of fine that involves aggressive flailing and rereading your letter thirteen times.

I’m happy for you. No, like. Really happy for you.

Not the fake “aww, that’s cute” happy where people want to die a little. I mean the real kind. The “I am so proud and completely unhinged with joy that I want to run laps around the neighborhood screaming about how my friend kissed a girl and felt the divine” kind of happy.

It sounds… electric. And like something you’ll think about forever. And I’m jealous in the “wish I was there to see your face” kind of way, not the weird way. I think.

Tell me everything. What did you feel? Did your hands do the awkward hover, panic, commit routine or did you black out? What did she do with her hands? Are you okay? Are you still floating or have you descended from gay orbit?

I’m so excited for you. I’m so emotionally compromised I may never recover.

Yours in emotional damage and righteous envy,
Regina

By sixteen, their letters had evolved into care packages and cursed surprises and Regina had a shoebox in the back of her closet labeled Ugly Socks. Inside was a museum of Janis’ nonsense.

One letter written entirely on the back of a Subway napkin. Four bracelets, all chaotic in color and tension. Three tiny bottles of sand labeled LEFT SIDE OF THE BEACH and THE OTHER LEFT and THE GAYEST SPOT I COULD FIND. A sketch of Medusa crying in a leather jacket. Two seashells, one cracked, one whole. One dried flower taped to a note that just said: This made me think of you. It’s aggressive and beautiful and kind of a bitch.

She kept everything. Even the envelope Janis licked shut and wrote SMELL THIS on.

—

Dear Janis,

I think I might be like you.

Not in the “cool and unhinged” way. In the… lesbian way. (That word that word still sounds like a sneeze with an attitude. Like a cough that also judges your outfit. But whatever. We move.)

A boy kissed me at a party. Aaron. Everyone thinks he’s hot. Like, cover-of-a-teen-magazine hot. Like, he’s got the jawline of a Greek statue and the emotional depth of a wet napkin, and somehow, that’s a selling point.

He leaned in. I panicked and let it happen, and I thought, maybe this is it. Maybe I’ll finally get it. Maybe all the weird buzzing static in my brain will shut up and I’ll feel normal. Maybe he’ll kiss me and I’ll feel fireworks or thunder or even just something. 

I felt absolutely nothing. Like. Less than nothing. Like maybe I was dying.

I smiled, said thank you (???) and went inside and threw up in the guest bathroom, and not in the drunk way. Because my body was like, “hey bestie, we don’t want this.”

I don’t know what this means. I don’t know how to make the thoughts sit still long enough to pin them down. I’m scared to say it out loud, but I wanted you to know because you always make all the scary things feel like just… things.

Also: my mom would LOVE this. And by love, I mean she’d throw a rainbow brunch and probably make a slideshow presentation called “Being Gay is Slay: A Mother’s Guide to Sapphic Excellence.” She’s woke in all the most embarrassing ways. She once made us watch The L Word as a “learning experience” and cried when the dog died. There wasn’t a dog, Janis. I don’t even know what she was watching.

I wish you were here. I wish I could say all this to your face instead of a piece of paper.

Love (probably in a very gay and very terrified way),
Regina

—

Janis read that letter in her garage at midnight. The geckos on the ceiling looked judgmental. Her heart didn’t just beat, it moshed. It stage-dived off her ribs. It started chanting SHE LOVES GIRLS, SHE LOVES GIRLS in the voice of an aggressively lesbian punk band.

Regina George, destroyer of my sleep schedule,

First of all: I love you. 

Not in the marry me and file taxes way (unless???), but in the I’m proud of you for saying that even though it’s scary as hell way.

I get it. Coming out is like jumping off a cliff while screaming "I THINK I LIKE TITS" and hoping the parachute opens before you hit the ground and explode into gay confetti. It’s the scariest, weirdest, most gloriously chaotic thing I’ve ever done, and guess what?

Still here. Still gay. Still annoying. I survived and you will too, because you’re Regina fucking George, and if anyone can bulldoze their way through emotional panic, it’s you.

You don’t have to figure it all out right now. You don’t even need to say the word if it makes your mouth feel like it’s trying to swallow a porcupine. But if you’re wondering if it’s real, if it’s you, maybe kiss a girl. Just… see what happens. See if the world tilts the way mine did. See if your knees betray you.

I wish I could be there. For all of it. For you. I wish I could throw glitter at you and scream affirmations and hit Aaron with a car (lightly. lovingly).

P.S. Your mom is a fever dream and an icon and I love her. Tell her I said hi. But also: hide this letter from her.

Gayly, gloriously yours,
Janis

—

Dear Janis,

You told me to kiss a girl, which is incredibly rude of you considering the only one I really want to kiss lives thousands of miles away, somewhere humid and feral and salt-crusted, and she sends me seashells like she’s trying to summon me through ocean debris and longing. She once drew me as a vampire queen with fangs and thigh-high boots and wrote, “worship is mandatory,” under it in dripping red marker. I think about that way more often than I should.

So yeah.

That kind of complicates things. I can’t exactly follow your very calm and casual advice to “just kiss a girl” when the only girl I want to kiss is you.

Don’t make it weird. Or do. You always do anyway. It’s basically your love language.

Yours (kind of always, definitely maybe, absolutely in a dangerously gay way),
Regina

—

Regina, you demon,

You can't just drop that kind of soul-shattering gay confession into a letter like it’s a fun little footnote and expect me not to unravel like a piece of cheap tinsel at the bottom of a Christmas clearance bin. 

Do you want me to forge a passport and hide in a crate of pineapples bound for the mainland like a gay smuggled fruit? Because I am this close, Regina. THIS. I swear on every frog I’ve ever drawn in lingerie. I am gay-yearning-on-a-jetway close. I am write-a-poem-on-my-armrest-during-takeoff levels of unhinged.

The only thing stopping me is the fact that I have no idea what you look like other than that one photo you sent when we were ten. You were aggressively sparkly and had a face like you just told someone off in cursive. For all I know, you now have a handlebar mustache and a tattoo of Jeff Goldblum riding a velociraptor on your neck. I wouldn’t even be mad. I would salute you. I would respect the hell out of it. I would bow. I would ask the tattoo for guidance.

Sometimes I think we should just cave and do the normal thing. Add each other on social media. Send memes. Start video calling. FaceTime me at 2 am while you eat Hot Cheetos and tell me about how your math teacher smells like cigarettes.

But then I look at your letters.

Your actual handwriting, Regina, and I don’t know. I don’t want normal. There’s just something about it. Something about ripping open an envelope and seeing your thoughts on paper like they’ve been traveling through time and space just for me.

I like the waiting. I like the wondering. 

I like you.

(Also: if you send me an updated photo, I’ll send one too. Fair is fair. But prepare yourself. I look like someone who got cursed by a surfboard and then joined a punk band.)

Sprinting toward the nearest airport, emotionally and maybe physically,
Janis

—

Dear Janis,

I don’t know how you manage to be both deeply threatening and heart-melting in one sentence. Like a shark that gives you a valentine and then bites your ankle out of affection. I’m obsessed with you. It’s disgusting. Don’t stop.

I get what you mean. About the letters. About the weird ache in your chest when you see someone type “wyd” instead of bleeding ink across a page.

Everyone else talks to me in emoji bursts and streaks on Snapchat, like that’s supposed to mean something. It’s all so instant and somehow, still so… flat. You send me words that feel like they’ve been living in your ribs and had to fight their way out just to reach me.

That’s what makes it real. You feel real.

Also, I’m not sending a new photo unless you promise not to fall in love with me immediately. Just kidding. I hope you do. I look amazing. My cheekbones could commit crimes. My eyeliner is so sharp I’m not allowed near bounce houses.

I want to see your cursed surf punk face.

P.S. If you ever show up at my door, I will scream. And then maybe kiss you. Then scream again, but softer.

Counting the miles,
R

Dear Janis,

Can we talk about college?

I know, I know. Snooze. But the adults keep asking and I feel like I’m supposed to have a spreadsheet and a five-year plan and a LinkedIn profile. Instead, I have exactly zero plans and an alarming number of existential crises.

I might want to be a lawyer. But also… maybe something in fashion. Or maybe a fashionable lawyer who cross-examines people in heels and makes the jury weep from envy.

I don’t know if I want to be feared or adored or both. Is that normal? Is it normal to want to break the system while also being the hottest person in the room?

Also, for a friend, how are the programs at the University of Hawaii? Like, hypothetically. In case someone wanted to go there. And not because she’s obsessed with the idea of being closer to a certain feral, emotionally complicated lesbian who sends sand in tiny bottles and once mailed a pufferfish named Gerald. Totally unrelated. Haha. 

(Unless???)

Say you’d write to me there. Or visit. Or both.

Yours in full existential panic,
Regina

—

Regina George,

You’re asking ME if you’re normal?

Babe, I’m currently sitting on the roof, writing a letter to a (presumably) hot maybe-gay girl I haven’t seen past age 10 while eating Spam straight out of the can with a fork I found in the laundry. I’m also listening to My Heart Hurts But in a Gay Way Vol. 7, which includes four different songs about yearning and exactly one about frog love. So no. We’re not normal. We are the blueprint. We are tragic icons.

I’ve been thinking about college too. About maybe doing art or music. But I don’t know if I want to study it, y'know? Like, sit in a room and have some dude named Chad explaining how jazz works until I claw my own ears off and I never want to hear a trumpet again.

What if I just… do it? Paint and scream and play shows at weird dive bars and send you bootleg T-shirts with terrible designs?

The University of Hawaii is solid. I toured the campus last year. It’s warm and green and smells like plumeria and ambition. They have both law and fashion design. Not that I was checking. Not that I’m laying out tarot cards about you moving here. Not that I’ve named three succulents after you. One of them’s dying. I think it’s because it misses you.

I’ve also thought about leaving. Going to the mainland. Trying something new. Big cities. New weather. Real autumn.

But then I remember that this is my home, and what it feels like to float in the ocean and have the auntie at the bakery call me “my girl” and give me an extra malasada because she says I have “gay eyes.” 

It scares me. I don’t want to lose who I am just to chase someone I might not even be. And I know deep in my bones, in my stubborn-ass heart, I’m not done here.

But if you were here… I don’t know. It wouldn’t feel like leaving so much as arriving.

Think about it.

No pressure. (Lies. There is so much pressure. I’m praying to my gay ancestors.)

Sincerely yours and always suspicious,
Janis

—

Dear Janis,

Okay.

I Googled the University of Hawaii for real. For myself. (Shocking. I know. Alert the press.)

I looked at the programs. I looked at the dorms. The view from the hill near the library where you said you once ate an entire spam musubi and cried about a frog you accidentally stepped on. I looked at the sunsets and pictured you running through them barefoot, skin sun-warmed and covered in paint like you got into a fistfight with a rainbow and kind of liked it. I imagined you laughing with your mouth wide open and your eyes squinting like you’re challenging the sun to a duel.

I imagined being there. With you. Watching the world turn gold and stupid around us.

I don’t know where I’m going yet, but I want to go somewhere that feels like something. That makes my heart beat faster for reasons other than dread.

You feel like something. Always have.

(That sounded disgustingly earnest. Pretend I said it while flipping my hair and drinking iced coffee like I’m about to murder my ex-boyfriend on the courthouse steps.)

Write back soon. Tell me if you’d still want me around if I was homesick and annoying and showed up with too many bags and not enough chill.

Yours in terrifying possibility,
R

—

Janis didn’t write back right away.

She booked a tattoo appointment instead.

Just a small one on her ribs. The outline of a little envelope to remind her of everything that had ever mattered.

She’d write back tomorrow. Tonight, she was too full of hope to sit still.

Janis,

I kissed a girl. Like. Actually kissed her. In real life. With lips. On her face.

Her name was Chloe. She goes to a different school. She’s cool, and she has a septum ring and opinions about ethically sourced coffee. She asked me if I wanted to make out at a party and I panicked and said yes because my brain short-circuited and I think I blacked out for the first three seconds. Like, actual memory gap. The lights were on but my gay soul had left the building.

It was… good. Soft. Nice. Real. And I didn’t throw up in the bathroom after, so we’re already doing better than Aaron. Tremendous growth. Ten out of ten. No notes.

I’ve been agonizing about telling you because even though we’ve never put a label on this, whatever the hell this is, I still feel like I cheated. Like I stole something that was supposed to be yours and handed it to someone who doesn’t even know the difference between your frogs and your sharks, and Janis… that’s criminal.

And that’s insane. I know. We’ve never kissed. We’ve never even met in person. But there’s something about you and about us that feels like it has rules even though we never wrote them down.

I just needed you to know because hiding it felt worse. Oh yeah, by the way, I’m definitely a lesbian. Like, aggressively. Like I walked out of that kiss and wanted to set fire to the nearest Boy Smell™ just to celebrate.

I told my mom. She cried and then bought me a cake that said “WELCOME TO THE GAY AGENDA” in rainbow frosting. She’s the worst. I love her.

Please don’t hate me. Please still write back. Please don’t fold this into an origami swan and burn it while cursing my name under a blood moon.

Still yours (maybe with extra anxiety sprinkles),
Regina

—

Regina, Destroyer of My Sanity,

First of all, I’m SO proud of you. So proud I could scream. So proud I DID scream. Mama threw a slipper at me and told me to “go be gay more quietly.” I tried. I failed. The slipper was deserved.

Second of all, I hate this. Not because you kissed someone. Not because you’re figuring things out. Because I wasn’t there. Because she got to have you, even for a second, when I’ve been writing you into my bones for almost a decade. She got a moment I’ve been dreaming about so hard it’s practically carved into the lining of my skull.

But I don’t blame you.

We never made this official. We’ve never even been in the same time zone, let alone the same room. So I get it. You are absolutely allowed to kiss whoever you want, to live, to explore, to find out what makes your heart skip and your knees turn to soup.

And I’m glad it was good. You deserve good. You deserve smiles and softness and gay cakes and hands that don’t hesitate.

But just so you know: I have every intention of being the last girl you ever kiss, and the first girl who makes you forget every one that came before. I don’t care if I have to kiss you through a blizzard or a sandstorm or on a plane that’s actively crashing, we are doing this.

So keep figuring things out, but don’t think for a second I’m not coming for you.

P.S. I don’t need to kiss you to know how it’ll feel. I already feel it every time you write me back.

In awe. In chaos. In gay, furious love,
Janis

Dear Regina “Why-Are-You-Like-This” George,

SPILL.

You CANNOT just say “I’ve decided what I want to do with my life,” and then immediately go radio silent like you’re some kind of tortured, mysterious poet on a mountaintop with no cell reception.

I am unwell. I am spiraling. I am a hollowed-out gay husk lying on the stained floor of my garage, surrounded by half-finished paintings and angry ukulele chords and no less than three vials of sand with names like “THE LEFT SIDE OF THE GAYEST ROCK” and “REGINA IF YOU DON’T WRITE ME BACK I’M EATING THIS.”

Tell me. Tell me what it is. Now. Is it law school? Are you disappearing into the Paris underground fashion scene to be mentored by a coven of chain-smoking lesbians named Margaux and Simone who say things like “love is a silk wound, darling”? Are you shaving your head and becoming an interpretive dancer in a yurt with no plumbing?

Because listen, if you don’t tell me in the next five business seconds, I will commit a felony. I can’t take it anymore. I will forge a passport. I will climb into a FedEx box marked TROPICAL FRUIT so I can be delivered directly to your front porch.

If you tell me, I will reward you handsomely. I’m talking a very tasteful nude. With lighting and props. Maybe even strategic seaweed placement. You don’t even know what you’re missing. I’ve been doing squats. I am terrifyingly powerful.

This is emotional blackmail and I have no shame. Tell me your secrets or suffer.

Sincerely deprived and semi-feral,
Janis

—

Janis, my feral little art goblin,

First of all, your bribery game is appallingly effective. And disgusting. Second, you can’t just dangle nudes in front of me and expect me to think straight (ha). You are evil. I adore you. (Though, for the record, yes, I would absolutely love that. Please proceed immediately.)

But no. You have to be patient. Not because I want to torment you (okay, maybe a little). Not because I don’t want to tell you. I do. I want to scream it into your mouth. So badly it’s giving me hives. But I’m scared if I say it out loud it doesn’t happen. Like a jinx.

I want you to know I want it. And I want you to know that I want you to be part of it, but I need it to be mine for a little longer before it’s anyone else’s. Even yours.

That being said, I am open to negotiation. You send me that tasteful nude? With seaweed? I’ll crack. I’ll break like a weak dam under a flood of sapphic lust. You’ll have bullet points. Spreadsheets. Possibly a PowerPoint presentation.

Also, this whole thing is unfair, you already know what you’re doing. You’re staying in Hawaii. You’ve got the surf shop job. The beach. The art. You’ve always known who you are. You’re the storm and the eye of it at once and it drives me insane with love and jealousy. I envy the hell out of that.

I’m so happy for you. I’m obnoxiously, catastrophically happy for you. I made a playlist. It’s 70% acoustic gay longing and 30% women growling into microphones. It’s disgusting. I’m disgusting.

Tell me everything. What your days are like. Who shops at the surf store. What music you’re making. How many women have fallen in love with you after you compared them to a coral reef.

Maybe I’ll tell you where I’m going.

Yours (and very seaweed-curious),
R

It had been two months.

Sixty-three days, not that Janis was counting (she was, aggressively, with tally marks on her surf shop clipboard).

The first letter was casual. Hopeful. A little teasing. Just a “hey, it’s been a minute, don’t make me fly to the mainland and cause a scene” kind of vibe.

The second letter cracked a little. She asked if Regina was okay. If something had happened. If maybe she’d decided to just... be done with all of it. Letters, long-distance affection, late-night confessions, her.

The third one was quiet. No drawings. No jokes. Just shaky handwriting that said, I miss you so much it hurts in places I didn’t know I had.

Still nothing.

Not a single envelope. Not a scribbled “I’m alive, just busy.” Not even a cruel postmark that said Returned to Sender.

Janis sat behind the register of the surf shop, chin propped in one hand, sketching tiny broken hearts onto a napkin while her mother restocked rash guards and occasionally offered gentle wisdom like, “Maybe she’s just dead” or “Write her one more time, but this time… cry louder.”

She didn’t get it.

No one did. No one knew what it was like to feel more connected to someone you’d never touched than most people you saw every day. To build a decade of devotion out of envelopes and hope and ink.

—

Dear Regina,

This is the fourth one. Four letters. Four miniature emotional breakdowns sealed with tropical humidity and the kind of dramatic energy that only happens when a lesbian’s in love and unhinged with a pen in her hand. 

I know you’ve gotten them. Unless your mailbox spontaneously combusted or you joined a cult that doesn’t believe in paper. In which case, congrats on the personal growth.

I told myself I wouldn’t get dramatic. That I’d play it cool. That I’d just be like, oh well, sometimes people vanish, that’s life, haha! But then I remembered who I am. So.

Regina. Where the hell are you?

I’m not mad. Okay, that’s a lie. I was mad. For like, a solid week. I called you every name in the Gay Heartbreak Handbook, Volume 1. Some highlights:

• Betrayer of Lesbians
• Duke of Vanishing Acts
• Emotional Ghoster Extraordinaire
• She-Who-Does-Not-Reply 

I drew a comic where I turned into a sea witch and cursed you to only find mismatched socks and disappointing shampoo samples.

Now I’m just worried. Worried like checking your phone every five seconds even though you know there’s nothing. And lonely. And trying so hard not to let my brain do what it always does, and make up worst-case scenarios that include amnesia or alien abduction. That you’ve decided I was just some postcard fantasy you outgrew. That I’m not real enough. That I was never real enough to begin with.

If you’re done, if that’s what this is, I’ll try to understand. I’ll scream into the ocean and cry into a sand dune and probably write a five-track lesbian EP about you. I’ll survive. I always do. But Regina… please don’t make me survive without knowing.

If there’s even one atom of you that still thinks of me, please write back. Even if it’s just one word. Even if it’s just goodbye.

Please.

Still yours,
Janis

Janis was dead. Not metaphorically. Not in the too gay to function kind of way. She was face-down, starfished into her mattress at 10:07 am, drooling slightly, dreaming about Regina who had somehow merged with a plate of waffles that kept whispering “I miss you”.

Enter: her mother. She exploded through the front door with all the subtlety of a caffeinated banshee.

“JANIS!” she screeched, thundering through the house. “JANISSSSSS, GET YOUR GAY CORPSE OUT OF BED, THE UNIVERSE HAS SPOKEN!”

There was a crash. Possibly a chair. Possibly her mother.

“THE LETTER, JANIS! A CHILD DELIVERED IT! A NEIGHBORHOOD CHILD! LIKE AN ANGEL, BUT STICKIER!”

Janis groaned from her bed, half-conscious and about to threaten violence. “Mama, I swear to the gods, if this is another coupon for psychic readings—”

Janis saw the envelope.

Large. Cream-colored. Across the front, in unmistakable handwriting: Janis ‘Imi’ike. The "J" had that dramatic curve. The "s" looked like it was mad to be there.

Janis' heart did a full-body cartwheel and then dropkicked her lungs on its way.

She bolted upright, eyes wide. “Give it to me,” she croaked, reaching out with the desperation of someone who had absolutely nothing left to lose.

Her mother flung it into her lap and backed away like it might detonate. “I haven’t even saged it yet. Read it! Read it now!”

Janis tore it open.

Out fell two things. An official-looking acceptance letter from the University of Hawaii. A handwritten note.

Janis, my love,

Okay so first: I’M SO SORRY.

Not the half-assed “oops my bad” kind of sorry. Not the "I forgot to reply to your meme" kind of sorry. I mean full-body, throw-myself-into-a-volcano, crawl-through-broken-glass-on-my-knees level SORRY. You deserve explanations. Real ones. Not vague ghost-girl silence and mysterious postal disappearances.

So here’s what happened: I GOT HIT BY A BUS.

No, for real. I’m not even kidding. Full send. Ka-POW. The universe looked at me dead in the face and said, “yes, Regina George, it’s your turn, time to pay the toll, bitch.” It wasn’t that bad. I mean, I didn’t break anything, unless you count my pride and possibly my last shred of cool. Just some bruises, a minor concussion, and an unfortunate amount of hospital pudding. But I was out of it for a while. Couldn’t write. Couldn’t think. And then life did what life does. It piled up. College apps. Deadlines. Screaming. Existential panic. 

You. Always you.

But listen. Listen. Are you listening?

I did it. I got in. I’m coming to Hawaii.

No more letters dropped into the void. No more whispering your name into paper. No more wondering what your laugh sounds like up close, or if your eyes really do that squint-crinkle thing when you smile, or if you’d actually tackle me into the ocean on sight. Because I’m here. I’m actually here.

I’m going to study political science because I want to crush the patriarchy with facts and rage with a minor in being obnoxiously in love with you, and maybe also women’s studies, because what’s more lesbian than that?

I want to argue in a seminar about queer history and then come home to you and let you draw frogs on my knees.

Attached is a card from the cafe around the corner from your house. You know, the weird one with the aggressively bright bird mural that looks like a tropical hallucination? That one. I’m there. Right now. Probably stress-sweating and pretending I don’t look like I just flew across an ocean with my heart in my carry-on.

This is it. This is the part where the book flips the page and says, okay, now do something about it.

Come find me. If you still want to.

(Please still want to.)

I’m sitting by the window. My heart is in my throat. I haven’t blinked in five minutes.

Love from around the corner,
Regina

—

It didn’t hit Janis all at once.

It was a slow, rising roar, like a wave climbing her spine. Grief breaking apart into joy so fast it left her dizzy.

“Where are you going?!” her mother shouted after her as Janis leapt to her feet. “You’re not even wearing shoes!”

“I’M GOING TO GET HER WHAT DO YOU THINK!” Janis howled, already halfway out the door. She nearly fell down the porch steps because gravity was too slow and her legs were working on lesbian urgency.

The streets blurred. Her heart was a live grenade, every beat echoing in her throat. Her hair was a disaster. She hadn’t brushed her teeth. There was a smear of dried acrylic paint on her left knee from last night’s existential art spiral.

She didn’t care.

All she could think was: she’s here. she’s HERE. SHE’S—

She saw the café and the awning flapping lazily in the breeze, too chill to realize a cataclysm was about to occur inside. Her feet hit the sidewalk too hard, too fast, a blur of bare ankles and nervous momentum, because there, through the window, like something from a fever dream or the world’s gayest prophecy, Regina.

She was sitting in the corner by the window, arms folded around a drink she clearly hadn’t touched, bouncing one foot like she was trying to shake the nerves off. Her phone was on the table, untouched. She wasn’t scrolling. She wasn’t pretending to be busy.

She was just waiting.

When their eyes met the universe didn't slow down, it stopped. Like someone had slammed the pause button on reality and said, Look. This is the moment everything changes.

Janis forgot how to breathe. Her lungs said, nope, we’re done, and her legs only kept moving because her heart had taken over completely. There was only one direction left to go.

Regina stood slowly, lips parting, eyes wide. There was no question. No awkward double-take. No wait, is that her? They knew. Instantly. Yes, it’s you. It’s you. Ten years of letters, drawings, secrets and longing. It was all right there, crystallized in a single look.

Janis didn’t even hear the bell chime when she opened the door. Didn’t register the soft music playing or the smell of roasted espresso and overwatered succulents. The world had narrowed to a single focal point.

Regina. 

Not on paper. Not in glitter ink. Real. Three-dimensional. Solid. Breathing the same air.

She was breathtaking in that annoying way where you want to punch someone for being so devastatingly good-looking. Hair curled softly at the ends, like she’d tried and then given up halfway through. Sunglasses shoved carelessly on top of her head. A slight sunburn on her nose.

Janis moved first. Three long steps and she collided into Regina, arms wrapping tight around her waist, finally something to be held, not just imagined.

Regina gasped softly, but melted into the hug immediately, one hand fisting the back of Janis’ shirt, the other cradling the back of her head with the gentlest possible violence.

“You’re real,” Janis whispered. “Holy shit. You’re real.”

Regina let out a shaky laugh. “So are you. You’re... warm. And weirdly damp. Why are you damp?”

“Shut up,” Janis mumbled. “It’s humid. And I ran. I was sprinting. For love.”

They laughed. Or maybe sobbed. It was hard to tell. Some hybrid creature of too many emotions trying to escape one shared body.

They sat down together at the little corner table, knees bumping under it, hearts still jackhammering. Janis couldn’t stop staring. Regina couldn’t stop smiling.

“So…” Janis began. “A bus? You got hit by a bus? Like, actually? ”

Regina rolled her eyes. “Yes. It was a slow-moving city bus, not a cinematic explosion. Still traumatic. I was crossing the street while trying to eat a quesadilla and read your last letter at the same time.”

“Oh my god.”

“Boom. Asphalt.”

“You were hit by a bus while reading my letter?”

“And eating. Multitasking kills, Janis. Let this be a PSA. I had to tell the ER nurse it was a gay emergency.”

They went quiet after that. Not awkward, just still. Janis studied the slope of Regina’s nose, the way her collarbone peeked out from her tank top, the little birthmark near her ear. All these things she hadn’t known. All these things that had only ever been scribbles and imagination.

“Holy shit, you’re hot.”

“Janis—”

“I’m serious. Like obviously I knew. Intellectually. But this? This is criminal.”

Regina blushed so hard her ears turned red. “You’re the one who walked in here looking like a hot fever dream with paint on your knees and that stupid ocean hair.”

“Ocean hair is not a real thing.”

“It is when you have it.”

Janis reached across the table, still grinning, and said, “I can’t believe you’re here.”

Regina met her halfway, fingers curling around hers.

—

The drink was a sad little puddle now, more memory than beverage. Regina's straw made a faint slurping noise that would’ve been embarrassing if Janis hadn’t already declared her a national emergency-level hottie. At this point, dignity was a formality neither of them was pretending to have.

Their hands were still tangled together on the tabletop, and Janis couldn’t stop grinning. Her cheeks hurt. Her heart hurt worse but in a good way. The best way. The finally way.

She leaned back, gave Regina the most dramatic once-over humanly possible, and said, “Alright. That’s it. I’m taking you on a date.”

Regina blinked. “What?”

“A date,” Janis repeated. “Food. Sunset. Possibly dancing. Definitely making out if you play your cards right. I’m not asking. I’m declaring. We’re making this shit official.”

Regina’s eyebrows shot halfway up her forehead. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me. We’ve done the gay yearning. We’ve done the pining. You got hit by a bus, Regina. A literal bus. You’ve earned a date. And a tongue in your mouth. Specifically mine.”

Regina put a hand to her chest, faux-shocked. “Janis ‘Imi’ike, I don’t even know you. We’ve just met. What kind of girl do you take me for?”

Janis snorted so hard it nearly became a wheeze. “Bitch, please. We’ve been emotionally entangled since we were ten. You sent me a sand dollar with a poem about vengeance on it when we were thirteen.”

“You framed the photo I sent you when we were ten,” Regina shot back, pointing accusingly. “You wrote ballads about my handwriting!”

“Yeah, because your lowercase g’s look like they hold ancient secrets. Don’t change the subject.”

Regina tried to look scandalized, but the smile was already breaking across her face, soft and radiant and wildly unfair. Her whole expression melted into something gentle, something real, something that made Janis’ ribs feel like poorly constructed scaffolding.

“No backsies,” Janis said, softer now. More certain. “This is ten years in the making. I’ve waited half my life to be able to look at you and say, this is real. You, me, date. Let’s go. Let’s be disgustingly in love about it.”

Regina exhaled slowly, still smiling, her thumb brushing against Janis’ knuckle.

“You’re the worst,” she murmured. “I’ve been in Hawaii for less than twelve hours and you’re already trying to wife me up.”

“Correct.”

“You didn’t even brush your hair.”

“And yet, you’re still into it.”

Regina rolled her eyes but didn’t let go. “You’re impossible.”

“And you’re mine.”

There was a long pause. A breathless, dizzy kind of stillness. The café faded. The world faded. It was just them.

“Okay,” Regina said.

“Okay?”

Regina nodded. “Okay. Take me on a date. Make it official.”

Janis whooped, fist-pumping the air, nearly knocking over the tiny succulent on the table. “HELL yeah. You’re gonna regret this. I’m gonna court you so hard, you’ll think I’m possessed.”

“I hope you are,” Regina said, standing and grabbing her bag. “At least then you’d have an excuse for not wearing shoes.”

Janis opened the café door with one hand, lacing their fingers again with the other. “There was no time!”

Regina didn’t say anything. She just followed Janis out into the warm Hawaii sunlight, the grin on her face a quiet kind of wonder.

As the door swung shut behind them, Janis turned and said, “Oh, by the way, so serious about the makeout thing.”

“Oh, I know,” Regina said.

—

The date wasn’t some orchestrated spectacle with candles or linen napkins or fancy overpriced water.

It was the beach. Janis’ beach. Janis had spent years imagining this exact scenario, minus maybe the weird sunburn line across Regina’s shoulder and the old juice stain on the blanket.

A quiet crescent of soft sand tucked behind a bend of lava rock. The sun hung low in the sky, bleeding gold and pink into the ocean, and the air smelled like salt and sunscreen and something that might’ve been destiny if you squinted.

Regina had kicked her shoes off the moment they arrived and was now lounging on a blanket Janis had stolen from her aunt’s garage, tie-dyed and sandy and absolutely perfect.

Janis was sprawled beside her, one arm under her head, watching the sky shift colors like it was showing off. (Or trying to keep up with the girl next to her.)

Conversation flowed effortlessly and familiar, with the occasional snort-laugh and far too many inside jokes for two people who hadn’t seen each other in person until today.

They talked about everything and nothing. Janis told her about the weird regulars at the surf shop and the time a sea turtle tried to bite her ankle because she mistook it for a coconut. Regina talked about her last semester of high school and how her guidance counselor told her she was “intimidating, in a promising way.”

Every few minutes, one of them would look over and just stare, like the other might vanish if they blinked too long.

Janis did it most.

She was doing it now, watching Regina as the sunlight caught in her hair and made her skin look like it was dipped in honey and maybe divine intervention. She was laughing at something dumb Janis had just said, and Janis wasn’t even listening anymore.

She was too busy falling. No. She was plummeting, headfirst, heart open. Gravity, do your worst.

She’s real.  

That thought looped through her brain.

She’s real, and she’s here, and she’s laughing with me on my beach, and she looks at me like I’m more than the words I’ve written her, like I’m something worth arriving for.

She kept reaching out to touch Regina like she needed proof that she was here, that her skin was warm, that her hand really did fit in Janis’ like it had been waiting for the cue.

Regina turned her head, catching her gaze.

“What?” she asked softly.

Janis just stared like an idiot. “Nothing,” she lied, and the word disintegrated the second it left her mouth.

“Liar,” Regina said, sitting up. “What is it?”

Janis mirrored her slowly. The moment stretched between them like a held breath. A string drawn tight. A page on the verge of turning.

Janis swallowed. She felt it in her throat. The accumulation of years, of sentences never sent and sketches abandoned, of wanting someone so much it made her weird about mail.

“I just…” she started, voice thick with everything she couldn’t believe she finally got to say, “You’re so—” Her words cut off, swallowed by a crooked smile and something too big for syllables.

“I can’t believe this is real,” Janis said quietly.

“I know. Me neither.”

“No, like, I used to sit right here,” Janis laughed, gesturing around them, “and imagine what it would be like. If you were next to me. If we could just talk, without postage stamps and time zones. I made up so many versions of this.”

“And now?”

“This is better,” Janis said, breathless. “It’s so much better and I don’t even know what to do with it. You’re actually here. And I know we’ve talked, like, forever, but I still... Regina, I can’t believe how catastrophically beautiful you are in real life. It’s offensive. I feel like I got catfished by Aphrodite.”

Regina rolled her eyes but blushed, nose scrunching the way it always did when she was trying not to melt.

“You already called me hot earlier,” she muttered, trying and failing to sound unaffected.

“Yeah, but that was in a panic,” Janis said. “This is with intent.” She leaned forward, just slightly. “This is me, with full awareness, absolutely losing my mind over you. I’m completely gone for you.”

Regina’s breath caught. Her lips parted.

The world tilted.

Janis leaned in and Regina met her halfway.

Their first kiss didn’t arrive with fireworks or swells of orchestral music. The kiss wasn’t cinematic. It was real and soft and a little clumsy in the way first kisses always are, full of too much feeling and not enough coordination. Full of ten years of letters, of longing, of someday.

This was someday.

Janis felt Regina’s hand slide up to her jaw, warm and steady. Felt her own heart burst open with something too big to name.

When they pulled back, foreheads resting together, Janis smiled, dazed and stupid with joy.

“So,” she murmured, “that’s official, right?”

Regina smiled against her lips. “No backsies,” she said.

Somewhere, in a crumpled shoebox under a bed, the very first letter they’d ever sent each other lay perfectly still. Unread for years and unneeded now.

They weren’t writing the story anymore, they were living it.