Girl Adventure Story by Rose Maxwell
2000 words, ~10 minutes reading time
Issue 8, Summer 2025
The first time she has sex, it’s with James, because she knows he won’t hurt her and she knows he’s not in love with her.
The sex is polite, friendly, unsatisfying. As they lay on her family’s basement futon, she traces the burns on his back, the ones that twist and turn in letters she can’t remember. Her eyes close and she remembers the hot breath of a dragon, the smell of moss, the feeling of being important. She remembers a black-eyed pirate captain, face scarred, hair long and unkept. She arches her back and tries to attempt something like a climax.
Later, when they are all in college and catching up around a fire pit, she will tap James’s shoulder. She is a little bit drunk and he is a lot drunk and it is in these moments, with cheap beer and surrounded by the smell of burning, that they can talk most easily about the past, about the world that opened up for them in the unstable ground of the abandoned quarry.
“What do you tell girls about your back?” she asks. “When you, you know… Fuck.” She takes a sip of beer, feigning confidence.
He shrugs. “I usually pretend that I’m a Satanist,” he says. “They think it’s hot.” She nods, laughs.
It was Rhys who found it, the place where the air seemed to twist in on itself, a ripple in the fabric of reality. He told James first, because they had always been best friends, had gone on family vacations together, and comforted each other through each of their parents’ divorces. But then they told the rest of them, the whole team, the posse.
They all stared at the ripple, the summer sun beating on the back of their necks, turning the necklines of their shirts dark with sweat.
“What do we do?” James asked.
It was a rhetorical question. Rhys stepped forward and wrapped his hand around the spot where the air twisted. Whatever it was, he said, it felt solid. He drew his hand forward, tearing at the spot.
There was the sound of ripping. The summer air turned cold.
For years after, she ran after the crows she saw on the street, hoping they would show her another door, hoping they had a story to tell her. As she grew older, she bit the instinct down, but her heart still fluttered when she saw a flash of black against the sky or heard a cawing.
There were five of them: Rhys and James and Sal and Brian and her. She was the only girl, ever since Laura Galloway transferred schools in the third grade, and she found herself without the hand-holding best friend that every other girl seemed to have. So she fell in with the boys, learned to play Super Smash Bros, talk about dicks, and twist people’s arms until they burned.
When they walked through the tear, they held each other’s hands, even her. She expected that she might die, that her whole body would stretch out from end-to-end, the way they talked about with black holes, and that she would suffer unspeakable agony before her consciousness was snuffed out like a candle. She had written letters to her parents before she left. They sat folded in the lap of the teddy bear that still lay on her bed, saying that she loved them but she had to go, for the sake of human knowledge.
She did not die. Not in the portal, not in the land beyond it. None of them died, though James had come close, his head resting in Rhys’s lap as Rhys keened. But there had been crows and fairies and snakes who helped them each step of the way. And Brian learned tricks with his fingers that could light up a dark cave or cause water to flow upstream. And Sal had been given a sword by a dying knight, the same one he later plunged into the heart of a dragon, spraying hot blood across his own face. She had to turn and vomit in the corner, which made her feel cowardly and unfeminist. Later, on a wagon ride back to the city where they had started it all, Sal just stared into the distance without talking and she knew nothing else but to hold his hand and rub the space between his thumb and forefinger.
And she learned how to speak the language of the birds and the dolphins, held thick ropes between her hands, felt strong callused hands against her cheeks, and wished she had the will to crane her neck up and kiss the most beautiful, fearsome woman that she had ever seen.
But if she had learned anything from that experience, it was that she was a coward. The boys could kiss beautiful cowmaids and princesses, wander out of fields smiling, with violets braided into their hair. Sal could stab a dragon and could still teach himself to laugh years later. James almost died, burned with dragonfire. But she could bring herself to kiss no girls, to kill no monsters. All she could do was hold her friends’ hands and even in those moments, she could never think of the right words to say.
Years later, when they’re adults orbiting in tight circles around their hometown, she hears from her sister’s girlfriend that Brian is getting married. And she texts the groupchat, and they all react with surprise and anger, because how can he be normal, how can he forget, how can he not long, like the rest of them, for a time in their youth where they were strange and important and held the fate of the world in their hands?
A week later, she is stretched out on Rhys’s couch in his apartment, Naruto playing in the background, sound muted and subtitles on. They talk about normal things: his last failed relationship, her job, the crumbling national infrastructure. Everything, she thought, smelled like mold here, in this world.
“I found the announcement,” he says, and he shows her his phone. There is Brian and his fiancée, looking normal and conservative, her hand against his chest, the ring on her finger gleaming. They look happy, generic.
“Do you think it’s a blood diamond?” she asks.
Rhys leans against his sink. “Dude, I can’t believe he didn’t invite me. What a fucker.” He says it like a joke.
She shrugs. “He, like, lives in Ohio now. He’s probably inviting all of his cool, new Ohio friends. They’re going to do things, like I don’t know.” She tries to think of a thing about Ohio. “Eat Skyline Chili.”
“I think he fucked that fairy,” Rhys says.
“What?”
“You remember. That annoying, like, lilac or lavender fairy or whatever that we met in the forest after we saw all those ghosts. Remember, they kept talking about his magical techniques or whatever? And then they were gone for a while, when we were trying to figure out the maps.”
“Oh yeah,” she says. “Which was so annoying, because he was so much better at reading maps than the rest of us.”
“Yeah. Anyway, I’m like 90% sure they fucked.”
“Huh,” she says. They were so young then, thirteen, deep in the throes of middle school confusion and lust. But time was different there. Maybe. “I feel like that would do something weird to your dick. Like it would get cursed or something.”
“Oh yeah,” Rhys says. “Definitely cursed his dick.” He waves the phone with the engagement photo on it. “So good luck, Jennifer.”
After they crawled out of the tear in the worlds, only two hours had passed, because this was how time worked, over there, over here. When they emerged, covered in blood and wreathed with flowers, Rhys said he never wanted to go in there again. And she remembered how she and Brian and Sal all looked at each other, because she knew there was more to do, parts of the map that were still uncharted, political tensions yet unresolved. But Rhys looked like he was going to cry and he had been through a lot that year already with his parents and everything, so they agreed.
But they were back in a week, ostensibly because James lost his contact case and thought he left in the other world. But she knew it was because they couldn’t stay away, because geometry and catching the school bus felt unimportant now that they knew that their hands could hold daggers and cast spells.
But when they jumped down from the lip of the quarry and found the spot where the world had twisted open, the air was clean and cool and whole. No rips, no imperfections. They clawed at the air the best they could, turning their hands in every motion they could imagine, even trying to bite at it with their teeth. But the air was still the air and the world was still the world. Sal began to cry, his voice high-pitched and hysterical and he punched at the rock wall of the quarry until his knuckles were red with blood and James had to pull him off.
“Don’t touch me, don’t touch me!” he cried. “Do you know how strong I am?”
They fought, with fists and teeth until they tired each other out, scraped, bruised, bleeding. She watched with Rhys, silent. When they turned to leave, they realized that Brian had left a while ago, disappearing into the woods.
When she was deep in the bowels of the pirate ship, searching for a gleaming gold key, she found a wizened old woman, with moss growing from her hair. She gave the woman a clementine from her pocket and in exchange, the old woman offered to show her a glimpse of her future.
She accepted, and the woman pulled a silk scarf from one of the cracks in the ship’s wooden walls. The scarf fluttered in the musty air, turning gold and silver until it grew still in the woman’s hands, and an image formed, as gradual as the spread of a water stain.
She saw the five of them, taller and leaner, hair shaggier, sitting on a couch. They lounged all over one another, the way that they always did. They laughed, joints passed from hand to hand. Older, dark shadows beneath their eyes, dressed in a fashion that she could not understand.
That image continued for an hour, the light in the room growing darker, everyone moving in and out of the frame but always returning, like moths drawn to the glow of the joint.
The woman folded the scarf up. “Did you see?” she asked.
And she said yes, and she never told the rest of them what she saw. She was trading in secrets back then, because she thought it made her strong and mysterious and because it was easier, when she was holding so many things back, to just never say anything true. But when they were holding swords rusted over with gore, when they were lost in a woods of tangled thorns, when Rhys called her high at 3AM in tears, she would carry that vision in a little breast pocket, letting herself know that it was all going to end okay.
