My Life is Different Ch. 01

Okay, so the whole "heterosexual girl goes to college and experiments with lesbianism" thing is a cliché. I know that. But it's kinda my story.

Although, if you had read the research done by Alfred Kinsey on human sexual behavior, it would become pretty much apparent that labels like "heterosexual" and "lesbian" are kinda dishonest and misleading.

Millions of people in America who are labeled as "heterosexual" or "homosexual", are actually bisexual to one degree or another.

Alfred Kinsey had a scale that he used to measure a person's overall balance of heterosexuality and homosexuality. The scale ranged from 0 to 6, with 0 being completely heterosexual and 6 completely homosexual. Honestly I think that I'm probably a 3 or a 4, so when I labeled myself as "straight", that was somewhat misleading and dishonest. However labeling myself as "lesbian" is somewhat dishonest too.

But, am I going to go around telling my friends and classmates that I rate 4 on the Kinsey scale? Most of my friends won't even understand what that means.

So, I just simplify it. I used to have a boyfriend, and now I have a girlfriend. Saying "gay now" is less complicated. It's sort of shorthand for explaining my sexual history and current romantic status.

And trying to simplify my life is important. You see, my girlfriend is Buffy Summers, and there is nothing simple about having Buffy Summers as your girlfriend.

She had been going out with Angel, which is complicated in and of itself. I mean, Angel is a vampire and Buffy is a vampire slayer. Can you say conflict of interest? It's almost like a chicken being romantically involved with Colonel Sanders. Or possibly, like Anne Frank being romantically involved with a Nazi.

At any rate, things started to change for me when Angel dumped Buffy, which left her emotionally unbalanced and feeling insecure and undesirable. She had a temporary recovery when Parker wooed her and seduced her, but once he got her naked and turned her into a sexual conquest, he abandoned her, and left Buffy feeling more insecure, awkward, unloved and undesirable than ever.

Buffy cried on my soldier, but somehow it wasn't enough for Buffy to make a full recovery.

And then Oz abandoned me, making me feel insecure, awkward, unloved and undesirable too. Buffy let me cry on her shoulder. I let her cry on my shoulder, but neither one of us were really happy. Then, somehow one day, Buffy realized that my shoulder wasn't really the part of my anatomy that she needed the most.

The first time I kissed Buffy, I realized that she was the perfect cure for what ailed me. Oz had abandoned me and left me feeling empty and hurting, but Buffy would never do that. Buffy had been my best friend and protector since the 10th grade. I could rely on her, in a way that I could never rely on Oz. The fact that she was female was almost immaterial.

Of course, when your girlfriend is the Chosen One and the slayer of vampires, holidays apparently are different for you than they are for other people.

Buffy and I had intended to enjoy a quiet Thanksgiving, with lots of snuggling and smoochies and chronic nudity, so that I could admire Buffy's perfectly firm and athletic body.

But Giles called and it turns out that Xander had somehow summoned an ancient Chumash spirit of vengeance. As the Chosen One, it was Buffy's job to fight the Spirit of Vengeance and slay him before he killed anybody else. Oh yeah, did I mention he killed Professor Gerhardt?

Oh, also Spike is tied up in Giles's apartment and Xander has smallpox and syphilis.

How many of you ever had a Thanksgiving infested with unpleasant complications like that?

Once I got past the Caucasian guilt over the slaughter and enslavement of the Native Americans that I kinda-sorta associated with Thanksgiving and the history of white America's interactions with the Chumash Indians, it occurred to me that you can't kill a spirit of vengeance. They're already dead.

So, how do you deal with a problem like Hus, if you can't kill him?

According to Kessler's tome on zombies, spirits and possessions, Spirits of Vengeance can only manifest when activated by a talisman. Xander probably activated some sort of talisman when he fell into the sunken Sunnydale Mission.

All I needed to do was find the talisman and destroy it.

Xander insisted on coming with, and actually it made some sense. Okay, actually it was kind of insane for the guy with smallpox and syphilis and possibly malaria to get up out of his sickbed, but I had no idea what the Chumash vengeance talisman looked like, and if Xander could tell me what he touched when he fell down into the mission, it could really speed up the process of figuring out which thing to destroy.

Also, Spike was annoying the hell out of Xander, and Xander wanted to get away from him.

"I don't understand why Buffy didn't just stick a stake in him," Xander grumbled. "I mean killing vampires is Buffy's job! And Spike's tried to kill us lots of times!"

"Yeah, but Spike seems to have the inside scoop on that secret group of heavily-armed secretive soldiers," I replied. "And if Spike can tell us where their secret base is, that would be worth keeping him alive, right? And did I say 'secret' too many times?"

Xander made a grunting noise and I helped him balance himself after he snuck in through the window of the Anthropology Department.

I shined my flashlight across the room and Xander said, "Are you sure it'll even be here? It could still be underground in the mission."

"I don't think so. I talked to one of the girls in my Western History class, and she said that the anthropology department was like an army of ants down there. They just spent hours going down into the hole and bringing up everything they could find."

Xander looked around the room and said, "My vision is going blurry. I'm not really sure if I touched any of this stuff."

I looked around the room. There were clay pots and clay bowls and wicker baskets and some primitive tools made out of stone or bone. I wasn't at all certain what I should be looking for.

"Hey," Xander called out with alarm, "Is blurry vision a side-effect of the smallpox or the syphilis?"

Honestly, I don't know why that would matter to Xander. The Chumash curse was making him sicker and sicker. What did it matter if the wonkiness to his vision was caused by the smallpox or the syphilis? Either way, it would all clear up when we destroyed the talisman.

Then Xander picked up a painted clay pot and held it up to his ear and shook it. He looked like a little kid with a Christmas present, trying to determine what was inside without unwrapping it.

"Xander," I said, trying very hard not to laugh at him, "I don't think that's going to help."

"Well, maybe we should just break everything," Xander replied. "Even if we don't know which of these things is the talisman, if we destroy them all, the talisman would have to get destroyed at some point in the process."

Xander's logic made sense, but I hated to the idea of destroying every artifact in the Chumash room of the Anthropology Department. The Chumash people had already been slaughtered. It seemed unforgivable to go ahead and destroy all of the meager belongings that they'd left behind. It would be a further injustice inflicted on a people who had already suffered far too many injustices to begin with.

Then I heard it.

It was a lot like a drumbeat, but muffled and not like any modern rhythm I'd heard from a modern band.

"Sssshhh," I admonished Xander. "I think I hear something."

I closed in on the source of the sound. There in one of the display cases was an odd piece that looked like a bracelet made of human finger bones, held together with a piece of string or cord.

I picked it up and held it close. The percussive beat became stronger as I held it closer. And I realized that I wasn't so much hearing it as feeling it. I had read that as witches became more skilled in their magic that they could sense things that ordinary people couldn't sense. It was like our nervous systems became finely tuned enough that we could sense the presence of mystic phenomena as well as physical phenomena.

Actually, upon closer examination I decided that the bracelet wasn't made of finger bones, but probably the centra of a shark's vertebrae. And it was definitely mystical. I could feel the magic radiating off of it, sort of similar to the way you can feel a powerful engine revving if you place your hand on the hood of a car.

"This is the talisman." I told Xander. "I can feel the thrumming of mystic energies. It's the only mystical thing in this room."

Without saying a word, Xander snatched the talisman from my hands and threw it on the floor. Then he began to stomp on it and grind it underneath the heel of his shoe.

"Hey," I exclaimed loudly and indignantly. If he wanted me to hand the talisman over all he had to do was ask. He didn't need to grab it from me.

"Well, do you know a better way to break the curse?" Xander asked me.

It turns out that Xander made the right decision. Within a few seconds, the symptoms of Xander's malaria and smallpox and syphilis began to clear up.

"So, does that mean we got rid of the angry ghost guy?"

Technically, Hus was a vengeance spirit, but I didn't bother to correct Xander. After all, he had just recovered from syphilis.

"Well, in theory, the talisman should have been the only thing that held Hus here in the physical world. With it destroyed he shouldn't be able to stay here with us in the land of the living. But I don't wanna say anything for sure until the sun comes up and there are no more dead bodies."

* * * * * * * * * *

When Xander and I returned to Giles's apartment, Buffy and Giles gave me the confirmation I needed to make me confident that the Chumash threat was all over. Apparently while Xander and I were at the Anthropology Department, Hus had attacked Buffy and Giles (and Spike too, but nobody really cares what happens to Spike) and in the middle of pitched combat, Hus and his band of Chumash warriors just mysteriously disappeared.

"Undoubtedly, you've done them in, Willow."

That was Giles's stuffy, British way of saying that I made the bad guys go poof.

"Without the talisman to hold the Spirits of Vengeance here in the physical realm, Hus and his Indian braves returned to the spirit realm and thus he is no longer a threat to those of us in the land of the living."

Again, that's British-speak for I made them go poof.

"So, now that Little Red Riding Hood has saved Goldilocks and Prince Boring over there could somebody please pull these arrows out of me? These things bloody hurt!!"

I was kinda surprised to see almost a dozen arrows sticking out of Spike. Apparently when the Chumash Indians attacked, they attacked anybody who looked Anglo-Saxon. Of course Spike is the whitest of all the white people I know, so he must have made a very inviting target.

I'll bet the Chumash must have been really confused when they shot Spike over and over again, but he still refused to die.

"Y'know Spike, I was kinda hoping one of these arrows would've got you through the heart. After all the times you've tried to kill me and Willow...and how you've threatened Xander and how you threatened Riley at that party, I've kinda got mixed feelings about keeping you alive."

As Buffy talked, she broke the arrows in half and then slipped the other halves out of Spike's perforated flesh, so he could heal.

"Riley? That the big bloke with the broad shoulders? I wasn't sure you cared about him anymore."

"Why wouldn't I care?" Buffy asked as she yanked a Chumash arrow out of Spike's thigh. "He's still human. He's still one of the good guys."

"Well, it's just that you're shagging Little Red Riding Hood now," Spike said casually. "The way I figured it; now that you're a lesbian; big lumberjack-looking types like Riley wouldn't even be on your radar anymore."

For a few seconds there was silence in the room. I stopped breathing. Buffy stopped breathing. Xander's jaw dropped open in a shocked, comical expression, and Giles just kept up with his typical stoic British demeanor.

Buffy was the first one to break the silence.

"Who the hell told you that Willow and I were having sex together?"

She was still holding a Chumash arrow in her hand when she said it. She looked like she might plunge it directly into Spike's heart.

Spike tried to keep up a cool façade. Even though he was tied up and helpless and Buffy was holding a weapon on him, Spike had a reputation for being a dangerous predator. It was beneath his pride to ever act nervous or fearful.

"Well, it was you, wasn't it?" You come in here with Red Riding Hood's scent all over you. It's like you bathed in her! You don't get all covered in another person's smell by sharing the same textbook, kiddies. You don't get it by sharing the same hairbrush or the same toothbrush either. There's only one way that you could be so thoroughly covered in another person's scent, and that's if the two of you had hot, passionate, sweaty, feverish sex together."

I was still too stunned to speak. I tried to, but all that came out of my mouth were some inarticulate vowel sounds, and just then Xander chose that moment to blurt something out.

"First Anya turns lesbian and dumps me, and now Buffy and Willow too? What? Is the whole town going gay?"

Spike gave Xander a long, hard look before saying anything. But when he finally spoke he said, "Normally mate, I wouldn't give a damn about your girl troubles, but Harmony just dumped me so she could hook up with a female vampire. So, I'm kinda feeling that we've bonded. We should go down to the pub and sink a few pints."

"Spike, you aren't going anywhere," Buffy admonished the vampire. "You and I and Xander are not friends, and you're not going anywhere until you tell us everything you know about those paramilitary guys on campus!"

Xander ignored everything Buffy just said and interjected, "Wait! Harmony just went gay too? So, that's Anya, Buffy, Harmony and Willow all in the same month?"

"Actually," Giles began in a tone much calmer than Xander's, "I was in a wine shop in the center of town the other day. One of the female employees is divorcing her husband due to irreconcilable differences....she's no longer sexually attracted to men."

"Coincidence?"

Actually, I didn't know what it was. Possibly all of these women were bisexual to begin with and eventually just grew tired of or, or dissatisfied with their male companions for some reason. As I said, lots of women are bisexual to some degree or another.

"Coincidence," Xander blurted out incredulously. "Will, six straight women all suddenly going gay in the same month in a town this size can't be a coincidence! It's gotta be the Hellmouth. It's an early warning sign of another apocalypse about to happen!"

"Xander, Sunnydale isn't exactly small. We've got a university, a museum an art gallery, forty-three churches, a zoo, twelve gothic cemeteries, a huge hospital, a train station, a bus station, a small airport and a small military base. You call that a small town?"

"Well, not exactly small per se," Xander began, but I cut him off before he could finish.

"Xander the hospital alone has over six-hundred employees! And UC Sunnydale has about five-hundred employees! And Fort Fremont military base has thousands of people! There's got to be over three-hundred-thousand people living in Sunnydale! Six women turning gay in a town of three-hundred-thousand shouldn't be considered a big deal!"

"I could still fancy a pint," Spike interjected. "My woman dumped me and I got shot full of arrows. That should entitle me to a drink, shouldn't it?"

I actually found myself starting to agree with Spike on this one. I mean...Harmony dumped him so that she could be with a lesbian and then he shot a dozen times by a bunch of angry Indians...that sounded like the title to a country-western song.

"Spike, I'll tell you what," Giles began. "Tell us everything you know about the paramilitary group on Buffy's campus and I'll buy you a bottle of Jameson."

"Six bottles of Jameson and twelve bottles of Guinness," Spike countered. "I get half up front and the other half when I've told you everything I know."

Giles countered with one bottle of Jameson and ten bottles of Guinness and Spike could have one pint of Guinness up front and the remainder after he told everything.

Spike was insulted by Giles's counteroffer, and the vampire and the watcher proceeded to haggle in earnest. That's when Buffy and Xander and I decided it was time to go home. I could tell that Spike and Giles weren't going to resolve this anytime soon.

They'd probably be at it for hours.

Buffy and I held hands as we walked back to campus. I figured as long as Xander already knew, there was no point in hiding our affections any longer.

"I don't get it," Xander complained. "First you're with Angel, and I never approved of Angel, but at least he was a guy. He had that whole XY chromosome thing goin' on. But, now you're with Willow. And no offense to Willow, but she-"

Buffy cut Xander off at that point and sharply added, "Xander, Angel dumped me. I saved Angel's life and then he dumped me! When he went to L.A., he stomped all over my heart and maybe, just maybe, I'm with Willow now because I know she won't ever pull a bone-headed move like that on me ever!"

I smiled at Buffy, giving her a non-verbal. It was a non-verbal that I appreciated the compliment and also a non-verbal that confirmed that I would never dump her and leave town like Angel did.

"So, when a guy dumps a girl, they automatically turn lesbian?"

"Everybody is different, Xand," I explained. "When Oz abandoned me I ran to the arms of my best friend...which just happened to be Buffy. And Buffy makes me happy, so we're gonna stay together. But every girl is different. Not every girl is gonna react the same way. Some girls will turn to drugs or alcohol to deal with the pain. Some will turn to chocolate. Some girls turn to kick-boxing or mixed-martial arts and beat the crap out of their opponents. Some girls just wallow in the pain and listen to lots and lots of country music.

At the mention of country music, both Buffy and Xander shuddered. Country music really sucked and we all knew it.

Since it was Thanksgiving and none of us had eaten anything since Breakfast, we all stopped in at a place called Mike's Bar and Grill and Buffy bought us all dinner.

Explaining the whole lesbian thing to Xander wasn't easy. He had had a crush on Buffy even since the 10th grade and to have Buffy suddenly go gay on him was really an emotional blow for him. I think that he thought he might have a chance with Buffy after Angel broke up with her and left town.

And then there was the moment when I got up to go to the lady's room and walked past the bar. There were two married guys sitting at the bar complaining about how their wives no longer cooked for them because they discovered "the joys of lesbian sex" and now their wives had girlfriends and they were never home at night.

Both guys were middle-aged and unattractive. One of them looked kind of like Joe Pantoliano and the other one was seriously overweight.

"You know who I blame this on?" asked the Joe Pantoliano guy.

"Our wives?" ventured the overweight guy, slurring his words slightly and obviously working on a good buzz.

"Janet Reno," replied the Joe Pantoliano guy. "She's a woman...but she's also the attorney general. You make a woman the top lawman in the country and it causes gender confusion. It's like she thinks she's a man. And women all over America see Janet Reno in a man's job. One of the most powerful men in America is a woman! That gives women strange ideas! Dontcha think? I heard 'em talkin' about it on Fox News Channel."