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It doesn’t really set in until fall, senior year.
The streets get repaired first―after the last of the gold seeps back into the ground―and then the homes and schools. The people in Angel Grove are a tight-knit community, and neighbours take in neighbours during the construction, but Kimberly thinks there’s something particularly insidious about how, as soon as everything settles down again, they’ll all go back to whispering behind each other’s backs and kicking people when they’re down.
(There’s such a thing, she thinks, as too close, too involved.)
During senior year, Kimberly starts to work at the Dunkin’ Donuts that replaces the Krispy Kreme in town, without really knowing why. Only, she could be saving up for college, or for a car, because she finally got her Class C over the summer and hasn’t found a use for it yet, and she thinks she might never―
That’s when it really sets in. When it’s almost December and Jason still hasn’t applied to any schools, and Zack and Billy keep talking about things they still need to finish in Angel Grove; it’s like the entire town has moved on from Rita, but Trini still has nightmares almost every day, and Kimberly’s starting to think the five of them are never going to be allowed to leave the fucking crystal under her feet.
-
In the winter, Angel Grove wakes up to the air crackling with ice and pale grey skies. A fine layer of frost encases the entirety of the town, and if Kimberly could muster any sort of fondness for it, she might say Angel Grove is sort of beautiful like this.
Her clearing in the woods is like something out of a story book: the air is cool and crisp, the trees still in a way she doesn’t normally think of them, and a thin sheet of ice covers her pond, the snow-capped Cascades looming in the distance. The first time she’d gone out into the woods and seen the transformation, she’d been transported, as if the clearing she was looking at was only a snapshot, a frozen moment captured of a different place and time.
And then it was her clearing again, and suddenly Kimberly had wanted nothing more than to press the toe of her boot into the ice, to see it crack down a million different avenues, to shatter the image before her.
In the morning, the climb towards the base is hard, punctuated by Jason’s swearing and the slip and slide of their sneakers and boots against icy rock. Billy makes them all wait at the top of the cliff while he throws rocks into the ravine. The water is wonderfully warm once he deems it safe, and the way to the ship is frigid in contrast. Billy stares up at the water ceiling for an extended minute, shivering, contemplating its logic-defying heat.
The condensation in the pit freezes solid to the walls, so that the rock glistens blue in the light filtering in through the water suspended above it. They trip their way to the ship, and it takes upwards of half an hour just to peel their wet clothes off and change.
Trini doesn’t own warmer training clothes, so Kimberly lets her borrow some of the old sweats she used to wear for cheer practice. When they finally make their way to the pit, Kimberly has to tear her eyes away from Trini and the attentive, almost reverent way she rolls her sleeves up one by one, smoothing her hands over the wrinkles in the fabric.
The first Saturday into winter break, they’re sitting around the pit when Trini brings it up.
She’s going around the circle, patching them up because she’s better at it after years of taking care of her brothers. Jason and Billy are mostly okay, just bruised and sore, but Zack looks like he’s gone eight rounds with one of the Zords, and Kimberly doesn’t feel much better.
Trini grumbles loudly as she begins cleaning up the scrapes crisscrossing Zack’s arms and face, pressing alcohol swabs into his wounds probably a little rougher than she needs to. He winces, but doesn’t complain.
“What the hell were you guys doing?” Trini murmurs angrily, a worried crease carved deep between her eyebrows as she tapes up the worst of it before moving on to Kimberly.
“Sorry,” Kimberly apologizes quietly. Trini’s inspecting a large bruise on the side of her neck, her hands fluttering anxiously around it; they’re pleasantly cool against her flushed skin, and Kimberly presses her mouth into a flat line to suppress the embarrassing sounds that she can feel climbing up her throat, clenching her fists. Trini seems to take this as a sign that her touch hurts, because now the press of her fingers against Kimberly’s skin is delicate, light, like gossamer whispering against it.
Somehow, this is worse.
“Idiots,” Trini says, loud enough so that Zack will hear, though it lacks any of her usual heat. Zack grins at her until she rolls her eyes, exasperated. She’s inspecting the cut under Kimberly’s eye, fingers just as careful and confusing as before, when she says, “So, you guys doing anything over spring break?”
“Helping my dad out,” Jason answers. “And since we have so much free time, we’re―”
“Training,” the team says in unison. Jason frowns.
“You got plans or something, crazy girl?” Zack asks.
Trini bites her lip nervously. Kimberly’s eyes drift down to it, before she catches herself and looks up quickly. Trini doesn’t notice – she’s determinedly not making eye contact with anyone, including Kimberly, carefully pressing a bandage over Kimberly’s cheek. It’s distracting; Kimberly almost doesn’t hear Trini’s answer.
“I was thinking about checking out some schools. Just the ones in California!” she adds quickly when the others don’t say anything. “But we’ve got, like, a week, and I thought it might be a good time to do it, if you guys want to join.”
They sit in uncomfortable silence for a moment.
“I’m not going to come,” Billy says simply, considering a sheaf of notes in his hand without looking up. The atmosphere in the room turns cold.
“Yeah, I don’t think I can leave my mom alone for that long,” Zack pipes up.
“I’ve got the stuff with my dad.”
“Right,” Trini mutters. She purses her lips, brow furrowed. Her shoulders are hunched up to her ears, and her eyes haven’t moved from Kimberly’s collar since Billy spoke.
Kimberly wonders how much of that is the response from the others, and how much of it is everything Kimberly’s been thinking since college applications opened, everything she’s been afraid of since Jason came up to her after Rita and said they were going to start training again.
Trini’s hands leave her skin.
“I’ll go,” Kimberly blurts out without thought. Trini freezes in front of her, and Kimberly averts her gaze immediately, examining her taped up knuckles. “I mean, I applied to a couple of colleges in the area, and, well, you can’t drive, and I can, and ... I’ll go,” Kimberly finishes lamely. “With you.” She looks up.
Trini is already staring at her. She’s still leaning completely into Kimberly’s space, just inches away, and Kimberly might pay more attention to the remnants of perfume clinging to Trini’s hair―it’s new, Kimberly’s sure of it, something surprisingly sweet and flowery and unlike her usual apricot―except that she can see each and every one of Trini’s individual eyelashes, and there’s this look of complete and utter awe on her face that makes Kimberly’s heart all but stop.
Trini’s eyes are wide, and they’re almost black in the dim light. She sways a little, before falling back with a thump onto her right heel. Kimberly feels her departure, the sudden rush of cool air taking up the space Trini had occupied before.
“Cool,” Trini says softly, almost to herself, looking down. She straightens up out of her crouch, smiles down at Kimberly for one fleeting moment, hesitantly smoothing her thumb over the bandage on Kimberly’s cheek one last time, like an afterthought, before turning away to say goodbye to the others and walking out of the pit.
Kimberly stares dumbly after her. She remembers to breathe. Heliotropes. “What.”
Zack bursts out laughing, the sound echoing endlessly around the pit. “Welcome back to earth, pilot.”
“But we didn’t take the Zords out today.”
“We didn’t,” Jason whispers loudly to Billy, “but I think Kim just did.”
-
There’s a tree in Trini’s backyard with wide, frosted branches that extend toward the part of the roof that slopes away from her window.
Kimberly doesn’t need it to reach Trini’s room, but there’s something sort of pleasing about the idea that, in another life, one where Billy Cranston doesn’t blow up the old gold mine, where they don’t find the power coins, Kimberly could climb it to visit Trini if she wanted to. If they ever became friends in such a life.
Trini’s window is unlocked when she reaches it – all of their windows usually are, but Trini’s is open to the rangers, always.
“Hey!” Kimberly says to announce herself, pulling herself into the room and taking her boots off before slipping onto the carpeted floor noiselessly. Trini startles from where she’s rummaging through her closet.
“Kim? What are you doing here?”
“Thought I’d come give you your Christmas present early,” Kimberly answers, sitting down on Trini’s bed. “What’re you―”
“Trini!” someone calls from below them.
“¡Ya voy!” Trini calls back, before turning back to Kimberly. “Now’s not actually a great time. We celebrate Christmas a day early. It’s tradition or something,” Trini explains, turning back to her closet.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for another outfit,” Trini mutters distractedly.
Kimberly frowns. “What’s wrong with the one you’re wearing now?”
“Ask my mom,” Trini replies, sweeping a rack of hanging clothes out of her way a little too viciously.
Kimberly hums sympathetically, standing up to get a closer look. Trini’s staring at an awful green thing she dug up from the back of her closet with apparent disgust on her face. “How about that grey dress?” Kimberly says, taking it down and handing it to Trini. “I think it’s more ...” Her voice trails off.
“Yeah,” Trini says. She looks down at the dress for a moment in her hands, face unreadable, before looking up at Kimberly. “Thanks.” They stand in silence for a beat, before Trini raises an eyebrow.
“Oh! Right, uh.” Kimberly spins on the spot, flushing a little when Trini laughs. “So, I came to give you your present,” she says again, trying to clear the dryness from her throat and failing spectacularly at sounding like a regular human being. The sounds of Trini’s clothes thudding to the ground ring loudly in her ears. “I’ll be really fast.”
“You can look again.”
Kimberly turns around. The dress looks completely new, like Trini hasn’t worn it once since she first hung it up in her closet. “It’s pretty,” Kimberly remarks.
Trini rolls her eyes. “It’s not me.”
Kimberly looks around the room. “Here,” she says, grabbing the jacket hanging on the desk chair and draping it over Trini’s shoulders. “That’s you.”
Trini smiles. “Thanks,” she says, tugging it tighter around her. She shivers in the cold.
Kimberly clears her throat again. “Anyway,” she says, pausing for dramatic effect, before raising her hand and brandishing her index finger. A set of keys swings back and forth from it. “Tada!”
The smile grows slowly on Trini’s face, until it’s wide and bright, and such a rare thing that Kimberly’s breath catches. “Is that what I think it is?”
Kimberly grins. “The keys to my new-old car! My parents paid for half of it as a Christmas present. And that,” she says, shaking the keys playfully, “is my present to you.”
Trini laughs delightedly, this beautiful, vibrant sound that makes Kimberly want to get in her Zord and touch the clouds, which – okay, she gets what the guys were saying now.
“We’re really going,” Trini says, a little shaky with disbelief.
“We’re really going,” Kimberly promises. Trini’s mother calls her name again. “And you really need to go.” She turns to put her boots back on and leave before one of Trini’s parents comes upstairs to check what’s taking her so long.
“Kim!” Trini exclaims, grabbing her hand to stop her. Kimberly turns.
A cool breeze from the open window glides across the backs of their hands. Trini’s grip loosens a little and, without thinking, Kimberly lets their fingers slot together so that they’re intertwined. It’s easy, the sort of thing―like their friendship, and the guys, and the five of them, all in this together―that will always come easy to Kimberly. Something she won’t regret having for the rest of her life.
Kimberly’s hands are still a little stiff from the walk over and Trini’s hand is a welcome comfort, palm warm and calloused against hers. They stand, just like that, for one, immeasurable moment. Trini’s looking down at their hands, her index finger tapping nervously against one of Kimberly’s knuckles, when she says, “Thank you.”
“Sure,” Kimberly replies gently. Trini lets her go; her skin tingles where Trini’s fingers draw paths across it.
As she’s climbing over the frame of the window, heels catching on the shingles beneath her feet, Kimberly looks back over her shoulder one last time.
Trini’s slipping out of the jacket Kimberly put on her. The strange mixture of a hundred different emotions flits across her face as she holds it in her hands, and when it settles, the expression there almost makes Kimberly stay.
By the time Trini looks up, Kimberly is swinging out of sight off one of the tree branches in her backyard.
-
“Dude, did you really make these?”
“My mom taught me,” Zack says. “Catch, Kimmy!” He hurls a steamed bun at her, and it’s only the constant practice she gets passing notes in detention that saves her. The bun warms her hands like a mug of coffee, and the pork filling steams in the cold air when she takes a bite out of it.
“You should try my mom’s,” Zack continues, like he didn’t almost just give Kimberly a black eye by means of savoury projectile as she was coming up onto their hill. “Hers actually have the twisted tops. I can never get them right.” Kimberly takes a seat by the fire as Billy and Jason assure him they’re perfect.
“No Trini?” Kimberly asks.
“Bao―zi?” Jason says clumsily.
“Hey, that one was pretty good, cap!” Zack claps Jason on the back as Billy puts his hands together enthusiastically. “She’s sneaking out later,” Zack says in an aside to Kimberly.
A log in the fire splits loudly, and a shower of sparks spirals into the air. “Sneaking out?” Kimberly repeats, confused.
“Yeah, her mom’s not really keen on letting her leave the house,” Jason says through a mouthful of food. Kimberly grimaces at him, and he grins.
“Or letting her hang out with us,” Billy speaks up over the crackling fire.
“Why not?”
“Well, she’s not exactly happy about the trip over spring break, right?” Jason answers carelessly. He looks up after Kimberly doesn’t say anything. “Trini didn’t tell you?”
Kimberly takes a long sip of the beer Zack passes her to avoid answering, letting her tongue curl around the fizzy alcohol in her mouth before swallowing. “No,” she says finally, “she didn’t.”
“She probably didn’t want to worry you, Kim,” Zack tells her, “so don’t worry about it.”
“I’m going to worry about it,” Kimberly mutters out of the corner of her mouth.
“Trini says her mom thought she was going to go to a local college,” Billy explains. “One of the ones around Redding. She was surprised that Trini applied to a bunch of schools further south.” Billy shrugs. “I don’t know why, Trini does exceptionally well in school – I’m sure she’ll be accepted to all of the schools she applied to.”
“Not sure that’s the problem, B,” Zack remarks.
“What’s the problem?” a voice asks.
The four of them whip around to see Trini pulling herself up onto the hill.
“Just these,” Zack replies smoothly, throwing a steamed bun at her much like he had Kimberly, only Trini seems to be expecting it, because she catches it without so much as blinking.
“Yes!” Trini crows. “I skipped dinner with my family today and I’m starving.” She digs into her food, plopping down beside Kimberly. “You guys should see the baozi Zack’s mom makes,” Trini adds before Kimberly can ask why she skipped dinner, the Chinese falling perfectly off her tongue, “they have the little twist on top.”
“See!” Zack groans dramatically. Jason and Billy pat him on the back.
“Anyway,” Trini says without sparing him a second glance. She pulls a bottle from the inside of her jacket, its contents glistening golden like her hair in the firelight. “Rum for the cold.”
Zack perks up immediately. “You got it!” He takes the bottle from her, eyes glinting mischievously in the light, and he throws Kimberly a significant look, an innocent smile turning his lips up. “Who’s up for a game of ‘Never Have I Ever’?”
Kimberly narrows her eyes at him suspiciously and opens her mouth to say something, but Trini beats her to it, turning to her and saying, “You in, Kimberly?”
Another log in the fire pops loudly, shooting sparks into the dark night sky, but it may as well have been silent for all the notice Kimberly gives it. She gapes at Trini stupidly, mouth still hanging open.
“Uh,” Kimberly says, “yeah, I guess.” Zack sniggers distantly from the other side of the fire.
“All right,” Zack says, “we can take turns drinking from the bottle. And I’ll go first!” He looks around the circle, making eye contact with each of them. “Never have I ever ...” Zack’s gaze lands on Kimberly, “... liked a teammate romantically.”
Kimberly prepares herself for a long night.
-
I h at e you, Kimberly texts Zack later, once Billy helps her through her window after two failed attempts.
Wc?
Wrong chat?
I think you have the wrong conversation, Kimberly.
Wrong chat, Kimmy?
-
Trini packs light, and Kimberly lets out a breath the moment Angel Grove disappears in her rear-view mirror.
“You think we’d get special consideration if these schools knew we saved the world?”
Kimberly laughs in the driver’s seat. “What do you care? You got offers from all your top choices.”
“Tuition in California is crazy high,” Trini responds, scrolling through Kimberly’s phone and scowling at the numbers on it.
Kimberly shrugs distractedly, eyeing a car edging precariously close to them in the other lane. “You’re probably going to graduate from some feeder school, anyway, and get a job in Silicon Valley with an insane entry-level salary and pay off all your student loans in, like, a year.” The car cuts into the tiny space between their car and the one in front of them. “Asshole!” she shouts, pressing her car horn and turning to complain to Trini, only to find Trini already looking back at her. “What?”
“How’d you know?” Trini asks, an odd expression on her face.
“Know what?” Kimberly replies, confused, glancing at the road intermittently; they’re about to take the exit for the freeway.
“That I was thinking about going to school for tech stuff.” Trini still hasn’t looked away.
“Oh.” Kimberly frowns as she merges into traffic. The highway is busy with other cars driving south for spring break, and she’s never actually driven outside of Angel Grove before. “You must have told me, right? Or, like, we talked about it with the guys.”
From the corner of Kimberly’s eye, she catches Trini’s grimace. She murmurs something that sounds a lot like, “As if we’d ever bring it up voluntarily.” She speaks up, saying, “No, I definitely don’t remember sharing with the group.”
Kimberly hums, tapping the steering wheel with her fingers. “Oh, I saw that book about programming on your desk during the summer!” Trini tilts her head in confusion. “You know, all the times I, uh, came over at night,” she says awkwardly.
Trini looks away, and Kimberly immediately regrets bringing it up. But then, after a moment, she asks, “What do you want to study?” Kimberly turns to look at Trini so sharply she gets a crick in her neck. “What?” she says defensively.
Kimberly hastily directs her eyes back to the road. “Well,” she says after a while, “my parents want me to go to med school, like they did.” Trini winces. “Yeah.” Kimberly drums her fingers against the steering wheel again. “I don’t really know what I want to do anymore. Business? Law? Something with people. I guess anything but ...”
What we’re doing now.
They don’t speak for a while, the only sounds between them the car’s quiet rumbling and their tires against the asphalt.
“I think you’d be good at that,” Trini volunteers. “The people thing.”
She plugs the aux cord into her phone before Kimberly can think how to respond.
-
They make a pit stop at the next In-N-Out and order enough food for four people. An old man at another table stares at them, as if waiting for more people to join them, and only looks away after Trini glares back at him.
“Jason says it tastes the same without the meat.”
“Jason is wrong,” Trini counters. “That’s like saying a black and white milk shake tastes the same as a chocolate milk shake.”
“A black and white does taste the same as chocolate.” Trini stares at her in disgust. Kimberly grins. “It does!”
“How are we friends?”
“Oh, you don’t remember? I threw you off a cliff.”
“That part I remember,” Trini mutters.
Kimberly laughs. “Here,” she says, holding her milk shake out to Trini, “try some. Just don’t finish it,” she adds wryly.
Trini rolls her eyes, then leans forward and drinks directly from the cup in Kimberly’s hand.
Kimberly goes absolutely rigid.
Trini’s lips are still wrapped around the straw when she seems to realize something’s wrong. Jerkily, she takes the cup from Kimberly and scoots as far back into her booth seat as she can, cheeks washed crimson. She makes a show of taking another drag from the straw, as if pretending she hadn’t before, hadn’t already let Kimberly feed it to her, and puts the cup back down like it’s burned her hand. Kimberly remembers to retract her arm.
“Different,” Trini says gruffly. “It’s―it’s definitely different.”
Kimberly recovers after a minute, blinking fast. She smiles coyly, propping her chin up in her hand. “You sure you don’t want to give it another try?” she asks, head cocked innocently, holding her milk shake out again.
“No!” Trini all but squeaks. The old man from the other table looks around again, but Trini doesn’t notice, too preoccupied with looking down at her tray and their unfinished food and anywhere but at Kimberly. Kimberly glares at him for her.
“Well, can I get a sip of yours, then?” Kimberly asks, guileless, turning back to Trini.
“Yeah. Here,” she says stiltedly, thrusting her milk shake out towards Kimberly.
The tendons in Trini’s hand are taut and strained, and Kimberly can see the way the muscles and bones in her arm have locked into position. Her wrist is tense, bent at an awkward angle so that the straw in her cup is pointing away from Kimberly.
Kimberly has to brace her hands against the table between them and get up from her seat to be able to reach. She leans all the way forward across the booth; the ends of her hair brush Trini’s knuckles once. She waits until Trini’s looking up at her again before, finally, she catches the straw between her teeth and takes a drink, her eyes never leaving Trini’s. She leans back slowly, Trini watching her the entire time.
“Hm,” Kimberly hums, licking her lips exaggeratedly, “you might be right, it’s definitely different.”
Trini stares at her. “You are the literal worst human being,” she says flatly.
Kimberly pouts. “Aw, don’t be mad. Here.” She holds a fry out tauntingly.
“How are we friends?”
-
The Airbnb they’re staying at while in the Bay Area is a fifteen-minute walk from Berkeley. Trini grabs their key from a flower pot in the backyard and drops their things off in their room before walking back out to the driveway. Kimberly doesn’t know she misses the smell of Trini’s perfume until she’s back in the car beside her, bringing the smell of flowers and eucalyptus in with her.
They drive along the interstate to San Francisco with the windows down, the bay rocking gently underneath them, boats drifting in the distance. Trini’s playlist blasts from the old stereo in Kimberly’s car; it’s surprisingly mellow – there’s a lot of Frank Ocean and Lorde, and none of the death metal Kimberly was expecting.
“That sort of music’s for when I don’t want to think,” Trini says when Kimberly points this out, and she lets Kimberly ponder that without any further explanation.
San Francisco makes Angel Grove seem tiny by comparison. The roads go up and down and up again, so steep they make Kimberly nervous. The Golden Gate Bridge looms in the distance, bright orange towers coming into and out of view as they drive; Trini’s eyes follow it.
It takes them a solid half hour to find a spot to park near San Francisco State, and even then, it’s several minutes away from campus. It’s chilly today, the sort of damp, windy weather that Angel Grove almost never gets, and by the time they make it to the front lawn, they’re both shivering; Kimberly sort of already hates the school on principle.
The tour of the campus is dull and long, and Kimberly stops paying attention once the sun disappears behind the clouds completely. They ditch the group halfway through, after Trini can no longer distinguish between the different buildings they’ve passed.
Stanford is about an hour’s drive south. Kimberly takes them down El Camino Real, so that the bay flanks them on their left the entire trip. It’s harder to remember that it’s cold here, not when it smells less like the city and more like the sea and they’ve left the cloudy grey of San Francisco behind them.
Trini bursts into startled laughter when Kimberly opens the passenger window without warning and the wind blows her hair all around her face, braids tangling in the salty sea air. She lets it twist and knot, and only when Kimberly slows the car and the wind dies down a little, does she finally brush it back, running her hands through her hair and leaning back in her seat with a contented look on her face. Kimberly’s heart does an uneven thump.
It’s the sort of thing she’s been waiting for all day, the carefree laughter, the nod of Trini’s head to the music. The way she finally relaxes in Kimberly’s car, how she looks around with interest when they drive into town.
“Is Stanford one of your top choices?” Trini asks after they join a tour, standing near the back of the group as their guide delves into the school’s history and town-and-gown relations.
“I don’t know,” Kimberly answers, eyeing the buildings and the archways they walk past. “It’s Stanford.” Trini hums. “Is it one of yours?”
“I didn’t apply,” Trini says offhandedly. “It’s expensive, so there was no point.”
Kimberly stops dead in her tracks, right in the middle of the pathway, so that several people have to walk around her. “What,” she hisses. Trini, several paces ahead, stops to look back at her. “You should have said! Then we wouldn’t have needed to come and visit!” Some of the kids in the group hear her and give her strange looks. Kimberly ignores them.
Trini raises one eyebrow. “It’s Stanford,” she parrots back to her.
Kimberly purses her lips, and starts walking again. The campus is nice enough, wide and open and well-kept, and everything Kimberly’s seen in movies. Their tour guide mentions Stanford’s reputation as the best university in California, notably for its life science programs and research facilities.
When they’re on the road again, driving back up to San Francisco, Trini turns toward her and asks, “So, what did you think?”
Kimberly glances to her right. Trini’s hair is all windswept again, haloing her face and bunching up around the collar of her jacket. It’s late in the afternoon and the sky is tender behind her, bright blue, but edging yellow right above the water. Trini’s eyes glitter a little in the sun shining through Kimberly’s window, face awash in golden light, and Kimberly finds herself saying, “It was beautiful. I’m sure it would be great.”
And then: “But there’s nothing for me there.”
-
“Billy asks how SFSU was.”
“What did you tell him?” The force with which Trini rolls her eyes makes Kimberly laugh.
“What do you think?”
By the time they reach the city again, the sun has set, and the Golden Gate Bridge is lit up in the distance, its towers like two beacons in the darkness. Kimberly takes them all the way up to Fisherman’s Wharf, and they have clam chowder in sourdough bread bowls by the marina.
It smells awful by the pier, like the sea, but punctuated by the biting smell of rotting fish and garbage, not unlike the fishing docks in Angel Grove. Even at night, the sidewalks are busy, illuminated by the glowing lights and neon signs of the shops lining the block.
Trini takes Kimberly to see the fountain in Ghirardelli Square, where the water and the statues reflect the lights strung up around them, and they get a sundae that’s large enough for two Zack-sized people to share in the original chocolate shop. The air smells almost overwhelmingly sweet inside, and they grab the table nearest to the entrance, a few seats down from a family sitting at another table.
“During the holidays,” Trini says, looking out the windows, “they put up a big tree in the square, and they get a bunch of lights. My brothers used to say the shops look like gingerbread houses.”
Kimberly shivers as a gust of wind blows in through the open door, gathering her jacket around her. “You’ve been here a few times?”
Trini hums around her spoon, idly licking a smudge of hot fudge from the corner of her lips and turning to watch the other customers. Kimberly pretends she’s not watching Trini’s mouth.
“No,” Trini says. “I used to live here. We used to live here.”
Kimberly blanks. “Oh.” She can’t think what to say.
“Our parents took us here all the time,” Trini explains. “It was our favourite, and we lived close enough that we could make the trip all the time.” One of the children at the other table laughs at something her father says. “Then, one day when they took my brothers here, they saw me with this girl from class. You know they make these monster milkshakes here? Like, the sort of stuff you see in stupid romcoms,” she bites out, her voice strained.
“Oh,” Kimberly says again. Jealousy claws at the cage of her ribs, creeping up her spine, but she pushes it down. “Trini, I―I’m sorry. That sucks. Like, a lot.” She makes a face.
“Whatever,” Trini says shortly. She shrugs indifferently, looking away from the other table as the mother wipes her daughter’s face with a napkin. She scoops another spoonful of cream and chocolate roughly into her mouth, teeth clacking loudly against her spoon. After a beat, she mutters, “Thanks.” They sit in silence for a while.
“So, I guess SFSU is definitely off the table, then.”
The soft glimmers of a smile flit across Trini’s face.
They drive across the Bay Bridge, luminescent against the black sky. There’s a joke to be made about how the bright yellow lights light Kimberly’s way, but Trini is quiet in her seat, and Kimberly doesn’t want to interrupt her reverie.
Lit up by the street lights lining the bridge and the glowing suspension cables, Trini’s fingers tap rhythmically against her armrest, beads of light scattering against her nails. Her playlist is on something with a lot of piano and a woman singing in Spanish, someone Kimberly doesn’t recognize. By the time they get back to their Airbnb, it’s after midnight, and Trini’s dozing off in her seat; Kimberly has to shake her awake and drag her through the house to their room.
Trini did all the booking. Their room is private, and there are energy bars and fruit set out for them along the shelves. Their private bathroom is across the hall, and everything is spotless.
There’s only one bed.
There’s only one bed, and Kimberly’s not sure why she thought there were going to be two beds, but it’s not really relevant because there’s only one bed.
“Kimberly!”
Kimberly shakes her head to clear it. “Uhm. Sorry, what?”
Trini looks at her weirdly. “I asked if I could go get ready for bed first.”
“No, yeah,” Kimberly says incoherently. “Yeah, you can go get ready first. For bed.”
Trini doesn’t humour her with a response beyond the crinkle in the space between her eyebrows. She leaves the room with her things.
Kimberly has slept in a bed with Trini before, has even held her, and it was in a bed smaller than this one. There was a period of time, after Rita, where Kimberly woke up in Trini’s bed every morning: she’d sit up in the middle of the night, her heart beating a mile a minute, and she would just know, feel in the unique vibrations of her power coin, that Trini was in distress.
But sleeping with Trini when neither of them is having nightmares, when they’re both lucid and clear-headed and they’ve just spent a long day together in each other’s company, feels different. It’s different from passing out during an all-nighter, or falling asleep on the couch in Kimberly’s living room after a long movie.
Kimberly hopes Trini can’t feel the way her heart’s racing for reasons that are decidedly not nightmare-related.
Without a sound, as if summoned by her thoughts, Trini brushes past her, and Kimberly jumps. She scrambles for her things, desperately trying not to make eye contact with Trini, scared Trini might be able to tell what she’s thinking just by looking into her eyes – which is a real concern, now that Kimberly’s thinking about it.
Kimberly tries not to pay attention to anything Trini’s doing, or notice what she’s wearing, or watch which side of the bed she’s getting into and―of course she’s sleeping on the right side, she always sleeps on the right side.
The bathroom is muggy and the mirror is steamed over completely when she goes in and, wow, Trini in the shower is definitely not something Kimberly should be thinking about right before she’s supposed to sleep in the same bed as her. She makes a monumental effort to think about something else instead.
Which is why Kimberly definitely thinks about it while she’s brushing her teeth, and shampooing her hair, and dragging her hands down her face.
When Kimberly finally gets back to the room, the lights are all turned off, and only a sliver of moonlight streaks across the room, coming in through an opening in the curtains, jagged where it runs over the bed and Trini’s unmoving body under the blanket. Kimberly breathes a relieved sigh. She makes her way cautiously toward the centre of the room and tries not to disturb the bed as she slips under the blanket and settles on her side, taking care not to touch Trini.
“A thirty-minute shower?”
Kimberly nearly falls off the bed. “Jesus,” she says hoarsely. “I thought you were asleep.”
“What do you do in the shower that makes you take an entire half hour in there?”
When Kimberly turns onto her other side, Trini is already facing her. She can only just make out her eyes, her hands resting in the space between them, inches away from Kimberly’s right pinky. Trini shifts a little against her pillow, and Kimberly remembers her question.
“I don’t know how you get everything done so fast,” she says.
“It’s just lather and rinse, and it’s a waste of water otherwise. Or are you doing something else in the shower?” Trini’s teeth glint softly in the darkness.
“I―what? No! I―” Kimberly splutters, and Trini snickers at her reaction, the mattress shaking with her laughter. Kimberly sulks petulantly. “Maybe you should teach me how to shower if it’s so important to you,” she mumbles, disgruntled.
The laughter stops abruptly, the bed stilling in its absence. Kimberly’s eyes adjust to the blackness of the room and she sees Trini gaping at her. “Oh my god.” Kimberly closes her eyes. “I didn’t mean it like that.” In the silence that settles over them, Kimberly becomes hyperaware of how warm it is under the blanket, how she can feel the heat of Trini’s body beside hers, and god, she’s slept in a bed with Trini before, this shouldn’t be so hard.
“Well ...” Trini says slowly, “... that’s definitely one way to save water.” She gives a shout of laughter when Kimberly shoves her hard, making indignant noises and ducking to hide the furious blush on her face. Trini shushes her, absolutely tremoring with laughter, the sound of the sheets sliding against their skin loud to Kimberly’s ears. There’s silence again.
“Thanks for doing this with me, Kim,” Trini whispers after a minute, so sincerely that it surprises Kimberly, and for a moment she doesn’t know how to respond.
She wonders if Trini’s been awake in bed this entire time, waiting for thirty minutes just to say this, if she’s been psyching herself up since the moment they set out together on this trip. Every lapse in conversation during car rides, every stoplight. When Kimberly looks up, Trini’s eyes are averted to the ceiling, her fingers flexing to a song Kimberly can’t hear.
It’s the simplest thing in the world, to reach across the distance between them and lay her hand in Trini’s. To skate her pinky across the steady, beautiful pulse in her wrist. To let her fingers wrap around Trini’s hand and grip hard. It’s so simple, and Kimberly can’t even remember why she was panicking before, not when this is the easiest thing she’s ever done in her life.
-
They get up late the next morning.
Kimberly wakes up to her own hair in her face, having turned over onto her back in her sleep. Her right arm is extended awkwardly over her collar, her fingers splayed out across her left shoulder, Trini’s only a breath away.
Dark clouds begin to gather in the sky as they walk to Berkeley. It starts to rain in the afternoon, after they leave campus, slow at first, then in ice-cold, heavy sheets; a few drops hit Trini on the forehead, and she flinches so viciously that Kimberly almost forgets to pretend she didn’t notice. She takes Trini’s hand, slow and soft, and carefully, silently, Kimberly pulls her forward, smiling back at her.
As the rain intensifies, they begin to sprint, feet splashing in the uneven, swamped sidewalks; Kimberly shrieks when she takes the brunt of the water that splashes up when a car drives by, and Trini laughs hysterically at her.
“Asshole!” Kimberly calls out behind her, more to Trini than the driver, but she’s laughing, too, and something warm and alive blazes to life in her chest. She can’t feel the hand that’s holding Trini’s anymore, and her socks are soaked through completely, but she doesn’t let go, and they run and run until they reach their door.
Once they’re past the threshold, Kimberly kicks her boots off and continues to laugh, dripping water onto the hardwood floors, and only when she turns to Trini does she notice that she’s forgotten to let go of her hand.
Kimberly drops it like it’s on fire, and Trini’s still staring at her after she’s rubbed the feeling back into it.
-
“Are there any schools you want to check out on the way to LA? And don’t just say the ones I applied to,” Kimberly says when Trini opens her mouth. Trini rolls her eyes.
“I didn’t apply to any private schools, so there’s just UCLA left, and maybe UC Santa Barbara.”
Kimberly nods absentmindedly, pulling her sun visor down as the glare from the morning sun becomes unbearable, glancing at her phone on the dashboard, set to direct them to Los Angeles. “Oh shit!” She throws her right arm out, catching Trini’s forearm and gripping it hard.
“What? What’s wrong?” Trini looks around, alert.
“I was going to take you to Mountain View!” Kimberly laments regretfully. “We didn’t get a chance yesterday because of all the rain, but I have a few cousins that work at some of the tech companies in the area, and they said they’d take us around.” She leans forward to examine the map on her phone. “If we keep following 880, we can still go back.”
Trini falls heavily back into her seat. “Maybe don’t act like it’s the end of the world next time you say something like that,” she says grouchily.
“It’s important!” Kimberly insists. “You’re going to be choosing between those companies after you graduate.”
An expression, half exasperation and half amusement, graces Trini’s face. “Oh, will I be allowed to choose between all of them?” she asks, sarcasm saturating every syllable.
“Yes,” Kimberly answers without missing a beat, tapping at her phone to change their destination.
“Wait, Kim, no,” Trini says, sighing. “Come on, let’s just go to Santa Barbara, okay?”
Kimberly catches a glimpse of Trini’s face. “Okay,” she relents, entering the new settings into her phone.
“I ...” Trini looks out her window. “I appreciate it, though.” Before Kimberly can say anything, she adds, “Aren’t there any universities you want to see?”
“No,” Kimberly answers dismissively, pursing her lips. “I mean, basically everything you applied for,” she adds quickly, taking the exit off the interstate. “Did you like Berkeley?”
Trini watches a mileage sign pass by her window pensively – Santa Barbara is just under three hundred miles away, Los Angeles sixty miles more.
“Yeah,” she says, “it was fine.”
-
UC Santa Barbara is another of Trini’s safety schools, not as far south as San Diego, but not as well known for its computer science program, either. Kimberly doesn’t even remember applying, and she yawns constantly during the campus tour, tired after five long hours of driving with only one short break for lunch.
The two hours they drive before reaching the apartment Trini booked in Los Angeles seem to drag on and on, not least because the streets are congested with angry cars and traffic so awful it might scare her if she weren’t certain that no car could hurt them.
Kimberly goes to put their things down in the bedroom while Trini explores the rest of the apartment. She throws herself onto the bed, groaning at the sensation of her spine stretching and her joints loosening, and closes her eyes for a minute.
When Kimberly comes to, her jacket is draped across her torso, and the curtains are drawn to block out most of the sunlight. She walks out of the bedroom to find Trini laid out on the couch and looking at her phone. “Hey,” she says.
“Hi,” Kimberly replies, voice rough with sleep. She clears her throat. “How long was I out?”
Trini sits up, checking the time. “Like, two hours.”
Kimberly scrunches up her nose. “I wish you’d woken me up.”
“Then how would I have gotten the pictures of you passed out and fully-clothed in bed for the group chat?”
Kimberly gawks at her, mouth opening and closing wordlessly. Finally, she says, “You’re buying dinner.”
“Okay,” Trini accepts easily.
“And I’m going to get you back.”
“Sure, Kim.”
-
(Trini makes good on her promise and treats Kimberly to dinner. They eat at an all-day brunch place that is so overwhelmingly Californian―in a way that Angel Grove manages not to be―that Kimberly can’t keep a straight face throughout the entire evening.
On the way home, Trini falls asleep. When they arrive outside their apartment, Kimberly parks the car and turns off the engine, undoing her seatbelt and twisting in her seat to take a retaliatory picture of Trini.
Her face is smooth and peaceful in sleep. Trini looks so unlike herself that Kimberly freezes, her thumb hovering over the shutter button on her phone, Trini framed in the display. The only working light pole in the parking lot partially illuminates her face, bringing her features into sharp relief, accentuating her cheekbones and her strong jaw. Where the light touches it, her hair and eyelashes are feathery white and gold.
Inadvertently, without even thinking about it, Kimberly lets her thumb press once, and her phone snaps a picture. She rips her gaze away from the image of Trini before her with difficulty to look down at the photo on her phone.
It’s perfect, so terribly perfect, that Kimberly feels awful, suddenly, for having it. For having seen Trini like this at all.
Later, though, Kimberly will send the photo to Trini, and only Trini, with a victorious comment attached, her heart beating wildly when Trini’s phone vibrates and Trini shifts in her sleep beside her.
In the morning, while Trini’s in the bathroom, Kimberly will wake up to a joking retort, her heart soothed, and they won’t talk at all about how Kimberly sent it at two in the morning.)
-
The traffic is even worse during morning rush hour.
Kimberly grits her teeth against the loud beeping of car horns in her ears, and she has to actively stop herself from crushing the steering wheel in her hands. They stop at the first moderately empty Starbucks they pass on the way to UCLA, and Trini hurriedly exits the car to buy drinks while Kimberly waits at the curb, lights blinking. She doesn’t tease Trini when she comes back with two coffees that say ‘Didi’ on them, too tired and irritated to speak.
They walk around campus a little before joining a tour, Kimberly following Trini’s lead. UCLA, like Berkeley, is one of the more appealing in-state schools in Kimberly’s mind, and she likes Los Angeles.
It’s cool today―or as cool as it gets this far south―and although it’s spring break, there are students spread out around campus, sitting under the arches in the arcades they pass under and basking in the sunlight shining down on the lawn. Kimberly turns to ask Trini whether she knows how long the tour is going to be, but she shuts up immediately.
Trini is staring at the student guiding their tour group, hanging off his every word with rapt attention, her hands stuffed into her pockets and her brow furrowed in thought. She’s engaged, more so than during any of the other visits the two of them have made so far, and it renders Kimberly speechless.
Silently, she falls back a step, following in Trini’s shadow for the entire duration of the tour, nodding at appropriate intervals and only adding her own remarks when Trini makes a comment about the twelve libraries around campus, or how the computer systems in the labs are a little outdated.
They walk by the science buildings and student centres, take a look inside of the main auditorium on campus and the gardens, and Kimberly makes note of how Trini’s eyes light up at each new part of the university, how they jump around, trying to take in as much as possible. After the tour concludes, Trini takes the long way around back to the car, pointing out details she clearly only knows because she’s researched the school, and Kimberly walks slowly, to give her an excuse to look around longer.
On the drive to the coast, Trini is quiet.
“How’d you like it?” Kimberly asks at a stoplight.
“It was kind of perfect,” Trini answers honestly. She doesn’t offer any more insight, even forgets to ask Kimberly what she thought of it, and it’s a stark contrast to how open she was before, during the tour.
They eat at a little Italian place in Santa Monica that serves squid ink pasta and flourless cake, and it’s almost unnerving, how Trini doesn’t joke about either of these things. She’s withdrawn during lunch, reserved, more inclined to do nothing but stare out the window.
It’s windy by the beach. Kimberly gets Trini about as far as the boardwalk reaches across the sand, the path underneath their feet transitioning almost seamlessly from wood to beach, before Trini seems to realize where they’re going and she stops. Kimberly looks back at her from where she’s standing directly on the beach, already barefoot, the sand warm beneath her.
Trini glares daggers at Kimberly before she can say anything. “No.”
Kimberly assumes a plaintive expression, bottom lip jutting out. The corner of Trini’s lips twitches slightly in response, and a burning sense of triumph flares to life in Kimberly’s stomach. She bursts into a grin, unable to keep a straight face.
“We’re already here!”
“No way. I hate sand.”
“One more step?”
“No.”
Kimberly throws her arms up into the air theatrically. “Fine. Can I see your hand?”
Trini snorts. “So you can pull me in? Yeah, I don’t think so.” She crosses her arms. “You’re not going to trick me a second time.”
“Come on, I won’t do that,” Kimberly assures her, holding out a hand, palm up. “Please?”
Trini shoots her a mistrustful look, scrutinizing Kimberly’s face and frowning at the unassuming expression she finds there. Hesitantly, she unfolds her arms and places her right hand in Kimberly’s. Kimberly puts her other hand on top of Trini’s, so that it’s sandwiched securely between both of hers.
“Please,” Kimberly says again, quietly, eyes lowered and fixed to their hands, where her thumbs stroke the back of Trini’s. “It’ll be nice,” she promises, “we can stand by the tideline and let the water come up against our legs. It’s fun.”
“But the sand ...” Trini begins.
“You’ll like it,” Kimberly vows, deliberately looking up at Trini through the sweep of her eyelashes. Trini stares back at her, eyes wide and flitting, just for a second, to Kimberly’s mouth. “And when’s the next time you’re going to be able to do this?”
This last bit seems to allay the last of her doubts. Huffing moodily, the tips of her ears bright red, Trini kicks her shoes and socks off, picking them up with the hand that isn’t still trapped in Kimberly’s. She steps onto the beach and looks up into Kimberly’s beaming face with a reluctant expression on her own. Kimberly’s smile turns sly.
“I totally did get you on the sand in the end,” she gloats.
“Unfairly,” Trini mutters, so quietly Kimberly almost doesn’t hear over the angry screams of the seagulls flying above them and the sounds of the amusement park on the boardwalk.
“Hm?” Kimberly says in an innocuous voice. “Unfairly?”
The blood rushes up to Trini’s face, and she doesn’t say anything.
Kimberly grins again, her heart pounding. She grabs her boots with her right hand, and holds up the hand still holding Trini’s. “Is this okay?” she asks.
Trini looks up at her in surprise, as if expecting Kimberly to start teasing her again. Wordlessly, she nods. Kimberly pulls them toward the water.
It isn’t a long walk. They sidestep the people laying under parasols around the beach, children shrieking in the distance. Trini is restless and uneasy, the muscle in her jaw jumping; once, a man comes sprinting towards them from the side, and she stiffens so fiercely, her grip on Kimberly’s hand tightening, that Kimberly feels it, only moving again when he runs past them.
Kimberly steers them toward a moderately empty part of the beach as they approach the line where the water meets the beach. Trini surveys the darker, wet sand with distaste, eventually turning to look up at Kimberly expectantly.
They take several steps forward in unison, watching the tide climb up the sand and recede again and again, splashing up against their shins. The sun beats down on the backs of their necks.
“This is nice.”
“It’s cold,” Trini says flatly.
“It’s nice!” Kimberly insists, as the tide laps particularly high up her legs, catching the rolled-up hems of her jeans. “It’s cold,” she admits, and then she’s laughing, face tipped up to the sky and shoulders shaking, her legs freezing, the water like bands of ice around her ankles.
And Trini’s laughing, too – that breathtaking, unrestrained sort of laughter that Kimberly hadn’t realized she was working toward until this very moment, and she isn’t thinking at all about how she can’t feel her feet anymore, or how awful the traffic will be driving back to the city, how the smell of car exhaust will seep into her car and her hair and her clothes, not when Trini’s eyes are dancing in the sunlight, and her laughter smells like the sea.
-
There’s a moment, after they get back from the beach, where they’re sitting across from each other in the bed in their apartment. Trini’s scrolling through Yelp on her phone, a look of concentration on her face that carves deep lines between her eyebrows, and she’s chewing on the Sour Patch she made Kimberly get her from the liquor store at the end of the block.
All of it is so unglamorous, so incredibly mundane. Trini throws another yellow candy back into the bag, the flowery scent of her perfume floating in the air between them, and it startles Kimberly, how much she wants, suddenly, to kiss her.
“It’s not just me, right?” she asks recklessly, breaking the relative silence they’d been sitting in.
“Hm?” Trini doesn’t look up from the photo of the decidedly unauthentic enchiladas she’s examining.
“I’m not imagining all of this, am I?”
The display on Trini’s phone turns off. Finally, she looks up, her face guarded. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Kimberly says, “I really want to kiss you right now.”
Trini’s hands betray her. Her phone makes a wrenching creaking noise, and Kimberly swipes it from her grip before she can do something she’ll regret; their fingers brush, and the expression on Trini’s face flickers, fearful and longing and hopeful all at once.
“Kim ...” she says weakly.
“Would that be okay?”
Trini’s eyes drift down to Kimberly’s mouth. And then she’s tipping forward, and Kimberly’s mirroring her, and all at once their lips are meeting.
Kimberly has never been very good at staying still. She’s made up of rash decisions and split-second impulses, of the frantic need to do.
But so much of Trini is quiet observation and soft reassurances, careful planning and cautious execution. She kisses like it, too – quiet and soft and careful and cautious, like even now she’s preparing for the moment Kimberly will pull away and say this entire trip has been a mistake.
But Kimberly doesn’t. She pushes forward and kisses Trini as thoroughly as she’s wanted to for so long now: since they set off together, since Christmas Eve, since the leaves started turning in Angel Grove. Since she’d thrown Trini off that cliff.
Kimberly threads her fingers through Trini’s hair, lets it curl in the dip of her palm and, for once, she slows. Lets herself sink into the feeling of Trini’s thumb slowly following the curve of her collarbone, the soft warmth of the hand on her jaw, lets herself just stop and enjoy what’s happening now.
So, it’s Trini who traces the tip of her tongue over Kimberly’s bottom lip, tentatively at first, then more sure when Kimberly responds in kind. It’s Trini who presses closer, licking carefully into Kimberly’s mouth when her lips part, and sighing when Kimberly shudders under her touch.
After a long few minutes, Kimberly pulls away, breathing hard, their heads knocking gently together when Kimberly melts into Trini, their foreheads touching.
“God,” she breathes out. Trini grins, running her hands up and over Kimberly’s exposed shoulders, fingers tangling in the hair at the base of her neck. They sit like that for a while, catching their breaths, Kimberly reveling in the warmth between them, in the feeling of Trini’s face in her hands.
“Trini,” she says seriously, after her breathing evens out, “I―”
“It’s not just you,” Trini says. Kimberly holds her tongue, her heart performing a frenzied flip in her chest. “I―fuck, it’s definitely not just you.”
Kimberly opens her mouth to say something, but she’s interrupted by the ringing of her phone, vibrating on her pillow. They jump, and Kimberly remembers where they are. Zack’s name flashes across the screen.
“Zack,” she says after picking up and bringing the phone up to her ear, curter than she means to be.
“Hi Kim, you take Trini for a ride yet?”
“Did you have that prepared?” Kimberly asks in a scathing tone, the corners of her lips curling despite herself.
“No. But I do have some other ones if you―”
“I’m putting you on speaker,” Kimberly warns him loudly, shooting furtive glances at Trini. She places the phone between them.
“Hey, crazy girl! I was just asking Kimmy here how the honeymoon’s going.”
“Zack,” Trini bites out, flushing red, “just get to the reason you called.” She sounds just as annoyed about being interrupted as Kimberly feels.
“Well,” Zack says slowly, “don’t freak out, okay? But Tommy Oliver was attacked today.”
The silence lasts for one second.
“What?” Kimberly shrieks as Trini swears effusively.
“I said don’t freak out!”
“We’re going to freak out if you say something like that!” Trini shouts at the phone.
“Tell us what happened,” Kimberly says, intervening before Zack and Trini can get into it.
“Okay, okay. So, Tommy’s just walking down Reefside when a bunch of―” Zack cuts himself off. There’s some indistinct mumbling on the other line.
“Piranha,” Jason says distantly, voice tinny.
“―piranha monsters come flying at her out of nowhere, and they just start beating the crap out of her.”
Kimberly and Trini exchange horrified looks. “Is she―”
“She’s fine!” Zack says hastily. “They only wanted the green power coin, and Tommy says they realized pretty quick that she didn’t have it anymore when she wouldn’t morph. She gave us a heads-up, and we had a good ten minutes to organize before they came after us.”
“So, you guys are fine?” Trini asks.
“Yeah, team’s fine,” Zack assures her. Trini breathes a sigh of relief.
“Zack broke his arm,” Billy adds almost inaudibly.
Zack tries discreetly to shush him as Kimberly and Trini dissolve into another chorus of anxious shouting.
“We’re coming back right now,” Trini says firmly.
“No! See, this is why I didn’t want to call you guys. It’s not a big deal! My arm’s already getting better,” Zack says loudly over Trini’s objections that a broken arm is a big deal.
“Zack ...” Kimberly begins.
“Look, it would have been nice if you guys were here,” he says, “but we handled it. Besides, you guys are coming back tomorrow anyway – just stick to the plan. We can handle everything until then. And then you can hurry back, okay?”
Kimberly turns to look at Trini. She looks conflicted and like she’s about to argue, but then she sighs.
“Fine,” Trini surrenders. “But we’re driving back first thing in the morning.” She looks up at Kimberly when she says this. Kimberly nods her agreement.
“Do you guys know who―I mean, was it―”
“It wasn’t Rita,” Zack answers. Before Kimberly can feel relieved about that, he says, “Zordon thinks it’s some new baddie after the Zeo Crystal, though. Someone he thought his team got rid of a long time ago.”
Kimberly doesn’t know how to respond to that. She doesn’t look up to see Trini’s reaction.
“We’re really glad you guys are okay,” she says instead.
“Yeah,” Trini chimes in quietly.
“It was nothing, it was just a little break,” Zack says airily, but he sounds touched.
“Well, actually―” Billy begins.
“Okay, bye!” Zack says swiftly, hanging up.
Kimberly and Trini sit in silence for a while, absorbing everything they just heard. It’s almost absurd how, only a few minutes ago, Kimberly had been happy beyond words, how she’d told Trini how she felt about her, how they’d finally kissed, and Kimberly was going to ask Trini if she’d like to visit the Griffith Observatory after dinner, but now it’s like the air has been completely sucked out of the room.
“I think,” Trini says finally, voice lacking any emotion, “we should probably get some rest, so we can get up early tomorrow.”
Kimberly looks at her with concern. “Okay,” she says carefully. “Trini―”
“I’ll go shower first, okay?” Trini announces, turning away. “We’ll―we’ll talk more tomorrow.”
“That’s not what I―” Trini closes the bathroom door behind her.
By the time Kimberly finishes getting ready, Trini’s already in bed, turned on her side so that Kimberly can’t see her face.
She stands at her side of the bed for a minute, waiting, hoping, but Trini doesn’t move, so Kimberly gets into bed beside her, staring up at the ceiling, her eyes wide open. It’s still light out; Zack’s words linger in the room, and Kimberly is sure Trini is no more asleep than she is.
The moon is out, shining through the thin curtains hanging from the window, when Kimberly wakes up later to Trini trembling in her sleep beside her and her power coin quivering agitatedly in her grasp.
“Trini,” Kimberly whispers sleepily in the darkness, sitting up. Trini doesn’t respond beyond a whimper.
After months and months of coming to Trini’s room while she’s having a nightmare, Kimberly knows not to touch her, but it still makes her feel useless, not being able to do anything but try to wake her up.
It was too much, to hope for the week’s streak of dreamless nights to last.
“Trini,” she says again, louder this time, “hey, wake up.” Trini begins to toss and turn in bed, thrashing around violently a couple seconds later. “Trini!”
Trini bolts upright in bed, hair wild, her power coin hovering ominously in the air above her nightstand like a tiny yellow sun. She looks around jerkily until her eyes focus on Kimberly, coin seeming to glow even more brightly, wobbling. Kimberly puts up her hands, her own coin still clenched in one of them, shining dully in the yellow light. After a tense ten seconds, Trini’s coin drops with a clatter back onto the table, making her jump, and Kimberly places hers back down beside her charging phone, where she’d left it before going to bed. The tears smudging Trini’s face gleam even in the weak moonlight.
Slowly, Kimberly coaxes Trini into lying back down, this time on her other side, so that they’re facing each other like they had that first night in Berkeley. Inch by inch, Kimberly allows her hand to reach across the bed, like it had then, until her fingers meet Trini’s temple, and she diligently brushes the errant strands of hair sticking to her cheeks away from her face.
Trini begins to shake again, this awful shivering that takes hold of her entire body, and when Kimberly moves closer, she notices new moisture gathering in Trini’s eyes.
Trini scrunches them shut, tears pouring from the corners of her eyes, and presses the back of her hand to her mouth.
“Kim,” she whispers helplessly.
And it kills Kimberly, to see her like this, to feel so utterly powerless in the face of Trini’s fears and nightmares.
She wraps an arm around Trini’s waist, pulling her in until their hips meet and their knees knock against each other. Trini is small―she’s always so small―and she fits perfectly under Kimberly’s chin, burying her face in Kimberly’s neck, her left hand resting on Kimberly’s stomach and the other clenching tightly around a fistful of her shirt.
Gently, Kimberly guides Trini half on top of her, twisting to lie mostly on her back and slipping her other arm around Trini. She strokes her hair soothingly, stopping every now and then just to hold her. Kimberly’s neck is damp where Trini’s face touches it, her wet eyelashes dragging against Kimberly’s throat.
Kimberly holds her until, gradually, the shivering stops, and then the crying a few minutes after that.
And after Kimberly is sure Trini has gone back to sleep, she cries, too.
-
When Kimberly wakes up in the morning, her arms are empty, and Trini is no longer beside her. She begins to panic, thinks for a ridiculous moment that Trini has left her, before she realizes Trini is sitting on the end of the bed, legs dangling, her back to Kimberly.
“Trini,” Kimberly says, relieved. “God, for a second I thought you’d―what’s wrong?”
At the sound of Kimberly’s voice, Trini jumps so violently that the bed frame shakes. She sits, trembling, and doesn’t respond. Kimberly slides out from under the covers, moving down the bed to sit beside Trini, watching her face carefully. Kimberly can’t remember Trini acting like this in all the times she’s woken up in Trini’s room, not since that first night after Tommy had shown up with the green power coin in her hand and Rita's words in her mouth.
“Hey,” Kimberly says quietly, “what’s the matter?”
Trini has that wild, cornered look in her eyes, and her gaze flickers to the curtained window, as if she’s considering jumping out of it. And Kimberly knows she could, if she wanted to – Trini’s climbed rock faces and jumped canyons for less.
“Trini.” Kimberly slips off the bed and crouches in front of her, grabbing one of her hands. She breathes a silent sigh of relief when Trini doesn’t pull away. “You can talk to me.”
“It’s ... it’s stupid.”
Kimberly squeezes Trini’s hand, and now Trini’s eyes flicker to their hands instead. “It’s really not.”
It’s the reassurance, maybe, or the quiet warmth between them, but Trini takes a deep breath before, finally, she says, “I have this idea. This idea where, if I can just get out of Angel Grove, just get away from my parents and everyone there, just ... leave, it’ll all be okay.” Trini throws a fearful glance at Kimberly before rushing on. “And since middle school, since all the moving began, LA has always been it for me. Like, if I can just make it to this city, I’ll be able to―” Trini laughs, looking up at the ceiling to stem the flow of her tears, “―to wear the clothes I want, have the friends I want to have.” Trini hesitates, looks back down at Kimberly, then says, “Date the people I want to date.” Kimberly’s heart does a somersault.
Trini laughs again, this empty, wretched sound that makes Kimberly jerk involuntarily. Thankfully, Trini doesn’t notice. “And here I am now, in LA, with the girl I like, and it doesn’t matter at all, because I’m going to have to go back to that shit-hole town. But hey, at least I have friends I actually care about that’ll be stuck with me, right?” Trini doesn’t laugh this time.
“That’s the worst part of this, isn’t it?” she says sombrely, playing with Kimberly’s fingers. “The whole Power Ranger thing is one of the best things that’s ever happened to me, but it’s also one of the worst. And the moment shit starts getting okay,” she continues, the movement of her fingers against Kimberly’s wrist making Kimberly shiver, “I’ll have a nightmare, or I’ll be given some other reminder of how this is it for us. How, even if everyone else has forgotten about what happened last year, the five of us are never going to be allowed to move on.”
“Trini, that’s―that’s not true,” Kimberly protests, but her words sound feeble even to her own ears.
Trini scoffs wetly. “Oh, come on, Kim. You don’t think I’ve thought about it? You don’t think I know that you’ve been thinking about it, too?”
“I―” Kimberly stops speaking abruptly. It’s true, all of it. This entire trip has been something out of a dream, but it can’t last forever; sooner or later, this perfect illusion will break.
Trini is right: eventually, they’ll have to go back, and while everyone else in their year will be thinking about which college offers they’ll accept, or whether to take a gap year, the five of them will be stuck in Angel Grove for the rest of their lives. Suddenly, the thought of working even one more day at the Dunkin’ Donuts in town makes Kimberly want to throw up.
“So―so, if you could, you’d―LA―”
“Stupid, right?” Trini says again, her voice rough with her tears. She sighs, her breath falling shakily from her mouth, and lets her head tip back so that her face is tilted up towards the pockmarked ceiling again, the column of her neck smooth and beautiful, her hair curling around it. “God, I’d go anywhere.”
Kimberly inhales sharply. She’d said something like that last year, standing before the glittering lights of their town. She wonders now, as she has a hundred times before, whether Jason’s offer had been her last chance to get out of Angel Grove.
Kimberly had been so afraid then, so scared she’d never make anything of herself, so sure that she would die if she was that girl who sent pictures of her best friend to her ex for even a moment longer.
So scared and so ready to just go, just be anywhere else but where she was.
But if she’d gone, Kimberly’s certain she would never have gotten to know Billy, would never have gotten to know Zack. And Trini – Trini would just be the girl in her English class that transferred in a month ago.
“But it doesn’t matter now, does it?”
Something about Trini’s uncertainty clears Kimberly’s head.
And she thinks she’d like to do something brave for once.
“So let’s do it,” Kimberly says without thinking, without really knowing what she’s saying, only that she needs to get it out now, before she can talk herself out of it. “UCLA, right?”
“What?” Trini says, startled.
“I’m not going to let you stay in that town, Trini. I’m going to UCLA, and you’re coming with me.”
“Kim, we’re―we’re the Power Rangers, we talked about this!” Trini says helplessly, but there’s this tremor in her voice, this little hopeful note, some part of her that wants to believe Kimberly, and it strengthens Kimberly’s resolve.
“You’re not staying in Angel Grove,” she says again, firmly, “I won’t let you.”
“There’s no way we can―what are you doing?”
“Calling Billy,” Kimberly answers readily, and now that she’s said it, she can’t believe she hadn’t thought of it before. She dials his number and holds out her phone between the two of them. It rings out loud twice before the call connects.
“Hello?” Billy says.
“Hey Billy, it’s Kim and Trini.”
“Oh, hi Kim, hi Trini!” Billy says cheerfully.
“Uh, hey Billy,” Trini says, still looking at Kimberly in confusion.
“Quick question, B. We were somehow transported to our homes after that train crash the night we found the power coins, weren’t we?”
Trini frowns at Kimberly, as Billy answers, simply, “Yes.” Kimberly’s heart jumps into her throat.
“So we can do that again, right?”
“Well,” Billy says, “the teleportation mechanism seems to kick in when we’re in mortal danger, which we were at the gold mine. But then there were all the times we were in danger and didn’t teleport, like at the docks,” he adds matter-of-factly. Trini winces, but Billy keeps talking, apparently unbothered. “And I’ve been trying to figure out why.”
The beat of Kimberly’s heart quickens. “Did you come up with anything?”
“I think our ability to teleport, like all of our other powers, is connected to our power coins,” Billy explains, “and our power coins are connected to the morphing grid.”
“So,” Trini says slowly, “we must be out of sync with the morphing grid somehow?”
“Like how we couldn’t morph before.”
“Exactly.” The sound of a pencil scratching against paper filters out of Kimberly’s phone.
“So ...” Kimberly says after waiting for a minute, “... do you think it’ll be possible for us to teleport when and wherever?”
“Oh!” Billy says. “Yes! I’ve been working on the Team Beam―I call it the Team Beam―for a while. It’s kind of like when we were trying to morph, like you said, Kimberly – we just have to practise and connect to the grid. Alpha helped me, and I think I finally got the hang of it – I beamed myself to MIT yesterday! You just need to calibrate your connection to the morphing grid, too, and then I can teach you.”
Kimberly stares directly at Trini and, without looking away, her heart racing, she says, “Thanks Billy, that would be great. Talk to you when we get back.”
“Bye Kim, bye Trini!”
“Bye,” Trini says dazedly. Kimberly ends the call, setting her phone aside. Trini looks up then, her grip vice-like on Kimberly’s hand. “So,” she says finally, eyes wide, “so ...”
“My parents wanted me to go to Stanford,” Kimberly says, unbidden. “They both went there, and I would have made the set. But after everything, with―” Kimberly swallows hard, “―with my old friends, I―” She takes a deep breath, calmed by the sympathetic look Trini gives her. They’ve talked about this before, Kimberly and Trini, and Jason and Billy and Zack, but it’s hard to address the shame that still sits in her chest. Kimberly exhales. “That isn’t what I want anymore.”
“Kim, I ...” Trini begins unsurely.
“We’ll work it out,” Kimberly says for her. “We’ll find a cheap one-bedroom apartment off-campus, and we’ll work part-time at restaurants for the free food. I’ll give up my thirty-minute showers. I’ll even do that god-awful eco-green thing you were talking about to save on gas.”
Trini makes an outraged noise. “It’s not awful!”
Kimberly grins. “No, it’s not.”
Trini’s mouth opens, then closes. She looks at a loss for words, like she’d been prepared to list the pros of biking over driving to class and she doesn’t know what to do with herself, now that Kimberly has acquiesced so quickly. A beat later, Trini says, “Even the showers?”
“Even the showers,” Kimberly swears, untangling Trini’s other hand from the bed sheets. Trini’s hands are small and warm in Kimberly’s, and Trini holds on to her desperately. “I’ll do all of it, if you do it with me.”
Trini stares at her for a moment; she has that awe-struck look on her face again, the one that started all of this, that suggests she’s looking at something wonderful, and Kimberly thrills once more at the idea that Trini is looking at her.
Finally, a tremulous smile splits Trini’s lips, her teeth pearly white behind them. She lunges forward in a surprise move that catches Kimberly off guard, her arms winding around Kimberly’s neck, and they fall to the ground like that, Kimberly’s hands lying uselessly at her sides as Trini settles on top of her, golden where the sunlight streaming in through the window touches her.
A swooping sensation, something like the exhilaration Kimberly felt when she flew for the first time, or when she leapt across that canyon to follow Trini―or more, still, like the adrenaline rush when she fell off that cliff with her―spreads through her stomach, and Kimberly sets her hands hesitantly on Trini’s waist, letting her arms wrap slowly, wonderingly around her.
“We’re really doing this,” Trini says, laughing breathlessly, squeezing Kimberly hard, as if to reassure herself that she’s here, that all of this is really happening. “We’re really doing this.”
Kimberly nods soothingly, squeezing back just as tightly, and Trini is real in her arms, real and solid and a million miles away from that delicate, fragile thing she’d held the night before. “Hope you like instant noodles, babe.”
Trini’s laughter fills the room, and Kimberly remembers the smell of heliotropes, of the salty sea air, and it’s like something beautiful.
Kimberly joins Trini, and they laugh and laugh until their sides ache and the floor tremors worryingly beneath them, and Kimberly can’t even remember what was so funny, can’t think of anything at all, except that the joy and relief of it fills her up like it had the first time the five of them morphed, like this living thing in her chest, and she’s content to lie on the floor of this apartment forever, if it means Trini will be beside her.