07:10

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Each loop, Nova's reason of death gets more and more creative. Sometimes it felt like a joke; like the god or the universe or whatever It is that is responsible for this mess is having fun creating anything that could make Nova die.

She had already drowned, shot by a gun, stabbed by a knife, got run over by five different vehicles (a truck, a taxi, a motorcycle, a police car, and heck, even a train), fell from my window at least eight times (due to wildly different reasons), poisoned, died on a fire . . . after about thirty loops, I had forgotten everything else. Sometimes, a loop plays exactly the same as the other ones, and I feel stupid when I don't catch it any sooner before she 'dies'.

I feel like Nova had gone through enough, and I don't think, if ever I'd get out of this loop, I would see her the same way again. Not after I'd seen her break her skull or lose her breath after choking on a rambutan seed, or after I'd seen her get run over by a car at least a horrendous amount of times.

When I opened my eyes for the nth time and saw the exact same ceiling of my room, I felt tired. Calculating all the hours spent with Nova all those loops, I guess I'd been awake for approximately 29 hours straight.

Seriously, I knew I was going insane.

I guess I was catatonic like that in my bed for a good ten minutes before I heard the same, rhythmic knock on my window. Tick tick, tick, tick tick, tick. This time I felt too tired to pretend to be shocked she was there; I've already used up all my lines ("Nova, what are you doing here?" "What the hell, Nova?" "Oh, god! Why are you there?" "What on earth?" (and many other variations of those)) so I just opened the window and said, "I knew you were coming."

She grinned, although it was evident she was struggling in my window.

"Hey," she said. "Mind pulling me in there?"

I didn't say anything else because I was already holding her forearm, pulling her in with all the strength I still had left in my mentally, and perhaps multi-dimensionally drained body. As soon as she was inside, I began to think of all the possible scenarios that could play out. Depending on the way I responded or pulled her inside my room (whether she had fallen on the floor, or fallen on top of me, or if I never pulled her at all) she would say a variety of lines. Each line depends on each different scenario that could occur in a loop, and sometimes it is all unique from each other, which, even for a little, makes the loop a little bearable.

In that loop, since she had successfully climbed inside with no problems at all, she joked about me having super strength, which I had heard twice from her already. It was the first time I had said, "I knew you were coming", so she had a new line to say.

"How come you knew?" she asked with an amused laugh.

"I just know," I said. "I dreamt about it."

"Oh, so you're clairvoyant now. Wow. Every day, I learn a new thing about you," she said, leaning her back against the wall beside my window while crossing her arms.

"Every day?" I said back to her, laughing. I sat at the edge of my bed, looking at her. No matter how many times it happened, watching her die and seeing her smiling and alive in my bedroom twenty minutes later makes me feel so much better. "What did you learn yesterday?"

"That you've got a car," she said, and I already knew that the 'plot' of the loop was already starting. She uncrossed her arms and walked closer to me. Next thing I knew, her long legs bent and suddenly she was kneeling in front of me. "Listen, Miss Cheerleader. I need your help."

We've got a gig tonight, and I badly need a ride. My bandmates are stranded at the venue, and they can't pick me up. I don't have a car. Too broke for a taxi. No buses anymore. My motorcycle is in the repair shop. My skateboard is at my other friend's house. You're the closest I can go to that has a car. Can you help me?

The simple answer is that I don't want to. I simply do not. She died the worst ways when I had driven for her. I surely did not want to drive across a truck and watch her get stabbed with car window glasses, for the nth time, so I had to convince her to stay.

"I can't drive," I said, barely even thinking about the lie. I had realized that I'd lied for the second time on the time loop escapade, which I had to be careful about because the first time I lied to her, she thought I hated her – which couldn't be insanely farthest from the truth.

"Can Kent?"

"What?"

"Can your boyfriend drive me there?"

I chose either between gagging or laughing, but laughing was the cutest possible choice. And the safest. "Who?"

"Kent? Your boyfriend? The guy you've been flirting with in the locker area this morning?"

"God, Nova. And I thought you're learning things about me," I said with an aghast smile, and although it was subtle, a slight smirk tugged on Nova's lips.

"What d'ya mean?" Nova said, getting up to her feet and sitting next to me. "Is there some mistake with my – well, assumption?"

"So many."

"Which are?"

"Kent can't drive you there because he is not my boyfriend and for the record, if it matters, I have never flirted with him. My whole life."

"That's not what I'm hearing in the school hallways," she said with a teasing smile. She was playing.

"Believe what you're hearing from the woman herself, Nova. In the four corners of her bedroom."

Something about that made me feel the gravity of the intimacy we were in. Nova and I. Alone in my bedroom. What else could happen aside from her falling to her death from my window?

"Guess I kind of had a feeling the rumors aren't true," Nova said, shrugging.

"How so?"

"I saw you." Nova leaned on her other elbow, her eyes trailing from my bed sheets up to my eyes. "You never looked at him."

I looked away. "That sounds kinda funny." What did she mean, I never looked at him? Was my extreme lesbianism and hate for men so obvious?

"Like earlier," she said. I realized she wasn't done yet. "You were smiling, talking to him, but your eyes were somewhere else, y'know what I mean? Like, you weren't even interested in whatever the hell he was saying. It's like your eyes were dead and you couldn't wait for the conversation to be over."

"Jesus," I exclaimed. "Why am I being psychoanalyzed?"

"I mean, if you wanna pretend to like the guy, do better," she said, and then she began laughing. A moment of silence hung before she awkwardly began talking again. "So . . . you don't like him?"

"We're not here to discuss my romantic interests, are we?" I said, shifting the topic. Being stared at closely, being analyzed by the very Nova Turner, was not good for my blood and heart. "You're here for a car."

"Now that I think about it, I'm not." I furrowed my brows when Nova began taking off her boots, and even so when she confidently lay herself down on my bed. "Let me sleep over!"

"Nova," I said, my cheeks burning. She's lying on my bed! "Are you serious?"

"Why, yes," she said. "I am a naturally curious person. And I am very curious about you. I won't sleep tonight without getting all the answers I need."

Nova Turner, as much as she was beautiful and interesting and insanely attractive, was sure a headache. I sighed, resigning to my fate, and sat on my bed again, just a few inches away from her. I could feel the bed weighing down on the pressure of her body. She was still looking at me.

"Are you sure you'd want to miss your gig?"

"I'd like to take a rest from flying bras for a night."

"No one actually does that!" I know because I was always at their gigs. This lesbian's fantasy is out of this world.

She shrugged, smiling lopsidedly. "They might as well."

"Have you always been a playgirl?" I said with an accusatory tone. "Do you kiss your fangirls backstage, call them baby on the phone, and tell them they're the only girl that made you feel a certain way?"

"Woah, where the hell are these coming from?" she said, sitting up, putting both of her palms in the air like a police officer had pointed a gun at her. "A playgirl?"

"Sounds guilty to me!"

"I have so much to unpack from that." Nova crossed her legs. For a moment she just looked at me. I slid across my bed and lay my back against my bed frame, then a smile plastered on her face. "Why are you assuming I'm kissing girls?"

A hammer might as well crush into my skull. I scrambled through my brain searching for something – anything – to reply, but with her face so close to me and with her attractive smile lit up by the closest orange lamp on my bedside table, I knew I had lost.

"God, Nova. Have you seen yourself?"

"What does that even mean?" She almost laughed out these words.

"You – you have the word gay written all over you."

"Where?"

"I don't know. In your rings? In your leather jackets? Shoot. You're like, a curly Angelina Jolie."

My face was burning so much I decided I needed to wash it with water, but when I stood up, her hand circled my wrist and kept my ass glued on my bed.

"Listen," she said. "I have more questions for you."

She sounded so serious all of a sudden, despite the naughty smile on her face, that I didn't move an inch.

"And for some reason I just have so much to say."

I knew what she meant. Spending 29 hours in my time loop extravaganza and spending each of those watching her die in multiple ways, I have mixed emotions I can't even understand myself. In a way, I felt so much closer to her, although I knew nothing felt real at that point but also, I felt sort of scared – like seeing her outside comes along with the feeling that she might die. I don't know which is the loop that is going to be it, but I have no choice but to go with the loops over and over again until she survives the night. Even if it meant watching her die a hundred more times.

"Me, too, actually," I just said.

"You know . . ." she began to say. "It's funny because I think we've never really hung out before. Like, really."

Suddenly I remembered the last time we shared a drink.

"Are you counting out that night?"

She smiled, looked at my ceiling, then gently shrugged. Nova looked at me again with a nostalgic face. "Well . . . I guess we do have that one."

We fell silent. I remember that night with a heavy heart. "Sorry. For laughing that time."

"What?"

"You know . . . when you – when you asked me."

"Oh. Oh. Cora, no," she said. "It's fine. Jesus. That was very weird of me to ask, too."

"Not really. It's a simple question," I said.

"Can you answer it now?"

"Oh."

"Really, I'm curious," she said. Her voice was suddenly much lower, like a whisper. "I have so much to ask."

The amount of sincerity in her face was too genuine to resist. I tried to look away, to even shift the conversation, but I didn't know how. It was just hard to be confronted by something you've been struggling with for a long, long time.

Realizing I will never be attracted to men was like a sucker punch in the gut. Society values men and being in a spectrum where you know you'd never want their a.) validation, b.) attraction and c.) basically anything from them, making them completely excluded from your vicinity of desires and needs, is tremendously isolating. I know my mother would accept me no matter what, but knowing she looked at me as a baby and dreamt of me having a husband and an 'ideal life' breaks my heart.

Being a lesbian is a special part of my identity, although it was the most difficult thing to come to terms with. This meant I would wash my mouth when I kiss a boy, and I would be frowned upon by girls my age, boys would look at me and ask me to kiss a girl in front of them, people would search up my sexuality on a disgusting porn site, and perhaps, most likely, I would never be always fully accepted and safe in a world that is confused and freaked out with people like me.

And then I realized, as I sat in front of Nova, I have never in my life felt so safe. The idea that if I said these scary thoughts in front of her is comforting. I knew I would feel nothing but be completely understood, because she would understand and would see where I was coming from.

It was funny, because no matter how many versions of Nova I met, I would always and always find a way to like her even more. 

♫