Chapter One, First Confessions

Maureen always wished she had been named Morwenna instead, or at least since renting Masterpiece Theatre's Poldark from 1975 with her mother, who said to her, "Oh, I envy your seeing this the first time." A Welsh name (she had looked it up), it meant either "white, blessed seas" or "maiden" depending on how you translated it. She liked to think it had something to do with Aphrodite, born from the white sea foam and reflected that Aphrodite probably hadn't stayed a maiden for long, being who she was but at the moment she left the waves and stepped onto the shore she was pure and clean.

Maureen, who was still a virgin at fifteen and very proud of it, loved thinking about Greek mythology and the origins of words and ideas. She rather regretfully concluded that the connection between Morwenna meaning "white, blessed seas" or "maiden" and the story of Aphrodite's birth was dubious at best but she wasn't quite ready to give it up; A girl could dream. She said the name aloud, "Morwenna" softening the W to make it sound like, "More-hwen-ah." People would comment on the fact that she sometimes had a vaguely English accent, probably due to watching so many TV shows and movies from the British Isles but she didn't care. Things sounded nicer that way.


The bell rang signaling the end of the lunch period and bringing her back from her Greek mythology-inspired reverie. The lunchroom, a large warehouse-like structure with painted white walls and square white pillars holding up the ceiling, housed roughly twenty round white tables at which roughly two hundred students sat every day to eat. Unless it was nice out, and then most people sat outside unless the hornets were bad. Maureen had been stung the previous year when she had waved her hand good-bye to one of her friends and smacked a hornet on what must have been its stinger. Her hand got all swollen and itchy for an entire week but she had a good story to tell, anyway: "I just waved my hand right into it, look now it's all swollen and red!" she breathed to anyone who would listen.

Today, however, Maureen was not in the lunchroom with everyone else (there was a blizzard, it being an unusually snowy February) or outside but in the library. She had been spending every lunch break reading through the titles that she thought sounded familiar or impressive that she could find in the fiction section. So far she had made it through I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Flowers for Algernon, Mill on the Floss, Mrs. Dalloway, Huckleberry Finn, and Watership Down. She had been meaning to read them and here was her opportunity.

Whenever Maureen heard people talking about books or when she found out that movies were from books or whenever she got to the end of an old paperback from the fifties or sixties with the lists of "Classics of Literature" that you could purchase by sending money to the address (she wondered if you could still buy books that way) she would try to make a mental note of the authors and titles so that when she was walking along the library isles the names would jog her memory and she could say to herself, "Oh yes, I've been meaning to read that."

Sometimes the books were boring at parts. Mill on the Floss had taken her forever and she hadn't been able to figure out why the two main characters had to die at the end, especially after she had put in all that work to get through the old-fashioned language. Watership Down had been better but she'd still felt compelled to skip over some of the boring parts to get through it the first time. Since coming to high school she had met a few more people like her, people who enjoyed reading as much as she did but they didn't spend their lunch hours in the library and they certainly didn't read literature, preferring manga, science fiction and romances. Maureen couldn't say that she blamed them; she couldn't explain why she soldiered through George Elliot and Mark Twain despite their relative difficulty when she liked the books her friends suggested too, especially Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

She left the library furtively, as she did every day, wondering what people would think if they knew. She suspected that someone must know by now, as she'd been following this routine for weeks and sure enough, as she turned a corner she saw Lynne, who brightened and said, "Morrie! Missed you at lunch today, everything alright? We've been kind of worried." Good, thought Maureen, maybe they would be nicer to her now, if she ever decided to start going to lunch again. Before she had started her forays into the library, Maureen had felt increasingly alienated from her "friends" who would sometimes tease her for making what they called, "Non sequiturs" in their conversations together. If they would only be patient they would see how what she was saying related to the conversation topic. It had become a joke, though and they frequently wouldn't let her finish by changing the topic or pretending that she hadn't said anything once they had amused themselves by making fun of her by saying something like "You are the non-sequitur queen!"

"Are you still coming to Leon's house for D & D tomorrow?" asked Lynne. "If you still want me too," Maureen retorted. "Of course we still want you, although the group has gotten pretty big since Magda started showing up, I can't believe we have so many girls, this is awesome." Lynne had often complained that her boyfriend Leon's Dungeons and Dragons group was too much of a sausage fest but since Magda and Maureen had been showing up the boys had been complaining that the campaign had become too "girly." Maureen had only been invited to fill a vacant spot left by Rod, who'd graduated and left to join the army and so could no longer fill the role of the group's Cleric. Having read enough Tolkien to get the general idea, she had agreed, although somewhat reluctantly. She caught enough flak at school for still being in the Girl Scouts.

They'd spent a somewhat tedious few hours one cold Saturday night during Christmas break drawing up a character sheet and rolling skill points for her character, Gwennevere, a half-elf Cleric who wielded a staff and dagger, as well as magic. Maureen had felt guilty taking up so much of their time but they explained that each of them had needed help for their first campaign, too. It was easy to lose track of time in Mike's basement, as there were no windows to let in any natural light. She'd rolled rather well on her first five tries, rolling over fifteen for all of the skill levels, so she decided at Lynne's urging to keep those scores. She'd had to decide what feats to take, where she was from, her name, physical attributes and which deity to worship, of which there were several to choose from.

Gwennevere the half-elf Cleric worshiped the Raven Queen, the deity devoted to the destruction of the undead. Maureen hated zombie and horror movies, so the idea appealed to her, although Leon had explained to her that it wasn't necessary for her character to reflect her personality or even her gender unless she wanted it to. Leon related gleefully how he had spent one campaign as a female dwarf rogue, "And what a terror he was, too," Mike had interjected, with his eyes wide, "Once he rolled three natural twenties in a row, killing practically all of the drows himself, oh, that round was a bitch and a half!"

Maureen finished her character sheet, giving Gwennevere long flaxen hair, a black cloak, a height of six foot one inches and as an afterthought, an eye patch. "Ooh, I wouldn't want to meet her down a dark alley!" Mike declared, glancing at the drawing she had been encouraged to make of her character. "Well, you're going to be meeting her down a dark dungeon, so you'd better get used to the way she looks." she replied. To her gratification, everyone laughed.

They had been gaming at Mike's house even though Leon was the Dungeon Master, because Leon's house was being fumigated. Mike's house didn't have the variety of snacks and drinks that Leon's house did but they usually ended up ordering pizza so it didn't matter as much. As usual, despite getting to Mike's at four, the actual gaming didn't begin until around six, after they had made themselves comfortable in the finished basement, arranged around several card tables Mike's dad had retrieved from the garage. Leon sat at the head, sequestered from the others by way of a three-paneled piece of illustrated cardboard meant to keep the players from seeing what was in store for them.

To Maureen's left sat Lynne and Magda, effectively segregating the girls "So you can giggle or talk about clothes or whatever the fuck girls talk about," as Johan had put it. Johan was sitting to Maureen's right and to his right was Leon. Directly across from her hunched over his collection of miniatures sat Mike, wearing the new woolen cape he had purchased at the Renaissance Festival, or "Fest" as they called it, which was only just voluminous enough to obscure his rather plentiful stature. Steve hadn't yet shown up, having not yet gotten off work at Dominoes, where he worked with his girlfriend Magda and so was able to get a discount for the group.

"Did you see Firefly last night?" said Johan, somewhat loudly, as Maureen put the finishing touches on Gwennevere's buskins using a set of colored pencils she had brought from home. "Man, I would not mind living on a spaceship if I got a Companion!" "Especially if they all looked like Inara," said Mike, "Wouldn't that suck, only having an ugly Companion available? "What, like Dr. Who?" asked Maureen, wondering why boys would get so excited about having a platonic female friend to travel space with. Her mother had introduced her to the series starring Tom Baker as a child while the reruns were playing on public television. Actually, once she thought about it, her mother had made her watch Star Wars, Star Trek and most of the Terri Gilliam movies, as well as several Masterpiece Theatres. "You haven't seen Firefly?!" Johan sneered, "Shun! Shun!" he exclaimed, turning away his head, crossing his arms at her and making fists. "She hasn't got cable, it isn't that big a deal!" retorted Mike, "I can burn you the first season, if you want," he leaned over and whispered across the table.

There was a knock on the door and Steve triumphantly descended the stairs shortly thereafter carrying four pizzas and three two-liter bottles, still in his Dominoes hat and uniform. "Didn't have time to change," he said apologetically. "I think you look hot, I love a man in uniform," cooed Mike. "Hands off, he's mine!" Magda said as she skipped over to where Steve was setting down the pizzas, embracing her boyfriend and kissing him on the mouth. "Let's have some music! I just bought Love. Angel. Music. Baby.!" said Lynne, walking over to the very expensive entertainment system recently purchased by Mike's parents. "Oh God! Not Gwen Stephanie!" Johan wretched and made an unhappy face. "Whatever, but I am not spending another five hours listening to the complete works of Metallica," Lynne said flatly, to which Johan returned, "Excuse me, but it would take way longer than five hours, do you even know how many albums they have?" Leon looked back and forth and considered the two of them. "I wouldn't mind a little Gwen Stephanie, put her on, we can listen to something else later."

"Wait, let me put it on," Mike hurried over and took L.A.M.B. from Lynne. "The rents just bought this new stereo and it's kind of tricky and they'd kill me if anything happened to it." As Steve got out his dice and character sheet Magda and Lynne began to dance and sing along to Rich Girl. "Hey, isn't that from Fiddler on the Roof?" Maureen was astonished that she recognized the second track of the album, being anything but up on music trends. "Dunno, could be, haven't seen it," said Lynne, "come and dance with us!" Maureen got up and they danced together until it was time to start gaming, the boys not bothering to pretend not to watch.