Free Welcome to Night Vale by Joseph Fink Page A

for a lasting friendship.
    Sometimes she was teased, called terrible names by other children. Sometimes, those children were not the same race as one of her parents. Conversely, those same children were often the same race as her other parent.
    As Diane became a teenager, she continued to hear not only about her race but also about her body.
    She was a girl, not yet a woman. She was fifteen years old.
    Imagine a fifteen-year-old girl of mixed-race parents.
    That’s pretty good. That’s very close, she might say to anyone who described what she looked like. Diane didn’t know what she looked like. She never cared to know. Many people would tell her anyway.
    When her body won the race to womanhood against her person, Diane began to hear that she was tall, short, fat, skinny, ugly, sexy, smiled too much, smiled too little, had bad hair, had beautiful hair, had something in her teeth, dressed nice, dressed cheap, had duck feet, had elegant feet. She was too dark. She was too pale.
    She heard a lot of different descriptions of her, and she took them all as truth.
    You must never need to get any sun, Diane, a person might say as they playfully (and jealously) batted their sleeved arm at her. You don’t look like who you are, Diane, a different personmight say as they playfully (and scoldingly) batted their unsleeved arm at her.
    Teasing about race came less and less. Or rather, it disguised itself as simple assessment. You sound like a regular person on the phone, someone might say to her on the phone.
    She also heard about the non-marriage of her parents. You’re technically a bastard, right? people sometimes asked when they heard her parents were unmarried.
    Were you an accident? other people (sometimes the same people) might ask. Do they not love each other? other people might inquire, earnestly. Well, they’ve got an easy escape if things ever go wrong, still others might joke, unearnestly. Are they swingers? some might joke and others might ask sincerely.
    But most common was the assumption that she would never fall in love. You’ll probably never meet someone, some assumed, because your parents didn’t teach you the importance of marriage.
    She did find true love. His name was Troy. He was seventeen. She was an older seventeen.
    Imagine a teenager named Troy.
    That’s not bad. He’s a bit less athletic, but it doesn’t matter. Troy looked like what he thought he looked like. Troy always looked exactly how he thought he looked. He never loved Diane until they met. Then he always loved her. Until later, when he never loved her.
    â€œI will always love you,” he sometimes said.
    Later he didn’t say this at all. He wasn’t even there to say it.
    They were always together and always in love for the eight months they first knew each other, working summer jobs at the White Sands Ice Cream Shoppe. Then Josh, not yet named Josh, began to form. He began first as scattered cells. Thosecells joined and began to multiply into billions and billions of cells until they were shaped like a single, giant cell.
    Those cells added more cells from Diane’s cells, and those cells began to make eyes and feet and kidneys and tongues and wings and gills, growing and expanding into a Josh-like shape. People pointed out to Diane how different she looked on the outside. She did not feel she looked any different.
    Then one day Josh came out of Diane.
    She was a girl, finally a woman. She was eighteen years old.
    Imagine an eighteen-year-old mother.
    Imagine a seventeen-year-old father.
    Troy couldn’t. Troy couldn’t see himself anymore. He looked at Josh, whom he named after his uncle, a retired Army Ranger he vaguely thought of as “cool,” and Troy saw a mirror out of sync. A face stared back, making different gestures, different motions than Troy made. It was his face, but it did not look like him, act like him.
    Troy had never experienced discord. Or he had never known he