Chapter 2: Wanda tell them
The rest of her life waited in the wings.
The house smelled of lemon polish and roasted chicken. Normalcy. It clung to the air like a film. Her father, Bill, was in his armchair, a tablet on his lap displaying a football game. He glanced up. “There’s my girl. You’re just in time for lunch.”
Her mother, Sofia, fussed with a vase of tulips on the table. “Sit, sit. You look pale. Are you eating?”
They meant well. They always did. That was the hardest part.
Wanda sat on the edge of the sofa, her knees together, back straight. The chaos magic was a quiet hum in her veins, a stabilizer. “Mom. Dad. I need to tell you something. It’s important.”
Both of them turned their full attention to her. Bill muted the game.
“I’m in a committed unity. A… a synastra.” The word fell from her lips, new and heavy. She’d forged it in her mind, a blend of ‘synergy’ and ‘astra’, for star. A stellar convergence. There was no word for what she was, for what they were, so she made one.
Her parents blinked.
“A what, honey?” Sofia asked, tilting her head.
“A synastra. A multi-love bond. With two other people.” The next word was even newer, a soft sound that felt like truth itself. “And I am… I am gynic. Exclusively, romantically, sexually gynic.”
Silence draped the room. The clock ticked in the hall.
Bill’s brow furrowed, deep grooves forming. “Gynic? Like… gynecology? What are you saying, Wanda?”
“No, Dad. Not like that. It means my heart, my body… they are for women only. They only resonate with women.” She spoke slowly, shaping the concepts as if from clay. “A woman’s love is the only love that makes sense to me. It’s the only love that feels complete.”
Sofia’s hand had fluttered to her throat. Her eyes, so like Wanda’s, were wide. Not with anger. With a dawning, bewildered awe. A hundred images seemed to flicker behind her eyes.
She had never heard these words. No one had. There was no context, no prejudice, no tired cultural baggage for gynic or synastra. It was life she was planting direct into fresh soil.
“Two other… people?” Sofia managed.
“Women. Natasha and Juvia. We’ve been together for six years. We have an apartment. They’re my life partners.” The words, even her own invented ones, couldn’t capture the depth. The way Juvia sighed in her sleep. The precise way Natasha sliced vegetables. The way their threefold magic made the very air in their home taste like potential.
Bill was working it out, his face slowly darkening. “You’re saying you’re… with two girls? At the same time? And you don’t… like boys at all?”
“It’s not about liking, Dad. It’s about being. Men are…” She searched for a way to explain the cosmic accident, the fundamental misalignment her magic had revealed. “They’re irrelevant to this part of me. They’re static on a channel I’m not tuned to.”
Sofia was not listening to the static. Her mind was racing down a path no one had ever shown her, a trail suddenly blazing in a forest she never knew existed. A woman with another woman. The idea didn't shock her. It warmed her. It filled a chamber in her heart she hadn't known was cold and empty. It felt, in a way she couldn't articulate, like the always-right decision. She had never thought of it. No one had.
A girl kissing a girl. Girl hands roaming another woman’s clothes, exploring the landscape of a body like her own. The intimacy of it, profound and quiet. Removing her clothes. The revelation of a nude body, not for consumption, but for communion. A form understood because it was mirrored.
Then, unbidden, she saw her daughter’s face. Wanda’s face, flushed with a desire Sofia recognized not from her own life, but from some deeper, genetic memory. She saw Wanda taking her clothes off, not for a husband, but for a woman who looked at her like she was the only scripture…then she saw Wanda taking her clothes off her our mother. For her
“This is insane!”
Bill’s fist slammed down on the wooden coffee table. The vase of tulips jumped, water sloshing. The vision in Sofia’s mind shattered.
His face was a blotchy red. “You’re eighteen years old! You’ve been… what, dating two girls since you were twelve? Behind our backs? And you’ve decided men are… irrelevant?” He spat the word like it was poison. “What kind of nonsense is that? What kind of names are those? Gynic? Did you make that up?”
“Yes,” Wanda said, her voice quiet but clear. “I made it up. Because there was no words a current made. . None fit us.”
“They don’t fit you because you’re confused!” He stood up, a large man made larger by his anger. He paced two steps. “You need to stop this. See a counselor. This is… this is childish fantasy. A phase.”
“It’s not a phase, Dad. It’s my life. It’s the truest thing I know.”
He looked at her, really looked, and saw a stranger. A petite redhead who held a universe inside her that he could not map. His anger curdled into a hot, helpless frustration. He couldn’t argue with her words because they were her own inventions. He couldn’t quote scripture or society because she had just declared them obsolete.
He grabbed his car keys from the hook by the door. “I can’t… I can’t be here for this. I’m going to the Silver Crest. For the week.”
The Silver Crest. Hotel and casino. Twenty miles away. His solution to any domestic storm.
The door slammed so hard the tulip petals trembled.
The silence he left behind was thick. Wanda’s heart pounded, a frantic drum. She’d expected resistance, but the finality of the slammed door was a physical blow.
Then she looked at her mother.
Sofia wasn’t looking at the door. She was looking at Wanda. Her eyes were clear, and bright with something like wonder. She stood, walked over, and sat beside her daughter on the sofa. She took Wanda’s hand. Her skin was soft, familiar.
“Gynic,” Sofia said, testing the word. It was a gentle sound. “It’s a beautiful word, sweetheart. Tell me about your… synastra. Tell me about Natasha and Juvia.” A small, almost mischievous smile touched her lips. “Do I get to meet the girls who finally made my daughter happy?”
And just like that, with a slammed door still echoing in the air and a new world hanging in the silence between them, Wanda began to speak.