Sapphic Embrace: The Half-Japanese Girl by Eroticatorium

CHAPTER ONE
    Marijuana
     
    It’s amazing how difficult it is to make friends outside of
school or work. Approaching people you don’t know, striking up a
conversation, making friends with someone new — maybe we’ve all
seen too many movies in which that kind of thing is a prelude to
something terrible. It comes across as a pretext to enact a
nefarious scheme. But that was how I met Meredith Angelopolous. I
saw her on the street, pretending to look at hemp necklaces on a
street-table counter near the college. The semi-homeless black man
who worked the table had disappeared, presumably off acquiring a
bag of weed to sell her.
    Meredith had very short
hair, spiky and platinum-silver — not a dyejob though, or so it
seemed, it was her natural color — overtop a kind, round and strong
face. She carefully scrutinized a bracelet adorned with red, black
and green beads. I approached her casually, not sure what I
intended to do. I didn’t make friends with strangers off the
streets anymore than anyone else did.
    I picked up a street map of
the DC area, saw that it was three years out-of-date and pointed it
out to the weed-buying blonde, who grinned. “It should be labelled
‘not for actual use’. Jinn-Deep just had to go get… something.
He’ll be back in a minute,” she said, her soft, lilting voice
ringing out even in the crowded street.
    I smiled back at her and
said okay, pretending that I was there to buy weed like she was. I
wasn’t really a pot-smoker, though I didn’t usually turn it down if
someone passed me a joint. “I’m Amy,” I said.
    “Meredith,” she said. “Nice
to meet you. Are you a student?”
    “I graduated last year. I’m
working for the Josephine Foundation now,” I said. It was clear
from her blank expression she didn’t know what that meant, so I
explained, “It’s a mental health non-profit agency.
It’s-“
    The scruffy black man in an
overly thick coat reappeared, drumming his hands on the table to an
unheard beat. He slipped a bag of weed into a little beaded pouch,
which Meredith picked up. “Move along, ladies,” he muttered, “About
to get busted.”
    Meredith looked at me in a
panic and we darted down the sidewalk, turning just in time to see
uniformed officers converge on Jinn-Deep, who put his hands in the
air. None of the cops seemed to have noticed that we were just with
him, and we scurried through the crowd, trying to stay together as
quickly and unobtrusively as possible.
    I kept thinking cops were
going to swarm us any second, but eventually we found ourselves on
a leafy-treed lane, small squat tenements on either side. We
stopped running and awkwardly fell silent, not sure where or how to
take our relationship.
    “Do you wanna come back to
my place and smoke some of this?” she asked.
    I shrugged and said
“Okay.”
    She lived in a squalid,
rundown building, which made me uneasy, for the first time
wondering if I had made a mistake in coming with her. She was a
stranger, after all. She must have recognized my discomfort,
because she smiled and said, “I know, it’s a shitty area. My place
is fine though, and it’s safe. Almost all of my neighbors are
really old.”
    I followed her into her
apartment, which was cluttered but not dirty, and it made me feel
at home instantly. Pillows and blankets were strewn about, like a
modern-day opium den, every spot an inviting place to lounge and
relax. We sat in the center of her living room, and she put some
psychedelic music on.
    “What do you do, Meredith?”
I asked.
    She sat down and began
breaking up the weed she had just bought. “I go to school, at
Georgetown,” she said. “I’m an information systems
major.”
    “Information
systems?”
    “It’s part of a library
science program,” she said, wincing a little. “I’m sorry, I’m such
a nerd. I want to be a librarian.”
    “No, that’s so cool,” I
said. “I love libraries.”
    We continued chatting, me
about my work at the Josephine Foundation,