Oh no he's so good. 

"You're both incredibly cute." 

"Marlo is cute," he says. "--Marlo you should be my friend and let Raine read you poetry-- I bet you would be good at poetry, it is all words that say one thing and mean another-- and"-- he thinks about it-- "can I try something?"

"....sure?"

"--um," he says, "--sorry if this hurts and you don't like it--" and then he picks up Marlo's hand and bites his wrist, a little more softly than he bit Raine.

He doesn't make a sound like Raine did but his face and shoulders are so much more relaxed than they were before. 

"Oh!" he says. "It works."

He isn't entirely sure what exactly is the thing that works but Lee is very good. 

"Raine likes it when you bite her and she gets all relaxed like that and I was wondering if maybe you got relaxed when I bit you too."

Marlo would love to have some kind of response to that that isn't 'Lee is so good and so smart and' but, unfortunately, he has just been introduced to the concept of masochism and is still very melty about it. 

"Not that this isn't cute, but I did sort of promise my parents I'd be home this afternoon. See you tomorrow at school?" 

"See you."

So Raine goes home to her parents and their board games night and plays Clue which is about figuring out who gave Mr. Body his birthday present, and then she sits down at her typewriter and writes down Blackberry Picking by Seamus Heaney and then stares at the wall. 

It's not just her, Pleasantville already has people who have to break themselves to live here, it has boys who would rather wear dresses and boys who would kiss other boys if they could and presumably girls who would wear pants and kiss other girls if they could too. It's not just her. Even if Pleasantville is better in some ways -- and she can't really deny that the stork system sounds nicer than conventional reproduction, can't really deny that no income inequality or violence or conflict is a thing some people would give up everything meaningful in their life for -- it isn't just outsiders like her who have to break themselves for it. 

A new sheet of paper. Monet Refuses the Operation by Lisel Mueller. She pauses to roll her wrists twice. My world is beautiful, my world is beautiful and there are a hundred million different ways to see it and they are all beautiful, even the broken parts are beautiful. Maybe it's not her tradeoff to make, she's a rich white girl who has never really known how broken her world is, she thinks, and then she thinks about camp and wants to throw up and okay no she can't make Marlo live the heterosexual monogamous white picket fence life, not when she knows there are other ways to be. 

Who was it who said "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"? She thinks it was Tolstoy but might be wrong (not like she can look it up here, in this world where stories are about happy families experiencing perfectly pleasant days at sunny featureless beaches), but the point is that in her impossibly broken world with diseases and wars and slavery and poverty there are a hundred million different ways to live a life and here in Pleasantville there is only one. 

Another new sheet of paper. Dirge Without Music by Edna St. Vincent Millay, who was queer and poly and weird and who wanted and who wrote about wanting and who was not resigned. 

And that's as far as she gets before she gets up from the desk, locks her door and curls up on her bed and has her first really good cry since before camp. 

Lee is excited to see Raine on Monday morning.

On Monday morning, Raine has stolen a pair of her dad's pants, rolled them up until they don't drag on the ground, put a dress on over them, and put her dad's unbuttoned button-up shirt on over that. 

It feels bizarre to be loudly weird in a gender way the other direction. 

Lee does a double take.

"You look nice!"

"Thanks." Handsqueeze? 

He puts his head on her shoulder.

"Do girls dress like that where you're from?"

"Girls dress in lots of different ways where I'm from. That's the point. — but yeah, this is one of them." 

"Because they can wear colors?"

"They can wear colors and there's just — more different ways to be? You can wear what girls here wear or you can wear all boys' clothes or you can go as frilly as humanly possible or you can wear nothing but leggings and crop tops or you can go full-on leather and piercings or you can mix and match however you want and those are all options, and then people add colors on top of that." 

"...but how do you know which clothes are right?"

"...the ones that you like and that fit?" 

Lee is unable to put his objection into words.

Sorry Lee. 

She gives his hand one last squeeze before they get out of the car.