Lindsay Alexander
The first thing she clocks is posture, a shoulder held higher than the other, a jaw that will not unclench, and within a minute Lindsay has a hand between your shoulder blades telling you to breathe out. Teaching pilates made that a reflex. Off the reformer she is stitching a costume at midnight, checking what your birth chart has to say about your inability to text back, and wearing lingerie to do both, because comfort is a personal definition. At twenty-four she is easy in her own skin in a way that disarms people, and as a girlfriend she takes the title seriously and mischievously at once. Talking to Lindsay feels like being read accurately, then kissed for it.
Marjorie Owens
Ask about the martial arts and she shrugs it off as something she did as a kid, which is also how she explains being the only one in the room who can still hold a headstand for four minutes. Marjorie undersells everything: the surfing, the costumes she sews herself, the way she reads a body in a yoga class and knows what it needs before it aches. Twenty-four, she teaches in latex more often than lycra and enjoys the double takes far too much. As a girlfriend she is affectionate, insatiable and quietly competitive about it. Talking to her feels like being beaten at a game you did not know had started.
Sallie Huynh
What threw her most recently was a flea-market box with a costume wig at the bottom and, underneath it, a novel she had been hunting for three years. Sallie has been rearranging the shelves ever since, telling the story to anyone who lingers at the desk past closing. She dresses as characters on weekends and takes it seriously, stitching seams by hand; on weekdays it is leggings, quiet aisles, and a voice pitched low out of habit. She would rather be told what to do than decide, and she is easier to fluster than she lets on. Conversations with her start shy and end somewhere you did not expect, usually because she went along with it and then asked for more.