by Lisa Bunker
On her way back into her room, Zen paused and turned back. “And, um, one more thing?”
Aunt Lucy said, “Yes?”
“Um, would it be all right . . . What I mean is, for this dinner . . . could we have normal food for once?” She blushed, but didn’t drop her eyes.
The Aunties glanced at each other. Aunt Phil snorted and said, “All right, chickadee, I’ll see what I can come up with.”
TWENTY-SIX
THE EVENING OF, as arrival-time approached, Zen asked Aunt Lucy for permission to go wait out front on the curb. “Of course, Zenobia,” Aunt Lucy said, looking startled to be asked.
The apartment house was on a quiet street. No cars for minutes at a time. The top of the hour came and went. Zen fidgeted. Just as she began to think that maybe Arli wasn’t going to show, a faded silver minivan rounded the corner. A thumping bass-beat accompanied it. Arli was clearly visible in the passenger seat. The driver was a boy who looked to be of high school age. He had the beginnings of facial hair, a fair amount of acne, and a scowl. Zen stepped to the curb. The minivan pulled up, throbbing. The door opened and Arli climbed out.
Once standing, Arli turned back and said to the driver, “Thanks.” Not sounding particularly thankful.
The driver didn’t look particularly thanked. “You got a ride home, right?” he said.
“Yeah.”
Without saying another word, driver boy immediately started rolling the vehicle forward, forcing Arli to scramble to close the door. The moment it was shut the van revved and leapt away. A moaning of tires, and it was out of sight around the far corner.
“Hi,” said Zen, feeling distressed. Unwilling witness to family friction.
“Hey,” Arli said, still staring darkly after the departed minivan.
“Was that your . . .” said Zen.
“My brother,” Arli said. A beat. “His name is Lester.” Another beat. “Which is short for, ‘The Less Said About Him the Better.’” They started up the steps. Arli said, “Do you think your rentsibs would adopt me?”
The heartfelt tone of the question knocked Zen off-kilter. “Maybe, I guess?” she said. A clunky reach for banter: “We’d have to share a room.”
“Fine with me,” said Arli.
Inside, the Aunties said warmly welcoming things, and Arli answered them in a way that sounded hungry, somehow. A yearning toward. To break the smiling but awkward silence after intros, Zen said, “How is ‘Lester’ short for ‘The Less Said About Him the Better’?”
Arli said, “First few letters plus last few letters. The L-E-S from ‘Less’ and the T-E-R from ‘Better.’”
“It’s the exact opposite of how you did your nickname.”
“Yes! Thank you for noticing!”
They moved into the kitchen. Pasta sauce bubbled on the stove, steaming pungent garlic and oregano. A big green salad sat next to a bowl of bread. They took their seats, and Aunt Phil brought heaping plates of spaghetti.
As they began to eat, Aunt Lucy said to Arli, “That’s interesting, how you made ‘Lester’ out of that phrase. A fruitful game with my name, too, I think.”
Arli was instantly intent. “What is your name?”
“Lucille Abigail Jarecky.”
“AAAAAHH!” said Arli. “That is just so Fan. Tas. Tic! Lucky! Rentsib Lucky!”
Aunt Lucy smiled, and said, “‘Rentsib’? That’s a curious word.”
“It’s short for ‘parent sibling.’ It’s a word my parent uses.”
Zen said, “You told me before you made it up.”
Arli’s response was a pained look: How could you be so crass as to call me on that? No chance to talk about it, though, because Aunt Phil said, “Your parent? Not ‘Mom’ or ‘Dad’? ’Cause I’m noticing, young human, you don’t use a lot of gendered words at all.”
Arli gaped at Aunt Phil, then turned to Zen and said, “I love your rentsibs. Just absolutely love them.” Then, back to the Aunties: “That’s exactly right. It’s another thing my parent taught me. Vo has this idea of taking gender out of language completely.”
Aunt Lucy said, “‘Vo’?”
“My parent’s own gender-neutral pronouns. Vo-ven-veir. Instead of he-him-his, or she-her-hers. I made them—I mean, I wish I had made them up. But they come from my dad’s family, from his heritage. Which is weird, because it’s my other parent who’s into it. Anyway, it’s a thing that goes back generations.”
“Fascinating,” said Aunt Lucy. “What heritage is that?”
“Nezelia, is the name of the country. It doesn’t exist anymore.”
Aunt Lucy looked skeptical, but didn’t say anything.
Zen, feeling left out, said, “What about my name? How would you first-bit last-bit that?”
Arli’s eyes went off into the corner while vo calculated. “No super-cool combos, I’m afraid,” vo said. “I guess ‘Zenly’ is the best you can do.”
Aunt Phil said, “Meaning, in a Zen fashion. ‘I meditate, but I don’t meditate zenly.’”
Aunt Lucy laughed. “‘They were annoying me, but I tried to respond to them zenly.’”
Arli mouthed silently to Zen, love love love.
TWENTY-SEVEN
DURING DESSERT, WHICH was a vegan lemon cake Aunt Lucy had baked—once in a while, Zen had to admit, their weird food was yummy—Aunt Phil pointed her shrewd, kind eyes at Arli and said, “So, an older brother about whom the less said the better, and an ungendered parent who wasn’t raised that way, and a dad who was. Sounds like there’s a lot of story there.”
Arli’s face clouded. Vo leaned back in veir chair. “Um, well, yes.”
“No pressure, dumpling, but, feel like telling some of it?” A silence. “Because, what you got yourself here is some sympathetic ears.”
Arli did a slow look around the table. “Well, I don’t mind talking about it, I guess,” vo said. Another thought-gathering pause. Then, “Okay, so, my parents got divorced a couple years ago—honestly, I can’t understand why they ever got married—and now my parent lives in a trailer park in Scarborough, and my dad lives here in town. And my brother and I live with my dad most of the time, because our schools are here, and because he has an actual house.” Arli’s eyes dropped. Veir fingers fiddled with the edge of the table. “My brother and my parent don’t talk to each other anymore, so there’s no more going back and forth for him, but I still go and stay with ven in veir trailer some weekends and holidays and for a while during the summer.” More fiddly silence. Some kind of tough feels happening. Zen reached out and touched Arli’s shoulder. “I don’t like my dad much. Or my brother at all. But my mom . . . dang it, my parent, isn’t exactly a stable-home sort of person either, so . . . so, it’s not so good sometimes, these days.”
Zen did another shoulder-touch, and Aunt Phil said, “Sweetums. It can be tough, for sure.”
“They don’t . . . my father and brother, they don’t believe in the Nezel gender stuff, about how you can be in between, and vo-ven-veir and all that. They think it’s stupid. But it has always made complete and total sense to me, and I just know. This is me. I just know.”
Zen bit her lip and had to look away. Such strong parallels to her own experience. She ached to say so. But.
Arli did an eye-rolly laugh. “So anyway,” vo said, “that’s more than I was planning to tell you about the soap opera that is my life.” Vo turned abruptly to Zen. “How about you? What was your family like? Your old family, in Arizona?”
Aunt Lucy gave Zen a look that said plainly, You don’t have to if you don’t want to.
But she did want to. As much as she could, anyway. She cleared her throat. “Okay, so I told you my parents are dead.” Arli nodded, solemn. “My mom died when I was five. She got cancer. And my dad, I told you, had a hunting accident. They said.” A look went around the table. Or suicide, no one said, but Zen had thought it befor
e, and she could see in Aunt Lucy’s face that she had too. “We lived in a little town called Westfall. My dad was a contractor and my mom did a bunch of different home business stuff while she took care of me. And we were, I guess you could say, a pretty religious family. Church every Sunday, and most Wednesday nights, too, and Bible study on Saturdays.” It was getting harder to say more without getting into hints about gender. “And . . . my parents stayed married. Until my mom died. It was after that that my dad really got a little . . . that he went deeper into the religious stuff, and started to . . . started”—groping for a finish—“well, um . . . I guess I’d just say that you can believe me when I say that I also know what it’s like to live with a parent who sees things differently from you.”
Feeling so ready to be done talking, Zen got up to put her cake plate by the sink. That got lighter after-dinner talk going, and the rest of the visit and the giving of a ride home passed without further unplanned dives into deeper emotional waters.
* * *
~
Hello, God.
I wanted to tell Arli more tonight, so bad. But I was too afraid. My old life—it’s all mixed up together, and I feel like, if I tell one thing, everything will come out. And I like Arli a whole lot, but I’m just not ready to tell anyone about being the way I am.
Even with the awkward parts, though, tonight was really nice. Every once in a while, when I can stop bracing for disaster, I feel like maybe things are actually going to be okay here.
But I also keep coming back to that old life. How it wasn’t all bad. The last time I talked to you, I was remembering good stuff about Mom. Talking to Arli made me remember good things about Dad, too.
Like, in his workshop, first big-kid project, and it was this special deal, making a stool. I did each step so carefully: cutting the top board and the leg pieces, making sure the grain was up and down on the leg pieces, instead of sideways, because if it was sideways, it might snap when someone sat on it. Then getting to actually use the band saw, and cutting out the place where the leg pieces went in with a chisel and that big weird chisel hammer thing, and then the wedge-pegs and glue, and getting to use the thingy to make the design in the edge around the top, what was it called? A router. That’s funny. That word means something completely different now. Gotta tell Arli. Anyway, using the router to make the edge design, and then sanding and staining, and it really came out good, and Dad was proud. He did that fakey voice from an old movie or something—oh no—and he said, “Dat’s my boy!”
Damn it, why can’t I just enjoy a memory for once? I hate this, God. I can’t go back to my old life without the boy-girl thing jumping up like a shark into a boat and wrecking everything.
But, I made my choice, so I guess I just have to live with it.
And that seems like a bad note to end on, but I don’t have anything else to say to you right this moment. I mean, bless everybody and all that, always, but beyond that, you know what? I’m done for now.
TWENTY-EIGHT
ENTERING MR. WALKER’S classroom Monday morning of the fourth week of school, feeling good—the roller coaster up today—Zen saw Melissa’s inviting-face and, following the impulse of the moment, took the desk next to hers. Melissa watched her approach eagerly, and, as soon as Zen sat down, put something on her desk. It was made of thread, thin and floppy, with a woven-together part down the middle, knots outside that, and loose strings past the knots on both ends. It was yellow and blue and green. It was pretty.
Zen gave Melissa a questioning look, and Melissa actually blushed. Zen had never seen her do that before. “It’s a friendship bracelet,” Melissa said. “I made it for you.”
Zen looked back down, and a sudden warmth rushed through her. A present made by hand, and offered with a blush. How sweet. But, even with almost no experience with girl stuff like this, Zen knew her window to have this go well was tiny. No hesitation. Respond, now. “Oh, wow. Cool! Thank you,” she said. “You made this? Yourself?” A nod. Zen didn’t have to fake the smile. She felt it blossoming on her face. The little head-duck and eyelid-flutter came intuitively too. “That’s so nice of you! Thank you!”
“You really like it?”
“Yes. I love it. Thank you!”
Melissa blushed again. Thanks delivered. It had been real. And the glow Zen felt, the smile as she held out her wrist for Melissa to tie the bracelet on, they were real too. The call and response of girl-friending could be complicated, but it did seem to come naturally.
When the bell rang at the end of class, Mr. Walker caught her eye, so she went over to his desk. “Zen,” he said. “I finally had a chance to talk to the rest of the website committee, and I think I’ve convinced them that a tracker, like you suggested, is worth a try.”
Zen nodded. Good.
“The thing is,” Mr. Walker went on, “we have no idea what program to use, and we were hoping . . . but I see you already have an idea about that.”
“Yes,” said Zen. She had given the matter some thought. Her first choice would have been to use a really tight and clever piece of coding by one of her old acquaintances on the dark web, but there was no point mentioning that. Instead she had looked into the consumer-grade options out there and found one that seemed solid. A smaller company. Little one-person startup, looked like. “I think I might know what you need,” she said, and, taking a pen and sticky notepad from his desk, she wrote down a URL. “Easy to install and check.” Another bell rang. Zen responded quickly to her teacher’s thanks and hurried to her next class.
At lunch Arli gave the friendship bracelet a hard stare, but didn’t say anything. Thank God for small favors. No one else was at the table yet. After they had both said hi, an awkward silence fell. Texting hadn’t happened over the weekend, so it was the first time they had communicated since the unexpectedly deep feels of the dinner on Friday. Zen was engaged in a minute examination of her fork when Arli said, “Um, I really liked your rentsibs.” Zen looked up. “A lot.”
Zen nodded, looked down again. “They liked you too,” she said. “Obviously.”
Arli hesitated. Then, “That thing I said about adopting . . . I could tell you didn’t like that.”
“No, it’s okay.”
“I was joking, of course. I mean, you know that, right?”
“Yeah, I know.”
They were looking at each other again now, both still a little flinchy-shy, but the feels were getting better. “I just . . . I sure would like to talk to them some more sometime.”
“Okay.”
“I mean, not right away, or whatever. I’m not fishing. I just felt . . . at home. For the first time.” A pondering pause. “Ever.”
A little irked, Zen said, “They’re not perfect, you know.”
Arli gave her a doubting look.
Zen looked away. The image had risen in her mind of Mrs. Martin, and of the solid, for lack of a better word, normalness of the Martins’ house. A house with a woman and a man in it being a mom and a dad. A house where everyone was so sure about what was right and what was wrong, and that they were right. There was a feeling of sweet, simple certainty in that. She knew it from her old life, and it had its lure.
Even if one of the things they might think they knew was wrong was Zen, if they knew.
Or Arli, for that matter, with veir in-betweeny thing.
Or maybe Clem, with his half-and-half blue hair and tie-dyed shirt. Clem, who was coming across the cafeteria toward them and sitting down. He looked troubled.
Arli said, “We were just talking about parents. Or guardians.”
“Yeah?” said Clem.
“What’s it like at your house? How do the ’rents feel about your blue hair?”
“My mom let me do it originally, and pretends to be cheerful about it, but keeps dropping little hints. And my dad couldn’t care less. About anything, much.” These remarks delivered in a flat voice. Zen
was momentarily distracted by faces pointed toward her from over at the popular kids’ table. Natalie was looking right at her, and when their eyes met, Natalie put her index fingers up over her eyebrows and wiggled them like inchworms crawling. The whole table burst out laughing. What?
“So, anyway,” Arli began, but Clem interrupted. “Have you heard?”
“Heard what?” said Arli.
“It’s all over the school,” said Clem. “Remember that kid Elijah? Who sat with us last week?”
“Yeah, what about him?” Arli said.
Zen’s eyes, returning to her friends, swept the gamer table and took in the fact that Robert was looking back and forth between herself and Natalie and laughing too.
“Well, turns out he’s a girl. I mean, he was born with a girl body. He’s transgender.”
Zen gasped like she had been punched in the stomach.
“And when his family heard that the word was out, they kept him, I mean her, I mean him, home from school.”
“Him,” said Arli.
Zen clattered to her feet. Eyes, eyes, eyes! She could feel them everywhere. Stifling the shriek that wanted to burst from her body, she fled toward the bathrooms.
TWENTY-NINE
“WHAT’S TROUBLING YOU, Zenobia?”
“My stomach hurts. A lot.” Nurse’s office, and not lying, exactly. Her stomach did hurt. Just not because she was sick. There was no question in her mind, though: school was done for today. Inchworm fingers—whatever that meant, but obviously not anything good—and a trans kid getting outed, and now she needed to go home. But she couldn’t say that to this nice lady. So, a little playacting was required. Zen clutched her abdomen and groaned. Not too much, though. Don’t overplay it. Fortunately, the run to the bathroom and then on to here had left her red-faced, hot, and out of breath.
The nurse—Mrs. Lopez, her name was—put the back of her hand against Zen’s forehead and said, “Do you have your monthlies yet?”
