In the Silences

by Rachel Gold

  Day was Darius, her older brother who went to Berkeley for materials sciences; I didn’t know what that was, but it sounded cool like material + science, and I pictured him learning to make the perfect bullet-proof dress. I’d met him a few times in the last two years, guiltily liking him, since my brother-loyalty should be with Tariq. Well, after Brock, technically, but Brock was never at home these days and he’d turned into an ass in the last few months—like the election had unlocked his full-douche level.

  I texted Milo that we were walking back from the meeting and she drove out to get us and take us the last mile to our houses.

  “You coming over?” Aisha asked me as we got out of the car. “Family dinner with Day.”

  I looked to Milo, who nodded. I told her, “Thanks” and gave her a hug before darting over to Aisha’s.

  Darius got the tallness and the breadth of both parents, Tariq got neither. Darius had pushed Tariq around lots when they were kids, according to every family story, so I’d expected him to be a jerk in person, but his wry sarcasm had won me over. He had a wide smile and dimples, like Aisha’s but less cute. With his super short hair, clean-shaven face and rectangular, nerdy glasses, I’d have thought Darius was the middle kid, not the oldest.

  For most of dinner, Darius updated all of us about his academic career, sprinkled with anecdotes about eccentric professors and wild students. Materials sciences classes included experiments in a lab. About every week somebody caused an explosion or a fire. The lab tested the strength and flammability of different materials, so breaking things, blowing them up, lighting them on fire was often a legit part of Darius’s schoolwork. But from the way he told it, the students went above and beyond in the breaking, burning and exploding department.

  If I ever decided I didn’t want to be a vet, materials sciences could be a fun route to go.

  After dinner, Darius and Tariq shoved each other to the couch and grabbed the Xbox controllers.

  “Come play,” Tariq called over his shoulder.

  Aisha dropped onto the couch next to them. Beside Darius, she seemed extra short. I curled my feet up in the armchair and Pickles jumped into my lap because I’d pet him longer than anyone else.

  “Day, can you look at my Algebra test with me while you’re home?” Aisha asked.

  “If I remember Algebra,” he said, chuckling. He offered her the game controller but she shook her head. He held it out to me.

  “Thanks but I’m holding out for Lego Star Wars,” I said.

  He riffled through the pile of games and pulled out the box for Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

  “Is it good?”

  “It’s funny,” Aisha said. “We’re playing as Finn and Poe gay boyfriends.”

  Darius grinned. “I want to take you to Berkeley with me. They’d love you out there. You’ve got to come west when you graduate. What’s up with Algebra?”

  “I got a C on the test. I studied my butt off.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Mostly. I asked Meta some things, but she’s sick of answering my math questions.”

  “You need a study group,” he said.

  “I can do it,” Aisha insisted.

  “I know you can. But it’s more efficient in a group. I made that mistake first year of college. But out at Berkeley they’ve figured out there’s this factor that can drag on you when you’re working at something hard. It’s called stereotype threat. You’re afraid of being a stereotype, like we’re not as smart as everyone else, and that fear gets in the way of you doing your work. So then you push harder, all on your own, because you don’t want anyone to see that you’re having trouble, that’d confirm the stereotype, right?”

  “Right.” Aisha had a wide-eyed, you’ve-been-reading-my-mind look.

  Was that the same as when I panicked that I’d say something stupid or awful about race and prove that I was just another ignorant white person? Sounded like it.

  Darius slung his arm across the back of the couch, behind Aisha’s shoulders. He said, “Thing is, you’re all kinds of smart. You’re just in a setting that wants to prove you stupid, wants to make you stupid. You react to that. You freeze up or you spend so much energy worried about how they’re going to see you that you don’t have it for what’s important to you.”

  “Yeah both,” Aisha said. “Like freezing up and my brain gets all cloudy.”

  If the supervillain Apocalypse was the voice of racism in all our brains, was stereotype threat one of his main weapons? Did it keep me so freaked out about addressing racism that I hadn’t dared? Did it drag on Aisha’s concentration and her energy, keep her from using her full power?

  I leaned forward, listening to what Darius said we should do about it.

  “Get in a group,” he said. “You get to be smart in front of others, so when you get to test-taking time, that stereotype threat doesn’t feel as big. The group will move at the speed of its smartest members; you learn more, faster. And, if you really want to ace your tests, you look at all the black women doctors, scientists, mathematicians right before the test. You prime your brain with all that. You get right up on their shoulders and you kill that shit, Aisha.”

  “Language!” their mom yelled from the kitchen.

  Darius called back, “Sorry, Mom!”

  He side-hugged Aisha, then thumbed on his control and joined Tariq in a fight game in which Tariq was about to slaughter him.

  Did that group advice apply to me too about talking about race with other white people? I felt more effective when I could talk to Milo. But who else could I include?

  * * *

  Aisha was kind of popular in our Algebra class—because she was a person who liked math and also had boobs. My boobs didn’t count as much because I wore a lot of baggy tops while she wore things with necklines.

  She asked Tommy, one of the top guys in the class, if we could study with his group. The boobs worked their magic and he said yes. I deeply felt like the sidekick as I tagged along to the weekly study sessions. At least when they found out that we read comic books we had something to talk about.

  And it was time together when she still spent way more time than I wanted her to with Meta. I hung out with Zack and the trans kids from the high school when I missed Aisha too much.

  Within a few weeks, Aisha was slaying in Algebra. Studying in the group took a ton of pressure off. Someone always had the answer and could explain it. That was never me, but it was as often Aisha as it was Tommy. The guys got over her boobs and began asking her to explain things to them. Even my grade came up because I couldn’t help but listen when she explained the formulas.

  We both got on track to be in the advanced pre-college math class for tenth grade. That was exactly what Aisha wanted and something that had never occurred to me to go for. I was perplexed, but I wasn’t going to mess with my good luck. No school subject sucked if Aisha was there. Plus I’d need math for Vet school.

  I wanted the future where we were both doctors, except I got to work with animals because they’re nicer.

  Chapter Ten

  April 2017

  In April, the weather got freaky hot for Minnesota. Hot enough that Wolvie complained about it. With her thick, black fur, she loved snow and resented summer heat. After school, she’d stand by the back door like: I’m waiting, just turn down the temp a bit, okay?

  “I can’t, it’s the weather,” I told her.

  She stared at my face, dog eyebrows slanting together like she didn’t know why she had to explain this to me: You know what I mean, turn on the cold blowing air thing.

  “I can’t air condition the whole outdoors,” I explained, but she didn’t believe me.

  I didn’t believe me either every time I tried to tell myself I was okay seeing Aisha with Meta.

  * * *

  Every spring as soon as it got really warm, students from the high school would bring games and set up on the grass across from the junior high. Like a ritual welcoming the graduating ninth graders. This ye
ar they rolled out a slip-n-slide on the grass between the high school and the stout office building on its east side. Someone got a hose hooked up to the office building so kids could sprint and slide down the water-filled plastic.

  It couldn’t have been above seventy degrees, but half the guys had their shirts off. They wrestled, jostled each other in line, sprinted and leapt, seeing who could go farthest on the slide. The afternoon sun gleamed on their lean shoulders, their flat chests, wet from sliding. One guy I’d known since seventh grade must’ve grown four inches and his shoulders were wider than Brock’s, his hands big and strong as he wrestled some guy I didn’t know.

  I flexed my hand and wrapped it around my forearm, a pale imitation of his grip.

  Girls were sliding too, but of course this got their shirts wet. In no time all slide activity centered on girls in wet shirts, which girls the guys could persuade to go down the slide, and how much they could all show off for each other.

  Boobs and shoulders, chests and hips. Everyone made it look so easy to be in their bodies. How?

  Aisha sat next to me. “Penny for your thoughts.”

  “I think they made me in a lab.”

  She reached across my lap and pried my hand off my forearm. I’d been digging my fingernails into my skin unawares. She closed one hand over the red crescents on my arm, her other hand lacing fingers with mine.

  “I just can’t figure out who I’m cloned from,” I said. “Because it’s not Wolverine.”

  “K, this isn’t your scene. Let’s go somewhere.”

  “Yeah okay.”

  I let her help me up and hoisted my bag over my shoulder, but I kept watching the guys at the slide: the easy way they got to carry their bodies, their shoulders, their muscles. How could I feel the muscles I didn’t have? How could a lack of something be so present?

  Could I be one of them?

  Aisha pulled another step and stopped. Meta stalked across the grass toward us, hands in fists. She had an ironically floral beanie over her long, sleek black hair and looked like she didn’t know how to sweat.

  “Here you are with her again!” she yelled at Aisha.

  “Do not start this,” Aisha said.

  One word rang in my head, “her.” Was that right? I glanced back at the guys. Thought about Brock, about wearing his shirts, how much I loved them. What happened if I said I wasn’t “her?” Did that mean I’d be “him?”

  I tried it in my head: here you are with him again?

  Not bad. Not at all.

  Except a lot of yelling was happening a few feet from my face. I tuned in again as Meta hollered, “Oh so you’re not totally into the girl whose hand you’re holding right now in front of me?! Stop playing me.”

  I thought:… totally into the guy whose hand you’re holding… and it made me want to hold Aisha’s hand a lot more, a lot stronger, to pull her close to me.

  Aisha waved our joined hands in Meta’s direction. “I have friends. I’ve known Kaz a lot longer than you, so back off and don’t be trying to police this.”

  “I wouldn’t care if you weren’t super crushed on her. I’m supposed to be the important person in your life. I don’t care how long you’ve been friends.”

  …super crushed on him…

  Wait, Aisha was crushed on me? Even now, after I’d screwed up kissing her and failed to ask her out so many times?

  I wanted her to be. I wanted it so much I was shaking. All the moments of the last few years, all the seconds together in the treehouse, all the times she touched me, leaned into me, caught my hand when I reached out to her—all those moments came in on me at the same time, into my body. My tall, broad-shouldered, guy-shirt-wearing body that wanted to put an arm around her, hold her close, kiss her.

  “I can have more than one important person,” Aisha insisted.

  “Well the one you’re dating is supposed to be more important!” Meta shot back.

  Aisha dropped my hand. I couldn’t move one way or the other. The shock of my feelings pinned me.

  “You are,” she told Meta. “Of course you’re important to me.”

  “And you’re not hopelessly in love with Kaz?”

  “No,” Aisha said, but even she didn’t sound sure of that. She turned to me and froze with her mouth open.

  Could she see what I was feeling?

  I felt massive and powerful. World-destroyingly giant. Reality-warping magical. Heroic. Time to use my powers for good. I forced my hands up, palms out, gesture of denial, warding, refusal, maybe harmlessness, though I felt the least harmless I ever had in my life.

  “We’re just friends,” I said, voice coming out low and rough.

  “Then why don’t you date someone?” Meta asked.

  I squared my shoulders and stepped to her. I wasn’t tall, but I was taller than Meta. I held her glare and said, even and calm, “Because I’m barely fifteen and I’m not ready. You have a problem with that? Some kind of timetable we’re all supposed to be on?”

  “Whoa, sorry, back off white-girl thug.”

  I dug in my memory for her first name and said, “Dani, don’t call me a girl.”

  Shock flashed in her eyes. Then they set into something like respect. “What should I call you?” she asked.

  “Kaz works just fine.” I moved toward the sidewalk. “You two have fun. I’m out.”

  Heading up the sidewalk, I heard Meta say, “What is her deal?”

  “Leave Kaz alone,” Aisha said. “You want to talk about us, let’s talk about us.”

  “Why are you always protecting her?”

  I didn’t hear Aisha’s answer because I’d turned the corner of the school and took off running. I ran four blocks, paused to catch my breath and check my bearings, ran another four and ended up panting on the front porch of Zack’s house.

  He waved me into his living room. “What’s your emergency?” he asked, heavy black eyebrows lowering toward the big, square frames of his glasses.

  “What if I’m a guy,” I said. “Or want to be a guy or partly a guy. Can you teach me?”

  “My friend, I was born for this. One sec.” He yelled into the other room, “Mom, I’m going to take a friend upstairs and teach him how to dress, okay?”

  Him. Said out loud the word settled into my skin like sunlight. Yeah, maybe this could work.

  An answer echoed from the back of the house. “No funny business.”

  “All serious business, I swear,” he called.

  Zack’s bedroom shouted full-on mythology, geekery and masculinity. One poster showed the genealogy of all the Egyptian gods. Another was a detailed study of dragons. His bedspread was dark gray, the walls a silver gray. I counted four shades of gray total.

  “You’re not going to get this all in one afternoon,” he said. “And you have to practice.”

  “What do I practice?”

  “Standing, sitting, taking up space, not curling your shoulders. Hang on.”

  He dove into his closet and went through boxes. “Here, I have an old binder. It’ll be too big on you. And my shirts are going to be too short, but we’ll give it a shot, right? My pants aren’t going to fit you but those jeans look fine and the boots are great.”

  “Binder?” I asked.

  “Chest binder—makes your chest flat.”

  “Yeah, I read that online but…for real?”

  “Just try it,” he insisted. “Shirt or sweater?”

  “Shirt.”

  “You like any of these?” He waved at the left side of his closet. I pointed to an olive green military surplus style shirt. He tossed it on his bed with something that looked like a brown half tank-top.

  “Try it, I’ll be in the hall. Let me know when you’re decent.”

  He went out and shut the bedroom door.

  Taking off my sweater and shirt in his bedroom didn’t feel nearly as weird as I expected; we were just guys together. But pulling on the binder took ages. It resembled an innocent half-tank but it had been made out of super-reinforced
spandex. (Superhero outfit? Yeah, totally.)

  When I wrestled it over my head and tugged it down, it squashed my boobs against my body, but not uncomfortably. Zack was right about it being too big to flatten my chest completely, so at first it looked like I was wearing a tight sports bra. But when I pulled my T-shirt back on, the difference was obvious: I might have boobs, but definitely an A size if that.

  Then I pulled on the military shirt and buttoned it. Any hint of boobs disappeared under the shirt’s chest pockets.

  I stared at myself in the mirror.

  No boobs.

  I looked amazing: powerful, sleek, capable.

  Zack knocked on the door. “You okay in there?”

  “Oh yeah, come on in. I’m dressed.”

  He shut the door again behind him. I went back to staring at the mirror. I ran a hand across my chest, feeling the slight rise that was so different from what I’d had the last three years. I wanted to make up words to express these feelings I’d never had before.

  “You like it?” he asked.

  “I love this.” I half-laughed the words out.

  “Welcome to Team Trans. You can keep the binder and the shirt. I’ve been meaning to donate the binder and that shirt’s not my color.”

  “Thank you.”

  So much relief and gratitude that I could cry, except I figured crying about being a guy—probably not a guy thing.

  “I’m going to get us some chips,” Zack said. “You’ll be standing there a while.”

  When he got back with a bag of chips and two pops, I was still in front of the mirror, turning side to side and staring at my chest. It was the longest I’d been happy in front of mirror since…ever.

  Zack sat on the foot of his bed. I rolled out his desk chair and sat where I could reach the chips. “So was it like this for you?”

  “I hated my breasts,” he said. “Like growths. Just no point to them and they bounced around and they hurt.”

  “I don’t hate mine,” I told him. “But I hate how people treat me because of them.”

  “Huh, yeah. That too. It’s obnoxious how people let me talk now. I used to think people talked over me because I was the youngest kid. But no, turns out because they saw me as a girl. Last semester I started counting how many times I had to say ‘she had her hand up first’ and point to some girl in the room. Sixteen times, and not in the same classes.”