by Rachel Gold
“But you don’t feel that now, right?”
“No, ’cause I screwed up a bunch of things and we laughed about it and I got that I can manage myself not to say anything obviously awful and if I say something stupid, you’ll tell me and I’ll apologize.”
“Like when you first started using ‘they/them’ and I messed up your pronouns,” she said. “Or kept calling you ‘girl’ and was apologizing all the time.”
“Yeah, I knew it was just habit and you’d get it. Like me not knowing what cornrows were or anything about the history of white people appropriating black hairstyles. Or me not knowing a ton of history, in general, that happened in my own country. Or the first time you said ‘Malcolm’ and I was like, ‘Who?’”
“But I didn’t know the names of any major trans people,” she said.
“All my TV shows had majority white casts.”
“My comic books had all cisgender characters,” she pointed out.
“Or so you thought,” I said. We’d decided a bunch of the characters were trans whether they said so in the comic books or not. “I like how we are now. I don’t want to live in any world that’s all one way. But shouldn’t we give Mr. B the chance to get this too?”
“Let me think about it. We’d get in trouble for having switched papers.”
“We don’t have to say that part.”
“I have a better idea,” Aisha said, returning to her phone. Whoever she’d been messaging, the longer they talked, the deeper her smile got.
“Something good?”
“Yeah. I think I found the right place for us.”
“Where?”
“The future,” she said and typed a bunch more. “I want to go right now. Is that foolish?”
“No. I’ll come with you. Where are we going?”
“College,” she declared.
She zipped her jacket and I followed her out of the building. She turned left out of the school and left again, so we came to the bus stop on the big road heading to St. Paul.
“The Cities?” I asked.
“Dad will pick us up on his way home.”
Buses came by often, since our town felt farther away from Saint Paul than it was, and a lot of people commuted. Aisha and I had taken this bus twice last summer to go to the gaming and comic book store.
We rode to the edge of Saint Paul and then had to change to another bus. The wind picked up and blew into the bus shelter. I tried to stand between it and Aisha so she’d freeze less.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Shh, wait, I want to see if this is going to be what I think,” she said.
The second bus let us off at the edge of a college campus. Aisha stopped at a map, glanced at her phone, grabbed my hand and pulled me across a broad, grassy lawn. We passed red brick buildings and modern glass and metal ones. She drew me into one of the brick buildings, up two flights of stairs, slowly down a hall as she read the numbers next to the doors.
She stopped in front of #260 where a plaque said: Dr. Amanda Wade.
We stood there for about a minute while she stared at the door and shifted from foot to foot. Then she knocked.
“Come in!” From the sound of her voice, Dr. Wade was cheerful and big, either physically or personality-wise, or both.
Aisha froze, so I turned the knob and pushed the door open, but didn’t go in. This was her thing. Or mostly hers, because when I saw Dr. Wade, I really wanted to go in. She’d stood up from her desk and she was tall and big-shouldered, broad and thick, heavy-jawed, soft eyed, kinky black hair down to her chin, warm brown skin.
Aisha went in, me right on her heels.
Shelves lined one wall of the office, filled with books, magazines, journals, stacks of papers. A window and file cabinets took up the short wall behind Dr. Wade’s desk. The other long wall held framed posters from museums and one big painting, that was half collage, of six black people sitting and standing around a table, talking intensely.
“Aisha?” Dr. Wade asked.
“Hi, yes, this is Kaz, we’re totally pleased to meet you,” she said and stuck out her hand. Dr. Wade shook hers and mine. I felt the strong gentleness of her hand and wanted to stay here for a super long time.
She was probably trans. I really hoped. She could be a trans woman or maybe a cis woman with big shoulders, athletic, but I so wanted her to be trans. She had a kind smile but very no-bullshit dark eyes behind her glasses.
“I read your bio but Kaz didn’t,” Aisha said. “I wanted to be sure of you, like that you existed.”
Dr. Wade laughed and said, “I get that a lot. I’m a trans woman butch lesbian sociology professor. Please, have a seat.”
Aisha sat in one of the two chairs in front of her desk.
I said, “I’m some kind of nonbinary, probably genderfluid or something you can’t say in English but I don’t have another language for it.” Then managed to get myself calm enough to sit down in the other chair.
“I can help you with that,” Dr. Wade told me. “And Aisha, I want to hear more about your school program and what’s going on.”
Aisha told her everything about our Chemistry class and Mr. Bretherton. Dr. Wade took notes and asked, “Have you told your parents?”
“I don’t want to. Mom’s already looking at houses in California. I don’t want to…” she repeated, trailed off and gestured at me.
“There are more than two options,” Dr. Wade told her.
“You mean it’s not a binary?” I blurted out.
Aisha flashed me a grin. “That should be one of your superpowers, not getting people stuck in either/or situations.”
“Except I get stuck in them all the time,” I admitted.
“Would you tell me about that?” Dr. Wade asked. “The research is very preliminary, but what I’ve read suggests that nonbinary people see themselves quite differently from men and women.”
“Yes!” I about hopped out of my chair. “The thing is, I read some of that, and I talked to Aisha’s friends, which was great, but almost everybody is like: I am THIS. Like they’ve got one or two or three names for what they are and it’s all handled.”
“Is it possible that because you’re looking from the outside, they seem to have themselves more together than they do?” she asked.
“Maybe yeah but a lot of people are like: oh I’m androgynous or nonbinary. They don’t talk about feeling different on different days. And yeah, they say flux or fluid, but I can’t see that.”
“Sight may be a significant part of the problem. We live in an incredibly visible time and culture. For tens of thousands of years, people did not rely solely on sight as much as we do now. There are cultures where a multi-sensory landscape was the primary way of getting around in the world. Hearing and touch were very important. At least one of these cultures didn’t seem to have gender at all. Can I give you some articles to read?”
“Please! But how can a culture not have gender?”
“It’s possible that gender is not a human universal. This is an imperfect analogy, but we might consider that humans have a universal drive to create and use language—and there are many different ways to do that: spoken, signed, written, typed, images, emoji, and so on. I suspect that humans have a universal drive to create social roles, but there are many different ways to do that: gender, age, seniority, geography, caste and class systems. We happen to live in a culture where gender is one of the strongest systems of social roles and it’s anchored primarily in how people look.”
“So some people are fluent in English and some are fluent in Spanish, but I’m fluent in both, but you can’t see that only by looking at me?”
“Or more than two,” Aisha said. “About four, from what you tell me.”
“But then is gender even real?”
“Of course it is,” Dr. Wade said. “English is real. Money is real, as is the U.S. Constitution, even though cultures created those. Some social constructions like gender, language, money, have more impact on us than t
he natural world, even to the point of changing our bodies. For example, our brains are now wired to speak English and it might be impossible for us to stop thinking in English if that’s our only language. My brain is wired for me to be a woman as, I’m assuming, is Aisha’s. Our brains evolved to shape and be shaped by our cultures.”
“But then shouldn’t I be a woman too?” I asked with a shudder.
“Cultures can come up with systems that are more restrictive than human beings are capable of. No one would say the creation of racism should’ve caused brains to adapt for it.”
“Hell no,” Aisha muttered.
Dr. Wade looked at me. “Your brain doesn’t fit itself into a model that is too restrictive for you. That doesn’t have to be a problem, it can be a strength. You can see where the social construction of gender needs to change. Can I give you homework?”
“Like the only homework I will completely look forward to in ever? Yes!” I said.
“You too?” she asked Aisha, who grinned and nodded. Dr. Wade said, “I don’t like what that school environment is teaching you and your parents need to know about it too. All of it.”
Aisha sighed and said, “Yes, ma’am,” but she hadn’t stopped smiling.
Dr. Wade took us over to the school union for dinner and Aisha’s dad met us there. The seating area was smaller than our school’s cafeteria, with wood and blue fabric partitions that kept the noise level low. And it didn’t smell like week-old tater tots in a stale oil bath. I could definitely like college.
Mr. Warren and Dr. Wade had one of those boring adult conversations about their work histories and current projects, while Aisha and I jostled each other under the table with excitement.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Late October 2017
Aisha told her parents about Chemistry class when I wasn’t around. She texted me that the conversation had happened, but didn’t give details until a few days later. That Friday, Aisha’s parents were having a dinner party and we’d been invited but it sounded dreadful. We opted to eat at my house and hang out there so we wouldn’t get called down from Aisha’s room to awkwardly meet a bunch of people from Mr. Warren’s office.
Brock and Mom were out. We’d eaten with Milo and Pops, then done the dishes while they played Bananagrams. They’d said good night at nine and we hoped to have the living room to ourselves for an hour. We settled on the couch, my arm over Aisha’s shoulders, her leaning back against my side, our history textbook open in her lap. I had a smaller book open on my leg. She underlined and took notes. I just had to read this for English. Since we had books out, no one was going to protest us being cuddled up together.
“What did your parents say about Chem?” I asked.
“Lots of stuff.”
That meant she didn’t want to talk about it. But I couldn’t keep from asking, “Did your mom say anything about moving?”
“Dad likes his job here, but she’s using this to get him to look for similar jobs near L.A. Now I think he has to because if he doesn’t it looks like he’s putting himself ahead of me, even though I told them I want to stay.”
“Do you?”
She sighed and lapsed into a long silence before saying, “I don’t know. There’s a lot I hate about being here, a lot that I miss about Cali, but there’s also so much I’d miss if I weren’t here. Even if you could come with me, I’d miss Milo and Pops, and the marsh, the seasons that aren’t winter. And if Dad couldn’t have his job, that would suck. I’m only in high school for two more years and he’s got to have a job for, like, ever. Plus being an EMT out in the sticks here is good for Riq. Closer to L.A., I’d worry about him.”
She sounded so much older than me and I felt sad for all the ways she’d had to grow up.
“I wish we could make our school more like your old one,” I said.
“Hah, me too, but we’d need at least a thousand kids of color, plus teachers.”
Brock banged in through the back door and stomped down the stairs to his room. Not that he was mad or anything; he always stomped. Mom followed, nuking herself some dinner in the kitchen.
We returned to reading. I snuck peeks at the curve of Aisha’s neck, brushed my thumb up the back of it and felt her press closer to me. I caught one of her curls and pressed it between my fingers, tugged it. She laughed and shook her head so her curls tickled my cheek. I kissed her shoulder.
She said, “K?”
“Huh?”
“You know I like what you’re doing, right? But would you not play with my hair when our friends are around.”
“When did I…oh.”
I’d finally taken Aisha over to Trina’s last Sunday for a fall-themed party. It did have great food. We’d spent most of our time in the living room watching TV, or pretending to, because that was less boring than the conversations going on around us. I remembered sitting next to her on the couch, my fingers tugging on her curls while I tried to figure out if it would be cool to have my arm around her. I’d decided “not cool” because all the other couples there were white.
Playing with each other’s hair had started last spring as a friends-to-flirting move. Aisha tugged on her curls when she was concentrating. I’d leaned over during a study session and teasingly asked if it would help her to play with my hair or did it only work with curls. She’d spent the rest of that study session wrapping a lock of my hair around her finger, curling it, letting it go—which had been just the excuse I’d needed to lie with my head in her lap.
Days later, she’d taken my fingers and placed them on a curl at the back of her head. I’d tugged it out and let it spring back, like she did. Now sometimes she’d wrap my hair around her fingers when she was thinking and I’d play with her curls when I wanted to feel closer.
So I’d done that at Trina’s last week. Now I remembered the expression she had when she’d come back from Trina’s kitchen later: hard, closed, angry but not able to show it. Something had happened to her and I’d missed it.
“I’m sorry.” I said. “I should’ve thought about where we were. I’ll pay better attention. You want to tell me what happened?”
I pushed the book off my knee and wrapped both arms around her. Her back and shoulders stayed tight.
“Eve patted me.” Her clenched jaw flattened the words.
“Fuck.”
“Came up behind me when I was pouring pop and ran her hand down my curls, pulled at them. I spilled pop everywhere.”
“Can I talk to her or did you? Or both?”
“I asked her to please not do that, but what are you going to say?”
I took a very slow, deep breath because I was furious. I considered a whole bunch of things I was not going to say, like: Please don’t pat my girlfriend like she’s a dog. And the fact that on the street people asked before they touched Wolvie and what the fuck that Aisha didn’t get that courtesy.
“I’m going to say: ‘You saw me playing with Aisha’s curls because she’s my girlfriend and that’s a girlfriend thing to do, it’s not okay to go up to someone you don’t know that well and touch their hair, especially if they’re black.’ And then Eve is going to say some colorblind bullshit and I’m going to deliver a concise lecture on the history of the exoticization of black hair.”
“The one my mom does?” Aisha asked.
“Yep.”
“Okay. Cool.”
I held her tighter. “A, I am sorry. I won’t do it again.”
“Except in private,” she said quietly. “’Cause I like that.”
I nodded and pressed my lips to her cheek. She sighed and relaxed into me. I kept both arms around her as she went back to reading, kept them there until she shifted and wriggled and pushed my hand back toward my book.
* * *
Later in the kitchen, after Aisha had gone home, Brock asked, “Why were you apologizing to her so much?”
He’d come up to nuke some mac-n-cheese, wearing gray sweatpants and a sleeveless black T-shirt—with giant, drooping armholes—th
at made him look like a skinny tool with goosebumps because the kitchen was chilly and he was too much of a dork to put on a sweatshirt.
“Wow, nothing good on YouTube tonight, huh?” I said.
“You were loud enough. All, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ what’d you do?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” I told him.
“Is it some mysterious black thing? You don’t have to be always apologizing to her for shit that happened hundreds of years ago.”
Okay that was it. Brock was getting the whole lecture on the history of black hair in America, not even the concise version. And not even only about hair. Like how some white people said slavery was so long ago but didn’t think how there’d been two-hundred and forty-six years of slavery on this continent followed by eighty-nine years of segregation. That was three-hundred and thirty-five years of being dehumanized and brutalized. And segregation had only ended sixty-three years ago. It was legal when Milo and Pops were kids. How long was it supposed to take people to get over all that? Especially in a country shaped by and carrying on its effects?
I wanted to yell at Brock. Beat on his chest until he heard me. But he wouldn’t.
Aisha had to do this all the time, every day.
And if she didn’t get to be angry, then I had to do better too. I ground my teeth, clenched my hands so they hurt, and said as calmly as I could, “I don’t understand why you think I shouldn’t apologize if I did something that made life harder for her?”
He took the mac-n-cheese tray out of the microwave and dropped it on the counter because he hadn’t used an oven mitt. At least it landed dish-side down. He leaned against the counter and folded his arms.
“What’d you do?” he asked.
“I let some of my friends think it was okay for them to touch her hair without asking. That’s a thing white people do a lot to black people, just touch their hair. Does anyone ever touch yours without asking?”
“No,” he scoffed, like anyone would dare.
“And what would you do if someone came up and started playing with mine—a person I don’t know well and maybe don’t even like?” I asked.
“Probably hit ’em. Does that really happen?”
