In the Silences

by Rachel Gold

  I wore the binder and slim-skinny guy jeans that I loved—dark blue denim, no tears, no wearing—and my amazing light blue Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men T-shirt that combined the X-Men and trans symbols. Over that I wore a dark brown men’s shirt, unbuttoned to show my T-shirt. But I also had my hair up in a topknot, and earrings, light makeup, so I didn’t come across as just trying to look like a guy. From the double-takes, this combination confused plenty of people.

  Aisha’s head tipped up, gaze sweeping back and forth across the audience. Searching for me. I straightened up. She saw me.

  I nodded once, slowly, grinning, acknowledgement and joke. Her lips quirked and she nodded back. She put her hands on top of the table and sat back in her chair.

  She stared out over the audience. The front three rows were sparsely populated on this side. Mr. and Mrs. Warren came up and saved seats for me and Tariq, and a few more for Milo and Pops.

  Meta came in with her mom and dad and her sister and three of her friends. I swallowed my pride and waved to her, calling, “Hey, Meta, we saved seats up here!”

  Her family and friends slid into the row with Aisha’s parents and got to catching up about parent stuff. Meta came over to me. “Why aren’t you sitting?”

  “So Aisha can see me better.”

  Meta opened and closed her mouth, turned and looked at Aisha. “Got it,” she said and stayed facing the front, leaning against the wall.

  “Thanks,” I told her.

  Sofi and Jon joined us.

  Trina and Eve came in with some other girls and they were all wearing X-Men buttons. “Do they know what those mean?”

  “Conceptually, sure,” Jon said. “For real, no. I bought a bunch for them to wear. Figured it was the right way to support our team. They did say they’d come see Black Panther when it’s out.”

  “Wow, let me know how that goes.”

  “You could come with us,” he offered.

  “Maybe. But I’m seeing it with Aisha first.”

  “Wish me luck,” he said and went up to take his seat next to Aisha. I couldn’t hear what he said to her, but from her eyeroll it was a failed attempt at a joke.

  The competition started and Aisha stayed middle of the pack even though she knew all these answers. Heck, I knew most of the easy ones at this point, but she kept looking up at her parents and over at me and at her hands. Mostly at her hands.

  Jon got one right and one wrong, putting them in fifth position.

  The next question was: “One of the strongest materials manufactured by processes within mammalian bodies, this polypeptide’s alpha helix forms a coiled coil. Its harder versions have up to 8% cysteine, while the more flexible versions go as low as 2.5%. What is this protein affected by heat, which can be curled, waved, or straightened when manifest as human hair?”

  Aisha hit the buzzer and said, “Keratin.” She got it right, but her forehead pinched, lines between her eyebrows. It took a second for me to get how she’d feel about being so quick to answer a question about hair. She was worried that people thought this was all she knew.

  She sat through the next four without even trying for the buzzer. Jon got one right about laminar flow and turbulent flow, which was badass.

  The questioner asked, “The first disease ever linked to a single gene, this condition’s abnormal protein—especially prominent in black people—can protect its carriers against malaria if they carry it on only one chromosome; two copies of the mutated gene, however, can impede blood circulation and cause strokes and seizures. What is this condition named for its misshapen or unusually shaped red blood cells?”

  Nobody moved.

  Aisha hit her buzzer and, voice strangled, said, “Sickle Cell Anemia.”

  She looked madder than I’d ever seen her. Way to load on the stereotype threat. She didn’t move through the next six questions

  I wanted to tear down this fucking school.

  I felt like we were in that scene at the end of the X-Men: Apocalypse movie when Apocalypse is beating the shit out of Professor X, has him pinned to the ground and is this huge, terrifying force in his mind. And Apocalypse has already beaten all the X-Men, immobilized or caged them. He’s going to wreck them and then the world.

  The same way this school was wrecking us. The way the force of Apocalypse, that hidden racism and sexism in the minds around us, beat down so many young heroes.

  As the X-Men are all dying, Professor X calls to Jean Grey, “Unleash your power!…No fear!” She’s afraid that her power is too destructive. Like Aisha being scared of being the angry black woman or falling into any of the stupid stereotypes she’d been offered.

  In my mind I called to Aisha: Unleash your power!

  But neither of us was that good at lip reading, so I squared my shoulders and the next time she looked my way I mouthed: I love you. And I hoped that my eyes showed how much that was true no matter what.

  She and Jon were in fourth place with only a few questions to go.

  “Archaeologists confirm that a largely alphabetical system of writing provided the foundation for extensive trade, philosophy, and poetry more than two thousand years ago in a system of city-states whose descendants survive in what modern nation?”

  Aisha slammed her hand down on the buzzer.

  “Greece,” she said. “That’s your answer. But it’s equally true of Ethiopia.”

  She got the next one right too, edging her and Jon into the third spot and the second round, where they would each compete as individuals. Jon wasn’t going to make it far into the second round; science wasn’t his thing. But how far would Aisha make it when all the attention was on her alone and each question felt like a trap?

  On the break I asked Sofi to save my spot and went to walk around the parking lot, pissed at so many people in that room and one who wasn’t. Brock didn’t even pretend he’d show up and at this point I didn’t want him to. I’d tried to give him something good and he’d shredded it. He’d always be my brother and I’d have a place for him if he wanted to wake up and be a decent human being, but I wasn’t wasting any more time on him, not when I had friends like Jon and Sofi who did want to create a better future together.

  I stomped the length of the parking lot and back, still had a few minutes before the break ended, so I crossed it again, heavy steps, arms swinging, trying to burn out my rage.

  On the strip of snow between parking lot and street, I stopped to watch a bunch of cars, driving by in a line, like for a funeral. The two bumpers I could see bore rainbow flag stickers. The next car had a trans sticker and a Black Lives Matter sticker.

  My superhero reflexes kicked in faster than thought. “Hey!” I hollered, waving my arms. “Hey, over here!” I ran after them, waving and yelling, “Here! Here!”

  The last car pulled over and a girl got out, college-aged, stout and dark-skinned, in a red hijab. “We’re looking for the high school auditorium,” she said. “Do you know where that is?”

  “Right here!” I pointed behind me. “Those other cars are heading for the junior high.”

  “Oh!” she pulled a phone out of her purse and texted quickly. “Thank you.”

  “You’re here for Aisha, aren’t you? Please say you are. Please.”

  “Are you Kaz?” she asked and I nodded. “I’m Hani. Why are you out here? Did Dr. Wade tell you?”

  “No, it’s just luck or magic or telepathy or all three.”

  Hani grinned and ducked back into the car so they could pull into the parking lot and help wave down the other cars. There were seven cars and a lot of people. Hani explained that Dr. Wade had invited all the students from her sociology classes to this event, saying it was a study of implicit racism in suburban Minnesota.

  From Dr. Wade’s three classes, more than twenty students decided to road trip down to our little town. I saw light brown faces, medium brown, dark, red-brown, tan, more races and ethnicities than I could name. Dr. Wade got out of her car with a curvy black woman in an orange shirt under a gray su
it that I’d have worn even if it was a women’s suit.

  Dr. Wade introduced her as her wife and was about to introduce the students, but I hopped in place and said, “We have to get back inside. The first round already happened. Come on!”

  We got to the auditorium three minutes before the end of the break and filed up the wide aisle between the two sets of bleachers and chairs. Conversation stopped. The tension of all the other white people in the room pressed hard against my skin.

  I turned toward our side of the room and yelled, “Milo, how many seats are still open up there?”

  That hit pause on the rising tension but it did not dissipate.

  Milo rose up from the row in front of Aisha. She beamed the way she did when we worked on a woodshop project together and it turned out just right.

  Without seeming to yell, she raised her voice enough to carry through that vast room. “Dr. Amanda Wade, I’ve been reading your papers.” With the entire audience silently watching, Milo crossed the front of the room, still talking, came down the wide aisle, hand extended. “I’m so pleased to meet you. How many seats do we need?”

  “Twenty-four,” Dr. Wade said. “And it’s wonderful to meet the famous Milo.”

  Mrs. Warren was on her feet, calling to the back of the room, “Milo, Dr. Wade, we’ve got eight open here. More if we could add some chairs.”

  “Spare chairs are over there,” Milo pointed. “The kids will get them for you.”

  Amid the resumed hubbub in the room, I scrambled with Sofi, Meta, Zack, and Tariq to get more chairs by the side of the front rows. We managed to fit in ten more chairs. Then Jon planted his feet, looked at Trina’s group and said, “Would you all move back a few rows?”

  Trina opened her mouth, but Sofi cleared her throat pointedly and said, “Caden and the guys will help make room, won’t they?”

  “Yes, they will,” Trina said and got up.

  Damn. Sofi must’ve had a talk with her. I wanted to know what she’d said.

  Conversations started again as Dr. Wade’s group came up to fill in all the empty chairs. Aisha blinked hard, trying not to cry as the front three rows on her side got filled in. I kept fiddling with the chairs, because I was also on the edge of tearing up too.

  I was far up enough toward the front that I could see how it might look to Aisha: the only white faces in the front three rows now were Milo and Pops. Plus me standing on the side. Rows two and three were all brown, tan, cashmere, chenille, walnut, mission oak, mahogany faces—two-thirds of the wood chart from Milo’s workshop, of the foundation colors on the card—most chatting with each other but also glancing up at Aisha and smiling, grinning, or giving a thumbs-up. All of us looked at her like she could say anything and it would be the best thing in the world.

  The second round started.

  Aisha was fire. Totally phoenix.

  Exactly that moment in the movie where Jean Grey is so scared but she walks out of the building, walks straight out in the air because she’s that powerful, frees all the other X-Men, including Beast. Together they disintegrate Apocalypse—literally turn him to dust and blow him away.

  Aisha was Jean Grey. And Storm if she wanted, and Dr. Maggie Pierce from Grey’s Anatomy, and anyone she wanted to be.

  From that point on, she rode over most of the other students and only came in second to a squirrely white boy who everyone knew was the school’s resident super genius.

  * * *

  In the aftermath of Science Bowl, most of the student audience members fled the building, while the parents and contenders and friends hung out for punch and cookies. Dr. Wade, her wife, and all the sociology students stayed.

  From the side of the room, I watched Milo and Mrs. Warren working in concert, without talking to each other. They went from group to group, meeting people from Dr. Wade’s classes and introducing them to clumps of students and parents from our high school, staying in the conversation long enough to make sure it really got going and then moving to the next.

  I saw two college students standing by the wall, one with a purple-white-green scarf: genderqueer colors. I went over to them. “Hey, I’m Kaz, I go here and Aisha’s my girlfriend and I’m nonbinary. Do you want to meet some of the other kids in the gender and sexuality group here?”

  “Oh yes!” one said. So I took them over to Meta and Zack.

  Once they got talking excitedly about their overlapping geekeries, I pushed up on tip-toes and searched the room for Aisha. I spotted her on the far side of the cookies and punch table having an intense conversation with Mr. Saito, the Physics teacher. Mrs. Warren saw this too and went to join them. From the amount of nodding Mr. Saito was doing, Aisha’s independent study for spring was more than handled.

  I found Milo sitting with Pops in the front row of chairs and plunked down next to her.

  “Looks like it worked,” I said, waving in Aisha’s direction.

  “She did great. He’s lucky to have her as a student,” Milo said. “But this won’t fix everything. She’ll still have to fight. We all will.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But we’re superheroes. And now she’s got a big team. She’s not like Superman, off doing everything alone. That’s never been how she likes things. We just needed to have other people to fight with us.”

  “Kid, always.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  January 2018

  Los Angeles

  I had an arm around Aisha’s shoulders, but that wasn’t enough contact, so she took my right hand in hers, pulled it across and played with my fingers. The sun lipped down to the ocean and the air hovered about sixty degrees. I’d taken off my sweatshirt, but Aisha wore a mid-weight jacket.

  In Minnesota, the high for the day had been three degrees. Milo faithfully texted me a photo of Wolvie in the snow. They’d gotten four inches in the two days I’d been in L.A.

  I’d met two of Aisha’s aunts, plus her trans cousin. Darius and his girlfriend drove down from Berkeley. They sat farther down the wall from us, still eating ice cream. Aisha and I had inhaled ours.

  Ice cream and a sunset over the ocean in non-freezing weather—Aisha might’ve been right about California. Not that Minnesota wasn’t also great.

  She fished in the pocket of her jacket and came out with a small wrapped box, white and silver snowflake paper. She’d gotten me some comics for Christmas but told me she was saving one gift for later. I peeled off the paper and opened the box.

  A necklace sat on green tissue paper: one big silver bead with two concentric circles around it, each with two beads. I rubbed my thumb over it, then picked it up, letting the circles dangle from the silver chain.

  “That’s a carbon atom,” Aisha said.

  “You remembered my pronouns. From the way the trees use carbon to communicate all pronouns at once.”

  “Kaz, life itself. You feel like that to me.”

  “You are too,” I told her. “We do all start out the same for the first few weeks of our lives. Maybe that’s why the feeling of my body changes, shifts from male to female to both to something else, because all bodies contain that original similarity and I feel it more than most.”

  “But we’re not the same,” Aisha said. “Our differences should be strengths, like superheroes. They don’t have all the same powers, but they learn to use all their powers together to be greater than they can be alone.”

  I put on the necklace, looped my arm over her shoulders again, and pulled her close. She rested her head on my shoulder and played with the necklace where it rested on top of my T-shirt.

  “You were right about California,” I said.

  “It’s the best.”

  “One of the best. This summer I’ll show you everything great about the family lake cabin and the lake itself. And Wolvie will show Mr. Pickles around. He’ll love it.”

  She nodded. I caught the flash of her grin. “We should invite Riq, he loves camping.”

  Her mom had paused the house-buying, moving-to-L.A. project for now. I’d
turn sixteen in a week and in May Aisha would too, which meant that for junior year she could pick any high school within driving distance of our Minnesota town. And I could go with her because the Warrens were staying in the big, bright house across the alley from mine. Or we could take some classes at our high school, some online, and maybe Aisha would take some college classes.

  Long term, the answer isn’t Minnesota or California—it’s not binary like that—it’s California and Minnesota. It’s all the genders. It’s people getting what they need without feeling they’ve got to take it from anyone else. And it’s whole bunch of things we haven’t imagined yet: living a present that understands our past but is dreamed from our future.

  Author’s Note

  In terms of race, this is a story about a white person learning to be an ally. There are many great books by black and African American authors about the experiences of black teens, with more being published every day. Read them!

  Rather than list the books I read to research this novel and those I recommend, you can find that list on my website at https://rachelgold.com/silences/ along with links to reading lists with more recommendations. On my website, you can also find gender-related reading recommendations and some comic books that I love.

  You can also visit:

  http://queerbooksforteens.com/find-books/ to find many young adult novels searchable by race/ethnicity and gender of the main characters, and much more.

  https://www.glsen.org/article/supporting-black-lgbtq-students for resources to combat stereotype threat.

  https://www.translifeline.org/ for support around gender identity and transition.

  More than ever, we’re not alone. If you’re not part of a team of superheroes yet, today is a good day to start gathering your allies and become a hero.

  Bella Books, Inc.

  Women. Books. Even Better Together.

  P.O. Box 10543

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  Phone: 800-729-4992