by Rachel Gold
Too bad Tesh already had a girlfriend or this could be Summer’s moment. They looked happy, heads bent toward each other, chatting and walking in the crisp late afternoon sun.
“Oh yeah, she’s not coming back,” Summer said. “We’re done. I’m glad. She was a lot of work and I’m so busy this year. The LSAT is freaking me out.”
“You’ll slay it,” Tesh told her. “And you’ll find someone perfect. Give it time.”
They turned onto the walk leading up to Cal’s. Halfway along it, Summer tugged on Tesh’s arm so they stopped walking. Tesh turned toward her.
Oh God, Summer was going to take her moment anyway. She stared at Tesh with that super intense I’m-going-to-kiss-you-now expression.
Could I scurry down the ladder and run behind the house without them seeing me? It was a creaky ladder. If I didn’t stay still as a stone, they’d hear me. From where they were standing now, the tree barely covered me. Maybe if I stayed frozen, they’d never realize I was here.
Tesh looked as frozen as I was. Summer grabbed the front of Tesh’s jacket, tugged, and leaned up. Their lips met.
I held my breath. How would Tesh deal with this? Short kiss and push Summer away? Or…
Tesh pressed into the kiss. All three grocery bags hit the ground. Tesh embraced Summer, while Summer’s hands went up around Tesh’s face and hair.
That was so much. It had been obvious Summer was smitten with Tesh. Summer was pretty easy to read. Tesh wasn’t. But damn, that kiss was super clear. They were trying to memorize each other. It wasn’t any sloppy making out. Their lips moved together, communicating everything they couldn’t say out loud.
They pulled apart, both gasping, hands still on each other.
“I can’t,” Tesh whispered. The cool breeze carried the quiet words to me. My hand was freezing to the gutter. My face was freezing in shock.
“Please,” Summer said, the word more plaintive than anything I’d ever heard from her. She would beg for Tesh if she had to.
I so didn’t want to be here for that.
Tesh kissed her, pulled away, said again, “I can’t. Not now, just not now.”
Picking up one of the bags, Tesh ran into the house. Summer watched Tesh go, mouth open, hands limp at her sides. She was crying. She moved to one of the grocery bags, picked it up and set it down again. Turned back toward the house and then spun halfway back, eyes focusing on me.
Her tear-streaked face went from soft grief to rigid fury. I held up my hands.
“Do you have to be in the middle of fucking everything?” Summer yelled at me.
I went down the ladder carefully, shaking with the effort of having stayed frozen so long and the impact of Summer’s anger.
“I wasn’t—”
“This isn’t about you,” she yelled.
“I know.”
“No you don’t. Every fucking thing is about you. You don’t get this too. You don’t get to swoop in here and…everything I have you take it and twist it.”
She spun and walked away, stride heavy with rage.
What was she talking about? I hadn’t taken anything of hers. I guess if she thought that Lindy getting expelled had pushed her own girlfriend to leave school, maybe she could justify being pissed at me. But that was messed up.
I needed a hot shower and soup and to tell my roommate Ella all about this because holy crap.
I carried the two grocery bags from the front walk into the kitchen. Tesh was putting the first bag’s contents into the fridge.
“Tucker?”
“Found these on the walk,” I said.
“Did you see Summer?”
“Heading back toward school. Did something happen?”
Tesh touched their lips, turned in the direction of the school. “I made a mistake.”
I burned to ask: which one? Kissing Summer or not kissing her more? Instead I said, “I’ve got to change for the party, you okay here?”
Tesh nodded and put more pop into the fridge. I about ran back to campus.
Chapter Three
Nico
On the two-hour drive from Columbus up to Freytag, I rehearsed different ways to talk to my dad about dropping the lawsuit. Threaten to countersue? Maybe. Offer him a bribe? If I could ever figure out what he wanted, short of turning me into a man.
Dinner with Ella didn’t help. I wanted her to tell me about Tucker, but Ella was all aflutter about her boyfriend—it being Valentine’s Day. I offered advice about boys, about friends, about sex. But it felt like we were on different planets and I was shouting across the vacuum of space. We didn’t sync up until we were back in her room.
“Help me pick what to wear,” she said, standing in front of her closet.
“He’ll like you in anything,” I told her. “He’s smitten.”
But before long I was trying on things from her closet while she checked out how bad she looked in my orange shirt. She stuck her tongue out at her reflection, yanked the shirt off and slipped her sweater back on. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t catch the shirt when Ella threw it back at me.
“That makes your skin look like three-day-old rice porridge,” I said. “Or, wait, like a zombie. I’ll bring it up for Halloween.”
Hands on hips, she demanded, “Put on a pastel, I dare you.”
“I am much too fabulous for pastels, babygirl.”
Friends since early high school—we’d dated on and off for two years—we didn’t look like we belonged together. Short, delicate Ella looked very high-society white girl and hid her nerd tendencies well. Her closet was full of sweaters. Even my everyday clothes had the feel of costume to them. Plus I was a blend on so many levels. Average for a guy, tall for a girl. I appeared light-skinned next to my mom and medium brown next to my dad. I flowed and danced through the fixed identities around me.
Ella went back to her closet, tucking strands of straight blond hair behind her ear. She said, “I have a dress you might like, if you’re in a dress mood. My sister says it’s too small for her. But it’s too big on me.”
I was not in a dress mood. But I wanted to keep playing with Ella. She’d had a tough first semester at college while I was down in Columbus partying with the astrophysics geeks and my theater friends.
She’d come up here already half-outed. Rumors were flying about there being a trans girl on campus. In the dorms—shocking! No one was inclined to believe the trans girl was Ella. After all, she’s five-foot-five. And everybody knows what trans people look like, right?
They were much more willing to believe that tall, thick-shouldered Tucker was trans. She’s not, but we don’t hold that against her. We don’t hold anything against her because she’s fourteen kinds of hot. Not only physically, but smart in this mellow, thoughtful way, calming and deep.
Brave, ridiculous Tucker came out as a trans woman to protect my Ella. She was not ready to get beat up over it, but she was. And she got so wrecked by what came after that she still didn’t see how messed up she was.
“Hand over the dress,” I told Ella. “Let’s see.”
I pulled off my chest binder and paused. I didn’t have a bra with me. I didn’t usually need both a binder and a bra on the same night. The dress was thick enough to wear braless and cut with a sporty, high neckline. I slipped into it.
“That works,” Ella said, like she’d expected the opposite.
The mirror showed an athletic girl ready to hit the tennis courts. The dress was a good blue for me, bold and electric with gray side panels. But it was profoundly not my style. I’d grown my hair out a few inches since fall and compensated by dressing more masculine. In this dress I went most of the way to full girlie girl.
“If I ever go through a Serena Williams stage…” I said.
“You’d need to bulk up your arms, you’re too skinny.”
Ella opened her mouth to say more, but there was a tap on the inside door of her suite and Tucker called, “Are you in there?”
Before I could ask her to wait, Ella open
ed the door. I grabbed the top item from the pile of clothes on the bed and held it to my chest, even though it was small and lace-edged. I was not ready for Tucker to see my chest. Or me without most of my usual, armoring, fabulous clothing on. Or me in a dress.
“Can I borrow your hot pot?” Tucker asked Ella, and then, seeing me. “Oh hey, hi.”
“Hey,” I echoed, unable to keep a ridiculous grin off my face.
Every time I saw Tucker she looked more excellent than the last. Her whole wardrobe was faded jeans, T-shirts and sweatshirts that were fraying at the edges. There was something magical about a tall girl with big shoulders where you could see the contours of her skin through the threadbare T-shirt she was wearing.
Plus Mohawk, did I mention? Bleached and starched up in a soft wave above the shaved sides of her scalp.
Her blue-eyed gaze traveled down my body, paused at the line of the skirt, blinked and leapt up to meet my eyes with a question. I couldn’t tell what the question was. Could be: wow, you like dresses? Could be: are you really a girl? Could be: do you honestly play tennis?
I held the cloth against my chest tighter realizing as I did that it was one of Ella’s camisoles. I could not have been more in the girl spotlight. I wanted to run. Dance away from the blinding cultural certainty of these clothes. I wanted to tell Tucker: I’m not this, I’m not.
But she was grinning—at me or at the image of girl she’d superimposed on me?
I knew that expression on her face. I’d seen it on too many people. It was: oh good, I figured you out. She saw the curve of breasts in this dress, around the edges of the lacy camisole that didn’t cover me. She assumed it meant everything it did not.
She was going to ask me out now, tonight, thinking she knew, thinking we were all okay and I could perform genderfluid all I wanted now that she knew I was a girl. It was an inverted kind of naked: exposed as something I was not. I watched myself being erased.
We’d talked about gender, that I was nonbinary, didn’t see myself as either male or female, or rather as a lot of both and more. But she didn’t know the whole backstory on that. She didn’t know that the physical details of me weren’t binary either, weren’t what most people think of as male or female.
I hadn’t found a way to tell her. I mean, I didn’t know when or how. If we never tried to date, never kissed, never seemed like there would be more, was there any reason to tell her? Awkward enough to say “I like you” out loud pre-kissing, but the whole thing: “I like you, now can we talk about my genitals?”
And now so much harder because she thought she knew me. Complex fear. Not the simple physical animal panic of my skin wanting to preserve itself. I’ve had that; I know what that fear is.
This fear was rooted in the nauseous anxiety that after months of getting to know her, seeing her vulnerable, seeing her messed up insides, I could show Tucker who I am and still have her freak out.
Ella broke the silence between us by saying, “We’re trying on costumes for next Halloween. Nico’s thinking about going as Serena Williams and I was going to go zombie.”
Bless her, she knew how inside-out I felt. She was trying to let Tucker know that I was in another costume.
“Walking Dead is so last year,” I managed to say, even though my tongue was sticking to the roof of my mouth.
“You’re not wearing that to the party tonight?” Tucker asked.
“Nico’s eschewing dresses until yo can perfect the guy-in-a-dress look,” Ella said and I wanted to hug her. She picked up her hot pot and handed it to Tucker with a pointed stare at the door.
Tucker paused on the threshold. “But I wanted to tell you about Summer…can I talk to you later?”
Ella nodded and made a shooing gesture. Brow furrowed, but smiling, Tucker went back into her room.
“You okay?” Ella asked me as I stripped out of the dress in a hot second.
“No.”
“How can I help?”
“You did.”
I jerked on the chest binder and tugged it comfortingly into place, back to flat-chested. Then undershirt, bright orange shirt, skinny jeans, guy boots.
“Do you have any non-white girl hair products?” I asked.
“There’s a gel that might be yours in the second drawer down. It ended up in the bathroom box and I figured one day you’d have a hair emergency in my room.”
“You’re an angel. An obnoxious, smirky angel, but I’ll take it.”
It wasn’t the right gel, but it got my hair to settle closer to my scalp, a smidge more masculine. Antidote to the dress.
* * *
We drove the four blocks to the party so I’d be parked there in the morning. I was staying in Cal’s roommate’s room. I didn’t want to have to make the drive back home to Columbus in the middle of the night.
Cal’s house was visible from the end of the block: flashing pink lights, pink crepe paper, giant heart decorations. If you’d filled a fire truck with Pepto Bismol and turned the hoses on Cal’s house, you could not have made it any more pink. It was glorious.
I followed Ella into the front hall, carrying my duffel. She veered left, through the combined living room and dining room, heading for the kitchen. I paused, duffel over shoulder, to see if Tucker was there yet.
From a chair near the couch, Summer called to me, “You look pretty tonight. Or is that handsome?”
“Both, darling,” I told her and darted the rest of the way down the hall.
A quick left put me in the roommate’s room. I dropped my duffel on the bed and cracked the window because unwashed laundry was not my ambiance.
What to do about Summer? I wanted to like her. She was light brown and loud, which I loved. But her obsessing about my gender got old months ago.
Some people got stuck on it. I’d had people say—to my face—that my gender bothered them.
And if they knew the whole truth…if Tucker knew…
But I was not thinking about that.
I slipped out of the bedroom, hoping the closed door would keep partygoers out of my stuff. A dozen people milled around the dining room table, picking at pizzas and bowls of chips. I grabbed a pop from the buffet.
Tucker turned the corner from the hall and came over to give me a hug. I wanted to hold onto her. We were about the same height but she was heavier than me—not hard to do; I burn calories like a nuclear reactor. She had this unbelievable chest and I wanted to slide my hands up under the sweatshirt and anything else she had on—but I was not thinking about that.
Especially after the whole dress thing.
Okay, yeah, I was totally thinking about that.
She smelled like sawdust and warm metal, and she’d swapped her threadbare T-shirt for one that was fraying at the neck, just visible under a newish university sweatshirt.
So I wouldn’t stare, I waved a hand at the living room crowd and asked Tucker, “What’s new?”
“Tesh’s hair,” she said.
Tesh was in the core group of queer and trans students who hung out together at Freytag University. At first I’d thought Ella was nuts to pick this random school in rural Ohio when she could’ve gone to OSU with me. But now that I’d met Cal, Tesh and some of the other students, it was shaping up to be a cool place.
Last fall, Tesh was all about peasant blouses, skirts, and boots. Now she sported cropped dark blue hair and a men’s shirt with a tie. Not like shirts have a sex, unless, you know, assuming buttons are the genitals of a shirt, technically the ones with the buttons on the right side could be male shirts.
The blue of Tesh’s hair made her eyes luminous. Her? Maybe it was the whole new presentation that caused Tesh to glow. In addition to the hair and clothes, Tesh was binding. No rise of breasts showed under the shirt.
I perched on the couch arm and leaned toward Tesh so I wouldn’t have to shout over the music.
“You look great! I love that hair color.”
Tesh grinned. I knew that look. I mirrored it back.
“Pronoun
?” I asked.
“They them.”
“Awesome.”
“What’s yours?” they asked.
“I’m sticking with yo and yos for a while,” I told Tesh.
I’d been through many nonbinary pronouns, and ‘yo’ felt good. Short and easy. Plus since it meant “I” in Spanish, it sounded pronouny already.
Tesh said, “Thanks for being around and, I don’t know, being you. You helped me figure out some stuff.”
I wanted to hear more about that, was going to ask, but Summer huffed from her seat in a folding chair across from Tesh. “Of course you two are best friends now,” she grumbled. “They, yo, how many pronouns am I going to have to keep track of?”
Leaning against one of the pillars between living room and dining room, Tucker asked her, “You effortlessly keep track of the personal lives of everyone on campus who’s ever had a queer thought, how hard can it be to manage a few new pronouns?”
Summer glared at her so hard I wondered what Tucker had done to piss her off. Hard to imagine Tucker doing anything to warrant that.
Summer asked, “So if you’re lesbian and you date a nonbinary person, are you still lesbian or are you, like, a nonlesbian?”
I tried not to stare at Tucker’s face, to puzzle out the mixed expressions fighting their way across her features. Confusion? Fear? I wasn’t a girl and yet I wanted to be her nonbinary date-person. Could that work for her? Would it screw with her lesbian identity?
I’d mentally practiced asking Tucker out. I’d thought about kissing her until it was driving me crazy. I tried to work out how to talk to her about me, make it all work, end up with the two of us laughing and holding onto each other like we had over the end of winter break. I hadn’t come up with anything.
“I know at least one nonbinary lesbian,” I said. “So if you can be both, I’m sure you can date like that.”
“What do you think, Tucker? Would you get to keep your dykest of the dykes status?” Summer asked.
“Fuck off,” Tucker said and stalked out of the room.
“Hit a nerve, huh?” Summer called after her.
I wanted to tell Summer to back off Tucker, because she didn’t know all of what had happened to her. She only knew the whitewashed public version: that after Tucker came out as trans, even though she wasn’t, she’d been assaulted and harassed and had a horribly bad breakup. For all of her gossip tentacles, Summer didn’t know that when they were breaking up, Tucker’s ex-girlfriend had raped her.
