by Rachel Gold
“Thanks,” I told her. I pulled the canned coffee out of my pocket and put it in the worn, cracked blue plastic cup holder.
Bailey nodded at it. “Pancakes first,” she said. “Then sleep. Then coffee. You want to go to Mom’s or crash on my couch?”
“Whatever’s easiest,” I said.
Bailey pulled out of the gas station, headed for the all-night pancake place on the outskirts of Freytag.
“You all right, Jess?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’m okay…I wasn’t feeling the party anymore and I didn’t want to clit-block my roommate.”
Bailey howled at that and pounded the steering wheel with one palm. “Clit-block, shit, is that a thing?”
“It sounds better than vag-block. Sounds like a yeast infection treatment.”
I kept her laughing as we drove. Maybe I should’ve called Bailey the night things went so wrong with Lindy. But I hadn’t wanted to go home then. Bailey would have known how messed up I’d been. She’d start to see me as damaged and then Mom and Brenna would too. And my presence would have turned her place against me—like Cal’s house felt to me now.
I should have gone back. I should have told Nico something.
Chapter Five
Nico
Jerking the door open, I stared down the hall. No Tucker. If she was triggered and panicking, where would she go? She wasn’t the type to lock herself in a bathroom, so maybe she went toward Cal’s steadying presence or outside for air. I opened the door to Cal’s bedroom in case. Empty.
She wasn’t in the living room and neither was Cal. I wove through the crowd to the kitchen. Cal was pulling pop out of the fridge, dropping cans into a cooler.
“Have you seen Tucker?” I called to him over the music pounding up from the basement.
He shook his head. If she’d gone for the back porch, she’d have passed him, so I danced through the press of bodies again to the front of the house. The front steps were full of smokers, the yard empty except for two people: one drunk and trying to sit down on the grass, the other struggling to keep that person from sitting in a pool of puke.
Maybe she had gone past Cal but he hadn’t noticed. I went through the house and down to the basement. She wasn’t there.
I checked every room again and asked Tesh if they’d seen her. After my third circuit of the house, I admitted to myself that she’d left.
There was no message on my phone from her. Why would she leave without texting me? I knew what had happened to her. We’d talked about it. She could’ve texted me to let me know she was going.
Unless she was in full panic. But then how could she have gone so quickly? Why wasn’t she sitting at the edge of the lawn catching her breath or pacing in the grass? Tucker always paced when she was upset.
Maybe it hadn’t gone down like I thought. Maybe she hadn’t panicked because of her ex.
When she’d said, “I can’t do this,” maybe she meant me. Did I feel too non-girl to her?
That would explain why she bolted out of a house filled with friends.
When we were making out, I knew where our legs were. I’d been careful not to let her feel anything from the crotch area. That was a lousy term, wasn’t it? Had the word “crotch” ever been sexy in the history of all sex? I doubted it. And since I was being frank, I had to say it to myself: there was no way she could have felt my dick. Not even with how turned on I’d been.
Damn, I was careful. What had I messed up?
Maybe I’d set myself up. Not like I never did that before.
I needed to dance or I’d end up locking myself in the roommate’s bedroom and feel like shit for the rest of the night. I went toward the music.
The basement was a big, open, low-ceilinged space with a bunch of workout stuff shoved against the walls. Two speakers pounded out music. It was wall-to-wall sweaty bodies moving, more or less, to the beat.
Since I discovered dance as a kid, I have danced. Every body has its way of moving, I figure. You see a person and you can tell this one was meant for hockey, this one paints, this one was made for soccer, this one for sitting still, and my one self was made to dance.
Ella was made for microscopes and computer screens. You saw that if you watched her up on a stool staring into a lens, chewing on her lip while the corners of her mouth tugged up with joyful intensity. And Tucker’s body was for making things. Her hands? Pure making.
I really liked those hands on me. But now the desire was mixed with a dark swirl of shame that I could not abide.
Dance always got me out of a bad headspace. I took classes formally from age five to fourteen. It got to this point where I had to pick if I was going to dance as a boy or a girl and I didn’t want to. Plus I was wearing the binder more and it made it hard to dance full out because of the way it compressed around my ribs.
The binder didn’t matter for dancing in a crowded, dark basement. I moved to the heavy beat. After a few songs, Summer and Tesh pushed in and joined me.
“Where’s Tucker?” Tesh yelled over the music.
“Don’t know.”
“She still here?” Summer asked.
She danced awkwardly because of the beer she was holding. It was full, the bottle wet with condensation, and she didn’t look like she needed another. At least she wasn’t driving. But if she kept drinking, I wasn’t sure she’d be able to walk back to her room.
“No,” I said, wanting this conversation to be over.
“She’s an ass,” Summer declared.
It didn’t have to be true to make me feel better.
“Be back,” Tesh yelled and headed away through the crowd.
Summer moved closer, put a hand on my shoulder. I reached for the beer bottle. She didn’t need more of that. She pulled it out of my reach. An arc of beer sprayed across my chest.
Laughing and repeating, “Sorry,” Summer pushed her hand across my chest, like she was brushing away the beer that had already soaked into my shirt. Except her hand stayed on my chest way too long.
I turned away and went to the basement’s sixties-style bar. There were coolers on top. I pulled out two bottles of water. Summer had followed me and I pressed one bottle into her hand. She leaned against the bar and watched me guzzle half of my water bottle.
“Why are you binding your chest?” she asked.
“How do you know I do?” The question came out hard-edged.
“What?”
“How do you know I’m not wearing a binder so you’ll think I have a chest to bind?” I asked her.
“What the hell is your deal?”
“What’s your deal?” I shot back.
She considered the beer in her hand, set it on the bar and opened the water, took a sip. She said, “You’re hot and my now ex-girlfriend is never coming back from her research project so I’ve been dumped. And tonight…shit. Tonight sucks. But you’re cute and alone and I don’t even know if you’re bangable.”
That softened me. Maybe her touching me had been a lame attempt at flirting instead of an assumption that she could have access to my body. So many people thought I was fair game for questions and touches designed to expose me.
“Everyone’s bangable if they want to be,” I said, leaning against the bar next to her.
She watched the mass of dancers in front of us and said, “I only like girls. Are you a girl?” She curled into my side, put her hand back on my chest. “Because you feel like a girl. What’s wrong with being a girl?”
I shoved her hand away. “You don’t get to touch me like that.”
I saw an opening between groups of dancing people and lunged into it, heading for the stairs.
Summer’s voice followed me, ringing triumphant. “Are you afraid of what I’ll find?”
I took the stairs two at a time and put distance between myself and Summer. I felt sick, angry, shaky. My tongue was heavy and bitter in my mouth.
In the kitchen, I jerked the fridge open. Miraculously the early partygoers had left most of a pizza. I grabbed t
wo slices, paper towels and another bottle of orange pop. I vacated the kitchen before Summer got herself up from the basement. I didn’t think she’d come looking for me but I didn’t want the awkwardness of running into her. I felt shit enough already. I didn’t know what else I might say to her.
Ducking into the roommate’s room, I clicked the lock closed on the doorknob and put the pizza on the desk. Tucker’s beer was there, a few lingering drops of condensation gathered on the outside like tears. I rolled the bottle between my palms, thinking about the bottle and me both touching Tucker’s mouth—both left behind.
I pivoted and threw it. The bottle smashed on the far wall, foam spilling down the gray surface. I watched the rivulets of beer slip down to join the brown glass shards on the floor.
Picking up a slice of pizza I sat backwards in the desk chair and doggedly chewed the salty, rubbery mass of cold bread, cheese, and meat while staring at the broken glass speckled with bits of white foam. I’d have to clean it up in a few, but for now it made me feel better to stare at the mess. I imagined myself able to throw bottle after bottle like that, to shatter a whole case of bottles, to break everything.
Chapter Six
Nico
I caught a few hours of sleep and woke up having to pee from all the pop. Peering at the clock, I saw in its blocky red numerals that I didn’t want to stay here until Cal woke up and asked me about last night and Tucker leaving. It was five-fifty a.m. and I could drive okay. I could make it home for breakfast if I wanted, or go partway to Columbus and crash at a rest stop.
I checked the wall and floor for any hints of staining from the broken beer bottle, but my cleanup job held. There was no trace that anything had happened except for the shards and paper towels in the trash can.
I carried my duffel into the bathroom and washed quickly at the sink. Cal’s room abutted the bathroom and I wasn’t sure if the sound of the shower would wake him. I put on my “boyfriend” jeans—because it cracked me up that there were guy jeans made for women, like women couldn’t just wear men’s jeans—and an OSU sweatshirt.
A glance in the mirror showed me that I was skewing toward boy today. I thought about putting on a bright scarf but I didn’t care enough. Instead I used my fingertips on my scalp to get my curls to perk up and diffuse a bit, a messier style that also read boyish. Boy felt right: armored, unemotional, brittle.
I set my duffel by the front door. Then I went back into the kitchen to get another slice of pizza for the road and to dig out one of the caffeinated energy drinks I’d seen in the back of the fridge. I wrote Cal a note and left him five bucks with an apology if I took one of his roommate’s drinks or his private stash.
My car was parked one house down. Really it was my stepdad Matt’s car. I was renting it from him. He’d torn up his leg rescuing a hiker and could still barely put any weight on it, much less drive. Because the car was his choice it was a flat black Dodge Charger that in the right light could be mistaken for a cop car.
I could look like a serious thug in that car, but that’s not my style so I put Star Wars family decals in the back window. My mom is Padme Amidala and Matt is Chewbacca; he picked that one himself—it’s not me ragging on how hairy he is. My grandmother, Yai, is classic Princess Leia, because Leia is Amidala’s mother and because Yai could rock some serious Leia braid-buns if she wanted to.
I picked Yoda for myself because my sister Deena wanted the Ewok and my other sister Hazey wanted R2-D2.
The two people not represented are my dad, Darth Vader, and my big brother Kenan. I’d probably make Kenan take the Luke Skywalker decal because he had that same innocent-guy-caught-up-in-big-crap element to his life. He’d been dragged back and forth across the country as our parents fought about my medical options and divorced. I never knew how much he understood about all that. He focused on school, video games, and girls. Sometimes he seemed more like my younger brother than two years older.
I threw my duffel into the passenger seat. My phone connected to the Bluetooth because the car was fancy, and that reminded me of last night and how Tucker hadn’t texted. I studied the phone face. No message from her.
I guess it was about me.
Summer’s words from last night haunted me. “Are you afraid of what I’ll find?”
I flicked through my contacts to Summer and blocked her. I so was not in the mood to deal with her.
I stared at my phone a good, long time and then blocked Tucker’s number too.
I’d unblock Tucker in a day or two but not until I felt less like breaking things. If Tucker had anything to say, she could email or tell Ella to text me. They did live right next to each other.
Ella would call me dramatic for blocking Tucker. But I blocked and unblocked people on my phone all the time, especially my dad. It kept my headspace clear.
Most of the two hour drive back to Columbus I put the car on cruise control and let the feeling of moving fast calm me down.
Sunday morning at my house was a blend of food, chores, prep, and lying around. Yai slept in the smaller bedroom on the first floor and got up at the crack of dawn to take a really long walk no matter the weather. After that, she listened to her radio shows and chilled.
Mom got up early enough to do her kitchen prep before everyone else was in her face. She was a professor of Astrophysics at OSU, so she did almost all the week’s cooking on Sunday and froze it. I helped with the chopping when I was home. She’d picked up cooking as a way to combine her heritage: soul food and Thai cuisine—soul Thai. She said it was the most relaxing thing she did all week. That used to sound made-up to me, but she was always smiling when she was in the kitchen, so I had to admit maybe it was me who didn’t like cooking.
I got home around eight a.m., super early for me coming back from a party. They wouldn’t expect me until late afternoon.
I opened the front door and paused on the threshold. Mom and Yai were talking in Thai. My Thai sucks, but I heard them saying my dad’s name. I dropped my duffel and went into the eating nook. Yai was sitting in her usual spot at the end of the table, facing into the kitchen. Mom stood by the stove.
“What about Dad?” I asked.
Mom set down the spatula and came around the counter to hug me. Putting my arms around her, I felt big. She was very solid but I’d been growing again. Mom was also a lot shorter than I was, but tall next to Yai, who barely broke five feet.
“You’re home early,” she said. “And you smell like beer.”
“You know I don’t drink. A friend…someone spilled her beer on me. What’s going on?”
A hard sigh was followed by a deep silence, then she said, “Your father is going to be in town for a few months for a project. He wants to talk to you. You can tell him no.”
“Oh, I’m going to talk to him,” I said, rubbing at the start of a headache behind my eyes. “He has to drop that lawsuit or I’ll find a way to countersue his…butt.”
Mom shook her head and went back into the kitchen. “Breakfast?”
“Please.”
Yai nodded to me as I slipped into the seat beside her. She patted my arm. “How late were you up? You look weak.”
“I slept some. It was a party, you know.”
She didn’t know, but she didn’t push it. She went back to reading movie reviews in the newspaper.
Mom slid a plate of eggs, rice, and sausage in front of me. I shoveled food into my mouth, more starving than I thought. It was great as usual. Mom has one of those palates where she can eat a dish in a restaurant and know how to make it at home.
“You do smell terrible, Noknoi,” Yai said.
I said, “Oh thanks,” and swallowed another mouthful of egg and sausage. I knew Yai saw me smiling down at my plate.
Nehal was my given name and Nico my nickname, but Noknoi was my Thai nickname. It meant “Little bird.” Everyone in Thailand has one or more nicknames, so it’s the same in my house. My mother, whose given name is Arinyah, got the name Fah, which means “sky,” because as
a baby she’d fall asleep staring up at the night sky.
Thai nicknames are usually words that mean something, or have a cool sound, or are a shortening of your full name. Matt is Mat and for some reason Hazey counts as both an American and Thai nickname, short for “Hazel.” But Deena is “Dear,” which is a Thai nickname that uses the American word, to make it extra confusing. At least none of us got the super weird nicknames like “Pepsi.”
My brother Kenan didn’t get a nickname. He hadn’t liked it when Yai moved in with us. He felt that as an eleven-year-old man, he didn’t need two women looking after him. But he was on his way out by that time anyway. He went to live with Dad in California. Dad didn’t have a nickname either. Well, I had a few nicknames for Dad, but I couldn’t say them in front of Yai.
I hadn’t seen either of them in over a year. Not since Dad started this ridiculous lawsuit.
Dad wanted me to be his son. He had this idea, since I’d lived as a boy my first ten years, that I was a boy. He thought Mom and the doctors were trying to turn me into a girl or worse.
It’s not like I didn’t enjoy being a boy sometimes, but not all the time. And not his son—you have to hear that with this deep, ominous inflection—bum, bum, bah, HIS SON. Like if instead of “Luke, I am your father” Darth Vader said, “Luke, you are my son.”
I’m not his son. I’m his kid.
He got weird enough when he saw me as a girl but then when I went openly nonbinary he couldn’t deal. There were threats and bullshit and a custody battle that he totally lost because I was almost sixteen and told the judge what I wanted. Next step? Sue my mother for child abuse because she let me be myself.
He wasn’t going to win that one either, but that wasn’t the point. Lawsuits were majorly expensive. He thought the pressure of that would get me to make a choice, pick a gender.
Mom said he was trying to get back at her for taking me away in the first place. She didn’t say it to me—wouldn’t say something like that to me. But I heard her talking with Matt when they thought I wasn’t home. She doesn’t talk to me about what happened unless we’re meeting with a therapist. Doesn’t talk about why we left California and Dad when I was four. Why she divorced him and moved us halfway across the U.S.
