Nico & Tucker

by Rachel Gold

  Surprised, I thought about it. Did I hate qualities associated with the cultural idea of being a man? Not the way I defined it. But I hated the way everyone assumed they knew what it meant and that they could dictate how I could and could not be.

  I didn’t know how to explain that to Dad. His idea of “man” was so rigid that a dinnertime conversation would never budge it.

  I said, “It doesn’t feel like me.”

  “You feel like a woman?” He couldn’t keep the edge of a sneer off his mouth as he asked it. He hid it most of the time, but in his mind men were always better.

  “Don’t you get it? I don’t feel like either. I feel like both. All the time.”

  I didn’t add that I felt like I was so much girl and so much guy that they barely both fit in this one body. And I loved all of it: being a girl, being a guy, being able to choose from day to day, sometimes from moment to moment. Being able to add in features outside of girl or boy, play with, recombine, redefine what all these categories meant.

  I didn’t think my nonbinary gender was from having intersex traits, unless I got the deluxe package. Most people with intersex traits did feel like they were one gender or the other. I was the lucky intersection between a nonbinary brain and an intersex body. And maybe if we didn’t live in a world that was so messed up about gender, maybe most of us would be everything all the time.

  He sat back, glaring up at the ceiling. “If only we had chosen for you.”

  “I would be miserable,” I said.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I’ve heard from enough people who had other people pick for them. The ones who didn’t kill themselves. The ones who don’t understand why so much of their lives feel wrong until they discover that doctors took away their dicks or their breasts, cut off core parts of themselves. You really want that for me?”

  “No,” he said. He spread his big hands on the table and stared at them. “I want you to prosper. I want you to live. I want you to grow up strong and brilliant and find a girl who takes your breath away and marry her and have children who are so beautiful you don’t even care when they break your heart. That’s what I want for you. Not to spend so much of your time and energy trying to be this in-between person, so much that you don’t live your life.”

  Being strong, wanting me to thrive and have the kind of life he thought was great—I thought it was great too. I did want to be with someone amazing—and of course right now that person looked uncomfortably like Tucker—and have a family.

  Not that I was going to give in to him.

  He said, “The things that happened when you were a child, I think you’re spending your whole life now proving me wrong.”

  “That’s not how medical trauma works. It’s not conscious like that.”

  He waved a hand. “Trauma, such a serious word. You were a child and afraid. Now you’re becoming an adult. Can’t you leave that behind and choose?”

  “If I consider it seriously, will you drop the lawsuit?”

  His dark green eyes narrowed, watching me. “What does it mean to you to consider it? Haven’t you already?”

  I had this half-baked idea I’d been mulling since the ultrasound, so I voiced it. “I haven’t spent a big block of time as a girl or a guy for a few years. I thought I’d spend time as each and see how I feel.”

  “This is a good step.”

  “Drop the suit.”

  “Do your consideration first and let me know how it goes,” he said. He added, “You understand that surgery I took you in for was warranted.”

  We’d had versions of this fight before, but each time we had it, I came to it with more information.

  “No. I got access to my medical records. There was nothing wrong with how I peed except that I had to sit down to do it.”

  “Hypospadias is a recognized birth defect.”

  “By an establishment that has a vested interest in ‘normalizing’ children assigned male at birth. Do you know how often that surgery goes wrong? Some kids, some babies, are given twenty surgeries or more trying to give them a ‘real man’s’ standing up to pee dick. And at the end of it most of them still have to sit to pee because the scar tissues, the surgery, the infections have messed them up for life.”

  Not to mention the people assigned female at birth who got surgeries to make their labia more “pretty,” or who had clitoral reduction surgeries. Those surgeries had no real medical reason either and could leave people with damaged nerves, painful scar tissue, and without the ability to have an orgasm.

  People acted like genital mutilation was a thing that happened in third-world countries, but our country was one of the worst. And Dad had completely bought in to the system that cut people up for nothing.

  I stood, put my folded napkin on the table.

  “Mom’s not the parent who fucked things up. Think about that the next time you have your attorney send some asshole letter to our house.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Tucker

  Days later, I still hadn’t heard from Nico. I jumped every time my phone buzzed, but it was always Bailey or Cal or Ella. I’d texted and called, left messages, but I didn’t want to be pushy. Was yo so mad at me for leaving the party that yo had blocked my number? Or was it not that serious to Nico?

  Maybe I was too messed up for this to work? I didn’t want to work on my damage, could I blame Nico if yo didn’t want to either?

  I read through the messages Nico had sent me over the last few months: pics, jokes, thoughtful stories. I contemplated reading the long emails we’d exchanged in winter when I was spinning and raw from everything with Lindy, but I couldn’t.

  Maybe there was something about me that screwed up relationships.

  I caught up with Ella over at the Union. Most of us got together for Thursday dinners. Fridays and Saturdays it was too hard to get everyone’s schedules synced up. She had her books spread out on the table, but was chatting with Cal. He hadn’t bothered with the pretense of books.

  “Have you heard from Nico?” I asked.

  “Not for days, which is strange.” She pulled out her phone, typed a few words, sent them.

  After a minute, she read the reply and said, “Yeah, Nico’s being weird. We’ll chat later and I’ll find out what’s up. Unless you know?”

  “Why would I know?”

  “Because both of you have been seriously odd since the night of Cal’s party.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and stared at me until I backed away a step.

  “Uh. I should eat,” I said.

  I went to get garlic cheese bread. Waited around the end of the food counter for a few minutes until my plate was ready. Cal and Ella were still sitting at the table waiting for me to come back and tell some kind of story. If I couldn’t wait them out, I might as well get it over with. And I did want Ella’s insider information about Nico’s long silence.

  I sat across from Ella. “Me and Nico kissed at the party, sort of made out,” I admitted.

  “No you didn’t,” Ella said.

  “What?”

  “You didn’t just kiss,” she insisted. “Nico didn’t call me to tell me that you’d kissed. It’s been almost two weeks and Nico hasn’t said a thing about it. That means yo didn’t want to talk about you two kissing. And that means you hurt Nico.”

  “Dang,” Cal said. “That was a deductive chain of some awesomeness.”

  “We dated,” Ella explained. “I know what Nico’s like when yos feelings are hurt.”

  I contemplated the browned spots on top of the cheese, the little craters where a burnt bit had broken open, the lake of oil that pooled in the middle. It made sense: I’d run out without saying anything, hadn’t even texted to tell Nico what was going on. I’d be mad at me too.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. “But I’m sorry. If you talk to Nico…I tried to call…I’m sorry.”

  “Tucker, you couldn’t have done anything that bad,” Ella said.

  I shrugged
and looked at Cal.

  “Fine.” He and threw up his hands. “You two have your girl talk, I’ll be back in a few.”

  When he was far enough away, I said, “I kind of panicked,” more to the cheese bread than to Ella.

  “That’s normal,” she told me.

  She brushed my arm with her fingers and I moved it an inch toward her. She rested her hand on my wrist.

  “For what you went through, that’s totally normal,” she repeated.

  “But what if it’s not that? What if it’s Nico? What if it doesn’t work, me being lesbian and yo being nonbinary?”

  “Well, that would suck in a profound way.”

  “I have to figure it out without messing up things with Nico any worse,” I told her.

  “Are you going to the counseling center?”

  I’d thought about it, but every time I did, I saw the disbelieving face of the woman who’d done the exam on me. That had been the final layer of wrong on top of a huge pile of wrong. What if I showed up to talk to someone and they gave me that same look?

  “No,” I said. “Not here. I need more time.”

  “Tucker, you need to do something. You’re not you.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. It was weird to hear Ella say it.

  I mean, sure, I’d never felt panicky making out with anyone before. I used to feel on top of the world. I wasn’t me and I didn’t know what to do with this person I’d become.

  I didn’t like her very much. I didn’t want to hang out with her.

  I wanted to roll back to who I’d been, but I couldn’t figure out how.

  I watched my garlic cheese bread get rubbery.

  “Summer said you were flirting with Quin.”

  Ella’s words shocked me and without thinking I spat out, “Since when do you gossip with Summer?” I jerked my arm away from her.

  “Tucker, she’s hurting. Everyone’s hurting after last semester. If we don’t talk to each other…And for Nico’s sake, if you’re not that into Nico…Are you into Quin?”

  “I just met her.”

  “I think Summer’s interested in her and...Summer’s a mess. She was a drunken jerk to Nico at Cal’s party and came to talk to me about—”

  “What?!”

  “She spilled her drink on Nico and sort of groped Nico,” Ella said, wincing at the idea. “I think she was trying to be flirty, but she crossed a line for sure. She feels bad about it.”

  “She was trying to flirt with Nico at that party after I left? I have a fucking panic attack and she decides to go flirt with Nico? Forget this shit. Tell Nico I’m sorry.”

  I grabbed my bag and the half-eaten garlic bread. I hadn’t considered Nico not calling because yo liked someone else. But Summer, no way. Still, why hadn’t Nico called me back? Or even texted?

  I was on my own like always. Maybe I should just get through this semester and spend the summer forgetting everything. I tossed the garlic bread into the trash on the way out of the Union and ignored Ella calling after me.

  Chapter Twelve

  Nico

  I’d gone in for the biopsy on Monday and ended up in bed for a day from gut cramps. Mid-week, when I was mobile again, I headed for the people who understood me—my friends at the Noodle. It was this cool performance space full of geeks and cosplayers and all flavors of queer and trans. There was a big sign out front that read: “Jim’s Glorious Noodle.”

  There was no Jim. The sign was a typo. It was supposed to read “Jin’s Glorious Noodle,” which was the original name of the Chinese restaurant that lived in this space for about twenty years. It moved downtown, went fusion, and changed its name.

  Five years ago when the performers bought the place and were trying to think of what to name their theater, someone found the discarded typo version of the sign in the basement. From then on it was Jim’s Glorious Noodle. The sign even had a squiggle on it to artfully represent noodles; someone drew a head around it to create a giant cranium full of noodle.

  The Noodle was in a three-story house long ago zoned into the business part of town. The whole place still smelled like fried egg rolls. I’m not really an egg roll person, but after a few years hanging out there, I found the smell comforting.

  On the first floor there was a big performance space with a stage, bathrooms and a side room where you could buy drinks and snacks. The second floor had classrooms for dance and acting, and costume rooms. The basement was a hangout space and had more costumes in process. And the top floor was where Sharani lived—she managed the troupe of performers and kept the space going. She was how I’d found out about this place and I’d never be able to repay her for that.

  Sharani was this amazing Romani woman who rode motorcycles way too fast and could kick ass a gazillion different ways. She was the only person like me that I saw on a regular basis. That wasn’t a completely fair thing to say. I knew a lot of people like me in the performance sense. Most theater people were like me. What I meant was that she also had intersex traits. She had a totally different intersex situation than I did, but we had a lot in common when it came to people and medical experiences.

  Usually I went down via the side door to the basement to check on the costume work. That’s where the cosplay projects were. The second floor was for official theater costumes. Sharani figured out she could rent a corner of the basement cheaply to the local geeks and have tons of kids available to fill in as extras and help with work around the place.

  This time I went in the front door because I wanted to see her. I poked my head into the snack bar and got a wave from Kaj, the only full-time employee at the Noodle. Kaj ran the bar, organized shows, and kept everyone sane.

  “Hot, Captain Jack,” Kaj said.

  I grinned. “Love that hat. Where’s Sharani?”

  Kaj pointed in the direction of the theater space. “Watching rehearsal.”

  I slipped through the entrance that opened at the back of the audience, and spotted her right away. This wasn’t hard because she always sat in the back and she was six-foot-two.

  Seriously, if all the Romani women looked like her, no one would ever have dared mess with them. She had raven-black, coarse hair to below her shoulders and one of those strong, beautiful noses that people called hawk-like but I think are super regal, probably because my nose is so flat. Her face had a stark, structural beauty like Cher, but her eyes weren’t sleepy and she was way bustier.

  I could hardly fathom the abuse she went through as a kid. Of the different kinds of intersex traits—some happened naturally and some folks ended up that way because of modern medicine. Sharani’s mother was given drugs to keep her from miscarrying and it turned out those drugs also masculinized girl fetuses. So she had XX genes and she felt female in her mind, but in the womb the drugs made her body more male-appearing than it would’ve been.

  And to add to the bullshit, it turned out the drugs her mother took didn’t prevent miscarriages anyway.

  At that time in the sixties, doctors thought you could raise a kid any old way. They suggested raising her male, which her father was totally into. You can see how we’d connect, right? Except her father was a lot worse than mine. He beat her for acting like a girl until she hit puberty and grew breasts and got a period.

  I thank the universe all the time that she found this performance group and people who loved her as she is so she could stop trying to kill herself and learn how to enjoy life.

  I watched the rehearsal with her for a few minutes. When the actors took a break to talk about the script, she turned to me.

  “Doctor Who?” she asked because I was wearing a button-down shirt and military jacket. She wasn’t into a lot of the sci-fi shows but had a rough sense of the costumes I liked.

  “Captain Jack Harkness—he started in Doctor Who but he’s mostly in Torchwood.”

  “How’s your day going, Captain Jack?”

  “For shit,” I said with a laugh. “The whole week. How’s yours?”

  “I like this new productio
n. What’s going on?”

  I sighed and stared up at the dark ceiling, not knowing where to start. Worst news first? If so, which news was worse?

  I went chronologically and said, “My dad’s keeping the stupid lawsuit going. And he’s in town for the summer.”

  “I’m sorry. Are you going to see him?”

  “I already did. Asked him to drop the suit. He’s thinking about it. We fought about all the usual stuff. If he doesn’t drop it, maybe I can countersue for mental anguish.”

  Nodding, she said quietly, with a hint of humor, “Do you want me to teach you some Krav Maga?”

  “Is that the martial art that’s like seventy-three different strikes to the balls?”

  She chuckled.

  The actors got their next scene going. We watched until one flubbed their lines and everyone cracked up.

  “I have to get surgery,” I told Sharani. “There’s a mass on my ovotestis.”

  I was surprised by the weight of relief at saying that out loud to someone outside my family who got it. She wasn’t all, “Your what?”

  “How bad is it?” she asked.

  I told her everything, turned half toward her in the theater seating. I reassured her that it probably wasn’t any kind of malignant cancer, feeling so much better getting to say that with more confidence than I felt.

  “You want me to come to the surgery?” she asked.

  She knew about my medical trauma. For sure nobody would dare mess with my body with a six-foot-plus black belt around.

  “Maybe, yeah. But it’s not just having surgery and the cancer thing. It’s the hormones and everything. I feel like everyone’s going to make me pick now. They’ve been waiting for years for me to grow up and settle down, pick a gender, and maybe this is it. I mean, I’m even starting to think I should.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “How would I know that with all the noise of everyone’s expectations? Dad wants me to be his son. Kenan can’t stand to be around me if I’m not one or the other. I know he wants me to be his brother again. I’m sure Tucker wants me to be a girl. I think Ella likes it better when I’m a boy; at least she did when we were dating. Yai thinks of me as a kathoey—Thailand’s third gender. Matt tries to be good, but he treats me like a guy. Mom and the girls and you are the only people who don’t keep trying to gender me one way or the other. So how would I know?”