by Rachel Gold
“Try some and feel if they fit?”
“Yeah I’ve been thinking about doing that. I stopped being a girl about four years ago.”
“Eighteen is very different from fourteen. Nico, you get whatever you want, okay? Surgery’s not bad. Having a gender’s not bad. It’s having someone else decide it for you, that’s what screws you up. Choose anything you want, but make sure it’s you choosing.”
She made it sound doable.
I kissed her cheek and she swatted at me. Slipping out of the theater, I crossed the hall to the snack area. I got a sandwich and a ginger tea and settled down to discuss the upcoming cabaret lineup with Kaj, who was emceeing.
While she was getting coffee for some of the actors, I pulled out my phone and stared at it. Nothing from Tucker. I wanted to talk to her about this but she’d been the one to walk away, to leave without saying anything.
I still felt like I was forgetting something about Tucker, something important, but what? Had I said I’d call her? No. I hadn’t had a chance to say anything when she bolted.
How cheap would it be to use my medical situation as an excuse to intrude on her? I had to give her more time. And if this was her way of telling me no…I’d have to live with it.
Chapter Thirteen
Tucker
Saturday night, the Black Student Union party, Quin—I could not figure out what to wear or even if I should go. I was afraid of running into Summer there. What was she even up to? She still watched Tesh like they were the only person in the world, but she’d flirted with both Nico and Quin. And she remained pissed at me for seeing her kiss Tesh, seeing her cry. Plus that wild idea that I was taking her place in the Women and Gender Studies department. Like there was only room for one of us.
I wanted to walk away from it all, or run. But everyone else from our student group was going to this party and I did want to support the BSU. I threw on jeans and a T-shirt with a heavier long-sleeved over it. I’d show up long enough to be supportive, then bail.
I was going to walk over by myself. Maybe flirt with Quin after all. Every time I thought about Summer touching Nico, my chest burned. Maybe if I fought back more, she’d back off.
Ella knocked on our adjoining bathroom door and popped through when I said, “Yeah?”
She was in a fitted blue and pink flannel that made her look like a pixie lumberjack. Impossible not to smile at her.
“Walk over together?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said. It wasn’t her fault everyone was so screwed up. “You hear from Nico?”
“Nico hasn’t called you?”
“Nope.”
She shook her head. “That makes no sense. Yos dad is in town, which is really freaking yo out, but I know Nico’s been thinking about you. And there’s nothing going on with Summer, other than Nico being royally pissed at her. Yo thinks the flirting, groping thing was just Summer trying to fix a gender for Nico.”
A wash of relief that Nico wasn’t interested in Summer. But that got swamped under a wave of anger at Summer.
I snatched my jacket off the back of my chair and kicked the chair so it rolled into the desk with a bang. “Let’s go.”
Ella followed me into the hall. “I don’t get it,” she said. “Of everyone, you and Nico should be talking the most. Don’t you see?”
“I called and texted and nothing. I don’t know what else to do,” I told her.
“I’ll talk to Nico.”
I slowed my strides as we hit the quad. Walking fast I’d outpace Ella easily. The anger settled into a slow burn and I blew out my breath. None of it made sense. Except Summer being an ass. I’d come to expect that.
“Don’t,” I said. “Not yet. I need more time.”
“What about getting support, like therapy or an online group, anything?” Ella asked.
“I don’t want help. I want it never to have happened.” My voice broke. I turned away from her, head down, standing on the night-dark grass of the quad.
Ella put her hand on my back. First her fingertips and when I didn’t pull away, her whole palm. I leaned into the pressure and yanked the fraying parts of myself back together.
“Can we just go dance?” I asked.
“Yep, let’s get Shen.”
We walked in silence to the Math & Science dorm. On my side, it was an angry, confused silence, but not a weird silence. Ella did quiet in a grounding way that I needed. Shen was also a pretty quiet guy, except when it came to gaming. He met us at the front door full of excitement about some challenge he and his cousin had finally surmounted.
Ella knew enough about it to ask questions. I let the patter of their voices wash over me, settling me back into my skin.
The party was in the lower level of the arts building. We went through the two-story lobby with its tall glass windows, student art lining the walls, flying sculptures hung from the ceiling. Down a broad flight of stairs was a huge open room, filled with people and vibrating with music.
With my bleached Mohawk and Ella’s porcelain skin, we looked like blinding bright lighthouses in a sea of attractive brown faces. I considered hiding under a table. But I made myself dance with Ella and Shen because they were sweet enough to include me. We did the rhythmic shuffling from one foot to the other that passed for dancing in crowded spaces until I got thirsty.
When the next song started, I turned away from them and ambled around the edge of the room. I found a table with a guy pouring cups of a bright orange punch. Cup in hand, I leaned against the wall to drink it.
The punch was sweeter than I thought possible and my teeth ached as I sipped. Quin leaned against the wall next to me, a cup of punch in her hand. Her hair was loose, falling past her chin, and her mouth turned up, already amused.
Maybe I did like her.
“You dance?” she asked.
“I suck at dancing,” I said. “But I can shuffle to the beat if needed.”
She chuckled. “Not my thing either. You play anything?”
“Like guitar?”
Her laugh was a rolling “hehehe” sound that I wanted to hear more often. She asked, “Basketball? Soccer? Track?”
“No,” I said, but that didn’t seem like enough of an answer, so I added, “I work in a hardware store.”
She narrowed her eyes at me like I was from another planet. Tonight I might be. The music throbbed, too loud and insistent. Her body was close enough to radiate warmth on my arm.
I liked that she didn’t know my history. Maybe better to hang out with people distant from all that.
“You want to go for a walk?” I asked.
She threw back the rest of the liquid in her cup and tossed it into a trash can. I did the same, minus the drinking, and followed her out of the cavernous room, up the stairs onto the small quad. The night sky’s low clouds looked gray in the lights set around the walking paths.
Quin’s legs were longer than mine, which rarely happens, and I had to lengthen my stride to keep up with her.
“How about food?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“I hate March volleyball practice,” she said as we walked. “It’s cold and we’re working hard. I’m hungry all the time.”
“I get that. I have a harder time running this time of year. Though, I run inside.”
“No track?” she asked.
“I’m not into the organized competitive stuff, I run because I like it.”
She grinned. “That’s cool.”
From the edge of campus, she took us down Taylor Ave, away from the school. I usually went north off campus. I wasn’t as familiar with this side of town. We’d gone by the sports fields and the stadium. Now there were some businesses, but not the kind students would use: a seamstress, a tax office, a vet. We passed those, our breath showing silvery and then ghostly gray as we went from the well-lit street by the school to darker streets.
We turned another corner and she stopped in front of a diner-style restaurant with wood paneling and plate glass windows.
The sign said: Mill’s Vittles. Inside about half the tables were full.
I followed Quin in. It was a seat-yourself place and she picked a small booth near the back. I pulled off my coat as I sat down and stuffed my scarf into the sleeve. She shrugged out of her jacket and I admired the size of her shoulders and her chest. Good thing she wasn’t one of those skinny-muscle jocks. Lindy had put me off skinny forever.
God, I had to stop thinking about Lindy.
“This okay?” Quin asked.
“It’s great. I didn’t know this was here.”
She pulled two menus out from the napkin holder and held one out to me. This was a breakfast-all-day place. I could always eat breakfast.
She talked easily about how she was from North Carolina and came here on a volleyball scholarship. She found Ohio cold and gray, but the team was great to hang out with. She didn’t miss home as much as she’d expected.
I told her about growing up in a town of four thousand people and she expressed deep sympathy.
She got a monster omelet: four or five eggs with a half-dozen kinds of veggies plus ham and cheese. I got pancakes to remind me what sweet was supposed to taste like and chase away the lingering orange syrup flavor in my mouth. And strong, black decaf so I could pretend to be more awake than I was.
After a minute of us seriously eating, she asked, “Tesh said you had a bad breakup?”
“Yeah, basically.”
“Dumped?”
I shrugged and pushed a piece of pancake through a line of syrup. “It got…too bad to keep going. You?”
“She left me for one of the basketball players—who used to be a friend of mine.”
“Oh, shit.”
“It was real messed up. She started seeing the other girl and didn’t tell me and two-timed both of us for a few weeks. And that girl on the basketball team didn’t even dump her for that. She was like ‘sorry, man.’” Quin sighed and stared across the restaurant, jaw tight.
“Is it tough being lesbian on the volleyball team? Or bi, or queer?”
That got a smile. “Queer,” she said. “I like girls mostly but not exclusively, so I don’t know if I should say bi because that makes most guys think they’ve got too much of a shot. You?”
“Lesbian,” I said. “I think guys are gross. I mean, sexually, not as people.”
“Some of them are nice. But girls are better. Volleyball’s okay. You don’t get shit for it, but you’re expected to not talk about it much. Basketball’s worse, they’re all in the closet with fake boyfriends. I hear Soccer used to be like that too, but now it’s one of the more open teams.”
“I’ve seen some of the players at our parties.”
“Does Katee go?” she asked. “She’s the left forward.”
“I don’t know what that is,” I admitted.
Quin laughed. “She’s the stocky, mixed girl with the short red-brown hair and calves like this,” she held her hands in a big circle.
“I’ve seen her around. You like her?”
Quin glanced away, tapped a finger fast on the table top. “She’s in my civics class. She’s cool.”
“Why don’t you ask her out?”
She ate a few more bites of her omelet and said, “I don’t even know if she’s single.”
“Ask Tesh, they can find that out for you,” I told her and forked more pancake into my mouth.
“Seriously? What’s up with Tesh and Summer anyway?”
A quick swallow so I could turn the topic away from her question. “I wish Summer would get her shit together. At the last house party she was flirting with my friend Nico, who was kind of my date. And then apparently she crossed a line, but I don’t know the details because yos not talking to me now. Nico is nonbinary, isn’t a boy or a girl. If you ask, Nico says yos both.”
“Yo?”
“Nico uses gender neutral pronouns, that’s the current one.”
Quin shrugged. “Huh, cool.”
I blinked at her. I thought with all the stuff about sports and not being all the way out, she’d be a lot more thrown by the gender stuff. I guess that showed me for thinking I knew jocks.
“Someone talked to Summer, right?” Quin asked. “I mean, she’s all politics, she should get coalition building.”
I said, “If we keep talking about Summer, I’m going to say ‘intersectionality’ a whole bunch. I’m just warning you.”
“I love me some intersectionality, as much as the next queer, brown girl, but it’s late. And anyway, what about Nico, why aren’t you making a move?”
I didn’t want to talk about that either.
The wild idea that had been nagging my brain for the last hour surfaced. Maybe if I made out with Quin, I could see if I freaked out or not. I could recreate the experience with Nico, but with someone else. Then I’d know if the problem was just me, like I thought it was.
And maybe I could push the last dregs of Lindy out of my brain. Maybe I could forget everything for a while and be the way I used to be.
I held her gaze in a way that I hoped was meaningful and not creepy and said, “I thought maybe I should get my rebound out of the way first.”
“Oh,” she said. “Ohhh. You want to walk some more?”
I nodded, but my brief flash of confidence drained away as we paid the bill and walked out of the restaurant. This was a stupid idea.
The wind had picked up and was chasing snowflakes in the light of the streetlamps. There wasn’t any accumulation, but the sight of snow and bare tree branches made everything feel wintery.
We walked the first few blocks in silence, reaching the edge of campus. Empty fields stretched in front of us, painted with lines, lit by a fraction of the lights they’d use for game nights. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I didn’t know what I was doing.
As we crossed the practice fields, she talked about the volleyball season last year: who was good and who wasn’t, which games they should’ve won that they lost. She kept on like that across the big quad. When we got to the alley between the buildings that led to the north quad, she stopped walking and turned to me.
“I picked the restaurant,” she said. “You pick where we’re going next.”
“Um, we could go to my room, but that sounds weird when I say it out loud. It’s, you know, warm there, and I don’t have a roommate. We could talk or whatever.”
“Works for me,” she said.
We crossed the north quad to my dorm. In the elevator I couldn’t look at her. Electricity buzzed under my skin. Did I want this? I couldn’t tell.
I unlocked the door and flicked on my desk lamp. We considered each other in the dim blue-white light of a single bulb turned toward the wall.
She dropped her coat over my desk chair and faced me. Her fingers reached for the front of my coat, slowly, her face questioning. I nodded and she pulled my coat off, folded it in half and draped it over hers.
I moved closer to her. I’d forgotten how to kiss. She came the rest of the way toward me, her lips heavy on mine. Her tongue was salty and it cut through the lingering maple syrup flavor in my mouth. My hands closed around her shirt behind her shoulders. She circled my back with her arms, setting us both off balance. We moved a step and her shoulders and my hands pushed against the wall, steadying us.
Her kisses were big and open, not controlled and tight like Lindy’s. Thank God not like Lindy. And not like Nico’s agile, playful kisses. I wanted Nico so badly my knees wavered and Quin had to brace against the wall and hold me up.
I pulled away, thought about stopping. But there’d been a few moments when we kissed where I hadn’t thought about anything but Quin’s mouth and her body, so I kissed her again.
We made out standing up for a long time and then sat on the bed and kissed more. Shoes got kicked off. Hands up under shirts and then shirts off, bras off. She sprawled back on the bed looking so amazing I had to follow.
Quin fumbled with my belt and got it open, worked the button loose and pushed my zipper down while I w
as on top of her playing with her breasts. When I stood up to kick my jeans all the way off, she undid her pants and shimmied out of them.
I knew how to do this. I had this. I could be the old Tucker again, the Tucker I liked being. I could rebound from everything.
I returned to the bed, crawled on top of her and kissed her. She rolled us to the side. One hand made its way to the top of my boxers, fingers sliding under the elastic.
Fear shot down my spine. All at once I felt the chill of the wall against my back and the vulnerability of my body nearly bare.
I jerked away and hit the back of my head on the wall.
“Ow, shit.”
“Ticklish?” she asked.
I rubbed the back of my head. “Yeah,” I lied.
Her body was too close to me, the heat of her skin oppressive on mine. I sat up and couldn’t stop myself from crawling down to the end of the bed. I climbed out to stand at the foot, shivering cold in my boxers.
Dizzy, coming loose from myself. She rolled onto her back, rising on her elbows, watching me. Her chest rose and fell fast, eyes narrowed: confusion, insecurity or anger?
I put a hand over my mouth and coughed. Said the word, “Water,” roughly and, “Back in a sec.” I dove into the bathroom between Ella’s room and mine like a soldier going for cover.
I splashed cold water against the closed lids of my burning eyes. I put my mouth under the faucet and ran the water between my lips, swallowing and letting water rush through my mouth and out again. Spitting.
My skin was clammy from sweat. I felt covered in a layer of grime and filth that I couldn’t see. I soaped a washcloth and washed quickly, went over my skin with another washcloth, went over it again with the towel. I wanted to scrub hard, take off the top layer of cells and the layer under that. I couldn’t scrub hard enough to get the filth off me.
I twisted the towel in my fists until my knuckles were almost as white as the worn cloth. There was a hot girl in my bed in her panties and I’d mostly proven to myself that what happened with me and Nico had nothing to do with gender and everything to do with how messed up I was.
