Nico & Tucker

by Rachel Gold

  Now my chest felt the same awful, clenching pain about Tucker.

  How could I even tell her what was wrong with what she’d said? That I was a guy and wasn’t a guy at the same time. The word “nonbinary” confuses people. It puts too much emphasis on the “non.” It’s about the gender binary, but some people only hear the “non” part. Like it’s about not being gendered—instead of being all genders, outside of, beyond them.

  I didn’t have a good word for all-gendered or beyond gender. There were so many genders to play with: butch guy, pretty boi, artsy girl, emo guy, clever girl, fierce femme, protective dude…I could list them all day. I was working out how to show it in dance for the cabaret and starting to feel like I could.

  My sense of gender changed over time. One day I looked in the mirror and the button down shirt was right if I wore earrings. Another day all earrings were wrong because my hair was too long or curling too much.

  Was that what it felt like every day for Ella before she transitioned? Did she see a little boy and feel that bone deep shudder of wrongness? I bet she did. But then she knew who she was.

  I didn’t know who I was. But I knew who I was not. I was not that foolish girl falling for Tucker and getting her heart broken again.

  When I got home, I stripped off everything colorful. I put on black sweatpants, a faded gray T-shirt and a purple hoodie because I didn’t have any dark sweatshirts.

  Yai was at the kitchen table writing longhand on her legal pad. Probably a letter. She wrote a lot of letters: to relatives in Thailand, to theater companies about what she liked in their productions, Letters to the Editor in the newspaper. She saw me in the hall and said, “You’re angry.”

  I poured a glass of juice and sat at the table with her. “It’s too hard to explain.”

  “Starbuck?” she asked.

  I folded my arms and slumped down, forehead resting on my forearms. The name that had sounded so cute a day before made me sad. Yai rubbed a circle on my back.

  “You’ll work it out,” she said.

  “Doubt it,” I grumbled and surprised myself by asking, “Do you think I should pick a gender?”

  She took her tea mug into the kitchen for a refill. When she was back and settled into her chair, she said, “You have to answer three questions to answer that one. What do you need? What does the family need? What does the village need?”

  “But if I need to be everything but the family needs me to pick one…”

  She didn’t say anything and I kept thinking. What did the village need? Here in the US where there weren’t villages, was the village the city? Or was it my community of people—including the ones I hung out with the most at the Noodle? Or was it the whole country?

  If it was the community at the Noodle, that was easy, they needed me to stay everything, to stay fluid and nonbinary, and to show people that was okay. If it was the whole country, did they need anything from me? Was I supposed to be a productive cog in the consumer machine? Make a bunch of money and buy stuff and keep it all going? I could do that better as a man.

  “What’s the village?” I asked. “And how do I know what it needs?”

  Yai looked over at me, her eyes steady and deep. “If you can answer that today, this week even, I’ll know you’ve become enlightened.”

  I had to grin. She nodded, small smile, went back to writing her letter. I was in no danger of becoming enlightened. What she said got me thinking about the Buddha and the story of how after he gets enlightened, the gods ask him to come back and teach humanity about enlightenment and he doesn’t want to.

  It was hard to always be teaching people things. It was hard to have a life that taught by example. I got why the Buddha didn’t want to teach and I didn’t even have something as gigantic as enlightenment to work with.

  On the other hand, at least the Buddha got to be enlightened while he had to teach. Maybe if I was enlightened the whole gender thing would get easier. Nah, probably not. It wasn’t like the Buddha never suffered again, he just wasn’t attached to it.

  That was probably the trick of it—not being attached. But non-attachment, not one of my strengths.

  Was it easier to be non-attached as a guy? I wouldn’t have to worry about things with Tucker. I’d get male privilege. I’d hate it, but I could use it to change things, couldn’t I? Or would it always end up using me?

  Maybe I should give up what I wanted for a role that was the most useful for everyone else.

  “Thanks, Yai. I’m going to dance,” I told her. I gave her a quick kiss and headed out to the Noodle.

  A few minutes later, Sharani gave me the want-to-talk look and I shook my head. I couldn’t repeat what Tucker had said, that whole scene, not even to Sharani. She’d understand, but I didn’t want to hear the words again.

  I had to move until I didn’t feel the hate in my body. The weight of all the judgments, all the ideas that this or that part of me was wrong. Spin and fall and catch myself against the ground until I felt that all of my body belonged to me.

  I thought maybe I should block Tucker on my phone again. But it didn’t matter, she wasn’t going to call.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Tucker

  I slunk back to my dorm room wanting to pound my head against the wall. Made myself lie down instead. The headache from that morning was back, double strength. I hazed out for a while, slipping from hating Summer to hating myself to dozing and then back into the hate cycle.

  Knocking woke me. I jumped up in case it was Nico coming back to let me apologize. My brain slammed into the front of my head with blurring pain, but I made it to the door and pulled it open.

  It was Quin, grim-faced.

  “Hey,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  I lowered myself into my desk chair, leaving the door open. She shut it behind her and sat on the side of the bed, elbows on knees.

  “We got played,” she said.

  “Summer told you?”

  Quin shook her head. “Nah, I’d have wondered about that. Gal on the soccer team asked if I was with you. I said kind of, because, you know, she might have been asking for Katee, the hot forward and I didn’t know what we were. That night and then dinner, we didn’t talk about it, but it felt like dating, you know.”

  I nodded because it had. Because before I heard about Nico’s surgery, before we started talking again, I had been thinking about dating Quin.

  She went on, “So this girl says how she heard you were away for the weekend with your boyfriend and did I know about that. And I was like: no way because that night when we had breakfast you said guys are gross. But she’d seen a pic of you with this cute guy.”

  Plausible. There were plenty of pics of me and Nico from over the winter. In some, Nico appeared fairly guy-ish. If you were expecting to see me with a guy in the photo, that’s what you’d see.

  I didn’t know how to explain that to Quin. She stretched up, blew out her breath, put her hands on her knees.

  “I figured I should ask about us,” she said. “I’m really sorry about when I asked.”

  “Yeah, that’s not on you. That’s on Summer. I’m sure she set that girl up to ask you about the boyfriend thing.” A long pause. “And it’s on me. You didn’t know Nico was there. I did.”

  “I should’ve waited until we were alone,” Quin said. “I just was looking forward to the weekend and seeing you. Then you blew me off and you really were out of town, so that part of the story was true. The more I thought about it…you know, when we hooked up, you never let me touch you.”

  “I did…” I started to protest but turned it into a question, “I didn’t?”

  “Tucker, you didn’t even take off your boxers. I figured it was a butch thing. But then the dating a guy story got me worried. Though if you weren’t really into girls, I figured you’d let me do you, not the other way around.”

  My head was filling with pressure and heat. Face burning.

  I used to…

  Back with Lindy, I u
sed to like…

  I pushed off the chair and stood up. Stared at the door to the bathroom, wishing I could see through it into Ella’s room, and that she’d be there and tell me what to do.

  “I am a lesbian,” I said. “And I like you. I thought Nico was blowing me off. I thought…but yo wasn’t and then I wanted that. I want that. I thought you and me we were rebounding, not really dating yet.”

  “Could’ve been,” Quin said.

  I didn’t have an answer for her.

  She stood up and walked to the door, then asked, “You still tabling with me at the gym?”

  I’d agreed to sit at the Black Lives Matter info table with her before the basketball game.

  “You’re sure you want a white girl sitting there?”

  She shook her head at me. “When it’s all black folks we get written off much faster.”

  “Oh, shit. Yeah, of course, I’ll be there. Quin I’m sorry about everything. I—”

  She cut me off with an impatient wave. “I’ll see you Thursday.”

  She shut the door hard behind her.

  I took some ibuprofen and ate part of an expired protein bar I’d bought on sale at the gas station. It tasted like packing peanuts, minus the peanut. My brain kept circling around to Nico and then looping back in time toward everything I didn’t want to remember.

  When the headache got less blinding, I went to the gym and hit the heavy bag until my arms were ready to fall off.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Nico

  I had the data from the girl side of the experiment, time to collect the guy side data. I texted Dad, asking if I could come over. He’d rented a furnished three-bedroom apartment a few miles from Mom’s house. A few weeks ago I’d thought that was a pathetic attempt to get me to come hang out. Now I was grateful for it.

  “Let’s give this a try,” I said when I got there. “The guy thing, for real.”

  He looked me over approvingly, waved me in and got me a pop. “I’m glad you’re taking this seriously.”

  The furnishings were super generic in his living room, like ten shades of taupe. But they centered on a massive flat screen TV, so it worked. Dad had paused a history show, with a bunch of people on screen building some temple.

  I dropped onto the couch and took the pop he offered. I told him, “Bring it on. Do it up. Let’s do all the guy stuff: monster truck rallies, pro wrestling, maybe we could rope some steers together and then eat twenty ounce steaks.”

  A bemused grin split the darkness of his beard. “Kenan’s coming out tomorrow for his spring break, I’ll make plans.”

  My dad’s guy plans the following day did not involve steers or monster trucks. We went to the Science of Big Machines exhibit at the science museum and it was awesome. Dad could explain what all the machines did—how they worked to make bridges and cities. Kenan was into it, which kept him from being a complete douche about every girl within twenty yards of us.

  Kenan spent a long time in the cab of the fully assembled crawler ’dozer. Dad leaned in over his shoulder to tell him what the controls did and how much dirt he could move. I hung out by the miniature cranes, moving tiny girders from one side of a mock construction site to another.

  Kenan hopped out of the cab when he saw the cute girl we’d passed coming in. Not like he was going to talk to her, though. Kenan had Dad’s thick, straight hair, but not the long face. So his eyes were jammed up under a heavy brow and short forehead. This meant that the expression he thought was sexy was, in fact, creepy and menacing.

  We’d been through all the big machines and Dad was reading the program to decide what else we should see. I leaned close to Kenan, indicated the girl he’d been stalking, and said, “Ken, stop staring at her, she’s not into you.”

  “What? She’s looking at me.”

  “She’s trying to figure out if you’re a serial killer. If you want, I’ll go ask. In fact, if you don’t knock it off, I’m going over to talk to her right now. I’ll tell her that you like her but she’d have to work around your Paleolithic manners.”

  “Asshole,” he said.

  Kenan didn’t get it because he’d never been a girl. Most people who’d never been girls didn’t understand the weight of fear that came with being perceived female in our culture. I couldn’t explain that to Kenan. He’d never believe me. He’d never believe that half the population spent that much time walking around in fear.

  At least when I presented as a guy, he’d listen to me. He stopped staring at the girl. He went over to Dad and they picked our next destination. This was in the opposite direction of the girl.

  Afterward I hung out with them at Dad’s. We played a snowboarding game and ate spaghetti that Dad made. He wasn’t as good a cook as Mom, but he’d mastered a few basics.

  Two days later we went to a movie: the new 300 film because Kenan wanted to see it and I didn’t have a strong opinion. At first it was fun because Dad’s so anti-Greek. We cheered for the Persians. The area that’s now Turkey was part of the Persian Empire back in the day.

  “The Greeks are not the heroes they’re made out to be,” Dad grumbled as we left the theater. “They did not invent culture. Turkey was civilized thousands of years before Greece.”

  “Dad, it’s Hollywood,” Kenan told him.

  “At least they didn’t cast a white guy as Xerxes,” I offered. “But Artemisia, ugh.”

  “What? She’s hot in that goth girl way,” Kenan said.

  I spread my hands in helplessness. Where to start? I mean, Artemisia had been the queen of a city and a naval commander—I’m pretty sure she didn’t look like the skinniest girls from my college. She’d have had muscles same as the guys.

  But that’s not what Hollywood demanded. They manufactured cut, muscled bodies to symbolize the pinnacle of manhood. And to contrast, we were supposed to believe that the super skinny bodies were ideal women. That’s how you could tell them apart, right? Men were hunks of muscle and women were willowy boob-trees.

  These actors all shaped their bodies to fit a cultural ideal. Like the way Dad wanted to alter mine with surgery. Their bodies reinforced the ideal that shaped them.

  Like Man and Woman were gods and all the people had to worship at their perfect forms. Do whatever it took to look like one or the other.

  And how weird was it that they called a person with low body fat and lots of muscles “cut?” Like they’d done surgery on themselves, maybe cut away parts of themselves.

  It made me want to be a guy so I could not be that. So I could put a big signpost in the country of masculinity that said “Here be dragons.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Tucker

  In my right hand, the notecards for the presentation to Prof. Callander’s class. On my left palm, key points written in permanent ink in case I fumbled the notecards. Ella had picked out a shirt for me to wear. It was very blue. I felt phony in this bright shirt and my least-worn jeans.

  Sitting in front of the class while Prof. Callander introduced me, the rows of seats seemed to stretch infinitely high. I re-read the writing on my palm so I wouldn’t clench my fist and sweat on the notes.

  When I got up to talk, I forgot everything. Ella had warned me that could happen. I read words off the cards. My brain slowly figured out what we were doing. The first few presentation slides covered terminology, so they were easy.

  After three slides, I glanced up. Half the students sat forward in their seats, curious. A few looked at their books. One was staring around glazed. I wanted all of them focused and listening. I got into the words, let them flow. I felt out of body. The words talked and my body moved while I directed the stream of words one way or another.

  I told them about the slur spray-painted on my dorm room door, about the names I was called. I told them about getting harassed in the women’s locker room and then—after one girl called her boyfriend—getting jumped and beaten up outside the gym. And I told them how I’d had my pepper spray out, managed to spray both guys in t
he face and get them kicked out of school.

  When I’d practiced this, twenty minutes seemed like forever. Now I got to the end of it really fast. Students clapped and Prof. Callander asked if there were questions.

  “How scary was it when those guys attacked you?” one student asked.

  “The most scared I’ve been in life,” I said. “But that helped. All the adrenaline kept me focused on finding the pepper spray and getting out of there.”

  Under my answer was another set of words. The story about what happened weeks later. About how I should have been scared when I was with Lindy, but I wasn’t because I thought I knew her.

  I took another question, pointing to a girl sitting near the front.

  “Okay this isn’t going to come out right,” she said. “But you’re really a girl, I mean, you were in the women’s locker room but you’re really a woman. And I get if someone’s had surgery, she’s really a woman too, but what if, like, she…er, um, that person has a penis? That’s not okay in the women’s locker room.”

  Prof. Callander said, “We associate penises with maleness, but that’s not always the case. There are other physical factors that we don’t associate with maleness but that would have health benefits if we did. For example, heart disease can be different in men and women, but culturally we spend very little time talking about that. If a woman with a penis goes into a locker room or public bathroom, what would be the issue?”

  “I don’t want to see a penis in the locker room,” the questioner admitted.

  The girl next to her rolled her eyes, “For real? You see one in your bed all the time. Who cares? Like you’re staring at everyone’s business in the locker room anyway?”

  A wave of laughter went through the class. A guy raised his hand slowly and Prof. Callander nodded to him.

  “Hasn’t testosterone been linked with more violent behavior? And we could assume that a person with a penis is likely to be producing testosterone, so aren’t women safer without that? Just last week,” he paused and flipped through his notebook, “I can’t find the number but overwhelmingly rapists are men.”