I said, “Should we be helping you get hormones or—”
“Oh, I’m comfortable where I’m at right now,” she said.
“Oh,” I said.
“Okay,” said Dwyane.
Because, honestly, most of what we knew was from TV and googling. She once asked us, “Uh, you do know there’s a difference between gender expression, identity, and sexuality, right?”
We were like, “Yep!” The second she walked away, we were grabbing our phones. “Let’s break out the Google,” I said. It was hard to shut up and listen. We got her a Black therapist who specializes in LGBTQ+ kids to work out the things she needed to know, but Zaya has always showed us what we didn’t know and needed to learn. And she has always led at the pace that is appropriate for her, not us.
At times, we had to catch up. Dwyane and I began discussions that were centered on the ways we and media had decided how trans women needed to move through the world. The impulse was to help her fit in a box. It’s so odd to look back on this time, which was not that long ago, and realize how little we were aware that we were foisting our own fears upon her.
We thought we wanted her to be happy. But we wanted her to be chosen. We assumed she had to look a certain way, embrace the typical trappings of femininity, in order to compete with other girls. To be deserving of love.
It was an awful, slow realization that made me question my assumptions not just about her but about myself. I realized, finally, having a stepdaughter, why mother-daughter relationships are often so fraught. Zaya is such a reflection of me that I now questioned what I saw in the mirror. What was I giving her to help her grow, and what was I leaving her with to undo?
We have stumbled, but Zaya has not missed a beat. In February 2020, Zaya introduced herself to the world as who she truly is. “Meet Zaya. She’s compassionate, loving, whip smart, and we are so proud of her,” I wrote in a social media post she approved. “It’s ok to listen to, love & respect your children exactly as they are.” Dwyane and I said we were leading with love and education, and guaranteed there would be times we took missteps. We wanted to be corrected, strongly and swiftly, when we fucked it up. This was too much truth for some people. There was a large segment of people who always said that I was a real one, a ride-or-die down-ass chick who was deserving of Dwyane’s love. And yet our child was not deserving of that same love and acceptance? Instead of compassion and nurturing, our child has experienced trauma, for merely existing, from some of the spaces and people that were supposed to love her the most. Someone, I am not sure why, sent me a story with a headline demeaning Zaya. My mind went to Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf. What was Zaya supposed to contemplate when the kindness shown her family was snatched quick from her? For little trans girls, I thought to myself, who consider staying in the closet when love and acceptance is too much for some.
We let Zaya speak for herself when she made her first appearance on the world stage. Dwyane did a golf-cart interview while Zaya was at the wheel, asking her if she had any advice for people who were afraid to be themselves.
“If they’re afraid they will be judged, I would say, don’t even think about that,” she advised. “Just be true to yourself. . . . What’s the point of being on this earth if you’re gonna try to be someone you’re not? It’s like you’re not even living as yourself, which is the dumbest concept to me. It’s just like, Be true, and don’t really care what the stereotypical way of being you is.”
“Even when people are being mean?” said Dwyane, who I don’t think was asking “for a friend” anymore. By then, Zaya had already received so much hate online that it frightened us. “Even when people are getting hurt because they’re trying to be themselves?” he continued. “Even through that, you still want people to make sure that they live their truth?”
“Yeah,” she said simply. “I think . . . I know it can get tough. Definitely. But you push through and you be the best you. . . . It’s worth it. I feel it’s very worth it. When you reach that point of yourself. You can look at the mirror and say hi to yourself. Nice to meet you.”
I often get asked for advice about raising a child in the LGBTQ+ community, and my impulse is to tell them to ask Zaya, since she has taught me so much since that third-grade project. That humility, the sometimes crushing, enforced humility of parenting a new teenager, is important. You can tell your child that you don’t have the answers, but what you do know for sure is that you love them. Their peace, like Zaya’s peace, is not up for negotiation.
And whatever their journey, it will not be taken alone. We’re in this together.
7
Freshman Orientation
He has long, pretty eyelashes. I can look at them better because he is starting to fall asleep on the twin bed we are squeezed onto. When you are seventeen, as I am, you see things about people in glimpses until you have the opportunity to really study them. I will forget his name but remember his eyelashes.
We are in his bedroom in his mother’s apartment in Newark, California, about a half hour from where I live in Pleasanton. The July sun is starting to rise outside, and I debate whether to wake him so he can drive me home. I will slip in through the unlocked front door and go up to my room with my parents none the wiser. I am wearing one of his old blue Newark Memorial track T-shirts, which someone had done in a book I’d read. Something cute that girls do. I’ve put my Umbro shorts back on after a stealth tiptoe to the bathroom, fearful of waking his mother.
The shirt is only “old” because he wore it last year, when he was a senior at Newark Memorial High and I was a junior at Foothill. I know him and his best friend from track meets, and now they both run track for Alabama A&M. They’re back home in the Bay Area for summer, and got the coveted jobs parking cars at the Alameda County Fair. Everyone wants the parking jobs because it’s all cash. You can park cars illegally, maybe up on the grass, and just pocket the money.
Last night I hung out there with him and his boy at the fair. They are men of the world now after their year in college, full of advice about navigating freshman life and grateful for an audience to their wisdom. College is a year away for me, but I overprepare for everything.
Their advice amounted to this:
“No matter what you do,” he told me, “don’t fuck anyone in the first semester.”
His friend clapped his hands. “For real,” he said. “You know . . . the first two months.”
My guy nodded. “Get the lay of the land. Otherwise you’re gonna get a label. Be tied to somebody or this, that, and the other.” He said it again, clapping his hands with each word: “Don’t. Fuck. Anybody.”
This was not territorial, and I don’t care for that to change, even as I am lying in his bed. He is not boyfriend material. But it feels grown-up to be here, wearing his shirt. I realize that this is postcoital bliss, another thing I’ve picked up from reading.
As I consider how completely unsexy the term “postcoital” is, there is a huge banging sound from the front door. He springs up.
“Oh my God,” I say. “It sounds like the police are here.”
He is out of bed, grabbing my shirt and stuffing it in my backpack. “They are,” he says.
“What?” I say dumbly.
He throws open the screen on the window, and tosses my backpack out. The banging on the front door continues. I stand.
“Run to the Albertson’s,” he says, scrawling a number on some paper. He tells me to call his friend. “He’ll come pick you up.”
“What the—”
“Go,” he says.
I climb out, lucky that he’s on the first floor. My bare feet touch the grass beneath me. “My shoes!” I whisper-yell to him.
My Birkenstocks come flying out the window. I slip them on and begin running to the Albertson’s grocery store. His shirt, I decide, is the perfect alibi if I am stopped. “Why am I running?” I say aloud. “I run track. Go Cougars.”
The Albertson’s
supermarket has a Pacific Bell pay phone in its empty parking lot. I find first one dime in a pocket of my backpack, then another. I wake his friend, and then sit on the curb to wait. I am just on the edge of thinking he rolled over and went back to sleep when he drives up. He chuckles when he sees my shirt. He’s playing a tape of LL Cool J’s Walking with a Panther, and I suspect he’s cued up “Going Back to Cali” as his song. We head toward Highway 680 to get me home to Pleasanton.
Turns out my guy with the long lashes is a small-time drug dealer. On the half-hour drive, I ask his friend a lot of questions about the business, genuinely curious, but the guy doesn’t know much. He steers the conversation back to college, and what I need to know.
“Remember,” he says. “Don’t fuck anybody.”
* * *
I am a passenger again one year later, this time in a van my parents have rented for the drive out to Lincoln. It’s move-in weekend at the University of Nebraska, a school I have chosen without a campus visit. I have chosen it impulsively, practically out of a hat, to have the decision over with. I give different reasons why, depending on the person.
“I’ll be playing soccer there.”
“My family actually moved from Nebraska when I was little, so it’s home.”
“They put me in the international dorm.”
I don’t yet know that Neihardt Hall is more accurately known as “the nerd dorm.” This weekend we are allowed to move our stuff in, but not physically stay in the dorm. So, after moving in, I’ll spend the night at my aunt Katie’s house in Lincoln, then do orientation Monday.
When I find my room, the door has a sign that my cheery RA made in bubble writing. On it are two names and hometowns: mine and my roommate’s, who is not here yet.
“Karen Johnson,” I say, as if that will ring a bell. “South Omaha.”
“South Omaha,” my mother repeats. She has a lightness to her voice, the tentative sound of someone who thinks she might be being recorded. We walk into a small room with two twin beds, two tiny dressers, and two closets.
“Karen Johnson,” I say again. My mother nods. Because this name and her hometown both walk that perfect line between whiteness and Blackness. My family is from North Omaha, and we know that while South Omaha has some racists, there are pockets of Blackness. Karen Johnson, I think, could be Black. And then: But she could also be white.
We decorate my side of the room, and when I can’t smooth the Bed-in-a-Bag sheets any more to make them look nicer, it’s time to go to Aunt Katie’s.
“I just wish she could know I’m Black,” I say, looking at the bare twin bed next to mine. This feeling or worry has boiled down to the essential matter: It’s not whether or not Karen Johnson is white, it’s how she will react to having a Black roommate. To sleeping in the same room as me. To sharing a sink with me. Will she object? Will her parents?
It’s my mother’s idea to leave a picture of myself with a note welcoming Karen to our dorm room. If they are racist, they can see the picture and switch rooms without me having to see them be racist. I can tell myself there was a mix-up. Go on about my life unharmed.
I find a picture of me from a photo album, and place it next to a cheery note. I worry over its placement on the note, angling it just so.
“There,” my mother says with a finality, to end this thing we feel we have to do to give someone the opportunity to be quietly racist rather than overtly so. To help them, in some ways, but mostly to spare ourselves the added indignity of having to witness that racism.
We leave for Aunt Katie and Uncle John’s. She has baked, which she will always be known for. Every year she sends Christmas cookies, and it got to the point that whichever Union was home first would hoard them. She sends us each our own tin now, and promises I will get mine hand-delivered before I go home for Christmas break. “You’ll get extra,” she says.
Uncle John is a former Nebraska national champion in football, and a real-life action star. He’s a black belt in judo who’s working his way up the ranks of the SWAT department in Lincoln. He is thrilled I chose Nebraska, and is the one person who doesn’t ask me why.
Her kids are around that afternoon. Of all my cousins, we are the most alike in a commitment to sports and academics, but we are not the closest. At the family reunions in Omaha, Aunt Katie’s kids hover close by her. Jay, Tanya, Christie, and Taylor are all athletes, but a little too goody-two-shoes for me, even if they are actually good kids. You’ll find me and my cousins Kenyatta or Johnny . . . well, you won’t find us, because we will be off on some adventure. Tanya and Christie, on the other hand, are not slipping out the window of a drug-dealing hookup.
I spend the afternoon at Aunt Katie’s, urging my parents to leave. I blame them for my onset of anxiety, like theirs is contagious. I breathe only in the upper part of my lungs, my chin up like I have to be somewhere. But it’s here in Lincoln I have to be. It’s only when they are getting in the car that I start bawling. This surprises everyone. I am not that girl. But suddenly I am all elbows and angles in my hugs, pulling on their necks like a child wanting to be lifted up.
When they drive off, I have the feeling I will never see them again. And the question I keep asking myself:
What did I just do?
* * *
Karen Johnson and her family are moving in when I arrive at the dorm the next day. She is white, and I soon realize she could be the sweetest person ever. She has brown hair and a boyfriend named Dale. Karen’s parents act like he is already her husband. We don’t have much in common except that she wants to be liked by her college roommate as much as I do.
That first night Karen and I go to a freshman orientation mixer. A mass of eighteen-year-olds trying on new identities to a soundtrack of Color Me Badd and C&C Music Factory. I meet a freshman named William, supercute with dimples and an easy smile. The kind of boy parents like.
“I’m in Neihardt,” I tell him, not yet ready to say I live there.
He tells me that he’s heard that’s the nerd dorm. Toward the end of the night, William invites me to his dorm, which is part of a trio of buildings called Harper-Schramm-Smith. This is where a lot of the athletes live, which at Nebraska means it’s where the Black people are. I spend the night with him.
In the morning, I remember the advice of my petty drug-dealer hookup back home: “Don’t fuck anybody in the first semester.” And here I am on the first day. I’ve gotten it crackin’ and school hasn’t even started.
William says, “I’ll take you home.” When we get downstairs, he leads me not to a car, but to his ten-speed. I stand there for a minute, wondering if I’m supposed to borrow it.
“You can sit on the handlebars,” he says.
The ride of shame, I think, but do not say. As he pedals, I sit up there, trying to look cool in day-old clothes. It’s like something out of My Girl, only Anna Chlumsky’s Vada and Macauley Culkin’s Thomas J. were eleven. And Anna had her own damn bike.
* * *
In October, it’s William who takes me to my first real college party, a takeoff on the Pajama Jammie Jam in House Party 2 with Kid ’n Play. Actually, his friend Scott takes us in his black El Camino. There had been a discussion on how to sneak liquor in, so since there is a pajama theme, I use my shower caddy as a giant mixing bowl. We somehow get ahold of Key Lime Mad Dog 20/20 fortified wine and margarita mix, and Karen helps me mix it in our dorm room sink.
When Scott drives up with William to pick me up, they look at me standing there in my pajamas, holding a covered bucket of neon-green alcohol.
“Those are the pajamas?” William says, as Scott laughs. I look down at the pink-and-gray PJ set my mom got me at a department store. The pants balloon out and the loose long-sleeved top is the kind of thing that you wear when it’s going to be a bit chilly, but not too.
“What? These are my pajamas.”
“Nothing,” says William, staring at the floor.
When we get there, I get it. All, I mean all, of the women are wearing sexy pa
jamas, not their actual pajamas. They have the satin and silk jewel tones of TLC’s “Red Light Special” while I have the Kmart blue-light special.
“Oh, God,” I said. “I’m wearing little-kid pajamas.” But my shower caddy makes me popular with the rest of William’s teammates. The cool ones are all older, and when you’re eighteen, people who are twenty-one or twenty-two look grown. William and I are just playing at being grown-ups.
William seems more childlike to me, and soon after that night, we are at a fast-food place when I offer to get the sodas.
“Get me a stwawbewwy soda,” he says.
It’s the voice of a three-year-old. Just that word. Stwawbewwy.
You can either have a ten-speed bike, or you can pronounce strawberry as “stwawbewwy.” But it can’t be both. Pick a struggle. And that was the end of William.
A week later I am halfway through an anthro class in a huge lecture hall. Somewhere between analyzing social structures and dynamics, I look over to see a guy checking me out. I look away, then back to find he is still looking. But now he has a sly, wicked, perfect smile. He also has a mustache and a short high-top fade.
When class is over, I move in slow motion to give him time to come over. He does, and he is even cuter up close.
“There you are again,” he says, “with the same smile each day.”
I give him the look of someone practiced at hearing lines. I am not. I fall for this. There is no hook, no line, no sinker. I basically jump into his fishing boat. He asks if he can know my name, and if he can take me out sometime. Yes, and yes.
Marcus is a sophomore and drives a Renault. He may as well have a French accent because I think that car makes him seem so worldly. I become an ambassador’s wife. “Should we take the Renault?” I say about a trip to Amigos, the taco chain.
“Tonight is yours, lady,” he says. “Yours and mine.”
It is noon. I don’t care.
Eventually I will realize that all of his lines were stolen. He was a Magic 8-Ball of Jodeci lyrics, each one he pulled out making just enough sense to be plausible and sexy. This will come to me when a friend plays the Forever My Lady album in her car, and for a split second I will think it’s so weird that Jodeci copied Marcus. But for now, I think he is a genius of love.
You Got Anything Stronger? Page 9
