by Lisa Bunker
A long, uncomfortable silence, neither of them looking at the other. Zen was just starting to think it was too awkward to stay when Arli pulled a book of matches out of veir pocket and used it to light one of the candles stuck to the box. The flame rose up first sooty and weak, then yellow and strong, with hardly a flicker. Arli clicked off the flashlight and settled back into veir beanbag again.
The change of light made the room feel another layer deeper in secret. As their eyes adjusted, the warm sphere of the candle’s light expanded, noiselessly pushing the gloom back until even the farthest grit-strewn corners glowed in a faint brownish illumination. The rest of the world felt apart now, and the passage of time seemed not to matter anymore—a thing that happened other places, not here. Womb space.
After another minute, Arli drew breath and spoke. “What’s your number-one fandom?”
Chitchat, then. Yeah, maybe that was best for the moment. Zen said, “You first.”
“That’s easy,” said Arli. “Novaglyph.”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s a web comic. Weekly updates. The artist lives in Boston, and it has a ton of trans and genderqueer characters, and it’s just wicked cool. What’s your number-one fandom?”
“Kimazui.”
“What’s that?”
“See? Nobody knows. Just like yours.”
“What is it?”
“It’s an anime series. It’s about this team of girls with powers charged with protecting the world.”
“And I bet it has girl clothes and girl hair and big shiny anime eyes and those tiny little mouths—”
“What’s your point?”
“I don’t know. I guess I just don’t like anime very much.”
“You don’t have to be all judgy about it.”
“Okay. Sorry.”
“Okay.”
Zen fiddled with her shoelace, contemplating. Her mind went to the thing that had been growing there for a couple of weeks now—the little seed of doubt that had rooted and started to sprout. To say the words would make it more real, and that was scary, but who better to talk about it with? And no safer place, no better time. After a false start or two she got the words out: “Do you believe in God?”
Arli nodded slowly. Not saying yes, just receiving the question. Vo looked her in the eyes and said, “You first.”
Zen opened her mouth to object, then remembered she had just done the same thing. Okay, fine. She stared off into the gloom, gathering thoughts. “Well,” she said at last, “for sure I was raised that way. Church, prayers, blessings before meals, don’t take the name of the Lord in vain. All that stuff. And if you had asked me in that old life, do I believe in God, I would have said, of course I do.” More thought-gathering. Then, slowly, “But, recently, I’ve started looking at it in a new way. Or, maybe, just looking at it, really looking, for the first time. And now . . . I’m not so sure.” Words lightly spoken, but only spoken at all because they were hidden in the secret womb of light. Arli opened veir mouth as though preparing to speak, then closed it again. Zen said, making an end, “I still say my prayers, though. Habit, I guess. Your turn.”
Arli mused a while, then said, “I was raised the opposite of you. Neither of my parents believed or went to church. And I’ve never had a reason to go against how they raised me. Especially considering how it seems like most of the people who judge in-betweeny people like me are religious people. They say stuff, I guess, like, ‘God doesn’t make mistakes.’” Silence. When vo went on, veir voice had a waver in it. “I may be a lot of things, but I’m not an it, and I’m not a mistake, either.”
“Of course you’re not,” Zen said. She smiled. “I think you’re cool just the way you are.”
A shaky smile in return. “Thanks. I think you’re cool just the way you are too.”
“Thanks.” They both laughed a little. Zen said, “So I guess that takes care of that.”
“Yep, all set.” They laughed again.
Zen said, “So, what do your parents believe in?”
“Hmm . . . give me a minute.”
Zen gave ven a minute. And another. Finally Arli said, “I guess my dad doesn’t believe much, now that I think about it. Except that it’s important to get rich. So that’s what he spends all his time trying to do.” The tone of Arli’s voice said, Not a thing I care about, at all.
“And your . . . parent?”
Arli did a look that said, Thanks for catching that. “You remember at dinner, I talked about the Nezel traditions of gender?” Zen nodded. “If my parent believes in anything, it’s that stuff. Riria Dizdi, they call it. This idea that kids ought to be able to grow up without being thought of as girls or boys until they are old enough to decide for themselves. Vo really likes that.”
“There’re those pronouns again.”
“Yeah. For kids who haven’t decided yet. Or for people like me, who have decided to stay in the middle forever.”
“You’ve already decided about forever?”
Another eye-to-eye look. “Yeah. I have.” Flat and final. Zen opened her mouth, closed it again. Arli said, “What about you? Have you ever really thought about your gender?”
Zen groped through the clanging of internal alarm bells for anything to say. At last she managed, “Not a thing I want to talk about right now.”
“Why not?”
Shaky-voiced: “I just don’t. For reasons I can’t . . . for . . . just, reasons. Okay?” They stared at each other. With her eyes Zen begged, Please just let it go. Please.
“Okay,” Arli said. “That’s cool. No problem.”
“Thanks,” Zen whispered. And if Arli could tell how many feels there were crammed into that one word, vo gave no sign.
THIRTY-SIX
THE MIDDLE OF October. Seven weeks of school somehow survived without everything imploding. Ruminating on this miracle in Mr. Walker’s first-period class one Monday, Zen didn’t notice right away that Melissa was holding out a note. Mr. Walker turned toward the whiteboard and Melissa made a tiny “hey” without voice. Zen turned and saw the little square of paper. For a couple of weeks now she and Melissa had been in a sort of friend holding pattern, talking when they met, but not moving toward anything deeper. Zen had started to see in the other girl’s eyes a touch of wariness she also felt herself. But there was still warmth and connection, too. She took the note.
It said: “Some Tuesdays my dad takes my brothers and little sisters out, and my mom and I do girls’ night. Would you like to come tomorrow?”
Zen thought fast. The passage of time had not made what Melissa had said—or to be precise, what she had said her mother had said—about Elijah feel any less sickening. But still, she was tempted to accept the invitation. Maybe because of seven weeks and not even one second look. Also, the roller coaster happened to be at the top of a hill. At least at this moment, she felt invincible. And she had a twisty curiosity to hear Mrs. Martin’s words about Elijah from Mrs. Martin herself. Not “know your enemy,” exactly, because Melissa’s mom didn’t feel like an enemy. Or, not just. After all, she had been kind. That hug. No, it was more wanting to hear someone actually say the words. Practice, maybe, for times that were coming.
Plus, if she could, she wouldn’t mind getting another look at that brother.
The few seconds it took to work through these deliberations felt well within the allowable period for answering. On the back of the note she wrote, “I have to ask. But, yay, sounds like fun!” She added a smiley face and a flower, and passed the note back. Melissa smiled and nodded.
When, permission and a ride sought and granted, Zen showed up at the Martins’ the next evening, getting another look at the brother turned out to be the first thing that happened. Talking to him too. He was sitting at the dining table doing homework, and after letting her in Melissa said, “I’m helping my mom in the kitchen,” and disap
peared, so it was just the two of them.
Douglas, his name turned out to be. Not Doug. Douglas. On closer inspection he turned out to be a clean-cut and somber-looking boy. Also, formal and polite. “So, Zenobia, you’re Melissa’s new friend from school.”
“Yes.”
“I’ve never met someone named Zenobia before.”
Zen nodded. No words.
“Is it a family name?”
Zen shook her head. She couldn’t very well tell him that she had picked it out herself just a few months ago, for the Z to A of it, the feel of getting back to the beginning and starting over.
He was watching her now, maybe because he had picked up that she was answering without speaking. Zen suddenly wondered again what would happen if he, if the whole family, found out that she was like Elijah. Too late to back out now, though. Just gotta brazen it out.
“I’m named after my grandfather,” Douglas said. “He was a minister.”
Nod.
“We come from a long line of ministers.”
Nod.
“But my dad isn’t one. His brother is, though.”
Zen felt the pressure of the accumulated silences and managed to say, “What’s his name?”
“My dad’s brother? James. Uncle Jim.” Douglas closed his book and shuffled papers together in a stack. Homework done for today, looked like.
Zen thought about saying, “I have an aunt named Phil,” and had to suppress a laugh. In order to have something else to say, she asked, “What about you? Do you want to be a minister too?”
The older boy seemed taken aback by the question. He stopped tidying. Their gazes met. He had gorgeous eyes. But also, now that she was looking, something . . . missing. An absence of spark. She tried to imagine him making a joke, and couldn’t come up with it.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess. If I’m called.” Then he went into the kitchen, where Zen heard him telling his mother that he was done, and could he go to his friend’s house now? He called her ma’am.
At dinner, Zen listened except when answering direct questions. Her mind was full of Elijah. She groped fruitlessly for a way to bring him up . . . but then Melissa did it for her. She said to her mom, “That girl who thinks she’s a boy. Remember I told you about her?”
Mrs. Martin glanced at Zen and said, “Yes, I remember.”
“I saw her again today. She’s still doing it. Still wearing the clothes. And using the same name.”
“That’s not surprising.”
Astonished to hear herself speak, Zen said, “You’re talking about Elijah, right?”
Melissa scoffed. “As she calls herself.”
“Melissa,” said her mother. “No need to mock.”
Still marveling at her own boldness, Zen said, “I don’t know . . . Elijah just seems to me to be . . . just feels boy-like to me. You know? Elijah just seems to me to be Elijah.”
Melissa’s mom was nodding sadly. She said, “The Bible teaches us not to treat any of God’s children with contempt. And it’s not that poor child’s fault that she’s one of the gender-confused.”
That was hard to take. Zen took a slow-motion sip of soda to mask her consternation.
Melissa said, “That’s what you said before.” She hesitated, and Zen glanced at her. Was Melissa about to say something that challenged her mother, even in a small way? Why yes, she was. “But I kind of sort of agree with Zen. She just seems like a boy to me, too. A little bit. Sometimes.” Then her cheeks went red and she looked down at her plate.
Zen wondered what Mrs. Martin angry would look like. Those eyes: so warm, usually. But with those quirky corners, too. And that firm mouth. So certain. Melissa’s mom mad could maybe be scary.
Tightness came into Mrs. Martin’s voice. “Well, that’s natural. First impressions are powerful. You met her as a boy, so in your mind she seems to be one.”
Melissa nodded.
“And she’s just a child.” Mrs. Martin’s lips had gone thin, and Zen nodded minutely to herself. Yep, something really hard there. “It’s the parents I deplore,” Mrs. Martin said. “That’s the real shame. There’s no way the situation could have gotten as far as it has without them encouraging it, or at least condoning.”
“I understand now, Mother,” Melissa said. “Thank you for helping me to see.”
Zen felt her body start to shake. All of a sudden, this was way too close to home. Confidence evaporating. She needed to flee. “Ma’am?” she said. It came out normal-sounding, and she gave silent thanks.
“Yes, Zenobia?”
“May I use your restroom?”
“Of course, dear.” A second look. “Zenobia, are you all right?”
“Yes, sorry, thanks. Um, I just, it’s just that all of a sudden I have to go really bad.” Already up, she performed the desperate-to-pee tiptoes dance.
“Badly.”
“Yes, ma’am, badly.”
“Very well. You know where, down the hall.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
LATER IN OCTOBER now, with weather to match. On an afternoon cold enough for gloves, Zen came home late, just before dinnertime, to voices sounding different in the kitchen. She heard it as she eased the door shut. Like a stranger was there. And, judging from the hitchless rhythm, they hadn’t heard her come in. She slipped off her shoes and whisper-walked to a spot just out of sight around the corner from the speakers.
Aunt Lucy was talking, with more than the usual edge in her voice. “. . . all this way. Everything’s fine. She’s doing well in school, and making friends.”
The voice that answered was not Aunt Phil’s, but familiar all the same. “We’ll see about that.” Zen’s eyes widened, and she held her breath. It was Grandma Gail. Instantly Zen was transported back to the surreal dream time when she had finally made the switch.
Things had gotten so dark and strange. Still, they had a rhythm to their days. Dad would go out and work. In the summer he did a lot of solo jobs, fixing up the winter homes of the rich people who returned once the heat broke. She was forbidden from going out. The expectation was that she was working on her homeschool lessons, but she found them easy, and they never took long. Also, he seldom checked her work. So once that was done, she spent most of her time exploring the dark web, finding solace in learning new skills, hacking new sites, designing new exploits. The rare times she tired of that, she would lie on the couch and stare endlessly out at the scrubby cactus-scattered front yard.
There had been a plan for that yard once, long ago, when Mother was still alive. Raised planters with stone wall sides. Paths between. Only remnants remained. The cacti she had planted still soldiered on, but weeds had come into the neglected dirt. Down by the river, one cottonwood tree flashed an improbably vivid swatch of green.
The weeks went by. Zen felt nothing much, most days. Locked away inside herself. Doing her time. Life without the possibility of parole.
Then the day came when he did not return. The long afternoon shaded ever so slowly into dusk, then into night, and the sound of his truck jouncing down the rutted drive failed to make itself heard.
A little waiting, and then a dive deep into herself. If there was fear it felt contained, as in a glass jar. A whole row of glass jars, actually, lined up in the cupboard of her mind, holding under their screwed-down lids all the feelings another human child might feel in this moment, so that this other thing could maybe possibly happen—a time-lapse flower maybe possibly begin to open. She waited to see if there would be enough time.
He did not return, and no one else came, and she made herself meals out of the fridge and pantry, and still he did not return, and no one else came. Her father, her last living parent, had disappeared, and she existed alone in their little patch of desert that grew hotter every day. Alone with the smell of scorched dust and the wind-rattle hush and the glare of the sunlight through the l
ong afternoons.
She had long ago marked the location of the boxes in her mind. She knew exactly which shelf they rested on, out in the shed. On the morning of the fourth day she rose, ate cereal with canned milk and raisins, and then stepped out into the tuning-up-to-furnace morning and walked the stone path to the shed and pulled the boxes down.
And when, a day later, Thomas Jarecky’s absence having finally been noted somewhere out in the world, Grandma Gail showed up and peeked through the blinds, she saw her grandchild in the living room, wearing one of her mother’s faded housedresses and dancing—to an old swing record—an ecstatic couch-leaping, arm-flinging, lamp-tipping, ululating dance.
To say the least, Grandma Gail was less than pleased with what she found. When, another day later, Zen’s father was found dead in a wash with a rifle bullet in his skull, Zen trembled under that hard gaze, afraid of another cycle of the rigid God-words that had clamped her life out of the world until now.
Somehow, though, that didn’t happen.
Grandma Gail was not one to ask a grandchild what that grandchild wanted, but she did seem to have a different sort of relationship with God than Father and Mother had had. One with a little more wiggle room in it. And Grandma did have two children, though eldest Lucille lived so far away and was in contact so seldom. When Lucille came to the memorial service and heard what had happened, a conversation had begun. Out of that conversation, an offer of guardianship had been made. And now, many months later, Zen stood in a hallway a thousand miles from the nearest natural-growing cactus or cottonwood tree, listening to her relatives talk about her.
THIRTY-EIGHT
“I’M GLAD TO hear you think the child is doing well,” Grandma Gail said. She didn’t sound glad. “But, if you don’t mind, I am also going to want to see and hear for myself.”