by Tom Perrotta
“One of ’em,” Julian replied.
Dumell chuckled. “How many you got?”
“Hard to keep count.”
“Listen to you, player. I bet they love it when you roll up on your skateboard.”
“What can I say?” Julian told him. “I’m a fuel-efficient lover.”
Dumell considered the metaphor.
“Guess that makes me a gas-guzzler,” he said. “Old-school Detroit. Ten miles to the gallon highway. But it’s a smooth ride, if you know what I’m saying.”
Barry, their host, pounded on the table, sparing Julian the need for further banter.
“Welcome, fellow scholars,” Barry said. “I’m glad you all could make it. And I’m especially delighted that our esteemed professor has decided to grace us with her presence. Dr. Fairchild, it’s a privilege to have you in my humble neighborhood tavern. You really class up the joint.”
Dr. Fairchild blushed and waved off the compliment as the students drank a toast in her honor. Julian made a point of clinking glasses with everyone at the table—Barry, Dumell, Russ, the professor, Eve (Brendan Fletcher’s mom, weirdly enough), the hilariously named Mr. Ho (who spoke very little English), and Gina (the chatty motorcycle dyke). Aside from Barry, who was one of those I’m-an-asshole-and-proud-of-it guys, Julian liked them all just fine, and he was even feeling okay about Barry, considering that he was picking up the tab.
Fuck you, he texted Ethan. These are my people.
*
Julian knew he was too smart for Eastern Community College. Everybody said so—his parents, his teachers, his friends, his former guidance counselor, who was a bit of a dick, but still. He had the GPA and the SATs to get into a good four-year school, and his parents had the money to pay for it, or so they said. It was just that senior year of high school had been a total bust—he’d been seriously depressed for most of it—and he hadn’t been able to complete his applications in a timely fashion.
He didn’t start feeling better until the beginning of summer—they’d adjusted his meds for the fourth or fifth time, and finally stumbled on the magic formula—and by then it was way too late to get in anywhere decent. His parents and shrink agreed that it would be wise for him to take a few classes at ECC, to get his feet wet, as they insisted on putting it. If he liked it and got good grades, he could transfer somewhere better for sophomore year, somewhere more commensurate with his abilities.
Julian hadn’t expected much from community college, and for the most part ECC had lived up to his low expectations. His Math class was a joke, way easier than high school. He regularly dozed off in Bio and still got A-pluses on the first two tests. Gender and Society was the only exception to this general rule of mediocrity. It was a wild card, a night class full of rando adults, taught by a female professor who’d been born a male and had transitioned, as she liked to say, in her late thirties, which definitely enhanced Julian’s academic experience. It was one thing to have a professor tell you that gender was socially constructed, and another to hear it from a person who had actually done construction work.
There was a lot of funky jargon in the reading assignments—cisgender and heteronormative and dysphoria and performativity and on and on—but he didn’t mind. It was one of those classes that actually made you think, in this case about stuff that was so basic it never even occurred to you to question it, all the little rules that got shoveled into your head when you were a kid and couldn’t defend yourself. Girls wear pink, boys wear blue. Boys are tough. Girls are sweet. Women are caregivers with soft bodies. Men are leaders with hard muscles. Girls get looked at. Guys do the looking. Hairy armpits. Pretty fingernails. This one can but that one can’t. The Gender Commandments were endless, once you started thinking about them, and they were enforced 24/7 by a highly motivated volunteer army of parents, neighbors, teachers, coaches, other kids, and total strangers—basically, the whole human race.
Any hot chicks? Ethan texted.
Ha ha, Julian replied.
Sad to say, it was slim pickings in Gender and Society. The only halfway hot female close to his own age was Salima, the Muslim babe, and she wore a fucking headscarf. The rest of her clothes were normal enough, and she had a cute round face, but that headscarf was black and forbidding. When they’d interviewed each other, she told him she didn’t drink, date, or dance—which explained her unfortunate but totally predictable absence at the bar—and was saving herself for marriage to a good Muslim guy. She said she was happy being a woman, except that just once she’d like to know what it felt like to punch someone in the face.
Only three ladies at the table. A dyke, Brendan Fletcher’s mom, and my professor
The tranny? Ethan texted back. Holy shit!
Julian snuck a guilty glance at Professor Fairchild, who was deep in conversation with Mrs. Fletcher. Early in the semester, he had unthinkingly used the word tranny to describe his teacher, before she’d had a chance to explain how offensive it was, and now his friends wouldn’t stop using it, no matter how many times Julian asked them not to. They insisted that tranny was just a harmless abbreviation, and called Julian a pussy for scolding them about it.
She’s a nice person, he wrote.
Hot?
They’d been over this ground before.
Not especially
Professor Fairchild wasn’t a freak or anything, far from it. She was what his mother would have called an attractive older woman. She wore tasteful conservative suits like a lady lawyer on TV, always with a colorful scarf tied around her neck. Lots of makeup and nice perfume. A little manly around the jaw, but otherwise pretty convincing.
What about Fletcher’s mom?
This was a harder question. Mrs. Fletcher actually was kind of pretty, as much as he hated to admit it. Not in a young woman way, but pretty-for-her-age, which he didn’t know exactly, beyond the obvious fact that she was old enough to be his mother. She had a nice face, maybe a little sad around the eyes, or maybe just tired. There was some gray in her hair, and she had a little belly, but she had a decent body overall. Excellent boobs, and she still looked pretty good in jeans, which was a lot more than he could say for his own mom, despite her Paleo diet and yoga addiction.
She’s okay, he texted back. Except that she gave birth to a raging asshole
* * *
The bar wasn’t all that crowded on a Tuesday night, but it was pretty noisy, with classic rock blasting in the background, songs that Eve remembered from high school—Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin and “Little Pink Houses”—more than a few of which inspired Barry and Russ to trade high fives or break out their air guitars. Eve hated most of those songs—cock rock, her college friends used to call it—but the lyrics were permanently engraved in her memory, courtesy of every boyfriend she’d ever had.
Snot running down his nose! Greasy fingers smearing shabby clo-hoes!
That awful Jethro Tull song came on while Professor Fairchild told Eve about her mother’s death, which happened just a few months after Margo—they were on a first-name basis now—had completed her transition. It was one of those freak things, a stubborn cold that somehow turned into drug-resistant pneumonia. Her mother went to the emergency room, complaining of a nagging cough and shortness of breath, and twelve hours later she was on a ventilator, unable to speak, drifting in and out of consciousness. She rallied a little right before she died, just long enough to scribble a final message to the daughter who had once been a son.
You are confused, she wrote, in a weak and trembling hand. You need to wake up and smell the coffee!
“Those were her dying words.” Margo tried to smile, but couldn’t complete the mission. “Right after I told her how much I loved her. You need to wake up and smell the coffee! I’ll never forgive her for that.”
“You should try,” Eve told her. “It’s unhealthy to resent the dead.”
Margo knew this was true. “I wish I could talk to her one more time. Just to make her understand that this is me. Not that sad little boy livin
g inside the wrong body. But she’d probably just hurt my feelings all over again. She used to say such horrible things.”
“I know how that goes,” Eve said. “I work with older people. You wouldn’t believe the stuff that comes out of their mouths.”
“Oh, I believe it,” Margo said. “But my mother was a schoolteacher. She was not an ignorant woman. She just refused to accept my experience and acknowledge my pain.”
“She loved her little boy.” It was strange how clear this was to Eve, though she’d never even met the woman. “She didn’t know how to think about you any other way.”
Margo drank the last sip of wine in her glass.
“She never really knew me. My own mother. Isn’t that terrible?”
Margo buried her face in her hands. After a moment of hesitation, Eve reached out and began rubbing the professor’s shoulder, aware as she did so that everyone else at the table was watching them with a mixture of concern and discomfort.
“Something wrong?” asked Dumell.
Eve shrugged—of course something was wrong—but Margo raised her head and told him that she was fine.
“Don’t mind me,” she said, wiping her eyes and mustering an embarrassed smile. “I just get emotional when I drink.”
“There’s only one cure for that.” Barry waved his hand, signaling to the bartender. “Yo, Ralphie! Another round for my friends.”
* * *
Russ had switched to Diet Coke, and everyone else at the table was drinking wine or hard liquor—trying to get the most bang from Barry’s buck—so Julian had the second pitcher all to himself. It was a lot of beer for one person, but he was approaching a level of intoxication where finishing it on his own seemed like a matter of personal honor. To make it official, he texted a pic to Ethan before he poured the first glass: the sweaty plastic vessel filled to the brim, his own liquid Mount Everest.
60 oz bro wish me luck!!!
“You texting or listening?” Dumell asked.
“Both,” said Julian, but he put down his phone and turned his full attention back to his real-life companion, who was telling him about Iraq, which was not a subject Julian got to hear about every day, at least not from someone who’d actually been there.
Not that it was all that exciting, apparently. Dumell said it was mostly boring as shit, due to the fact that he was an auto mechanic, not a combat soldier. He spent most of his tour sweating in a repair shop, changing oil and brake pads, replacing spark plugs and rotating tires, the same routine tasks he now performed every day at Warren Reddy Subaru in Elmville. Every once in a while, though, he got sent out in a tow truck to pick up a disabled vehicle that had been hit by an IED or an RPG.
“That’s when shit got real,” he said. “You’re driving through that desert, totally fucking exposed, just waiting for something to explode. Every pothole feels like the end of the world, know what I’m saying?”
Weirdly, Julian thought he did, though he’d never been near a war zone, and had never seen anything blow up that was bigger than a firecracker, except on a screen.
“Anything bad happen?”
“Not to me. Just did my job and came home.”
“Must’ve been a relief.”
“You would think so. But I didn’t . . . readjust too good. Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t hold a job. Marriage fell apart. Scared all the time. Like I was still out in the desert, driving through a minefield.”
“That sucks.”
“PTSD,” Dumell explained. “That’s what the doctors say. But it doesn’t make any sense. I was lucky. Came home in one piece. Ain’t got shit to complain about.”
Julian was intimately familiar with this line of thinking. It had played on a loop during the black hole of his senior year. My life is good. People love me. I have a promising future. So why can’t I get out of bed?
“Doesn’t matter,” he told Dumell, surprising himself with the conviction in his voice. “You feel what you fucking feel. You don’t have to apologize to anyone.”
Dumell squinted for a few seconds, as if he was trying to get Julian into focus. But after a moment, his expression softened.
“Guess you know what I’m talking about, huh?”
“Kind of,” Julian told him. “I got PTSD from high school.”
* * *
Eve stopped drinking after her second glass of the house white—a watery pinot grigio—but Margo happily accepted Barry’s offer of a third.
“What the heck,” she said. “I’m not teaching tomorrow.”
It was close to eleven, and Eve started thinking about the logistics of a graceful exit. It would have been simple, except that she felt responsible for getting Margo back to campus, where she’d left her car. She was about to broach the subject when Margo turned to her with a wistful smile.
“This is nice,” she said. “It’s just what I hoped it would be.”
“What do you mean?”
Margo gestured vaguely, sculpting a roundish object with her hands.
“Just this. Going out with a girlfriend and talking about . . . stuff.” She laughed sadly. “I always thought I’d have more women friends after I transitioned. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I have friends. But not too many of them are cis women.”
“It’s hard,” Eve said. “Everybody’s so busy.”
Margo tapped a manicured fingernail on a damp cocktail napkin. “I think I watched too much Sex and the City, and read too many novels about amazing female friendships. These women who talk about everything, and help each other through the hard times. I never had friends like that when I was living as a guy.”
“My ex-husband didn’t have any friends like that, either. Men just don’t need that much from each other.”
“But you do, right? You have friends you can confide in. Talk about your love life or whatever. Share your secrets.”
“A few,” Eve said, though she hadn’t done a great job of maintaining those friendships in recent months. She hadn’t told Jane or Peggy or Liza about her porn problem, and she certainly hadn’t mentioned her crush on Amanda. The only person she could imagine confiding in about her feelings for Amanda was Amanda herself, and that wasn’t possible at the moment. They hadn’t really talked since their fateful dinner at Enzo, even though they saw each other every day at work. When they did communicate, they were both a little guarded, very proper and professional, as if neither one wanted to venture into any gray areas, or get anywhere near the other’s personal boundaries.
“You know what the problem is?” Margo said. “I missed out on the bonding periods. I didn’t grow up with a tight group of girls, didn’t have any women roommates in college, didn’t get to swap sex stories with co-workers at lunch. No Mommy and Me classes, no hanging out with a neighbor while our kids had a playdate. The only woman I could ever talk to like that was my ex-wife, and she refuses to be my girlfriend. She wants me to be happy, but she doesn’t want to go clothes shopping or hear about the cute guy I have a crush on. Can’t really blame her, I guess.”
“That’s gotta be complicated,” Eve said.
Margo nodded, but her mind was elsewhere.
“When I was a guy, I used to get so jealous when women went to the bathroom together. One of them would get up, and then her friend would get up, too. Sometimes two friends. It was like a conspiracy. And I’d be like, What’s going on in there? What kind of secrets are they telling each other?”
“Nothing too exciting,” Eve said, though she’d actually had some interesting bathroom experiences over the years. Sophomore year of high school, Heather Falchuk pulled up her shirt and showed Eve her third nipple, a little pink island at the bottom of her rib cage. Her college friend Martina, a recovering bulimic, used to have Eve accompany her to the bathroom so she wouldn’t be tempted to purge after a big meal.
“I know it’s stupid,” Margo said, running her finger over the lip of her wineglass. “It’s just one of those things I always wanted to do.”
* * *
Julian had
made it through two-thirds of the pitcher when the extent of his inebriation made itself clear to him.
“Oh, shit,” he told Dumell.
“What?”
Julian’s laughter sounded hollow and faraway in his own ears. “I’m pretty fucking wasted, man.”
“I can see that. You been sucking it down pretty good.”
“Can I tell you a secret?” Julian leaned toward Dumell. It felt to him like something important was happening. “I never had a black friend before. You think that makes me a racist?”
Dumell thought this over, scratching the corner of his mouth with the tip of a thumb.
“I hope you’re not driving home,” he said.
Julian shook his head and pointed to the floor.
“Got my trusty skateboard.”
“Where you live?”
“Haddington.”
“That’s five miles away.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You really commute on that thing?”
“It’s better than nothing.”
Dumell didn’t dispute this. “Is it fun?”
“Fuck yeah. You know that hill on Davis Road? Over by Wendy’s? Sometimes I’m going faster than the cars. Feel like a superhero.”
“Ever have an accident?”
“Nothing bad. If I see trouble coming, I just hop off.”
“I get that,” said Dumell. “But you can’t always see it coming, right?”
Julian picked up his glass—it was half-full—and then put it down without drinking.
“Only bad thing that ever happened, some jock assholes from my high school kidnapped me.”
“Kidnapped?”
“They threw me in their car, drove me to a park, and duct-taped me inside a Port-A-Potty.”
Dumell’s eyes got big. “You shitting me?”
“Nope.”
Julian shot a venomous glance across the table at Mrs. Fletcher, but she didn’t notice. She was too busy sucking up to the professor, who was apparently her new best friend. Mrs. Fletcher’s dickwad son had been one of the kidnappers.
“Why would they go and do that?” Dumell asked.
“Why? Because one of these jocks was being an asshole at a party, so I threw a drink in his face.”