by Rachel Gold
Aisha took the world’s longest breath in. Everyone else in the room held theirs. When she let it out, her shoulders didn’t drop from their scared, defensive height.
“No. You’re right,” she said. “I made a mistake.”
Meta shouted, loud enough to be heard at the front cash register, “Are you calling me a mistake?”
“Don’t you dare put words in my mouth,” Aisha’s voice rose almost to Meta’s volume.
Around the room bodies stayed statue-still.
“What did you mean then?” Meta asked. “Because you sure as hell did not mean that I’ve spent five months on a mistake, did you?”
“Meta, I like you. A lot. But we both knew this wasn’t going to last forever.”
From the way Meta flinched on that last word, she hadn’t known that. Her eyes squeezed shut on the pain and opened with hard fury. Leaning forward, palms on the table top, she said, “Last? When did it even start? You used me to get Kaz to say yes to you.”
“Kaz hasn’t said yes,” Aisha replied.
“But she would. Ask her. You’ll see.”
“Um hey,” I said, wincing as all the eyes turned to me. “Awkward timing, but I’ve been meaning to ask everyone if you’d use they/them pronouns for me. Except not if my mom’s around.”
Meta glared at me and back at Aisha. “Fucking ask them. Get it over with already.”
“No. I am not going to pressure my best friend. Nobody has to date or define themselves or anything before they’re ready.”
“Fine,” Meta said. “Ask whoever you want whatever whenever because we are done. We are over.”
Aisha said, “Sorry” and fished in the pocket of her jacket, coming out with the tissue. She turned and sneezed into it. Only I could tell she’d faked the sneeze, that she held the tissue to her nose to cover the tears gathering in her eyes.
I wrapped my fingers around Aisha’s elbow and drew her back out of the room, saying, “Bathroom” loud enough for everyone to understand that we’d be back.
Five Star Chinese had single-occupant restrooms and I locked us both in the women’s room. I put an arm around Aisha and she curled toward my chest. Stepping back, I leaned against the door, both arms around her, pulling her closer. She pressed her face into my shoulder, crying.
I tried not to think about the sweet almond and coconut smell of her hair or how extremely happy I felt about the end of her and Meta. Tried to get all the ways this could hurt: that she genuinely cared about Meta, hated hurting her, felt embarrassed about all that happening in front of many of our favorite people. I ended up balanced between one-third hurt empathy and two-thirds wishing I could scoop her up in my arms and fly us to the treehouse and kiss her.
Probably not the right time for that.
Aisha pulled away to blow her nose and wash her face.
“Do you want to talk about stuff?” I asked.
“About Meta? No. About you and me, maybe soon. I don’t want to put that off forever again.”
“Yeah. For the record, I’d say yes. If you asked. But would you even want to with me like this?” I asked, brushing a hand down the flat front of my chest. “Even if I’m not a girl or only sometimes a girl or don’t know what ‘girl’ is? Even if I don’t know what I am?”
Aisha held out her hand and when I put mine in hers, she tugged me toward her. I dropped her hand to put both arms around her. She rested her cheek on my collarbone and sighed, our bodies fitting together perfectly.
“Especially because,” she said. “Because you’re Kaz and I want to be around you all the time.”
I pressed my lips to her forehead. “Same. But I can wait. I made you wait. It’s only fair.”
“It’s not. But after everything Meta said. Ugh.” Aisha pulled away and blew her nose again, so I wasn’t sure if that last “ugh” was about Meta or mucous.
Aisha was flying out to California in ten days to spend almost two months with her aunts, so I said, “I could ask you after you get back from Cali, as long as you promise not to say yes to going out with anyone else before you get back.”
“You jerk, like I would,” she said, but a huge grin crinkled her nose and made her eyes smile.
“Great, now I’ve got two more months to figure out how to ask you out.” I tried to sound cheerful, but I hated that she was leaving for that long.
She opened her mouth, taking a breath in like she was going to say something and then closed it and beamed at me.
More even than asking her out right then, I wanted to beg her to stay. But I couldn’t. I knew how much she loved it there with her aunts. She’d asked me to visit and I really wanted to but I had a bunch of dog walking jobs, and time at the lake, not to mention there wasn’t money for a plane ticket, but I didn’t want to tell her that. At least we’d get to hold hands and sit close every day until she had to go.
When we walked back into the GSA meeting, Meta had gone, along with the pretty girl and two of the sporty lesbians. Everyone else crowded around us, half comforting Aisha and the other half clapping me on the back and congratulating me about my pronouns.
Chapter Twelve
Summer 2017
The first afternoon Aisha got to Cali, right after the plane touched down, she sent a pic of her in the sun, sunglasses on, deep smile, everything about her shining in that bright light.
I sent her a pic of me doing yard work in a sleeveless shirt with the binder on. Sweaty as anything, but better than doing it in a bra.
She sent me a pic of her at dinner with her aunts and cousins and their families: a long table with seven fabulous women and a few guys looking way out of their depth.
I texted back: Say hi from me! and sent her a two-second video of me waving and Wolvie wagging her tail.
She sent me a pic of herself and her cousin with blue and purple hair grinning into the camera.
I sent her a pic of the new comics pile, then sat in the treehouse and tried not to cry about how much I missed her.
I did not spend two whole months in the treehouse. For the three-sometimes-four-person book club with Aisha and Milo and Mrs. Warren, we finished reading The Transgender Teen and started reading Mindful of Race. Mr. Warren joined us for that second one because he understood the meditation parts more than the rest of us. He tried to teach us to meditate, but I kept laughing and then Mrs. Warren joined in, at which point Milo did too. Mr. Warren decided laughter meditation was the way to go.
I wanted Brock to read the book too, but no way that would happen. Apocalypse’s mind control of him had been getting more complete; Brock thought our country was headed in a good direction. And he seemed to only want to listen to people who thought the way he did, probably one of Apocalypse’s strategies. That voice in Brock’s head seemed more real when the people he talked to said the same things.
Maybe Mom would read it if she wasn’t too busy at work. Or I could ask Sofia. She’d been part of our lunchtime group in ninth grade and would be in tenth with us. With Aisha in California and Jon at gay summer camp, we’d been hanging out more. But I didn’t know if as a white person it was okay to ask my Asian American friend to read a book about race that mostly focused on black lives. How could I even start that conversation? Way easier to stick to music and TV and safe topics.
* * *
I was in the treehouse when Aisha got back two days early and surprised me. I didn’t even turn when I heard the door open. I figured it was Mom coming to get me for dinner, since Milo would’ve yelled from the deck.
Instead, Aisha said, “Hey” and I leapt up, almost smacking my head on the ceiling. Wolvie got to her first. Aisha let herself be knocked over by dog love and then I jumped in, so we ended up in a human/dog/human pile on the soft, sanded planks of the wood floor.
I’d been trying to think of the most awesome way to ask her out, searching through our comics to find the perfect panel that I could copy and put new text on. I wanted to use Black Panther but couldn’t figure out if as a white person I should be using
images with two black women, so I fell on the careful side of “probably not.”
And now Aisha was here and I didn’t have anything. I hadn’t completely worked out how I fit into all this, so what came out of my mouth was, “What if I’m just a person?”
“Um, hi? I’m glad to see you too,” Aisha said.
She rubbed Wolvie’s belly vigorously, which got Wolvie to lie on her back between us, putting us face to face. Her glorious grin greeted my dorky one. I didn’t know how to kiss her grinning.
“Do you date people?” I asked.
“If they’re you, I do.”
“For real?”
“Why not?”
“Because…boobs,” I said and flushed hot and hugged Wolvie in an attempt to hide that.
“Cart super ahead of the horse there,” she said. “You don’t have to be a girl for me.”
“Are you sure?”
“I know you. You’re Kaz. Someone who names a big dog ‘Wolverine’ and is going to chase a girl with a little dog down the street just to make sure we’re okay. Can we for real talk about all this now? I’ve been waiting.”
“You have?”
“K, in my old school, I was already in the GSA by sixth grade—it was still called ‘gay-straight alliance’ back then and you know I was not the S. I told my parents I like girls when I was eleven. And you know I don’t just like girls. And I know that you sometimes light up when I treat you like a guy, but not all the time. So, you want to tell me what you’re thinking about for yourself?”
“I don’t know how to be what I am.”
In the semidarkness from the roof and leaves outside the window, Aisha’s eyes were deep, wide. “I’d be scared if I didn’t know,” she said.
“Yeah, I am. So sometimes I try to be other things. Like a girl or a boy.”
Her hand slid from Wolvie’s belly to find my hand. I wrapped my fingers tightly around hers and put our joined hands back on Wolvie so she wouldn’t kick us in a bid for attention.
Aisha said, “You know when someone gets their superhero powers for the first time and it completely freaks them out because they don’t know how to control it and they don’t know what all the powers are? Maybe this is like that.”
“I wish,” I told her.
“Why not?”
I turned my head, indicating the comic books all around us. “Nobody looks like me.”
“Anyone come close?”
“Maybe, but you’ll think I’m a freak.”
“I promise I won’t,” Aisha said.
She sat up, untangling from Wolvie’s legs and my fingers, and searched the stacks of comics until she had Black Panther #1. She turned the pages to show me Ayo and Aneka kissing.
We’d gotten this issue a few weeks before Aisha’s birthday, spring of eighth grade. After school, we ran over to her house and sat on the bed, leaning into each other. I sat on her right so she could turn the pages as we finished reading them. When she got to the one where Ayo and Aneka touched palms and kissed, she didn’t turn the page.
She sat and sat, her eyes wet and glistening, shining from inside, like she couldn’t see this enough. I wondered if this was the first time she’d seen a comic book image of two black women kissing. Or maybe it was that they were heroes. Or that they loved each other so much. Now I thought it was all of that: they’re powerful and loving and kissing each other. And now I also knew it was about how dark they were; that they looked more like Aisha.
Back then, I’d lifted her fingers off the edge of the page so she wouldn’t think she had to turn it for me. She’d curled her hand around mine and I held onto her. When she did turn the page, she used her other hand. We read every page of that issue, even the bios at the end, and then we read it again. Aisha wore her hair in short twists like Aneka for the rest of that year.
Now I closed Black Panther, gathered up the others I’d been reading and put all the comics in the big storage box.
“The ones I want to show you are in my room,” I said. “Come on.”
We climbed down and went into my room. I got another, smaller box from the back of my closet, an old comic book box fraying at the edges. Wolvie hopped on the bed and took over the entire foot of it, so me and Aisha sat outside my open closet door with the box in front of us. I lifted out a few comics in plastic bags.
“These were my dad’s,” I told her.
Best thing my dad had ever done for me was leave his comic book collection. I had a hazy memory of him sitting on the couch with me and Brock, reading us these comics, but I think he spent more time with Brock than me. And no matter how cool he might’ve been, Milo and Pops were better. He’d left when I was six, so I barely remembered him as a parent, just remembered how upset Mom had been.
I put the stack of comics in Aisha’a lap and told her, “These are how I know I like Beast. And I remembered them a while ago and read these again. They’re really goofy but, okay, read these parts.”
Aisha read what I showed her. She had a few very on-point questions, like: “Did this character just turn into a guy because she’s crushing on this woman and doesn’t know lesbians exist?”
“Basically. Keep going.”
When she got to the end, she turned back the pages and re-read the ending. “Whoa, cool, so Cloud has both a boy body and a girl body and can switch back and forth between them?”
“Yeah. When Cloud got to Earth, they were trying to communicate with humans, so they copied the bodies of the first two they met: a girl and a boy.”
Aisha turned back a page and forward again, touched her finger to a panel, “So Cloud is a being who can be a girl or a boy or both at the same time in two side-by-side bodies?”
“Yep.”
“And Cloud is also a nebula, so they’re really big. They’re this vast place where stars are born but they have a girl body and a boy body too? Is that you?”
We sat so close, her shoulder leaning against mine, the usual way we read a comic book together, but with electrified, shimmering sparks and icy jabs of nervousness under my skin. I leaned more into her, needing reassurance.
I told her, “It’s super close. Not boy and girl and nebula side-by-side, but all in the same place. Not half and half, I’m all. I’m a whole girl and a whole boy in the same place with something else, that’s what the nebula stands for. How my body feels changes within that range, like sometimes the girl is more in front, or the boy, or the nebula. And there’s definitely a point where I’m too girl or too boy.”
I stared at the drawings in the comic, the outline of two bodies on the backdrop of a field of starts.
Aisha’s lips pressed my cheek.
“Okay,” she said without moving away. I felt her breath and shivered.
I reached for her hand and her fingers caught mine.
Now that I could talk, I kept going. “I don’t understand why boy-girl are the only choices. People are so many things, why do we have to get stuck with those two?”
“Because you’re also a nebula?” she asked.
“Yeah. Or trees, that works too. Sometimes in the treehouse it’s just me and our tree and I understand that a lot better than I understand how people do ‘girl’ all the time.”
“We’re not doing ‘girl’ Kaz. Some of us are girls.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, bae, I’m a girl all the time. It’s not something I have to do or put on, it’s me.”
“I’m not like that,” I said quietly.
“I know.”
“But I could be for a while. I can do girl.”
“You don’t have to,” she said.
“But you like girls.”
“You don’t have to be a girl for me. I don’t only like girls. If you were going to be a guy all the time, maybe then it would be different… but you… I like how you are.”
The whole time, talking, our bodies got closer and closer together, further entwined, her fingers around my fingers and she threw one leg over my leg. I’d been leaning back
on my other arm and I moved it forward until it stretched across her back, she scooted closer.
I’d missed her so much and all that missing reinforced how I felt, but missing her didn’t help me know what to do now that she was here. I knew that I wanted to go on with her sitting inside the curve of my arm. But I didn’t understand what she was saying. I wasn’t a guy all the time. But how did we fit together?
Her free hand rested on the comic spread open on our legs, one finger on the drawing of Cloud. She set it to the side, put those fingers on my arm, rubbed her thumb on my wrist.
“You’re wonderful,” she said, watching her thumb move on my wrist. “How you are is amazing. I’m sorry about this winter, about not talking to you about everything first.”
All my breath caught in my throat while the words slipped away, so I took my hand off the floor and wrapped my arm around her. She rested into me, her whole body sighing. My hand curled around her lower ribs, small and delicate for holding all the intensity of her lungs and her heart and all those other parts she’d know as a doctor-in-training.
Her head rested on my shoulder, tucked into the curve of my neck, her forehead on my cheek. I tipped my face down, pressing my cheek to her skin, to the soft density of her hair, trying to see how much of a smile she had going. Thoughtful smile, from the curves at the corner of her mouth, happy, from her dimple, maybe nervous too. I sure was.
“I was trying to figure out how I am, so I’d know if we’d work together,” I told her.
“I got that, eventually. After I thought a whole bunch of other stupid stuff.”
Then she got quiet again. I needed her to keep talking because she was better at it than me, so I asked, “Wonderful-amazing for real?”
“Literally,” she said, the corner of her mouth quirking in as her smile deepened. “Full of wonder. The most…”
“But that’s you!” I said.
She grabbed the hand I’d rested on my knee—and tugged, as if I could get closer. I turned toward her as her face tipped up, eyes shining. Her lips pressed mine—and I was so scared that I was going to panic again, or that I wasn’t going to pay attention, remember this, that I almost didn’t feel the kiss—warm, dry, too brief. She rested her cheek on mine and whispered, “Is that okay?”