In the Silences

by Rachel Gold

  “That shirt?”

  “Yeah, that shirt.”

  “Jacket?”

  It looked great on Angel, but it wasn’t me. “What if I’m not that…masculine?”

  She kissed my cheek, her fingers finding mine, and we should’ve run up to her room because we were about to get all kinds of cuddly. But the garage door went up and she pulled away.

  Tariq and Mr. Warren came in wearing workout clothes: a navy T-shirt and cut-off gray sweatpant-shorts for Tariq and a much sweatier light blue T-shirt for Mr. Warren, along with full gray sweatpants that gathered at the ankles and looked highly dorky. Not to mention the actual, for real, light blue headband around his forehead.

  “You go to yoga?” Aisha said laughing. “All downward dogging up in there?”

  “Running and weights,” Tariq sneered. “That’s tight, who’s she?”

  “They,” Aisha said. “Angel Haze, agender amazingness.”

  “Damn, perfect,” Tariq said. “Aww, my babies have role models. You two should YouTube cover song them a love letter or something.” He’d have been obnoxious except that he meant it and it was a pretty good idea.

  Mr. Warren had stopped rubbing his neck with a paper towel and came over to stare at the screen. “Pretty girl,” he said.

  “Angel’s not a girl, Dad, Angel’s a pansexual agender person.”

  “She looks like a girl.”

  Aisha clicked onto another photo.

  He said, “Okay…androgynous?”

  “Agender, Dad.”

  “Right,” he said, very doubtful and headed back into the kitchen.

  Bullet dodged.

  But not.

  After dinner we’d retreated to Aisha’s room and even did a little homework. I was sneaking to the bathroom—sneaking so Mrs. Warren wouldn’t offer to help with our homework because we very much had not only been doing homework—when I heard her and Mr. Warren talking in the kitchen again.

  “Honey, this word ‘agender’ have you heard it? What’s it about?” he asked.

  “People who don’t have a felt-sense of being a man or a woman or some combination of those,” she said. “Who used it?”

  “Aisha, about some rap artist.”

  “Oh Angel Haze, right? Long hair, great hats?”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Some of the songs Aisha bought are explicit and she wanted me to know they’re anti-suicide, so I wouldn’t ‘freak.’ I looked Angel up online and I like Aisha listening to their music.”

  “Their? That’s not even gram—“

  “Sweetie, it is.”

  I missed the next bit because Aisha peeked out her bedroom door and saw me sitting at the top of the stairs. I put my finger to my lips. She silently slid the door wide and came to sit next to me.

  Mrs. Warren was saying, “If the style guides say that they/them can be used as a singular pronoun, I’m not inclined to argue that one. We had a whole workshop at work about this.”

  “Workshop, for what, pronouns?”

  “Jack, I dispense a lot of hormones to a lot of different people, I need to know how to make my customers feel comfortable so they can ask their questions without being afraid.”

  “You have customers who are…agender? And take hormones?”

  Mrs. Warren made the “hrum” sound she did when she was thinking, then said, “I don’t think I have any who identify as agender, though I do have one whose kid is. But I have a few who are nonbinary. And you know I can’t tell you what I give them.”

  “Doesn’t feel right to me,” he grumbled. “Masculine and feminine are core archetypes of humanity. Every person is supposed to blend them in different amounts, but this is monkeying around with nature.”

  “You never say that about electricity.” Mrs. Warren’s voice came out light. I cheered silently at her point. Aisha put her hand on mine, weaving our fingers together.

  “That’s harnessing the power of nature. This is strange. People changing their bodies. What went wrong with them? Do people research that? When I was a kid, it was just men and women.”

  “No it wasn’t. It simply wasn’t safe for people to show themselves. Like Aisha and Kaz, my heart’s still up in my throat seeing them go out together. The way they hold hands, like it’s the most natural thing in the world, because it is, but it’s not how things used to be. Don’t you think it can be that way about gender too?”

  “But that’s exactly my point,” he said. “It’s better than it used to be. So this means people need to keep making it better for men and women, so they can be how they want to without thinking they have to change their bodies. Boys these days, they’ve got to know how to be a man, that they can be gentle, have feelings. They don’t have to become women to have that.”

  “That’s not what’s happening. There are people who don’t feel like boys or girls. I don’t know what that’s like, but I’ve read some of the studies.”

  “They need to do more tests. That’s not normal.”

  I flinched when he said that and Aisha saw me. She leaned in and asked, “Trust me?”

  I nodded. She slipped down the stairs and into the kitchen. I scooted down far enough to watch her.

  “Hey Dad, Mom,” she said, moving next to her mom. She put her hand up and whispered something to her mom, whose eyes went wide and flicked to the stairs. I ducked back behind the wall.

  “Jack, would you chop the carrots? I’ll be back.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Carrots,” Mrs. Warren said and pointed at the cutting board.

  Only silence and then his sigh and the sound of a stool’s feet scraping on the linoleum.

  Mrs. Warren came to the foot of the stairs and looked up at me. “May I join you?”

  “Yeah,” I said, so she sat on a middle step below me. I asked, “Aisha told you?”

  She nodded and said, softly, in a pretty fair imitation of Aisha, “‘Please make Dad stop; Kaz is nonbinary.’” She paused and added, “I’m sorry. Grownups have things they need to work out too. He’s not talking about you. He’s talking about himself.”

  “Sounds like me,” I muttered.

  “Do you have people to talk to?”

  “Milo knows,” I said. “My mom…” I paused and waved a hand in the direction of the kitchen.

  “Like Jack?”

  I shrugged.

  “Worse?”

  Nodded.

  “Can I show you something?” she asked, standing up and beckoning.

  I followed her down the hall. She slipped into her bedroom and came out with her tablet, holding it so I could see a page from a book with a lot of lines connecting words about the development of human sex and gender.

  Mrs. Warren said, “This is something I’ve been reading after that workshop we had, so I’d understand this better. It’s by one of the top researchers about sex and gender development. See this diagram, it’s a simplified illustration of how sex and gender are formed.”

  I considered that glowing page and all the lines. There were words linking to other words, spidering down the page, more intricate as it went. If this was the simplified version, how many pages did the complicated one cover?

  “What’s ‘morphological?’” I asked.

  “How your body is shaped. See up at the top here it says ‘indifferent fetal sex’ because for the first six or seven weeks, everyone’s body is the same. People have different genes and environments, and that is what determines how the fetus develops. We act like there are only two paths a person can take, but human development is more like a sound mixing board, a series of sliding switches that can go all the way to the right or left or somewhere in the middle. So what gives you your biological sex and your gender is how all of these come together—and there’s no wrong way for them to go together.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “People are supposed to be different,” she said. “Otherwise God would’ve made everyone five-foot-seven.”

  Aisha came up the stairs
with a bowl of carrot sticks. We showed her the sex and gender development diagram. After her mom explained it again, Aisha said, “Well yeah, genes aren’t light switches, I mean, epigenetic effects and all that.”

  Mrs. Warren put an arm around Aisha’s shoulders and beamed.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Early October 2017

  I had a whole plan for telling Milo about me and Aisha. No part of that plan happened. On Wednesday in History class, Trina informed me that our group would start meeting twice a week, not just on Sundays, and the first Wednesday meeting was that night.

  “This project can’t take that much work,” I protested.

  “We do our other homework too,” she told me.

  “I do that with Aisha. And I can’t make it tonight. I have a job walking dogs.”

  She sighed and put a hand on my elbow. “Kaz, this is important. Can I count on you to show up starting next week? And I’ll see you on Sunday.”

  She didn’t wait for an answer because it hadn’t been a question.

  Which is why Milo found me sitting on the back steps crying while Wolvie tore the bark off a fallen branch. I was crying about Trina and the study group, but more about Aisha’s mom looking at houses in L.A. and the idea that I could get stuck here for two more years with Trina and Eve and without Aisha.

  “Kiddo?” she asked.

  “School.”

  She leaned against the porch railing. “Bullies?”

  I couldn’t talk about the idea of Aisha moving yet, not without losing it and bawling like a five-year-old, so I said, “I’m in this study group and I’m supposed to go over tonight but I want to study with Aisha, I always study with Aisha. And Trina keeps acting like Aisha’s stupid and doesn’t even know that she’s my girlfriend.”

  Milo’s deep-lined frown flipped into a smile, then settled into a tight-lipped, more serious smile.

  “She’s been holding your hand a lot lately, I was hoping,” Milo said. “I know her dating that girl last spring made you miserable.”

  “You seriously have superpowers of observation,” I told her.

  “It’s called aging,” she said. “If you do it right. How’d you get into a group without Aisha?”

  I told her the entire stupid story.

  “Can you give it a week or two?” Milo asked. “You have a whole semester. See what your options are?”

  “I guess. And I want to tell them she’s my girlfriend. I guess I should tell Mom too, huh?”

  “Family dinner night’s tomorrow. Do you want to me to tell Pops tonight?”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  We didn’t have any formal thing at our family dinners, not like the three A’s. People just talked, often over each other or in two separate conversations, which usually fell out as Mom and Brock, then me, Milo and Pops—or me and Milo, with Mom joining in with Pops and Brock.

  We went on like that for most of dinner. Toward the end, I got worried that Brock was going to leave before I did my announcement.

  “Hey,” I said. And again louder until Mom and Brock stopped talking about his sports. “Hey!”

  They all looked at me and I wanted Aisha there. Her dad’s weird questions were one thing, but I worried more about what Mom or Brock might say, so I’d asked her to let me do this by myself. Now I wrapped my hand over my thigh and gripped, like I could be holding her hand.

  “I have news,” I said. “I’m dating Aisha now. Um, and it’s great and I’m super happy and her parents know and they’re cool with it, of course, so, that’s it.”

  A smile passed between Milo and Pops. Mom caught it and tried to smile; the muscles tensed around her lips but didn’t move them.

  “Very good,” Pops said.

  Brock got a look on his face like he had to poop and couldn’t. Or like he was working out a complicated puzzle using his butt cheeks.

  “What?” I asked him.

  “I don’t care who you date,” he shot back in a tone that meant the opposite. “Just don’t get all sappy at school.”

  Brock had a bunch of convoluted ways he could act okay with Aisha and Tariq but not with “immigrants” and other code words for people of color—like that wasn’t the same. A year ago, I couldn’t understand what had happened to him. Now I saw this as the evil of Apocalypse, the whole system of racism, changing the words and ideas it used so it could hide better.

  I hoped that if Brock knew how much these ideas hurt people just like Aisha and Tariq, he’d stop thinking that way. But I still hadn’t found a way to talk to him. And he kept pissing me off, so I wanted to yell more than talk.

  “Why shouldn’t I hold Aisha’s hand at school?” I shot back at him. “I see a lot of kids snuggling, even making out in the halls.” I glanced at Milo and added, “Not that we would ever do that.”

  Brock said, “People know you’re my sister… er, sib, whatever, and you’re already weird enough.”

  “Fu—” I caught myself. “Fart off, dillweed.”

  “Fart yourself,” he said and almost chuckled because we hadn’t said that to each other since we’d been way younger. My heart squeezed, hard and painful, remembering when I was ten and he was twelve, all the stupid games we played that we thought were awesome.

  I’d wanted him to be happy about me and Aisha. And I’d known he wouldn’t be, but having that proved to my face sucked. Before I could tell him to shove his farts back up his butt, he’d picked up his plate and taken it into the kitchen.

  Milo reached for the salad bowl, lifting it in a half-toast to me. “I’m glad for you two. She’s a very sweet girl.”

  Mom asked, “What did her parents say when you told them?”

  I had to say enough to be real, even if I didn’t tell her everything, so I went with, “Stuff about emotions, like it’s going to get weird because we’re also best friends. Or more like we should be careful because of that.”

  I didn’t want to say the bedroom door thing, both because I didn’t want Mom to think about that, but also because—this fear surfaced like a leviathan under ice in my brain—Mom would think it was because of Aisha, not because of me. Like Aisha was loose, even though all we did was make out. That is, Milo would say “loose” and be all polite, but Mom would be thinking “slutty.” Because of—as Mrs. Warren had said—“any fool’s black girl stereotypes.” Mom didn’t get to think that about my girlfriend.

  Mom nodded, saying, “Well I agree with them.”

  Pops reached across the table for another dinner roll, saw Milo’s frown, tore the roll in half and put half back in the basket with a sigh.

  “Who asked whom?” he asked. “I don’t know how kids date anymore.”

  I told the grandparents-appropriate parts of the story. We discussed current dating trends, and dissed Brock’s last girlfriend, because that was a family favorite pastime.

  After dinner, of course, Mom got weird anyway, by which I mean: racist.

  Pops was doing the dishes, Milo had taken Wolvie out back, and I’d been sitting in my seat texting Aisha that it went okay. Mom came in from the kitchen with a cup of tea and sat in the chair beside me. She said, “There are a lot of girls you could date. Maybe it’s not such a good idea to date your best friend.”

  “Um?”

  “That girl Eve, she’s athletic. Do you only like girls?”

  I shrugged and said, “Kind of soon to tell.”

  “I always thought you’d go out with Jon. You two would be so cute together.”

  “He’s gay.”

  He might date me as a guy, but I didn’t want to be a guy all the time and anyway that would fry Mom’s circuits.

  “Oh, all right,” Mom said with a sigh. “There’s the girl down the street who always comes out with the lemonade when you’re mowing.”

  “I’m not into her,” I said. “I’ve known Aisha for years and she’s great and I love her and you just named three white people.”

  “I don’t mean it that way. It’s going to be hard for you two. You’re alre
ady dating a girl, do you really want it to be that complicated?”

  “Honestly, no,” I said. “I want to be growing up in a country that has handled its racist past—and present—but apparently I don’t get to do that, so I’m not going to stop loving Aisha because it makes other people uncomfortable.”

  “It’s not always about racism,” she said. “I’m not racist. I don’t know how you could even suggest that. I’ve never been anything but nice to the Warrens. You need to think about what you’re saying before you go around calling people names like that.”

  I double-taked at her. Names? Like it was a personal insult? But I hadn’t called her anything, I’d been talking about the system we were in. Oh but this was one of those Apocalypse strategies—one of the ways he defended his presence in her brain—making it into a huge deal about her, not about actual big deals like, I don’t know, racism itself.

  I wanted her to see what was going on in her brain, so I asked, “Why would you be cool with me dating Eve?”

  “Eve’s from Minnesota. You have a shared background. You haven’t even met the rest of Aisha’s family, you don’t know what they might be like.”

  “What ‘shared background?’ Eve’s family has always had money, she’s never read a comic book in her life, she’s a jock, and they’re Catholic. The only thing we have in common is that we’re white. I have way more in common with Aisha and Tariq.”

  “Where you grow up makes a difference,” she said, quietly, turning red.

  “It sure fucking does,” I said, getting up so fast the chair hit the wall.

  “Don’t you swear at me!” She was on her feet too and very red.

  “Why should it matter what Aisha’s family is like? What did Dad’s parents say to you after he left? Aisha’s family would never have thrown us away like that.”

  “Go to your room. You are grounded.”

  I stomped up the stairs, called Wolvie into my room, and slammed the door. Then I had to sit on the floor and let Wolvie wriggle into my lap because she didn’t like loud noises inside the house. And I needed to have my hands in her fur.

  I was pissed. And scared because I hadn’t won that fight in any way. I didn’t know how to do that fight.