In the Silences

by Rachel Gold

  I dragged my backpack over and pulled out my paper. We had the same teacher, just different class times. I’d also gotten a B on the paper, but there was a note on the first page: “Interesting ideas. Develop more and cite more quotes in your next paper.” On the second page a “nicely said” sat in the margins next to rather good sentence I’d written. One the third page, “Add a secondary source to strengthen the point you’re making” and “Please include at least two sources per paper.”

  “Hey, A, can I see your papers before these?” I asked, staring at the two side by side.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “I’m breaking a code.”

  “K, you already broke that one,” she said, but she pulled out her English notebook and got the papers out of the back. I didn’t have mine with me. I’d tossed them into a box in my closet, but I remembered they had comments all through them too.

  I skimmed through Aisha’s top paper. She’d gotten an A and the last page only said, “Good!” The one before that was a B with the comment, “too short—assignment was 3 pages.” She’d written two and a quarter. I’d done about the same. We’d been rushed that week.

  Aisha scooted next to me and peered over my shoulder. “Anything new?”

  “Mr. Bretherton writes way more stuff on my papers than yours. Like sentences on mine and words on yours. What’s up with that?”

  “You know,” she said. “Same obvious reason he answers my questions last. Lets me stand around while he talks to everyone else. I’m sure he thinks he knows me, that I’m not going to be anything, so he doesn’t ‘waste’ time on me.”

  “That’s so not fair.”

  She shrugged one shoulder. “I’m doing good enough in English for pre-med.”

  “Next week, swap papers with me. We’ll both write our papers like usual but we each hand in the other person’s with our name on it. I want to see if he notices.”

  “I’m in.”

  “Oh hey.” I turned to the last page of my recent paper and tapped the note about having more sources. “I think when he says our papers should be longer, this is what he’s talking about. We have to quote somebody else, not just the author we’re reading.”

  “Cool. Maybe I’ll quote Malcolm.”

  “If we’re switching papers, maybe I should.”

  Aisha half-grinned at me, not quite with enthusiasm, but at least fondly enough that I dropped our papers and kissed her. She pushed on my shoulder, signaling that we were too close to the open door. I scuttled back across the room into the space between her bed and her desk and she came with me. Here we could kiss for a few minutes before one of us got freaked out that her mom was going to come up the stairs—and if that happened, we had four seconds from the creaky step to the top of the stairs, plus an extra two since this was the least visible corner of the room.

  I sat against the bookcase, arms open to her. Her grin got bigger, bunching up her cheeks. Kissing the side of my face and my neck, she ran her hand down from my shoulder and sat back with a startled, “Oh. You’re not flat today. You’re usually…I wasn’t trying to…”

  “It’s okay. I was kind of in a boob mood.”

  She laughed. “Is that random or does something evoke the mood?”

  “Um, maybe, you. I was getting dressed and thinking about us hanging out and it seemed like it would be fun. Is that okay?”

  “Very.”

  “And is it okay if it’s not always like this?” I asked.

  “Because you have a girl body and boy body in the same space and sometimes you’re more one or the other but you’re also always both?”

  “You’re amazing,” I told her.

  “You realize you’re saying that only because I’m smart enough to repeat you back to yourself,” she said.

  “And you’re smart enough to know when to do it. And a million other things I really like.”

  It was hard to explain about boobs. Sometimes they were fine, but a lot of the time they weren’t. Not okay for people to look at them, not okay for me to feel them. Those times, I wore the binder and feeling Aisha’s hand slide across my flat chest was wonderful. When we sat together in the treehouse or in her bedroom and she curled into me with her cheek on my chest, I loved it.

  But I also loved that she had boobs all the time and I felt like a hypocrite. She had to put up with people treating her like a stupid girl and other super creepy sexual variations. I felt like I was leaving her to deal with a heap of shit without me. I was a huge feminist, in part from hearing Milo’s stories about when she was younger. So how unfair was it for me to wear the binder, to opt out of being a girl?

  Except not that.

  Because it wasn’t easier to be a person who often looked like a girl and sometimes was a girl and sometimes wasn’t. Not easy to feel my body changing based on who knows what. Maybe reacting to the people around me and internal measures I couldn’t track. Hormones? Brain stuff? Some days I’d wake up and put on the bra—always the plainest white or a gray sports bra—and it was super wrong, like poison ivy wrong, slimy tentacles wrong, and other days it was fine, and sometimes it was even a good idea.

  Aisha snuggled against me, her shoulders tucked under my arm, body diagonal to mine, cheek resting on my shoulder. Her fingers played with my earlobe while I nuzzled the parts of her face I could reach. I wanted to kiss her fine collarbones, where they peeked out from her sweater at the curve of her throat, but I couldn’t bend that far without hopeless awkwardness.

  “Does it bother you if my body changes?” I murmured. “If some days I’m more girl or more boy or more both?”

  “Hmm, no. That’s all you.”

  “Even if I can’t be a girl all the time? If I always think of us as two girls, like Kate and America, I get worn out and kind of bleak.”

  “Depressed?” she suggested.

  “Is that what that is?”

  “Sounds like it. What helps?” she asked. “Do you know?”

  I shrugged and brushed my fingertips over the curve between her collarbones. She put her hand over mine and pressed it flat to the middle of her chest. I felt the deep vibration of her heart.

  “When was the last time you got exhausted?” she asked.

  “Last week.”

  “And what happened before that?”

  “We went to the movies and hung out with Jon and tried to get your mom to let me sleep over and…oh, I kept being a girl for all of that, like she’s going to say yes if I’m a girl and we’re going to make more sense to everyone if I’m a girl instead of a person.”

  “How do you know what you are?” Aisha asked.

  “There’s a way the inside of my body feels. But it’s hard to feel that if there’s a lot going on. So the shortcut is who I picture myself as. I could say that I feel tall and broad and like laughing and playing a lot—and the code for that, in my head, is that I’m Hulkling.”

  “And that’s when you’re more of a guy?”

  “Yeah, but like more male without being a man, if that makes sense. I picked Hulkling because he’s an alien shapeshifter. He’s not an Earth guy.”

  She kissed my temple and nuzzled my cheek. “It doesn’t have to make sense to me or anyone else, only to you. So, sometimes you wake up Hulkling and sometimes…?”

  “If I wake up as Laura Kinney, new Wolverine, then I’m a girl. And sometimes, I wake up as Cloud, in nebula form. Or I wake up as a tree. And if I’m not a girl on the inside, it’s really hard to keep being a girl on the outside.”

  “Do you want to just tell me who you are every day?” she asked.

  I kissed her.

  “But America doesn’t go with Hulkling,” I said. “You’re always a girl, but you’re never a straight girl. I don’t want to make you have to be one.”

  She sighed. “That’s a lot of categories. You think about gender way more than I do. How about I be Moon Girl?”

  Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur was a series we’d both been loving, even though it was written for young kids. Mo
on Girl was a mega-genius black girl in New York City whose best friend was a super-powered T-Rex.

  “Am I supposed to be the dinosaur?” I asked.

  “You’re whoever you want to be. Moon Girl is, like, nine or ten in the comics, so we don’t know what she’ll be like at fifteen, but let’s say she’s all kinds of bi and pan—and you can be everyone you are, some days you can be the dinosaur—and we’ll fit together all the time.”

  “So I’m a nebula and a boy and a girl and the dinosaur and you’re the girl genius?” I asked.

  “Sounds like us.”

  “How can I be sure this wasn’t an elaborate joke to get me to agree to being a dinosaur?”

  “You can’t, ’cause I’m the genius,” she said and pulled me around and down to where she could kiss me harder.

  We ended up lying on the floor and scooted ourselves back up to where we’d look proper enough for parents.

  She said, “I’m sorry that I don’t understand all this.”

  “You do,” I said. “You understand enough. You don’t have to be the same as me. I mean, you put up with me being white.”

  “Yeah because you…oh, okay. You do the work. You make sure you understand things. I don’t have to get what it’s like being nonbinary to know how to make a space for you. And the more I read, the more it makes sense to me.”

  “How?”

  “Different cultures do gender differently,” she said. “Some maybe didn’t do it at all like what we’re used to.”

  “Like what cultures?”

  “K, do you never Google this?”

  “Some. I read the Native American Two-Spirit stories but I don’t want to be appropriating. And when I’m looking it up, there’s other articles that aren’t good. They get stuck in my head. I can’t look at things for very long sometimes.”

  “I get that. Sorry. How much do you want to know? Cori and Royce gave me a site to read and there’s a local professor they want us to meet.”

  “You’re the best girlfriend,” I said.

  “You’ve read more about race than I have about gender,” she pointed out.

  “Yeah, but I had a head start and…” I was about to say that gender wasn’t as big a deal, but it was, only in a completely different way.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Mid October 2017

  Another week passed of me having to go to World History study sessions without Aisha, of both of us washing glassware in Chemistry class and being late to lunch. I counted the days to Thanksgiving break.

  By the end of the week, all the way home on the bus, Aisha’s jaw was clenched. She stared out the window while I glared around the bus, though this probably wasn’t the location of whatever had upset her. Even if no-cutting cafeteria guy had been on our bus, he wasn’t nearly as bad as staying behind, day after day, in Chem class to measure liquids and wash glassware.

  We walked to Aisha’s house. She dropped her bag heavily by the side of the kitchen island and opened the fridge.

  “Want to split one of Dad’s ridiculous smoothies?” she asked, voice flat. She didn’t even make a joke about how much better the store-bought ones were to those her dad tried to make.

  “Sure. You okay?”

  She poured the thick orange goop into two glasses. Best case: mango. Worst case: persimmon kale.

  “I went to talk to Mr. Bretherton because I have questions about our next paper and I had to wait ages, like usual, and then he asked me to give some extra credit assignment to Hannah Porter.”

  “Who’s Hannah Porter?”

  “Exactly!” Aisha said.

  Raising the oddly heavy glass, I took a sip of the alleged smoothie. It tasted like lawn clippings in orange juice. “You don’t know her?” I asked.

  “No, but I’ll give you one guess what race she is?”

  “Wait, what?”

  “You know how it is, all the black kids must know each other, right? I looked her up.” Aisha pulled out her phone and held it up for me to see a black girl smirking at the screen, no dimples, her skin a few shades lighter than Aisha’s, her hair in box braids.

  “I don’t have any classes with her,” I said. “Is she a sophomore?”

  “Junior. Figured I’d better send her this so she doesn’t get in trouble.”

  “That’s super weird, him giving you her assignment. Should we tell someone at the school?”

  Aisha took a sip of her smoothie and winced. “No. It’ll make him mad and I don’t want to deal with that.”

  “Can I tell Milo?” I asked.

  “K, leave it alone.”

  The icy air of the kitchen clued me in that I was doing this wrong. Plus Aisha’s body was turned away from me, shoulders curled in, tired, hurt and protecting against more hurt.

  I hopped off my stool and moved closer. “Hug?”

  She shrugged. That wasn’t a no. It wasn’t really a yes, so I put an arm loosely around her waist. She set her smoothie glass on the island and rested her cheek on my shoulder. I pulled her close.

  “Aisha Warren, you have the most beautiful smile in this whole state, probably the country,” I whispered. “And you’re my favorite person in the whole world. You want to play some Lego: Star Wars and break stuff?”

  Her sigh ended in a chuckle. “Yeah.”

  When we got into the living room, she put the big couch pillow on the floor. I sat on the back half of it, leaning against the couch, and she settled between my legs, leaning back into me. It wasn’t easy to play with my arms around her, the controller in front of her stomach, me looking over her shoulder, but I didn’t care.

  When Hannah texted back, I played solo while Aisha got deep into that conversation, summarizing for me.

  “She’s doing a paper about this British poet who reworked The Canterbury Tales, and she’s all into spoken word and she’s out as bi!” Aisha said. “I mean the poet, Patience Agbabi, not Hannah, as far as I know.”

  “Oh, I thought Hannah was into spoken word,” I said and Aisha laughed.

  “She says it’s funny to watch Mr. Bretherton try to be cool when he’s freaking out about this black woman redoing Chaucer. Any time Hannah reads this poetry in class, everyone else likes it better than the original.”

  “Is Hannah going to tell Mr. B not to give you her assignments?” I asked.

  Aisha shrugged. “Don’t know. But I am definitely reading The Wife of Bafa to quote and mess with him if it happens again.”

  She read the poem and then read it out loud to me.

  “Whoa wait,” I said about some lines near the end. “Show me that.”

  She held her phone up and I scrolled the screen until I got to the lines I wanted to see:

  Some say I’m a witchcraft

  ‘cause I did not bear them children.

  They do not understand your Western medicine.

  “That part could be me,” I said.

  Aisha leaned back against me, resting her head on my shoulder. “Sometimes I think we’re lost in the same place. I mean, the place where you and I are, where we lost ourselves to, is the same. I want us to go find where we belong together.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’m looking.”

  I ambled through the Legos level, not really playing, more bumping into things as I paid more attention to Aisha sitting between my legs, leaning into me, her hands on the outsides of my knees, my arms around her, holding the controller in front of her stomach.

  “Wherever it is,” I said. “I belong with you.”

  * * *

  That next week, we got our English papers back. We’d read The Great Gatsby and in the spring we were scheduled to read Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, so Aisha wrote up a paper contrasting the autobiographical elements of Gatsby with Frederick Douglass. I put my name on that paper and turned it in.

  She put her name on a paper I’d worked my ass off to write, comparing the women in Gatsby to Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, which I’d read last year. I even quot
ed experts on both books and made sure my citations were done right.

  October hadn’t turned super cold yet and we could catch a ride home with Jon, so as soon as we got the papers, we ignored our bus and stayed in the school foyer to compare. The paper with my name got a half page of commentary from Mr. Bretherton, including “extraordinary research” and the recommendation of a book I could read for further study. I got an A+.

  Aisha also got an A+, and thank goodness because I’d never worked that hard on any school paper in my life. It had more citations than the one with my name on it, but the comments to her only said, “Very good work!”

  That is, my paper said, “Very good work!”

  I showed her the “extraordinary research” quote and all his comments throughout my paper.

  “What do we do?” I asked.

  “Keep using secondary sources.”

  “This,” I poked the paper with my finger, “it’s so unfair.”

  She’d been checking something on her phone and glanced up long enough to shake her head at me. “First, we’d have to tell them we switched papers.”

  “Okay that could suck.”

  “Bae, it’s a bad idea. Mr. Bretherton would fight it. And I don’t know what anyone could do about it. I asked Darius why a teacher would write a bunch of stuff on your papers and not mine. He said it’s that same effect that screws me up in math: stereotype threat. I get so afraid I’m going to be a bad stereotype, it’s hard to think. Only now that’s working on Mr. Bretheron. He’s so afraid he’s going to say something racist, he says as little as possible. Even though he’s screwing with my academic future by not telling me how to do better. Like his fear of being racist is actually causing him to be more racist.”

  “I get that.”

  Aisha stared up from her phone at me. “You do?”

  “The fear part. I’d never screw with your academic future.” We grinned at each other. “But I used to feel that a lot and not bring up topics ’cause I didn’t know how to talk about them with you, like I was going to screw it up and be really racist and you’d hate me.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Very.”