In the Silences

by Rachel Gold

  I laughed and he ducked into the fridge for the orange juice. He handed me a Sprite.

  Sofi came in and filled a bowl with chips and one with pretzels, but didn’t carry them into the other room.

  “You should go back and talk to Trina,” she told me.

  “Why? I’m not into The Trina Show.”

  “She asked questions. She took a risk. She’s got to start somewhere.”

  I stared at Sofi, her black and light purple hair falling across the side of her face, her steady, dark eyes. I hadn’t thought nearly enough about what life must be like for her as the one Asian American girl in our sophomore friend group. And I had never asked. I still had so much to learn.

  “Oh,” I said. “I didn’t see that. Thank you.”

  I turned toward the living room, but Sofi’s fingers on my arm paused me.

  “I noticed that about the flags,” she said. “Because they don’t have Laos either or South Korea. I didn’t know who to tell.”

  “Do you have Foggy for World History too? What period?” I asked.

  “Yes, sixth.”

  “Want me to meet you after your class Monday and we can talk to him together?”

  “That’d be great,” she said. “What else can I do? Is there something specific?”

  “Aisha’s in the Science Bowl, so show up for her, cheer for her, support her,” I said.

  “I’ll bet we can find someone with a great set of flashcards for that,” Sofi said. “I’m on this.”

  I thanked her again, braced myself and went into the living room to tell Trina that she was brave and on the right path and then to gently deliver How To Be A Badass White Ally 101.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  December 2017

  Sofi brought us one set of flashcards and Zack came with extensive notes. I hadn’t seen much of Zack since school started, with him being in eleventh grade, and was so glad to have another trans person in the friend group. Since the GSA had been founded from an International Baccalaureate prep class, it turned out to be a not-so-secret network of academic brilliance. Aisha’s living room became a war camp for Science Bowl strategy.

  I caught her mom watching us: me, Zack, Meta, Sofi, Jon and a few other kids. Most of the time the white kids were the minority and I prayed that her mom, seeing this, was deciding Aisha could stay here, that we’d take good enough care of her.

  I’d only go home when there were too many people for me, too many voices talking at the same time, or when I had to show up for dinner so mom wouldn’t get on me. Over at Aisha’s, everyone used they/them pronouns for me, most of them doing it easily, except Mr. Warren, but he tried. At my house, I hadn’t even asked. Though I noticed that Milo had stopped using pronouns for me at all and I was so grateful.

  If Aisha could take on the whole school, I could at least talk to my family. At dinner, in a lull, I said, “Hey, so I’d like you all to use they/them pronouns for me.”

  Mom threw Milo a razor-sharp look and Milo caught it in her steady, clear eyes like she was daring Mom to come at her. Mom said, “You didn’t tell me that was for Kaz.”

  “I wasn’t telling you only for Kaz. I didn’t know their pronouns. Just figured you should know that it’s something the kids use these days.”

  Brock asked me, “You going to be a dude?”

  “No, I’m nonbinary. I don’t fit in those boxes.”

  Mom let out a big sigh and said, “I’m sorry, honey, would you explain that to me again. I’m used to men and women.”

  “Hang on.” I ran up to my bedroom and got the notebook where I’d been putting info from Dr. Wade, photos from Aisha, images I’d found on my own.

  Back at the table I offered it to Mom. She read the cover where I’d scrawled: Kaz’s Big Book of Gender and took it. Paged through it with Brock leaning to where he could see over her shoulder.

  They looked at the examples of cultures with three, four, five, even six genders, cultures where people easily switched genders or had multiple genders at the same time, cultures without gender. And facts about biology, like how all humans had all of what we called “sex hormones,” most of us in really similar amounts; everybody needed all these hormones.

  Plus statistics because I went all out! Over sixty percent of adult cisgender (not trans) men experienced some breast enlargement during their lives. About forty percent of cisgender women could grow facial hair and at least seven percent had amounts and patterns of body hair considered “male.” If there were only two discrete biological sexes, how come so may men got boobs and so many women had mustaches and beards? Because we all started out the same and we all had the same hormones—and as we grew, there were so many different pathways we could take.

  I said, “Humans are super adaptable, there isn’t one right way to do things, there’s a bunch of right ways and some work better than others. It’s pretty recent that Western culture decided that if you have certain characteristics, like boobs and ovaries, then you have to do this social role called ‘woman.’ That’s not what my body means. My body means I’m a person. My hormones and my parts don’t define me and who I’m going to be. I get to be all the ways I’m capable of being.”

  “Yeah but what bathroom do you use?” Brock asked.

  “Any of them. Toilets are toilets.”

  “Who’s Dr. Wade?” Mom asked, because her name was in the notebook.

  “A college professor who’s helping me think about all this. She gave me some books and articles. I figured if I got it all organized for myself, then I could explain it to other people and maybe use it for papers the next few years.”

  “You’re doing a project for a professor?” Mom asked. “Wow. I’ve never seen you this organized.”

  “That’s ’cause you haven’t seen my dog training stuff.”

  “Can I meet Dr. Wade?”

  “Sure. Next time me and Aisha go to see her, you could come pick us up and hang out for a bit. Hey also, do you want to come to the Science Bowl? Aisha’s on a team with Jon and they’re going to slay. You too, Brock.”

  “Nah,” he said. “That shit’s boring.”

  “You’re not there for the science, you’d be there to support Aisha.”

  He shrugged. “The tenth grade one doesn’t matter anyway. And she’s got lots of support.”

  I considered Brock’s pink-white face. When had the strength of his jaw and the close set of his eyes gone from looking heroic to clueless?

  “Hey.” I took my notebook back from Mom and turned to the back so I could get the color printouts I’d done at school that week. I pushed them across the table to him. “I made these for you.”

  “Captain America? Why?”

  “Chris Evans, the actor who plays him, he’s a pretty great human being. And that’s Matt McGorry, he’s another actor, and Justin Baldoni, he acts, directs and makes movies.”

  “Yeah, who cares? I don’t want to act or do any of that.”

  “Because we don’t see enough good white guys on TV,” I said.

  He picked up the pictures, tapped them on the table to line up the edges, then tore them in half. Dropping them on his dinner plate, he got up and walked out.

  “Asshole,” I said. Nobody at the table got on me for language.

  Milo lifted the pictures off Brock’s plate, wiped the back and put them by hers.

  * * *

  I finished my World History paper—the part of the project I got to do on my own. We did a presentation in class too, for which we got all of fifteen minutes and I had to wear a tunic and sandals in December. But Caden’s temple model was amazing and got displayed in the back of the room with my charts comparing wealth inequality in the Roman Empire to modern America.

  Spoiler alert: in the U.S. today the top one percent of households owns forty percent of the country’s wealth, while in Rome the top one-and-a-half percent owned twenty percent. So our country was doing a lot worse than ancient Rome, and we knew what happened to them.

  More than our tea
cher reading the paper, I wanted Mom and Brock to read it. Considering how unlikely that was, I waited for our next family dinner. Brock hadn’t shown up. We weren’t talking since he’d ripped up the pictures I gave him.

  “Do you all want to hear parts of my World History paper?” I asked Mom, Milo and Pops when we’d finished eating dinner.

  “Isn’t that a group project?” Mom asked.

  “It’s both. We did a group presentation plus individual papers. My group compared banking in ancient Rome and the U.S., and I did a paper about two families in Minnesota.”

  “We’re all ears,” Milo said, waving a hand to include Pops. She’d already read the paper in an early draft, but being the best grandmom in the world, was totally up for hearing it now.

  We moved to the living room, with Milo, Pops and Mom on the couch. I ran up to my room for my paper and notecards, so Wolvie ran up and down with me, then turned around a bunch in her dog bed before settling.

  I started out with the info about how wealth inequality in the U.S. is way worse than in ancient Rome and asked, “Why is this?”

  Mom shrugged. Milo grinned at me and said, “I trust you’re going to tell us.”

  “One of the main pillars of wealth inequality in our country is racism,” I said, reading off my notecards too much. “And to show you how this works, I want to tell you a story about two families. Now I know in our family that when you got together…” I pointed at Milo and Pops. “Pops’s dad helped you buy your first house. And I asked Aisha about her grandpop and grandmom. They didn’t own a house when they got married or for a long time after. So let’s start there, but let’s look at the same family under two conditions, whether that family is white or black.”

  I’d been tempted to call the family the Wadamses after Warren + Adams, but that sounded too flippant for the topic, so I went middle of the alphabet and picked “Long” as the family name. I had printouts of a white couple in front of a house and a black couple in front of an apartment building and held these up while talking.

  “In the 1940s, a white family was twice as likely to own their home as a black family, for lots of reasons including having higher income, banks being more likely to lend to them, housing discrimination, etcetera. So, if our average family, the Longs, are white, they’ve probably got great-grandparents who own a home while that same family, if black, doesn’t. The grandparents of the white family are also much more likely to own a home and to get help from their parents to do so.”

  I’d been ignoring the thumping in the kitchen that meant Brock taking off boots but now he came around the corner, through the dining room, to the living room doorway. He leaned there and crossed his arms. I put my chin up, realized I couldn’t see my notecards, looked down and went on with my report.

  “Now let’s look at the income of those white grandparents—and no snickering, Milo and Pops, I did averages and I don’t have the math to adjust everything for inflation, but you’ll get the idea. An average white man without a Bachelor’s degree makes about a million dollars over the course of his working life—and because of racism, an average black man with the same degree would make $730,000. That’s a lifetime tax of $270,000 just for being black. That hasn’t changed between 1980 and 2015, and before 1980, it was less. Since women still make less than men, the grandmom in the white Long family would make about $820,000. But if she’s in the black Long family, she’d make about $700,000.”

  “Kaz, I made more than that,” Milo said.

  “I know, but you have a degree, and I rounded it down to a million to make the math simple. See, with my average family, the white grandparents together make $1,820,000 but the black grandparents only make $1,430,000. And if the cost of living is $1.4 million, the white family ends up with $420,000 in the bank and the black family with $30,000.”

  “There’s no way,” Brock said from the doorway. “There’s reasons for that.”

  “Yeah there are,” I said, louder than him. “Study after study shows that black Americans are given fewer promotions even when equally qualified, are hired less—”

  “I don’t believe it,” he said.

  “I have some of them printed out in my room. I’ll bring them down for you.”

  “The studies are biased.”

  “All of them? Let me finish this.” I returned to my notecards, flipped over one I didn’t need. “If you think my math is unrealistic to show that the black family has seven percent of the savings of the white family, national statistics show that black households actually have closer to five percent of the wealth of white households. Because they’re also more likely to be targeted by predatory lenders and have to borrow money for emergencies at higher interest rates.

  “And that’s just savings based on earnings, that’s not even looking at investing. Since the white grandparents have more money, let’s say they’ve got enough to invest $1000 a year in the stock market. Over forty years the $40,000 they’ve invested would grow to over $200,000. Since the black family has five percent of that wealth, let’s say they invest $50 a year—and let’s go benefit of the doubt that they don’t have to take that money back out for an emergency—at the end of the same forty years, they’ve managed to save about $11,000.

  “My grandparents have been putting money away for me to go to college since I was born. I have $13,600 in the bank for me to go to college. Thanks, Milo and Pops! In the black family I’ve presented today, given the average wealth gap in our country, do you know how much would be in the bank for my future? Not because my family didn’t work hard, but because of everything stacked against us. Can you guess how much? Six-hundred and eighty-five dollars.”

  “No! Way!” Brock about yelled from the doorway. “There are so many other reasons: drugs, single mothers, violence.”

  “Our country is full of systems that are biased against black people,” I shouted back.

  “You only give a shit because of Aisha!”

  “I am lucky enough to know how ignorant I was because of Aisha. I would hope that I—and everyone in this family—would be a decent enough human being to recognize when something is grossly unfair and fix it.”

  Mom, Milo and Pops all turned sideways on the couch, so they could look from one of us to the other. Pops had his hand on the couch arm, ready to push up in a flash if our argument got too heated.

  “Why fix that first when so much else is fucked up?” Brock asked.

  “Like what?” Mom asked and it took me a second to register the question had come from her. The weight of her words said she knew the answer to what Brock wanted fixed, and then I did too, even before she said, “your father has a new family now. He doesn’t want anything to do with us.”

  Brock stomped out through the kitchen, slamming the back door.

  “I’ll talk to him,” Pops said and followed.

  I knelt and put my arms around Wolvie, who’d pressed against my leg, shaking, as she felt the anger in the room. But I watched Mom’s face and wondered how much I didn’t know about our family.

  If I asked, she’d tell me whatever she knew about our father. Probably that Brock had tried to get in touch with him again and been ignored. And I didn’t want to know that yet. I’d heard how she’d found where my dad was living with a new wife and new kids, and gone to him for child support that he paid sometimes, and I ignored all that. So what if he had a new family? I had a new family too and mine was better. I had Milo and Pops and Aisha and all the Warrens.

  And I didn’t want this fight to be about Brock or about me. No matter how upset Brock got, that didn’t make it okay to use terrible contentions about other people to get ahead.

  “Can I show you the rest of the report?” I asked Mom.

  She patted the couch cushion between her and Milo and I tried to sit there, but Wolvie beat me to it.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  December 2017

  Our school auditorium usually smelled like ass feet—like a pair of feet had grown out of unclean buttocks and walke
d the room for days. But for Science Bowl they managed to switch it over to an antiseptic smell with a note of inky intelligence. They hadn’t swapped any of the sports team banners, but they’d set up the stage with long tables draped in deep blue cloth edged with gold. Those were our school colors and they made it pretty classy.

  Aisha had been studying for weeks, with me and Jon, plus online, and with Darius, Sofi, Zack, Meta and anyone else who’d run through her flashcards. I’d given her a pep talk the night before that included more holding her close and giving her little kisses than talking.

  Now Aisha sat in her spot, behind her nametag, wearing a peach sweater and dark pants, with her hands twisting together in her lap, keeping them from shaking. She was so scared. Not about the math or the kids up there with her, but this audience. So scared that she’d screw up and prove their stupid stereotypes right. Most of our teachers were here, including Mrs. Alexander in the second row on the other side since her “leave” didn’t start until after break.

  The competition went in two rounds. For the first, students competed in pairs. The top three pairs made it to round two and went against each other individually. Of the twelve students in the first round, nine were white and two Asian or Asian American. Aisha was the only black person and one of three girls. The auditorium had half filled, we still had fifteen minutes until the start time, but already it looked as white as our high school.

  To be fair, I noted that Jon was the only out gay guy. He and Aisha had been joking that their team name should be “Team Queer.” The formal contest didn’t have team names, but the study group all called them that.

  I walked to the side of the room, leaned against the wall, crossed my arms. Some people looked at me. What did they see? Some babydyke? Okay. A tomboy? Less okay. A boyish girl or girlish boy? They could look but they probably couldn’t see me. It didn’t matter right now, I only needed Aisha to see me.