What We Left Behind

by Robin Talley

  From the critically acclaimed author of Lies We Tell Ourselves comes an emotional, empowering story of what happens when love may not be enough to conquer all

  Toni and Gretchen are the couple everyone envied in high school. They’ve been together forever. They never fight. They’re deeply, hopelessly in love. When they separate for their first year at college—Toni to Harvard and Gretchen to NYU—they’re sure they’ll be fine. Where other long-distance relationships have fallen apart, theirs is bound to stay rock-solid.

  The reality of being apart, though, is very different than they expected. Toni, who identifies as genderqueer, meets a group of transgender upperclassmen and immediately finds a sense of belonging that has always been missing, but Gretchen struggles to remember who she is outside their relationship.

  While Toni worries that Gretchen won’t understand Toni’s new world, Gretchen begins to wonder where she fits in this puzzle. As distance and Toni’s shifting gender identity begin to wear on their relationship, the couple must decide—have they grown apart for good, or is love enough to keep them together?

  Also by Robin Talley

  Lies We Tell Ourselves

  To Mom and Dad, for being awesome, and always supporting my dream of becoming a writer. Look! It worked!

  Contents

  Before

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Before

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Before

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Before

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  After

  Acknowledgments

  Excerpt from Lies We Tell Ourselves by Robin Talley

  Before

  OCTOBER

  JUNIOR YEAR OF HIGH SCHOOL

  HOMECOMING

  TONI

  Even before I saw her, it was the best night of my life.

  It was Homecoming. I was about to walk into a ballroom full of people. A girl in a flouncy dress was clinging to my elbow, her photo-ready smile firmly in place, her left hand already raised in a preparatory wave.

  I didn’t smile with her. I didn’t know if I could even remember how to smile.

  I was happy, yeah—I was so, so, so happy that night—but I was terrified, too. Any second now I was bound to throw up.

  Everyone in that ballroom would be looking at us. Everyone in there would be looking at me.

  I’d known them all since we were kids. To them, I was Toni Fasseau, substantively unchanged since kindergarten. Short red hair and black-rimmed glasses. Pompous vocabulary and a pompous grade point average to match. And most of all, gay. Extremely, incredibly gay.

  Tonight, though, when they looked at me, they’d see something else. This morning, a story had come out that had temporarily made me the most famous student at Martha Jefferson Academy for Young Women in Washington, DC. It would probably only last until the next senator’s daughter got caught shoplifting at Neiman Marcus, but still.

  It took all my concentration just to breathe as I walked through the ballroom doors. My date, Renee, beamed out at the rapt crowd, still hanging on my arm.

  For her, the attention was fun. For her, tonight was nothing.

  For me, tonight was everything.

  It was too much. My stomach clenched, unclenched and clenched again as my brain whirred with a thousand thoughts at once.

  I’d won. I’d actually won.

  We turned the corner and saw the crowd. A few hundred of our classmates and their dates, dressed up in their finest finery.

  All I saw was their eyes. Hundreds—no, thousands, it felt like thousands—of eyes fixed right on me.

  I looked down, took a breath and tried to focus on something else.

  My outfit. That was something.

  Tonight was one of the first times in my entire life when I actually liked what I was wearing. Spiffy new gray-and-black-striped pants, a bright blue shirt, shiny black shoes, black-and-white-striped suspenders, and a black top hat.

  Granted, the top hat might’ve been a little much, but the suspenders rocked. Before we’d even made it through the parking lot, a dozen different people had come up to high-five me about the lawsuit. Half of them complimented me on the suspenders, too.

  There’s something about looking exactly how you want to look—finally—finally—that feels like you’re being set free.

  Like most of the girls at our school, my date, Renee, had gone the fancy-designer-dress-and-matching-high-heels route. She’d worn bright blue to match my shirt, which was awesome of her. She kept her arm tucked through mine and beamed at the crowd as we entered the cheesy hotel ballroom through the balloon arch we’d spent hours making at yesterday’s Student Council meeting.

  “You go, T!” a guy I vaguely knew yelled from across the room, giving me a thumbs-up. “Lesbians rock!”

  I gave him a thumbs-up back. Even more heads had turned in my direction at the guy’s shout. People grinned and held their punch cups out to me.

  “You’re popular tonight.” Renee grinned and waved at the crowd again.

  “Oh, that guy was just expressing appreciation for how my suspenders show off my übertoned physique,” I said. Renee laughed and fake-punched me in the arm. I made a face like it hurt, and she laughed again. Renee was just a friend, being straight and all, but I was so, so glad to have her there with me that night.

  My hands shook as I exchanged smiles and nods and more high fives. I made a big show of escorting Renee around the room, holding her elbow and using my free hand to make swooping motions with my arms like a guy in an old movie might do. That made her laugh.

  I laughed, too. I couldn’t believe tonight was really happening.

  I never thought I’d win. For so long it had seemed impossible. Then, last night, the school administration had finally backed down.

  For years, I’d begged. I’d written strongly worded letters that were just as strongly ignored. I’d given impassioned speeches to my classmates. I’d gone to administration meetings and made presentations full of graphs and statistics and quotes from important court cases.

  It hadn’t mattered what I said. I spoke at meeting after meeting, but at each one, the administrators just thumbed their phones until I’d stopped talking.

  Then last week our school’s Gay-Straight Alliance decided that since we’d already tried everything else, we might as well go the old-fashioned route and have a rally. We made posters and sent out an invitation telling people to gather on the front lawn of the main building after eighth-period bell. We figured we might get a dozen people there.

  Instead, almost the whole school showed up.

  I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t think anyone besides my closest friends even cared, much less agreed with me, but those speeches I’d been making had paid off. The photos in the news reports that day showed hundreds of my classmates waving homemade posters and burning old school uniforms with the gleaming glass Martha Jefferson Academy sign in the background. You could hear the chants on the video clips.

  “What do we want? Equal rights! When do we want them? Now!”

  “Gay rights are everybody’s rights!”

  And, embarrass
ingly, “We stand with Toni! We stand with Toni!”

  The news coverage woke the school administration up. So did the letter my newly acquired ACLU lawyer sent over. She called me last night with the news. I could hear the glee in my lawyer’s voice as she told me they’d caved.

  Starting immediately, I was allowed to wear pants to school.

  It was like being let out of prison. Except my prison was the entire world. I would never, ever have to wear that stupid blue-plaid uniform skirt again for the rest of my life.

  The Washington Post called to ask me a bunch of questions. My lawyer drove me to two different TV stations to do incredibly scary on-camera interviews, and a profile of me went up on a website that was so big even my grandparents read it.

  And now I was at the Homecoming dance, and everyone was looking at me.

  I’d been buzzing and giddy for hours, but as I stared around at the crowd, another feeling climbed in. The one that comes when you know people are talking about you but you don’t know what they’re saying. It’s like bugs crawling over your skin. It was nearly as bad as it was before, with my mother, when she... No. I wasn’t going to think about my mother right now.

  It was all too much. My mind was skittery, unsteady, unfocused. I couldn’t deal with this rapidly growing ache.

  I needed to get out.

  The idea bloomed fast inside me. I’d feel so much better if I’d just turn around and walk off the polished wooden dance floor. Go hide in the parking lot until everyone found someone else to stare at.

  Then I saw her.

  She was dancing. Her head was thrown back with laughter. Her eyes sparkled. Her smile radiated light.

  Everything else that had been spinning through my head floated away like air.

  GRETCHEN

  The last thing I wanted to do was go to the Homecoming dance.

  We’d only moved down to Maryland the day before. I hadn’t even unpacked. I wouldn’t start my new school until Monday, and going to a dance where I didn’t know a single person was guaranteed to be the most awkward experience of my life, basically.

  But my parents thought it was the best idea ever. They even found me a date. My dad knew someone who knew someone who had a nephew who went to the University of Maryland who wasn’t doing anything that night. A recipe for true love if ever there was one.

  So I opened my suitcases and tore through my boxes until I found the green-and-silver lace dress I’d worn to my brother’s wedding last year. It was a little tight, but I could dance in it. Mom lent me a pair of heels that pinched my toes so much I wound up leaving them in the car and going into the dance barefoot. At least my toenails were still polished from when my friends and I gave each other mani-pedis at my goodbye party back in Brooklyn.

  The nephew, whose name was Mark or Mike or one of those, turned out to be a pretty nice guy. He told jokes that made me laugh. He poured my punch for me, which was cute. And since neither of us knew anyone else and we didn’t have anything to talk about, after just a couple of minutes of us standing around self-consciously he asked if I wanted to dance. I said sure, because I will pretty much never turn down an opportunity to dance.

  Mike/Matt/whatever wasn’t a half-bad dancer, and soon we were in the middle of the floor, shaking our booties to the Top 40 the DJ was playing. (Were all DJs in Maryland this boring, I wondered?)

  No one else was dancing that early, and before long a bunch of people had gathered in a circle to watch Matt/Marc/etc. and me. So I hammed it up, because what else was I going to do? I started doing this Charleston-type thing I’d seen on TV once, where you bend at the waist and move your knees in and out. It was a blast. Mike/Matt tried to do it, too, but we could barely keep up with each other. He started laughing, then I started laughing, then he started going faster, then I started going faster, and then he grabbed me and swung me around into a dip. I was laughing so hard I nearly fell over.

  I was upside-down when I saw the girl in the top hat and suspenders smiling at me.

  The blood was rushing to my head. When Mark set me back on my feet, I could barely stay upright.

  I smiled back anyway.

  TONI

  I couldn’t believe I’d never seen her before.

  She must have gone to a different school. There was no way I could’ve just not noticed her.

  She had long blond hair, almost to her waist, brilliant blue eyes and the warmest, widest smile I’d ever seen. Even upside down.

  She was in the middle of the floor with a guy I’d never seen before, either, dancing like a maniac in a punk-looking green dress. Her feet were bare and her toenails were blue.

  No one came barefoot to Homecoming. In fact, every other girl in the room—except me, of course—was wearing shoes that must’ve cost at least a hundred dollars. Maybe two hundred. Come to think of it, I had no idea how much shoes were supposed to cost.

  “Who’s that?” Renee asked. I shrugged, helpless.

  The song ended. The blond girl climbed back up, clinging to the guy she was with.

  Her face was mesmerizing even though she was probably the only girl in the room who wasn’t wearing any makeup. Except me, again.

  She was probably straight. God, though, she was beautiful.

  It wasn’t just her model-perfect face, either. It was her smile. It was the light in her eyes.

  Lord. I’d thought all that love-at-first-sight stuff was supposed to be a load of bull.

  I could feel my face turning pink. Crap. I’m pale with red hair, so my face will turn pink pretty much anytime the wind blows, but it’s never stopped being embarrassing.

  A new song came on.

  “Want to dance?” Renee asked.

  No one else was dancing except the blond goddess and her equally blond boyfriend. That was probably why Renee wanted to go out on the floor. She was never happier than when everyone was looking at her.

  “Sure,” I said.

  I couldn’t actually dance, but I figured Renee would take care of the hard parts. Plus, people at our school always gave extra leeway when they saw gay people being noticeably gay. They liked to coo about how cute we were.

  Renee grabbed my hand and pulled me behind her onto the dance floor, leaving maybe ten feet of space between us and the blond couple. This close, I could get a better look at the girl’s face. She and the guy were still dancing like maniacs, with the guy’s back to us. The girl looked so happy. So light. For a second I thought I saw her look at me, but I probably imagined it.

  Renee started doing this dance I’d seen some boy band do on TV once. I tried to imitate it. I felt ridiculous, but I laughed so it would seem like I meant to look ridiculous. Renee laughed, too. I took her hand and tried to spin her around, except I didn’t know how to do that, so we both stumbled, but we kept laughing. I pumped my fist in the air in one of those crazy ’70s dances, and Renee laughed again and started doing the same thing opposite me. The people watching us started to clap.

  I could’ve sworn I saw the blond girl look at me again.

  GRETCHEN

  Crap. I was being too obvious. The girl in the top hat saw me looking.

  I mean, she had to be gay. She was dancing with a girl and she was wearing a top hat. Right?

  Not like it mattered, since apparently she had a girlfriend.

  Of course she did. I’d always had awful luck with girls. Besides, I could tell this one was popular, what with the way everyone kept smiling at her and reaching out to high-five her. The popular ones never stayed single for long.

  Everyone was gathered in a circle around her and her girlfriend, clapping while they danced. Mitch/Max and I stopped to watch them, too. The girl in the blue dress was being kind of show-offy, but the girl in the top hat looked like she was having the time of her life, dancing like John Travolta in one of those old movi
es where he wears those gorgeous suits.

  I couldn’t help it. I wanted to dance like that, too.

  I wanted to dance like that with her.

  So I did.

  I walked over to the two of them, tapped the girl with the top hat on the elbow and smiled at her.

  She stopped dancing and blinked at me. Then she smiled, too.

  Max/Miles/Mark figured out what I was doing, and he went with it. He strode right up to the girl in the blue dress, grabbed her hand and started twirling her. She laughed and followed him.

  The girl in the top hat bit her lip, but she looked right at me as we started to dance. She was still smiling.

  I kept my shoulders even and my smile in place so she couldn’t tell, but I was pretty sure that was the most nervous I’d ever been in my whole life.

  TONI

  I was pretty sure I was hallucinating.

  Beautiful blond straight girls you’ve never seen before don’t just come up to you at your Homecoming dance and start disco dancing with you out of nowhere. Not in normal life.

  Of all the things that had happened to me lately, this was by far the strangest. And maybe the best.

  It took me a second to realize the girl was mirroring me, doing the same weird feet-shuffling and arm-waving moves I was doing. I dialed it up and added in some swaying from side to side. The blond girl grinned and did the same.

  The song changed again, but we didn’t stop moving. It was the first time I’d ever had fun dancing.

  The girl leaned in toward me. I have a thing about personal space, so normally that would’ve made me back away. But I didn’t want to back away from this girl. She moved her lips toward my ear so I could hear her over the music. The proximity made my face flush again.

  “I’m Gretchen,” the girl said.

  Gretchen. It was such a gorgeous name.

  “Toni,” I said.

  Gretchen shook her head. She couldn’t hear me. I had to lean in to her ear, too. I blushed to the roots of my hair.

  “I’m Toni.” I tried desperately to think of something to say that would make me sound cool. “Nice shoes.”