What We Left Behind

by Robin Talley

  Did Eli and Pete think Nance was talking about me?

  Was Nance talking about me?

  Then Nance and Derek catch my eye, and they both look down. That answers my question.

  Is this because of the stupid pronouns?

  Why does everyone always make such a huge deal about pronouns? It’s as if my whole life has to be dictated by those two or three letters. I wish pronouns had never been invented.

  Derek hands me one of the water bottles. Probably Derek’s way of saying I’ve had enough to drink.

  Screw that. Derek doesn’t get to tell me what to do. Nance is right—I’m not anyone’s charity case.

  “I’m getting another drink.” I push off the wall. My legs are shaky, but I propel my way forward.

  “You sure you’re okay?” Derek asks.

  “I’m fine.”

  Then we hear someone yell across the room. Barb, the bouncer, is towering over everyone on stiletto heels.

  “Who are you to disrespect my friend?” Barb screams at a guy in a Red Sox cap. “She’s the prettiest girl who ever lived!”

  “Leave it alone, Barb!” one of the bartenders yells.

  “Yeah, well, maybe if she ate her weave she’d be pretty on the inside, too!” the guy in the cap shouts. It sounds to me like the guy is joking, and I start to laugh, but then Barb winds back and punches the guy in the face with a loud thud. A collective shout echoes across the bar.

  “We should go,” Derek says.

  I let Derek pull me to the door as more people start yelling. Behind us, Eli and Nance are pushing their way through. I can’t see where Andy, Pete and the other guys went. I’m still shaky, so I need Derek’s help, but I try not to let that be too obvious.

  “DOES THIS ALWAYS HAPPEN?” I yell.

  “PRETTY MUCH, YEAH.” Derek laughs as we make it out into the chilly open air. “It’s all part of the adventure.”

  The rest of our group stumbles outside. Nance and Inez light cigarettes.

  “Think we can get a cab?” Laura asks.

  We try for a long time. It doesn’t help that everyone else who left the bar is trying to get cabs at the same time. We also aren’t in the best neighborhood. None of the services we call have cars anywhere near us. After twenty minutes I’m shivering from the cold, worried about my wallet getting stolen and completely sober.

  Finally an empty cab pulls up. Nance and the other two girls pile into it first.

  “I can only take one more, up front,” the cabdriver says in a thick, annoyed Boston accent, eyeing Derek, Eli and me.

  “We can all fit,” Derek says. “See how skinny we are?”

  “No way,” the driver says.

  “We can fit one more back here, Derek,” Inez, a pretty brunette, calls from the back of the cab. “We can scootch in.”

  “Toni, Eli, get in,” Derek says. “You’re skinnier than me.”

  “No way,” I say. “You’re skinnier than I am.”

  This is an obvious lie, but I’m still reeling from what Nance said. I don’t want anyone taking pity on me. I don’t want to have to squash into a cab with Nance, either.

  “I can only fit one, kids,” the driver calls.

  “If you guys are going to be indecisive, I’ve got a paper due tomorrow,” Eli says.

  Derek and I nod. Eli climbs into the cab and it speeds off, leaving us alone in the cold with no cabs in sight.

  Derek scans the empty street, then turns back to the bar. “It seems to have calmed down in there. Want to go back in? You look cold.”

  “Yeah. Next time I’ll bring a bigger coat.”

  “Don’t bother. You’ve got to get used to Massachusetts weather sooner or later.”

  The place is only half-full now. There’s no sign of Pete and the rest of our group. Barb is at a cocktail table toasting champagne glasses with the guy in the Red Sox cap, so I guess all’s well.

  Derek and I find an empty booth in the back. We each order Cokes. Derek insists. “Trust me. You’ll appreciate it tomorrow.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” I say. “I can take care of myself.”

  “I know, but you can also learn from my past mistakes.” Derek laughs.

  I gaze down into my drink.

  “Okay, fine,” Derek says. “Is this about what Nance said? Are you pissed?”

  I shrug.

  “You shouldn’t take her seriously. She’s prickly at first, but she’s a great friend once she gets to know you.”

  I shrug again. I don’t want to talk about Nance. “Who were those other two girls who were here before? Laura and Inez?”

  “They were both at the last UBA meeting. You don’t remember?”

  “Oh, right. Laura was the one who gave the speech about making the sexual harassment policy queer inclusive. Wait, why are you grinning that way?”

  Derek grins some more. “’Cause I always grin when I talk about Inez.”

  “Ah.” Since Derek used to go out with Nance, I’d figured Derek wasn’t into feminine-looking girls like Inez. Live and learn, I guess.

  Inez is cute enough. Nowhere near as pretty as Gretchen, though. Definitely not my type.

  If I even have a type. It’s been so long, I can barely remember what it’s like to be attracted to someone who isn’t Gretchen.

  Now I’m anxious again.

  “Are you and Inez a thing?” I ask, to distract myself.

  “No. At least, not yet.”

  “Are you going to be a thing?”

  “You say that as if it’s entirely up to me.”

  “If it were entirely up to you, would you and Inez be a thing?”

  “Maybe. She’s cute, and she’s a physics concentrator. I like me some physics concentrators.”

  I shake my head with a smile, but I don’t get how you’d ever say “maybe” about whether or not you want to go out with someone.

  With Gretchen, I knew from the first night that there was something between us. Something real.

  It was never only that Gretchen was pretty, either. It always felt—well, serious. Deep. There was never any “maybe” about it.

  I try to explain that to Derek. It doesn’t come out very well thanks to the lingering effects of all that beer, but Derek smiles at me.

  “Hey, that’s great for you guys. I’ve never been in love at first sight like that. I’ve always liked people the old-fashioned, boring way, where you like someone a little, and then you like them a lot, and then you like them a lot.” Derek laughs. Derek, I’ve noticed, laughs more often than not. Gretchen does that, too. “You and your girlfriend must have something really special. I can’t wait to meet her. When’s she coming up?”

  “Halloween.”

  “Not before that? I thought you said you guys were going to visit each other every weekend?”

  “We were.” I motion to the waitress for a refill. For our first couple of weeks of school, Gretchen kept trying to make plans to come up. Finally I said we were both too busy and we should just wait until Halloween and the dance.

  The thing is, I am busy. But I’m also aching to see Gretchen. To touch. I never thought I’d feel so starved for physical contact.

  I’m also kind of terrified of the idea, though. I’m scared that when we’re face-to-face, that ache won’t be what comes through. I’m afraid it’ll be the anxiety. And the anger I still can’t rationalize away.

  “You should ask Inez to the dance,” I tell Derek. “I mean, if people ask people to dances in college.”

  Derek laughs even harder. “Sometimes I forget you’re a freshman.”

  “Good. No one else does.”

  “Anyway, yeah, people ask people to dances sometimes. I’ll probably ask her if I can get over myself in time.”

&n
bsp; I nod. “So is Inez bi or what?”

  “Last I heard, she identifies as heteroflexible.” Derek laughs again. “So she’s a step up for me. My last relationship ended because it turned out his idea of bi meant ‘screwing every other guy within a hundred-foot radius and then lying about it.’”

  I pause with my drink halfway to my mouth. “Wait, what did you say?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing bad. Heteroflexible means she mostly likes guys, but not always. She thinks it’s more accurate for her than bi.”

  “I know what heteroflexible means.” I shake my head. “It was the stupid pronoun. Sorry, I’m dumb. I didn’t know you’d dated guys. Up until now I thought you were straight.”

  Derek’s mouth falls open.

  “How have we never talked about this?” Derek says. “That’s hysterical! I guess I need to come out to you, then. Toni.”

  Derek takes my hand and puts on a fake-serious expression.

  “I have to tell you something very important about myself. I like guys sometimes, too.”

  We laugh some more. Derek lets go of my hand.

  “Do you identify as bi?” I ask.

  “Yeah, usually. What about you?”

  “I don’t have a label that I use for sexual orientation. I just think of myself as queer.” I could go through the whole explanation for why I especially hate the word lesbian—it makes me think of old ladies playing pool and wearing flannel—but I don’t want to get into that. I don’t know who might be eavesdropping. The last thing I need is for Barb, or one of Barb’s equally well-built friends, to take offense. “It doesn’t seem to matter anyway since I only want to be with Gretchen.”

  “But what if someday you—” Derek pauses. “Never mind. When did you first identify as GQ?”

  The truth is, I don’t even like the word genderqueer that much. I especially hate abbreviating it as GQ. It makes me think of the dumb magazine with the half-naked girls on the cover.

  I haven’t heard a word I like better, though. It’s like Inez with heteroflexible. Even though that’s a stupid word, too.

  “Junior year of high school,” I say. “I went to this crazy private all-girl school, and we had to wear a uniform with a white shirt and a plaid skirt. It was like something out of Japanese porn. I went to the administration and asked if I could wear pants instead, and they said no. So I wound up threatening to sue the school. Eventually they changed the policy. Before that, though, I talked to these lawyers at the ACLU, and they asked me if I identified as genderqueer, because if I did, they’d put it in the argument. It would be the first time they’d had a genderqueer plaintiff in a case like mine. They were all excited about it. I didn’t know much about genderqueer as a term, so I looked it up. In the end it turned out we didn’t need to sue, after all, because the administration got scared and decided I could wear pants. Besides, if I’d let the ACLU tell people I was genderqueer, it would’ve gone into the news stories, and I’d have had to tell my mother, and I was nowhere near ready to do that in eleventh grade, or now for that matter. But anyway, at least I got a semiacceptable label out of the thing. So when I started coming out to people online and stuff, genderqueer was the word I used.”

  Derek stares at me. “That was you?”

  “What was me?”

  “The school uniform lawsuit! I followed your case on all the blogs. I even started a petition about you! You were my hero!”

  I laugh so hard I spit Coke. “You’re lying.”

  “No way! I can’t believe this. I can’t believe I didn’t recognize your name when I first met you!”

  “The stories probably called me Antonia,” I say, making a face.

  “Oh, that’s right. I remember it all now. I was so jealous of you! I was completely closeted in high school, but you—you had the nerve to fight the power!”

  Derek lifts a fist into the air, grinning even harder now than when we talked about Inez. I sit up straight and smile back. I never thought anyone outside my high school friends would remember that story.

  “I guess it was pretty cool,” I say.

  “It was majorly cool! But I do have one question. This always bothered me. You had a guys’ high school that was connected with yours, didn’t you? So why didn’t you ask to wear their uniform instead? Why did you want to wear the same uniform the girls did, only with pants? Because that’s what you wound up with, right? I saw the picture—you had on some unfortunate blue-plaid pants in the end.”

  “It wasn’t about fashion,” I say.

  “I know, but if it was about gender presentation, wouldn’t it have made the most sense to wear the guys’ uniform?”

  I gnaw on my knuckle. “I didn’t think about it that way at the time.”

  Why did I do that? It never occurred to me back then to want to look like the guys. Before the ACLU prompted me to start searching the internet, I’d thought of myself as butch. Now that doesn’t feel right at all.

  If I were doing it over again, would I want to wear the guys’ uniform? I don’t know. I feel more like a guy now than I did then, but I can’t imagine wanting to, like, go to the guys’ high school and use their locker room or whatever.

  Derek probably would have. Andy, too. Maybe even Eli.

  What makes me so different? Am I just in a temporary stage before I wind up the same as them? I try to imagine living full-time as a guy, wearing a suit like Brad’s and joking around with guys the way Andy and Kartik do. It sounds kind of thrilling. And terrifying. When I try to picture it, I see myself dressed up like it’s Halloween or like I’m acting in a movie. It doesn’t seem real.

  Why is this stuff so confusing? Am I really the only person in the world who thinks this stuff is complicated? As far as I know, Gretchen never thinks about this stuff at all. Gretchen’s always identified as a girl without angsting about it or anything. I don’t know what I’d do if I had all that spare time. I could probably train for the Olympics.

  “Sorry,” Derek says. “It was a long time ago anyway, but I’ve always been curious. Even when I was home for Thanksgiving break I used to sneak onto the library computers to see if there was any news about you.”

  “Why’d you have to sneak onto the computers?” I say.

  “Sometimes I forgot to clear my browser history at home. My dad always checked it.”

  “That sucks. Are your parents better now?”

  “Sort of. It’s a work in progress.”

  “Are you out to them?”

  “Yeah. I’ve talked to my dad and my stepmom a couple of times, but they never want to talk about it afterward. It’s as if I never brought it up.”

  Derek has stopped laughing. It’s strange having such a serious conversation after everything else that’s happened tonight.

  But I want to know about this. Suddenly I need to know.

  “Do your parents call you by the right pronouns?” I ask.

  “They don’t call me anything. It’s like they go out of the way to avoid using pronouns at all. The way you do. For different reasons, obviously.”

  “Do they call you the right name?”

  “I don’t know what they call me when I’m not there. But they don’t call me anything to my face. They start out their emails with just ‘Hi.’ But they’re better than they used to be. High school was pretty awful. I’m just lucky I made it out of there in one piece.”

  I nod. “What was your name before?”

  Derek takes a sip of soda. “Michelle.”

  “How’d you pick Derek?”

  “I used to be really into Derek Jeter. Look, I’m sorry, but can we please change the subject? No offense, because I understand why you want to know, but I get asked these questions all the time, and I really don’t like talking about this. The past is the past, and it’s better if it stays there.”

 
“Okay,” I say. Even though I desperately want to know if the Derek Jeter part was a joke. “Want to talk about Inez some more?”

  “That’s okay. Why don’t you tell me about your parents? You said your mom is scary, right?”

  Now that it’s on me, I’m not sure I want to talk about this, either.

  “My mom’s scary,” I say. “That’s basically it.”

  That’s a sufficient summary anyway.

  My mother and I have gotten good at avoiding each other over the past couple of years. Over our whole lives, really.

  I can count on one hand the number of significant conversations we’ve had. There was the time in fifth grade when I announced I was quitting piano lessons and had to listen to a speech about the tragic death of my mother’s dreams of having a concert pianist in the family. The time freshman year when I came out as a “lesbian” (ick). The time junior year when I admitted that my friends and I had broken the Tiffany iced tea pitcher while we were playing Wii.

  My mother and I manage to avoid most insignificant conversations, too. That became a lot easier once I got a driver’s license and could spend as much time as I wanted at Gretchen’s. Even before that, though, we were never the sit-around-the-dinner-table-and-talk-about-your-day kind of family. Mostly, when I had dinner at home, it consisted of me and my sister hanging off the kitchen counter eating Salvadoran food and begging our housekeeper, Consuela, to tell us stories about the crazy families Consuela worked for before ours. One was a high-ranking Republican White House official—Consuela never told me which, but I have theories—who insisted that the floor rugs be inspected every day for evidence of either bedbugs or planted recording devices.

  Sometimes I wonder if my mother actually personally hates me, or if I’m just a major lifestyle inconvenience. It always seemed to bother Mom way more when I did “weird” stuff in front of other people—like when I went through my middle-school goth phase and wore a fake nose ring to school for a week—than when I just did it in the house, where none of our snooty neighbors had to know about it.

  “What about your dad?” Derek asks. I blink before I remember we’re still having this conversation.