by Kris Ripper
Abuela is always glad to see me. Even if she misgenders me like crazy.
“Here’s my flaca, come to see me!” She kissed me on my cheeks. “Why don’t you ever eat? I looked up that thing you do, eating only plants, and it’s not healthy!”
“Beans and rice are plants, Abuelita.”
She made a kind of growling sound. “I looked it up on your mother’s computer. Being vegan.” The way my abuela pronounced vegan made it sound a lot closer to bacon than vegan.
“It’s a plant-based diet, and there’s a lot of evidence to support it. And anyway, it makes me feel better, so it doesn’t really matter.” I sat down on the coffee table in front of her chair. “How’s your day been?”
“Es bueno. You know. But you tell me about your exciting day, mija.”
It’s hard to describe how it feels when someone you love more than life calls you “my girl” when you aren’t. When I was a kid, Abuela used to come in at night and brush her hands through my hair over and over again until I fell asleep. This is like she’s brushing her hands through my hair but there are needles on her fingertips; I want it to feel so good, but it hurts, too. The kind of pain that never lets me forget how much it hurts.
I told her about the blind cat who could tell when someone was about to die.
“And you met this gato?”
“I saw it sleep on someone’s lap, this old man. But he might not have died.”
“Animals can sense things. They know things.”
“I know, Abuelita.”
She patted my hand. “Do you want to hear about the ladies?”
“Definitely.”
Abuela has a group of “ladies,” this mixture of white and black and Latina women she plays bridge with down at La Vista Rec. They’re basically a running telenovela that I tune in to every time I visit Abuela.
I never stopped looking at the clock.
My mother got home before I was able to escape, greeting me with a kiss on the head and a slightly wary expression. If I stayed too long, it would cause problems between my parents, but I thought she liked seeing me. The way I liked seeing her, probably, some tentative combination of love and distrust.
“I gotta go, Abuelita,” I said as Mom unpacked groceries in the kitchen.
“All right, flaca.”
Being misgendered in front of my mother felt a little extra ugly to me, a little humiliating. When it was Abuela and I alone, I could still pretend to be her granddaughter. But in front of Mom it felt more like giving in, or maybe like me being who I am was the phase they said it was.
But I don’t correct Abuela, so I bit down on my cheek and excused myself.
I went home, successfully got into my room without being seen, and ate a cold dinner of cashews, salsa, and black beans rolled in cabbage leaves. It was actually pretty good, so I wrote it down on my list of meals to make again. Trying to quit meat and cheese after growing up in a Mexican-Italian home was almost impossible, but the absence of all those heavy foods made me feel better about myself, as if that weight in my guts was particularly female and leaving it behind meant more than just dietary change. None of which actually made sense, but it worked for me, so I let the weird associations slide.
Today had a blind cat. I wondered what tomorrow would bring me.
I hadn’t paid much attention to the story, the way you don’t when a story is awful, but not too awful. A twenty-one-year-old boy died on his birthday. Beaten to death and left at the waterfront down beyond where people usually went. A woman taking a jog on a Monday morning with her dog had found the body. She’d thought it was a pile of garbage at first, until she’d noticed the shoes, still on feet.
Not garbage. A man. Steven Costello. Just home from his third year at UC Santa Barbara. His parents said he’d gone out for his birthday, but not with friends, or at least, none that they knew of. They had no idea where he’d planned to go, but he liked movies, so they assumed he’d gone to a movie.
If he’d been younger, I probably would have paid more attention. If he’d been tortured or sexually assaulted. If he’d been a more obscure race, maybe, and not a nondescript brown-haired white boy. If he’d been found anywhere other than the waterfront, a mostly foul stretch of the Bay that hits La Vista on the far side of the freeway in a tangle of weeds and trash and stinking debris from nearby cities. But I’d skimmed the story, felt a momentary pang at the prevalence of such crimes, and forgotten it. The Times-Record ran the story on Thursday, June 23. I started paying attention on Friday, July 8.
I was in the kitchen at work, getting my third cup of coffee. Someone had been doing the Chronicle crossword at the counter, so I added to it, only getting one clue while the coffee finished brewing. (One good thing about my job: free coffee all day long, as much as you want to make.) I did all right through Wednesday’s and Thursday’s crosswords, but the weekend puzzles were more challenging, so as I stood there trying to find any clue to the answer, I also did a lot of random glancing around, like inspiration would just show up on the bulletin board, or the refrigerator.
The bulletin board. Someone—probably Amie Arry, who wrote a lot of our “big” stories—had started pinning murder articles to the bulletin board. Even though Steven Costello wasn’t interesting enough for an Amie Arry byline, he still had been murdered, so he was on the top of the stack.
Steven Costello, whose face from his UCSB ID card smiled at me from just below the headline. I’d seen him before. I would have sworn it. I’d seen that smile. I had no idea where, and he was way too young to be someone I’d gone to school with, but damn it, I knew his face.
I read the article while I stood there. And when the coffee was done, I unpinned the article and took it with me back to my desk.
Died on his birthday. No suspects. No leads. I could read between the lines. Kid didn’t have a lot of local contacts, and had recently come home from college. His parents were the last people known to have seen him, but they didn’t know where he’d gone to celebrate his birthday, and they had no idea who he’d gone there with.
I picked up the office phone that sat in the middle of the table between me and Caspar and dialed the extension of Joe Rodriguez, who’d written the article. Since I didn’t really want Caspar to hear my probably stupid questions, I asked Joe if he had a minute to talk.
Joe, being one of the older guys, had an actual office he shared with a constantly rotating cast of staff. Right now the other desk was taken by a woman named Star, who spent the day with her headphones on, “editing” the Times-Record’s social media accounts. She seemed nice enough, as much as I could tell from someone who only communicated via 140-character email requests for 140-character articles.
“Eddie! What’s going on, man?” Joe shoved a stack of notebooks off a chair and gestured me to sit.
“Not much. Yesterday I reported on a blind cat who can sense when people are dying.”
He laughed. “I heard about that. Tim Potter was all up your ass. All he wants is a story that makes people feel good, damn it, but you always have to make it dark.”
“I wasn’t! The whole point of it— Never mind. I’m not here about the damn blind cat.”
“What’re you here about? How can I counsel you, young Padawan?”
I put the Costello article on his desk, carefully moving a picture of a kid in a karategi. “What’s the story with Steven Costello?”
He picked it up, but I could tell by his eyes that he wasn’t really reading it. “Yeah, that was a bummer. Lady’s out for a jog, finds the body, calls the cops. At first they thought someone put him there figuring he’d be pulled out to the water, though he was a little above the high-tide mark. But the more they looked around, you know, he was killed right there. Beaten all to shit, Ed. Kid’s face looked nothing like this.”
“You saw the body?”
“I saw the photos. He was a fuckin’ piece of meat.” Joe put the article back down and smoothed over Costello’s face. “If he was a girl, maybe it was some kind of ho
okup that went wrong. If he’d been raped, you know, maybe it was that. But this was just a kid out at the waterfront, killed in the middle of the damn night.”
“Drugs?”
He shrugged. “That’s what the cops are going with, unofficially. He wanted to celebrate his twenty-first with some refreshments of the illegal chemical variety, so he tracked down someone he knew could get it for him, arranged to meet. Maybe he didn’t have the money. Maybe he had too much money. Bad things go down, he gets beat. But he had twenty-five bucks sitting in his wallet. No fingerprints to make it look like anyone even went through it. What the fuck drug dealer kills a grown man and doesn’t take his cash?”
“None,” I said. “That makes no sense.”
“Yeah, and I’ll tell you something else.” He smoothed over the kid’s face again. “I talked to the mother, asked her if there was anything else she could tell me about her son, you know? ‘Straight-A student gets beat to death,’ that kind of thing. And she just . . .” Joe paused. “I don’t know, man. She didn’t say anything, really, but it felt like there was stuff she wasn’t saying specifically—stuff she could be telling me but didn’t want to. So maybe it was drugs. Maybe our clean-cut college boy had a problem. But he grew up here and his parents couldn’t name a single friend they thought he might be out with. That’s a little weird, right?”
“Well, I grew up here, and my parents probably couldn’t, either. But yeah, that’s strange. He’s pretty young for them to know nothing about his life.”
“Yeah, look, everyone grieves differently, but if you talked to my mama a week after I was killed, when I was missing for two whole days, she’d be accusing every kid who ever spit on me or tripped me in line for hot lunch, you know? And Mrs. Costello was just . . . quiet.” He shook his head and handed me the article back. “Dead ends. Cops had nothing to go on. Sorry, kid. Why’re you asking about all that, anyway?”
“I don’t know.” I hesitated, not sure if I should mention how familiar Costello’s face was. “I have it in my head that I’ve seen him somewhere before, but I might be making that up.”
“You should think about it. And call up— Fuck, I forget his name. Green, I think. Detective Green was the guy on that case. Call Green if you think of anything.”
“Sure. Thanks, Joe.”
“No problem. You got any more blind cats to write about?”
I withheld my sigh. “I have a church bingo game that’s donating money to the homeless, and a sweater drive down at the rec center. You want to trade for whatever you’re working on?”
He laughed. “Fuck no. I did my time writing shit like that. You’ll live.”
“Thanks again, Joe.”
“Don’t mention it.”
I went back to my desk, but I didn’t put the Costello article back on the bulletin board. I stared at it a little longer, then started to google.
Before I got this job, I’d thought every story I covered would be a labor of love, at least in some sense. Sure, some might be boring, but I loved digging out details, and writing facts in a way that made them not only readable, but inspiring.
If you’d told me I could force myself through inches of words that I didn’t care about, that I could write entire articles without hardly learning the facts of them, I wouldn’t have believed you. I didn’t think I could be that jaded about reporting. By the time I finished the bingo article (both the online version, which was little more than bullet points, and the print version), I wanted to write my younger, more dewy-eyed self a letter. Dear self, on some days you will be so bored at work you’ll become obsessed with the murder of a poor kid just to keep yourself awake. I’m sorry. Love, your future self.
It had been a surprisingly tough week, though part of that was having Monday off. Even working four days felt long when you had three days off before them. (I hadn’t done any big Fourth of July things, either. I’d spent that time reading the newish Sarah Vowell book and trying new vegan recipes, most of which had been terrible.) But whatever the reason, by Friday night I was in need of some light entertainment, so I headed out to Club Fred’s.
Fred’s is the queer club in La Vista. It’s basically the anchor of queer nightlife, and rules one corner of Steerage, which is an L-shaped alley that runs between Mooney and Water Street. The other side of Steerage plays host to a dive bar called Bayside Saloon that might have been straight twenty years ago, but was now, at the least, “lifestyle optional” if not outright queer.
I don’t go to the Bayside much. Not really my crowd. Club Fred’s is all about music, and camp, and seeing everyone you’ve ever had sex with all in one place. Which sounds more gruesome than it actually is; if you really want a place where everyone knows your name, in La Vista, that place is Club Fred’s.
I got myself a beer and started wandering around, chatting with different people, different groups. I passed a poster proclaiming next Friday “F*ck G*nd*r Night,” which would be entertaining. When I was done with my beer I hit the dance floor, and immediately found Zane Jaffe (whose dancing was . . . unique).
“Baby!” she shouted over the music. “It’s been too long, tell me everything that’s happened since I saw you last!”
“It’s only been a couple weeks!”
“Yeah, like I said, too long!” She tugged me closer, putting her hands on my shoulders and leaning in to speak in my ear. “How’s it, Ed?”
“It’s good.” Now that she wasn’t throwing her limbs everywhere, we could settle into a fun little grind. I liked Zane a lot, at least in part because we’d never dated, so she was one of the only lesbians I knew who didn’t make me feel like I had to explain my transition to her.
I wanted to ask her about the Costello kid, but that hardly seemed like dance-floor conversation. “How’re you?”
“I’m not fucking pregnant. Christ, Ed, it’s beginning to fucking wear on me. Doesn’t matter. Maybe this cycle it’ll work, right?”
“Right! That’s a good attitude to take.” I’d gone to her two “conception parties,” but she’d stopped throwing them. “Sorry I can’t help you out, Zane!” I leaned back enough so I could adjust my crotch.
She laughed. “Oh baby, if only you could! I would totally mate with your genes!”
No joke, that was a really cool compliment. “Aw, thanks.”
“Hey, you gotta talk to Jaq tonight, okay? She’s got a student she wants to pick your brain about.”
“Okay. Is she here?”
“Not yet, she’s off with her girlfriend! Have you met Hannah?”
I shook my head.
“Oh, just wait until you do. I’m gonna go eat something disgusting, babe. See you later!”
She did some kind of wild shuffle in the direction of the bar, grinning when I turned back. Zane was hilarious. She’d also added a streak of pink to her purple hair since the last time I saw her, and while pink and purple might look little girlish on a lot of people, on Zane it just looked fierce.
After ten years of coming to Club Fred’s, I felt pretty comfortable dancing by myself, or with whoever was around me. In the early days—when I was poor Steven Costello’s age—I’d only gone to Fred’s if I had a date or very close friends with me, so I would never have that moment of feeling by myself in a crowd.
Then again, these days I know so many people the difference is a little moot.
I registered the hand grabbing mine even before I registered the words.
“Hey, you.”
“Hey, Alisha.” It was easy to smile at Alisha. Alisha was full of smiles.
She moved in close against me, and I had a momentary flash of feeling revealed. Could she tell I had a binder on? But she’d known me for years—obviously I didn’t have to hide that I wasn’t born with a Y chromosome.
And anyway, Alisha didn’t look the least deterred, whether she could feel the binder or not. “Looking good, Ed. Dance with me?”
“Sure.”
Hell yes, I’d dance with her. I put my hands on her waist, and this w
asn’t quite the playful dancing I’d done with Zane; Alisha kept looking into my eyes and I kept looking back, far too long to be casual.
Her eyes were blue. Dark in the club, but I bet if we were outside they’d be bright, like the sky.
Dating had been the hardest part of transitioning for me. I dreamed sometimes about moving somewhere totally new, where I didn’t know anyone, where no one knew me. Where no one remembered me awkwardly attempting to embrace being a “tomboy” as a kid (I always hated that word), or butch as a teenager, or transmasculine in my twenties before I let myself admit that I couldn’t keep pretending the voice in my head that knew I was a man would go away. It was scary. Really scary.
And that was before I started telling people.
I still dated, but it was tricky. My old group of friends were gay in a binary sense, and a lot of them still had trouble understanding the difference between me now and me then, that even if I look pretty much the same on the outside, I’m not. And I’m probably more paranoid than makes sense; I always think the second I meet someone new, they’ll talk to someone else and that maybe after that they won’t want to date me because I’m trans, or they won’t want to date me because I’m not trans enough, because I only started T a year ago, because my dick’s not that big or my breasts are too big.
Alisha and I had been acquaintances a long time, but we’d never run in the same circles that much. She certainly knew I was trans, and whatever she was seeing, it was working for her.
“I’m glad you’re here tonight,” she said into my ear. I could barely hear her over the almost-intolerably loud beat pounding through the speakers.
“Me too. I mean, I’m glad you’re here.”
She grinned, little dimples in her cheeks making me flush. “I had to come out. Got this feeling something was gonna happen tonight that I needed to be here for.”
I got up closer, my lips almost brushing her ear. “That sounds mysterious. Has it happened yet, or are you still waiting?”
“I’m not waiting anymore.” She stepped back, dancing for a moment by herself, long hair down her back, arms upraised, her entire body undulating to the beat. Still looking at me. Still smiling.