Meet Cute

by Jennifer L. Armentrout

  “Okay,” I said shakily. Maybe he was right. I’d felt something today, which was more than I’d done in months. As for tomorrow, who knew? I’d quit or not quit V, I’d reconcile with my father or fall more out of touch with him than ever, and Phineas would move on to perform in Philadelphia and then Atlanta, and maybe we’d talk every day or never talk again. But it didn’t really matter right then. All I could think about was that water hitting the backs of my legs and how good it felt that Phineas was here, with me, telling me it was okay.

  And how proud my mother would be if she knew I’d just conjured up a storm.

  Somewhere That’s Green

  — — — — — —

  MEREDITH RUSSO

  NIA

  “YOU’RE NOT TRYING out for a girl part?” Lucian said. His tone was distant as he furrowed his brow and shuffled through cards with pictures of sheep, bricks, and lumber on them.

  “I don’t think I have the vocal range,” Nia said. The tip of her tongue poked through her teeth as, with the delicacy of an artisan, she placed the last of her little wooden meeple atop the pyramid she’d been building instead of paying attention to the game.

  “Bull,” Lucian said. Nia arched an eyebrow. “Audrey’s, like, nothing but falsetto. You could do that.”

  “Look,” Nia said. She sniffed and flicked a purple meeple onto its side. “I feel like the school’s barely tolerating the whole bathroom thing. If I start taking roles from the ‘real’ girls, too, they might burn me at the stake.”

  “Ah.” Lucian pursed his lips and drummed his fingers on a stack of cards. “Yeah.”

  “Which is why Audrey II’s so perfect,” Nia said. “It’s not a boy or a girl, just a terrible alien space monster, which is totally in my wheelhouse—”

  “—transgender student using the girl’s bathroom at a local school,” the TV blared, drawing Nia’s attention across the room where her dad sat with his feet on the coffee table. “A crowd has gathered at city hall to protest the school district’s decision. We’ve got Carlita Fernandez on the—”

  “Booooo!” Nia said. She cupped one hand around her mouth and threw board game pieces at the screen. “Boo! Change the damn channel!”

  “Hey!” Lucian said, snatching as many meeple and sheep tokens out of the air as he could. “Hey, come on.”

  “How about you watch your language before I watch it for you?” Nia’s dad said, turning to her with a look that stopped her in her tracks.

  “Sorry, Dad,” she said.

  “Yeah you are,” he said, turning his attention back to the screen and unpausing the DVR. “Throwing things in my house. Throwing your friend’s things in my house. Pick all that up.” Nia wanted to roll her eyes and groan as she did it, but the memory of The Look was still fresh and she didn’t dare confront it again, so she did as she was told. Lucian started to help, but Nia’s dad snapped to get his attention. “No, no, no. She wanted to act a fool, she can clean it up. She’s a big girl, let her do it. You go get a soda and chill with me.”

  “Hella,” Lucian said before disappearing into the kitchen.

  “That’s not how you use that word! It’s an intensifier, not a noun!” Nia yelled, earning a much milder glare from her father, which she returned with a sheepish grin. “What? I love him but he’s corny.”

  “It’s part of my charm, though,” Lucian said, jogging back from the kitchen with a soda and hopping over the back of the couch. He flashed Nia a perfect grin and winked. “Lull them into a false sense of security with show tunes, malapropisms, and European board games, then broadside them with Lucian, World’s Greatest Lover.”

  “World’s Greatest . . . ?” Nia’s dad said, looking at Lucian like he’d just started speaking in tongues. “Boy, you are seventeen years old! ‘World’s Greatest Lover’ my ass.”

  “That’s what she said,” Nia said, grinning like an idiot. But her father didn’t notice; his eyes were glued to the television. She looked over her shoulder and saw a blond girl in an orange cardigan in front of town hall’s big Corinthian pillars, fidgeting and pulling at her hands like someone had a gun to her head just off screen. Nia recognized her. She ran with the Christian crowd and pretty much kept to herself. The junior class alone was 1,300 strong, but Nia was a people person and she always remembered a face, especially one as cute as the blond girl’s, though the whole “fundamentalist transphobe” thing certainly took a few points off her cuteness quotient.

  “We are all God’s creatures—is, uh, what I say, really. But, I mean, if the school lets, um, Nia use the bathroom because he—because she says she’s a girl—”

  “Dad, please change the channel!” Nia said. She threw herself to the floor and groaned, wishing she could fast-forward to graduation and, hopefully, a time in her life when the local news didn’t run stories about where she went to pee. She wasn’t the only trans kid at her school, of course. Nashville was a relatively progressive city, sometimes, in its way, and the sheer mass of students guaranteed, statistically, at least a handful of people like her. But Nia was the only one with a parent supportive enough to let her transition, and Nia was the only one who had been willing to put her foot down and demand access to the correct facilities—or, well, her dad had when it occurred to him one day that his daughter really was his daughter and his charming, stifling, fatherly protectiveness kicked in. No daughter of his was going to shower with a bunch of teenage boys. Nia pretended not to care about the news report, but they both knew it was a shell, that she only distanced herself because of how scared she was, how apocalyptic the stakes seemed.

  “—a real risk to the, uh, biological girls,” the girl on-screen continued, her voice quavering, “because then can’t any boy come in? It’s horrifying.”

  “Maybe you don’t take this seriously,” Nia’s dad said, turning the volume up to match her voice, “but I do. Just because the school’s on your side now don’t mean they’ll stay that way, and we need to keep abreast—”

  “I get it, Dad, okay? I get it,” Nia said as she returned to picking up pieces.

  LEXIE

  “Who’s Lexie Thompson?” a voice called. Lexie stood up from the fountain and wiped her mouth, craning her neck to scan the crowd.

  “No way!” another voice yelled, but this one she recognized: Lucian Jimenez, the boy from U.S. History. She turned toward the voice, Lucian’s shaggy mane unmistakable even in the crowded hall, and made her way carefully through the crowd, muttering quiet apologies like machine-gun fire. She found him and a dozen other kids huddled around the bulletin board beside Ms. Gunnerson’s drama class. “She didn’t even tell me she auditioned.”

  “Did I get a part?” Lexie said. The entire crowd turned to her, looking more confused than anything, which made Lexie want to melt into the tile and disappear. Lucian grinned and pulled her forward, tapping on a list of names.

  “You sly dog, you got the part.” She followed his finger up the cast list for the school’s fall production of Little Shop of Horrors to Audrey and gasped when she read the name next to it: her name.

  “But I didn’t—” Lexie started, her eyes going wide. “I didn’t think. I just . . . You made it sound fun, so I thought I’d try, but I didn’t mean to—”

  “This is amazing!” Lucian said. He squeezed her shoulder and grinned.

  “Yeah,” Lexie squeaked. He kept talking, something about rehearsal schedules (how was she going to make room for this and church on Wednesdays?) and getting her measurements to the tech theater kids, but to Lexie it was mostly static. Her eyes drifted back down the page, locking on the line just below her name, to the entry for Audrey II. The name “Nia Robinson” was right there in black ink, plain as day, but her mind had trouble latching on to it. She hadn’t known Nia was auditioning. It hadn’t even occurred to her that a transgender would want to be in a musical, though now that she thought about it she felt a little reflexive wave of embarrassment because obviously they were people, right? With the same ambitions as eve
ryone else? Her stomach lurched and she started working out the fastest route to a bathroom when Lucian’s voice cut through again.

  “So you have to come with us to Vaughn’s farm on Saturday,” he said.

  “Whose—Huh?” Lexie tucked a strand of gold hair behind her ear and blinked. “Vaughn?” Lucian pointed to a guy nearby with a red kaffiyeh and oversize knit cap who only gave her the faintest nod before returning to a conversation with a girl Lexie didn’t know.

  “He’s the Dentist. He said we can have a party this weekend. It was gonna be small, but now? Preemptive cast party, I think.”

  “But Nia will be there,” Lexie said, her voice barely audible over the crowd. Lexie had seen Nia and Lucian sharing a table during lunch, but they were usually with a crowd. She wasn’t sure how well Lucian actually knew the other girl, and she’d always been too nervous to ask. “Right?”

  “Ah,” Lucian said. He rubbed his knuckle against his bottom lip. “Yeah. True.”

  “Won’t that be weird?”

  “Will it?” Lucian said. He turned toward the crows with a shrug, and Lexie noticed an odd tension lurking at the corner of his eye. “You could talk to her about it.”

  “I think I would die if I tried,” Lexie said. She was almost certain she had some kind of anxiety disorder, which would probably explain the constant jitters, the jumpiness, and the nauseous panic attacks, but her parents didn’t believe in psychiatry or secular therapy, so she couldn’t do much about it except try to breathe.

  “You might be surprised,” Lucian said, not looking at her. “She’s kind of intense, but under that she’s a good person. Have you ever even said hi to her, actually?”

  “. . . no.”

  “Hm,” Lucian said, then shrugged again. “Well, it’s not like you’ll have to talk. She won’t jump you or anything. Just promise you’ll come, okay?”

  “There won’t be drinking or anything, right?” Lexie asked. She hoped the answer was yes, there would, not because she wanted to drink (she didn’t, because underage drinking was a crime and she wasn’t a criminal) but because it would be an excuse to bow out without seeming rude or stuck up.

  “Nah,” Lucian said. “The techies usually pregame, but that’s it.” He looked haunted for just a moment. “Don’t cross them, by the way.”

  “O-okay.”

  “So I’ll see you there?” he said.

  “I’ll ask my parents,” she said, praying her parents would say no. She continued her prayer all through third and fourth periods, barely taking any notes on chemical equations and supply and demand, only stopping her constant entreaties to God when school ended and her mom picked her up. Lexie was normally embarrassed that she didn’t have a car, but now it was a kind of relief. If she’d had a car of her own, she suspected she might have just gotten in and driven into the sunset to start a new life at a new school.

  “How was your day?” her mom asked when she got in.

  “I auditioned for a musical,” Lexie said. She expected her mom to look angry, or at least sarcastically amused, but she just looked surprised. “I got the lead. A lead.”

  “That’s fantastic! Oh, Lex, you’ve always been so good in choir—this is perfect. What’s the play?”

  “Little Shop of Horrors,” Lexie said. That, at least, should get the reaction she was hoping for.

  “Hmm.” Her mom puckered her lips and tapped the steering wheel for a moment but then just shrugged. “I would have preferred Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat or Godspell, but Little Shop isn’t . . . too bad.”

  Lexie’s stomach bottomed out and her shoulders sagged. She’d prayed. She’d prayed so hard. Her mother’s insistence on moral outrage at every opportunity had dominated Lexie’s life for the past seventeen years, but now, when she actually needed it, it was gone. Why had she auditioned for the play? It seemed so stupid and impulsive now, but when Lucian had told her about the story she’d gone home and watched a video of Audrey’s song “Somewhere That’s Green,” and something deep inside her had resonated with the woman from the slums dreaming of a better life. She’d signed up without thinking, and now here she was.

  “My parents let me stay up and watch it when I was ten. I developed quite the crush on Rick Moranis,” her mom said.

  “You what?” Lexie balked, this revelation momentarily distracting her from the doom awaiting her on Saturday.

  “Oh, honey,” her mom said. She shook her head and smiled. “I forget you’ve never seen your father without the mustache. My type hasn’t really changed.”

  “Mom!” Lexie said. She covered her face and her mother laughed, but Lexie understood she was only delaying the inevitable. Finally, as they passed the vet’s office near their neighborhood, she took a deep breath and spoke. “The rest of the cast invited me to a party.”

  “Oh wow!” her mom said, smiling wider than Lexie had seen in a long time. She felt like her chest was imploding as she realized that God really hadn’t listened. “Lexie, that’s so good! Your first high school party!” Her expression grew suddenly serious. “There won’t be drinking will there?”

  I could lie, Lexie thought. I could tell her there will in fact be drinking, and then she’ll say I can’t go, and I won’t have to face Nia. But she could no sooner lie than a walrus could tap-dance, and she knew it, or she would have just told Lucian she had an important project or something. She especially couldn’t lie to her own mother—except . . .

  “No,” she said.

  “And you promise you won’t have sex?”

  “Mom!” Lexie slapped her hands over her face and gasped, though not for the reason her mother probably assumed. “No, Mom. You know I’m not like that.” Her mom actually didn’t know the extent to which Lexie was “not like that,” and she hoped she never found out.

  “I know, baby, but you don’t know what boys are like.” Lexie lowered her hands and blinked. “They can be insistent. Will there be an adult to supervise?”

  “I don’t think so,” Lexie said, her spirit soaring. Maybe she’d say no over this. Her mom thought for a while, but nodded as they pulled into the driveway.

  “You are seventeen,” she said. “Your grades are perfect and you’ve never gotten in trouble.” She nodded again, then turned to Lexie and smiled. “I think we can trust you. Just promise you’ll check in.”

  “Okay,” Lexie said. Her eyes drifted down to her lap.

  “What’s the matter?” her mom said. She was half in, half out of the car, a concerned look on her face. “You should be excited.”

  “It’s just . . . Nia’s going to be there.”

  “Who?” her mom said, but then there was a flash of recognition. “You’re not sharing a dressing room, are you?”

  “She’s Audrey II,” Lexie said, hating how her mother’s eye twitched over the feminine pronoun. “So she shouldn’t need a costume.” Her mother waved her hand and gave a dismissive shake of her head.

  “Just stay away from her. This whole thing should be over soon anyway.”

  Lexie wanted to ask for clarification on that, but her mom was already headed for the front door, and most of her was sure she probably didn’t want to know.

  NIA

  “Please just be nice,” Lucian said. “To Lexie, I mean.”

  Nia reached over without taking her eyes off the road and flipped Lucian’s newsie cap into the backseat, too frustrated to laugh at his screech of protest. She’d been shocked when Lucian had admitted that he and Lexie were friendly—she noticed he used the word friendly instead of friends, as if testing the waters. She knew Lucian had other friends, that obviously they didn’t spend every second of every day together and he talked to other people . . . but still, the idea that he’d spent time with that Lexie girl felt like a betrayal. And now they were in a freaking musical together.

  “Why should I?” Nia said. She flexed her fingers on the steering wheel. They were only half an hour from Vaughn’s farm and the tension was starting to get to her, heating her che
eks and making her back hurt. Thanks to Lexie, the school district was reconsidering its position. They would let her dad know their decision this weekend.

  “This isn’t a game, Lucian,” she said. “I can pee in the teachers’ lounge during lunch, but I don’t have my phys ed credits yet. I specifically put them off because I didn’t want to change in a locker room with boys. Because I was scared of changing in a locker room with boys.” She sucked in a shuddering breath through her teeth. “Before her little speech, the school thought it was just a bunch of grumpy old bigots, but she made it seem like other students cared.”

  “You saw her, though,” Lucian said, his voice small. “She was practically having a panic attack. I don’t think she wanted to be there at all.”

  “How convenient,” Nia said, shooting him a sidelong look. “Have you actually asked her what she believes?”

  “Well,” Lucian said. He rubbed his neck and looked out the window. “Not exactly, no.”

  “Of course not,” Nia said. “Of course not. Too busy flirting to give a shit about me.”

  “That’s not fair and you know it!” Lucian pointed a finger at her. “Tanner broke my nose when I stopped him from kicking your ass.”

  “The only difference I see,” Nia said, “is that she’s using adults instead of her fists.” She narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips. “And, of course, she’s a cute white g—”

  “No,” Lucian said, dropping his open palms into his lap. “She’s gay, idiot.” Nia’s eyes widened and she cocked her head. “It didn’t seem like my place to say it, but that’s why I don’t think she really meant what she said on the news.”

  “Mmhmm,” Nia said, thinking. “She actually told you she’s gay?”

  “No,” Lucian conceded. Nia rolled her eyes and Lucian shrugged. “But I really think she is. It’s like . . . I don’t know. She reminds me of you before a year ago in a lot of ways. You used to get this look like you were starving and you’d just been stabbed all at once, and she looks like that a lot, but, like, whenever a cute girl says hi to her, or when guys in class flirt with her. Stuff like that.”