by Rachel Gold
“Tucker, Quin,” Summer said. “Quin’s an organizer for the Black Student Union. We’re talking about joining in on their dance on March first.”
“Cool,” I said. I was trying to figure out too many things at the same time. Summer was wearing an oversized red flannel that was so not her style, why? New girlfriend?
And I thought Quin was queer, because she’d come to a meeting of ours, but if she was only working to bridge our two student groups, I’d have to re-think that. Too bad because she was an inch or two taller than me and I always wanted more tall girls around, made me feel like I stood out less.
Quin led the way out of the Union to a moderately beat up Ford Fiesta. It wasn’t quite the junk heap that Bailey’s car was, but only because nothing was held on by duct tape.
“It’s Katee’s,” Quin said.
“Tell her thanks from us,” Summer replied and slid into the front passenger seat.
I crawled into a narrow backseat littered with candy wrappers. Not sure how we’d fit sandwich boxes in here with three people. Probably end up with some in my lap.
As we pulled out of the parking lot, I couldn’t resist telling Summer, “Nice flannel. You going to help represent the butches?”
“Quin loaned it to me. I thought today was going to be warm.”
That explained the style and the size. It would look so much better on Quin.
Normally one woman wearing another woman’s clothing was a clear sign they were together, but the way each one sat distinctly in their seats, the way they hadn’t turned toward each other in the Union while talking, didn’t add up. I wanted to ask but wasn’t going to risk Summer blowing up at me.
Summer rambled on about how rough her life was between school and the upcoming LSAT until Quin asked, “You sure you have time to help us with the dance?”
“Oh, of course.” Summer turned half around in her seat and said to me, “The Black Student Union lost some of their leadership this spring and it turned out their finances are, well, not as good as anyone hoped. I told them we’d help out, co-host the dance, help raise money.”
“Yeah, great,” I said.
“I don’t know how to explain it to Cal.”
On paper, Cal was the leader of our LGBTQIA+ student group, but in practice most of the organizational decisions were made by the whole core group. Summer and Tesh were always in on decisions and now they’d taken to including Ella as our one out trans person.
“Just like you explained it to me?” I suggested.
“We should donate some of our funding.”
“Oh.”
That was going to be a hard sell. Cal was only ever serious about fiscal responsibility. When it came to money, he was one step away from being a gay Republican. Also this explained why she was being semi-nice to me. She wanted me to help her persuade Cal.
“Maybe see how this sale goes and start by suggesting BSU gets all the profits?” I offered.
“That’d be awesome,” Quin said.
We pulled up at the sandwich shop. I paid extra attention to how Summer and Quin moved around each other. Best I could tell, Summer was flirting lightly to see if Quin was interested and Quin enjoyed the attention but wasn’t flirting back. When Summer touched her arm, she didn’t pull away but she didn’t get closer either. She didn’t make excuses to touch Summer.
Maybe she didn’t know how to flirt with a woman. Or she had someone else in mind. Or she wasn’t into Summer.
As the treasurer for our group, Summer paid for the sandwiches. Quin grabbed two of the flat boxes so I grabbed two. Heavy but not ridiculous. Summer ran ahead, took too long fishing the keys out of Quin’s jacket pocket, and got the back of the Fiesta open.
It was clear the boxes weren’t going to fit.
“Put the seat down,” I said. “The big one on the left.”
Summer went around and tried, but couldn’t find the catch, so Quin had to put her boxes on the roof of the car and help. I shifted my boxes to rest against my hips, weight in my heels and waited. When they got the seat down, Quin came over to me and took the boxes out of my hands, fingers brushing mine. Bolt of warm, fuzzy electricity.
She slid them into the car, got hers off the top and put those on the pile. “Can you watch the car?” she asked Summer. “We only need one more trip.”
Summer nodded, leaving me and Quin to head back into the restaurant.
Quin said, “You know, you can help with the planning too if you want.”
I hefted boxes and grinned. “I’ve impressed you with my lifting and carrying skills?”
Her laugh was full and loud, made me smile, but also made me miss Nico. If Nico were here, we’d never have gone this long without everyone laughing.
“Let me know when the meetings are and I’ll try to show up,” I told her. “But I’ve got this presentation due soon that I’m freaking out about, so I don’t have a ton of time right now.”
Back to the car, boxes in. I crammed myself into the small backseat next to the stack of boxes.
Quin backed out of the parking space and asked, “What presentation?”
That was hard to explain, but I gave it a shot. “Last fall a bunch of students were being assholes about there being a trans girl in the dorms, so I said I was the trans girl they were talking about—to shut them up and keep her safe. And then I got harassed and beat up because of it. But I pepper-sprayed the shitheads who attacked me and they got kicked out of school, so that was sweet. Anyway, Professor Callander asked me to come talk to her class about it.”
“Damn, girl, that’s incredible.”
Summer sighed and stared out the window. She fluffed her hair in the pissed-off way, abrupt rather than flirty.
“It’s just one class,” she said.
“Yeah but that’s some heroism,” Quin replied.
“It’s not any more heroic than anyone who stands up for what they believe in,” Summer said. “Last fall, that protest for Trayvon Martin, standing up to people who called him a thug and acted like that meant a kid deserved to be executed in the street. You were there, Quin. I saw you. I didn’t see Tucker. And I’m not pretending to be brown. I can’t hide who I am.”
“Like I’m ever not obviously a big-ass dyke,” I shot back. “We all get harassed.”
“Yeah, but I’m at all the queer events. When are you planning on showing up for Black Lives Matter?”
I shut my mouth and stared out the window. We drove the rest of the way back to school in heavy silence.
Quin and I carried the sandwiches in while Summer set up the table. On the level below us, Cal and his boyfriend were joking with Tesh. The boyfriend was showing Tesh a dance move, Tesh repeating it, and the three of them collapsing into laughter every time Tesh’s angular body flubbed the steps.
Summer had stopped setting out sandwiches and watched avidly, smiling, eyes soft. Summer was seriously pretty when she wasn’t being a jerk. At my elbow, Quin pointed toward Summer, then Tesh, and asked, “She likes her?”
“Them,” I corrected automatically.
“Huh?”
“Tesh’s pronoun is ‘they/them.’”
“But Summer likes them, right?”
“Yeah. I wonder, if Summer is actually more attracted to Tesh as nonbinary. That would mess her up.”
“Why?” Quin asked. She took over setting out the sandwiches and I went to the stack of boxes to hand her more so it would go faster.
“The answer to that is long and convoluted and includes words like heternormative,” I told her.
She finished a row of club sandwiches and raised an eyebrow at me. “Are you going to say hegemony?”
I laughed. “Probably.”
“That’s where I draw the line,” Quin said. She picked up two empty boxes and set them behind a pillar. “See you at the dance?”
“Sure.”
Confusing. I had to talk to Ella soon about all of this. I got the impression that Quin was a lot more eager to see me at the dance than she was
to see Summer.
Chapter Ten
Nico
In Mom’s office I played her the recording. She hugged me a lot and said, “You’ll be okay.” The whole ride home was about how great the OSU doctors were and how this would turn out to be a little bump in the road, nothing major.
She was trying to convince herself along with me. It didn’t work. As soon as Yai saw us, she asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Nico needs surgery,” Mom said and explained it all while I went to put my backpack in my room. I didn’t want to hear it again.
Mom and Yai were at the kitchen table when I came back downstairs, both with mugs in their hands, serious-talk style. Like when Ella and I broke up the second time and they ganged up on me about how depression is really serious. As if I hadn’t known.
Yai watched me walk into the kitchen to get my own mug of tea. “Okay, so you get the bad thing out and you put good in,” she said.
I smiled. “Yeah, just like that.”
“You’re afraid. It will be okay,” she said to me while she patted Mom’s hand. She was way better at the convincing thing. I couldn’t even tell if she was bullshitting. She sounded completely certain.
I put my mug on the table and hugged her. She patted my back. “Okay, okay,” she said, sounding mildly impatient. “These things happen all the time. Your pops had two tumors out and in the end what was it? His heart.”
Pops was Grandpa Bolden and she had a point. I let go of her and sat down. I didn’t want to leave Yai’s side. I wanted her to keep telling me and Mom it was no big thing. But I didn’t want to stay too long or I’d blurt out the gender situation and I wasn’t ready to discuss that.
“When did you schedule the biopsy?” Mom asked.
“Monday.”
“That far out?”
“It’s six days. It’s not that far. I have to go see Dad for dinner on Thursday and I don’t want those both at once. Plus I might be sore and I want to dance this weekend.”
“You don’t have to see him,” she said. “Especially not now.”
“Might as well get it over with.”
The door from the garage opened and Matt thunked into the hallway, one leg heavy in its brace. Mom must’ve texted him because he yelled, “How bad is it?”
I glanced from Yai to Mom, “Can I skip this part?”
Mom nodded. She’d explain it to Matt. And if she was going to freak out, she could do that in front of Yai and Matt and not me. I needed to be the only person freaking out around me.
I went up to my room and watched Torchwood on my tablet until dinner. Deena and Hazey hugged me a bunch and kept watching me like I was going to fall over. But then life got normal again: eating and doing dishes, Mom asking how my classes were going, Yai talking about taking the girls to the children’s theater.
For the next two days, I went to class and did my usual homework, all the time thinking about gonads and hormones and impossible choices.
I had to talk to someone who’d get this. Not Ella, because she always knew what gender she was. I wanted to talk to Tucker. Every time my phone buzzed, I expected to see her name pop up and it wasn’t her.
I kept flopping back and forth in my head about her. I’d persuade myself that she’d panicked and was embarrassed and I should text her and tell her it was okay. And then doubt would creep in. Maybe she wasn’t getting in touch because she didn’t know how to tell me it wasn’t going to work.
I felt like I was forgetting something important about Tucker texting me. Maybe I shouldn’t contact her until I remembered what that was.
And even if she wasn’t texting because of the panic/embarrassed thing, what if after all this I decided I wanted to be a guy?
The desire to talk warred against the part of me that wanted to wait until I had all the info from the biopsy. Why scare more people if it was no big thing? Why panic if they could snip out my badly-behaved ovotestis with robots and call it a day?
To add sucking to injury, before the ultrasound I’d texted Dad with a super casual: You’re in town? Dinner?
I would love to see you. What night is good for you? he wrote back, formal for a text, but that’s how he was.
So two days after finding out I had an evil mass up in my business, I went to go see him. We met at a steak place. He was a steak and beer guy, not steak and wine. I liked that about him. I was mad as hell at him, but I liked him, if that made any sense. Or at least I liked him except for anything related to gender or the legal system or medical decisions. It was mad complicated.
I arrived a few minutes late. He’d gotten us a corner booth and was reading his tablet. He was a long person. In addition to the height I inherited from him, he had a long nose and a long face. Short hair, though, and a short beard, very black, that made his skin seem paler than it was.
I got his cheekbones and chin, Mom’s eyes and nose. Great combo, no complaints. My brother Kenan resembled him more closely. Kenan had the most don’t-screw-with-me Turkish nose possible combined with a Cro-Magnon forehead.
“Nico.” Dad got up to hug me. He held me away from him, looked me up and down and gave me a big, eye-crinkly grin.
“Hey Dad, you’re in town for a while?”
“Three, four months, to kick off this project,” he said as we settled into our seats. Dad was an engineer, bridges and stuff. “Your brother will come out for spring break and when school’s done. You two can spend some time.”
“Sure,” I said, making an effort not to sound too indifferent about Kenan showing up. He and I had nothing in common. But I guess it would be good to see him.
“Good weather so far this spring?” he asked.
“Seriously? We’re talking about the weather now?”
“School?”
“It’s fine. I don’t have a clue what I want to major in, but the classes are interesting. I’ve been a little distracted, though, by the fact that my father is still suing my mother.”
“I have to do what I believe is right,” he said. Hands flat on the table, facing me evenly, not giving an inch.
I kind of appreciated how straight up he was about it. Everybody wanted me to be something. Lots of people thought they could decide for me. They’d say, “I know you’re really a boy” or “I know you’re really a girl” when they didn’t know jack. Lots of them didn’t even say what they were deciding for me. At least my dad said it so I could fight it out with him.
“I’m eighteen, I’m the one who gets to say what’s right for me,” I told him.
“Your mother took you away and made many choices without me—choices that shape who you are now.”
“I made those choices,” I said. “You’re the one who wants to make decisions for me, not Mom.”
“Some decisions should not be made by a child.”
“Oh, like the shape of my own body?”
“Nico, I don’t want to fight with you.”
I slumped back in my chair and picked up the menu. We ordered and talked about school and work and dance.
I’d decided while I was driving over that I should tell him about the whole surgery thing. Sooner or later, Kenan would hear the news from someone in the family. We had a lot of chatty cousins. The minute he heard, he’d tell Dad. And if Dad heard it from Kenan and not me it would wreck all the bridge-building, don’t-sue-my-mom work I was doing.
I waited until we were done eating.
“I want to tell you something and have you not flip out or get obnoxious,” I said.
His bushy brows went up. “All right.”
“I’m going to have surgery this summer for a mass on my ovotestis. It’s probably nothing. I’m getting a biopsy soon. I’ll let you know what it says.”
He reached across the table and covered my hand with his. “Nico, I’m sorry. Tell me about it.”
I wanted to hug him for that Dadness of that. His big hand was warm and comforting on mine. He did the protective thing really well. I held myself back. In two minutes we’d be fighting ag
ain.
“We don’t know that much yet,” I said. “I mean, this is why I’ve been getting the ultrasounds, so it’s not like it’s advanced or anything. Could be a random growth or pre-cancerous, not dangerous.”
“The doctors said this could happen.”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t mention that every year Dr. Peace wanted me to have my ovotestis taken out and every year I said no. It was part of me and I didn’t want my parts taken away. But probably also because the idea of surgery terrified me beyond words.
“When you have this surgery, will they normalize you?” he asked.
There was the side of him I wouldn’t hug.
“Um…” I had to stall. I was pissed off enough to blurt out something nasty. That wouldn’t help change his mind or stop the lawsuit. I said, “I don’t understand your question.”
“Will they make you into a man?”
So many replies ground against each other in my brain. Depends on how you define man. You can make men surgically? When did that happen? I’m already a man whenever I want to be, why would I want to be that all the time?
I asked, “You think surgery makes men?”
“You’re being difficult. You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, you’re asking if I’m going to let them chop off my breasts and sew my vagina shut and then try to meet some Hollywood standard for dick length.”
“Why are you being so rude?”
“Because you are. You’re being horribly rude to me and you don’t know it and that makes it worse. What would’ve happened if you let them do all the surgeries to me when I was a kid and it turned out I felt like a girl inside? I saw this video of a woman with intersex traits, like me, who was being raised as a boy and when she started growing breasts the doctors lied to her and said that happened to some boys and did surgery on her. Years later she realizes she’d felt like a woman all along, but now someone had chopped her up, telling her it was for her own good. They took her breasts, Dad, for no reason.”
Dad leaned back and steepled his fingers. “What is it you hate about being a man?”