by Rachel Gold
“Ten minutes,” Nico said and hung up.
I grinned at the phone. Okay, Nico definitely wasn’t mad at me.
I didn’t like waiting alone in strange restaurants, so I sat in the car until I saw Nico pull up in the badass black Charger. Yo moved toward the front door, but I called across the parking lot.
Nico ran at me. I caught yo in a hug and felt yos muscles tighten, holding me close. Shivering. No, shaking. Nico’s whole body was trembling against me, crying. I held tighter and leaned back against the car, bracing to stand like that forever if I had to.
Yo was crying hard. I knew what that felt like, though I didn’t know Nico’s mix of pain, fear and desperation. I pressed my cheek to the side of Nico’s head and tried to remember what yo used to say to me in the winter when I was torn apart about Lindy.
“I got you,” I said.
Nico sobbed harder for a minute and then started to settle and catch yos breath. Yo pulled back enough to dig a tissue out of a coat pocket and blow yos nose.
“You want to sit in the car for a minute?” I asked. I wouldn’t want to go into a restaurant after crying like that.
Nico nodded and peered around me at the car. “That made it down from Freytag?”
“Hey, it’s my sister’s. She’s not big on bodywork, but it runs fine.”
“Come sit in mine,” Nico said.
Nico’s car was a hundred times nicer and it didn’t smell like hairspray. It smelled like leather and men’s cologne. I coughed.
“It’s my stepdad’s,” Nico said. “I drove him to physical therapy. I keep telling him he’s overdoing it.”
In the glow from the front windows of the cafe and the parking lot lights, Nico’s face looked more gray than brown. Nico wasn’t wearing any makeup or jewelry. And yo still looked male and female: strong lines, soft edges, eyes like a geode broken open, a sparkling array of crystal and shadow.
Nico got a box of tissues from the back, blew yos nose again and said, “Sorry.”
“For what? I’ve cried on you plenty.”
“Yeah.” Nico smiled. “Thanks.”
“Ella said it’s complicated. Do you want to talk?”
“Kind of. But I was promised fondue. Do I look like I’ve been crying?”
“More like you smoked a pound of weed,” I said.
“That works. Let’s go in.”
I walked ahead of Nico and got us a table, watched Nico take off yos long, blue, military style wool coat and settle across from me.
“Nice coat.”
Nico smiled. “It’s my Captain Jack Harkness coat.”
“Who?”
“He’s a sci-fi character. I cosplay him at conventions sometimes.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“You wouldn’t believe how much flirting I get in costume,” yo said with a wicked glint in yos eyes.
“Seriously?”
“Girls love the captains. Any of them. Some guys too. It’s probably my most effective, since I’m not into slave Leia. Kidding about that last. I mean that it would ever be a consideration.”
We paused to read the menus and order our chocolate fondue. When the server was gone, I asked, “So you dress in costumes and flirt with people?”
“Basically. You should come with me sometime. I’ll bet I could scare up a Battlestar Galactica flight suit if you want to be Starbuck. You’d look hot. I mean, not that you don’t now.”
Nico glanced down and peeked up out of the corner of yos eyes, the gesture perfect flirty girl. I laughed, but the comment and the gesture reminded me of kissing Nico and that reminded me of the party at Cal’s.
“I’m sorry about the party,” I said. “Leaving like that. It wasn’t anything to do with you.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. I am.”
Nico sat back in the booth and sighed, a grin returning to yos face. “We have a lot of stuff to talk about,” yo said.
“You want to start with what’s up with you?” I asked.
“I think you got the gist of it in the parking lot.”
“You’re scared as fuck? And kind of pissed off and freaking out and you don’t want to tell the people around you how messed up you feel? You don’t want them to worry any more than they do?”
Nico’s eyes were bright. “Just that. I figured you’d get it.”
“I haven’t told my mom or my one sister about what happened. I don’t know how to explain it to them. And I don’t want to stop being the tough one.”
“I don’t want to stop being the playful one,” Nico said. “And Mom has gone through enough with me already.”
“How bad is it?”
Nico shrugged. “It’s pre-cancerous which is medium bad. It means they’ve got to take out more stuff than they would otherwise. I should have let Doc Peace take it out years ago, but it’s part of me, you know.”
“Um, no, you lost me. What part are we talking about?”
The fondue showed up and Nico waved my question away. We dug in. I’d had cheese fondue once, but never chocolate. I made a serious mess of my side of the pot and table. Nico was a lot more deft, even though yo kept glancing at me.
Finally yo said, “I forgot how hard this talk is.”
“Hey,” I waved my fondue fork in a little circle. “I’m your friend who’s mostly not a douche. You can tell me stuff.”
Nico ate another fondued bread piece, chewed it slowly, stared at the top of the table. Then yo said, all in a rush, “It’s not just that my gender is nonbinary, I also have intersex traits.”
“Hang on while I Google that.” I pulled out my phone because I wasn’t sure I was remembering correctly what that meant. Plus I had to cover anything stupid my face was doing.
Nico reached across the table and pushed down the phone I was holding up between us.
“I have physical characteristics that we’d culturally describe as both male and female,” Nico said. “Naturally. I produce all the hormones in decent amounts. In a binary system, I really am both.”
I put a big piece of chocolate-dipped bread in my mouth and mumbled an affirmative so I’d have time to think. I’d figured Nico was some form of trans that didn’t go neatly into male or female categories. I’d wondered if Nico took hormones to stay in a nonbinary space physically. But it hadn’t occurred to me that Nico’s body could produce that situation naturally.
In my whole life I’d probably read one paragraph about intersex people. Yes, it was in our group acronym: LGBTQIA+ in which the “I” stood for “intersex” but it wasn’t like anybody knew a real intersex person. Except we did. We had for a while.
Nico dipped another piece of bread in the chocolate but paused, holding it over the fondue pit, dripping.
“Not all people with intersex traits are nonbinary or genderqueer, you get that, right?” Nico asked. “Most identify as female or male. So don’t think you know things about people with intersex traits that you don’t.”
“Like Ella?” I asked.
Nico’s eyebrows went up because we both knew Ella was trans, which was a whole different situation.
I explained, “The way that people were more willing to believe that I was a trans woman because I’m closer to the stereotype than she is. People don’t get how many trans women there are who aren’t out, who are living their lives. You’re saying that being intersex, or, I mean, having intersex traits is like that, most people are men or women and you’d never know.”
Nodding, Nico said, “Yeah, and sometimes people don’t know they’ve got intersex traits until they try to have kids or they’re being raised as a guy and suddenly get a period. And most nonbinary people don’t have intersex traits.”
“Okay, sure. Like Tesh.”
“Well, we don’t know about Tesh because we’d have to know all their inner and outer business, and we’re not about to ask. But yes, the most important thing is that a person doesn’t have to have anything going on with their bodies to be nonbinary, to not fit into the cultura
l gender molds.”
I nodded and swirled a piece of banana in chocolate.
Nico went on talking. “And heck, I may change my gender presentation again, I don’t know. I was a boy for a while, and then a girl, and then neither seemed to fit, or rather both did. I don’t like having to be one thing all the time.”
“I think I get that,” I said.
Nico waved yos fork at me. “I wasn’t kidding about the cosplay. Come with me sometime.”
“Okay.”
“What are you doing tomorrow?”
“Taking the car back.”
“There’s a little con down in Cincinnati, we could drop off the car and go. I like science fiction more than fantasy, but I’m open to both—you like either?” Nico asked.
The topic switch felt abrupt. I wanted to get back to talking about Nico and about what intersex traits meant, but I couldn’t think of a smooth way to do that. And maybe Nico needed this change, the space of it.
I said, “I watched Firefly and most of Battlestar Galactica.”
“You’re one of us already.” Nico beamed at me. “Did you like Battlestar okay? There are some flight suits in the basement of the Noodle, we could pull off Starbuck and Athena pretty easily.”
“Um, yes? Noodle? What?”
“Can you pull your Mohawk into a ponytail?” Nico asked.
“Yeah.”
“Starbuck and Athena it is. Where are you staying?”
“I didn’t think that through,” I admitted.
“You heard what was up with me, borrowed a car and drove down without a plan? Tucker!” Nico laughed and didn’t wait for me to answer. “Want to crash at my place?”
“I didn’t mean to invite myself over like that,” I said.
“Whatever. I think Hazey has a sleepover, you can sleep in her room so, no pressure.”
“Thanks. I mean about the place to crash. Well, and everything.”
We talked about shows and costumes and a bunch of the theater productions Nico had been in. As Nico talked I started to see it all come together: acting, costumes, using artifice to project yourself for others, cosplay. And then I did want to get into a flight suit, even though I was going to feel like a huge dork, and walk around some convention so I could see what Nico was like in that setting.
When the fondue place kicked us out, I paused in the parking lot between our cars and asked, “What if I have more questions?”
“About my intersex traits, right? Because it’s completely natural to have questions about Battlestar Galactica.”
“Uh, yeah.”
Nico bounced on the balls of yos feet and gazed off into the darkness. “I’m sorry, it makes me antsy talking to you about this, you know. Let’s go somewhere.”
“I’ll follow you,” I said, because I would. Anywhere.
Chapter Sixteen
Nico
Tucker got in her sister’s junker and followed me through the dark streets to a small playground. It was in the middle of the winding park system by my house. I’d never seen kids there, but I usually went in the middle of the night.
Tucker leaned against a post of the wooden monkey bar structure. I kicked around in the wood shavings spread across the playground.
“So questions, go,” I said.
She’d driven down here at the drop of a hat for me, I could put up with the usual curiosity and feeling like an alien.
“What makes people have intersex traits?” Tucker asked.
“I’ll take genes, hormones and science for two hundred,” I said. “But if you ask Mom she’ll tell you it’s all nature doing its diversity thing because that’s how nature rolls.”
“You have a cool mom.”
“Yeah. She took me away from my dad because he forced surgery on me.” Having said that, I had to go on. “My dad’s all about how men are better, though he knows not to say that outright. He was sure I should be a boy. They raised me like that for a while but Mom wouldn’t let anyone do surgery on me until I was old enough to say what I wanted. That’s the right thing, the current standard of care. Not all the docs know that, though. Dad had no trouble finding one who’d do a surgery that I didn’t need medically but that would make me more ‘normalized’ as a boy.”
“How old were you?”
“Four.”
“Jesus…” The word whispered out of Tucker’s lips low and sad.
“That’s when we moved here. My brother Kenan too, but he went back to live with Dad after a few years.”
“So it’s you and your mom and…you have sisters too, right?” she asked.
I’d sent her pics of me goofing around with my sisters, but we hadn’t talked much about family. “Oh, I should prepare you. There’s my step-dad Matt and my sisters Hazey and Deena, and Yai, my grandmom. You’ll meet them tomorrow.”
“Whoa,” she said. “That’s a lot.”
“They’ll like you. They love Ella and you stood up for her. You’re already a hero to them.”
I went hand over hand along the bars, knees bent up. The strength and pull in my arms felt good. At the end I turned without putting my feet down and swung hand over hand back. Tucker hopped up to sit on a platform, her feet dangling. When I dropped from the bars, I sat next to her.
“Hazey’s the one who started calling me Nico instead of Nehal, because when they moved in, she was young enough to have trouble with her Ls. She called me ‘Neho’ but that had the word ‘ho’ in it—not cool when I was eleven—so we settled on Nico.”
I was babbling from nervous energy, knowing the next part of the story I wanted to tell Tucker, but scared of her reaction.
“I lived as a boy until I was ten. And then I switched to girl until I was almost fifteen. Since then I’ve just been Nico. But there’s an M on my birth certificate, if that’s going to freak you out.”
“But you’re not a guy,” she said.
“I’m me.”
“I liked kissing you. Before I…I got scared. It wasn’t you. You know what it was. I’m sorry I left, but I had to. Um, and there’s another thing I should tell you.”
I nodded, because how bad could it be?
“I hooked up with someone else last week,” she said. “You know, to see if I was okay. And I thought maybe I should rebound.”
The idea of Tucker having sex with someone else made me way more mad than I wanted to be in the middle of the night alone with her. Mad and sickeningly jealous, when what I wanted to feel was the soft closeness we’d had a minute before.
After a lot of silence, Tucker said, real quietly, “I wasn’t okay. Last week, in bed, I could hardly stay there. I got all shaky inside. But that also made me happy—messed up as that is—because I knew at the house with you, it was all me. And that house. That night, with Lindy, she came up to me on the back porch. That’s where she talked to me about going to her place. It started in that house. If I hadn’t gone with Lindy, she couldn’t have done what she did to me. The house reminds me of her and of how stupid I was.”
I should’ve thought of that. Should’ve suggested we go somewhere else the night of Cal’s party. No wonder she left so fast if the house was triggering her.
“You weren’t stupid,” I said.
She waved away my comment. “If we kiss again or whatever, I might freak out.”
“It’s okay to be scared.”
I moved my hand toward her and she laced her fingers with mine. What was the right way to talk to her about panic and trauma and what it did to your brain? I knew how to explain it in theory, but not in a way that would feel okay to her.
She said, “Anyway, that’s enough about that. What happened after you all moved out here?”
“You can talk about it,” I said, squeezing her hand.
“Do I have to?”
“Of course not.”
“I don’t want to,” she said, not looking at me, a slumped shadow in the dark.
“Hey okay, back to me,” I told her. “After we moved here, I got into dance and school
plays. Yai moved in with us. I got to spend summers in Thailand with her. Most of her family’s still there. Over there, people aren’t weird about appearance like here. Yai’s sisters would say, ‘Hi, you got fat’ and it wasn’t an insult. People in the family had birthmarks and scars and it was never a big thing. Over there things like that make you who you are. It’s okay to be different. It was good for me to see that as a kid.
“Plus there were kathoey people all over. Thailand has a third gender. I remember hearing one of my mother’s cousins saying to Mom once when she was over for part of the summer: ‘You’re lucky if Nehal grows up to be a ladyboy. They’re the most fun. I wish I had a ladyboy child.’”
“Ladyboy?”
“That’s how some people translate kathoey in English. It’s not my pick. And it’s not the same as trans.”
“Why’d you switch from boy to girl?”
“I wanted to try it,” I told her.
I didn’t mention that I’d started growing breasts at eleven. I liked that we weren’t talking about my body. I’d had too many conversations that went, “I have intersex traits,”…“Oh, what kind of junk did you get?” Coming out as a person with intersex traits—not a reason to ask me about my genitals. But Tucker got that. She hadn’t asked.
I played with her index finger, rubbing it between my finger and thumb as I talked. She had a callus on the outer edge. I liked the contrast of the soft side of her finger and the hard thickness of the callus.
“The boy pressure started to get scary,” I said. “We fought when we were little, the boys in the neighborhood, and we talked about fighting all the time: endlessly rehashing whether our group could take some other group of kids. A new guy would come along and we’d spend days talking about who could kick whose ass. Or which superhero could beat another, which sports team kicked another team’s ass, you get the idea. And all the rest of the time was about girls. I liked girls, but I didn’t want to spend all that time talking about them. I’d rather talk to them and I figured maybe I’d rather be one.
“Mom put me in a junior high away from my elementary school and I went as a girl. I did slightly better as a girl than as a boy. I’m better at seeing the emotional stuff people are trying to pull than acting tough. I got in with a decent clique of smart girls and had a pretty good time in junior high. But first year of high school sucked. I had to dress girly and do makeup and all that because with my shoulders, and the muscles in my legs from dancing, and the way my cheekbones look in harsh light, if I’m not careful I don’t get read as a girl.”