Nico & Tucker

by Rachel Gold

  “Yeah, you do,” Tucker said. “I mean, if you want to, you can totally look like a girl.”

  “Not a heteronormative clique girl.”

  “Me either,” she said with a snort. “You know I was about this size by the time I was twelve. I got called dyke before I knew what it meant.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Yeah, but it got me to look up ‘dyke’ and that was a pretty sweet discovery in the long run.”

  “I like your size,” I said. “And this.” I ran my fingertips along the shaved side of her head under her Mohawk. “And this.” I tugged at the collar of the men’s shirt she was wearing under her jacket.

  “My dykiness?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  I was grinning at her and she started to grin back. The heaviness that had been on her before lifted away. If we kept sitting here like this, just grinning at each other, I was going to kiss her.

  “Can I ask another stupid question?” Tucker asked.

  I nodded.

  “You said genes and hormones, but, I mean, how do you actually end up with both male and female characteristics? How is that physically possible?”

  I’d been watching her lips move, still thinking about kissing. It took me a second to digest the question.

  “Tucker, you know everyone’s junk is made from the same stuff, right?”

  She stared at me blankly, shook her head.

  “Everyone’s biology starts out from the same place.”

  “Well yeah, we all start as a glob of cells,” she said.

  “No, after that part. When you’re starting to form organs and everything. The exact same tissue makes up your genitals and reproductive kit, no matter what. There’s a bunch of cells that can turn into a penis or a clitoris or some combination, a cletis. And another bunch of cells turns into labia or a scrotum or a mix of the two. It’s all the same material for the first couple months you’re in the womb. Hormones make some parts go one way or the other or both.”

  “For real? How does that work? Penises are way bigger than clits,” she said and then blushed.

  She clearly hadn’t had nearly as many conversations about genitals as I had. I said, “Actually clits are really big. They extend way back into the body, they’re much bigger than they look.”

  I got out my phone and found a drawing of the whole thing. I held it out to her. “That’s what a clitoris actually looks like.”

  “For real? It’s that whole alien-looking thing? That’s awesome. I should have more swagger.”

  “You should.”

  She contemplated the image on my phone. I pondered how weird this was, sitting on playground equipment with a girl I wanted to kiss, talking about genitals. At least, for once, we were talking about her genitals instead of mine.

  How much of my life was going to be like this? If I got the whole surgery, picked a gender and got the business to match culturally, maybe I’d never have this conversation again. Of course I might be missing out because Tucker was very cute blushing and staring at my phone.

  Tucker said, “So it’s sort of like clothing.”

  “What?” I asked. I was almost used to her broadly leaping analogies.

  “You know how everyone has a waist and shoulders and some kind of chest, but clothing styles make it so that ‘women’s’ shirts emphasize the chest and waist and ‘men’s’ emphasize the shoulders. So walking around it seems like most men have way bigger shoulders and women have narrow waists. It erases the women who don’t have waists, like me, and guys who have narrow shoulders. And then we feel bad about how we’re different. The pictures of people’s parts are like that—they only show this perfect ideal, not all the different variations.”

  “Right!” I said. “Like there were debates about how small a guy’s dick could be before it constituted a medical emergency. Or how big a girl’s clit can be before doctors freak out and think they should cut it off. If you’ve got a small dick or a big clit or labia, you think there’s something wrong with you instead of getting that nature is unbelievably diverse.”

  She peered down at my phone screen and dragged the image larger. “It’s all made out of the same stuff,” she said. “People stuff. It’s all the same parts in different places.”

  I put my fingers on her cheek, the barest suggestion of pressure, asking that she turn toward me. She did, eyes bright. I leaned toward her, watching her eyes until it got awkward, watching for signs of fear. She met me partway, lips dizzyingly warm. Her fingers curled around the fabric of my jacket, pulling at me.

  The kiss went on. My phone fell into the playground mulch. Tucker tried to get both arms around me while I was trying the same, sitting side by side on the bumpy logs. I pulled away when I was in danger of falling into the mulch next to my phone.

  I hopped down and picked it up, brushed off the surface and shoved it in my jacket pocket. Tucker stood up too. I wanted to kiss her again, but that front-to-front contact I wasn’t ready for yet. She seemed cool with everything and I wanted it to stay that way.

  “Follow me home,” I said. “I’ll set you up in Hazey’s room.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Nico

  I couldn’t sleep with Tucker down the hall. I wanted to crawl in bed with her. Or get her to crawl into mine. Not for anything intense, just to be close to each other. But I was scared.

  Flirting I could do. Kissing I really liked. Relationships were so much harder. Not that I’d had a lot of them—only three. The one in junior high was for show. And another one almost didn’t count because I was in costume the whole time. I’d met her in costume and wore that same costume every time we got together.

  Ella was the only relationship I’d had with someone who knew all about me. It was the easiest one and the hardest.

  I’d met Ella during my first year of high school. Our moms met at a therapy center info session for parents of trans kids. Mom was there because there wasn’t a group for parents of kids with intersex traits. And I’d gone from presenting male to presenting female, so that was close enough.

  Mom and Ella’s mom decided we should meet, but getting us together was dicey. How do you go to your trans daughter and say “I want you to meet this intersex kid whose mom is cool” without sounding like a giant meddler?

  Mom took me to one of the big parties Ella’s mom was always having. With all the people around, Ella and I could hide from each other if we wanted. I went to the party plain-faced and butched up clothing-wise, wearing one of my brother’s old, ratty jeans jackets, cargo pants and boots.

  At thirteen Ella was a tiny slip of a person. She had short hair and liked to wear layers: a T-shirt over a long-sleeved shirt with another shirt to go over that if she got chilly. She was hiding the fact that she didn’t have breasts. She looked like a sad elf who’d fallen out of her tree and gathered up a bunch of human clothes for security.

  Before we got there, I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about meeting her. But the minute I saw her, I was taken with her broken little elf look.

  “Hey, I’m Nehal but most people call me Nico,” I said and she introduced herself with her boy name, which I won’t repeat here because it’s not relevant to who she was or is.

  We got awkward for two or three hours while we tried to figure out if we had anything to talk about other than gender. She liked reading books, hiking, historical dramas—boring stuff. I danced, I moved, I watched cartoons, I went to conventions in costumes, and when I wasn’t miserable, I collected friends like metal to a magnet.

  We tried to talk and gave up. Tried again and failed.

  I ended up in the basement rec room watching Doctor Who with a couple of the grad students from Ella’s mom’s department. Ella came down and sat with us.

  “What is this even about?” she asked after a while, about the TV show.

  “It’s about Rose,” I said. “She’s the blonde—the Doctor’s companion. She started out as just a nineteen year old shopgirl from London. She’s super awesome.”r />
  “She’s pretty,” Ella said.

  When the grad students wandered off—one to the bathroom and one to get snacks—I told her, “That’s what you’re going to look like.”

  She faced me, grinned and managed the grin into a compact smile.

  “Not really,” she said, but she went on smiling. “That actress looks pretty Anglo-Saxon. I’ve got a good dose of Swedish somewhere on my dad’s side. See how my nose and face are narrower.” A pause and she added, “I’m really into genetics.”

  I stared back at her because I’d never heard a white person distinguish themselves that much from another white person.

  “You’re still going to be pretty,” I said. “I mean, you already are.” And then because I was embarrassed about that, I added, “I’m Thai, and black, and Turkish-American.”

  It was the first time I’d volunteered that to anyone.

  She cocked her head to one side and studied me. I thought she was going to say something about all that, but instead she offered, “Mom says you hate your school. Do you want to come with me to mine some day and see if you like it better? It’s cool.”

  “Yeah, that’d be awesome.”

  Her school went well beyond “cool.” They had two hundred students in this old building that used to be a kindergarten. Every room had the walls painted in a theme like jungle or sunrise or starry night. All the kids watched out for each other. And they had the same teachers every year, so there were a lot of in jokes between the teachers and students.

  I came home after one day at that school and said I wanted to go for my sophomore year. And I wanted to go nonbinary. Mom seemed a little exasperated about that, but we talked to the administration and teachers and they said it was fine. They already had some nonbinary and genderfluid kids, plus a few in transition. It was no big deal. I loved that place.

  And I loved Ella. She stuck to me the whole first semester. I thought she wanted to make sure I did okay there, but then I caught on that she felt safer around me. My big flamboyant nonbinary presentation drew attention away from her. Next to me, she could dress more feminine and it worked, even when she was living in boymode.

  The summer after our sophomore year, she was starting to get breasts from the hormones. Of course we had to compare. After we had our shirts back on, I realized that I wanted to kiss her.

  I’d kissed another girl that year, but it was weird. We couldn’t work out who was supposed to move the action forward. We’d kiss and stop and get all awkward and talk about a lot of nothing. She’d play me a song, we’d kiss, end up back at awkward. After a couple of hours it was too much trouble to keep coming up with excuses to kiss her.

  I didn’t think it could get awkward with Ella. I was scared because I liked her so much. I didn’t want to mess up our friendship. But I didn’t want to keep hanging out not kissing her.

  We’d always been super straightforward with each other so I asked, “Do you want to try kissing?”

  “What?”

  “In the fall you get to go to school as Ella and people might ask you out and, you know, you could practice.”

  I got up from the chair next to hers by the computer and moved across the room because my face was way hot and we were too close. Her hair was starting to grow out past her ears in this messy pixie bob that was adorable. She watched me with her big green confused innocent elf eyes. I took a step toward the door, ready to bolt.

  “It’s cool,” I said.

  “How were you thinking this would work?” she asked. Because she was practical like that.

  “Um, I hadn’t worked that far ahead yet,” I said because I was not practical in the least.

  “Go sit on the bed,” she told me.

  I did and she turned in her chair and stared at me for a minute before getting up and sitting next to me.

  “You have to tell me if I’m bad at this,” she said. “Or if I don’t kiss like a girl.”

  “I only kissed one other girl and it wasn’t that good,” I admitted.

  “At least the bar’s low,” she joked.

  I put my hand on the side of her face and tried to go in slow and romantic like they do in movies. I hadn’t counted on the fact that she’d also be moving forward. We bumped our teeth together behind our lips and it hurt. I pulled away and came back softer. Hers lips were thin with tension.

  I pressed my lips against hers harder, but that didn’t feel any better, so I tried touching them with the tip of my tongue. She opened her mouth enough to touch her tongue to mine. That made her lips relax. The kiss was starting to feel good when she pulled away.

  “That’s kind of strange,” she said. “Not you, just kissing in general. Am I supposed to keep my eyes closed?”

  I shrugged. “If you open them and I look stupid, close them again.” I wanted to kiss more, not to talk about it.

  She laughed. I scooted closer on the bed and leaned in, kissing the side of her jaw and her neck. I kissed up to her ear but when I got there I wasn’t sure what to do. I knew not jam my tongue in her ear because my junior high pseudo-boyfriend had done that and it was nasty.

  I kissed her on the lips again. More of the tension was gone so I ran my tongue across the inner edges of her lips. She opened her mouth. I touched her tongue and circled it. We were both breathing fast. I felt puffs of air from her nose on my cheek. This made me worry that I was snorting on her, so I sat back to catch my breath.

  She grabbed one of the throw pillows from her bed and put it over her lap. I took that as a good sign. I was starting to get hard too.

  “It’s okay,” I told her.

  She shook her head. “I don’t like how it feels.”

  “Kissing?”

  “No, you know what I mean.” She gestured at the pillow in her lap and what it hid.

  Back then she still had her “boy parts,” which is what she called it when she ran out of girlie euphemisms like “my bits.” I had no trouble saying penis or dick—though never about Ella’s because she’d glare at me. I’d talked about my penis to enough doctors in my life.

  I preferred dick or junk or clit or cletis. Even Ella, with all her knowledge about trans stuff, did a double-take if I said dick and clit in the same conversation. But it was the same for me. Same for everyone really when you got down to it.

  I didn’t know how to tell Ella how great she was even with the parts she didn’t like. Back then, I didn’t know how to explain that it was all the same. Probably wouldn’t have made a difference. It wasn’t the same to her. Not at all.

  “Do you want to kiss more?” I asked, bracing a hand on the bed to show that I had no intention of messing with her lap-pillow boundary.

  “Not today.”

  “Should I go?” I asked because of how uncomfortable she seemed.

  “Yes,” she said.

  My heart did a dying-fish flop into my belly. But she’d said “not today” instead of “never again” and I hung on to that.

  She texted me later: I’m sorry.

  We okay? I replied.

  Always, she said.

  Then don’t be sorry.

  We didn’t talk about it and went back to our usual patterns of hanging out. She sat a little further away from me for the next few weeks. Then she started sitting closer.

  “Can we try kissing again?” she asked one night in her room. School had started, but we were searching for cute clothes online, not doing homework.

  “Yeah, totally.”

  With her serious expression on, she climbed onto her bed, grabbed a pillow and set it in her lap. She patted the space next to her. I levitated across the room because she was so much cute all in the same place.

  From then on, we made out every time we were alone together at one of our houses. We started junior year with her as my girlfriend in an unstated way. I even butched up so we could walk around together like a picture-perfect hetero teen couple. It made her feel safer. She thought people were less likely to read her as trans if she was out with a boy.

/>   I tried to tell her no one would read her anyway, but that first year she was super paranoid. And I got it, I’d gone from boy to girl too and you had to be highly vigilant at the start. If people saw something too boyish or too trans in how you did girl, you could get hurt.

  We went to movies and I put my arm around her. We parked by the river and made out in her dad’s truck once she got her license. That’s where I broached the idea of taking us further. At either of our houses, it felt more dicey because someone could walk in. Ella’s house was safer; her sister was at college and her parents knocked first. So did my mother, but not my sisters.

  But the safest place of all was in her dad’s truck when she could borrow it. There was a big armrest/cupholder thing in the middle that was about a mile wide, and by “mile” I mean at least eighteen inches. We’d start out each in our seat, but then Ella would keep scooting forward until she was sitting half on top of the armrest.

  So one night I said, “Turn around, put your feet in the driver’s seat.”

  I wrapped my arms around her waist and pulled her into my lap. She giggled and pressed against my chest. We both squirmed around until we were fairly comfortable. She’d taken off her mid-weight winter coat because the truck was plenty warm, and bunched it in her lap in place of the pillow.

  I pushed up her shirt and her bra and kissed all over her breasts. She leaned back, trapping my other arm between her back and the door. She was breathing fast and making happy murmurs. Kissing down the center of her chest, I tucked the fingers of my free hand under the edge of the jacket and moved slowly up her leg.

  “Nico, what are you doing?” she asked. With her head higher than mine, her lips tickled my forehead.

  “I want to touch you,” I said. It had been eight months since we first kissed and it seemed like forever. “It’s okay. It’s not weird. I’m like you.”