by Rachel Gold
From Dad: “That was remarkable.”
I chugged water and toweled the sweat off my face and hands. “It’s what I’m doing for the cabaret in a few days. I’d invite you but it’s not really your thing.”
“How so?”
“All the performers are genderfluid or nonbinary,” Sharani told him.
Kenan had returned to a game on his phone and without looking up he said, “Nonbinary means they don’t have a gender, Dad. Not identifying as man or woman.”
Not exactly, but I gave him points for that last part. I added, “Beyond the gender binary.”
“Is that what you want?” Dad asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said.
He held up his hands and peered heavenward like he was calling for help, but he said, “Nehal, when I see you as a man, I see a beautiful, thoughtful man. And when you are a woman, you’re a smart, powerful woman. I hope you’ll settle on one of these.”
You could’ve heard a jaw drop in the silence that followed.
Kenan broke it by saying, “If we’re voting, I want my brother back so we can complain about girls together.”
He was grinning but with a glint of truth in his eyes.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Tucker
For the next appointment, I borrowed Bailey’s car and drove to the clinic alone. It looked like a small hurricane had been through the waiting room. There were magazines everywhere, broken pieces of wood and chair parts on the floor.
“I’m sorry,” pink-haired girl said. “Don’t mind the mess. I’ll tell Bridget you’re here.”
Someone must’ve picked up one of the flimsy wooden chairs and slammed it down on its neighbor. The bottom chair wasn’t in terrible shape, a loose arm hung to one side. The top chair had split along the back and one of the legs was off, another barely attached.
I lifted that splintered chair and set it on the carpet on its back. I put the detached leg next to where it would go and set the dowels of the back into their holes. I examined the bottom chair to see if the dowels could be used in the loose arm. One was splintered and I started working it free of its hole.
A door opened but no one called my name so I jiggled the dowel free. The arm could be glued back into place but it would be better if there was a new dowel.
The door opened and shut again. Bridget bent her long legs and sat on the carpet next to me. She offered me a bottle of wood glue. I held out my hand and she put the glue bottle in it.
“You have a dowel too?” I asked.
“Afraid not,” she said. “Laney, do we have dowels?”
Pink-haired Laney said, “Maybe in the back supply room. I’ll check if you’ll watch the phone.”
“Will do,” Bridget told her.
The chair back was loose from one side but the dowels were okay so I poured glue into the holes and set it back together. I was holding it, waiting for the glue to set, but Bridget said, “I could do that.”
While she held the drying back of the chair, I contemplated the damage to the leg.
“It’s not going to be right,” I said. “Might not hold a person if we glue it.”
“I’ve been searching for something for my office to put the plants under the window. I was already planning to sneak one of these chairs away when Laney wasn’t looking. Would it hold a few pots?”
“Sure,” I said.
“I’ll take it.”
I got the glue on the cracked leg and fit it into place.
Laney came back while we were sitting there holding the chair together and said she hadn’t found a dowel—after having to look up “dowel” on her phone because she didn’t even know what that was. I had Bridget switch from holding the back to holding the leg and addressed the other leg, the one that was askew but not broken. I squeezed a bit of glue into the gap between leg and seat and gently shimmied it back true.
“Let’s take this into my office,” Bridget said.
She got up, holding the chair so that she supported its glued legs and nodded toward the door. Laney opened the locked door from the waiting room to the back and I pushed wide the half-open door to Bridget’s office. She carried the chair to the window and paused.
“Can I set it on its legs?” she asked.
“Yeah, you should. The weight of the chair will hold it while it finishes drying. Here, let me see.”
I crouched in front of it as she set it down and made sure the legs were sitting right in the seat. I put my hand on the seat and pressed down gently. It might never hold a person, but at least it wasn’t wobbly and crooked. A few plants would be perfect.
“We should put a little weight on it,” I said.
Bridget got two half-dead plants from a short bookshelf and handed them to me. I put them in the middle of the seat and turned their few green leaves toward the sun.
“Thank you,” Bridget said.
I shrugged and straightened up so I could stare out the window at the lake. Behind me, Bridget closed the door.
“I’m here because of my ex-girlfriend,” I told her. “We were breaking up. I thought she wanted to talk. Maybe she did, at first, I don’t know. I wanted to leave, but she wanted me to stay. She pushed herself on me and—I didn’t want to, I told her I didn’t—she raped me.”
I held my breath. Bridget didn’t say anything.
I turned around. She faced me, eyes soft with listening. She nodded once. I stared at her boots, at the carpet, at my boots.
“I freak out. I mean, I panic, that’s what Ella would say. I don’t want to. I was in bed with Nico and I panicked. I gave a presentation to a class, not even about that, and the panic was there. I don’t want this shit in my life. I don’t want it in my bed. I get this other feeling too, like I’m covered in grime, filth, like it’s inside my skin. I don’t want to feel that either. I don’t want to be like this. I don’t know what to do.”
“Thank you for telling me,” she said and sat down.
I figured what the hell and picked a random chair.
“Are you going to say I’m brave and all that shit?” I asked.
“Do you think you’re brave?”
“Nothing about this feels brave. I don’t even care. I want to be strong again. I used to be strong. Now I get shaky and I cry and I feel like I’m going to puke. I hate it. It was bad enough…Lindy and…God, I loved her. Fuck. How could she do that to me?”
“Why do you think she did it?” Bridget asked.
I didn’t want to think about it. I wanted her to give me an answer. Something quick and easy that made the pain end. But she sat there like we had all afternoon.
“I was leaving. She wanted to stop me,” I said. The words came out in ragged clumps. “The girl before me, the one she was dating, Lindy used to complain about how flighty she was, that Lindy had to calm her down all the time. I didn’t know that meant she was hitting her. I think, if I asked her about me, about why, she’d give some awful justification like that. That she had to show me…”
I shook my head. Couldn’t talk. Balled tissues in my fist and wiped at the tears that kept coming.
“Doesn’t matter what she’d say,” I said. “She was trying to control me. Like she owned me, like she could do whatever she wanted. Trying to beat me down inside so I’d stay.”
“But you didn’t,” Bridget said.
“Yeah, but I thought she loved me. How could I be so stupid?”
“Would you be that hard on anyone else? If there was another girl in this room who’d been through a similar experience, if she called herself stupid, what would you say to her?”
“Oh, fuck your bullshit questions. I don’t know anyone else this has happened to. Just me because I’m the stupid shit who loved someone who fucking raped me.”
“There are thousands of women who have had similar experiences to yours,” she said.
I was going to argue, but Ella had said she’d found resources online. I hadn’t looked. I was afraid I wouldn’t find anything. And I was afraid I would
. Afraid I’d have to look at it and all the panic and pain would be right there.
I breathed out, let my head hang forward, brushed away more of the tears. I said, “I’d tell her people aren’t all good or all bad. You can love someone because of the good in them for a while and maybe not see the bad. Especially if they’re working at hiding it from you, if they act like they love you too. I’d tell her it wasn’t her fault.”
Bridget let me cry. Held out the box of tissues when mine got all soaked.
“How do I stop feeling so bad all the time?” I asked.
“Let’s make a plan for that. How was your anxiety level with Nico when you panicked—on a scale from one to ten?”
“Like a seven. But the week before with Quin it was a nine and I was afraid it was going to be like that again.”
“Can you stop at five?” she asked. “Are there actions that don’t push your anxiety level higher?”
“Yeah, making out was great…oh, you mean really stop at five?”
I couldn’t imagine wanting to stop that night in the hotel, except for the fear and hurting Nico. How did a person do that? Any time action stopped in the past it was the other person stopping.
Bridget had both feet on the floor, hands resting on the arms of her chair, no clipboard or notebook or anything. I thought therapists always had those. But she was just sitting, open and relaxed. I uncrossed my arms and tried to breathe more evenly.
“Does Nico know what happened?” she asked. “Can you ask to keep things at a level where you’re never above a five?”
“Yeah, I told Nico what happened. But I want to have sex.”
“Stopping at five is for now,” she said.
“Oh. I ask Nico—assuming yo will even talk to me—to keep it where I feel five or less or whatever?”
“Whatever?” She repeated the word with curiosity, like it was a whole bunch of questions at once.
I turned enough to see the broken chair by the window and said, “I feel messed up. I feel like Nico shouldn’t have to deal with all that.”
“What if Nico was asking you to keep the action at a five or lower because Nico was afraid?”
I didn’t have to think about that. “No problem. Oh shit, yeah. I see what you did there.”
She grinned at me with a flash of mischief that made me like her more.
She said, “What you experienced is stored in your body as a traumatic memory. We don’t remember trauma the way we remember ordinary events. It’s not linear. That’s why it feels like parts of it keep coming back at you. It’s what we call a trigger. Your body is trying to protect you from something like that happening again.”
“How do we tell my body it’s not going to?”
“You practice feeling safe. I’d like to teach you a breathing exercise and one or two other ways to bring yourself into the present moment. You can try them and see what works best for you.”
“I’m going to feel stupid doing them,” I told her.
“As long as you’re feeling self-conscious in the present, not the past, you’re in good shape.”
Bridget had me breathe with a focus on exhaling, slowly, most of the air in my lungs. She had me pay attention to the sensations in my body. Feel my body and my feet on the ground. Tune in to my heart beating. Put a hand on my stomach if I felt weird or nauseous. And she wanted me to do this self-hugging, hand-squeezing thing that seemed ridiculous, but did make me feel better.
For the first time in months I had a way to manage the damage in me. I wished I’d had that before the convention and freaking out with Nico. Even if I couldn’t figure out how to get us back the way we were, I had to find a way to apologize.
* * *
On the drive back to school, it dawned on me that I knew people who were smart about having a relationship with gender complexity in it. I’d met Emily and Claire two years ago at a convention, not the kind with costumes, the kind with an academic track that I was avoiding.
Emily had come out as trans and started her transition while dating Claire in high school. From Claire’s perspective, her boyfriend turned into her girlfriend. They’d stayed together until they went to college in different cities. After a few years apart, Claire asked Emily out again and now they lived together.
I video-called them.
“Tucker,” Claire answered, cheerfully peering into the screen. Black hair was coming out of a messy bun, wisping around her face. “I thought you might be too busy to call. That was a great pic you sent. Is that Nico?”
I had to remember all the way back to the convention weeks ago. I’d sent her the photo of me and Nico in our Battlestar flight suits. Before all the stupid stuff. I propped my phone on my desk and rested my head in my hands while I talked. Thinking about Nico made my head a lot heavier.
“Yeah, that’s Nico in costume.”
“Are you an item now?” she asked.
“That’s what I’m calling about. What do you do if you like someone but maybe their body isn’t…you know, what you expect?”
Her forehead creased, mouth a thoughtful frown. “Tucker, when you love someone they become beautiful to you.”
“Seriously?”
“Every year I’m with Emily, she’s more beautiful. You don’t love someone because they’re beautiful, loving them is what makes them beautiful to you.”
She turned away from the screen and called, “Isn’t that right?”
Emily’s voice came from across the room. “You were always beautiful.”
“You’re not helping,” Claire told her. “Come say hi to Tucker.”
A chair leg scraped on wood and then Emily’s voice sounded closer to the phone. “She’s right,” Emily said. Her face appeared in the screen as she leaned over Claire’s shoulder. Brown hair curled to her shoulders, wild and loose.
Emily said, “Looking at Claire makes me happy even more than back when we were in high school. I think it’s the weight of all the good times together and deeply knowing each other.”
I had to groan. “Ugh, you two are so sappy.”
A knock on my door and Ella’s voice called, “Hey, is that Emily?”
I opened the door. Ella slipped past me and stole my desk chair. “Hey you two, how cold is it up there?”
“Minnesota cold,” Emily said. “So we’re fine and you’d be a block of ice.”
I shifted from foot to foot behind Ella. Harder to tell them the story of what I’d said in front of Nico now that Ella was here. I let them go through the basic catching up while I tried to figure out what to say.
“Tucker, you’re pacing,” Claire said.
I stopped in the middle of walking back from my dresser. I hadn’t realized I was moving that much.
“You want to tell them what happened?” I asked Ella.
“Oh, no way, this is all you,” she said and got up from the chair.
I dropped into it and made my stammering, halting way through the events from the convention to my stupid mouth in the student union. I managed not to out Nico. I didn’t have any right to.
In the middle, Claire seemed perplexed. She opened her mouth and asked, “How—?” but Emily touched her shoulder and said, “We get it.”
“Yeah,” Claire agreed and waved for me to continue.
At the end I asked, “How do I fix it?” looking from the screen to Ella so she’d know she wasn’t off the hook for answering.
“I don’t know,” Ella said.
“You have to apologize,” Claire insisted, leaning close to the screen.
“Hon, Nico said not to call,” Emily reminded Claire. “That makes it quite a bit harder.”
“Oh, she can figure it out. Our Tucker’s smart. Phone’s not the only way to communicate.” Claire turned back to the screen, staring at me hard. “But don’t go off half-cocked. Take your time and think about this. What would show Nico that you get it?”
I laughed bitterly. “I could run naked down the street.”
“I am not advocating public nudity
,” Claire said. “Not much at least. But that’s a start, being willing to be awkward. You’re on the right track.”
Ella was staring at the Evolution of Life poster that she’d hung at the start of the year when the room was empty. I’d never taken it down because it reminded me of her. She raised a finger and traced a curve that ended in the mammals.
“We’ve got to go,” I said. “Thanks a ton.”
“Keep us updated and take care of yourself,” Claire said.
Emily put her arms around Claire’s shoulder and added, “Hugs.”
Turning the chair away from the desk, I asked Ella, “What are you thinking?”
Still facing the poster, she said, “Can you imagine what it’s like to want someone and when you take off your pants they say—this person who was totally into you a minute ago—‘what the fuck is that?’ and laugh at you?”
I imagined Quin saying that when we’d been in bed. A shudder went the length of my spine. Being naked in front of someone already felt much more vulnerable to me than it used to. How would I feel to always be a hundred times more vulnerable? I crossed my legs and leaned forward.
Had that happened to Nico? For sure it had happened to someone Ella and Nico knew. How many people had to have amazingly careful conversations with prospective partners or chance hearing awful words at their most vulnerable?
I leaned an elbow on my knee and put my face in my hand. How betrayed did Nico feel when I said “fuck no” about dating a guy?
“What I said in the Union, I didn’t mean it like that, can you tell Nico? It was all Summer trying to get at me.”
“And your pride,” Ella said.
I raised my face. She was watching me, arms folded.
She said, “You’re very proud about being a lesbian, and that’s great, and Summer went after your identity. I get that. But you know that’s not what Nico heard.”
“Because sometimes Nico is a guy too, right?”
“I think inside Nico’s always both. But walking around in the world, that gets pretty exhausting to explain. Sometimes Nico plays boy or girl so that it’s all easier for a while—or at least easier on the outside. And doing it with cosplay, with characters, that’s how Nico says, ‘Hey, I’m pretending, don’t think this is the real me.’”