As La Vista Turns

by Kris Ripper

  “Aunt Florence claims he’s full of regrets and would see me tomorrow if I let him.” She paused. “She said he wants to meet James. Mom hasn’t expressed an interest in James at all. I’m like this blemish on her perfect record of being exactly what she was supposed to be. Poor mom. With her fat, pansexual, half-black daughter. And now I have a child out of wedlock.”

  I sucked in a breath and bit my lips so I wouldn’t say anything. But I wanted to defend her from her own charges of imperfection. Dred was strong and incredible and funny and beautiful. And I definitely wanted to defend her from anyone who would dare be ashamed.

  My teeth dug harder into my lips.

  Emerson’s smile was somewhat sick. “She and my folks could hang out. They think I moved away to the city to live a life of sin. They’d be freaked out if they knew I lived with a little kid, that you trusted me with him.”

  She reached across the table, and for a second they clasped hands. Two people who never went out of their way to touch, connecting over the perception of their wrongness in parents who should have only shown them acceptance.

  Then they let go.

  “I think I might be able to see Dad without killing him. He said a lot of fucked-up shit to me, but it was a long time ago, and he sent two hundred dollars when James was born. And a note that said ‘Love, Dad.’ That was it. Aunt Florence says he’s repentant, which isn’t really my business, but maybe—I don’t know.” She gestured toward James. “It’d be good for him to have a grandfather. Even if Dad and I never really get close, maybe he could be around for James.”

  We sat in silence but for James’s crunching and occasional insistent question to which he didn’t seem to require a response.

  I stayed a while longer, trying to find a way to apologize to Dred. But even when Emerson went upstairs, she wouldn’t let me. The second I said “Sorry” she held up her hand.

  “Don’t. It’s okay. It’s not part of your plan, I get it. I shouldn’t have pushed the whole thing anyway, Zane. Don’t worry about it.”

  “But—”

  “Really. Let it go. And you can keep coming around to do your quilt and stuff.” She offered me this small smile that looked like the kind of thing you did when you really wanted to cry. “We’ll go back to fake-dating. We were better at that, anyway.”

  I wanted to know what that meant. I wanted to argue that the last thing we should do was go back to fake-dating. Instead I kissed James’s head and said good night.

  For a long moment I sat in my car, staring up at her bedroom windows. It was dark in there, just enough light coming in from the hallway for me to see vague shapes.

  I’d slept there. Smelled it. Cried in her arms. Felt safe.

  But I didn’t even know this could be part of my plan. Maybe I want it to be.

  Or maybe I didn’t. I definitely couldn’t go back to Dred until I was absolutely certain. And then I’d hope she’d give me a second chance.

  Jaq kicked my ass all over the gym on Wednesday and dragged me back to Hannah’s after.

  “You realize you live here, right?” I needled as I stumbled up the stairs after her. (Of course we weren’t allowed to take the elevator.) “I mean, you might be in denial about it, but that’s what it is.”

  “Oh, like you’re one to talk about denial. Heard about your breakdown at Carlos’s, kid.”

  “Bite me.”

  She laughed.

  We finally made it into Hannah’s elegant, lovely condo. I collapsed in a heap on her couch. “Your girlfriend missed her calling as a personal trainer!” I yelled.

  Hannah appeared, like a wonderful post-gym fairy, with wine for us, a soda for Jaq, and a bowl of tortilla chips. “Tough day at the office, hon?”

  “Actually, I negotiated leases for two different locations and sold a third this week. I’m on fire.”

  “Cheers to that.” We clinked glasses. “Let me get the salsa and guacamole.”

  “Oh my god, guac. You are a goddess, Hannah.”

  “I know it.”

  Good guac is the food of the gods, but most people load it up with spices and shit. That’s weak sauce. Hannah’s guac, I have reason to know, is always good. Avocados, garlic, salt, lemon. That’s all you need. Unless the avocados are underripe. That’s the only reason to add more shit to your guac.

  Hannah’s avocados were perfect. I might have made a . . . sound. Possibly.

  “Are you moaning right now?” Jaq threw herself into the other corner of the couch. “Gross, Zane. Keep your guac-based sex acts to yourself.”

  “It’s not my fault that Hannah’s guac brings all the girls to the yard. Oh my god, that’s so good. It almost makes up for your sadistic treadmill routine.”

  “Almost?” Hannah snatched the bowl away. “Did you say ‘almost’?”

  “Totally. Totally makes up for Jaq’s sadistic treadmill thing.” My empty chip wavered in the air. “Please give me back the guac, I swear, I’ll never say anything less than fully enamored of it again.”

  “Speaking of fully enamored,” Jaq began.

  “You shut your trap.”

  “Girls.” Hannah refilled her wineglass. “I made a salad. I’m sure we can forage for carbohydrates after that, but I’ve eaten nothing but crap this week.”

  “Salad sounds great.” It did. In the week leading up to ovulation I usually ate a lot of fruits and vegetables. It might have been intentional back in the early days, but now it was just another way of marking time, an internal calendar made up of inseminations and periods and everything in between.

  Jaq relented and reached for the chips and guac. “So I did a horrible thing today. Kind of.”

  “A kind of horrible thing?” I asked.

  “Kind of. I, uh, slipped with Merin’s pronouns. In class. He’d said some jackass thing, and Sammy teased him, and I heard myself say ‘Torture him on your own time, Sammy.’” She grimaced. “I’ve never done that before. I rehearse as they file in for Journalism. She, she, she.”

  “What happened?”

  She sighed and laid her head back. “Merin froze like he’d been shot. Sammy laughed and covered over the whole thing with a manufactured question about deadlines. Or something. But I can’t stop thinking about the look on Merin’s face. Like I’d stripped him naked in the middle of class. I feel horrible. And of course he won’t let me apologize.”

  Hannah slid over to sit on the coffee table and take one of Jaq’s feet in her hands. “Do you want to go back to using ‘she’ when you’re at home? I think that made it easier.”

  “It did. But it also felt so wrong. No. Merin’s—you know. I can’t go back now. It’s weird to me that I ever thought of him as ‘her.’ Babe, that feels so good.”

  “That’s the point.”

  They traded looks.

  I cleared my throat. “So he needs a place to live?”

  “Yeah. He stays with Sammy for a few days, and at his girlfriend’s parents’ place. But he always goes back home when he worries he’s overstayed his welcome, and that always ends with a huge fight and him walking out.”

  “He won’t stay with Josh and Keith?”

  She shrugged. “I think he feels like he already owes them too much. He might be willing to add their couch to his couch-surfing list, but he knows they’d let him move in permanently, and he won’t do it.”

  Hannah began working on the other foot. “I hate feeling helpless. It’s ridiculous that there’s nothing we can even do to help. Short of funding an entire transgender shelter.” She stopped. “Wait. Can we do something like that?”

  Jaq offered a tired smile. “What, like you and me? I think it might be a bit more than we can afford.”

  “We need more rich queers.”

  “Right?” I got a third (or maybe twenty-third) chip. “I thought all queers were supposed to be rich. That’s why I decided to be queer. For the money.”

  “And all the social advantages,” Hannah added. “Like Club Fred’s. Who could resist Fred’s?”

/>   Jaq took her feet back in favor of kissing her girlfriend. “Technically even nonqueers can get into Fred’s.”

  Hannah and I performed gasps of mock-outrage.

  “No way!” Hannah fanned herself. “They wouldn’t dare!”

  “Nonqueers,” I said. “I’m trying to wrap my head around this idea. Who would choose not to be queer? Do they have some kind of webpage I can go to in order to better understand them?”

  Jaq shook her head. “What would they even say? Must be so boring.”

  “Hey now.” Hannah pointed at both of us. “You two be nice. Some of my best friends are not queer.”

  I leaned forward, trying to keep my face serious. “Will you ask them if they have a website?”

  We dissolved into giggles.

  Jaq clapped her hands. “Okay, okay, back to reality. There are actually some protections in place for transgender homeless people, though implementation is sketchy. Still, it’s the Bay Area, so if you’re gonna be trans and homeless, this is probably the place to live. But what do we do with these kids who are turning eighteen with no stability, no safety net?”

  “We talk to Josh and Keith,” I said.

  Hannah nodded. “And I was actually serious. I can’t bankroll a shelter, but there really are rich queer people. At least some of them would contribute if we could work out what it is we need.”

  “Scholarships.” Jaq downed her cream soda. “Lots and lots of need-based scholarships.”

  “But.” I hesitated. “Not everyone wants to go to college.” Jaq was a teacher. We didn’t always see eye-to-eye on education stuff.

  “Well, setting aside the fact that a scholarship covering room and board would take care of a whole lot of problems at one time, and the fact that outcomes are still more promising for college graduates than non-college graduates, that’s not actually what I meant.”

  I waited. Hannah nudged her with stockinged toes.

  “Don’t you think there should be a way we can fund . . . something, some kind of program, that would cover room and board, and prioritize job training, or apprenticeships, or hell, I don’t know, internships.”

  Damn. “Sometimes I remember how smart you are.”

  She threw her chip at my face and got me in the neck.

  Hannah, way less juvenile than Jaq and me, had unearthed a notebook and was hunting around on the table. “I need a pen. A scholarship for kids who want to go directly into a field, but it’d be a program, structured like college, with dorms, and a cafeteria. I love this idea.”

  Jaq glanced at me. “There might not be any demand for something like that—”

  “Hush, Mama’s writing.”

  I smothered my laughter in my elbow while Jaq glared at me. Glared daggers at me.

  “I love everything about this idea,” Hannah mumbled, still writing. “We have to talk to Josh and Keith. And Fredi. And the gentleman who always sits at the back.”

  “Donald,” I said.

  “Right. We have to talk to the people who might be able to find us some of those proverbial rich queers.”

  “You mean the old guard.” I had a conflicted relationship with the people who came up when things were more militant and defined. I liked being part of a community that held a certain amount of fluidity as a core value. Sometimes sitting around with old queers made me feel like we were two different species of queer, nearly unrecognizable to each other.

  “Hannah and I can interface with the old guard.” Jaq straightened the lines on the button-down she’d changed into after the gym. “A butch and a femme, we’re totally old guard. Right, babe?”

  “You mean, except for the crate of sex toys?”

  Jaq sputtered. “We wouldn’t tell them about that!”

  Hannah’s pen didn’t stop moving. “Mm-hmm. I think this might be workable, but we can’t be the first people who’ve ever thought of it. I’ll have to get on research.”

  “Ask Keith,” I said. “He loves research.”

  “I will. Can you two get dinner going? I want to write all my thoughts down while they’re fresh.”

  We retreated to the kitchen.

  I raised my eyebrows. “So Hannah’s kind of . . . driven.”

  “You have no idea. Here. Do something clever with”—she gestured to a bunch of greens—“whatever that is.”

  “I think it’s . . . watercress?” I tried one of the leaves. “Is it weird that all greens taste like freshly cut lawn to me?”

  Jaq wrinkled her nose. “Gross. How can you even eat them?”

  “I guess I kind of don’t mind eating grass.” I dangled a bouquet of possibly-watercress in her face. “Yummy!”

  “You’re twelve years old.”

  “You know me so well.”

  “Focus!” Hannah called.

  I sighed. “Yes, Mom!”

  “Don’t make me give you a time-out, Zane!”

  “Awww.”

  “Hey.” Jaq’s voice was low. “If you need anything for this insemination, let me know, okay? You want to do another conception party? It’s been a while since you shot up at home.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not doing anything. I’m not rearranging my schedule. I’m not skipping the gym.”

  Her eyes widened. “Seriously?”

  “I can’t do it anymore.” I abandoned the salad and sat on the counter. “I can’t stop my whole life twice a month: once to inseminate, and again because I’m so fucking depressed when I get my period. I can’t, Jaqs. It’s awful.”

  “I know.”

  “So I’m gonna stop doing that.” My eyes pricked with tears. “Anyway. I talked to the boys. Basically Tom will give me as much spunk as I want.”

  Jaq cracked up, then covered her mouth like laughing was inappropriate at that juncture. “Sorry! Sorry, but Tom giving you spunk, oh damn, that’s too fucking much.”

  “I know. What’s weird is it’s beginning to not feel that weird to me. Especially after all those years of being like, ‘Whoa, unprotected sex, you could die.’ And now I’m cavalierly gonna shoot up with unwashed sperm.”

  “Unwashed?”

  “That’s the term. There are different types—”

  Her eyes started to glaze over.

  I sighed. “Never mind. And anyway, he went and got tested for everything on earth, even before they talked to me.”

  “Aw. That’s kind of sweet, actually. Like he didn’t want to talk to you until he was totally sure it could work.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Plus, I think dying from unprotected sex was a whole lot more about, you know, getting punished for being irresponsible than it was about actual medical fact.”

  “Lesbian superpower.” I held up my hand for a high five. One of our old rituals, dating way back to the first sex ed class we’d had in high school, when Jaq had raised her hand and asked the health teacher what the health risks of lesbian sex were.

  The teacher had stammered and blushed and ended up getting a little angry at her inability to address the question. We’d laughed about it, but the undercurrent there was: You don’t matter. Your health is irrelevant. Your sex is irrelevant. Who you are is irrelevant.

  I thought about Merin sitting through that same class (though at least the current health teacher at LVHS was one of Jaq’s friends, and probably would handle that shit better). If you were a trans teenager sitting in health class, what messages did you get from that? Other than the fact that you apparently didn’t exist?

  “Okay, bestie.” Jaq returned to the salad-prep process. “Got it. Nothing out of the ordinary. I will hound your ass to the gym like usual. Noted.”

  “Hey, Jaq.”

  “Hey, what?”

  I jumped down from the counter and wrapped her in a hug from behind. “I’m really glad we knew each other as kids. I don’t know who I would have become without you.”

  She hugged my arms. “Me too. I think about that all the time. We were real fucking lucky, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

&n
bsp; “Zane Jaffe! Unhand my woman!”

  I gave Jaq a squeeze and disengaged. “You can lease her from me, but she’s totally my best friend forever.”

  Hannah grinned. “As long as I get all the sexy parts of her.”

  “Ew. Gross. Don’t talk about Jaq and sex in the same sentence. That’s disgusting.”

  “Hey!” Jaq protested. “Sex with me is not disgusting!”

  Hannah kissed her. “Damn right it’s not, sugar.”

  Dinner was good. We talked more pie-in-the-sky dreams about what it’d look like to have a college that was focused on apprenticeships, and if kids like Merin would even be interested.

  I recklessly volunteered to ask him. Jaq laughed at me. Hannah told me to take notes and send them to her.

  I went home after, to my place, and as much as I still loved walking in, keeping the lights off, going directly to the bathroom to shower, leaving all the doors open, not bothering with clothes—I couldn’t escape the idea that the night would have ended even better if I were in Dred’s bed, with her, instead of my own, alone.

  I got an email from Ed Friday morning, asking if I was free for lunch. I surveyed my to-do list and decided I was definitely free.

  We met at Taco Junction and took our food around the corner so we could sit in the sun.

  Transitioning had been good for Ed; he’d gone from being a masculine-leaning, lesbian-identified person who never looked comfortable, to being a man who looked comfortable in his skin in certain situations. Like now, sitting with me at a table eating lunch. He passed effortlessly these days, letting whiskers grow on his face, carrying himself differently than he had even six months ago.

  “You look good,” I said.

  He cracked a smile. “Are you hitting on me right now? I’m flattered, but I have a girlfriend.”

  “Can you imagine Alisha in a cat fight? No, thank you. And I wasn’t, babe. I’m only into girls.”

  His eyes flashed. “That, I’m not. And thanks, Zane. Appreciate it.”

  “Since I doubt you took me out to lunch so I could compliment you, what’s up?”

  “We have a thing.” He rearranged his beans and rice and guac burrito as he talked. “It’s— Actually, I have no idea how you’re going to feel about this.”