by Rachel Gold
If you’d asked me yesterday, I’d have told you I was good at making friends. But in the past I always had friends around me, so making more friends felt natural; when you were part of something, it was easy to invite others to join in.
I went into my room and closed the door and locked it. Then I went through the bathroom to the empty room and made sure that door was locked. I sat on the bed and curled my knees into my chest and just let the shy-scared-spidery feeling happen for a while. When it started to fade away, I got up and unpacked.
My clothes didn’t all fit into my closet, so I borrowed space from my nonexistent roommate. I also hogged both sinks in the joint bathroom just because I could, not because I have that much bathroom stuff. I hung a poster in my room, the one of the Doradus-30 nebula that always reminds me how big the universe is, and then I went and hung my Evolution of Life poster in the other room. It was too bare in there otherwise.
Dinnertime came but I wasn’t really hungry because I’d eaten with Mom and Dad a few hours before. I decided I should really get a mini-fridge for the room and maybe a hotpot or something. I set up my laptop and started looking at things I could buy for the room, and then checked out my class schedule and the various orientation events I was supposed to attend. At least it would be a busy next few days.
Just in case I had too much downtime and wasn’t so good at this making friends on my own thing, I also looked at the university clubs. They were mostly really boring stuff about farming or cheerleading or ineffective social change, but one caught my eye: Real-world Gaming at FU.
There was contact information for a student named Johnny Han, so I sent him an email letting him know I was interested in joining. Hopefully by Real-world Gaming they meant something easy and not too geeky. I couldn’t really pull off live-action role-playing without laughing and I was in no shape for parkour, but I played a lot of other games in high school.
I didn’t miss high school. Not exactly. But I missed…something. Friends? I texted Nico: Call?
My phone rang two seconds later and I grinned. I’d been #3 on Nico’s speed dial for the past four years.
“How’s the middle of nowhere?” Nico asked.
“Shockingly well-populated. I haven’t seen a single cow on campus yet.”
“Crap, girl, why did you not come to school with me? I’m so bored.”
“You’ve been there three days,” I pointed out. Not like it mattered, Nico could get bored in ten minutes absent the right stimulation. That’s what happened when you were the kid of an engineer and an astronomer. If Nico couldn’t take something apart and put it back together again or fit it into the grand scheme of the cosmos, it was boring. Nico had bought me the Doradus-30 poster and told me that, like me, it was an “extremely luminous non-stellar object.” We’d been sort of dating at the time and I hadn’t been inclined to complain about th e “object” part of that compliment.
“So bored,” Nico repeated. “It’s like a production plant of human beings out here and Mom won’t stop checking on me.”
“I’ve got an extra room if you want to drive out here for a few days.”
“Anyone hot enough to drive out for? Other than you, of course.”
I laughed. “I’ll keep you posted. Don’t tell me there’s no one at OSU, you have ten times the options I do out here.”
Nico laughed with me and, into the pause after the sound, I added, “I miss you.”
“Miss you too, baby girl. Gotta run.”
I said bye and clicked off and then just stared at my phone for a minute. Was Nico right? Should I have gone to OSU? Furthermore, if there was someone hot out here, what would I even do about it? I’d barely managed to date Nico, let alone a total stranger.
Chapter Two
Tucker
By the time she got back to campus, Tucker was starving. Trust Lindy to invite her over for a movie and only have popcorn and beer even though it was dinnertime. The Student Union’s restaurant didn’t close until ten, so she swung by to pick up something. With luck her roommate would be asleep when she got back and she wouldn’t have to hear another story about the greatest high school production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the history of ever.
Cheese breadsticks or hummus wrap? That was the real question. The garlic cheese breadsticks were loaded with butter and salt, making them taste like savory heaven, and they had the added benefit of making her highly avoidable until she’d brushed her teeth, just in case her roommate was still awake.
The Student Union was doing a booming business as new and returning students met and caught up on their summer activities. The whole place reminded her of a coral reef: schools of colorful students swarmed around the tables. Here and there were individuals, but most of them already seemed to be moving in packs.
Toward the back of the wide seating area was the huge table that the LGBTQIA students had commandeered last year as their go-to meeting spot. A few students sat there now and as she tried to identify them, the biggest guy at the table spotted her in line and waved. That would be Cal, who was built like a two-door refrigerator and who dressed as stereotypically gay as possible while looking like a football player. She grinned and raised a hand in his direction.
The line moved up a step. There was probably garlic in the hummus too and it would be better for her.
A word seared across her awareness and pulled her right out of her thinking with a jolt of anger. One of the girls behind her just ended a sentence with: “tranny.” The offense of it put a bitter taste on Tucker’s tongue and she turned her head sideways to hear better.
“I wouldn’t either,” another girl said. “Isn’t the administration thinking at all? Any of us could end up in a bathroom with that person. Did you see his name?”
Tucker ground her back molars together. The fingers of her right hand curled into a fist. Using a male pronoun for a trans woman was so rude.
“I tried, but I was so surprised and the memo was just there for a minute,” the first girl said.
“What did it say?”
“Just something about an MTF transsexual student and the dorms and a private bathroom. MTF, that’s male to female, I looked it up.”
Tucker’s skin turned cold as she realized what must have happened. A trans girl had applied to live in the dorms and this little jerk in line behind her saw some notation about giving that girl her own bathroom because, of course, the freaked out, straight, cisgender world couldn’t deal with the idea that one of their precious girls might accidentally walk into a women’s room with another woman who, once upon a time, didn’t have exactly the same body parts they all assumed they had.
She was afraid for this girl she’d never met, and so proud of her, even though her friends Claire and Emily would tell her that was a stupid reaction. Why be proud of someone who simply lived her life the way she had to? But it wasn’t the transition that made her proud, it was the fact that this girl insisted on her right to be treated the same as any woman.
She could almost make out the reflections of the three girls behind her in the glass covering the hot food serving area. The details were lost, but she could see the shapes of their faces and hairstyles.
“What if he’s one of our roommates? What does yours look like?” the girl with the skinny face and big hair asked.
“Oh it can’t be mine,” said round face, big hair. “She came back from the shower and changed in the room.”
Their ignorance made Tucker want to spit. She almost hoped that roommate was the trans girl except for the danger she would be in from this weasel.
“I still just can’t believe they let a transsexual in the dorms,” said the girl with the mean face. “What if he’s just there to peep at girls?”
That was it.
Tucker spun on her heel and glared at them. For a second she was too angry to speak and all the words she had to confront them with fell short of what she wanted to say. The words that did come out of her mouth surprised her, “Do you have something to say to
my face?”
They all leaned back away from her as far as they could get without bumping into the people behind them in line. Like synchronized robots, their heads moved in unison; their eyes went down the front of her body, pausing at her breasts and then her crotch, before coming back up.
“It’s not nice to eavesdrop,” said Mean Face.
Tucker crossed her arms and stood up as tall as she was. This had the effect of hiding her rather large chest and showing that she was just two inches short of six feet.
“Do you want to repeat your nasty speculation to my face,” she said. “I’m not here because I give a fuck about any of you. I’m here for an education like anyone else.”
“You’re not a tranny,” Round Face said.
“The term is ‘trans woman’ or just ‘woman,’” Tucker said. “And you don’t know shit about what I am. You think you can pick a trans woman out in a crowd, well you can’t. We look just like you.”
They paused and took in that information and Tucker saw their eyes get impossibly harder and more distant than they’d already been. Never mind that she wasn’t really a trans woman. The fact of the matter was that somewhere on this campus was a girl who just wanted a normal life and didn’t deserve this hunt for her. If they believed Tucker was their target, at least they’d stop looking.
She’d come out as a lesbian in high school and stared down plenty of bigots; how different could this be?
“You’re really a guy? Or are you turning into a guy? I don’t get it. I can’t even tell what you are,” said Mean Face.
“You’re full of shit,” Tucker said. “You can tell that I’m a woman and it just freaks you out that I was born with a male body.”
“No way,” Skinny Face said.
Tucker leaned in and bunched the muscles in her shoulders in a way that she hoped looked sufficiently masculine to them.
“She is kind of big,” Round Face said under her breath to the others. “And look at how square her jaw is and those big hands.”
The line was moving forward again and Tucker had to take a few steps backward toward the registers to keep pace with it. The three girls let a wider gap open between her and them.
“You stay away from us,” Mean Face said.
“You couldn’t pay me to get near you,” Tucker said and stepped out of line.
She crossed the room unsteadily because she was shaking from her shoulders to her knees. The LGBTQIA student table was on their feet by the time she reached them, having seen in her face that something was wrong. At this point in the year, the population of the table only amounted to three people: the hulking Cal; stocky, bronze Summer; and shy, peach-faced Tesh.
“What was that?” asked Summer with a scowl. She was by far the shortest and loudest member of their group.
“They were saying shit about trans people,” Tucker told her. “I got so pissed I kind of came out to them.”
“Like anyone doesn’t know you’re a lesbian just by looking at you,” Summer told her. She waved a hand at Tucker’s thick, bleached Mohawk, worn T-shirt, baggy men’s jeans and boots.
“As trans,” Tucker said.
“You are?” asked Tesh as she ran a hand through her short hair, making her face look even more pixie-like as tufts of hair stood up in light brown wisps.
“No, but I think maybe I should just be out as if I were. Will you guys cover for me if anyone asks and tell them that I am a transsexual woman?”
“Sure.”
“Yeah.”
“What?”
Tesh and Summer had been the female core of the LGBTQIA students since Tucker met them last winter. For months she screwed up their names because Tesh’s deep blue eyes reminded Tucker of a summer sky and Summer’s disposition was anything but sunny. She learned to keep them clear by associating Summer’s temper with the heat of a scorching July day and linking the softness of Tesh’s full name, Stesha, with her quiet demeanor.
“That’s crazy,” Summer said. “What’s Lindy going to say when everyone thinks she’s dating a transsexual?”
“She better not fucking care,” Tucker said.
She sat down at the table and put her head in her hands. Tesh rubbed her back lightly. It drove her crazy that she lived in a world with this level of ignorance.
When she came out as a lesbian, it surprised no one in her family. Her mother didn’t have the energy to protest. The fact that one of her daughters was attracted to women was so much less important than the fact that it made Tucker willing to try her hand at fixing things around the house, and that she wouldn’t be coming home someday with an accidental pregnancy.
Tucker found it harder to get support for herself wanting to pursue a career in Women’s & Gender Studies than it was to get support as a lesbian. In her family it didn’t matter who you went to bed with: what mattered was your ability to make money and your spouse’s ability to stick around and do the same. Tucker had been trying to talk herself into a practical career, not that she’d found anything that interested her, until she met Claire and Emily, and read Emily’s book, and then she really wanted to study Gender Studies.
Claire and her girlfriend Emily were good friends of hers now, even though they mostly corresponded online and had only met in person twice. They’d taught her almost everything she knew about what it meant to be transsexual or transgender.
The smell of garlic wove through her folded arms and got her to lift her head. Cal pushed a plate of cheese bread in front of her.
“You’ve got to keep your strength up,” he said.
Although the school’s LGBTQIA group had held an orientation (or sexual orientation) session last week, Tucker already knew most of the group from Lindy, whom she’d been dating since January. Tucker was from one of the small towns near the university, so she came to the U for films, plays and other events when she could get away. She’d met Lindy at the screening of Before Stonewall and they’d started dating a week later. That relationship, plus the utter lack of any extra money for college, had been the deciding factor in Tucker’s choice to come to Freytag.
Now in her junior year, Lindy lived off campus, but she and Tucker had come to enough meetings of the campus group last spring that Tucker knew them all and they knew her. Around the core group of Cal, Summer, Tesh and Lindy were about thirty other students who showed up to parties and movie nights and sometimes brought friends. Tonight, Tucker was glad it was just the four of them.
“What you did was really brave,” Tesh said. “Though I can’t say I’ve heard of a lot of people coming out as what they’re not.”
“Maybe more of them should,” Tucker said.
Chapter Three
Ella
My first course on Monday was also the one I most looked forward to: Machine Learning. I’m not much of a computer geek, so I was really happy to see there was a course that offered the fundamentals of how computers think without me having to learn a bunch of programming languages. I never planned to program anything mechanical, but I’d been reading some really cool articles about biological computers and I thought a basic understanding of computing would be one place to start.
At the start of my first year, I wasn’t expected to know what my major would be or how that translated into a job exactly, but since I’d been around my mom at a university on and off for the last dozen years, I’d picked up some ideas. For example, I knew that if I started off going for a biology major and picked up some other courses in science that I liked along the way, I could very well end up with a double major, and that never hurt when looking for a job. Plus it gave me a good reason to take a bunch of cool science courses.
I started out a little early for class because I still didn’t know my way around the campus very well. I had a map on my phone, but that’s not the easiest thing to read while walking, so I got lost and had to ask directions from a hassled-looking older student.
The classroom was in the lower level of one of the buildings that hadn’t been updated yet, with floor
tiles stained a yellow tan and halls that smelled like metallic smoke. Inside, the room held the usual chairs and long tables, like in the science classroom in my high school, but across the back wall were thick workbenches with machine parts on them. I started to worry about what we’d have to do in this class. I have a bit of a knack for fixing machines that go wrong, but that’s really from playing a lot of games on the Xbox, not because I know anything. This looked a lot more serious than the Xbox or the DVR.
Also, I was one of three girls in the class. But hey, at least there were other girls—though the other two didn’t look like first-year students. They chatted to each other rapid-fire, like they’d been in a class together before.
“Hey, are you Ella?” a cheerful male voice asked from behind my left shoulder.
I turned and found myself facing a grinning Asian guy. He had a long face with a wide nose and a broad smile.
“Johnny Han,” he said and stuck out his hand.
“Oh, I emailed you, but how do you know who I am?”
He tapped the side of his head and winked. The gestures were caricatures but they looked natural on him because of his good humor.
“Your name is on the list of students on the wiki for this class…” He paused and swept an arc with his hand indicating the room. “There are only three girls and I know the other two, so I figured you were probably the third. That doesn’t make me sound like a stalker, does it? I was on the wiki for the assignments, I swear.”
“I’m sure you were counting the number of girls in the class by accident,” I told him, and then, “There’s a wiki?”
“We’ll show you, come sit with us, if you care to, that is.” He had a fast way of talking that blended midwest with east coast broadcaster and a smidge of old-fashioned western.