by Rachel Gold
I moved around the table to take the seat on his left. On his other side was another boy who leaned around Johnny and nodded in my direction with a slight smile.
“Shen Li,” he said.
His accent was moderately thick Chinese, though I was guessing at the nationality because I knew “Li” was a Chinese name.
“Nice to meet you, Shen,” I said, on the formal side because he seemed so composed.
“I keep telling him to change it to ‘Shawn,’” Johnny said. He punctuated the statement to Shen with an elbow jab aimed at his ribs. Shen deftly twisted out of range.
“I like ‘Shen,’” I said. “We have more than enough Shawns around here.”
Shen gave me another half-smile. It wasn’t the grand gesture of Johnny’s grin, but it conveyed a lot more depth as his lips seemed to quirk down and up at the same time. He had darker eyebrows and eyes than Johnny and a square face with a flatter nose and a narrow but full mouth. Wisps of bangs hung down over Shen’s forehead and his black hair was a little longer than Johnny’s, who wore his spiked up.
“Where ya from?” Johnny asked me.
“Columbus,” I said. “You?”
“Cleveland, but Shen’s from distant China. His father is my father’s cousin so they sent him over here to make sure I behave.”
“How’s that working out?” I asked.
Shen just shrugged but Johnny said, “He’s worse than a nun.”
“How many nuns have you spent time with?” I asked.
Johnny laughed and I got another little smile out of Shen.
“The game,” Shen told Johnny.
“Oh yeah, you emailed me about the gaming club. We’ve got a game going on Friday if you want to play. It’s an adaptation on the real-world assassination games only instead of using squirt guns, you use compliments. It’s called Cruel 2 B Kind. I’ll email you the info. Can you put together a team of three?”
“I don’t really know anyone here,” I admitted.
“If you don’t have a team by Wednesday’s class, let me know and I’ll add you to the pool of lone wolves. We can assign teams from there. You play other games too?”
“Nothing hardcore, just a lot of the fantasy franchises on the Xbox and the usual tabletop stuff.”
“Dance dance revolution?” Shen asked and I couldn’t tell if he was serious about the dance competition game or if he was teasing me as a girl gamer.
“All my high scores are in Pretty Princess Magical Rescue Adventure,” I deadpanned back.
“Me too,” Shen said in mock surprise.
“I bet my unicorn can own yours,” I told him.
“Tell me this is not a real thing,” Johnny said. He looked back and forth from me to Shen but neither of us graced his question with an answer. After a while he said, “We have a sweet setup in our dorm’s community room if you want to come by sometime. Are you in computer science? What dorm are you in?”
“Washington. I’m in biology, I think.”
“Oh, yeah, sorry you’re a first year, they’re not going to stick you in the science geek dorm yet anyway. But come by sometime, it’s always full of the gamers and we’re a friendly group.”
I just managed to get in my thanks when the professor started the class.
* * *
In the afternoon I had Calculus, which wasn’t nearly as friendly as Machine Learning. The homework scared me. I try not to be a girl stereotype, but I’m not that facile with mathematics. I do all right when I bear down and apply myself, but it’s usually not that interesting to me in the abstract. When I really understand what it means in terms of real-world application, then I’m in better shape. I spent a couple of hours looking up ways that calculus is applied to the study of population genetics so I’d be really clear about why I had to learn this stuff.
I debated going over to the gaming common room that Johnny and Shen mentioned. Would it seem too eager to show up the same day they’d invited me? It was a good group of students to get in with because they’d be fun. I suppose I could have looked for a biology club, but really the only other group that I connected with was the LGBTQIA student union. I was tempted to find them and lean on my identity as a bisexual girl to get in—though I wondered how accepting they’d be of bisexuals, not to mention the other letter that included me, the “T.”
I decided to do both. There was a social hour at the LGBTQIA student union office at eight p.m., so I could drop by the gaming room and have an excuse to leave if I wanted to, or I could stay and skip the office hours and go some other time. I looked at Johnny’s instructions and the campus map a few times. There were three quads surrounded by dorms: the huge main quad where I was, a big quad to the northwest of me and one to the southwest, a small quad with only four dorm buildings around it—that’s where they were. To get there, I had to go out the back door of my dorm, walk two blocks and turn left.
The evening air still had a bit of the muggy daytime humidity and the campus lights looked haloed against the cloudy sky. The air was heavy with the green smell of mown grass and that baked concrete smell that’s more like a pressure than a scent. I’d have to remember to email Mom and let her know I wouldn’t be on the Friday afternoon bus but rather the one on Saturday morning since I’d be here playing a real-world game with my new friends. She’d be glad to hear it.
I took out my phone and texted her: going to meet new friends in communal game room.
She texted back: That’s great, homey!
My mom was not a big slang user, so that had to be an incidence of spell-checker revenge on her phone. I resisted the urge to reply, “Yo, dog, thanks.”
I looked up from my phone and tried to orient myself. Had I gone two blocks already? I thought so. I didn’t really feel like asking for directions again and there wasn’t any downside to getting lost, so I turned left and went into the first dorm I saw.
The game room was supposed to be the third-floor common room, but when I found that, it was a spartan square filled with silent students staring at books and tablets. Was I wrong about the dorm or the floor? Probably the dorm, but just to be sure I figured I’d go look at the room on the second floor. It was weirdly entertaining to be able to just poke my head into rooms full of strangers. I guess my shyness was starting to wear off now that I had new friends.
I took the stairs at the end of the hall to the second floor and looked for the common room but this floor wasn’t set up the same as the third so I had to walk along the hall toward the middle of the building. A lot of the students had already decorated their doors with posters and stickers. This made for great juxtapositions like Justin Bieber and a nihilistic creed on one door, and Ke$ha and a feminist poster on another.
But the next door stopped me in my tracks. Someone had torn a poster off the door, its top still held in place by clear tape, and below the ragged edge of the paper they had spray-painted “Tranny” in big red letters across the door’s surface. My heart and lungs stopped as if a huge steam engine piston slammed into my chest.
In the silence of not breathing, I heard voices raised inside the room.
“What were you thinking!” a first, nasal voice asked.
“She’s the bigot,” a second voice shot back. “Don’t be mad at me.”
I gasped in a big breath and then tried to exhale slowly and quietly so I could hear them.
“Do you think it was those girls?” the first voice asked.
“Or their boyfriends, or someone who heard them gossiping, who knows.”
“I’m worried that you’re not safe here. Let your roommate keep the room, come move in with me.”
There was a long silence and then the second voice said. “Thanks, really, but I need to think about it. I kind of had my heart set on living on campus my first year.”
Because she was still talking, I didn’t realize how close to the door she was until it opened in my face. The woman who opened it was tall and looked even taller—her hair was some kind of bleached Mohawk that stood another three inches abov
e her scalp. It wasn’t made of aggressive, starched spikes, but rather a soft mop of wavy cream-colored hair. She had a square face with high, wide cheeks and blue eyes. Her complexion was that creamy, darker Germanic-white that I envied every time I looked at the random freckles on my pink cheeks.
“What?” she snarled at me.
I took a step back. “I’m sorry.”
“You think there’s something to see here? Did your friends send you over to look at the freak?”
I held up my hands. Was she the one who’d drawn the attention of the jerks who’d painted the slur on her door?
“No,” I said. “I don’t know who you’re talking about. I got lost and I was walking through and I saw…that…and I just stopped because it was so unbelievably hateful.”
The line of her mouth softened. “Oh shit, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell at you, it’s just been a really long day. I’m Tucker.”
She held out her hand. Her grip was strong and dry.
“Ella,” I told her.
“I’m sorry I thought you were one of them because you’re pretty,” she said and grinned at me.
“Um, thank you, I think.”
“I was going to get a Pepsi, do you want anything?”
“May I walk with you?”
“Of course, if you don’t mind being seen with me,” Tucker said.
“Why would I?”
I turned sideways to her and we walked down the hall together. The room with vending machines was only a few doors from Tucker’s room.
“Did I see you in first-year orientation?” Tucker asked.
“I think I was sitting behind you for part of it,” I told her. “I remember appreciating your hair. I’m sorry for eavesdropping, but I’m curious about what happened.”
Three bottles dropped into the bottom of the vending machine one after the other as Tucker fed it random coins. I’m not really a big pop drinker, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from having an anthropologist mom it’s that sometimes you need to mirror the local customs to show your respect and good intentions. I took the Pepsi that Tucker offered me.
“What all did you hear?” she asked.
“Something about your roommate,” I told her.
Tucker turned back for her room and I fell in step next to her.
“She complained to residence hall administration that she doesn’t want to room with a trans woman,” Tucker said.
The content of the sentence was crappy so I tried not to smile even though my heart was pounding with excitement. How lucky was it to already find another trans woman when this was clearly a high-stealth, high-prejudice campus?
“I gather there aren’t a lot of out trans women on campus,” I said.
“None,” Tucker said.
“I’m—” I started, then stopped because there was a tall, lean, angry-looking woman standing outside of Tucker’s dorm room door.
“Who is this?” she asked.
“Ella, I just met her. She stopped to hate on my hateful graffiti, so now we’re besties. Ella, this is my girlfriend Lindy.”
Lindy was the same height as Tucker but she looked taller because she was rail thin. Tendons and veins stood out in her hands and forearms, and her cheeks had a hollowness to them. I’m a skinny girl too, but that’s because all of my bones are on the small end of the spectrum and I have an athlete’s metabolism without having to work at it, so I’m not opposed to skinny people—but I could see through the contours of Lindy’s skin that her bones were medium to large and yet the skin stretched tight over them and gave her a bladed look. She was a handsome woman with an angular face, but her light brown eyes burned with frightening intensity. Wearing cargo pants with a dozen pockets that tucked into half-laced boots, and a tight gray shirt of some slick material, she looked like a character from a comic book or an opera, not quite like a real person.
“Hey,” Lindy said. “Look, how long do you want to think about this moving in thing? Are you really going to protest it to the administration?”
“I don’t want to, but it might be good for them to learn some things,” Tucker said, but something in her tone was hesitant about more than just the administration. I thought that I wouldn’t want to live with Lindy either, especially while just getting used to college.
“If you want to stay on campus, I have an empty room next to mine,” I said. I was thinking that I’d love to have a trans woman as my roomie and the administration couldn’t possibly get upset about that.
“You’re a first year,” Lindy said with disdain and clear disbelief that I could have access to an extra room.
“They say it was a paperwork screw-up. I’m on the third floor of Washington with a two-singles suite and a shared bathroom to myself.”
“For serious?” Tucker asked.
“Completely. I was kind of bummed about not getting the roommate experience. Of course if you move in there, I’m going to reserve the right to complain about you.”
“Will the administration even allow that?” Lindy asked.
“Won’t know until we ask,” Tucker said. She stepped up to Lindy and put a hand on her arm. “I really want the whole on-campus experience. It doesn’t mean I won’t be over at your place almost every night anyway.”
Lindy’s shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch. “I guess.”
“And why don’t I come spend the night tonight? I’ll text my stupid roommate and let her know she can have the room to herself and I’ll be moving out soon. Then I can talk to admin tomorrow, if that’s okay with you, Ella.”
I nodded. “You can move in whenever. If they’re slow giving you a key, just knock on my door. My biology seminar ends pretty early tomorrow so I’ll be around.”
“Thanks,” Tucker said. “This is really cool of you. You don’t even know me.”
“The RA said they might move someone in from the overcrowded dorm so I’m really just ensuring that I get a good roommate.”
“Damn right you are,” Tucker said and grinned.
I gave her my room number, full name, cell phone and email and left her and Lindy to packing a few things and clearing the essentials out of her room. This new friends thing was going great. Now I could add to my list one of the few other trans students at the school. This was the best getting lost on campus ever.
Outside the building I looked at my map, read the dorm name off the little plaque I hadn’t noticed going in, and re-oriented toward the math and science dorm. It was starting to get dusky, the sun now behind the taller dorms, but it wouldn’t be full dark for at least another hour.
I found the gaming community room easily once I had the right building. Unlike the other community room, this one was packed with about fifteen students clustered around two televisions with gaming consoles. One TV was showing a four-car racing game, and the other had a motion sensor hooked up to it so that people could play the popular dance games. I’m not a huge fan of those, but I did post a very respectable score in Fruit Ninja. Johnny and Shen didn’t show, but the other students were friendly enough and by the time I was ready to walk back to my dorm, I felt that I’d found two places where I belonged.
Chapter Four
Tucker
Tucker tried to focus on the teaching assistant who was lecturing from the front of the room, but her eyes burned. She rubbed them, but that made them feel sandy like the inside of her brain. She’d been up way too late fighting with Lindy over the roommate thing, and then making up from the fight.
The making up made the fight totally worth it. She’d fallen into a doze just as the sun was starting to color the sky outside the bedroom window and dragged herself out of bed three hours later to get to this class.
Lindy had helped her get into this Women’s & Gender Studies class, even though it had a prerequisite. The professor was Lindy’s advisor and last year when Lindy was in this class, she’d managed to get a grant to present a paper at a conference. For a sophomore to already be getting grants was a huge deal, according to Lind
y, and based on the way she seemed to get whatever she wanted in the department, she wasn’t kidding.
Offered as a 200-level course to students in five other departments, including English, History, and Sociology, the class tended to be really big. Lindy said there were over eighty students in it when she took it. All students attended the same lecture once a week, but then they had two smaller classes, called recitations, with a teaching assistant. Because the lecture was on Wednesday and the recitations on Tuesday and Thursday, Tucker was at a recitation for the class before she’d heard the first lecture. Instead of the full group of sixty-some students, there were only twenty-two in the recitation.
She’d been assigned to the group whose TA was Vivien Yarwood and Tucker wasn’t sure yet if that was an advantage. Vivien and Summer had a thing going on, but Summer never seemed quite able to say what sort of thing it was.
Tucker pulled a piece of paper out of her notebook and scrawled on it: Are Vivien and Summer still together? Yes. No.
Cal was sitting next to her and she put it in front of him. He looked at it for a minute, then picked up his pen and circled both Yes and No.
Vivien was attractive in an uptight white girl way. Her parchment-fair skin looked even paler under her red hair, which she’d pulled back in a loose bun. When she leaned against the desk and crossed her arms, the thick freckles on her forearms stood out. She’d rolled up the sleeves of her light blue button-down shirt and the effect made her arms look more delicate. Tucker had never seen Vivien and Summer together, but she could imagine how they’d make a handsome couple with Summer’s stocky build, shorter black hair and warm russet skin highlighted by Vivien’s pale and brassy tones.
After class she went to the administration building to ask if she could transfer into the dorm room next to Ella. When she first tried to describe the situation, the woman behind the desk looked at her like she was insane.
“I told a group of girls that I’m transsexual and now my roommate doesn’t want to live with me. I’m sure you have her complaint on file by now,” Tucker said. “But Ella Ramsey over in Washington says she has an empty single attached to her room. You can call her and confirm she’s cool about me living there.”