Just Girls

by Rachel Gold

  She folded a pair of worn jeans and put them in the drawer and then tossed a pair of cargo shorts in next to them. On top of the dresser was a four-foot high stack of paperback books with creased spines. I didn’t know how she managed to have so many books or why she bothered to bring them to college with her rather than buying eBooks so she wouldn’t have to pack so many.

  I wanted to know what made her say she was transsexual if she wasn’t. That seemed plain crazy to me, but also too personal a question. It was possible she did have some gender dysphoria and just hadn’t completely come out to herself. I didn’t want to freak her out by asking about her directly, so I picked a related question.

  “What were the girls saying, the ones you came out to, if it’s okay to ask?”

  “Oh yeah, it’s fine. They weren’t targeting me, I was just in line with them, and, well, it makes more sense if you know that I have a good friend who’s a trans woman so I know a bunch about all that and these girls…it sounded like one of them was working in admissions and saw a memo about a trans girl moving into the dorms and was freaking out about it.”

  I swallowed around the dry clot of sandy fear in my throat. The subject of the memo had to be me.

  “What did she say?” I asked.

  “The usual dumb shit about not wanting to be in the bathroom with a…well you know…a trans person,” she said and folded another pair of jeans into the dresser drawer. “I can’t repeat all of it, it was pretty stupid. Like they kept referring to this girl as ‘he.’ I don’t know how much you know about the trans community but that kind of misgendering on purpose is total bullshit. It’s really disrespectful.”

  I was glad Tucker wasn’t looking at me because I felt like if she did, she’d see right through my skin and my defenses and know everything about me. She’d see my history written in my body. And she’d see my gut-twisting fear that there was a whole group of girls on campus who were on the lookout for a trans girl and they were all set to make her life hell—they were looking for me.

  When I came out I’d had a really lucky situation, relatively speaking since it’s kind of hard to call coming out transsexual “lucky.” I was pretty young when I first started telling Mom that I was a girl, and she was open to the idea, plus she explained it all to Dad for me. They both had a lot of questions and concerns, but they agreed that I could go on hormone suppressors and block male puberty from happening to me. I lived my first two years of high school as a very girlie boy and then over a summer, with the help of hormones, went into puberty as a girl and that’s how I went to school my junior year.

  I attended a very cool alternative high school with about two hundred students so my parents were able to talk to each teacher and we held a town hall meeting in the school common room for everyone. My closest friends, Nico especially, took on the few people who thought it was weird or unnatural and explained transsexualism in great detail to them so that I didn’t have to, and by the time I came back to school as Ella, the response was overwhelmingly positive.

  I know it helped that I’m on the small side and I have big eyes and people tend to see me as cute or pretty. It helped that I had Nico, who came out as genderqueer before I ever came out. And it helped that half of our group of friends were geniuses who could figure it all out really quickly or who were too into their own subject matter to care.

  This was the first time I really felt afraid for my safety. The kids who were willing to get into Tucker’s dorm and spray-paint a slur on her door in the middle of the night intended that act of hate for me.

  Tucker switched to a box of books and went about unpacking them, finding places for them on the dresser or on the nightstand by her bed. She kept talking as she organized the books with more care than she’d shown any of her clothes.

  “I figured, what if the girl in admissions really had seen something,” Tucker said. “What if there is really a trans girl student here this year? The last thing she needs is to overhear the shit that I did. I know I don’t understand viscerally what it means to have gender dysphoria or to have people always questioning who you are, but I do know what it’s like to have people be assholes to you just because of who you are. And I just got really pissed and really afraid for this girl and so I said it was me. That way they’ll direct their bullshit at me and I know I can take it.”

  She glanced over at me and put down the books in her hands.

  “You’re crying,” she said.

  I wasn’t really. The tears were in my eyes but none had fallen—okay maybe just one. I waved a hand in front of my face and tried to keep my voice level as I said, “That’s so heroic.”

  “Well, I hope it works, so if anyone asks, don’t tell them I’m not transsexual, okay?”

  I crossed the small room and put my arms around her. After a second, her arms wrapped around my shoulders. My chin rested in the warm curve where her neck met her collarbones and she smelled like applewood smoke and molasses. Her breasts felt heavy against my chest just above mine. I stepped back but my body didn’t seem to want to let go of the memory of hers.

  She grinned at me. “I should be heroic more often,” she said.

  I smiled back and went to perch on the edge of her desk. I opened my mouth to tell her why she was even more of a hero to me than she knew, but what held me back had nothing to do with Tucker and everything to do with Lindy. I didn’t like the way I’d seen her looking at me when she thought I wasn’t paying attention. I got the impression she resented me for inviting Tucker to live here when she wanted Tucker to be with her. And I suspected that if I told Tucker she’d eventually tell Lindy and who knows what would happen then.

  Tucker had given me a gift of unfathomable value and I wasn’t about to waste it.

  * * *

  After staying Wednesday in the dorm room, Tucker said she was going to spend the next night or two at Lindy’s. I was glad for the quiet. Much as I liked having the coolest roommate in the world, I needed a day or two to get my mind around what she’d shared with me and to figure out if she was really that amazing or if she just had some kind of martyr complex. Maybe playing an assassination style game with her would give me some clue.

  The email about the game came on Thursday afternoon around twenty-four hours before the start time. It felt very secret agenty—like it should self-destruct after I read it or something:

  Dear Kind Assassin,

  The playing field for our game tomorrow night, Friday, will be the triangle created by Tyler and Jefferson avenues and the south edge of the main quad. Any team moving outside of this area during the two-hour play time will be considered dead. The game will run from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. and we’ll all meet at the Union afterward to debrief and display booty.

  Players must bring a piece of personal booty. You won’t get this back, so choose something slightly significant but not majorly important to you. If you are killed, you must surrender your booty to the team that killed you.

  Your weapons! You have three verbal weapons you can use to “kill” other teams. These are:

  Welcome your targets to beautiful FU.

  Tell your target s “You look gorgeous today!”

  Wish your targets a happy made-up holiday.

  These are used in a rock-paper-scissors fashion so that:

  Welcome beats Gorgeous

  Gorgeous beats Holiday

  Holiday beats Welcome

  When you “kill” a team, that team becomes part of your team. Your entire team must stay within eyesight of each other throughout play, though you may stand apart to be less obvious.

  When you make a kill, report this via text to Game Master Johnny Han. If you have questions during play, please address them to Game Master Shen Li.

  You must be within five feet of your target team to kill them. You can’t shout across the quad and randomly down other teams.

  We’d like to thank the game’s creators Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost.

  Everyone have fun!

  It sounded awesome an
d there was nothing in the rules that said we couldn’t strategize ahead of time. I texted Tucker: check your email for game rules. strategy session?

  She texted back: Yes! @ Lindy’s. Come over?

  I wrote back: sure, address?

  She sent me the number and street and I looked it up on the map. It was two blocks north of campus and an easy walk from my dorm. I should have asked if I could bring anything. I headed out of my dorm and onto Tyler Ave., which ran all the way along the east edge of campus and was populated with stores that catered to students, including a bunch of restaurants. I’d already discovered the creamery that made its own ice cream, but that was a couple of blocks south and I was headed north. This end of Tyler had a pizza place, a clothing store, and a Vietnamese deli. They served bánh mì so I went in and picked up a few sandwiches. No one ever resented a guest showing up with food, right?

  A block over, the shops catering to students gave way to a residential area that looked to be mostly duplexes, triplexes and a few small apartment buildings—the low kind with eight or twelve units. Lindy lived in one of the big old houses that was converted into a triplex. She had the top unit and Tucker’s text said to come up the back stairs, so I did.

  The second flight of back stairs looked like someone just tossed boards together and hit them randomly with a nail gun, but I survived the ascent and knocked. Tucker opened the door.

  “I brought sandwiches,” I said and held up the bag.

  “Oh, Lindy was making some kind of salad,” she said. “But these will go great with that. Are some vegetarian?”

  “Two are tofu, one beef and one pork.”

  “Great, come on in.”

  I handed her the bag and stepped through the doorway as she moved into the room. Inside was a vaulted area, basically a single room under the roof. At the far end was a kitchen and, in the middle, a place with a couch and television. In front of the door I’d come through was an entryway/study with a coat rack and a small desk. One door led off each side of the single, vaulted room and I guessed one was a bathroom and the other a bedroom.

  Lindy stood in the kitchen space at the far end, chopping something on a large cutting board set on the countertop. I paused in the middle of the room, near the couch, and looked around. The décor was early eclectic with an accent of hit-or-miss. There were beautiful built-in bookshelves with some classic-looking books, a few new books with bright, glossy spines, a variety of pieces of wood or stone, a Greek goddess statue, and a thick layer of dust over all of it. The television was also dusty but had a scattering of recently touched DVD cases around its base. The couch looked about fifteen years old and sagged in the middle but featured a thick, folded wool blanket on the back and a few rather nice Navajo-style throw pillows. The rug under this area showed a fine Turkish pattern and if it was genuine it probably cost a few thousand dollars. The kitchen continued the combination of careless affluence and affected poverty with islands of obsessive neatness.

  “Ella brought sandwiches,” Tucker said.

  “Bánh mì from the Vietnamese place,” I added. “Two are vegetarian, they’re the ones with the green tape.”

  “Thank you,” Lindy said. “That’s very thoughtful. I was just making a lentil and kale salad, but we can eat that as a side. It will keep.”

  She over-enunciated the words, but her tone was friendly enough. I couldn’t get a good sense of her. In my high school we had more than enough geeky kids and brilliant kids with various emotional challenges. For all I knew, Lindy could be some kind of high functioning, undiagnosed Asperger’s. She did seem to have some issue with eye contact, tending to either stare at me or not meet my eyes.

  Tucker got me a glass of water and set the beef bánh mì on a plate with a bit of kale salad. I know beef isn’t a traditional option and I felt a little guilty about ordering it, but it was my favorite. I wondered if Shen liked bánh mì. Yeah, it was Vietnamese and he was Chinese, but hey, I’m from the Midwest and I like a lot of different cuisines. Of course I wasn’t sure Midwestern cow town bánh mì could compare to anything you could order in China.

  When I took my plate to the living room area, I discovered that the couch was even older than it looked. I sank a good six inches due to compressed springs. I set my water on a coffee table that looked like an expensive mission-style antique that got in a fight with a wood chipper. Tucker took the middle of the couch and Lindy the far end.

  “You called this meeting, team leader, what’s on your mind?” Tucker asked after we dug into our sandwiches. “This is great, thank you,” she added, lifting her sandwich in appreciation. She had taken the pork sandwich, not the tofu.

  “Well, I was thinking we should decide our protocol for which weapon we’ll use and in what order. The ‘weapons’ are to either welcome people to Freytag, to tell the m ‘You look gorgeous today’ or to wish them a made-up holiday.”

  I paused and looked at Tucker. She swallowed a mouthful of sandwich and asked, “Let me see if I get this? We run up on people and say one of those three things and if they’re another team and they didn’t see us coming, then we beat them. But if they see us coming and say their weapon-phrase at the same time, then we have to beat them rock-paper-scissors style with ours?”

  “Yes, like that,” I said.

  “Let’s try it,” Tucker suggested. She held up her fingers counting down three…two…one.

  I said, “Merry Chrisnukka!”

  She declared, “Welcome to beautiful Freytag U!” at the same time.

  “Who wins?” Lindy asked.

  “I do,” I said. “Holiday beats Welcome. I kind of figured that most people would start with Welcome, so we should tend toward Holiday, unless the other teams are likely to figure that out too.”

  “I think it’s fair to assume most teams will be as new as we are,” Lindy said. “Why don’t we start out using Holiday and Gorgeous.”

  “Should we have a hand signal so we don’t say out loud which one we’re going to use? Like one finger or two or three?” Tucker asked.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “But let’s do it in reverse order so one means Holiday. That way if they think we’re going to do Welcome…oh wait.”

  “They’ll do Holiday,” Lindy finished. “So one should be Gorgeous.”

  “So then two would be Welcome and three would be Holiday.”

  “I’m going to need a cue card,” Tucker said. “What are we going to use for our holidays?”

  “Kwanzakka?” Lindy offered.

  “Arborween?” I suggested.

  “Hallowgiving, Lesbian Day,” Tucker said.

  Lindy and I laughed. “I like that last one,” Lindy said.

  “I’ll make a list,” Tucker offered. “We can put the holidays on one side of a card with the numbers, for quick reference.”

  “We should practice our number system after we’re done eating,” I suggested. “And you two can pick where we should be when the game starts. I really don’t know the campus very well.”

  We ate in silence for a few minutes and then Lindy said, “Ella, I hear you’re in biology. I’m glad to see more women interested in science. What drew you to it?”

  “I’m just one woman in science, but thanks. It’s just always interested me. As a kid, I brought stuff into the house from the yard and so my parents got me a bunch of books about bugs and how things work and evolution. Lucky for me, I was more into evolution and genetics than bugs, though I suppose I wouldn’t feel that way if I was really into bugs. Tucker tells me you’re a little bit famous because you’ve already presented a paper at a conference?”

  Lindy shifted away from me, or toward the arm of the couch, it was hard to tell with Tucker between us, but her eyes darted down and then around the room before coming back to my face.

  “Yes, it was very exciting but now I have to figure out what I’ll do next. Academia is so fickle like that, you know, they always want the next great thing.”

  “But she’s working on it,” Tucker said and gave an e
ncouraging pat to Lindy’s leg.

  “No pressure, ha ha,” Lindy added with a forced laugh. “But tell me more about your field of study. Are you one of those people who doesn’t freak out about Frankenfood?”

  “Not as such. I think paying careful attention to genetic modification is important but we’ve been tampering with genetics through plant and animal breeding programs for millennia. A lot of what people take for granted as natural today isn’t at all…it was just created by people long enough ago that the popular mind forgot we did it. There’s this real romance about a lot of stuff being natural that actually isn’t.”

  And I was off and running. I can talk about genetics for a good long while and Lindy seemed genuinely interested. When we finished eating, Tucker took the plates and washed them while we kept talking.

  I started to see what Tucker liked about Lindy—when you had her full attention you really felt like someone important. Even though she was clearly against genetically modified food, she had a way of asking questions and really taking in the answers that made me want to not only explain my side but listen to her side too. I didn’t want to stop the conversation, but I finally had to shake myself out of that limelight so that we could practice our hand signals for the game.

  * * *

  I thought the Game Masters picked Friday night for the game just because it was a good social time for the players, but when we showed up to our spot on campus, it was clear that they were better masterminds than I thought because the quads were packed with students. No one had classes for the next two days, so coursework was on hold, and the weather was still warm enough that people wanted to be outside playing Frisbee, reading, or just hanging out.

  “How are we going to find anyone in this?” Tucker asked.

  “We don’t need to,” I told her. “We just need to be really kind to a whole bunch of people. That’s the brilliance of using compliments instead of squirt guns.”

  It was five minutes to seven and we were on the southwest side of the north quad. From where we stood, we could easily see fifty people playing and lying around and walking from one place to another. Much harder was determining who of those fifty was in a three-person kill squad.