by Rachel Gold
“If we just start walking around welcoming people, we’ll be a target,” Lindy pointed out.
“We need camouflage, but not the military kind. Come on.”
Now that I was part of something and had a team, my old self-confidence had returned. Well, most of it. A thin line of fear tugged at me at times through the day as I wondered which of the people around me were the ones who wanted to ferret out the trans girl and harass her, but that didn’t trouble me tonight. I walked up to two guys playing Frisbee.
“Hey, can we join you for like ten minutes?” I asked. “We’re part of this thing and we need a cover.”
The guy standing near me with the Frisbee laughed. “Sure, honey.” Then he yelled to his friend, “Duke, come closer, these girls want to play.”
We formed a fairly loose pentagon and tossed the Frisbee around. I felt certain that we could have been at least twice as far and still caught it with ease, but standing closer made it easier for us to compliment targets as they walked by us.
As people came near us, Lindy would flash a number of fingers and we’d chime out cheerfully:
“Happy Solar Power Day!”
“Oh cool, is that today?” the guy passing us said. We just grinned and waved.
“You look gorgeous today!”
That made a group of girls giggle their way around the corner.
“Welcome to beautiful Freytag University!”
That was greeted by thanks and cheers.
“Wishing you a beautiful Arborween!”
“Oh shit!” the guy passing near me said. “No way! Is that a made-up holiday?”
“It sure is,” I said cheerfully.
“Ugh, I surrender.”
I handed the Frisbee back to the guy who had it originally and told him, “Thanks for letting us play, honey.” He blinked but didn’t seem to get that I was just returning the endearment he used on me.
The other two members of that team formally surrendered and then their team lead, the guy I’d hit with my holiday greeting, asked, “Whose idea was it to hide out as Frisbee players?”
“Me,” I said.
He handed me his booty, which looked like some kind of high school sports medal, and the other two also gave me theirs. I was going to need a bigger bag to carry my catch if I got much more.
“Brilliant idea,” one of the guys said. “We’re Team Death Socks. Let’s get into some cover and we’ll call in our kill.”
Due to a stalemate between some mildly obscene and truly obscure names we ended up being named the Woolf Pack. I’m pretty sure that when we said the team name to the Death Socks guys they didn’t get that Woolf had more than one “o” in it, even though Lindy said, “like Virginia Woolf.”
“What’s your strat?” the Death Socks lead said.
We explained our hand signals and handed them some extra reminder cards I’d printed up.
“Now that there are more of us, we’re going to have to use more natural cover,” he said. “Come on.”
I cleared my throat. “I think we defeated you so you’re supposed to do things our way now.”
“Whatever,” he replied, but he waited and he didn’t even look annoyed about it.
“I know we’re not supposed to go in the buildings, other than the Union, per the rules,” Lindy said. “But did they say anything about going on the buildings? There’s a fire escape on the back side of Russel that would give us a pretty good view if we can get over the trees.”
“It will make us visible,” I said. “We could get trapped.”
The Death Socks lead turned to one of his guys and asked, “Jake, you have any smokes on you? We could disguise ourselves as smokers using the fire escape.”
“Yep, got ’em. Let’s go…uh, when you’re ready, boss.” That last bit was directed at me.
I grinned at him. “Lead on, lieutenant.”
We ducked behind one of the dorms and around the side of a big parking ramp. My heart was pounding much faster than I thought it should. After all, if we were spotted all that would happen was a fierce greeting and complimenting, but I wasn’t ready to die yet, even in a game.
We ran along, crouched behind a retaining wall, and came out behind Russel. Lindy pointed to where the fire escape ladder had slipped its mooring and hung nearly to the ground. Tucker gave me a leg up since I was the shortest of them all and then we were scrambling up. Jake already had a cigarette in his mouth and he’d given one to a teammate so by the time we made it to the third-floor level of the fire escape we had a good cloud of smoke going.
“Get a little behind each other if you can so we don’t look like six people,” I suggested.
Lindy stepped behind Tucker and put her hands on Tucker’s hips. The three guys looked but didn’t say anything. Maybe I should have okayed the name “Team Grrrl Power.” It was better than “Team Vagina Dentata.”
“What do we see?” I asked.
For a few minutes we all just looked. I think Jake may have been actually smoking too but I wasn’t going to complain since he made our literal smoke screen. A few times I thought I spotted a group of kind assassins, but then the groups would split up or turn out to have numbers not divisible by three.
“Well, we could just hide up here and take our survival points,” one of the guys said.
“No way, let’s give it a bit more time,” I said. “The larger the groups get, the easier they’ll be to spot. Let’s say twenty minutes and then we’re out of here regardless. In the meantime, let’s figure out how we’re going to get down from here and do an ambush, right?”
“We could travel single file like the Sand People,” Tucker said.
“What?” Lindy asked at the same time that I said, “That’s great.”
“You weren’t joking?” Lindy asked her.
“Only half,” Tucker said. “After all, they do travel single file to hide their numbers.”
Lindy didn’t get the Star Wars reference but I flashed Tucker a smile.
“If we get down from here, we can go in a line across the back of the building and catch anyone walking between Russel and Washington to the North Quad,” Jake said.
“I like it. Now we wait, okay?”
We waited maybe ten minutes. Jake started to look like he was getting sick of smoking. Then we saw a big group of students pour out of the Student Union. I counted twenty-one. They started moving in a mass toward the center of the quad and then stopped.
“We have to take them,” Jake said.
I nodded.
The group turned north.
“That’s it, let’s go. Operation Sand People is on!”
We scurried down the fire escape like there was a real fire and jogged in a line across the back of the dorm. Lindy got to the edge of the building first and peeked around.
Then she turned to us. “They’re coming. We’re doing Gorgeous on my mark.”
I held my breath. I thought for sure they were going to hear my heart beating, or Jake shifting impatiently behind me so that his boot scuffed on the concrete. A slow breeze carried the scent of cigarette smoke from him to me. I moved a halfstep forward and brushed Tucker’s shoulder by accident. She reached back and found my fingers with hers and gave them a quick squeeze.
“Go!” Lindy said in a whispered shout and we surged around the corner.
I bounced up on the balls of my feet and spread my arms overhead and yelled, “You look gorgeous today!”
A few of the startled crowd said “Happy” or “Welcome” followed by things lik e “damn” or “crap.”
The surrenders started coming in. Now I was worried because a group of twenty-seven people was pretty obvious even on a busy Friday.
“We need sentries,” I told Jake. He had a much louder voice than I did.
“When you’ve surrendered, go to the outside and keep watch!” he bellowed.
Lindy was getting a lot of booty for being the first one around the corner with the Gorgeous attack. Some of the guys got booty from peopl
e who were friends of theirs, and Tucker and I each picked up a few items. Okay, I got more than Tucker but only because I have a more traditional cuteness and even a non-spiky Mohawk on her could be intimidating.
With so many people, we couldn’t rely on hand signals anymore, so we just set an order. We’d do Gorgeous again, then Holiday with Chrisnukka, then Welcome, then repeat the cycle. The new teams were pretty sure the remaining teams had to be in the north area, so we continued in that direction.
We were an army of complimenters and many startled students were the recipients of twenty-seven voices calling them gorgeous or welcoming them or wishing them a happy holiday. We went up to each group sitting on the North Quad and used our weapons of kindness on them, leaving a lot of laughter and giggling behind. We turned at the end and started down the other side. Even if we didn’t find the other teams, it was a heck of a good time.
“You look gorgeous!” we shouted.
But at the same time nine people jumped up from where they’d been reading or chatting on the grass and yelled, “Welcome to beautiful Freytag University!”
Their compliment beat ours. We were down.
Tesh, Summer and Cal were in that group. We should have recognized them, but they wore actual disguises, including hats and sunglasses, and at that point we’d become mad with power and weren’t really playing attention. I gave my booty, a blue-footed stuffed bird, to Tesh.
The lot of us set off south again to meet up with our game masters and hear how the scoring played out. The winning team was Team Covalent Bonds, but there would still be prizes for high-scoring players and runner-up teams. I thought we had a good shot at getting the prize for the biggest kill and that was plenty for me.
Jake fell in beside me while we were walking.
“Hey, that was really well played,” he said. “Have you played this before?”
“No, but I played a lot of games in my high school. Have you played it?”
“I was in the one they did last year but it wasn’t nearly this big. I think we had twenty-one people total. So, what program are you in?”
“Biology.”
“Really?”
He looked so surprised that I said, “Don’t tell me you thought I was in Home Ec.”
“They have that here?” he asked.
“No, they don’t.”
“Are you teasing me because I did the ‘girls don’t like science or games’ thing?” he asked.
I liked him better. “Guilty. I get the science thing a lot. You’d think it wasn’t the twenty-first century or something.”
“Does that mean I’m screwed if I ask you to coffee or something? I mean, do you have a boyfriend?”
I checked him out again peripherally. He was pretty good looking if you liked your guys to have that triangular and lean muscled swimmer body. Okay, he was quite good looking, but I just didn’t feel that into him. I tried to imagine what we’d say at a coffee shop and kept blanking, and then the mental picture flickered and was replaced with an image of me and Shen in a coffee shop. I liked that a lot better.
“There’s someone I’m interested in,” I said.
“Is it her?” he pointed at Tucker.
I was startled that he’d pick another woman, but there was a way Tucker had of filling up a space with her energy. Or he’d seen her take my hand—that was a simpler explanation. Of course it might just be his way of trying to find out what my sexual orientation was since I clearly hung out with lesbians.
The curious thing was that the answer to his question about Tucker wasn’t “no.” I could still remember the hug from the other night and I wanted to do that again for a lot longer, but I wasn’t even going to try as long as Lindy was on the scene. Okay then, I was interested in two people. But I wasn’t going to tell Jake that.
“It’s a guy,” I said.
“If he doesn’t work out, Johnny and Shen know how to get in touch with me.”
If he didn’t work out, no way was I going to ask those guys for Jake’s info.
“Thanks,” I said. “It was fun being on a team with you.”
We all poured into the Student Union and took up half the tables on the ground floor. Johnny and Shen had already ordered a bunch of pizzas and everyone fell on them while the guys read a long list of awards. Team Woolf Pack did take Largest Single Kill and second place Survivalists. Lindy won the award for most points due to her excessive amount of booty.
I watched Shen help Johnny hand out the ribbons and admire the various booty items. Shen still smiled more with his eyes than his mouth, but his eyes were smiling a lot. Compared to Johnny, he was quiet, but he didn’t seem particularly shy. As he counted the booty items, he grinned at a few and cracked a joke I couldn’t hear that made all the students around him laugh.
“This was a great game, thanks for inviting us,” Lindy said when she got back to the table after accepting her ribbon.
“Congrats on your win,” I told her.
She held up the ribbon, which was the kind of blue “1st Place” ribbon you get at a State Fair for a kid’s event. “I shouldn’t feel as happy about this as I do,” she said.
“Are you kidding? I’m putting our Largest Single Kill ribbon on my dorm room door—on the outside—just so everyone knows how awesome we are.”
Chapter Six
Tucker
At first, Tucker thought living next to Ella was going to be more of a problem than she expected, because Lindy kept asking her about every conversation they had and trying to get her to stay the night every night. Frustrated and feeling claustrophobic, Tucker spent a whole weekend working at the hardware store in her hometown so she could have space away from Lindy, even though the owner told her she should be focusing on school. She’d worked at Shipley’s Hardware on and off since she was fifteen, and the familiar smells of oil and paint blocked out Lindy’s nagging jealousy.
The fourth time Tucker answered Lindy’s question with, “Ella and I talked about the cute boy in her Machine Learning class…again,” Lindy calmed down.
“Seriously,” Tucker said while she and Lindy were sitting together on the couch after dinner. “Is she ever going to ask him out? I get that it’s weird with his cousin around all the time, but I think she should just text him or something. We all have his phone number from the Cruel 2 B Kind game. It’s been over two weeks and she hasn’t even used it. Maybe she could ask him to come fix her computer or something.”
Lindy made the sound of agreement that meant she wasn’t really listening, followed by, “I have a movie picked out for us.”
“I can’t stay for a whole movie,” Tucker told her. “I have to get to work on this paper for Gender Studies; I was at the shop all weekend fixing jammed weed-whackers. Anyway, don’t you have writing to work on?”
“I was working on that all day,” Lindy said. “I need a break from it. I’ll find something to watch by myself.”
Her sentence ended on a down note that was half-pout and half-sigh and made Tucker want to curl up next to her on the couch. She kissed Lindy and picked up her backpack.
“I’ll text you good night,” she said.
Halfway back to the dorm, Tucker remembered a story Lindy had told her earlier in the evening about how Lindy had taken her car in to the shop that morning and gotten stranded while they fixed some stupid issue with her thermostat. She’d said that she walked around boring downtown Freytag for a few hours and not gotten home until after lunch. If that was the case, how could Lindy have been working on her writing “all day?” Maybe she’d meant all afternoon. That had to be it.
She also wouldn’t let Tucker look at her work. Was she even getting work done? Lindy said she’d had issues with depression and anxiety in the past. Was she going into some kind of down spell? Tucker wasn’t sure what to do for her.
It was early enough that she could go for a run before settling down to work on her paper. She had two more weeks until it was due, but she wanted to get it right. She went to her room and picked u
p her gym duffel, then knocked on Ella’s door.
“You know you have Shen’s cell phone number, right?” Tucker told her without any preamble. “You should text him that you need someone to come fix your computer.”
“They’ll both come,” Ella said, standing in the doorway with a bemused look. “But thanks for thinking of me.”
“You need someone to run interference for you. What’s Johnny’s type?”
“Female humanoid, I think, but I never asked. He could be gay,” Ella said.
“Well, that narrows it. Find out. Cal is single and I’m sure we could come up with an eligible woman, so that solves that. I’m off to the gym.”
“Have fun.”
Tucker walked the few blocks to the gym, changed and went to the track that ran around the second floor above the swimming pool. She preferred to run barefoot and that made it tough to run outside.
She did an easy two-and-a-half miles while her brain churned through the last few weeks with Lindy. It had to be something about the start of the school year that had her down because she’d been pretty cheerful all summer. After Tucker had the first draft of this paper done, she’d spend more time watching movies with her and see if they could talk about depression or whatever the issue was.
Lindy was her first real girlfriend, so she didn’t exactly know what the protocol was for addressing problems that impacted the relationship. She’d fooled around with a good female friend of hers in high school on and off, but then that friend kept having boyfriends. And she’d had some hookups early in her senior year when her reputation as a lesbian was all over town, but nothing long-term. Now that she had a girlfriend, she didn’t really know where to look for advice. Tesh was too quiet and Tucker would feel weird asking her, and she didn’t trust any advice that came from Summer.
She grabbed her towel off the bar and wiped her face and neck on the way back to the locker room. One of the sports practices must have let out because the place was full of women. She threaded her way over to her locker without looking at any of them. As a lesbian, she was always overly conscious of looking at straight women in various states of undress; she didn’t want them to think that she was getting ideas when she really wouldn’t give them the time of day.