by Rachel Gold
Most of the women she saw around campus weren’t that interesting to her, but somehow as soon as she was out as a lesbian, they all assumed she was checking them out.
“Oh my God, it’s that freak,” a sadly familiar voice said from the end of the locker row. She looked up into the ferret-like eyes of Mean Face.
“This is the one I was telling you about,” Mean Face said to a half-dozen of her friends who were gathering around you. “The one who was born a man.”
“What’s he doing in here?” one of the girls asked.
“This is for wo-men,” another said, really slowly as if she didn’t speak English.
“I’m going to tell the staff,” a third girl chimed in and headed for the doors.
Tucker was acutely self-conscious of her sweaty T-shirt and shorts. She was taller than most of them, but there were at least six women in various stages of half-dress holding towels over themselves and glaring at her. That struck her as particularly ludicrous since a few of them came around the lockers just to glare at her when she hadn’t even been able to see them.
“Do you all get how horrible you are?” Tucker asked.
“You’re the one invading our space,” Mean Face said.
“I’m not invading anything,” Tucker told her. “I’m a woman in the women’s locker room. Now if you’ll get out of my way, I’m done here.”
Tucker pulled her gym bag from the locker and threw her street clothes in it. She could walk back to the dorm in her shorts and T-shirt. She grabbed her boots with the socks stuffed in them and slung the bag over her shoulder.
“She has really big boobs,” one of the girls said to another. “How do you think they do that?”
“Surgery,” another said. “Boob job. I saw a show on TV. And they do the dick too.”
“How?”
“They gut it like a fish and turn it inside out like a sock,” Tucker said angrily. It was a paraphrase from Kate Bornstein and the humor was clearly lost on this crowd.
Shocked giggling and disapproving sounds rippled through the group as Tucker pushed past them and into the long hallway heading out. Angry tears burned in the back of her throat and she needed an hour-long shower to remove the disgust she felt.
Beyond the glass doors that led out of the building, the evening sky had turned to full darkness. She stopped and sat on a bench just inside the door to put on her boots, even though they looked ridiculous with her gym shorts. No one would see her in the dark outdoors. While she was tying the laces, no one came to throw her out of the building. She hoped the girl from the locker room had found an official sort of person who told her she was being ridiculous. More likely she’d given up and wandered back to trash talk with her cohort.
Normally Tucker didn’t worry about walking across campus after dark. She’d been tall from a young age and never developed a general fear of strangers that the other girls in her high school seemed to have. She trusted her ability to scream, fight and run if she had to. But tonight she was on edge, and she was about to cross campus in short athletic shorts and a tight T-shirt over her sports bra because she hadn’t wanted to change in front of the mean girls. She reached into her bag for the pepper spray her mother insisted she carry. Holding it ready in her hand, she gripped her gym bag loosely in the other.
The night air was cool now but not chilly. The smell of turning leaves mixed with a lingering warm grass scent. She loved this season and the rest of fall with its crunchy fallen leaves and crisp air, fresh apple cider and pumpkin muffins at the local bakery.
As she walked, an acrid smoke smell drifted across the evening air. It didn’t belong here, being too early in the season for anyone to burn leaves, and it smelled like a chemistry experiment gone bad. She walked faster to get free of it, passing behind the smallest of the university’s three quads, and came to the dark gap between two buildings that would take her to the big quad and her dorm. Running steps sounded behind her and she turned.
His fist caught her high on the left side of her head. Tucker staggered sideways as the already dark landscape blurred. His hand closed on her left arm and he shoved her into the shadowed area between the empty class buildings. He shoved again and her momentum slammed her against the brick wall of one building. The impact ran up and down the nerves of her arm, delivering a mix of pain and numbness.
“Fucking faggot,” he said. “Don’t ever go near my girlfriend again.”
Her tingling fingers registered that the pepper spray canister was gone. She must have dropped it next to the building when she hit the wall.
Could she scream and get help? They were tucked into a dark well where the lights from the paths on either side of the buildings didn’t reach. This wasn’t the most used part of campus after dark, but maybe if she was loud enough someone would hear.
She glanced at the hulking form of the guy who’d hit her. He positioned his body between her and the nearest path so the light was behind him and his face masked in shadows, but he was clearly one of the school’s athletes.
She opened her mouth to scream and his thick fist rammed into her stomach. Bile burned in her throat as her gut clenched around the impact, but her legs didn’t buckle. She coughed and tried to gasp in a full breath.
“Pat, that you?” another voice asked from the direction of the path.
“Over here,” Pat said, “Don’t use my name, you idiot.”
His words sent a jagged flash of fear through her body. She wiggled her fingers trying to get full sensation and control in them. Did these two actually plan to get away with assaulting her?
“You get that freak?” the nameless guy asked.
“Right here. What should we do with it?”
He punctuated his question with another punch that hit the side of her head and knocked her shoulder into the wall again. Tucker wanted to shout back at him. She wanted to scream with rage, but she knew better. She had to minimize the number of times they hit her so she wouldn’t be too hurt to run when she got a chance.
She couldn’t run yet. Her head was spinning from the second punch and as soon as he heard his friend approaching, Pat moved in front of her, standing out from the wall. If she ran forward or tried to dart left, he could reach her. And if she tried to turn and run, his friend could tackle her.
She crouched down and put her left arm up to protect the side of her head, hoping that in the darkness they couldn’t see her right hand combing through the gravel for the spray canister. Her fingers dragged through the rough stones but found nothing.
“Aw, it doesn’t want you to hurt its face,” the nameless guy said in a mincing tone. “Maybe we should break its nose. That’d probably make it prettier.”
Pat laughed and the dry, cold sound hit Tucker as hard as his fist and scared her worse. She tried to search through the gravel systematically, but her fingers were shaking hard and scattering the little stones everywhere.
“You think those tits are real?” he asked.
“Do you care?” the other guy asked. “What if it still has a dick?” He paused and spat.
When he spoke again his mouth was only a few feet away from her ear. “Do you still have a dick? You want us to cut it off for you, save you all that trouble? Put you out of your fucking misery?”
A hand grabbed the hair at the back of her head and forced her face up. She saw the squinting eyes of Pat and they looked gray-black in the darkness. His other hand grabbed her breast and squeezed it roughly.
“Fucking boob job,” he said. “See if it has a dick.”
Tucker’s whole body was shaking now. Her mouth was dry as sandpaper or she’d have spat in his face. She wanted to tell him to fuck off, but she was afraid if she spoke he’d hear her teeth chatter and know she was afraid.
And she was afraid, but the rage kept burning through the fear. If they decided to go ahead with their sadistic plan to see what kind of genitals she had, she figured the likelihood that they’d try to rape her was high. She made herself take her focus off them and l
isten for sounds of other students or campus security. The minute she heard footsteps, she would start yelling even if they hit her again.
The nameless guy reached for her crotch.
Her hand closed over the pepper spray canister.
He was so close she smelled the bitterness of his sweat. Near the ground, her fingers turned the canister and felt for the groove that meant it would be pointing away from her. His fingers poked at her while her index finger found the groove in the front of the canister.
“Nothing here,” he said. “Hold it still, I want to see what it looks like.”
She took a deep inhale and held her breath. His eyes were narrow with muddy-colored pupils and she met them for a second as she raised the canister and pressed the button. The stream of pepper spray hit him full in the eyes and he screamed with a high-pitched yowling sound like a cat.
She twisted left just far enough to see where Pat’s face was and directed the still streaming spray there. He was staring at his friend and the spray caught him mostly on the right side of his face, but it was enough. His hand dropped from her hair and went to his face.
The two of them rolled on the ground, coughing, choking and howling. Tucker straightened up from her crouch and waited a moment for the world to settle itself around her. Her head throbbed from where she’d been hit and her right arm felt bruised in a half-dozen places. She felt ready to scream, puke, and cry. She took a couple of quick breaths through her mouth then leaned down to grab a handful of Pat’s hair.
“Should I break your nose or chop off your dick?” she snarled at him. “You worthless piece of shit.”
He was coughing hard enough that she couldn’t be sure he heard her so she dropped her hold on him and kicked him hard in the crotch. Then she kicked the other guy too. Their howls went up in pitch.
She wanted to kick them again and again, but this dark alcove wasn’t safe. Pat might have told more than one friend to meet him here. Tucker picked up her gym bag with her left hand and started walking slowly toward her dorm. The lawn wavered like the deck of a ship but as she walked it evened out. Her legs didn’t hurt, and she was grateful for that, but every step sent jolts of pain across her right shoulder and up into her skull.
She fell into a rhythm of taking careful steps and breathing. Nothing felt seriously injured, broken or torn, and what hurt most from the whole experience was the conversation the jerks were willing to have over her, as if she wasn’t human. She had to turn her mind away from it or she wouldn’t make it back to her room without falling apart.
In her dorm, outside the elevator, she paused and put down the gym bag so she could pull the pepper spray canister out of her clenched hand and tuck it into the side pocket. Her right arm didn’t want to move any more than it had to. She rode up to her floor but went past her own door and knocked on Ella’s.
“One sec,” Ella called and then swung the door wide. Her lips parted in shock. “Tucker, oh my God.”
“You should see the other guys.”
Ella stepped to the side and let Tucker move slowly into the room. As soon as she crossed the threshold, Ella took the gym bag out of her hand and dropped it by the foot of the bed. She swung the wheeled chair out from her desk.
“Sit.”
Tucker did so and held onto the arm of the chair with her good hand just to make sure she was completely steady. Ella bent and looked into her eyes and then at the side of her head. Her full lips pressed together hard, making a straight, pink line, as she examined the damage.
“Who hit you?” Ella asked. “Lindy?”
“No! Two guys, outside the gym.”
Ella’s fingertips brushed high on her cheek. The touch quivered. Ella’s other hand gripped the edge of her desk, as if she could use that to pull herself and Tucker to safety.
“We should call emergency services,” she said.
“I really don’t want to go anywhere,” Tucker told her. She felt the burn of tears start in her eyes and tried to blink them back.
“How do you feel?” Ella asked.
“Like I got hit,” Tucker said and managed part of a laugh. “Twice. In the head. And my arm hit the wall. I think I’m going to have some bruises but nothing’s broken.”
As a kid, Tucker had broken her foot and her wrist pulling reckless stunts and she didn’t feel the sickening pain now that accompanied those breaks. Her shoulder just throbbed, a big, dull mass of pain.
Ella walked to her desk and typed something into her computer, then scanned down a page. She turned the lamp toward Tucker.
“Look up,” she said. The bright light hit Tucker’s eyes and made her blink.
“Your eyes look okay, decent pupillary response,” she said. “Nausea? Dizziness?” She turned the lamp away.
“No. I was dizzy but it cleared up fast.”
“Stay put. I can clean you up, but if you start to feel worse you have to tell me.”
“Yes, Nurse Ella.”
That almost got a smile, but Ella’s mouth stayed compressed, lips stitched together with anger or fear or furious disapproval.
Tucker remained in the chair and watched Ella go into the bathroom and come out with two washcloths. She also got a little white case, a first-aid kit, from her dresser and opened it on her desk.
“You’ve got a pretty bad cut on your cheek,” Ella told her. “I gather one of the guys was wearing a ring.”
“Yeah.”
“You want to tell me everything that happened?”
Tucker sighed and tried to hold still as Ella dabbed the damp washcloth on the part of her cheek that stung the most.
“It was that girl from the Union. The anti-trans one. The ringleader of that little group. She was in the locker room and she started going off. One of the girls left the locker room to get someone official and I guess when she didn’t find anyone, or at least anyone who would listen, she went and told her meathead boyfriend, who decided to try to scare me or something.”
“I’d be scared,” Ella said in a barely audible voice.
The way she said it made Tucker want to wrap Ella in her arms, and that made her feel better than just about anything else could. She lifted her hand from the chair and rested it on Ella’s shoulder. Ella’s lips turned up but she stayed focused on Tucker’s wound.
“He’ll think twice about picking on anyone of the LGBTQIA flavors again,” Tucker said. “He and his buddy caught up with me halfway back from the gym, in that spot by Davis Hall where the lighting is shitty. And the first guy called me a faggot and shoved me into the dark spot.”
“How does that figure?” Ella asked.
She dabbed gently at the blood, working her way along the painful part of Tucker’s cheek. When Tucker flinched, she put her other hand on Tucker’s jaw to keep her from turning away and her fingers felt ice cold. The golden curtain of her hair half-obscured her face, but the parts Tucker saw, the cute, broad nose and rounded chin, were white as snow.
Tucker said, “That’s what I wondered. Then he hit me again and they got really creepy talking about what they should do next.”
“You have to report them to campus police,” Ella insisted. “I wonder if they can identify one of the guys from the cut from his ring.”
Tucker grinned, even though it made her cheek ache. “It’s going to be a lot easier than that to find them.”
Ella opened a tube of ointment and dabbed it along the cut. It stung some, but the pain was nothing compared to the rest of the evening.
“When the first guy hit me, I dropped the pepper spray I had out, but then I found it in the gravel. And it’s the kind with the purple dye in it. Campus cops are going to have no trouble finding them. You should have seen them drop when I sprayed them, and then I kicked them both in the fucking balls.”
Tucker glanced up to see Ella staring at her wide-eyed. “Wow.”
“I got the spray out because I was in my shorts and it was dark. And then he was waiting to grab me, the stupid shit.”
Ella turned
back to the first-aid kit and pulled out a bandage pad and some tape. She cut it down to size and then taped it carefully on Tucker’s cheek.
“I think that’s as clean as I can make it without hurting you worse. You’re going to have a bruise I’m sure, but probably not a black eye. I hope you didn’t want to look too tough.”
“This is fine,” Tucker said.
“You need to call the campus emergency line. I’m going to see what I have for bruising.”
“How many first-aid kits do you have?” Tucker asked.
“Only two, maybe three…I wanted to be a doctor for about ten minutes before I realized genetics is so much cooler. But no one knows what to get a future geneticist for the holidays so I get all this medical gear.”
Tucker went carefully into her room and sat on the bed for a minute staring at the phone. Then she took a long breath, grabbed the orientation packet she’d tossed on her dresser and dialed the number on the back.
“These two guys grabbed me outside of the gym, punched me a few times and slammed me against the wall,” she explained after the woman on the other end had clarified that she wasn’t in immediate danger. “I had my pepper spray out for walking in the dark so I got them pretty good. They should be showing up in the health center any time now with purple dye all over them. I just wanted to report it. Oh and they called me a faggot and said a bunch of anti-transgender stuff, so it was a hate-motivated thing.”
“I understand,” the woman said. “Do you need medical attention? You sound like you’re in shock.”
“I’m back in my room and I want to stay here,” Tucker told her. “My roommate is doing first-aid.”
“I’m sending campus police over to take a statement and make sure you’re okay. What room are you in?”
Tucker told her and was assured that they were on their way. When she hung up, Ella was standing in the doorway. She had an array of items held on a box lid that she was using as tray, including a bottle of painkillers, a white tube of some kind of cream, and a pint of ice cream with two plastic spoons.