Just Girls

by Rachel Gold

  “…and then today in my Gender Studies class, it was like nobody got what really happened and when I told the TA she blamed me. She said maybe I shouldn’t have been in the women’s locker room because it was women-only space. It was insane.”

  “Oh sweetie,” Claire said again and there was a long pause on the other end of the line. Finally she said, “Are you writing all this down?”

  “To document it?”

  “Yes, but also just to process it and to remember it. And it will help if you need to take legal action. But right now I want to make sure you’re really safe. Are you?”

  “Yeah, I’m just pissed. Cal’s been walking me around campus and Ella bandaged me up really well.”

  “Ella…she’s your cute roommate?”

  “Yeah.”

  Tucker was glad Claire couldn’t see her blushing. She’d sent a few long and complimentary texts to Claire about Ella right after she got the offer to move in and they included a lot of description about how Ella was really pretty, but not like stupid Barbie pretty, just beautiful and with an inner strength. Yeah, she’d gone over the top with the Ella texts.

  “Tucker, you realize you didn’t mention Lindy.”

  “She’s been really stressed out about her next presentation, but she brings me dinner and stuff. She’s trying, she’s just not always paying attention. Anyway, the guys who attacked me got thrown out of school.”

  “Maybe you should come out as cis,” Claire suggested. “You’ll be safer if people know you’re not trans.”

  “I was going to tell Vivien, the TA, but then she got so shitty about it. And what if it was really true? The only way she’s going to learn is to have to deal with a trans student, or at least one she thinks is. There’s still a girl here who is, you know. What if she’s in that same class?”

  “Just take care of yourself. You sound spread thin emotionally. If Lindy isn’t taking care of you, make sure you have other support around you. And call me more.”

  “Okay,” Tucker said. “Thanks a bunch. Give Emily a hug for me.”

  Claire would be graduating from the University of Iowa that spring and planned to move back to the Twin Cities where she hoped to get a job at a local literary journal. She wanted a few years out of school before she thought about going for a graduate degree and this put her near Emily, who still had another year and a half at the U of M due to the year she took after community college to work full-time and complete her transition.

  Tucker went to the top of her dresser and found her copy of Emily’s book. She wanted to share it with Ella. By the way Ella reacted to Tucker’s story about coming out as trans, she thought that Ella would like it. She had trouble reading Ella’s reactions sometimes. She seemed to be pretty up on trans issues but not very political. Or maybe she was just shy about discussing her politics. Tucker wished she knew how to draw her out more. Maybe the book would be the thing.

  She knocked on Ella’s door. Holding her phone, she thought about texting her and asking her when she was coming back to the room. She wanted to talk to her more than anyone else on campus right now and the thought scared her. Claire was right, it was weird that she listed Ella as one of the most supportive people around her rather than Lindy.

  There was something to Ella’s soft, inquisitive way of listening to her; it gave her the impression that Ella knew a lot more than she let on. She hadn’t freaked out when Tucker showed up bruised and bleeding at her door. She hadn’t pestered her with a million questions or turned it into a “who’s been more victimized by life” contest like Lindy did.

  Tucker wanted to stay in her room and wait until Ella came back, but already there were two texts from Lindy asking what she wanted for dinner. She sighed and went back to her desk to put the books she was reading into her backpack.

  Chapter Nine

  Ella

  After dinner on Thursday I went back to the room, but Tucker wasn’t there. She wasn’t in the Union either so I headed for the library to see if I could find Shen.

  Shen didn’t say where in the library he studied and the building had three floors plus a basement. I figured I’d walk around the first floor and then pick a spot in the open study area near the door and start studying. If I didn’t see him in an hour, I’d head up to the second floor and so on.

  I sat down with my tablet and my notepad and started looking at the biology text on the tablet. I loved being able to carry a bunch of big textbooks on my tablet but preferred the feel of paper note taking. It felt like my fingers helped my brain learn the material. Maybe someday I’d pool my money and get a smartpen so I could write and upload it to the tablet as text.

  After about fifteen minutes I looked up and scanned the room. No Shen. I went back to reading and looked up again about ten minutes later. Still no sign of Shen and, as it turned out, there was one major flaw in this plan. A moment after I was absorbed in the book again, I felt someone sit down next to me. I looked over to see a total stranger smiling at me.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “You looking for someone?” he asked.

  He was tall and lean with Finland-meets-England ruddy tan skin and short brown hair in a messy style—if that was an intentional style.

  “A classmate,” I told him.

  “Are you sure it’s not me?”

  He was trying to make a joke, or a come on, or a joking come on. He sprawled out in the chair with his legs stretched close to mine and one arm thrown along the back, making his already long body look bigger.

  “Pretty sure,” I said with the emphasis on “sure.”

  “You should give me a try,” he said.

  “Have we met?” I asked, trying subtly remind him that he was a total stranger to me and his presence might not be welcome.

  “Yes, just now.”

  “I don’t know you,” I persisted.

  “I’m Mike,” he said.

  “What I mean, Mike, is that you’re someone I don’t know who just interrupted my studying and I’d like to get back to my book now.”

  “You don’t have to be like that,” he said, getting up from the chair. “I was just trying to be friendly.”

  I didn’t answer that and he got up and stood there for a few seconds exuding hurt just to see if that would work. It didn’t. I knew better than to look up from my tablet again and in a moment he gave a loud sigh and walked away.

  This sort of thing happened to me fairly often when I went anywhere alone, which was one reason I rarely did. I could walk into a coffee shop and be checking out the décor and a complete stranger would come up and say something about the weather or ask what I was reading or, most awkward of all, tell me how pretty I was.

  I felt like saying, “I’m not sitting here being pretty for you. I just won the genetic lottery and I like wearing makeup so I look pretty to myself.” But I usually said, “Thank you” and then “I’ve got a lot of studying to do.” If that didn’t work, I just got up and left.

  I remembered being fourteen years old and going into a coffee shop and reading for a whole hour and no one ever talked to me. I could stare around the room all I wanted and the only thing that happened was that people would look away from my direct gaze. Not that I sat around staring at people, but I liked to check them out and hypothesize about their genetic heritage or think about human evolution in general. Why did we grow bodies that could make us that big or that small? How did we escape having long necks or tiny forearms?

  By the time I was almost fifteen, as if someone had flipped a switch, the world began reacting differently to me. I shouldn’t make it sound that cosmic: the switch was hormones. At fourteen I was able to go from just taking the blockers that prevented me from entering male puberty to taking female hormones. This was a compromise with Mom and Dad. I wanted to start at twelve or thirteen, they wanted me to wait until sixteen, just in case I realized this wasn’t the path for me. We fought about it some and hammered out a date we could all live with.

  Back then I couldn’t und
erstand how they could be so cool and so pigheaded at the same time, but that was because I could tell I was lagging behind the other girls and it was driving me crazy. I don’t know whether it’s worse being a late bloomer and not knowing when you’re going to hit puberty or knowing it’s there waiting for you and you just can’t have access yet because someone else decided it was too soon. At least I knew that mine was coming.

  And once it happened, I could sort of understand Mom and Dad’s fears—but I was never going back. The trouble is that gender dysphoria is not something you can see so Mom and Dad thought they had a son. They’d spent ten years thinking they had a son before my continued insistence that I was a girl wore through Mom’s defenses and she realized what I was trying to tell her. So then I’m a boy in their minds and I’m changing who I am—or that’s how it seems to them because they’ve never experienced the feeling of their self-perception and their body not matching up. They wanted to make sure I wasn’t “changing” something I couldn’t change back, but to me it was never a change.

  It’s hard to describe to them or friends or anyone what it’s like. It’s kind of like the phantom limb thing where a person loses their arm but they keep feeling it should be there, it’s actually hurting but they can’t do anything about it because it’s not really there—but the brain keeps sending the signal anyway, “Hey, move your arm.” Well, my brain kept saying “Hey girl” and the limb was my whole body.

  I hit puberty at seven a.m. on November 13, six months after my fourteenth birthday. That was the morning I first took hormones. Nothing big happened, I just added a pill to the GnRH and the multivitamin Dad made me take. It was rather a letdown.

  Everything started to change the following spring. I was still going out in public as a boy. I mostly wore jeans and T-shirts with geeky stuff on them and kept my hair shaggy but on the short side. I looked a little young for my age in general and with the hormone blockers I looked extra young, so mostly people thought I was a twelve-year-old boy instead of nearly a fifteen-year-old girl. My guy friends assumed I was going to come out as gay at any minute since I had a lot of female friends and a reputation for being a sensitive guy and a great listener. That didn’t bother me since I did think some guys were cute, I just didn’t want to date any of them while I was still a guy. I didn’t actually want to date a girl either with a boy’s body so I cultivated an asexual, late bloomer identity.

  That spring I had to start binding my breasts under my T-shirt in order to keep passing as a boy. We planned that I’d grow my hair out over the summer and come back to school for my junior year as myself, as Ella, but it was getting harder to hide the way my body was changing. The shape of my face slowly altered and I began to put some padding on my butt and hips.

  My friends didn’t really notice, or at least they weren’t aware of noticing, because they were so used to the way I looked that I don’t think they saw changes: the way you don’t see a friend losing or gaining a little weight. But if I went into a store on my own, I could be called “miss” by one person and a minute later it was “young man” from someone else. That lasted until the summer when I started to grow my hair out and didn’t hide having breasts anymore.

  At fifteen I’d lost the ability to sit quietly in a coffee shop for an hour without someone trying to strike up a conversation with me, but compared to everything I gained, I really couldn’t complain.

  I shook myself out of the memories and looked at the time on my tablet. I’d spent forty-five minutes on the first floor, I could legitimately start moving up through the library without feeling like I was here just to stalk Shen.

  The second floor of the library had two study areas. I looked into the larger one first but didn’t see him so I headed for the little one: a service room before the library was renovated. Now the space had a couch along one wall and a small table with three chairs at either end. Shen was tucked into the near corner with his books spread out on the table there.

  “Oh hi,” I said. “This is a cool space.”

  He looked up. “Ella. I am hiding from my cousin. I’m glad you found me.”

  “You’re safe, I doubt he’s left the gaming room.”

  “He is quite loud and talkative.”

  “Well, I didn’t want to interrupt you…”

  He smiled. “Your interruption is welcome.” He pulled the chair next to him back from the table. “Will you join me?”

  “Thanks.” I sat down and tried not to grin a bunch. I had no idea what to say now that I was here. “I’ve been wondering where you’re from,” I said and then immediately felt dumb.

  “China,” he said deadpan, but I caught the mischievous glint in his eyes.

  I flipped my hair over my shoulder and widened my eyes, “Oh my gawd, is that, like, really far away?”

  He laughed. “You got me. You want to know what city? Kunming. Southern China. Very beautiful. Cool summers and soft winters. And yes, I miss it.”

  “What do you think of America? Are we still the land of opportunity?”

  “More like land of innovation and favorable exchange rate,” he said.

  “So you’ll go home after you graduate?”

  “It depends where the jobs are in three years. Where do you come from?”

  I oriented myself toward a direction I hoped was easterly and pointed. “About two hours that way.”

  “Closer,” he said.

  “Much.”

  “You didn’t want to go far?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “Someday I’d love to travel.”

  “Will you be a scientist?” he asked and we got talking about biology and career aspirations. From there somehow we got on the topic of gaming and the kinds of characters we like and the games. He liked the science fiction games and playing characters who were part or all machine.

  “Machines are very elegant,” he said. “But it’s best when a character is both the messy human and the disciplined machine. The struggle is good between the two. Johnny and I go to movies on Fridays. What is your feeling about the Resident Evil movies?”

  “Guilty pleasure,” I said with a grin. I am a sucker for women-with-guns movies.

  “Perhaps would you join us?”

  “I’d love to, but are you sure Johnny won’t mind?”

  “Of course not,” he said.

  And with that we went back to studying. Or at least it looked like he was studying, I was staring at the words on my tablet without reading any of them and trying to figure out what the deal was. Did he like me? It seemed that way when he asked me to come study with him, but then why would he invite me out with both him and Johnny? What if Johnny was the one who liked me and Shen just offered to invite me when Johnny wasn’t around so it wouldn’t embarrass him? Or what if both of them just wanted to be friends and were inviting me to their weekly movie night because they thought I was fun?

  I wondered if it was true that they’d have to date the same girl. I didn’t want to date Johnny, but we could work that out later if it turned out this was really a date.

  * * *

  When I went back to my room, I wanted to talk to Tucker and ask her what she thought about that interaction with Shen. And I wanted to know how she was doing, but she still wasn’t there. I was starting to feel like I would never see her again.

  Finally on Friday afternoon when I got back from class I heard music coming from her side of the door. I tapped on the bathroom door to Tucker’s room so she’d know it was me. I’d already told her to just ignore me if she was working on something and when I didn’t hear a response in a few seconds I went back to my room. I got a glass of water and, since I was caught up on my schoolwork, I flopped down on my bed to do a little pleasure reading.

  Minutes later, I heard a tap on my room’s inner door. “Come on in,” I called.

  Tucker came in and sat on the foot of the bed. The cut on her cheek had a thick scab over it.

  “You should keep a bandage on that for a few more days,” I told her. “Unless yo
u want it to scar.”

  She laughed a little. “You’re sure you’re not pre-med?”

  I blushed and turned around to fish in my dresser for the Neosporin. There was only one reason I knew a lot about scars and it had nothing to do with studying biology. Maybe it was time to tell Tucker that chapter of my history.

  “At least let me put some Neosporin on it,” I said.

  She didn’t protest as I put a dab of the cream on my finger and rubbed it along the cut on her cheek. I replaced the tube in my dresser and sat back down in my desk chair.

  “How do you feel?” I asked.

  “Sore. And tired of answering that question,” she said.

  “Well then, let me change the topic.” I was still debating how to come out in my head, so I picked the next thing on my mind. “How do you know if a guy likes you?” I asked.

  She raised her eyebrows at me. “Hell if I know.”

  “Well, I mean, anyone?”

  “They laugh at all your jokes,” she said. “And smile a lot. Or they corner you during a party and fuck your brains out, it kind of depends on the person.”

  I couldn’t think of a thing to say about that because I was trying not to think about Lindy…yeah, no. Ugh. Tucker, on the other hand—the idea sent a wave of heat from my knees up to my scalp.

  “What are you up to?” I asked her, in order to change the topic again, and reached for the glass of water on my desk.

  “Working on the Gender Studies paper. I can’t seem to say what I want to. Vivien, my TA, totally pissed me off yesterday. She said maybe I shouldn’t have been in the women’s locker room as a trans woman, that it was women-only space. Can you believe that?”

  I forgot about the water I was sipping and inhaled sharply, giving myself a fit of choking. Tucker grabbed the glass so I wouldn’t drop it and waited while I coughed myself back into clear breathing.

  “Sorry,” I managed. “Swallowed wrong. Go on.”

  “That was it,” Tucker said. “As soon as I said the attack was anti-trans she was done with me.”