Just Girls

by Rachel Gold

  I was sitting completely upright from the coughing attack and I crossed my arms and held them tightly against my chest. In a way it was even more frightening than the idea of being attacked for who I was—the idea that allies could turn away for the same reason.

  “That’s awful.” I pushed the words out of my mouth. I didn’t know what to say. It felt like I was comforting someone who should have been me and at the same time I was over here being as upset as if they’d come after me and not Tucker.

  I had to get her to stop pretending to be me, even though she didn’t know it was me. Could I do that without coming out to her myself?

  But the truth was, I really did want to come out to her now. We’d been friends and roommates for only a month, but already I felt as close to her as I’d been to my best friends in high school—well, except Nico.

  Coming out was always a weird thing because it could completely change how someone thought about me, and I didn’t feel like I wanted to come out to a lot of people. It was a really personal thing and I’d always been a girl in my own experience so there wasn’t that much to reveal. But it wasn’t about revealing, it was about sharing. In our late-night chats Tucker had already told me a bunch about growing up with a single mom and not having a lot of money and how that shaped her experiences. Telling her about how I’d been born and grown up was the same order of information—the kind of detail your close friends know and love you all the more because of it.

  “I had no idea how much anti-trans feeling is still out there,” Tucker was saying. “I mean, I have the ability to undo my coming out, but so many people don’t and they have to put up with this shit. I don’t know why it bothers me more than anti-lesbian stuff. I guess I feel like it’s a different kind of ignorance. Plus as a lesbian I really could hide that if I wanted, but trans people don’t always have that choice.”

  “Not always,” I agreed.

  “Oh hey, I have something for you,” Tucker said. She went back into her room and reappeared through the doorway a moment later with a book in her hand. “I thought if you have time you might want to read this. I know the woman who wrote it, she’s really cool, and it’s about her coming out as trans, and I think if you read it then it’ll help you understand more about what’s going on with the transphobic shit on campus and all that.”

  The familiar cover made me smile. “I’ve read it,” I told her.

  I’d read all of them. There weren’t so many trans books in the world that you couldn’t blow through all of them in under a year, even with classes and homework, and then wish for more.

  “You have? What did you think?”

  “Tucker…can I trust you to keep something confidential, just between you and me?”

  “Of course. You want me to swear to it or something.”

  “I trust you,” I said, and I did.

  Now I just had to remember what my coming out speech was.

  A loud knock sounded on Tucker’s door and we heard Lindy’s voice calling her name. Tucker got up but before she could cross back into her room, Lindy was knocking on my door and saying loudly, “Tucker, are you in there?”

  I nodded at Tucker and she opened my door. “I’m here.”

  “Why are you always in her room?” Lindy asked.

  “I’m not. I’ve been at your place all week. We’re just catching up. We’re friends, you know, we do that.”

  “Well, are you coming back to my place?”

  “Sure,” Tucker said, though she didn’t sound enthusiastic. “But not right away.”

  “Were you there this afternoon? Did you move my papers?” Lindy asked.

  “No.”

  “Someone moved them. Someone’s been through them.” Lindy’s words rose in volume.

  “It wasn’t me,” Tucker shot back in frustration. “Who else have you had over?”

  Lindy’s face was turning red and she sputtered with her answer, but before she could get actual words out, someone farther down the hall called, “Hey, is that room 226?”

  The voice was beautifully familiar and reminded me of home. I pushed past Tucker and Lindy into the hall. Nico was standing three doors down under the watery golden glow of the overhead light, looking to me like an Afro-Asian god/dess.

  “Nico!”

  Nico came down the hall and caught me in a crushing hug. After a moment, I was held at arm’s length while Nico looked me up and down. This gave me a good view of Nico’s current look as well.

  Nico’s presentation changed like the seasons—regular and yet unpredictable. Over the summer the highly feminine garb of our senior year had been falling away and now Nico looked like a very pretty man wearing dangling jewelry on one ear and serious guyliner—or was the look sort of a neo-butch lesbian play? I couldn’t decide. With Nico, that was usually the point.

  The quarter-inch buzz cut of Nico’s black hair suggested masculinity, but the jewelry was highly feminine. The rest of Nico’s outfit included heavy black leather boots with a girl-style narrow foot, worn boy-style jeans and a T-shirt under a bright blue-green Nehru-style Indian jacket that wasn’t buttoned.

  “Ella, baby doll, what the hell? I read about this online! Who got attacked? Are you safe?”

  I shook my head in a frantic “no” motion and looked at Tucker and Lindy, who had both stepped out into the hall. If Nico had heard that a trans woman was attacked on my campus it would be logical to think it could have been me, but Nico was a half-second shy of outing me.

  Nico looked from me to Tucker to Lindy, back to Tucker, back to Lindy, then said, “Hey, I’m Nico.”

  “This is my roommate Tucker and her girlfriend Lindy,” I said. “Nico’s a friend of mine from high school.”

  “You drove all the way up here to check on her just because a woman was attacked on campus?” Tucker asked.

  “Oh, I messaged her first,” Nico said. “But someone has been unusually tight-lipped on the Interwebs the last few days. You can’t tell me something isn’t wrong.” That last was directed at me.

  “It was Tucker,” I said. “They attacked her.”

  “Holy beans, you’re the cis girl who came out as trans?” Nico grabbed Tucker’s hand and shook it heartily. “Majorly cool, man.”

  I was used to watching people watch Nico and learning a lot about them by their reactions. Tucker looked confused but had a lopsided grin that widened as Nico shook her hand. Lindy’s face mixed distrust and wariness. I could watch her trying to work out what to ask Nico without sounding too horribly rude.

  “So are you Ella’s boyfriend?” Lindy finally asked.

  Nico looked at me. “You have a boyfriend?”

  “You know I don’t,” I said. “At least not yet.”

  The air in the hallway thickened. Nico’s eyes looked intense with the weight of unasked questions that had nothing to do with dating and everything to do with why I wasn’t out and whether or not I was safe. Lindy’s face was a narrow mask of suspicion. And Tucker was trying to smother her smile so it wouldn’t look like she was laughing at Lindy’s discomfort—which she was.

  “I thought you said you hadn’t had a girlfriend,” Lindy persisted with her questions by directing this one at me.

  “I haven’t,” I said.

  An edgy silence fell over our group and I just had to break it. I didn’t like Lindy very much, but it was too hard to watch her try to work out what she could or couldn’t ask.

  “I love that look,” I told Nico. “It’s so dyke George Clooney in drag. How does it play at OSU?”

  “Drives everyone crazy,” Nico said with a grin. “I went back to using per instead of ze.”

  “I thought ‘per’ didn’t carry well in loud places,” I said. Nico cycled through gender-neutral pronouns as often as through looks.

  “Yeah but with ‘ze,’ people kept screwing up and reverting to ‘he.’ And it would have been cool if they then turned ‘zirself’ into ‘herself,’ but they didn’t. Gender’s just stubborn like that. I figure with ‘per’ a
t least they’ll turn it into ‘her’ when they screw it up and that counterbalances the pretty boy butch look.”

  I laughed. “I wanted you to try ‘yo.’”

  “That’s next when I get sick of ‘per.’”

  “You can use ‘yo’ as a third-person pronoun?” Tucker asked.

  “Some kids started doing it spontaneously,” Nico told her. “Like, ‘Have you seen yo?’ and ‘Isn’t that yos jacket?’”

  “Sweet,” Tucker said. “Are you here for the weekend?”

  “As long as my baby girl will have me,” Nico said with a sidelong look at me.

  “You two really never dated?” Lindy asked.

  “Oh we dated, I was just never a boyfriend or girlfriend,” Nico said. “And anyway, it didn’t last.”

  “Too much geek all in one place,” I said in answer to Tucker’s raised eyebrows.

  “Well, if you’re here tomorrow night, come to the party at Cal’s,” Tucker said to Nico. “It’s just a casual thing.”

  “Thanks,” Nico told her. “That’d be cool.”

  Tucker put her hand on Lindy’s arm and pulled lightly so they moved down the hall past us to the door to Tucker’s room. She opened it and Lindy went ahead of her into her room. Tucker turned back to me and her eyes were full of questions.

  I shook my head at her. I wanted to come out to her so badly, but not with Lindy there. If it had only been Tucker, me and Nico, that would have been the most perfect coming out ever, but no. I went into my room with Nico right behind me.

  “You have not been telling me the full story,” Nico said.

  I put a finger to my lips and crossed the room to my iPod and speakers. I turned on music and kicked the volume up high enough that Tucker and Lindy couldn’t hear us, but not so high that we couldn’t talk normally.

  Nico sat on my bed and scooted back to lean against the wall. “Not the full story,” per repeated. “What is up with those two? That angry one is like a violin string about to snap. And Tucker, hot damn, you just said she was cute, but she’s like: oh. my. gawd.”

  “Well, I was going to try to take a pic to email you, but I hadn’t figured out how to set it up to look casual. I couldn’t really be like, ‘Hey, Tucker, I want to show my friend Nico how adorable you are.’”

  Nico paused and raised an eyebrow. “Yeah you could. As long as that possessive Polly wasn’t with her. So you’re not out to her either?”

  “Again, Lindy,” I said by way of explanation.

  Nico nodded. “I get that. Still, girl, I panicked when I saw that article online.”

  “There’s an article?”

  “On a trans news blog I follow about how a trans girl was attacked up here. My heart seriously stopped.”

  “I told you I was okay.”

  “You know you always say you’re ‘okay’ when you’re freakin’ losing it, right?”

  “Oh.”

  “So?”

  I climbed onto the bed, crawled over to Nico and curled against per chest.

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” I said and started crying.

  Per arms tightened around me and I felt the comforting pressure of per cheek on the top of my head.

  “I got you,” Nico said quietly and let me cry.

  Chapter Ten

  Tucker

  “I’ve never met anyone genderqueer who was so…good at it,” Tucker said. She and Summer were sitting on the porch at Cal’s place waiting for more party guests to arrive.

  “Well, what did Ella say about her dating life? She said she’d kissed girls and something about it being about the same with boys, but then Nico said they dated, right? Maybe we can figure it out that way,” Summer suggested.

  “You haven’t even met Nico yet and you’re already trying to figure per out.”

  “Oh and you didn’t, Ms. High and Mighty? Nice use of the gender-neutral pronoun; how long did you have to practice that?”

  “Okay, yeah, I wondered about Nico,” Tucker admitted.

  “See!” Summer pushed off the ratty outdoor couch and went to get another beer.

  Cal lived in the bottom half of a duplex with a broad, broken-down front porch and a worn deck off the back. His roommate was in an ongoing relationship with a girl who lived across town and he was gone more weekends than he was home, so Cal’s place became a frequent gathering spot for the LGBTQIA Alliance parties. They were only a block off campus and this was Cal’s second year renting there. The upstairs unit was also rented to Freytag students so they didn’t complain about the noise as long as they could come down and raid the beer cooler on the back deck.

  The weather was still nice enough that on the screened-in porch, Tucker wasn’t cold in a T-shirt and could enjoy the soft wind moving around her. A rich, sweet, jasmine smell carried from the little white flowers climbing a trellis in the neighbor’s yard and mixed with a sharp metal tang from the half-cleaned bike parts in a heap against the porch wall. Tucker inhaled deeply. It reminded her of working in the back of the hardware store with the windows open.

  Her phone vibrated and she read the text from Lindy: Where are you?

  Cal’s. You coming? Tucker typed.

  Is Summer there?

  Yeah, why?

  Vivien asked, Lindy wrote.

  Tucker didn’t recall Lindy having any classes with Vivien this semester. What was going on? Did Vivien want to know about Summer because she was trying to meet up with her? But why not just text her? Or was she trying to avoid her? Summer hadn’t mentioned Vivien recently and Tucker wasn’t sure if those two were still hooking up or not.

  She typed to Lindy, Is she looking for Summer or avoiding her?

  We’re on our way, Lindy replied.

  Hearing familiar laughter, Tucker looked up from her phone to see Ella and Nico coming up the walk together. A few inches taller than Ella, Nico had an arm draped easily around her shoulders. Tucker’s chest clenched. She wanted both to join them and to push them apart.

  They opened the door to the porch and she stood up.

  “I’ll give you the tour,” she offered.

  Ella looked better than she had all week. Tucker had only seen her in passing until Friday, and her face had been shadowed with fatigue and worry. Now her green eyes were bright again.

  She was in dark jeans and a gray T-shirt over a white waffle-weave long underwear shirt. The effect of the slightly butch outfit made her look even smaller and more delicate than usual. Nico was in a denim jacket over a shimmering multicolored shirt with slender pants tucked into heavy boots. As before, Nico struck Tucker first as a guy who was cross-dressing, then as a woman who was passing as a pretty man wearing male-style eye makeup. In the time it took them to walk across the porch and into the living room, Tucker changed her mind about Nico’s gender three times.

  “There’s beer on the back deck in a cooler, and another cooler of water and pop, plus some other drinks in the fridge.” She didn’t have to point out the food since it was spread over the dining room table and buffet.

  Tesh sat on the couch by the front windows, her short brown hair sticking up wildly in many directions as it often did after a long day of running her hands through it while she studied. Cal was in the big armchair next to her, his tall body bent toward her with one elbow propped on a thick armrest. Summer came into the room from the back deck with three beers in her hands.

  “Hey guys, this is Ella’s friend Nico from OSU. Nico, that’s Tesh on the couch and Cal next to her and this is Summer.”

  Summer put two beers on the coffee table in front of Tesh and Cal and held the third out to Nico.

  “Want one?” she asked.

  “Sure. Thanks.”

  Ella rolled her eyes and Tucker wondered if she often got overlooked next to Nico. They were both striking but in such different ways. Nico clearly dressed to draw attention. It was hard not to want to look at per.

  “Since when do you drink?” Ella asked Nico.

  “I’m a college student now,” Nico sai
d and took the bottle Summer was offering.

  “You want anything?” Ella asked Tucker.

  Tucker held up the half full can of Pepsi she was drinking and shook her head. Ella went toward the back of the house. Summer dropped onto the couch in the middle, next to Tesh, and patted the open space on her other side. Nico obligingly took it.

  “What’s Nico short for?” Summer asked. “Nicholas?”

  “Nope,” Nico said.

  “Nicole?”

  “Still no.”

  “Nikhita?”

  Nico shook per head. “If you must know, my birth name is Nehal, but my little sister started calling me Neho and it just morphed.”

  “Is Nehal a boy’s name?” Summer prompted.

  “It’s unisex.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Look it up,” Nico said and gave her a wide grin.

  Summer paused and smiled back at Nico because it was almost impossible not to smile at Nico up close. Nico’s thick lips framed the sort of bright white teeth you usually saw on TV and with per high, wide cheekbones even a small smile looked like an invitation to mischief. Per had warm brown skin and hazel eyes outlined with kohl and weighted down gently by well-shaped black brows. No matter what gender you read into per, Nico was a beautiful person.

  “Okay.” Summer switched tracks. “So was Ella out when you two dated?”

  “Out as what?”

  “Bi, right? What else?”

  “She has a lot to come out about. She didn’t tell you about her embarrassing Bollywood phase? I’ll bet she still has a sari in the back of her closet. You should ask her.”

  “I do not,” Ella said. She’d just returned from the kitchen with a bottle of orange soda. There were four folding chairs around the room and she carried the nearest one to the side of the couch where Nico was sitting so she could be on Nico’s right.

  Tucker leaned against one of the wooden columns that separated the living room from the dining room and sipped her warm Pepsi. She disliked not being the one Ella gravitated toward in a group.

  Lindy came in the back way with Vivien. Tucker heard their voices in the kitchen and then they pushed through the swinging door into the dining room. Lindy paused at the table, but Vivien came to the archway between the rooms and leaned against the column opposite where Tucker was standing.