by Rachel Gold
Ella shook her head. “She seems random sometimes. Maybe that’s just school and pressure or maybe there’s something going on, but if it’s making you unhappy or stressed out, you don’t need to put up with it.”
“It is really tough, especially with the crazy harassment for being the only out transsexual in the history of the world who isn’t. But then I’m afraid I’m just stressed out from that and overreacting.”
Tucker settled back further into the shapeless beanbag chair and then had to straighten up again so it wouldn’t shift and dump her out flat on her back.
She went on, “I used to love listening to her talk theory, or talking about anything with her. Now we just get into fights about stupid stuff like whether trans women are ‘real’ women, whatever that is. I mean, hell, most of the time I know that Emily’s more of whatever a woman is than I am. She actually likes femininity, and isn’t that the basis of feminism anyway? Not just making the world safe for women but for femininity so it’s seen as something powerful and not artificial. I mean, don’t you ever feel like people don’t take you as seriously because you look like a girlie girl?”
Ella laughed. “All the time.”
“And wouldn’t it be cool if looking feminine was perceived as powerful and not weak?”
“Sure.”
Tucker sighed and slapped her palms against her thighs. “I’m getting all caught up in theory again and really I’m just upset about Lindy. I’m so mad she doesn’t believe what I believe. But is that enough to break up over? Or do I stick with her and try to change her mind?”
“It’s not just her politics,” Ella offered. “What’s causing her to lie to you?”
“I have no idea. I wish it could go back to the way it was last spring. I wanted to be around her all the time.”
“Are you going to tell people you’re not trans?” Ella asked.
“No way,” Tucker said. She shifted forward in the chair and spread her hands on her thighs for balance. “I’m pissed. One way or the other, they should have to deal with that. And think about that poor girl…what if she hears about some of this shit?”
“She has,” Ella said.
Tucker had her mouth open, ready to go on with her rant, but she shut it. Ella looked as serious as she’d ever seen her. In the dim glow from the one weak overhead service light, Ella’s face and lips and hair all seemed to be the same honeyed-cream color. Her cheeks looked like they’d been carved in ivory.
“You know who it is? Is she okay?” Tucker tried to sound more concerned than curious, but she was burning with the desire to know who it was. Maybe it was one of the gamers and she’d come out to Ella recently, or it was someone in a class with her.
Ella tucked her hands together between her knees and lifted her chin, putting her eyes level with Tucker’s.
“Tucker, it’s me,” Ella said.
Every muscle in Tucker’s face went loose and her mouth fell open. Ella watched her, wide-eyed and waiting. Tucker worked her mouth into a grin.
“No shit?” Tucker asked.
She forced herself not to do the stupid body scan look that she’d seen too many people do to Emily when they met her: looking at her facial structure, then her chest and shoulders, then her hips and hands to see if they could spot some lingering masculine characteristic.
“Utterly devoid of shit,” Ella said. “I was born with a boy’s body, started hormone blockers when I was eleven and transitioned to living like I am now between fourteen and fifteen.”
“That’s amazing!” Tucker said and meant it. She opened her arms and leaned forward to hug Ella but the beanbag chair shimmied out from under her and dumped her butt-first onto the concrete. Ella’s effort to meet the hug or catch Tucker sent her tumbling into the gap between the beanbags. She landed on top of Tucker.
Tucker wedged her back against the edge of her capricious beanbag and got her arms around Ella. With a half wriggle, Ella balanced herself sitting across Tucker’s lap. She was laughing into Tucker’s shoulder and holding onto Tucker’s jacket to keep herself from sliding backward onto the floor. Her hair smelled like balsam, vanilla and clover honey. Tucker tightened her hold on her.
“That’s why you stopped at the graffiti on my door,” Tucker said.
Ella’s head was under Tucker’s chin and she nodded.
“Well, that’s why I knew what a shitty thing it was to do to someone,” Ella said quietly.
“The other day when I showed you Emily’s book, I was trying to figure out what you were going to say before Lindy and Nico showed up.”
“Did you figure it out?” Ella asked.
“I thought maybe you were going to come out to me as genderqueer or trans, but as female-to-male.”
Ella laughed. “Been there, not going back.”
Tucker tightened her hold on Ella. “All this time…” she started and trailed off, not sure what she wanted to say.
“All this time you’ve been making my first year at university safe for me,” Ella said.
Without question, Tucker thought, this was the most righteous moment of her whole life. No matter what happened, she had a kind of invulnerability because she’d now done one thing completely right. It was noble to protect a stranger, but it felt incomparably fulfilling to protect a friend. This is why soldiers go into battle, she thought.
“Thank you,” Ella whispered.
They sat together until the dropping temperature and hard concrete floor finally drove them apart and back to their dorm rooms.
On the way, Tucker said, “While we’re doing true confessions, you should know my full legal first name is Jessamine. I went by J.T. for a while but then I liked just using my last name better.”
“Wow, that’s quite the secret burden. It must have taken you tremendous courage to share that,” Ella told her with a smirk.
“Years of therapy,” Tucker replied.
* * *
Tucker went through the next day feeling bulletproof. She was ready to have a talk with Lindy and break up with her if it came to that, but she also hoped that Lindy would be able to explain the discrepancies in her stories and actions in a way that made sense at last.
Lindy beat her to the punch and sent Tucker a text saying: Maybe we should cool things down for a while. I’ll talk to you after fall break.
Fall break was a four-day weekend slipped into mid-October—and it was two weeks away. That was a long “break” for a relationship. Tucker wanted to run over to Lindy’s apartment and demand to know what she’d done wrong. She wanted something to change, but now that it was changing, she wasn’t ready.
She went to the gym to run but mostly to not do anything too stupid. Ever since the attack, she used the well-lit front door rather than the back entrance, even in the middle of the day, and she’d stopped changing in the locker room. Just walking by the door to the women’s locker room made her feel sick to her stomach.
Now she wore her running shorts under a pair of sweatpants that she tossed on top of her bag next to the track before she ran. So far she hadn’t seen the mean girls and she wondered about the one whose boyfriend had been kicked out of school. Was she angry at Tucker or was she on some level happy? Tucker figured the kind of guy who was willing to attack a stranger probably didn’t act like a prince in his intimate relationships.
In the middle of the run, the anger and sadness about Lindy hit her. She sped up her pace and drummed her feelings into the track. They had just made it to the nine month mark, so this was Tucker’s longest relationship to date, unless she counted the on-and-off again relationship that spanned her junior and part of her senior year of high school. They’d been off more than on, though, as the other girl kept trying to date guys and didn’t want to be seen in public with Tucker once Tucker was out.
It wasn’t that she thought she’d be with Lindy forever, or even through all of college; it just hurt to think that it meant little enough to Lindy that she was willing to chance throwing away the whole relationship via text
. Of course on the other hand, this could be Lindy’s attempt to get Tucker to come running back to her, which she badly wanted to do.
She finished three miles and wiped the sweat off her face, then put on sweatpants, boots and jacket. Back at the dorm she showered and tossed on clean sweatpants and a tank top. The room was usually on the hot side for her since she shared a thermostat with Ella, who was perpetually chilly.
She knocked on Ella’s door.
“Come on in,” Ella said and Tucker opened the door to find her sitting propped in her bed with her laptop in her lap and papers fanned out on both sides of her. Tucker wheeled the desk chair next to Ella’s bed and turned it so she could sit backward and rest her arms on the back. She called up the text on her phone and handed it to Ella.
“What does it mean?” Ella asked.
Tucker shook her head. “I’m trying to stop myself from running over there to find out.”
“I’m sure that’s what she wants. Why doesn’t she just tell you to come over instead of this reverse psychology?”
“You really didn’t date much, did you?” Tucker asked with a smile.
“Everyone thought I was a boy.”
“So? Boys date.”
“Straight girls and gay boys aren’t my type,” Ella said.
“Oh yeah, so what is?”
“I don’t really know yet. I thought maybe I should, like, date randomly this year. I don’t even really know if I like girls or boys better, but I think maybe I just like people. When did you know?”
“What?”
“What you like?” Ella asked.
“I always liked girls. In about fourth or fifth grade, when the girls and boys started teasing each other, I thought all my friends were being really stupid and it was just obvious that the girls should stick together. I fooled around with a couple of guys when I was thirteen and fourteen and it just didn’t feel like anything at all…not like being with a woman. But beyond that, I’m not sure that I know what I like either. I thought Lindy and I were really good together but the last few months it’s just been more and more shit.”
Her voice broke on the last word and she cleared her throat but it didn’t help.
“Hey, do you have plans for fall break?” Ella asked.
“The usual,” Tucker said.
“What usual? Isn’t this your first fall break?”
“Oh, I thought you meant for my birthday. It’s that Sunday.”
“Oh my God, what are you doing for it?”
“Just hanging out with whoever’s around like I do every year.”
“Tucker, come home with me for break. It’ll be fun, I promise. We can go shopping for your birthday.”
“You’ve mistaken me for Lipstick Lesbian Barbie,” Tucker said, but she was grinning. In the face of the shit with Lindy, the idea of getting away for a weekend and spending it with Ella, even if she had to go shopping, seemed wonderful.
“You’ll like my parents,” Ella went on. “They’re sweet. Don’t get Dad talking about sustainability, though, he’ll never stop. Come on, half of the students will be gone for break, you can’t just sit around here and mope.”
“I don’t want to get in the way,” Tucker said.
“Please.”
Ella’s pale green stare made her breath catch in her throat. “Yes,” she breathed and escaped back to her room.
How could she want to go running back to Lindy so badly and at the same time be so dazed by Ella?
Chapter Thirteen
Ella
Fall break was just Friday and Monday off from school, like a practice session for Thanksgiving. We took the bus down Friday afternoon and planned to stay until Monday afternoon. Mom picked us up because she had the day off too and drove us to the house. I had a duffel, a suitcase and my backpack. I wanted to do some of my delicate laundry at home where the washer actually had a gentle cycle. Tucker just had a big green army-style backpack.
We carried the bags into the foyer and Tucker stared up the spiral staircase that commands the middle of our house. She looked worried.
“Dad’s an architect, remember,” I whispered to her. “This is basically his third kid.”
“Oh yeah,” she said quietly.
“Mom, we’re going to put all our stuff in my room for now,” I called to her where she’d stopped to sort the mail onto the little table in the foyer.
I motioned to Tucker, who picked up my second suitcase and followed me up the grand staircase. My room was the second door at the top, just after the door to the master suite that ran along one whole side of the house. I went in and dropped my bags by the open door to the attached bathroom.
“It’s not pink,” Tucker said when she saw my bedroom.
“Really? You’ve seen my room at school and you thought I’d sleep in pink at home?”
A little grin cracked the startled mask of her face. “I was hoping you did so I could tease you about it.”
“Foiled!”
My bedroom was a smoky blue-gray-green color with a light tan-gold trim. I didn’t tell Tucker that I went through a pink phase when I was eleven, and then a bright gemstone green phase that Dad said was terrible to paint over.
“It’s very…you,” Tucker said. She put both bags down next to my bed.
I glanced around the room and wondered what her bedroom at home looked like. Mine was on the spare side now that I didn’t live here all the time: there was a double bed with a small table on one side and a bookcase against the wall on the other side, then the closet across from the foot of the bed and a little desk by the big window. Most of the room was neat, except for the bookcase. I’d run out of room for books and notebooks and notes, so they were all piled onto the shelves on top of each other.
“Let me show you something really cool,” I said and stepped back out of the room.
I went around the curving hallway, past the utility room to where the hall dead-ended in a shallow bookcase. The catch for the door was the fourth shelf and when I touched it, the bookcase swung out. Inside was a room just a little smaller than my bedroom with two walls lined with books and a small desk under the far window.
Tucker followed me into the room and walked slowly along one wall, her fingers tracing the books.
“I want one of these,” she said in a thick voice.
“Secret room?” I asked.
“Library.”
“If you don’t mind an old air mattress, you can sleep in here. There’s also Amy’s room, but it’s full of Mom’s files right now.”
She nodded and went back to looking at the titles of the books.
“I’m going to check in with Mom,” I told her. “I’ll be back in a few.”
Mom was in the kitchen making a list on a piece of paper. She looked up when I came around the corner and smiled.
“Is your friend settling in?” she asked.
I turned one of the dining room chairs perpendicular to the table and sat. “She’s in the library. Can she sleep up there? She really likes the books.”
“Of course. I’m headed to the store, do you want to come?”
I shook my head.
“What do you eat for breakfast these days?”
I detailed my favorite options along with what we’d like to drink and my top picks in ice cream flavors. Then I went back upstairs. When I peeked into the library, Tucker was sitting at the desk with a book open in front of her. I tiptoed back out of the doorway and went downstairs to put in my first load of laundry.
* * *
Friday night we watched movies. My parents went to bed while we were still in the middle of one. When that one finished, Tucker said, “I’m tired but I’m not sleepy. I kind of want to watch the next one.”
“Let’s watch it upstairs,” I suggested.
The old air mattress that Dad had inflated and put in the library easily fit two people and with all the pillows off my bed we could prop ourselves into a halfway sitting posture against the wall. I got my laptop and put it on my l
egs where Tucker and I could both see it.
We started up the show and then all I could think about was the warmth of Tucker next to me. She put her arm around my shoulders and I leaned into her. I felt every centimeter of her body where it touched mine but I had no idea what to do or even what I wanted. Was this friendly or more? Did I owe some kind of loyalty to Shen even though we’d only been to a movie with his cousin? I told myself that if anything I owed it to him to figure out what I liked, though I had to admit that was a pretty thin rationalization. It sort of didn’t matter what else I thought then because I was very clear that I didn’t want that moment with Tucker to end.
She reached across my legs under the blanket to adjust the angle of the laptop and then her hand rested on my leg and stayed there. I felt as if her fingers were moving up my thigh with microscopic slowness, but then I thought that might be wishful thinking. Her hand moved again, maybe a whole centimeter.
“Tucker,” I said and turned toward her.
Her face was inches from mine. She leaned down and kissed me. Her lips were bigger than mine and so soft I melted into them.
The arm around my shoulders shifted and her hand went up the back of my neck and into my hair. I got my hands untangled from the blanket enough to slide around her back and press myself closer. She kissed me harder and all I could feel was her lips and tongue and how hot her skin was through the material of her T-shirt.
Her right hand traveled farther up my leg. It sent a jolt of wanting her and an equal surge of fear into my gut. I pulled away from the kiss.
“What’s wrong?”
“Too fast,” I said and my voice came out squeaky because I was breathing so quickly.
“Okay,” she said with a wide smile. “It’s okay. We can just kiss if you like that.”
“I do,” I admitted. “I just never…”
“I thought you’d kissed girls before,” she said.
“Kissing is all I’ve ever done. With anyone.”
She took her hand off my leg and hugged me. I realized I was shaking.
“It’s okay, baby,” she said and to my horror, I started crying into the side of her neck.