Just Girls

by Rachel Gold

Tucker wanted to relax completely into Lindy as she had in the spring and summer, but something inside of her wouldn’t unwind. It must be the weekend with Ella and how clear their night together remained in her memory. She forced herself to set it aside and settle back into her relationship with Lindy.

  * * *

  It was smooth sailing for about three days. Then Tucker found herself blinking at the message in her student email account, sure that she was reading it wrong:

  Subject: Low Grade Warning

  This email is to inform you that you have a grade D or below in your course: Women’ s & Gender Studies. At the midpoint of the semester it is time to take action to raise your grade. If you cannot think of ways to raise your grade, please talk to your instructor.

  D or below? How? It was still before her first class of the day and she threw on clothes and ran across the campus to her physical mailbox in the Student Union. There was the copy of her paper for Women’s & Gender Studies with a resounding D on the cover page. The comments said, “Lacks analysis, originality and depth.”

  “What the fuck!”

  She pulled out her phone and logged into her student email so she could send Vivien a message.

  “A D?” she wrote. “Why?”

  The response pinged back into her phone just after her history class. It said, “The subject was extremely lopsided and lacked analysis, as I noted. You have two weeks until the deadline to drop a class has passed.”

  She stomped from the history building across the corner of the quad to the Union. It was a cloudy day but the slight wind that moved between the buildings held a touch of warmth and didn’t cool the sweat on her skin.

  Summer and Cal were at The Table in the back of the Union. She showed them the message and the writing on her paper.

  “She’s trying to force you out of the class,” Summer said.

  “Can she do that?”

  They looked at each other and Cal shook his head.

  “Don’t know,” he said. “Never had it happen to me. Seems wrong. You should talk to the professor.”

  “That class is the prereq for all the Gender Studies classes,” Tucker said. Her words snarled together. “I can’t get a degree in it if I don’t take the foundational course.”

  “You want me to talk to Viv about it?” Summer asked.

  Tucker stared at her trying to imagine something more embarrassing. “I thought you two were over. And no, I don’t.”

  “We hooked up again last week, but then she was gone all weekend again. It’s just weird. Speaking of weird, what’s up with you and Ella? Ever since you and Lindy called a time out, she’s been super touchy with you.”

  “We’re just friends,” Tucker said.

  “Really good friends,” Cal said.

  “Really really good friends,” Summer added. “You’d make a cute couple.”

  “We’re not a couple,” Tucker said. The anger from the low-grade warning spilled over and made the statement come out more harshly than she intended. She took a slow breath and said, “I’m with Lindy. We talked and I get what’s been going on and it’s cool. And Ella’s into Shen, so just focus on the crisis.”

  “Talk to the prof,” Cal said.

  Summer turned to him. “What if she already saw the grades? What if she’s in on it? I think you should go outside the department and complain.”

  “To who?” Tucker asked.

  Summer shrugged. “I don’t know, look it up?”

  Tucker texted Ella and asked where she was. With a professor mom, Ella had to know the right course of action.

  “Texting Lindy?” Summer asked.

  “Ella,” Tucker said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Tucker rolled her eyes at Summer. “Her mom’s a professor. And Lindy is friends with Vivien so that would be as weird as asking you for help.”

  “Right…” Summer elongated the word.

  Ella wrote back: Lunch with Shen at the sandwich place, join us.

  “I’m out,” Tucker told Summer and Cal.

  As she walked away from the table she heard Cal mutter, “No kidding,” and laugh.

  The sandwich place had to be the restaurant where Ella picked up the bánh mì to bring over to Lindy’s that one night. That seemed years ago now. Tucker walked over. The place was crowded and Ella and Shen were finishing as she came in. They stood up and Shen said a quick goodbye to both of them before excusing himself.

  “What’s wrong?” Ella asked when they were out on the street.

  Tucker showed her the paper and the email.

  “Summer thinks she’s trying to force me out of the class but I need it for my major. Cal said I should talk to the prof, but what if she already knows about it and agrees with Vivien? Can you ask your mom who I should complain to?”

  “Sure,” Ella said. “She’ll only know how to complain at OSU, but that should give us a place to start.”

  The fact that Ella said “us” and not “you” made Tucker smile. It wasn’t intrusive like Summer offering to talk to Vivien, it was just this assumption that they were naturally in it together, on the same side.

  “Do you have anything to show that this is because of her anti-trans position?” Ella asked.

  “Just the material in the paper,” Tucker said. “And how cold Vivien got when she thought I was trans, Cal saw that too and I’m sure he’d say it was weird to anyone we need to tell.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Ella

  I called Mom right away about Tucker’s low grade and she said going to the professor was a good choice, or to the dean of the department. But when I looked it up, Women’s & Gender Studies didn’t have a dean because it combined professors from English, History, Sociology and Psychology. The representative of the department who took general questions was Professor Callander, the same professor who taught the Intro course that Tucker was in.

  While I tried to figure out who to talk to, Tucker was loaded for bear. She moved up to the front row of the Gender Studies class and made sure that on the days when Professor Callander was lecturing, she answered questions and participated. But at the same time, I could see that she was worrying. She’d worked her butt off for that paper and to be told it was poor quality, when she wasn’t busy being pissed, started to eat away at her self-assurance.

  Still looking for another option, I went over to the administration building. One side of it was under construction with scaffolds and workers crawling over the brickwork doing restoration. Dad would know exactly what they were doing. I just glanced up at it and went inside.

  The inside had already been restored. It gleamed with warm, honey-brown wood above a slate floor. Dad would love it. There was even a little plaque by the door saying they’d used eighty percent locally-sourced building materials. I went up to the work-study student at the desk.

  “Hi, who do I talk to in order to find out more about contesting a grade?” I asked.

  He looked up and smiled at me. “I’m sorry to hear you’re having trouble.”

  “It’s for a friend.”

  “Well then, you’re a good friend to have. You can go talk to the assistant provost. Do you want me to buzz him for you?”

  “Would you?”

  He was chatty for an administrative guy. Or maybe it was me. If I’d been a boy, would he have answered me in monosyllables? He certainly wouldn’t have flashed that smile at me.

  “He’ll be out in just a minute,” the student said. “Can I get you a cup of water or anything?”

  “Thank you, I’m fine.”

  I sat in the row of chairs arranged along the wall facing his desk.

  “What’s your major?” he asked.

  “I haven’t declared, but I’m thinking biology.”

  “Oh cool. Nursing?”

  “Microbiology, maybe genetic engineering,” I said.

  “Holy shit.”

  “Basically.”

  Yes, it was one of those days where I felt like I’d become the lightning rod for g
ender perception. Nursing? Really. Did I look like someone who goes into nursing? Oh right, I have breasts and that’s really all you need, isn’t it? Pun intended.

  I managed not to say that out loud and his phone rang so I was relieved of small talk duty. While I was sitting there getting good and annoyed, a trim man with his brown hair in an unfortunate bowl cut came down the hall and gestured to me. I followed him into a heavily oaked-out office. There was so much wood in there I expected to see him using wooden pens. He introduced himself as Assistant Provost Gordon Dack and I gave my name but explained that I was just there to find out some things for a friend.

  “I wanted to know the process for contesting a grade or complaining about a TA,” I asked, sitting in one of the chairs in front of his big oak desk.

  He didn’t take the seat behind the desk, just leaned back against the edge of it so that he loomed over me.

  “You can complain about the TA to the professor,” he said. “Usually grade complaints are done at the end of term. It’s on the website.”

  “I looked at the website. My friend just got her low-grade warning and it seems like it would be better to contest it now. Plus her professor’s out of town all the time and it’s like the TAs are running the class. It doesn’t seem fair.”

  “She does have half a term to get the grade up.”

  “What if she can’t because the TA is opposed to her point of view?”

  “We encourage everyone to keep an open mind here,” Dack said and leaned forward a few inches, which made me crane my neck worse just to keep eye contact with him. “I’m sure if her grades are low it’s because of the quality of her work.”

  I stood up and put one hand on the back of the chair. I knew how to take up space when I had to. He leaned away from me.

  “Let’s just assume that’s not the case,” I said. “Is there any way to contest a grade mid-semester?”

  “There’s still a week for her to drop the course,” he said. “Sometimes new students get in over their heads, especially in the first semester. She can drop it and still have enough credits to graduate.”

  “So what you’re saying is there’s no way to contest a grade until after the semester ends?”

  “That’s right,” he said as if he’d finally gotten through to me.

  “Who handles complaints against TAs if the professor isn’t available?”

  He paced to his window, then back to his desk. “Complaints are a serious matter,” he said.

  “I understand that.”

  “You can talk to the dean of the department,” he said.

  “It’s a small department. There isn’t a dean.”

  “The representative,” he suggested.

  “That’s the same person as the professor,” I told him.

  “Then that’s the right person to talk to.”

  I wasn’t going to get anything more helpful from him. I said, “Thank you for your time,” and left quickly.

  Outside the front door of the building I heard a wolf whistle from above. I looked up at the worker on the scaffold.

  “Did you seriously just whistle at me?” I called up.

  “Oh sorry, I couldn’t see from up here that you were a bitch,” he replied.

  That did it. If the patriarchy picked today to mess with me, then I was going to mess with it right back. I let all the frustration about Tucker and her situation and the stupid responses I was getting rise to the surface of my mind. By the time I was back down the hall to the assistant provost’s office, I had tears in my eyes.

  “He whistled at me and then he called me a bitch,” I said, swiping a tissue from the box on the desk and sniffling loudly into it.

  “Josh at the front desk?”

  “No, the worker out front up on the…the ladder thingy, what’s that called?”

  “Scaffold?”

  “Yes. He made one of those dirty-sounding whistles and then he called me a bitch.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” Dack said sternly. “Wait here.” He put a protective hand on my shoulder on the way out and I managed not to shrug it off.

  He was back five minutes later.

  “He won’t be working on this campus anymore. I’m sorry that happened to you.”

  “I’ll be okay,” I said, and then added with genuine feeling. “Thank you for taking care of that, I really appreciate it.”

  I walked out of the building without further incident and made it all the way across campus to the Union without being flirted with, condescended to or aggressively sexualized by strangers (as far as I could tell). Tesh and Summer were at The Table with Cal and a woman I didn’t know. They introduced her as Alisa Foss, a junior who hadn’t been around nearly enough lately, according to Cal. She seemed nice in a quiet, mousy way; she had a lot of medium brown hair that she liked to hide behind. I understood the feeling.

  “I’m having a ridiculous day,” I told them.

  Cal struck a chin-in-hands storytime pose.

  “I went over to admin to talk to someone about the thing with Tucker’s TA and the provost guy was so condescending—like a first-year student doesn’t know harassment when it’s happening.”

  “Was that G-Dack?” Summer asked. “He’s kind of a prick.”

  “I noticed. I go to leave and the guy on the scaffold wolf whistles at me and when I call him on it, he calls me a bitch. So I turned around and ran right back into G-Dack’s office and did the crying girl thing.”

  “You did not!” Tesh gasped.

  “Complete with real tears. He lit right out of there and ‘handled’ it for me.”

  “Isn’t that sort of hypocritical?” Alisa asked quietly. “I mean if you don’t like being condescended to but then you’re going to act all helpless.”

  I thought about that. On the one hand, she was right, but on the other hand, why should I have to be the well-behaved one? Did I have to be perfectly good until the long future day when guys like G-Dack got a clue and stopped treating women like airheads? Audre Lorde said you couldn’t dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools, but she didn’t say you couldn’t just screw around with the master’s tools until you break them.

  “If people want to treat me like a girl, then I’m going to weaponize girl,” I said.

  The Table cracked up.

  “I want a T-shirt,” Summer said. “Weaponize ‘Girl.’”

  “I’m not sure it translates into that medium, but you’re welcome to print some up. Just don’t ever wear them to an airport.”

  “No kidding. I don’t want to be on the receiving end of that strip search,” Summer said.

  * * *

  I told Tucker a shorter version of the day that boiled down to the fact that we couldn’t contest the grade and we should make an appointment with Professor Callander. I was at my desk, turned toward the room’s inner door where she leaned against the frame.

  Tucker sighed. “I guess we should do that. Something in me rebels against the idea of going after another feminist. There aren’t enough of us to go around already.”

  “Vivien went after you first,” I pointed out, but I felt the same. “Professor Callander will probably want Vivien in there too—do you want me to come with you so the sides are even? I’m good with academic types.”

  “That would be cool. I’ll make us an appointment during her office hours and text you.”

  I closed the cover on my tablet and asked, “I’m headed over to the dining hall, want to come?”

  “I’m going to Lindy’s. She’s making something.”

  Guilt flashed through me at the mention of Lindy’s name, followed by a kind of sad regret. When we got back from fall break, I hadn’t known what I wanted—and Tucker seemed to crave being in a relationship—so even though I wanted to get into bed with her again, I didn’t bring it up, afraid to find myself in a capital-R “Relationship.” But it felt like Lindy had swooped in vulture-style and carried her off.

  “Did things get better?” I asked.

&
nbsp; “Yeah, a lot, sort of,” she said. She came a few steps into the room and sat down on the bed, slouched forward so her elbows rested on her legs and her fingers knit together between her open knees. “I kind of figured you didn’t want to hear about that.”

  I put a hand on hers but I didn’t really know what to say. If everything with her could be as simple and straightforward as having sex had been, I’d want to be with her all the time. But even on the ride back to campus, she was back in the drama in her mind.

  She didn’t have to tell me what was going on. Lindy was over in her room all the time if she wasn’t over at Lindy’s, and I didn’t need to hear the details through the wall to know that the last week had included plenty of laughter and a strong dose of sex.

  That had even driven me out of the room once and over to the gaming room to destroy an unusual number of opponents in Halo. I wasn’t jealous exactly. My feelings for Lindy had gone from low neutral to active distaste and I didn’t want her with Tucker—anyone else but not her. But I couldn’t tell Tucker that. What would I say: I don’t want a relationship with you but I want you to stay broken up with your girlfriend anyway?

  It wasn’t fair and there was nothing to do but suck it up and support Tucker.

  “We’re friends,” I told her. “I didn’t want anything serious. It was perfect.”

  Tucker grinned. “I like perfect.”

  “You can tell me about you and Lindy, I’m not going to freak out,” I told her, gritting my teeth and promising myself that was true.

  She looked into my eyes for a moment and then shrugged. “It’s been pretty nice,” she said. “She apologized and explained about all the stress she’s been under and I guess it made sense to me. And then, you know…” A blush crept over her cheeks and I tried not to wonder what Lindy had come up with that would make Tucker blush.

  “Did she explain to you why she lied so much?”

  “I think she was just really distracted,” Tucker said, but her words didn’t hold conviction.

  Tucker seemed like the one who was distracted, but I couldn’t accuse Lindy of using sex to distract her, even if it was true. Maybe I’d get lucky and Lindy would call for another “break” or Tucker would get fed up again and go find someone better for her. Maybe by then I’d be ready.