Just Girls

by Rachel Gold

  The student center woman offered counseling, but it was clear from her expression that the counselors wouldn’t be any more help so Tucker declined. She told Ella she was okay and went to her history class to have something to do, but she skipped Gender Studies because she was too likely to run into Lindy in that building, plus the idea of having to deal with Vivien was way too much. She was used to feeling thick-skinned and powerful, but now she felt that if someone tried to tell her which bathroom she could or couldn’t use, or lecture her about woman-born-woman crap, she’d start crying.

  She wanted to call Claire, but she didn’t know what to say. Not wanting to tell the story of what happened again, she just sent Claire a message asking if she was available later in the week.

  She spent the next few days in a numb stasis. From the safety of her room, she caught up on her remaining three classes and emailed Prof. Callander of the Women’s & Gender Studies class to say she was still recovering from a bad flu and wouldn’t be in class that week. And she researched majors other than Women’s & Gender Studies that she could take. Journalism or Public Relations both looked possible—not exciting, but doable, and she’d have better job prospects.

  Every evening, Ella invited her to come watch shows on her computer or play games on the Xbox her Mom had driven up to deliver from their house. Sometimes Shen was there too.

  “What did you tell him?” Tucker asked Ella after the first night the three of them spent playing a racing robot game together, jammed into Ella’s small room.

  “Bad breakup,” she said.

  “Oh, that makes sense. Thank you.”

  Ella smiled, “I like having my best guy and my best girl in the same room. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “It’s cool,” Tucker said, and she meant it.

  She just wanted to be around friends right now. The idea of dating or hooking up with anyone felt so far away, like a postcard of a foreign place she wasn’t sure she wanted to visit.

  * * *

  A week after she’d reported the incident, she got the first response from the Student Conduct Committee. It was fast, but it wasn’t good. They wanted her to come in for another interview in a few weeks because allegations of misconduct had been brought against her by another student.

  Tucker put her head down on her desk. She should have the energy to yell and to fight it, but she didn’t. If it had been someone else, she’d stand up for them in a minute. If it had been some guy shoving her down at a party and trying to rape her, she’d have beat the crap out of him.

  But she and Lindy had been lovers and friends. They’d been as close as she was to anyone, and she could still remember the late-night conversations, the sweet gestures, falling in love with Lindy’s quick mind and wild ideas. The only part she had trouble remembering now was the sex. Every time she tried to remember the good nights they had together, she remembered that last night and her mind shied away from all of it.

  Lindy’s complete disregard for her that night got into her like acid, dissolving everything it touched, all the feelings, all the memories, all the dreams. She felt hollow except for a numb echo of pain where her life used to be.

  Tucker knocked on the door to Ella’s room. She was glad to see that Shen wasn’t there, so she didn’t have to worry about what he might hear. Ella brought the textbook she’d been reading, holding it like a shield, and came through the bathroom to sit at the foot of Tucker’s bed.

  “The conduct committee wants me to do another interview,” Tucker told her. “They say I’ve been accused of misconduct.”

  “That is such shit,” Ella said. “Lindy?”

  “It has to be.”

  Ella’s eyes narrowed and she didn’t say anything for a minute but her body thrummed with tense energy, like a cat about to pounce. She lowered the textbook to her lap, spread her hands on it and stared down at them. Tucker wondered if she was contemplating which video game weapon she wanted right now to blow Lindy away with, because that’s what it looked like. Then Ella shook herself, blinked a few times and looked at Tucker.

  “Come home with me for Thanksgiving, please? You can just forget about all of this.”

  That was exactly what Tucker wanted to do. She wanted to get on a bus headed away from campus and never have to come back again.

  “When are you going?” she asked.

  “Wednesday after class. I’ll get you a ticket.”

  “All right,” Tucker said and managed not to add: could you make it one-way?

  She didn’t want to go stay in Ella’s big house and listen to her clever family, but she didn’t want to stay here. Here she could run into Lindy. Here the tight bars of muscles across her back and sides never released and she felt like her body was turning to stone.

  She’d ruled out going to her mother’s house for the holiday because her sisters would know something had happened. They’d get the story out of her and then they’d be horrified but have nothing they could say to her because they didn’t even understand her being queer, let alone this. And if she went to her mother’s house, she’d go to the hardware store to have something to do. But that was her sanctuary and she couldn’t go there now and dirty it with these hands that had failed to push Lindy away.

  If she had the energy, she’d get a bus ticket going west and just ride until she found a place that looked like no other place she’d ever been. Maybe she’d go to Minneapolis and see if Claire and Emily could help her get a job and start again. Could she go far enough and fast enough to outrun herself?

  Easier to go with Ella for now. At least Ella’s home wasn’t a place she could mess up just by being there. She could get some rest away from here and away from Lindy.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Ella

  Tucker showed me the email from the Student Conduct Committee asking her for more information because she was the subject of another student’s complaint. I’m not the sort of person who has a hot temper and even then I didn’t rage or yell, I just read it through a few times and studied Tucker’s face. She looked as bad as she had the night she told me what happened, maybe worse. At least then she was crying. Now her face was gray.

  One very clear thought rose to the front of my mind as I looked at the oh-so-official signature at the bottom of the message: Whether you wanted a fight or not, Lindy, you got one.

  I went back to my room and texted Tesh: where are you?

  Union.

  Come meet me in the library alone please

  10 min, she replied.

  I met her in the entryway and took her up to the second-floor study nook by the vending machines where Shen and I usually studied. It was still early, dinnertime for most students, so it was empty. I didn’t worry about Shen showing up. He’d understand if I told him I needed privacy.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked when we were sitting at the big table on the far side of the small space.

  “I need this conversation to be secret,” I told her.

  Tesh nodded and ran a hand roughly through her short hair.

  She didn’t gossip as far as I could tell, but just to make sure, I added, “So secret that you and I never had it, okay?”

  “I promise,” she said.

  “Tucker got an email from the conduct committee because another student has accused her of misconduct. We think it’s Lindy. Have you heard anything?”

  Tesh looked around the room. Even though it was empty, she moved her chair closer and lowered her voice. “Lindy told Vivien that Tucker followed her home from the Halloween party and tried to get her to have sex and it got rough. She’s saying she broke up with Tucker and Tucker can’t handle it and is coming after her.”

  “Tucker broke up with her,” I said.

  “I know that. Lindy’s a horrible liar. I mean, horrible because she lies all the time, not that she’s bad at it.”

  “She’s pretty good at it from what I’ve seen. But if you know that…?”

  “It’s not my story to tell,” Tesh said.

 
; I wanted to pry, but her eyes held a stony resolve. The same confidence I had that she’d keep Tucker’s secrets and mine meant she wouldn’t tell me anyone else’s. I had to honor that.

  “What else is Lindy saying?” I asked.

  “Just a lot of bullshit. That Tucker’s failing in women’s studies because she can’t hack it and she’s taking it out on Lindy. And what kind of crazy says she’s trans and sticks to that story even after she gets beat up for it. That Tucker likes violence and attention and…you get the gist.”

  “She says all this to Vivien?”

  “And Summer when she’ll sit still long enough to listen, but Summer kind of hates her right now because she’s pretty sure she’s hooking up with Vivien and that’s why Vivien isn’t into Summer anymore.”

  “What?” That wasn’t a question, more an expression of shock. Tesh just looked at me and shrugged while shaking her head. “Does Tucker know?” I asked.

  “Nobody knows anything,” Tesh said. “Summer is just suspicious and the rest of us don’t want to get close enough to Lindy’s bullshit to try to figure it out.”

  If Lindy was hooking up with Vivien on the side, that explained some of Vivien’s dislike of Tucker. Of course it could be the case that Vivien was just one of those radically anti-trans-women feminists—there were such people, though I’d never met one in real life. Still, if she had a bad impression of trans women, thought Tucker was one, and then found out she wasn’t but still saw Tucker as a rival for Lindy’s attention, that would be a pretty nasty blend and would go a long way to explaining why she’d given Tucker a terrible grade on a good paper and then tried to justify it.

  “Who’s on Tucker’s side?” I asked.

  Tesh blinked at me in surprise. “We all are,” she said. “Tucker’s amazing and Lindy’s a lying jerk.”

  “I’m not sure Tucker knows you feel that way.”

  “Summer told her she’d beat the crap out of Lindy for her, but she just looked uncomfortable,” Tesh said. “She doesn’t seem to want to talk about it. I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Keep letting her know you’re there for her and that you believe her,” I told her.

  I didn’t want to say that last part, about belief, but it was important. There are a lot of things where you shouldn’t have to say, “I believe you,” because it shouldn’t even be a question, but where it’s so important for the other person to hear.

  When I first looked up at Mom and said, “I’m a girl,” and she worked it through in her head and said that she understood, that she believed me, it was like someone lifted a ten-ton weight off my shoulders. Nobody was treating me like a girl and that invalidation just kept heaping up on me until she believed me and started treating me differently.

  I had to imagine it was similar for Tucker now, with Lindy lying and invalidating what had happened. Not that our situations were similar, but the pain of knowing something and having people deny it to your face—I knew that pain. And no way was I going to let Tucker suffer with it.

  Tesh’s comment made a lot of sense to me. She didn’t know what to do, and Summer and Cal probably didn’t either. Neither did I, but I’d come up with a plan somehow.

  “Tell Summer and Cal we’ve got to find a way to show Tucker we believe her, that we’re one hundred percent for her,” I said.

  * * *

  We hopped the bus Wednesday afternoon. I was glad Tucker didn’t have to spend another evening cooped up in her room worrying that Lindy was out there in the spaces they’d shared, waiting for her to come out. We got to my house in time for dinner and then a movie and off to our respective beds.

  I knew Tucker wouldn’t come knock on my door in the middle of the night and climb into my bed, and in terms of my relationship with Shen I was relieved I didn’t have to make a choice, but at the same time I felt sad because I knew Tucker also didn’t feel like she had any choice in the matter—since Halloween, she’d rarely wanted to be touched in any way by anyone.

  The next day, I focused on keeping everything lighthearted, which was easy because Thanksgiving at my parents’ house is a huge social event so there are always too many people around for any serious conversation to happen. Every year, Mom invited Nico’s family, plus a few graduate students from OSU with their significant others and kids. Because she was in anthro, she always ended up with a crazy blend of cultures.

  This year we got Nico’s parents, Nico and per two younger sisters, plus a Native American woman and a Canadian guy, both grad students, and a visiting professor from a town somewhere in Eastern Europe that I couldn’t pronounce. He had the kind of accent that you hear in spy films when someone mangles a Russian accent. He brought his wife and their three children, so there were five little people between the ages of six and twelve romping through the house. Amy came back from school and brought her boyfriend. Mom spent the whole day cooking and we all took shifts helping in the kitchen and then the eighteen of us jammed ourselves around a series of tables that started in the dining room and spilled into the den.

  I listened half-heartedly to a lot of high-volume conversations about the global political scene. Tucker hardly said two words during dinner and I saw Nico watching her with an uncharacteristically somber expression on per face.

  After dessert, the party broke up into groups based on interest. The political conversation continued in the kitchen, the kids went into the basement rec room to watch TV and play games, and sports fans collected on the couch in the den in front of the other TV. Nico and Tucker vanished.

  I helped Mom get the first load of dishes started and then wandered around the house looking for them. At the top of the stairs, I heard their voices coming from the library. The bookcase-door stood open and from outside of it, I could see them sitting on Tucker’s inflated mattress.

  Tucker had her back to me and Nico was sitting sideways on the mattress with per back against one of the bookcases. Nico had toned down per outfit to a brown, buttoned shirt with a mandarin collar and burgundy jeans, but compensated with a touch more makeup and long, dangling earrings made from tiny coins. Next to Nico, Tucker’s flannel shirt and worn jeans looked very classic butch.

  “Is it hard staying between genders?” she was asking Nico.

  “It feels very natural to me, but I think it would be hard for a lot of people. It’s always hard to be what you aren’t, but there are so many ways to be, it’s difficult to tell, you know?”

  “You mean how do I know until I try it?” Tucker asked.

  “Do you want to try it?”

  Nico grinned sideways at her, but per eyes ranged up for a moment and saw me. Per gave me a quick shake of per head that Tucker didn’t notice because she was staring down at the knee of her jeans where her fingers idly toyed with a loose thread.

  “I don’t know,” Tucker said after a while. “I like being a woman, well, a lesbian specifically, which is kind of like another gender half the time anyway. Mostly when I was a kid I didn’t feel like a girl or a boy, not until I was old enough to be interested in other girls, and then it all made sense.”

  “Maybe you’re not strongly gendered,” Nico said. “Or you like to do woman in a way that isn’t traditional. It’s cool.”

  Nico was two inches taller than me, closer to Tucker’s height than I was, and per darker skin and black hair contrasted beautifully with Tucker’s midwestern tan and bleached hair. They would be a striking couple and the jealousy hit me with a wave of nausea. I leaned against the wall and didn’t make a move to go into the room.

  “Hey, I’m going to get something to drink, you want a pop or whatever?” Nico asked Tucker.

  “Sure, thanks.”

  Nico came through the doorway and took my hand in one fluid movement, drawing me down the hall and away from Tucker.

  “You look like you’re sucking a lemon,” Nico said.

  “I might be jealous.”

  “You might be silly,” Nico said. “I’m just easy to talk to ’cause I’m outside of it all.�
��

  “Thanks for—”

  Nico waved a hand dismissively. “Silly,” per repeated. “Go enjoy the party. I’ve got this.”

  We’d walked down to the kitchen while talking, and Nico got two glasses and filled them with pop. When per walked back down the hall toward the stairs, I didn’t follow.

  * * *

  Black Friday we went shopping. Who can resist being jammed into crowds of maddened bargain seekers? Okay, just about anyone. Our tradition was to get a front table at a restaurant overlooking the mall so we could view the madness from a safe distance. Then, after lunch when the most insane six a.m. shoppers went home for their naps, we slowly browsed the scraps they’d left. Tucker came with us for that and also for the hike Dad and I took on Saturday. Between the two, I think she liked the hike a lot better.

  She’d started to smile again, though it looked strained. She and Mom talked for a while about what you could do with an anthropology degree. When they finished and Tucker went to read in the other room, I pulled Mom into her home office.

  “I’m starting to come up with a plan,” I said. “But I don’t know how to pull it off without drawing too much attention to Tucker. How do I get the Student Conduct people to realize she’s the victim without letting the whole campus know what happened?”

  “You need to protect her confidentiality,” Mom said. She walked over to her desk and moved a few papers around without really looking at them.

  “I know. She’s been so great about not talking about me, even after she was the one who took all that shit for coming out for me. Oh…”

  An idea peered up over the horizon of my mind. I looked at the parts of it I could see, willing it to clarify. It had to do with Tucker coming out for me and becoming a target because of it.

  Mom waited. I think she was watching the cogwheels of my brain click together and turn. Tucker was already a target. I didn’t need to tell anyone about the rape for them to understand that she did something brave and got hurt because of it. I could say that a number of things had happened to her because she came out for me and now she needed help. I didn’t need to detail all the things. And maybe Lindy’s willingness to do violence to Tucker had something to do with her pseudo-coming out too. Though it sounded to me more like Lindy wanted to get her way and was willing to ignore other people’s feelings to get it.