Just Girls

by Rachel Gold

  “Yes,” Ella said. “Tucker only said she was in order to protect me.”

  “Protect you from what?” she asked. “Nothing ever happened to you.”

  “I didn’t share information about myself until late November,” Ella said. “I consider it to be rather personal.”

  “And no one would guess,” the dean said. “You look very natural.”

  “I am the product of millions of years of evolution,” Ella said.

  Tucker thought the dean should have looked at least a little embarrassed about th e “natural” comment, but she didn’t. Breaking into the conversation, Tucker explained, “It all started because a student working in admissions saw a memo about a transsexual student in the dorms. She was talking about it with her friends in the Union.”

  Now a ruddy color rose in the dean’s cheeks, and she jotted a quick note before asking, “Do you know this student’s name? That information should be confidential.”

  “I could point them out to you.”

  “I presume the student they were talking about is Ms. Ramsey,” the dean said.

  “Yes, but I didn’t know that, I just wanted them to stop being so prejudiced so I said that it was me. And then I got harassed in the women’s locker room and beat up and the university came out with this bogus policy saying that trans people can only use the facilities corresponding to their birth certificate.”

  “What’s the problem there?” the dean asked.

  “You can’t change your birth certificate in Ohio,” Ella said. “Mine still says I’m male.”

  “Well shit,” the dean said. Tucker saw Ella’s head jerk back in surprise and suppressed a smile. She’d heard the hint of rural Ohio farm country in the dean’s words and it made her feel a little more at home.

  “Yeah, basically you told Ella she’s supposed to use the men’s room,” Tucker said.

  “Plus it’s offensive,” Ella added. “Even if we were in a state where I could change it, I might be asked to prove I had sex reassignment surgery and I don’t know a lot of eighteen-year-olds with families who can afford that and college. I’m lucky, but what about some other girl who just wants to get along with her life and the school is basically telling her she has to out herself and put herself in danger?”

  “We’ll take a serious look at that policy and convene a diversity committee,” the dean said. “But now I have to talk to you about this other complaint against Lindy Heaton.”

  The dean paused and looked from Tucker to Ella and back to Tucker again. She shifted the files on her desk in order to pull one to the top, though she didn’t open it. Resting her hand on it for a moment, she pushed up from her chair and walked over to the window that looked across the big quad.

  “I’m not unsympathetic,” she said. “But let me explain one of my many problems with this situation to you. I understand that Ms. Tucker and Ms. Heaton were dating and now I have a report from each of you saying that the other assaulted her. It is essentially your word against hers because as far as I can tell the only evidence collected simply verifies that the two of you had a sexual relationship, which neither of you deny.”

  She turned from the window back to them. Under her navy blazer, her shoulders looked thick with muscle and Tucker wondered what sports she’d been in. She wanted to get up from her chair too and move around the room, maybe look at the trophies, because now that the dean was talking about her and Lindy, it felt like the walls were pressing in on her. The air grew heavy and sickening.

  “I know that young romance can be painful and breakups terrible,” the dean said. “How do you intend me to determine if there was wrongdoing and who did it to whom? I’m not a court. If you feel strongly about this, I recommend that you go to the police.”

  “There must be something you can do,” Ella said. To Tucker she sounded amazingly calm because Tucker felt ready to hurl.

  “I can invoke a campus order for protection against both parties stating that you may not come within one hundred feet of each other.”

  “Yeah okay,” Tucker said because she wanted to get out of the chair and the room and maybe the campus.

  “I don’t trust Lindy to follow that order,” Ella said.

  “If Ms. Heaton does break the order I expect you to report it immediately. That will be cause for disciplinary action.”

  Tucker got out of her chair and walked over to the bookcase by the door, breathing quickly through her mouth. She felt the dean watching her, but she didn’t say anything. Soccer, that’s what these trophies were for—1990 and 1991. She made herself calculate how many years ago that was while her heart slowed and the sick feeling slid down her lungs and settled in her gut.

  Tucker wasn’t sure if the dean had stopped talking for a minute or if she’d missed what was said, but now the dean had moved on to another topic and she didn’t seem to expect Tucker to respond.

  “We need to talk about these other protests,” she was saying. “I can’t have students staking out a TA’s car or home; that’s stalking and if it keeps up there’s going to be hell to pay. That group playing card games in the administration office is costing everyone time and money, plus no one has been able to get into the admin building bathrooms all week because someone superglued them shut—and that is vandalism.”

  “We’ll stop it,” Ella said. “But it would be good to have some news come out about the diversity committee and the bathroom ruling.”

  The dean made a sound of agreement. “I understand you want students to feel a sense of agency in this. I must say, this is the most well-organized protest we’ve ever seen.”

  “That’s because it’s a game,” Ella told her.

  “What kind?” she asked.

  “Technically, alternative reality.”

  There was a long enough silence that Tucker turned around to look. The dean had stepped back to her desk and was writing something down. Tucker hoped it was: alternative reality game protest—what the hell?

  When they got out to the quad Tucker said, “Well, that was fun while it lasted.”

  She didn’t know how to put her feelings into words because there were too many of them. Topmost was a thick blanket of disappointment. Probably the dean didn’t have the power to just change the university’s bathroom policy. Tucker loved that all these students had rallied for her, but the dean was just going to make them stop with promises of committees and a restraining order that Lindy was too smart to publicly violate.

  “At least they’ll look into the facilities policy,” Ella said. “And if Lindy tries anything, she’ll hang herself. But I really wish we had something else we could do there.”

  “You’ve done a lot,” Tucker told her.

  She didn’t want Ella to worry about her anymore. It didn’t seem fair to let Ella go on trying to make Freytag safe for her when she was planning to move to Minneapolis as soon as she could.

  * * *

  Dusk came early in January and when Tucker and Ella left the Student Union a light snow was falling but melting as it hit the ground. Tucker lifted her face to feel the tiny wet flakes hit her cheeks. In the two weeks since they’d talked to the Dean of Students, it seemed like almost nothing changed.

  She wasn’t being escorted around campus by other students anymore, and that was a relief. When Johnny and Shen officially ended the game in the Union and handed out prizes, she wanted to be proud or happy, but she felt disappointed. The players congratulated each other and compared scores and then they moved on, maybe a lot more educated about trans issues and feminism at least, but ready to get into the next big thing.

  “Let’s go the long way around,” she told Ella and waved toward the long side of the quad. It turned a one-block walk into six, but she hoped it would give her enough time to talk to Ella about leaving the university. If she dropped out now she could still get most of her tuition, room and board refunded. That would be enough to move to Minneapolis and find a place.

  “Can we walk along Main?” Ella asked. “I want to
pick up another pint from the creamery.”

  They went around the Union to the street that was the eastern border of campus. Tucker stretched her legs into long, slow strides and let the cold air clean out her lungs and her brain. Beside her, Ella also seemed thoughtful. For the hundredth time, she wondered if Ella wasn’t seeing Shen, would it be enough to motivate Tucker to stay at Freytag? Probably not. The problem was Vivien and Lindy and the possibility that at any time on any day she could run into either one of them—and even if she didn’t, always looking over her shoulder for them was wearing her out.

  They walked down by the athletic fields where a few die-hards were running and the big lights made the snowflakes look like falling diamonds. Then they crossed to the side of the street with all the businesses. They had another block to go, but Tucker didn’t feel the right combination of confidence and heartlessness to tell Ella she was planning to leave.

  They stopped at the corner and waited for the light to change. Across the street was the creamery and, through the plate glass windows, it looked warm and golden inside. Maybe if they stopped and had ice cream, then Tucker could tell her. The traffic light clicked to yellow and then to red for the cross traffic while she looked at the students clustered around the tables inside the ice cream shop.

  The walk symbol lit, but Tucker didn’t move. At the corner table in the back was Lindy and some girl she didn’t recognize. Lindy was telling a story that involved big gestures with her hands and the girl kept giggling. Tucker knew that moment. She’d been inside the glowing circle of Lindy’s conversation often enough. She knew how the girl felt: caught up in Lindy’s quick mind and flattered by her attention.

  “Tucker?” Ella asked.

  “It’s Lindy,” Tucker said. “Back corner on the right.”

  “Who’s that with her?”

  “I don’t know, I’ve never seen her before.”

  They stood in silence as the light went through its green-yellow-red cycle a few more times. The snow turned from a pretty addition to the walk to a nuisance, making pinpricks on Tucker’s icy skin. The girl sitting across from Lindy got up to get a napkin.

  “Oh no,” Ella said. “I know her.”

  “How?”

  “She was in the game. She’s a high school senior, but I don’t remember her name.”

  The cold was all the way through Tucker now and it hadn’t only come from the outside. Yes, she knew exactly how this girl felt—how she’d felt as a senior when an important upper-class college student showered her with attention. She felt as if she were standing outside herself watching the girl and being the girl at the same time.

  And then her perspective shifted again as she watched herself watching Lindy. A memory rose into view: sitting in the Student Union with Lindy and looking up at the second-story mezzanine to see Alisa Foss watching her. Back then, she thought that the look of anger and fear on Alisa’s face was directed at her. She believed Alisa was jealous. No, wait, that’s what Lindy told her. She’d constructed a lattice of stories about what a bitch Alisa was and how she drove Lindy away by wanting to control her. She’d been so complete in her trashing of Alisa that Tucker had never given her the time of day back then.

  But now she realized Alisa hadn’t been angry at Tucker or jealous or afraid of her. She’d been looking at Lindy. She was afraid of Lindy.

  While Tucker worked this through, Lindy and the girl finished eating and threw away their plastic bowls. They came out of the front door. Tucker stayed frozen in place.

  Lindy saw her standing across the street and her eyes narrowed. She put her arm around the girl and steered her down the sidewalk away from Tucker and Ella. Their heads bent together and Tucker knew what Lindy was saying without needing to hear it. She was telling this girl how terrible Tucker was—so bad that Lindy had to take out a restraining order, no doubt. For a minute she had a sickening double vision in which she saw herself as the person Lindy described and remembered how she’d seen Alisa when she’d first been with Lindy and Lindy told her all the terrible things Alisa had done to her.

  “They’re gone,” Ella said.

  “Alisa Foss, I need to find her,” Tucker told her.

  “Where does she live?”

  Tucker shook her head. She pulled out her phone and called Tesh.

  “She doesn’t give out her address,” Tesh said when Tucker told her what she wanted.

  “Do you have her number?”

  “She said not to give it to you, but that was back when you were with Lindy. Do you want me to call her for you and ask if it’s okay?”

  “Please. Tell her, I’m sorry. I owe her an apology. And tell her that I understand now.”

  Tesh said she would and ended the call.

  “Can we go back to the rooms, I’m freezing,” Ella said. “And I’m not in the mood for ice cream anymore.”

  They walked up the street toward their dorm. Ella didn’t ask, but Tucker could tell she was curious and just waiting to give her time to talk so Tucker told her about Alisa.

  When she was done, Ella asked, “Did Alisa try to warn you?”

  “I think she would have if she could ever get to me without Lindy being there, but those first few months we were together all the time.”

  Ella nodded.

  “I wouldn’t have listened anyway,” Tucker said in the elevator to their dorm floor and then once they were safely in her room and away from prying ears, she added, “I was so into Lindy at the time I wouldn’t have believed anything like that.”

  “I’m going to try to figure out the name of that girl she was with,” Ella said.

  She went into her room and Tucker stood in the doorway watching her flash through web pages, looking at photos of teams and players from Kind 2 B Cruel.

  How had Lindy convinced a girl who was part of a game to protect Tucker from her to go out with her? Probably the girl had been invited after the first meeting and didn’t have the whole story. And it was likely that Lindy had been sniffing around the more distant players to try to find someone who would give her an inside scoop on the game. It wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine she’d seen this girl hanging around campus with other players and then found an excuse to talk to her alone.

  A knock sounded on her door. Tucker stepped back into her room and called through the door. “Yeah?”

  “It’s us,” Tesh said from the other side.

  Tucker opened the door. Tesh was standing in front of Alisa and Tucker waved them into the room. Alisa had her face down so that her long, brown hair hid most of it and her hands were clenched around the straps of her backpack so hard that her knuckles were white.

  “Thank you for coming,” Tucker told Alisa.

  She nodded in reply and asked, “Is Ella here?”

  Tucker called into the other room and in a moment Ella appeared in the doorway.

  “I’m really glad you came,” she said.

  Alisa stepped away from Tucker, toward Ella, and looked up at Ella’s clear eyes.

  “Can you protect me?” Alisa asked. “The way you protected her.” She pointed at Tucker.

  Ella paused, thinking. “Protect you like we did with the game?” she asked.

  Alisa nodded.

  “Yes,” Ella said. “But it would take me some time to set it up.”

  “I just needed to know,” Alisa told her.

  Ella touched Alisa’s shoulder gently and when she didn’t pull away from the contact, Ella guided her to sit next to her on the edge of Tucker’s bed. Tucker had never realized how small Alisa was. She lurked at the back of Tucker’s mind like some menacing creature, but she was the same size as Ella, who only came to just under Tucker’s chin.

  “What happened to you?” Ella asked quietly.

  “You protected Tucker from Lindy, didn’t you? That’s why she had people walking her to class, even though you didn’t say that. And then Tesh said you went with her to the dean and got a restraining order against Lindy.”

  Ella nodded.
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  “I saw Lindy trying to get to her and she couldn’t,” Alisa said. Her expression was half-grin and half-sneer: her upper lip raised to show small, even, white teeth, her dark eyes narrow.

  “They did a good job,” Tucker said. She had to clear her throat to get the words out but she added, “I’m sorry. Really sorry. I thought…the whole time I thought you were angry at me.”

  Alisa said, “No. Mostly at myself for not saying anything.”

  “Should’ve been angry at her,” Tesh said in a low voice.

  Alisa smiled at her and then said, “Ella, can I ask you something personal?”

  “Sure.”

  “Is it scarier before you come out to people or after?”

  “Before,” Ella said. “I always think it’s going to be worse than it is.”

  “Even though they know personal stuff about you?”

  “People tend to think they can ask me all sorts of things and talk about my business like it’s a carburetor or something, but at least their thoughts are out in the open and I can choose my reaction to it. And for the most part once people know me as a person, they start to see me as a person and not some Discovery Channel special.”

  “That’s really brave,” she said.

  “It’s not brave to be who you are,” Ella told her. “It’s necessary.”

  “But it’s brave to be who you are in public,” she said. “It’s brave to speak up about something, isn’t it? Even if you had no choice about it happening to you in the first place.”

  “That’s for sure true,” Ella said and waited.

  Alisa sighed and slipped her arms out of the straps of her backpack so she could pull it around to her lap and hug it.

  “Lindy took something of mine,” she said. “And when I confronted her about it, she hit me. And it wasn’t the last time. She hit me and did other things. I didn’t know if I could talk to anyone about it but then I saw those students around Tucker and I thought maybe I could finally be safe from her.”

  “We’ll protect you,” Tucker said.

  “Do you want to talk to someone about it?” Ella asked. “You don’t have to.”

  Alisa unzipped the top of her backpack and put her hand inside. “I kept proof,” she said. She pulled out a thin binder and handed it to Ella. “In case I got brave enough to go to the police. I have photos and dates and I have proof that I wrote the article she stole, the one she presented under her name at that conference, that she got the grant for.”