I laugh, disbelieving. “It’s called having an anxiety disorder, Jonah.”
“It’s called giving a fuck.”
A long silence grows as I look down into my lap. The box of doughnuts we’ve been demolishing. Jonah bought these for me. He wanted me to relax. To sit on a park bench with him, eat something sweet, and look at something beautiful. This city is spread out before us—this place where good people work hard to make the world better, and bad people work even harder to make it worse. I want to join the fight. He knows that. And he believes I’m good enough to do it.
Do I believe it, too? Could I?
“You’ll get here someday.” Jonah spreads his arms: here, the National Mall, the heart of the free world. “And you don’t need Georgetown to do it. There are a thousand ways to get here. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a bartender. Lucy McBath was a flight attendant. Bernie Sanders was a folk singer.”
“Was he? Actually?” I giggle, dropping my voice a couple octaves: “We shall ovah-come, we shall ovah-come . . .”
He laughs and lifts a hand, strokes my hair. “You’ll figure it out,” he says fondly. “One day.”
I reach down for another doughnut. “Maybe, but I’m at a disadvantage as a tiny trans guy who—”
“I don’t think you’re tiny,” he says. “I think you’re thirty feet tall.” He pauses, flattens a palm against my cheek. “I’m . . . I’m in . . . I’m in awe. Of you.”
I look at Jonah, at the steady movement of his chest—up, down, faster, I think, than usual. His pulse sprints where his wrist meets my skin. Something about those quick breaths, the breaks in his speech, the nervous cast to the look he’s giving me—if I didn’t know better, I’d swear he meant to say, I’m in love with you.
“Jonah,” I say, his name coming out so soft, so low, I’m not even sure he can hear me. “Jonah, I . . .”
“Hey!” A voice—an adult’s, angry, loud. “This is private property!”
I leap to my feet, hands in the air. The doughnuts tumble into the dirt. I barely have time to mourn the apple cruller rolling untouched in the mud before Jonah takes me by the wrist and swings me to the left, out of the glare of a flashlight. He’s running, and I’m running right alongside him, lungs heaving below my binder. We don’t stop until we’re safe, a block and a half away, far enough that the whole thing’s funny instead of fear-inducing. I’ve got a hot stitch searing my side open, and Jonah’s chest is heaving again—with heavy breaths, but laughter, too.
I gasp. “What time is it?” and he pulls his phone out of his pocket, squints at its sunny glare. “It’s about . . .” he says, then stops. “Holy shit. Half past two.”
“And the final round begins at . . .”
“Nine.”
“Okay.” I nod, barely able to breathe. “We can totally get, like, six hours, right?”
He crosses his fingers. “Let’s hope.”
“This is not a disaster.”
“No,” he says. “Not a disaster at all.”
* * *
—
Yeah, no, it’s a disaster. By the time we return to our dorm, crawl into our sleeping bags, and close our eyes, sleep is impossible. Everything Jonah said—especially, I’m . . . I’m in . . . I’m in awe—is ringing loud between my ears. He’s on the other side of the room, wrapped tight in his own nylon cocoon, but I can hear him breathing gently all night.
The alarm on my phone begins to blare at eight o’clock. I just lie on the floor for a long moment, listening to it, miserable, acutely aware that I have not slept even one single wink. Six hours of tossing and turning in terror: That’s what I’ll be running on today.
I’m still full after last night’s jaunt in the park—all those doughnuts, all that sugar, not a lick of it settling well in my stomach. This, plus exhaustion, means my breakfast consists solely of coffee, pumped from the dining-hall samovar into the tallest paper cup I can find. At least I’m not alone in my fatigue. Every debater in this dining hall looks like a gray-eyed zombie.
“Damn, dude,” says Nasir—no exception—yawning hugely when I take my seat at the breakfast table. “That is a shit-ton of coffee.”
“Leave him alone, Nas,” Ari chides, picking at a plate of eggs. “We all slept like shit. No shame in caffeine.”
“You’ll be fine, Finch.” Jonah reaches out, rests a hand on my wrist. “Whatever happens today, you got this.”
He means to be reassuring. To help. So why do I feel irritated? It’s my lack of sleep, maybe. Or what he said to me last night, still rolling around in my head. I reach out. I push his hand away. When I see the look on his face—not a frown; a wound—I regret it.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” The voice of the headmistress echoes loud from a podium at the front of the hall. “It’s been a wonderful weekend, but I’m afraid our time together is coming to an end.”
We all sit up a little straighter. This is it. We’re about to learn if we made the finals—and, if we did, who we’re up against.
“It is with great pride that I announce the finalists for this year’s N.A.D.A. National Championships,” she says. “The two teams I name will have fifteen minutes to prepare before we assemble in the Gray Auditorium for this weekend’s final debate.”
Her manicured nails slip into an envelope and retrieve a piece of pink cardstock. She holds it delicately between thumb and forefinger, squinting down her nose, through her glasses.
“The first team that will compete in this final round,” she says, “is Washington . . .”
I hold my breath.
“. . . Red,” she finishes. “Ariadne Schechter and Nasir Shah!”
The room erupts in applause. I’m not among the cheerleaders. I’m looking at Ari and Nasir, and I’m wondering: Can two teams from the same state even advance to the final?
“And the second team competing in this round,” says the headmistress, “is Washington Blue! Jonah Cabrera and Finch Kelly!”
I wait for it to come: the perfect, flawless happiness. It doesn’t. Instead, it’s like every stress, every petty anxiety I’ve ever felt, grows wings and swarms. Will I have to argue against trans rights? In front of thousands of people? On national television? Jonah hauls me up and out of my seat, lifting me into the air and spinning me, and I want to tell him no, stop—I think I might throw up. But I don’t want to complain. He looks like he’s feeling everything I wished I’d feel.
“West Coast represent!” Nasir crows, when I clamber up onto the stage on shaky legs. He claps Jonah exuberantly on the back. “Showed all these East Coast boarding school mother . . .”
A glare from the headmistress cuts him short. He goes quiet, chagrined, putting his hands behind his back. And then, as the headmistress turns back to the podium, I feel a tap on my shoulder: Ari.
“Hey,” she says, in a whisper, “if you have to argue no, will you . . . will you be okay?”
I level my gaze, soften my voice: “Will you?”
The headmistress turns, flinty fury in her eyes. We go quiet. Ari pulls away, worrying one thumb against the other.
“As is customary, we’ll flip a coin to determine which team will argue for the proposition,” says the headmistress.
It’s simple enough: Heads, we argue against trans rights; tails, we argue for them.
I watch the smooth, high arc of the coin as it sails forth from the headmistress’s thumb. Tails, I think. Please. I can’t argue against trans rights. Not again. Not on TV.
Tails. Tails. Tails.
She lifts her head, puts her lips to the microphone.
“Heads.”
chapter fifteen
I will be sick to my stomach. I know this. I know it as I shake hands with Nasir and Ari and the headmistress. I know it as I stand shakily on that little stage in the dining hall for another minute of polite preamble. It may, in fact, be the only thing I
know right now. My mind is a wasteland. A mess. We have fifteen minutes to prep for the final, and all I can think about is painting the floor with my breakfast.
Jonah’s hand finds the small of my back. He steers me gently to the side of the stage, down the stairs. When he speaks, his voice is quiet, sober: “I think we’re supposed to prep in the classroom in the east—”
“Bathroom,” I interrupt.
Jonah, mercifully, gets the message. There’s his hand on my back again, leading me forward—ten, twenty, thirty agonizing steps. A door opens. He guides me through it. I see the white gleam of a urinal. It’s the signal my stomach needed. Something animal takes over. I lurch out of Jonah’s arms, swing through the door of the first vacant stall, and fall to my knees.
I am vividly, horribly, defiantly sick.
It’s a strange, scary feeling, throwing up. It’s like my body doesn’t really belong to me. I float out of my skin and lean coolly against the clean white tiles of the wall. Down on the floor, a redheaded kid kneels pathetic before the bowl and opens his mouth and heaves. All the soft bile of last night’s doughnuts, this morning’s coffee—it pours out in sick, half-digested shades of yellow and black.
I fall to the floor, back in my body. “Fuck.”
Jonah’s at my side in an instant, on his knees, water bottle in hand. “Here,” he says, and I take a drink. “No, no,” he says, gently. “Don’t drink it. You’re not supposed to eat or drink anything for a few hours after you throw up. Just swish it around. Rinse. Spit.”
He’s the son of a nurse. I trust his medical advice. The next sip is dutifully swished and spat. Another one; another. Finally, Jonah reaches up to flush the mess in the bowl.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“I’m sorry.” There’s a throbbing in my head, a sick, raw feeling in my throat. “It’s my fault. Ate too many doughnuts last night. Drank too much coffee this morning.” I should have known better; caffeine is poisonous, an accelerant. I was practically inviting a panic attack. “Give me a minute.”
“I’ll tell them you’re sick,” Jonah says. “They can postpone the round.”
“No.” My answer comes out sharp, severe. “I’m not holding up the national final just because I ate too much.”
But I know why I’m really sick. It’s panic, pure and simple, that brought me here, pushed me to my knees, and forced me to throw up in—in the men’s room, I realize, and laugh.
“First point.” I hold up a finger. “Trans students shouldn’t be allowed to use the bathroom because they might throw up and make everything smell like rancid Boston Creams.”
Jonah doesn’t laugh. “Finch, we don’t have to do this.”
“What do you mean?” I blink at him, baffled. “It doesn’t matter what we want. This is the resolution. Period. You don’t get to change the topic at Nationals because it’s personally offensive to you.”
“But, Finch . . .”
“We have fifteen minutes.” I reach for the backpack I dropped before I vomited. The notepad inside, thankfully, was spared most of the splatter. “Come on. Help me think of new arguments. Ari and Nasir know all our old ones. Why shouldn’t I be allowed to use a toilet?”
“Finch,” Jonah says, “stop.”
“If we want the most persuasive case,” I mumble, scribbling on my notepad, “these people in England have gone a long way with this whole ‘trans people are destroying women’s rights’ thing. Like, way more than the American evangelicals being like, ‘trans people are an abomination of the Lord.’ So if we go with the British angle—”
“Stop,” Jonah says. “Stop. Please. You have to stop.”
“It’s just a debate!” I say—and I realize, with hot, sudden shock, that there is real water springing from my eyes, and falling from them, and staining my cheeks. For the first time in years, I’m crying. Really, truly crying. “All I have to do is go out there and pretend to believe some bullshit arguments for an hour. If I do it well, I win Nationals, and Georgetown might give me a second chance. There is no way—no fucking way—I’m giving up now.”
“I’m not debating this round,” says Jonah.
I look up at him, bewildered. “But it’s the final. The national final.”
Jonah looks at me like he pities me, and that’s it, that does it; I’m over the edge, vocally sobbing. All the water I’ve been holding in, all these months on testosterone: The dam is broken. It rains from my eyes to the collar of my shirt and it mingles with the green-gold flecks of puke there.
Jonah, inches away, is watching me. Has been watching me the whole time. Watching me throw up, watching me melt down. He can see me right now. Really see me, see right into the ugliest, shabbiest parts of me. I cover my face with my hands and I close my eyes. This way, at least, I can’t see him.
But his hands are moving my hands. And light is coming in pink through my lids. Something soft, and a bit scratchy—oh; toilet paper—is brushing beneath my eyes, and around my mouth, mopping up tears and vomit both. When I look up, Jonah is right there, working carefully, gentle presses of the paper to my skin.
“I will not go out there,” he says, “and argue that you’re less than human.”
“Jonah . . .”
“I am not going to stand on that stage on national television and say that you shouldn’t be allowed to exist in public.” His jaw is square. “I’m not going to do that to you, Finch.”
“You’ve been doing it this whole weekend!” I feel furious—on top of all the other feelings surging through me, threatening to make me heave up even more bile. “Why now? Why do you want to throw the final when we’re this fucking close?”
It happens so fast: hands on my waist, pulling me forward, into his lap. His forehead on mine. His nose brushing mine. His mouth touching mine.
He’s kissing me.
He’s kissing me on my puke-stained mouth, on the floor of the men’s bathroom, the rim of the toilet pressing hard into my shoulders.
And I’m kissing him back.
All I can think to say is, “Why?”
He pulls away, looking like he’s just stuck his fingers in a light socket. “Because I love you. And I don’t want us to win. Not if it means having to go up there and . . . and humiliate you, and . . .”
“You love me?” I ask. “Really?”
“I’m sorry,” he says, and moves away from me, just an inch. “I know that you’re going through a lot right now, and I shouldn’t have—”
No, no; none of that. I pull him back to me, into my arms. I want to kiss him again. So I do. And the second time is better—not surprising, but familiar. This is a mouth I’ve kissed before. A mouth I’ll kiss again.
“I love you, too,” I tell him. Because I do, don’t I? Because I’ve been lying to myself. Because the thing I feel when I touch him and talk to him and take in his easy, perfect smile—it’s love. “I can’t believe you’re boycotting this round for me.”
“I can’t believe you thought I wouldn’t,” he says.
And then he helps me stand, on shaky legs. I cling to him as we cross the tiled floor. He flips on the faucet and I lean forward, splashing cool water on my swollen face.
“What about you?” he says. “What are you going to do?”
He no longer sounds hopeless. He says it like I’m the one in charge. Like no matter what I do, no one will ever be able to hurt me in any way that really matters.
“I’m going to wash my face. And then my hands. And then I’m going to do this round.”
He sighs. “If you really want to do this, I can’t stop you. I just wish that you’d—”
I cut him off: “Come up with me. But let me take your place. The first speech.”
He searches my face, confused. And then—there it is, that smile again. The one I love. Love.
“Oh, Finch,” he says. “Fuck yes.”
* * *
—
CSPAN, turns out, isn’t the only news crew at the final. The aisles are cluttered with cameras, and people with pads, pens, phones out. Reporters, I realize, peering from the wings. My stomach churns, still queasy; I’m glad it’s empty.
We walk out of the wings and take our seats to thunderous applause. The headmistress gives a speech that I don’t, can’t, hear. Jonah’s hand is under the table, holding mine, reminding me that he’s here, reminding me of what I have to do.
“And now, from the Annable School in Seattle, Washington”—this is the headmistress, lifting her beringed hand—“Ariadne Schechter!”
Ari strides to the podium with her head held high, not a stitch out of place in her pristine, girlish uniform. The half-asleep Ari who slumped into the dining hall yesterday, the fully wasted Ari who vomited all over Jonah the night before that—she’s gone. This is Ari in fighting form, the best sparring partner I’ve ever had.
“At stake today,” she says, “is nothing less than the right of transgender Americans to exist in public.” Her every word is sharp, precise. It’s like she’s running for president and this is the speech that decides everything. “Take away a trans person’s right to use the bathroom and you take away their right to attend school. To hold a job. To receive social services. This policy is nothing less than the slow and calculated removal of an oppressed minority from public space. One might even call it genocidal.”
I realize, listening to her, how easy it would be to refute her arguments. So simple. I’d just hold my nose, repeat the words of the people who hate me, and walk away with a trophy. I’ve done it before. I’ve repeated so many bad arguments for so many bad ideas. And why? What good has it ever done me? Sure, it’s helped me know my enemies—but when have my enemies ever tried to know me?
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