What We Left Behind

He gives me back my phone and starts rooting around in the nearest open box. It’s full of high school stuff. I’d wanted to have it with me up here, but this afternoon, as I watched my dad sweat while he hauled boxes out of the car, across the jam-packed New York sidewalk, through the lobby and up the fourteen floors to my room, I wondered if maybe I should’ve just left a couple of those things back home.

Carroll pulls my yearbook out of the box and flips through it. He laughs. “You went to an all-girl school?”

“Yeah.” I wonder if everyone in college always goes through everyone else’s stuff without asking or if this is a New Jersey thing.

“So you and your girlfriend are trying to stay together?” he asks. “Even with the long distance?”

“Toni and I aren’t trying to do anything,” I explain. “It’s not, like, an effort. Toni and I have always wanted to stay together, and we still want to.”

“Come on. Everyone knows you’re supposed to be single when you get to college. How else are you supposed to have any fun?”

“Being with Toni is fun.”

“But you don’t even know what other girls you’re going to meet.”

“Doesn’t matter. I don’t want to be with other girls. I want to be with Toni.”

“What’s up with how you keep saying her name over and over? It sounds weird.”

Yeah, I know it’s weird. I sigh.

“I don’t use gendered pronouns when I talk about Toni,” I say.

My life would be a lot easier if he let it go at that, but I already know he won’t.

“‘Gendered’?” he asks. “What, you mean like she?”

“Yeah.” He’s giving me the strangest look. Maybe I shouldn’t have tried to explain.

“That’s so weird,” he says.

“It’s what we do.” I shrug. “Toni doesn’t use gendered pronouns at all anymore. For anyone.”

“That’s impossible.” He sits back on his elbows like the point is now settled.

“No, it’s not,” I say. “I thought it would be, too, when Toni first told me about it, but I’ve been listening to Toni talk without saying he or she even once for the past year.”

“So she used to use pronouns, but she doesn’t anymore?” he asks. I nod. “So you’re saying when she talks about you she says Gretchen over and over?”

“Basically.”

“So weird!”

I sigh. “Look, this is a big deal to Toni, and I love Toni, so that means it’s a big deal to me, too, okay?”

He grins and cocks an eyebrow. “Love, eh? Twoo love?”

He pronounces it like the priest in that old movie The Princess Bride. I can’t help laughing.

“Yes,” I say. “It’s totally twoo.”

“Come on, though. You’ve got to admit this thing with the pronouns is crazy.”

“No, it’s not. We should all do it, really. Our language patterns are totally sexist.”

He laughs. “Do you say ovester instead of semester, too?”

“No,” I say. “That’s dumb.”

“Hey, look, it’s funny. What, is your girlfriend one of those hard-core bra-burning lesbo feminazis? ’Cause you don’t seem like that type at all.”

Should I tell him?

Toni isn’t out to many people back home. Just me and some online friends. No one ever asks, and Toni doesn’t volunteer it.

No one’s ever asked me before, either. When I moved to DC I joined Toni’s group of friends right away, so all my friends there were Toni’s friends first. I never talked to them about Toni, since they knew T better than they knew me.

But I can already tell Carroll’s going to be a good friend, and it’s not as if Toni ever asked me to keep it a secret. Besides, Toni doesn’t even know Carroll. I want to text and ask if it’s okay for me to tell him, but Toni’s probably asleep by now.

Well, if it turns out Toni minds, I won’t tell anyone else after him.

“Toni’s genderqueer,” I say.

Carroll looks at me blankly.

“You know,” I say. “It’s like being transgender.”

He pulls back, an ugly look on his face. “Your girlfriend’s a man?”

I grimace. “No. God, come on.”

“So, what? Your girlfriend’s an it?”

“No!” This conversation isn’t going how I thought it would. I wish I’d never told him. I stand up and pace to the other end of the room.

I don’t know how to say this so he’ll understand. I’ve never had to explain this to anyone. I’ve barely even talked about it with Toni besides the really basic stuff. Toni and I talk a lot about how male and female are such restrictive, limiting terms, and how our society is so rigid about labels and it’s so damaging and...to be honest, mostly it was Toni who said all that. I nodded like I understood it all because I wanted to be supportive, but there was an awful lot I didn’t follow.

“Sorry.” Carroll shakes his head. “Look, I’m from this tiny town way out in Jersey, okay? We don’t have this stuff out there.”

I sigh. I can tell Carroll really doesn’t know any better.

“It’s okay,” I say. “I didn’t mean to freak out on you.”

“Seriously, I’m just trying to understand,” he says. “I didn’t mean to say the wrong thing. But what does this all mean? Did she, like, get a sex change operation?”

I lean my head against the base of my roommate’s bed. Carroll’s flicking through my yearbook again.

“No,” I say.