What We Left Behind

“Uh. Thanks.” I’m not sure whether to be proud or offended. I’m leaning toward proud.

“Yo, guys, don’t be crass,” Derek says, squeezing onto the couch with the rest of us and leaning over to look at the picture. “Show some respect.”

“Hey, man, I have the utmost respect for hotties!” Nance says. Everyone’s laughing, so I do, too. “Ask anyone!”

“That’s not what I heard.” Derek smiles and takes the phone out of Eli’s hand. As Eli reaches over to give it to Derek, I catch a glimpse of a chest binder through Eli’s T-shirt. I guess that means Eli presents as male, too. I wonder if Eli’s definitely trans, like Derek, or still figuring it out, like me.

Nance turns back to me. “Are you going to try to stay with your girlfriend all year? You didn’t want to take a break or anything, what with starting college?”

“‘Taking a break’ is juvenile,” I say, making air quotes. “You’re either with someone or you’re not.”

“Yeah, but freshman year is hard,” Derek says. “Long distance is tough when you haven’t done it before.”

“I know. I’ve heard all the clichés,” I say. “How everyone always breaks up freshman year. I’m just saying they couldn’t have been that committed in the first place if all it takes is some distance to split them up. Besides, Gretchen and I are barely even long distance. New York to Boston is a couple of hours on a train. We can see each other every weekend if we want to.”

“Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much,” Nance mutters. I decide to ignore this.

“Every weekend?” Eli asks. “Are you really going to do that?”

“That’s the plan.” I don’t mention that we skipped last weekend.

“Our friend Andy used to have a girl like that,” Nance says. “She was gorgeous, too. She dumped him, though. She had issues with the trans stuff. You know how it goes with some girls.”

“Is your girlfriend cool with it, Toni?” Eli asks in a soft voice. “Or are you not out to her?”

I can’t imagine keeping such a big secret from someone I care about as much as Gretchen. Is that really normal?

Well, I guess Gretchen kept a pretty big secret from me.

“Gretchen’s very much cool with it,” I say. “We’re completely honest with each other about everything.”

“Hey, you should get her to come up for the Halloween dance so we can meet her,” Derek says. “Since you’ll be visiting back and forth all the time anyway.”

“There’s a Halloween dance?” I ask.

Nance snorts. “Dance isn’t the right word. It’s more of an excuse to dress up in slutwear and drink a ton of alcohol.”

“That works for me,” I say, and the others laugh. Not that Gretchen or I usually drink very much. Gretchen is such a lightweight, and I’m always the one stuck driving.

But I don’t have to drive up here. Everyone walks everywhere at Harvard. I can do what I want here.

I can be who I want.

“Some of the straight guys come in drag,” Derek says. “Mostly it’s respectful, though. It’s supposed to be just for the people in our house, but we can get you guys in.”

“Cool, thanks. I’ll tell Gretchen.”

Nance launches into a story about last year’s Halloween dance and Derek joins in. Soon all of them are rushing to tell me all the best stories from last year, and the details on everyone I met at the UBA table, and all the reasons we shouldn’t be hanging out and talking right now (all four of us have reading we should be doing instead).

Derek and Nance and I don’t do any work on the transition guide, but that’s okay. We have plenty of time.

And I have plenty of time to think about this transitioning stuff on my own, too.

4 (#ulink_78502227-7edc-518b-a483-d6dc6d88637f)

SEPTEMBER

FRESHMAN YEAR OF COLLEGE

2 WEEKS APART

GRETCHEN

“I looked up your girlfriend online,” Carroll tells me.

It’s a Friday night, and we’re in the lounge carbing up on microwave pasta before we go out. There’s a club Carroll’s been bugging me to try since our first day of classes. Plus my bus to Boston leaves crazy early tomorrow morning, so we figured it would be easier to just stay up all night. It’ll be my first time seeing Toni since school started.

“Oh, yeah?” I say. “Are you and T officially best buds now?”

He laughs. “No. I mean I looked up that genderqueer thing you told me about.”

Crap. I still haven’t mentioned that conversation to Toni. I’ll come clean first thing after I get to Harvard. No, wait, I should do it before I get there. Toni might be upset, and I don’t want to ruin our first visit with this.

“So what did you find out?” I ask Carroll.

“The site said a lot of genderqueer people are just kids who haven’t made up their minds yet whether they want to be a guy or a girl,” Carroll says, turning the faucet on full blast. “It said in the end, most of them either get over it or wind up full-on trannies.”

I sigh. “Don’t say ‘tranny.’ It’s offensive.”

Carroll holds up his hands in surrender. He drops the bowl he was supposed to be rinsing out. It clatters into the sink.

“See?” Carroll says, pointing to it. “Another casualty of political correctness.”

I roll my eyes. “Ha, ha.”

“So, is it true?” He wipes off the bowl. “About genderqueers?”

I’m pretty sure adding an s to genderqueer is offensive, too—it’s offensive to just say queers, I think, and the principle would be the same, right?—but I don’t know that for sure, so I don’t say anything about it.

“I think that’s just a stereotype,” I say, though I’m uncertain. What Carroll read sounds like the kind of thing people say about bi people—that bisexuality isn’t real, and they’re really all either gay or straight and are just being indecisive. Since I have lots of bi friends, and I used to think of myself as kinda-sorta bi, I know that whole thing is bull. Being bi isn’t any less real than being gay or straight is.

The problem is, I know stuff about being bi. I don’t know enough about being genderqueer to argue with whatever Carroll’s been reading. Toni and I talked about this stuff some back when T first told me about it, but it’s all so complicated and it’s hard to remember all the details. I really need to go online and read some websites that are better than the one Carroll found. How will I know which websites are the good ones, though?

I guess I could ask Toni, but—well, I don’t want T to know I’m still kind of confused. A good girlfriend would remember all the details. Actually, a good girlfriend would just instinctively understand all of this.

Of course, a good girlfriend probably wouldn’t have lied about where she was going to college, either.

Okay. Enough. We’re going out. I can berate myself later.