I swallow.
“Or do you think that Tina and Blake won’t be together then?”
“If we’re all babies, why would they be together?”
He shrugs. “Blake’s twenty-five. That’s old enough to know.”
“How on earth would you know anything about relationships?” Between the hangover and the nerves, the words slip out.
He looks over at me, and for a long moment, I get the feeling that he’s considering his next words. His fingers tap on the counter.
It’s at this moment—with the hammer-like pain of a headache pulsing through my head—that I realize the truth.
I love Tina.
I hate living with Tina and Blake. It’s not that they’re inconsiderate. It’s not that they’re coupled off and I’m not. But they’re here, doing couply-things, inviting Blake’s terrible father over and not warning me about it. None of this is wrong. They live here. I just don’t like it.
I hate not feeling secure in my own space. I hate feeling like I can’t complain. It reminds me of living with Anj. It reminds me of…
No. Not going there. All my complaints swell in my chest, a tight bubble of irrational need.
“Good point.” Adam Reynolds shakes his head, and I’m reminded of that lion, scenting a wildebeest. “How the fuck would I know dick about interpersonal relationships?”
Great. I’ve offended him. I gather up my bag and retreat to my room with a whispered excuse.
I hate everything.
* * *
JAY
* * *
It’s almost eleven at night.
Today has been ridiculous, packed with faculty meetings, a university committee that was never supposed to take up so much time but which will end up being the primary university service component of my tenure application, an unexpected conference call with a colleague…and Em’s messages, which I haven’t known how to answer.
Your inconsistent boundaries are hurting me. I felt that one. Felt it deep in me.
But tomorrow promises to be equally terrible. The final committee report is due. A faculty candidate is coming through, and I’ve been drafted as the New Guy/Representative College of Chemistry Minority to be in the group that takes her to lunch. Gabe is giving a seminar up the hill in the evening, so everything I put off today has to be shoved into my nonexistent spare time tomorrow.
And I can’t imagine what Em must be feeling. I haven’t been able to condense my response into my available time. I’m staring at my screen, trying to figure out what to say. How to say it. What I’m feeling.
Then I see she’s writing. A message pops up a moment later.
So the only thing worse than repeated late-night profanity-laced messages would probably be repeated apologies. I’m mortified. I’m sorry. Your friendship is really important to me.
My lip curls, and I manage to condense my complicated, fucked-up feelings into one single word.
Don’t, I type.
She doesn’t respond. And now that I’ve broken through that barrier, I can’t stop.
Don’t apologize. Don’t stop having expectations for me.
Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.
She responds with her own tentative single syllable.
A.?
I’ve read her messages a dozen times in the last day. I know them by heart, every last excoriating word.
And maybe that’s why I tell her the thing I didn’t realize until it’s sliding out of my fingers.
Let me lay this shit out on the table.
I know you’re interested in me. You want to know what my name is. What I look like. You want to maybe meet up sometime and see if our real-life chemistry is as good as it is online.
I don’t wait for a response.
On my part…
I stare at my phone. Thinking, trying to figure out how to tell her what she means to me. I don’t know how to put it in words. And then I do.
Imagine me drawing Maslow’s pyramid of needs, I write. At the base are the fundamental requirements: food, shelter, wifi.
This gets a response from her. Ha.
On the tiers above are things like social acceptance. Basic scientific research. Baklava.
Of course, Em says. The well-known baklava tier.
I take a breath, and put it out there. You do not show up in the drawing.
While I’m writing my next line, her response comes through. Gee. Thanks.
I shut my eyes and hit send. You are the table the drawing rests on. Em, I’m pretty much in love with you.
Fuck. That’s out there, then. She doesn’t say anything, and I can imagine her shock reverberating back through my phone.
I shoved you away pretty hard in December. It was the anniversary of my little brother’s death. I should be over it. I’m not.
I don’t think I’ll ever be over it. She doesn’t say anything in response. I only know Em is there and listening because my messages change from delivered to read, one by one.
In high school I was… Popular is the wrong word, but maybe respected? I was in all Honors classes. On the tennis team etc etc. I was a workaholic then, too.
I’m typing more slowly now.
My little brother was a freshman when I was a senior. I knew he wasn’t popular. I knew kids teased him. But I thought he’d figure it all out. Kids do. I was busy. When shit was really bad, I let him eat lunch with me and my friends.
I don’t want to finish the story, but now I have to.
My parents were busy. My mom is a software engineer, and she had a project on deadline. My dad is an author, and he was also on deadline. And I was busy, dammit, because I’m always busy.
Received, the message status says. Then: read.
I go on.
I didn’t know how bad it was. Typing those words hurts, because they sound like an excuse. I don’t give myself excuses. I don’t deserve excuses. I should have known. I was at tennis practice the day my brother posted on his LiveJournal that he wouldn’t kill himself as long as one person smiled at him on the way home.
He got one response: “Go ahead. No one cares.” By the time I got home, it was too late.
Oh, A., she finally writes. I’m sorry.
Yeah. So am I. I should have been there. But it was worse than that.
The girl who wrote it… We were dating. She was sick of Chase eating with us at lunch.
Oh, Em says. No.
She didn’t think he would do it, I respond. I’ll give her that much. But of all the things my parents ever asked me to do, “Look after your brother” was the big one. And I fucked it up. I’m kind of a mess. I’m freaked out at the idea of people relying on me. I’m freaked out at the idea of them not. I feel like I’m a failure no matter what I do, and I’m afraid of failing you.
A., she writes. It’s okay.
It isn’t. I don’t want to hurt you, I tell her. That was all. I didn’t want to hurt you, and I did.
There’s a whole tangle of other emotions. I’m not sure how to explain to her that I want her to expect things of me. That I’m afraid I’ll mess it up anyway. I basically said everything with I’m pretty much in love with you.
It’s late as it is.
Hey, she writes. So. I have some issues, too. I get it.
Yeah.
When I was twelve, she says, my parents kicked me out of the house. It’s more complicated than that. I went back for some summers to try therapy with them. It never worked out.
While I’m trying to digest the scope of that, she continues.
My mom’s mother got divorced, and people looked down on them. Or maybe mom looked down on herself. She didn’t want her kids to deal with any kind of stigma. She had everything planned out for us. Then she got me.
I squint at the phone.
And I was not a boy, Em writes. Even though that’s the gender they assigned me at birth.
It takes a moment for the clue to sink in. For me to understand that she’s telling me that she’s transgender. To remember mon
ths ago, when she sent me that picture of those shoes and told me that she wore them to remind herself that she deserved to feel pretty and feminine.
It all makes sense. I want to gather her up and tell her that she deserves her shoes. That she never deserved what happened to her.
Em’s been typing as I try to align my thoughts. So she’d scold and complain and threaten. I have this thing I do where I just keep quiet, and keep quiet, until I cross some line and suddenly—well, I guess you know now.
Yeah, I do.
We had a huge fight when I was twelve, Em says. Mom and Dad and me, and they told me I’d either go to the military boys’ school they’d picked out or I’d have to leave.
Shit, I type. That sucks.
My older brother gave me a hundred bucks, she writes, and I took a bus up to my grandmother’s. I had no idea what she would do. I was scared the whole way, but she was my best hope. Even though she was an observant Catholic. When I visited her, she always used to go to mass and take us with her. She prayed to the Virgin Mary for miracles. She had a portrait of Thomas More in her office.
Shit, I write. I’m not going to like the way this turns out, am I?
But she’d always been… Nice, I guess. I arrived on her doorstep at 11 at night and told her everything. I asked her if she thought God could make me into a girl. If that was the kind of miracle he did.
Shit, I write for a third time.
And she said…
I wait. Unable to look away from the phone.
She said, “I think He already did.”
I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.
Obviously, she writes, I have issues with…so much of the Catholic Church. And so does she, really. Religion is a weird mix of weird and ugly and incomprehensible, but it also has in it this beautiful thing that made her love me exactly as I landed on her doorstep. That’s why I still go to mass with her on Sundays when I can. It’s why when I legally changed my name, I took hers as my middle name. Camilla. So. There you are. I’m complicated. I have issues. I get it.
I don’t have a good response. Not in words. Instead, I send her an emoji string: a heart, a bowl of soup, and heels.
Sorry, I append. Bad at words.
No, she types. I’m pretty sure that’s emoji for “hold me.”
Exactly right. She’s exactly right.
I sit in place.
I still don’t know her name. I still haven’t seen so much as a picture. I’m pretty sure that I’m more in love with her than before this conversation started. I don’t know how to move forward, but I can’t stay in place.
The one thing I’m sure of is that I don’t want to hurt her.
My number is 650-555-2761, I write. I think we’re beyond a selfie or two at this point. I want to do this right. I want to hear your voice.
There’s a bit of a pause before she responds. That’s a Bay area code. I’m 415-555-3113.
That’s San Francisco. My pulse is racing. She’s right across the Bay. Has been this entire time.
And, she continues, it’s past midnight. I have a hangover, and I need to be up by eight. Call me vain, but when we talk for the first time I want my voice to sound its dulcet best.
I look through my calendar. Work, work, work, and then Gabe has a seminar in the evening and I’ve already committed to dinner. Tomorrow sucks. I have a late afternoon thing and dinner with friends. But I can beg out by eight or so. Pacific time.
The silence that follows seems fraught.
This is why I was afraid of this, I say. I’m so fucking busy. We’ll get together, and then in a month I’ll be like, bye, have to go to Australia for two weeks! I don’t want you to hate me.
A., she says, I’m busy, too. I was just about to say that if we make it tomorrow at nine Pacific time I can make it.
Shit. This is happening. This is really happening. I’m scared. My nerves tingle in anticipation. And if her phone number is any guide, she lives just across the Bay.
I’m glad we’re still friends, she says. Who else would I get to emergency-text me, after all?
I manage a half-hearted smile. I was just thinking about that earlier today. You know, I think we may be quantum entangled?
Quantum entangled?
You know. Transmitting information to each other faster than the speed of light.
For me, it’s a second way of saying I’m half in love with her already. And maybe she gets it, because she sends back a smile.
Good night, Em, I say.
Good night. Talk to you tomorrow.
Except this time, she really means talk. I set down my phone.
Let me not screw this up.
17
JAY
I spend the first two hours of my day going over an experiment with Vithika.
“Jay,” she finally asks over Skype, “are you okay? You’re not paying attention.”
I shake my head, “Uh.” Shit. “I have a date tonight.”
Her eyebrows go up.
“Shut up,” I say, even though she didn’t say anything.
I spend an hour in my lab talking through experimental design with Gary and Soo Yin. I grab a sandwich in crackling plastic from the campus market for lunch—it’s fast, at least, and filling, even if the bread is soggy.
I’m good at working. I’m shit at feeling.
By the time it’s four in the afternoon, I’m a complete tangle.
Gabe comes to my rescue.
Yo, he texts half an hour before his seminar. I was gonna go meet Maria and bring her up here, but I got delayed.
Gabe. Late again. I shake my head.
Can you bring her up?
I exhale. It’s not like I have any option to say no. It won’t even be the first time I accompany Maria there. Gabe works at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and despite heavy ties to the university, it’s a separate entity run by the federal government. Maria couldn’t just walk in. LBL employees (like Gabe) or affiliates (like me) can sign visitors in, but otherwise the gates won’t open.
Fine, I tell Gabe.
“Well, here we are,” I say to Maria a half-hour later when we meet in the courtyard outside my lab. “It’s confirmation bias again.”
She gives me a level, annoyed look.
“You okay with walking?” I ask.
“Fine,” she says tersely.
I sigh.
Maria doesn’t like me, and I can hardly blame her. I accept responsibility for the fact that we don’t get along, but… Still, we don’t get along.
I walked into work today, which means I don’t have my car. It’s not really my fault that I’m forcing her to walk, but I still feel responsible. Nothing about her outfit looks like it was made for walking.
Her dress comes halfway up her thighs, and the material is a little tight. To make it worse, LBL is up a hill. Calling it a mere “hill” isn’t quite fair. The Berkeley Hills are steep, with the road up to the lab at something close to a 20 percent grade. The sun is out, though, and it’s a nice day.
“You know that I’m going to have to be responsible for you,” I say as we start up the hill.
“Relax, Three Sigma,” she says with a roll of her eyes. “I don’t run with scissors.”
“I’m serious. This is not the kind of site where visitors can wander around and gawk at buildings. It’s the kind of site where the wrong person in the wrong place when the synchrotron is running will die of radiation poisoning in seconds. Not that there’s any danger of that.”
“Aw, you’re being a pedant again. Having never visited or talked with my brother, I wouldn’t know anything about his workplace.”
I accept this sarcasm in silence.
“Although,” she continues, “radiation poisoning could solve a lot of my problems. Want to play canary?”
A smile tugs at my lips despite myself. With my blinders off, I have to admit that Maria is something of a trouper. She’s wearing a gray sweater dress that clings a little bit too much to her smoo
th curves. It’s tight enough that I can see the round muscles in her ass tense and release as she goes up the road.
I shouldn’t be looking. I’m talking to Em tonight. But I’m human.
And Maria and I may be nothing alike, but dammit, I have to respect her. And her ass.
“Don’t be shy,” she says. “Your death will be for the good of the country.”
“I’ll tell you what. I’ll stick to determining safe spots theoretically and leave the empirical validation to you.”
She glances over her shoulder at me. “Running out of breath? I thought you wanted to walk.”
I’m not running out of breath. Yes, I’m breathing hard, but it’s a hill, and Maria walks quickly. She tilts her head, as if gauging my fitness level. Then she speeds up, which I hadn’t thought possible. Her dress sways around her thighs. Shaping her quads. Spilling over her butt.
Maria and I will never get along, but I’m not about to let her leave me behind. I grit my teeth and dig in and move faster. I can’t believe that she’s doing this in heels.
And that’s when my eyes fall to her feet. I’m not much of a shoe person. One heel looks much like another. But Maria is wearing red heels.
Not just red heels.
My heart stops. My fists slowly clench. I feel almost dizzy. Yep, some undiscovered part of my mind whispers. Those sure are shoes. Everything seems to move slowly; I can hear every individual beat of my heart separated by an infinity of silence.
Her shoes are three-inch heels. Red. Chased with a bit of ribbon, decorated with gold butterflies and Swarovski crystals. I know those shoes. I have them practically memorized.
Maria Lopez is wearing Em’s fuck-off shoes.
I can’t look away from them. They click on the pavement in front of me.
For a moment, I can’t even process what this means. Why is Maria wearing Em’s shoes? Do they know each other?
No. My mind may be moving slowly, but I know the truth. Words I can’t even say in my mind.
Maria can’t be Em. That makes…
No, I correct myself. It doesn’t make no sense. It makes a lot of sense.
The floodgates of recognition open. Maria is the right age. Em is, and always has been, a… Well, a nerd for lack of a better word. Maria knew enough statistics to know what three sigma meant. She knew enough physics to understand her brother’s job talk. And she gave me hell for assuming she couldn’t do these things based on how she looked.