EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT LOVE, I LEARNED FROM GAMBIT AND ROGUE
For most of my life, I never really identified with your standard superheroes. I respected them, certainly—Wonder Woman was always awesome because she could stand equal to any hero and she was a girl, Superman was pretty cool because eye lasers and invulnerability, and Batman really liked his toys.
They were fun. Strong. Colorful. But if you’d asked me, I couldn’t say that I really got what they were. Who they were, specifically in regards to what and who I was. Those legends were out of my reach—gods among kings, entertaining and full of adventure, but never mine to associate with. They just didn’t speak to me.
Which was fine, because I was pretty sure I didn’t need a superhero to save my life.
Contrary to popular belief, turns out superheroes can work in mysterious ways. Whatever I thought, life conspired to make sure I tripped over the one that I needed when I needed her most.
My family consisted of a single mother and a brother thirteen months older than me. When we were teeny, I’m told, my brother and I got along like a house on fire—which I understand means something like “great.” As we got older, we got along like you’d imagine a house on fire actually feels like. As in, mass destruction.
In between bouts of full-scale war, my brother taught me the awesomeness of Transformers—original die-cast metal figures, naturally. I played with dolls like any other girl was expected to, but I also played with GI Joes, with Starscream (I actually liked his voice), and with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I loved Donatello best. During that point in time when our interests overlapped—and my brother wasn’t so keen to abandon me for playmates of his own—we watched cartoons. Around 1989 when it aired, we watched the original animated X-Men, Pryde of the X-Men.
I was seven years old. Too young to think that I’d need a superhero someday but old enough to act like a sponge for a one-shot cartoon. In a quiet, long-term way, this minuscule act of generosity on my brother’s part set the foundation for the rest of my life—or at least, as the X-Men tend to have it, this life in this continuity. (In other continuities, I’m the superhero.)
My mother tried her best for us in those days, but it’s hard for a single mom raising two kids on a nine-to-five—especially in San Francisco. She worked a lot, and though I’ve never had the courage to ask, I think she played a lot, too. I wouldn’t blame her. Mom had us fairly young, and now that I’m without children in my thirties, I can’t imagine how hard it was to raise two toddlers by herself while still in her twenties.
At that time, we were too small to look after ourselves, so she hired a babysitter, a married mother with two teenagers of her own—a boy and a girl. Since our babysitter had her own family to take care of, the couple watched us in their home, took care of us when we got the chicken pox, and made sure we had good food to eat and a place to stay.
We stayed a lot. Sometimes, we stayed the night.
Sometimes, I woke up in the shared bed sobbing.
Those were the memories that surfaced first.
* * *
We moved a few times after California. By the time we settled in Virginia, I’d gotten used to coming home after school by myself. My older brother was supposed to be the responsible one, but he was already a troublemaker and spent as much time outside playing with friends as he could. Sometimes, he stuck around. Mostly, he kept to himself. Mom didn’t believe in things like Nintendo, see, and all our friends did.
The closest my brother and I got to bonding in those days was over Saturday morning cartoons. Though we usually argued over who would watch what, we settled easily on X-Men: The Animated Series. I met Gambit and Rogue for the first time.
I only sort of understood her whole “no touch” issue—people who touched her dropped into comas. Seemed like a good reason not to touch her, didn’t it? The awareness for what that meant for Rogue, the compassion for how that kind of isolation shaped her, didn’t come to me until later.
Saturday morning was special—a place and time entirely disconnected from the rest. Reality was different.
When Mom eventually brought home her fiancé, I was well into a comfortable routine of independence. I didn’t need or want someone around messing it all up. I didn’t like the new guy, I didn’t like that he came with kids of his own, and I especially didn’t like how scared those kids made me feel. Opening up to my new stepsister in the only way I knew how didn’t get the best results—she felt I was copying her every move, and I just wanted to be liked by the older sister I’d never had. Every time she lashed out at me, I tried harder to be someone she’d like.
Someone, for example, like herself.
This cycle didn’t end well.
Take the sudden appearance of a father figure and mix it with the nightmare that is puberty, add the hellish landscape of public school for extra fun, and I was ripe for the first escapist avenue that came my way. I will forever be grateful that it came in the form of books. When my world became too much to handle alone, I always had a way out. Even if only for a little while.
* * *
Some years later, and I was officially classified as an odd kid—always reading, never entirely focused on anything real. I’d already grown wary of love; in fact, I’d become downright cynical—a sort of world-weariness that masqueraded as practicality when it was really exhaustion and fear.
I often joke that I’m the most balanced one in the family, and this humor covers a lot. I don’t remember when my mother started coming to me with her grown-up troubles, but I became something of a therapist along the way. I think that because I was practical, it was mistaken for maturity. It made it harder for me to open up—I picked up too much knowledge that wasn’t mine. By the time I was thirteen, I’d developed Rogue’s reaction to people in general: if they got too close, I took on their baggage. I didn’t know how to let it go.
The year I naively nursed a crush for a flesh and blood human—instead of the awkward pressure I felt to go through the motions like everyone else—things had devolved at home. My folks were always fighting, and my brother was constantly in trouble. I had discovered theater, which kept me away from the uneasy environment, too busy for the impromptu therapy sessions I was already tired of.
All that quality time onstage with the star of the show slipped in under my wariness and turned into full-blown puppy love.
It was the only time I really tried—the one time I thought it might be worth trying. The night my year-long crush finally asked me on a date, my mother wouldn’t let me go. It was near the end of my freshman year, and I was already scraped raw from peer pressure and hormones and the sheer embarrassment of existing. I was always fighting with my stepfather, feuding with my stepsister, and trying to cover for my brother. I spent so long trying to be everything to everyone that I didn’t know who I was. Only that for this night, I could be the girl asked out on a date by a guy she liked.
With one phone call, I was suddenly placed in the painfully embarrassing position of explaining that I couldn’t go on a date because my mother and stepfather had gotten into a protracted domestic dispute.
How does a kid—no matter how mature she’s forced to be—describe that? How does a child of fourteen explain that she was so tired and so embarrassed, that she was angry and didn’t want to go home to deal with the drama? That she’d rather go on the date—her first real date—and sing Beatles songs and watch a play with him and stay out forever.
Short answer? I didn’t try. Not really. I tore the Band-Aid off—announced the ugliness for what it was, right out in the open—and left the wound exposed to the air, painful and throbbing.
The boy awkwardly made his apologies. I can’t say for sure what he thought, but he definitely had no idea how to proceed from there. Neither did I. I’d tried to touch someone, and gotten burned for my efforts. That was the end of my crush, and the end of any interest I had in going through that again.
Like the wary X-Man I met so long ago on a Saturday morning and all but forgotten in the interim, this moment hit me the same way Ms. Marvel’s psyche hit Rogue—too much, too hard, and too painful. The event shaped the rest of her life, just as this one shaped mine.
When my mother and stepfather finally divorced, we moved away.
* * *
My cynicism only grew as the years went by. In North Carolina, I did everything I could to be a tomboy—too boyish for pretty, too mouthy for respectable. I hoped it would keep me from being noticed, pursued, or touched. I built the walls that would keep people from relating to me, or wanting to try. I buried myself in books and kept very few friends. I didn’t trust anyone to “touch” me and not lose their mind—or worse, inject themselves too far into mine. When the adults in the rural community started teasing about marrying me off to “a nice military boy,” I fled the state.
I was fifteen, going on sixteen, when Mom and I ended up back in a different part of Virginia. My brother stayed behind. Contrary to musical numbers, there were no strapping young lads lining up to escort me around a gazebo while singing about how much they loved me. Rightly so. Odd had turned into prickly; a sheet of armor as thick as my books now protected the exposed nerve that my inner voice had become.
I knew that I didn’t want to be touched—not touched as in physically, not like a hand to my arm or a hug. The touching that Rogue feared began as a physical thing, but it was the consequences she hated most—the same consequences I carried. I didn’t want someone else’s thoughts in my head, disguised as memories. I didn’t want their voices in my psyche.
I was desperately afraid of the people around me and the baggage they’d already forced me to carry.
I started to remember things. Little things at first, triggered by harmless nothings.
I recalled the awful feelings when I woke up sobbing in a bed that wasn’t mine, and the dismissive laughter that accompanied it. Then I remembered how I’d get yanked through a room by my hair. Then came the hands that strayed where no hands should be laid on a child. The laughter when I successfully mimicked an act taught by a family that was supposed to be taking care of me. I had been eager to please, because what child doesn’t want the praise of those around her?
I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t quite believe myself. And even if it was true, so what? It was years ago. I was older. Independent. I was a teenager who’d learned how to repress memories that didn’t suit the world I wanted to live in.
When my brother left us, it was simply the way it was. When my mother made choices that didn’t include me, that was fine, too. I separated myself from everyone—present in physical form but emotionally detached. I already knew that I would never marry, have kids, or otherwise trust that someone would be there for me—much less forever.
I was broken inside, but I couldn’t understand the fundamentals of how. Memories, guilt, a slow fury simmered inside me, scars from years of betrayal—right or wrong, and there was plenty of both.
All I could do, all I wanted to do, was live my life alone. But at fifteen years old (going on sixteen, and this was the age where that sort of thing mattered), I knew I couldn’t just become a hermit. I needed money—to live on, to buy the things I wanted, and replace all the books I’d lost over the years of traveling light.
So I applied for a job at a comic shop. It looked like a cool place. I liked comics in passing and art in general and things I could call mine in specific, so I thought I’d give it a shot. It didn’t even occur to me that I’d be the only girl working there—I barely even considered the fact that I was a girl with any depth of meaning. At that point, I was a sexless biped with long blond hair, stick limbs, and a habit of wearing my brother’s old hand-me-downs.
Comics became my go to for short reads. They were perfect for break time adventures, bold and filled with life. They were as much of an escape as a way to pass the time, just like the books I loved.
I didn’t know it then, but the comic shop that hired me helped save my life.
* * *
I honed my social skills because that’s what retail does for you—you learn to put on a smile, to make like you’re having a great day, to pretend the customer is the most important thing in the world. If you’re lucky, you learned to enjoy it. Like Rogue in X-Men, I picked up the traits and habits of those I came into contact with. While hers was a genetic predisposition, mine was taught by hard experience—I adopted peoples’ likes and dislikes, altered myself, and I did it all without any conscious effort.
As a social chameleon, my only real talent was dressing down into as inconspicuous a default template as possible. I developed a kind of armor—an invulnerability that made it so I could fly away from every moment anytime I wanted.
And like Rogue at her best, I pretended I was fine. Because it was abnormal, I hid the fact that I hated to be touched, to be close. All the while, deep inside, I was desperate to find even one person who could do it without screwing with my head any more than it already was. I was lonely, but I carried the secrets and voices and baggage of all the people who’d touched me prior and they echoed and reechoed until I learned that quiet moments were impossible to handle.
So I never stopped reading. When I started work at the comic store, I promptly enrolled in the employee hold plan. This ensured that most of what I made went right back into the store. A smart plan, and it made it easy to buy comics by the handful.
I started with comics whose art or concept I found appealing. I was drawn to fantastical worlds, like Avalon Studios’ Aria. I returned to stories that had what we would call today an “urban fantasy feel”—gorgeous art with kick-ass women front and center, like Michael Turner’s Witchblade and Fathom, or David Finch’s Ascension.
The third corner in my growing foundation, the thing that would sync with old-school cartoons and a whim of a job, struck me by accident. While organizing the stacks, I stumbled across a special X-Men issue. I recalled that my brother liked X-Men (my brother, mind, because even then, there were all these rules about what gender was supposed to like which comics) and so I thought I’d be nice and pick it up for him. We weren’t living together anymore, and at just turned sixteen, I figured I’d gain some cool points for being the sister that worked at a comics joint and slung a superhero comic his way.
Silver holographic foil embellished the title, and a blown-up action shot of Rogue and Gambit brawling across the cover promised all kinds of entertainment. She wore green and yellow spandex; he sported his unmistakable pink armored vest under a brown trench coat. It was classic X-Men, and even better, it had a full foldout cover for maximum impact.
Oh, yeah. I was racking up the points even holding this thing.
I couldn’t just send it off to him, I needed to read it first—nothing crossed my field without getting read at least once. As it turned out, reading it was the best thing to happen to me—to me as I was then and to me as I am now—in a very long time.
The story took what I’d absorbed years earlier in the animated series and turned it into something raw and emotional—Rogue and Gambit, in love but at odds after an explosive kiss that left the smooth-talking Cajun in a coma and Rogue on the run. She was angry, manic, haunted. Trying to hide from something she didn’t quite get, desperate to love somebody she couldn’t trust. It wasn’t about saving the world, it was about two broken, flawed people trying to make it work.
I touched that comic and took a piece of them with me. Seared both superheroes into my mind and my heart, and if my subconscious stapled that special anniversary edition over my fraying armor, well, that was okay, too. In the pages of that comic, the thing I’d picked up on a whim for a brother I hadn’t seen in months, I found something I hadn’t yet learned how to articulate: I found me.
Amusingly, the issue never did make it to my brother. While rifling through the two shoe boxes that hold what’s left of my comics today, I found it nestled between a stray 10th Muse and the first issue of Top Cow’s The Darkness/Batman. Its publication date is listed as October, 1995.
I was only thirteen when Marvel wrote the comic that set the bar for the rest of my life.
* * *
We moved again in July 1999. I was a couple months shy of seventeen. My mom was staying at her boyfriend’s house, leaving me to my own devices. My invulnerability was impenetrable. So much so that when I dated a person, I did it with the kind of shallow motives that would make a dude brofist me if I were a man.
What I wanted, what people wanted from me, didn’t matter. I’d scored up some geek cred in my years of online text-based roleplay, sessions of D&D around the table, and in my time as a comic book slinger; I strapped it all up into a surefire pillow fort that I felt like I could comfortably defend. I was a gamer. A nerd. A bookworm. I was a geek who hadn’t yet figured out what being a girl meant, and wasn’t all that inclined to worry about it.
But I didn’t leave my bad habits behind. That power of Rogue’s—of mine—remained. I absorbed the people around me, used them like plates in my armor, until even I didn’t know who I was—it changed depending on who I was with. For a long time, that was okay.
I was seventeen going on thirty, with an open-door policy for friends in need of crash space and a weekly commitment to local LARPs. That’s live action role-playing, for you uninitiated, and it’s about as nerdy as sitting around pretending to be vampires and werewolves—except more, because we actually dressed up for it. As it turned out, it was another excuse to behave like someone I wasn’t.
Among my fellow gamers, a twenty-two-year-old guy stood out—he was friends with friends of mine, a LARPer, and geeky enough that we became friends pretty quickly.
Shortly after, he moved back home across the state. We stayed in touch, the way I always stay in touch—online or nothing. That habit started early. The Internet is for porn, cats … and instant messaging.
He and I had a lot in common, including our love for text-based gaming, and a lot that we didn’t agree on. Our debates were fierce and spirited. For the first time in a long time, I began to wonder how dangerous it’d be to touch someone—and with it, I worried over how badly it would mess me up. Too much, I figured. In that, Rogue was the braver of us—at least she’d kissed Gambit (even if they did think the world was ending).
I didn’t want my world to end. I’d already gotten closer to this guy than I ever had to anyone else, and I could feel the voices altering inside my psyche—and that made me afraid. So I ran.
Frankly, I didn’t handle it any better than Rogue in that anniversary issue. Somewhere along the way, he came to be my Remy, patiently and cautiously pursuing a woman who could very well wreck his world if he got too close—I was that volatile.
He didn’t seem to care. He was persistent, and he was kind, and when I finally agreed to date him a year later, I made a backup plan. An escape route. I reserved a large portion of myself, sealed it off with the rationale that it was fine because he’d leave anyway—or I’d leave first. Rogue knew how to protect herself, see, how to keep from getting touched, and so did I. I believed that he’d see how messed up I was, see the demons I throttled back behind the armor, see how easily I absorbed people around me, and go running—and of course he would, because that’s what real people do. Real people aren’t comic book superheroes.
Real people don’t kiss a girl, fall into a coma, wake up, and still patiently, persistently go after the girl they love. Most don’t know how to handle a past scarred by trauma and abuse.
Superheroes save the world, and sometimes they save each other, but Rogue and Gambit? They’d never, ever work out in the real world. If I was Rogue, and he was Gambit, then the outcome was already determined.
I kept one foot out the door, ready to run at a moment’s notice.
The first mix CD he gave me was called For the Love of a Princess. In faded color, he’d added artwork pulled from his favorite love story of all time—Remy and Rogue, casual attire, swept into the kind of kiss that swore to defy everything except the love they shared.
Okay, I thought, fingering the plastic case. Maybe I could give this one a shot.
I was eighteen going on blindsided.
* * *
Years later, the tale of Rogue and Gambit continues. They work it out—they stumble over something else that gets in the way. Sometimes, they get in their own way. They break it off—they find each other again. They save the world. And then they fall victim to their own fears all over again. Because that’s what happens to superheroes.
It happens to us, too.
Over a decade later, and the man I eventually learned to trust—who spent years patiently unraveling those demons, the masks, the armor I’d cobbled together from the absorbed remains of the people I’d known—hasn’t let me down. The going is tough, just as it is for Gambit and Rogue. The enemies we face aren’t as dangerous to the world at large, but they are as real a threat to us as any supervillain. He gets the sharp side of my tongue more often than not, but he’s got a quick wit of his own and a powerful will to see this through.
The day I finally told him about the memories I carried—the scars I’d carefully hidden under layers and layers of armor—he didn’t flinch. No matter what I threw at him, he didn’t run. I told him they might never heal—he said we’d work it through together. I told him that some days are worse than others—he said he’d be there for them.
I said I didn’t like to be touched.
He knew as well as I did that even talking about it was the same as letting him in to touch.
Turned out, I was looking at this all wrong from the start. As Remy says in Gambit 16, “Roguey, we spent so much time worryin’ about your powers keepin’ us from havin’ a real relationship when all it took was a bit of … tweakin’ on my powers instead!”
I just needed to find the right person willing to “tweak” their powers for mine.
* * *
If I ever manage to go back in time, like the X-Men, I’d tell the ten-year-old me how important it is to watch all the X-Men cartoons with her brother. I’d tell the teenage me to be sure to get that job at the comic store, and don’t worry about the convenient lie about buying the special anniversary edition issue for that brother—just get it, and enjoy.
I wouldn’t need to tell the eighteen-year-old me, with the picture of Gambit and Rogue on that mix CD, anything—she got it.
And I know that if I did manage to go back in time, the younger me would laugh and swear that everything was fine. That I didn’t need stuff like comics and superheroes and love. That of course everything would be all right, because the young me didn’t know about things like depression and rage and cutting herself up to bleed the demons out.
But Rogue and Gambit knew. I watched them work it out, all the while utterly oblivious to my own feelings, unaware how much I envied Rogue her Remy. Even now, there are times when I think about the pieces that came together—the TV show, the job, the comic I stumbled into—and I shake my head. I know without a shred of doubt that had he not given me that CD, with that cover, I wouldn’t have let down my guard enough to give him the chance I did. Because I didn’t think he’d understand.
And I would have been so wrong.
I never did tell him how much I loved Rogue and Gambit, even after he’d given me his heart on a CD cover. These days, he doesn’t have to ask. Somehow, he knows. And on the days when the demons that still live inside my psyche get too much, or the anxieties and self-doubt start itching and I flash back to that little girl sobbing in a stranger’s house, the man I married puts his arms around me and drawls, “Don’ you worry ’bout it none, chère.”
Because that’s what superheroes do. They save lives.