Nico
The night before the appointment to go over the biopsy results with Dr. Peace, I had a hard time getting to sleep. When I finally did, I had terrible nightmares. People in white coats dragged me down a long institutional hallway as I screamed and fought. When they got me into the surgical suite, they were going to carve up my dick like a garnish flower made from a carrot. Make it pretty and useless and numb.
I woke myself up yelling, curled in a ball with my hands between my legs. The door to my room flew open and Hazey threw herself into my bed. She wrapped her skinny arms around me. I hugged her close.
Mom came in too. She got into the other side of my bed and put an arm around both of us.
“I’ll be with you tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll be with you for all of it.”
I leaned into her. “I know. Thanks. Would you tell me a story?”
“Fable or science?” she asked.
“You have a good science story?”
“I think it’s good, but you can tell me.” She leaned around me and touched the tip of Hazey’s nose. “Did you know that our galaxy is still making stars?”
“Cool,” Hazey said.
“And the places that make stars are inside of nebulas. They’re called stellar nurseries. Some people have been studying these stellar nurseries in the Snake Nebula. They’re looking at cosmic seeds: glowing areas in the nebula where stars are created.”
Hazey made a drowsy “mmhm” sound. Curled into my pillow, tucked under my arm, she was half-asleep. I grinned at Mom.
Mom said, “We used to think that high-mass stars formed from extremely massive cores. You’d have a very big core and it would collect the star material around itself.” She held up one fist and circled it with a finger. “But now we’re learning that stars don’t form alone. Stars are born in groups. One of the study’s authors called them villages or families.”
“Big stars are made in families?” Hazey asked blearily. “Like us.”
“Yes, like us. Eventually the Snake Nebula will have all these clusters of stars that formed in these families. The stars will all grow up together.”
“That’s good,” Hazey said.
I kissed the top of Hazey’s head. “Go to bed,” I told her. “I’m okay.”
She grumbled, a sound I’m sure she learned from Yai, and went back to her room. I bunched up my pillow and put my head on it. Mom brushed her fingertips across my temple and stayed until I fell asleep.
* * *
Ella texted every day, a bunch. She was onto me. I told her I was doing family stuff and I’d talk to her after the weekend. I said enough about Dad being in town and fighting with him at the steak place to get her to give me some space. I figured I’d call her when the biopsy results came back and I could tell her it wasn’t serious.
But the results came back and it was serious. Not malignant, not quite cancer, but pre-cancerous. Dr. Peace wanted both the ovotestis and the ovary out. As soon as I was back home, alone in my room, I called Ella.
When she answered, I couldn’t talk.
“Nico, what’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
“I’m okay,” I managed around the lump in my throat. I hopped up from my desk chair and circled the middle of the room to loosen my words.
“What’s going on?” Ella asked. “Tucker says she’s called you a bunch and texted you and you’re ignoring her. What happened?”
I pulled my phone away from my ear and stared at it.
I hadn’t gotten any calls or texts from Tucker.
Then I remembered and my gut dropped with horror: after I’d blocked Summer, I had also blocked Tucker. That’s what I’d forgotten.
I’d meant to unblock her right away, a day or two at most, give me a little space not to be angry, not to react. But with my dad in town, the lawsuit and then the evil peanut…
That had been weeks ago. She’d been blocked all this time. She’d been calling and texting while I thought she was ignoring me.
“Are you mad at her?” Ella asked while I worked to uncurdle my brain.
Matt’s favorite non-swear words, like “numbskull” and “nincompoop,” circled in my head. Tucker must think—I had no idea what she thought.
That I was an ass?
That I wasn’t into her? Oh hell, what if she thought I didn’t want her? What if she thought I was punishing her for panicking? That would be beyond awful.
I’d avoided calling her because I thought she wasn’t calling me. Tried to give her space.
“Why would I be mad at Tucker?” I asked as my fingers flew through the steps of unblocking her number.
“I don’t know, neither of you are telling me anything. What IS going on with you?”
“Ella,” I drew out her name to buy myself another few seconds. “Babydoll.”
Steel came into her words. “Tell me.”
I flopped back onto my bed, put a hand behind my head, tried to sound light. “I’ve got to get some surgery.”
“What?” Her voice dropped into the quiet-mad-worried range.
“The radiologist found a…something like an evil peanut.”
“What!”
“There’s a mass in my ovotestis, they have to take it out,” I said, staring at the blankness of the ceiling and trying not to cry.
“Nico!”
“And the ovary too,” I said. “They have to take it all.”
Her voice was high, tight with worry, “No! Are you okay? How are you doing?”
“So-so.”
“Will that change your hormones?”
“I’ll have to go with shots and pills,” I said.
“The pills aren’t bad.”
She would say that. It was how she got her hormones. But I was glad to hear it.
I told her, “I have to decide what hormones I want and, um, while they’re in there they could change some other stuff. Make my junk more generically picture perfect. And my dad’s pushing for that. He’s still on his ‘be a man’ thing.”
“Oh, Nico.”
“Dr. Peace says female would be easier, but I don’t know. You knew me as a girl for a bit, what do you think?”
“I can’t,” she said. “You have to decide that. I can come down this weekend and we could talk about it.”
I wanted that. Wanted to see her and hang out and talk it all through. But it would be tough on her, the parts about me freezing eggs so I could have kids someday when she never had that option.
Plus she’d always been so sure about herself, she didn’t seem like the right person for a conversation about picking a gender. She’d say things like ‘you just know’ and other unhelpfulness.
I asked, “Aren’t you and Shen going camping for spring break?”
“I’ll cancel it.”
“Don’t. Come down for the surgery but go have your trip with him. He’s going to be gone all summer, right? Back to China to hang with his family? You should get your romance on. Besides I cannot wait to hear the Princess Ella Goes Camping stories. Shen does not know what he’s in for.”
“Nico…”
“There’s time.”
“Can I tell Tucker?” she asked. “I mean that you’ve got a surgical thing going on, not the part about ovotestis.”
I grinned thinking about Ella talking to Tucker about my ovotestis.
“Is that like the initiation for advanced trans and intersex conversations—the graduate level course? You have to have a detailed and polite conversation with friend B about friend A’s junk?”
She was laughing, but softly with this edge of worry in her voice. “You talk about your own junk, but I know she’d want to know that something’s up with you. She’s been asking about you. A lot.”
My heart thumped its approval of that. Asking was good. Not giving up on me because I was the dolt who’d blocked her and forgotten, very good.
“Yeah, go ahead.”
After a pause she said, “Nico, I love you.”
“Love you too, baby.”
We hung up and I immediately listened to all the messages Tucker had left and read all the texts. The first were close together. Then they trailed off like she was trying to give me space and not bug me.
Yeah, I’d been pissed off, but way more about Summer than about Tucker. With Tucker it had been that old echo of shame, like she ran away from me because of me. Summer’s words “you’re afraid of what I’ll find” had hit so deep in me, so close to my fears about Tucker’s reaction, that it all got mashed up together. I’d wanted to block out the fear, not Tucker herself.
I decided to wait a few minutes so Ella could go over and talk to Tucker first, and then I’d call her.