Nico
The convention was at a Best Western on the outskirts of Cincinnati, but all the rooms were booked. I got us a room across the street at the overflow hotel and we went in to drop off our bags. The room was humid and smelled like sweaty dogs. At least it was big, with two queen beds, a couch and two chairs.
It had taken two hours to drive up and return the car to Bailey. Then we got lunch and had to drive two and a half to get down to Cincinnati. We’d talked our way through all our classes, everything we knew about Ella and Shen, about Cal and his boyfriend, what I had been watching, what Tucker was reading.
She spilled some amazing drama about Summer and Tesh that made the whole Summer-groping-me situation less awful. No wonder that girl was messed up. She was way in love with her best friend, maybe more so now that Tesh was rocking the nonbinary, and she’d been shut down hard. That had to hurt in a deep, bitter way.
Tucker also updated me about the Quin situation—how they’d only hooked up once and called it a rebound thing from the start. The fact that Tucker drove down on a moment’s notice to be with me when she’d heard about the evil peanut, and our kiss last night, made it a lot easier to hear. I wondered what Quin thought about all this, what she was going to think when Tucker got back to campus. But I figured that was for Tucker to deal with.
All the best stuff at the convention happened at night, so I told Tucker we had time to chill in the room. We both used the bathroom and settled our stuff where we wanted it. For Tucker, that meant dropping her bag on the bed near the door and flipping through the TV’s movie channels.
I unpacked my makeup kit and touched up. Then I hung my extra shirt in the closet so it wouldn’t be a mass of wrinkles by morning. Tucker watched me with raised eyebrows. Did that mean she was anti-closet or did this read as super girly to her? Like dapper guys couldn’t use closets.
I was worrying about the “binding” moment at the Noodle. Not that I didn’t want her to know, I totally did, but she’d looked so surprised and delighted. She hadn’t been like, “Dude, how weird is it that you have boobs?” which I’m actually used to, but more like, “Oh wow, presents!” On the one hand, awesome. On the other hand, what would the reaction be when she saw the rest of me?
I couldn’t deal right now if that freaked her out. Not on top of the evil peanut news, and Dad, and her hooking up with Quin. Way too much. I needed to disconnect and get some distance. Then I could come at it again, maybe find answers in there.
Thinking of Dad, this was the perfect way to do my experiment with being a girl again. Not any girl—a badass cylon girl from a science fiction future, my favorite kind to be. With the long hair of my wig brushing my shoulders, I could settle in and see how much I really liked this.
We went to the Best Western restaurant to get burgers, lucking out with a corner booth. The décor was forest green and brown and even the wallpaper smelled of old grease. But the table top was clean and the menus non-sticky, so overall a comforting “we’ve been here for decades” vibe.
Since I was trying out this gendered thing, I asked Tucker, “While we’re here, could you use female pronouns for me?”
“Um, sure.” Her jaw was tight, lips compressed.
I asked, “How are you doing?”
“Sweaty. I feel like everyone’s staring at us.”
“They’re not,” I reassured her. “The Klingons were probably in here earlier. After them, few other costumes stand out.”
“How’d you start doing cosplay?”
“A ton of kids at the Noodle were into it. They’d throw parties every few months and I started going.” I held the menu up, read it for a bit. I wanted the conversation to go deeper, but not too deep. I said, “It’s, um, actually how I got laid the first time.”
Tucker’s jaw had relaxed while I was talking and now she laughed. “You are going to tell me the whole story, right?”
Her blue eyes had copper in them, close around the pupil. Like Tucker herself, bright and metal, solid. I wanted her to keep looking at me so I settled into my side of the booth and tried to pick the right place to start the story.
“You know I dated Ella for a while, kind of a long while, but we broke up in the middle.”
“Why?”
I did not say: because I was a lot more comfortable having a dick than she ever was. I said, “I wanted things to go faster than she did. And we had a fight and…” I circled my hand to indicate complexity.
She nodded at me, smiling, so I continued.
“There was this girl at the Noodle, Sian, pretty high up in the general pecking order. She organized a party blending all the vampire, werewolf, and zombie shows. Her invitation line was, ‘Blood, brains, or carnage?’ I picked carnage because I was in a crap mood that day. She told me to dress up as Alcide from True Blood.”
“He’s the tall, cut one who’s also in that male stripper movie, right?” Tucker asked. “Ella dragged me to that.”
“Yeah.”
“So, this girl…” Tucker prompted.
“Five and a half feet and curvy—one of those girls who has boobs, a belly and a butt and carries it all like ‘screw you, I’m cute.’ A ton of copper red hair that she put into cool updos. And she had freckles. She seemed way older than me at the time, but she couldn’t have been because she was in high school too.”
I sipped my water and continued the story, “I put together a pretty solid Alcide. It seemed to me the defining characteristics of the True Blood werewolves were facial hair and a strong desire to take off their shirts. I did fingernail claws and a spirit-gum short beard. Plus two thick, ribbed white tank tops over my binder and one of those red checked flannel plaid shirts. Thick-soled boots and my shoulders got me close enough to tall, hunky guy.”
“Yeah, that sounds pretty hot,” Tucker said.
I grinned back at her, because if she thought that was hot, we were so going to be okay.
“Sian was playing Jessica, the young, red-headed vampire character. She had her hair long and wavy—realistic-looking fangs with a trail of blood running down one side of her mouth. Grey cardigan sweater with a red push-up bra under it so you could see bright red lace framing her cleavage. On the bottom she had a short black skirt and fishnet stockings with garters. She looked amazing. I was completely scared to talk to her.”
“Did you?”
“No. She came and found me.”
“And…?” Tucker asked.
“We ended up in one of the upstairs studios. The door was locked but Sian had the key ring because she’d done the setup. She said we were going to talk. We did talk for a while, but then she was like ‘Are you going to kiss me?’”
“You did, right?”
“Oh, yeah.”
Our food arrived and it dawned on me that if I kept this much detail in the story, I was going to end up telling Tucker everything about my anatomy. I ate my burger steadily for a few minutes.
Tucker asked, “Was she out before that or were you surprised?”
“Oh, I was surprised. I don’t know what her orientation was, she never said. She liked me, for sure, but I always wondered how much of that was the Alcide costume. She’d seen me before, but she seemed to get really interested after I showed up as a werewolf guy.”
“Was that weird?”
“It was fun. I was less self-conscious. She invited me to come over and watch movies. She lived in the basement at her parents’ and I could slip in the side door at night. We hooked up a few more times.”
“Was it different out of costume?” Tucker asked.
“I don’t know.”
Her eyebrows went way up. “You kept having sex as Alcide?”
“Yeah, it worked.”
I hadn’t told this story to anyone start-to-finish like this and hearing myself, it sounded different than it did inside my head. Cool but with a hint of pathetic.
I said, “I was seventeen. I liked that I didn’t have to have ‘the conversation,’ that I could simply be a hot werewolf guy hooking up with a hotter vampire girl.”
I’d only had sex with two people and, thinking back, I’d always been in costume.
In a sense, I was always in costume anyway. Did I know what the real me looked like? Felt like?
The real me was the person who’d been with Ella in her bedroom. But that person, that me, wasn’t right for Ella. Was I right for anyone?
“What about you?” I asked.
“I’ve never had sex in costume.”
“You should try it.” The words came out automatic, fast, as a defense. Then I realized how that sounded considering she was in a costume right now. Blushed a bunch and went back to my burger.
Also…Tucker had had sex with Ella and I hadn’t. How unfair was that? I’d been smitten with Ella for years and she wouldn’t have sex with me, but she did with Tucker after knowing her for how many months?
“What’s that look on your face?” Tucker asked.
I swallowed the bite of burger that had gone dry in my mouth, gulped some water.
“Ella and I dated on and off for two years and never had sex,” I said.
Emotions flashed across Tucker’s face. Eyes widening then narrowing, brow creasing. She shook her head.
“You get why she had sex with me, though, right?” she asked.
“No.”
“She could afford to lose me. She can’t afford to lose you. If you’d hooked up and it got super weird, so weird you couldn’t be friends—you two just can’t do that. She can’t take that loss. With me if it went sideways, at the end of the year she could bail on me.”
“She’d never do that.”
“When you love someone, there’s a lot more pressure for the sex part to work out,” she said. Her face closed like a shutter slammed over a window.
I had a flash of fear that she meant me. But the way her face went empty, she had to be thinking about her ex. Thinking about how messed up ideas of love and sex got when someone took away your right to your own body, your self.
“That wasn’t your fault,” I told her.
“Don’t.” She picked up the cloth napkin and wrung it around her finger. She said, “I don’t want to talk about it. Go back to you and Ella, why did you split up the second time?”
“On the surface, because I cheated on her, sort of,” I said. “There was this guy I knew from conventions. We made out a few times. I met him when he was dressed as the tenth Doctor and I was Jack Harkness, and we were both about sixteen, and it all made sense. But that was before Ella and I were together, before Sian. I stopped seeing Sian after Ella and I were okay again. We started going on dates, but we never talked about if we were dating officially.”
I thought about it for a second and added, “No, that’s not fair to Ella. We were going on dates and she wanted this perfect hetero couple date situation. The longer it went on, the less it worked for me. I was so into her and it felt like not having sex was a criticism. Like my body wasn’t right. I ended up in this shitty place in my mind. The next time I was at a con and that guy, the tenth Doctor, asked if I wanted to go up to his room, I did.”
“I get that,” Tucker said.
“But that led to a huge fight with Ella and she broke up with me. I think the cheating was the excuse. She was going to get her surgery soon and she wanted to be with a guy. She wanted the dream relationship, the hetero romance movie thing. I’m never going to be that.”
“It’s never real anyway,” Tucker said. “Dream relationships suck ass.” She plastered a grin on her face, barely covering the sadness. I loved the attempt. I grinned back and stuck a fry up my nose.
What I didn’t tell Tucker was how bad our fighting had been. Ella and I had started yelling at each other in her driveway. Days later we were still fighting. In her bedroom, I’d perched tensely on the edge of her bed while she sat rigid in her desk chair.
“I’m never seeing him again,” I told her. “And I’m really sorry.”
“I know,” she said in the sad Ella voice that was highly worse than the angry Ella voice. “But we’re never going to work.”
“Of course we are, we’re perfect. Baby, listen, I can do what you want. I can be that.”
“Even if we never have sex?” she asked.
“What, like never?” I got up and bounced on my toes to work out the nervous, angry energy. “Why never?” I paused and stared at her. “Is it me? Are you not okay with…with me?”
She shook her head and I bounced harder. I knew she hated that she still had “boy parts,” that she wanted to block that out and never think about it. I understood that.
But what if my body was the real issue? We’d seen each other naked in quick flashes, changing in her room back before we’d started the kissing phase of our relationship. She knew what I looked like. Why had I never thought this through?
“What, like my dick isn’t good enough for you?” I asked, full on furious. “You need to have a ‘real’ one to prove you’re a ‘real’ girl? It’s not going to be right until you have some hetero cisgender guy’s dick up in you?”
For the record, that is the worst thing I’ve ever said.
Ever.
She started crying and I slammed out of her room and out of her house. I went home and did a lot of crying of my own, but at least she couldn’t see me doing it.
And then I shut off everything. I shut off boy and I shut off girl and I shut off both. I made myself into neither and nothing for a while. I did school and I cleaned the house so I’d have a reason to get up on weekends. I watched every season of every science fiction show I’d ever liked even a little.
Ella wrote me a letter and emailed it to me a few days before she went for surgery. It was scary, like she was worried that the surgery could go wrong and she’d never wake up, never get a chance to say this stuff to me. And it was super sad. She said that she was sorry for everything and that there wasn’t a thing wrong with me. She said she’d always love me, but that my body—how I looked when I was naked—reminded her of a part of her life she never wanted to think about again.
And I got it.
I felt like such an asshat. I could rock what nature gave me, but I did look similar to Ella’s mid-transition phase. She shouldn’t have to be reminded of that all the time.
As soon as she was home I went over with flowers and a teddy bear and we were friends again. But that was it, that was all we were ever going to be. I didn’t want to love somebody else like that and get turned inside out ever again.