Tucker
Tucker tried to focus on the teaching assistant who was lecturing from the front of the room, but her eyes burned. She rubbed them, but that made them feel sandy like the inside of her brain. She’d been up way too late fighting with Lindy over the roommate thing, and then making up from the fight.
The making up made the fight totally worth it. She’d fallen into a doze just as the sun was starting to color the sky outside the bedroom window and dragged herself out of bed three hours later to get to this class.
Lindy had helped her get into this Women’s & Gender Studies class, even though it had a prerequisite. The professor was Lindy’s advisor and last year when Lindy was in this class, she’d managed to get a grant to present a paper at a conference. For a sophomore to already be getting grants was a huge deal, according to Lindy, and based on the way she seemed to get whatever she wanted in the department, she wasn’t kidding.
Offered as a 200-level course to students in five other departments, including English, History, and Sociology, the class tended to be really big. Lindy said there were over eighty students in it when she took it. All students attended the same lecture once a week, but then they had two smaller classes, called recitations, with a teaching assistant. Because the lecture was on Wednesday and the recitations on Tuesday and Thursday, Tucker was at a recitation for the class before she’d heard the first lecture. Instead of the full group of sixty-some students, there were only twenty-two in the recitation.
She’d been assigned to the group whose TA was Vivien Yarwood and Tucker wasn’t sure yet if that was an advantage. Vivien and Summer had a thing going on, but Summer never seemed quite able to say what sort of thing it was.
Tucker pulled a piece of paper out of her notebook and scrawled on it: Are Vivien and Summer still together? Yes. No.
Cal was sitting next to her and she put it in front of him. He looked at it for a minute, then picked up his pen and circled both Yes and No.
Vivien was attractive in an uptight white girl way. Her parchment-fair skin looked even paler under her red hair, which she’d pulled back in a loose bun. When she leaned against the desk and crossed her arms, the thick freckles on her forearms stood out. She’d rolled up the sleeves of her light blue button-down shirt and the effect made her arms look more delicate. Tucker had never seen Vivien and Summer together, but she could imagine how they’d make a handsome couple with Summer’s stocky build, shorter black hair and warm russet skin highlighted by Vivien’s pale and brassy tones.
After class she went to the administration building to ask if she could transfer into the dorm room next to Ella. When she first tried to describe the situation, the woman behind the desk looked at her like she was insane.
“I told a group of girls that I’m transsexual and now my roommate doesn’t want to live with me. I’m sure you have her complaint on file by now,” Tucker said. “But Ella Ramsey over in Washington says she has an empty single attached to her room. You can call her and confirm she’s cool about me living there.”
The woman typed into her computer for a silent minute. “I see,” she said. Another minute passed as her fingers clicked the keys. Her eyes zigzagged as she scanned back and forth across the screen. Then she said, “Wait here.”
She went into some back office for about ten years. Tucker dozed off in one of the unyielding plastic waiting room chairs, despite the way it was mistreating her butt and back.
“Excuse me,” the woman said from near her ear, which made her jump but definitely woke her up.
“What’d they say?” Tucker asked.
“Just sign these papers and you’re all set.”
“Seriously?”
“There’s nothing in your records about it, but I assume you’ve had the surgery, otherwise we can’t let you stay on an all-women’s floor.”
Tucker’s half-sleeping brain rolled over on itself. What surgery? She reviewed what she’d said when she came in. She hadn’t said that she was trans, but she hadn’t clarified that she wasn’t either. What did her record look like now? Had they changed her status to “transsexual woman?” Did they even have such a coding?
And what gave this woman the right to ask about her genitals? Like she’d ask any other student if they had a penis or vagina or whatever. With a blush she realized that she’d asked Emily a similar question once, only to have Emily politely explain that the question was just as rude when asked to a trans woman as to a cisgender woman.
For a second, Tucker considered asking this woman, “Well, what do your genitals look like?” or “Tell me about yours and I’ll tell you about mine.” But she didn’t want to risk losing the chance to sign a few forms and move out of her current room and into someplace infinitely more welcoming.
“I have a vagina,” she said with a dry mouth.
The woman gave her a lemon-sucking frown and thrust the papers at her. “That wasn’t necessary,” she said. ‘“Yes’ would have been enough.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not used to being asked that,” Tucker told her, with little sincerity in the apology. She signed the papers quickly.
“I hope you won’t run into any more trouble in the dorms,” the woman said in a steely tone that suggested she’d better not or she’d find herself short one dorm room. Considering what she had to scrape together to get a year in the dorms, even with the financial aid she had, it was a pretty good threat.
She hurried out of that building and stood blinking in the bright, late afternoon sunlight. Ella should be back to her room so she could start moving things over. She wished for a couple of big guys who could help her move and then realized she knew at least one.
She texted Cal: Help me move and I’ll buy you beer.
Deal, he texted back.
He was a year older than her, but Tucker had a fake ID she used to sneak into gay bars sometimes. Granted the name on it was “Maria” and it said she was five four rather than five ten, but no one ever seemed to check the height. She and Maria, who’d sold Tucker the ID a year ago for fifty bucks, had the same eye color and hair color and broad cheekbones. As long as Tucker was in a group of women entering the bar on a busy night, the bouncers never looked hard. Buying beer was more of a challenge, but she knew one neighborhood liquor store where the aging owner hadn’t updated his eyeglass prescription in about a decade. As long as she got there when he was behind the register, she was golden.
She texted back to Cal to meet her at her room in an hour and went to cram her stuff into boxes and plastic bags.
* * *
Cal showed up with Summer and Tesh, which meant a single trip across campus with most of Tucker’s worldly possessions. She and Lindy had already taken a few boxes of books and essentials to Lindy’s house the night before and now Lindy replied via text that she’d drive over to Ella’s dorm and meet them there. And that’s how Tucker found herself knocking on Ella’s door at the head of a caravan of four people loaded with a variety of boxes, duffels and black plastic bags, resembling a homeless LGBTQIA United Nations.
Ella opened the door within seconds of Tucker’s knock, probably because no place in her room was far enough from the door to make it take more than a few steps to reach it. She looked as shockingly pretty as she had the first time a door opened between them. It was the combination of high cheekbones and classic features, plus great makeup, and an inner light that shone through her intelligent green eyes.
Tucker didn’t usually go for pretty; she preferred strong good looks, but the superficial beauty of Ella’s face had a matching thoughtfulness behind it that she wanted to know more about.
From over Tucker’s shoulder, and some distance above it, Cal intoned, “Ours is not a caravan of despair.”
Ella laughed. “Oh good. Let me go around and unlock the door. You won’t all fit in my room.”
A moment later her head popped out from the next door down.
Tucker followed her inside the small room. Compared to her last dorm room, this was heaven: a really bare heaven. The long, narrow room held a single bed that took up almost half of its width, a dresser pushed against the same wall as the bed, a little bedside table, and a desk near the door. Tucker thought she could just fit a small bookcase on the wall of the room between the closet and the door to the bathroom. Currently, the only thing in the room was an “Evolution of Life” poster showing eras of plants and dinosaurs leading up to modern plant and animal life.
“Oh sorry,” Ella said when she saw Tucker looking at it. She went to take the poster down. “I was decorating so it wouldn’t look so empty.”
“You can leave it,” Tucker told her. “It’s sort of cool and I should probably know that stuff.”
Everyone tried to cram into the room and set down their baggage, but this created a traffic jam that pushed Tesh through the bathroom into Ella’s room. Lindy showed up and commandeered Cal and Summer to go down to her car and get the other stuff. Tucker struggled to stow the various boxes and bags in the most efficient way that would let her get back into them later when she had time to unpack.
“You owe me next house party,” Cal said as he set another big box on the bed. His face was blotchy with the exertion of carrying it up from Lindy’s car and sweat stains showed on his peach T-shirt.
“I sure do.”
“We should order pizza and have a room party,” he announced.
“Because we love being all on top of each other so much,” Summer said. “Why don’t we just meet up in the Union like always?”
Tucker dug herself out of the box pile and slid around people into Ella’s room. Ella was sitting in her desk chair talking to Tesh, who was perched against the desk itself.
“Did you meet everyone?” Tucker asked, dropping down to sit on the foot of the bed. “I’m being a horrible roommate already.”
“I met a few.”
“This is the core group of the LGBTQIA student organization on campus,” Tucker said. “I met them all last spring since this is the nearest queer oasis to my home town.”
She watched Ella’s face closely as she talked. So far she seemed cool with lesbians, and at least the idea of trans women, but hadn’t given up any intel about her own sexual orientation.
“I was thinking about going to that open house last night,” Ella said.
“You didn’t miss much,” Tesh told her. “A few new students showed up, which is always nice, but out here in the boondocks you don’t get a huge group of incoming students wanting to wave their hands around in week one and yell ‘Look at me, I’m queer.’”
“What’s the makeup of the group?” Ella asked. “Mostly gay and lesbian or some bi and trans also?”
“The first,” Tesh said. “We’ve got a few bisexual folks and I’m sure someone’s a closet crossdresser, but that’s it for the T.”
Ella turned to Tucker. Her eyebrows were up and their front ends dipped toward each other, creating worried creases in her forehead. Celadon, that was the right word for the color of Ella’s eyes, Tucker thought as Ella stared at her.
“You’re trans…” she said.
“Actually I’m not,” Tucker said. “I’m sorry if you were counting on that, like it made me a super cool roommate or something. I just told a bunch of girls that I was because they were being real jerks about trans stuff and I thought they should have to face a real person for once and not just their stupid ideas. I figured I’m tall enough and big-boned enough that they’d believe it.”
She knew she was rambling, but Ella looked so discomfited that she wanted to keep going until she could erase that look and replace it with the light, smiling Ella.
“It’s okay,” Ella said, with a strange, resonant tightness in her voice. “You don’t have to be trans to be my roommate.”
“You just thought it was cool?” Tucker asked.
“Something like that.” Ella looked at the poster on her wall, the one with the dense cluster of bright blue stars surrounded by gold and red space dust. Her expression was sad and wistful.
Summer, who’d overheard part of the conversation from the doorway, cut into their deadlock with the blunt question, “So are you a lesbian or what?”
“I’m…I think I’m bi,” Ella said. “I don’t know. I kind of feel up in the air but…that makes me sound like the worst kind of bi-curious girl, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, yes it does,” Summer said and Tesh shot her a disapproving look.
“You’re fine,” Tesh told Ella. “You take all the time you need to figure things out. Some of us just need a little more time than others before we’re ready to make a declarative statement to the world about what we are.”
Lindy shoved into the bathroom behind Summer and called into Ella’s room. “Hey, are we getting dinner?”
“I was just going to head over to the dining hall,” Tucker said. She couldn’t afford to buy dinner at the Union every night, or even most nights, especially if she didn’t want to spend every school break working.
“Come to the Union, I’ll buy,” Lindy said. Either she was reading Tucker’s mind or perhaps she’d seen the sorry state of the contents of Tucker’s wallet.
“Well, if you’re buying.”
“Before you all go,” Ella said. “Do any of you like playing games? I need a team of three to play Cruel 2 B Kind on Friday. It’s like Assassination but with compliments.”
“Like what?” Tesh asked.
“Assassination is a game that people play with squirt guns where you go around in teams and try to kill other teams by jumping out and squirting them,” Ella said. “But apparently when they played it here a few years ago some students who weren’t playing got soaked and complained, so in this version you ‘kill’ people with compliments.”
“That sounds awesome,” Tucker said. “I don’t know how good I’ll be, but I’d be happy to be on your team, roomie.”
“I’m in too,” Lindy said quickly.
“Can you have more than one team?” Tesh asked.
“I’ll check tomorrow but I’m sure they’ll say yes.”
Tesh looked at Summer who nodded and then shouted over her and Lindy’s shoulders into the other room, “Hey, Cal, you free Friday?”
“Yeah,” he yelled back. “Is there food?”
“We’re going to play a game, we need you to hide behind.”
He laughed. “Sure thing.”
The whole crew emptied out of Ella and Tucker’s rooms and into the hallway except for Ella. She stood in her doorway looking small inside the wooden frame.
“I’ll be there in a few,” she said. “I just want to finish this problem I was working on.”
They went down the hall in a straggle and then split into small groups as they walked across the quad toward the Union. Tesh and Lindy were talking about a movie and Cal was a few steps behind listening in; Summer fell in next to Tucker.
“You think she’s really bi?” Summer asked.
“As opposed to lesbian?”
“Straight.”
“I haven’t met any straight girls who just want to hang out with us,” Tucker pointed out.
“Do you think she’s had a girlfriend or even kissed a girl?” Summer went on. “I mean, maybe she really is just bi-curious like she said, but I’ll bet you as soon as someone’s really interested in her, she’s going to pull away.”
Tucker shook her head. “You don’t know that.”
Summer’s dark brown eyes warmed with mischief. “We need a single girl we can get to hit on her and find out.”
“What about Tesh?”
“She says she met a girl over the summer but won’t tell me who it is yet, like I’d be jealous or something.” Summer frowned.
She and Tesh had been together the latter half of their first year at Freytag and the beginning of the second until, with surprisingly little drama, their dating slid into a comfortable friendship and they started to date other people.
“Too bad Alisa’s not around,” Summer added.
“Where is she?” Tucker asked. Alisa was Lindy’s ex before her.
“She’s here,” Summer said. “I saw her across the quad, but she won’t come to the table. She’s probably mad that you and Lindy are still together. I don’t think she liked Lindy going after you and was hoping it wouldn’t last.”
“She didn’t ‘go after’ me,” Tucker protested. “It was mutual.”
She jammed her hands into her pockets as they crossed the corner of the big quad toward the Union.
“Figure of speech,” Summer said. “And anyway, you two were like horny rabbits the first few months. I think it bugged Alisa. I saw her watching you a few times and she looked pretty upset.”
“Yeah, Lindy said she was being weird possessive.”
Summer shook her head as she held the Union door open for Tucker. “Let it be. People gotta process their own shit in their own time.”
They were halfway through dinner when Ella joined them with a tray of cheese bread and a salad. She slid onto the bench next to Tucker and tore off a strip of bread.
“Want one?” she asked Tucker.
Tucker was already stuffed, but she took one anyway because she could always find room for garlic cheese bread.
“So what’s your deal?” Summer asked, leaning across the table and half into Tesh so she could face Ella directly. “Have you ever dated a girl?”
Ella blushed and Tucker jumped to her defense. “Hey, you didn’t quiz me when I showed up to my first meeting.”
“That’ s ’cause you were clearly staring at anyone with boobs,” Summer said.
Tesh looked across the table at Ella and said softly, “Summer likes to pick on the shy girls. Sometimes it works out for her.”
Ella smiled, though the discomfort on her face didn’t vanish.
“I get it,” she said. “I’ve kissed two girls, but it was more like an experimenting thing than dating.”
“Boys?” Summer asked.
“Kind of the same boat. I went to this really small, tight-knit high school and we all knew each other for years and years so when it was time to start dating it seemed really awkward.”
“How small?” Tucker asked, eager to get the topic off Ella’s dating life, even though she was fiercely curious.
“Two hundred students total. It was a magnet school—lots of geeks.”
“Damn, that’s as small as my high school and I come from a town of five thousand,” Tucker said. “And I know what you mean about knowing everyone.”
She caught Summer’s eye and shook her head. Summer rolled her eyes.
“Well honey, you just let us know when you’re ready for us to fix you up with someone,” Summer told her.