What We Left Behind. Robin Talley
is going to be as much fun as T. That’s the thing about soul mates, I guess.
It’s late when we get back to the dorm after the show, but my roommate still isn’t there.
“Maybe she had a séance to go to?” Carroll says when he sees all the candles.
“What if she’s been kidnapped?” I ask. “She is from South Carolina. A stranger in the big city. Some weirdo could totally have lured her into a van.”
“Yeah, you always hear about that happening to goth country bumpkins.”
“Should we go ask the homeless people outside if they’ve seen her?”
“Nah. Let the vampire fend for herself.” Carroll shoves some boxes out of his way and sits down on the floor. “Sit with me.”
I join him on the floor. For the first time all night, it’s awkward.
Suddenly I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what you’re supposed to talk about when you’re sitting on dirty industrial carpet in a dorm room surrounded by cardboard boxes full of books and shampoo and tampons and all the other junk you made your parents haul up from DC.
“So tell me about your girlfriend,” Carroll says, and just like that, the awkwardness is gone.
“What makes you so sure I have a girlfriend?” I finger my top hat charm and smile. Carroll’s certainty that I’m taken is making me feel a lot better about what happened yesterday. Things between me and Toni can’t be too terrible if I’m radiating coupledom.
“You’ve got that hippie granola Indigo Girls vibe.” Carroll points to my Birkenstocks, which aren’t so much hippie as they are superbly comfortable, but whatever. “So I figure that makes you a lesbo, and all lesbos have girlfriends. It’s, like, a law. I mean, not that I’ve ever met a lesbo before you, but trust me, I am wise in the ways of lesbos.”
I laugh. Toni would point out the lack of logic in his arguments, but that sort of thing doesn’t bother me.
“We’ve been together for almost two years,” I say. “T left for college today, too, in Boston.”
He asks to see a picture. I pull up our Queer Prom photo on my phone.
“Wow,” he says. “A redhead. She’s really butch, huh? With the short hair and the suit and all that?”
I shrug.
“You clean up good, though,” he says, pointing to the dress I was wearing in the photo. I’d borrowed it from my friend Jess. It was long and black with pink dinosaurs printed all over the fabric. “You should try combing your hair more often.”
I elbow him. “Some of us have better things to do than hang out in front of the mirror for hours every morning.”
“Touché,” he says, but he smiles like I complimented him. “What did you say your girlfriend’s name was?”
“Toni. T for short.”
He gives me back my phone and starts rooting around in the nearest open box. It’s full of high school stuff. I’d wanted to have it with me up here, but this afternoon, as I watched my dad sweat while he hauled boxes out of the car, across the jam-packed New York sidewalk, through the lobby and up the fourteen floors to my room, I wondered if maybe I should’ve just left a couple of those things back home.
Carroll pulls my yearbook out of the box and flips through it. He laughs. “You went to an all-girl school?”
“Yeah.” I wonder if everyone in college always goes through everyone else’s stuff without asking or if this is a New Jersey thing.
“So you and your girlfriend are trying to stay together?” he asks. “Even with the long distance?”
“Toni and I aren’t trying to do anything,” I explain. “It’s not, like, an effort. Toni and I have always wanted to stay together, and we still want to.”
“Come on. Everyone knows you’re supposed to be single when you get to college. How else are you supposed to have any fun?”
“Being with Toni is fun.”
“But you don’t even know what other girls you’re going to meet.”
“Doesn’t matter. I don’t want to be with other girls. I want to be with Toni.”
“What’s up with how you keep saying her name over and over? It sounds weird.”
Yeah, I know it’s weird. I sigh.
“I don’t use gendered pronouns when I talk about Toni,” I say.
My life would be a lot easier if he let it go at that, but I already know he won’t.
“‘Gendered’?” he asks. “What, you mean like she?”
“Yeah.” He’s giving me the strangest look. Maybe I shouldn’t have tried to explain.
“That’s so weird,” he says.
“It’s what we do.” I shrug. “Toni doesn’t use gendered pronouns at all anymore. For anyone.”
“That’s impossible.” He sits back on his elbows like the point is now settled.
“No, it’s not,” I say. “I thought it would be, too, when Toni first told me about it, but I’ve been listening to Toni talk without saying he or she even once for the past year.”
“So she used to use pronouns, but she doesn’t anymore?” he asks. I nod. “So you’re saying when she talks about you she says Gretchen over and over?”
“Basically.”
“So weird!”
I sigh. “Look, this is a big deal to Toni, and I love Toni, so that means it’s a big deal to me, too, okay?”
He grins and cocks an eyebrow. “Love, eh? Twoo love?”
He pronounces it like the priest in that old movie The Princess Bride. I can’t help laughing.
“Yes,” I say. “It’s totally twoo.”
“Come on, though. You’ve got to admit this thing with the pronouns is crazy.”
“No, it’s not. We should all do it, really. Our language patterns are totally sexist.”
He laughs. “Do you say ovester instead of semester, too?”
“No,” I say. “That’s dumb.”
“Hey, look, it’s funny. What, is your girlfriend one of those hard-core bra-burning lesbo feminazis? ’Cause you don’t seem like that type at all.”
Should I tell him?
Toni isn’t out to many people back home. Just me and some online friends. No one ever asks, and Toni doesn’t volunteer it.
No one’s ever asked me before, either. When I moved to DC I joined Toni’s group of friends right away, so all my friends there were Toni’s friends first. I never talked to them about Toni, since they knew T better than they knew me.
But I can already tell Carroll’s going to be a good friend, and it’s not as if Toni ever asked me to keep it a secret. Besides, Toni doesn’t even know Carroll. I want to text and ask if it’s okay for me to tell him, but Toni’s probably asleep by now.
Well, if it turns out Toni minds, I won’t tell anyone else after him.
“Toni’s genderqueer,” I say.
Carroll looks at me blankly.
“You know,” I say. “It’s like being transgender.”
He pulls back, an ugly look on his face. “Your girlfriend’s a man?”
I grimace. “No. God, come on.”
“So,