What We Left Behind

I’m not used to feeling like this around Gretchen. I love Gretchen. Anger is reserved exclusively for my mother.

I close my eyes. I can’t let Gretchen see what I’m feeling.

We never fight. We aren’t like that. Anger and love don’t go together.

“Fine,” I say. “Fine. It’s fine.”

Gretchen’s fingers are light on my arm. “Are you sure?”

“Can we take the train and see each other every weekend?” I ask. “Because I thought I was going to see you every weekend.”

“Yes, sure, totally, every weekend.” Gretchen lays a soft hand on my cheek. I turn, and our eyes meet. I hate seeing Gretchen look so sad. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.” I sniff. I’m such a wuss, crying out here on the street.

“Oh, crap,” a familiar voice says.

I look up. Audrey’s standing right in front of us, wavy brown hair streaming over awkwardly folded arms.

Christ. Now my kid sister is seeing me cry.

“Are you guys fighting?” Audrey asks. “You guys never fight.”

I answer quickly. “No.”

“No,” Gretchen says at the same time.

Audrey looks back and forth between us. “Chris wanted me to say he was sorry. He’s a total idiot who can’t keep his mouth shut.”

I don’t react, even though I want to flinch. I can’t believe Gretchen told them and not me. My fingers curl and uncurl, the nails digging into my palm, but I hold my hand down low where they can’t see.

“Relax,” Audrey says. “It’s just college. Whatever. Afterward you can get married and have your little picket fence and adopt a hundred Chinese babies and be the most boring, stable couple on the planet, like you’ve always been.”

I try to smile. Coming from my sister, that’s a compliment.

When we were kids, Audrey and I used to say we were BFFs. The truth is, though, for a long time, I’ve felt much closer to Gretchen than I ever felt to Audrey or even Chris. Gretchen knows me better than anyone ever has or ever could.

Like with the gender stuff. I’ve never been able to talk to anyone but Gretchen about that.

Gretchen’s always listened and never, ever judged. When I first said I was genderqueer, Gretchen was so cool with everything, I couldn’t believe it. When I said I wanted to stop using gendered pronouns, Gretchen didn’t laugh once. It was never an issue between us at all.

I couldn’t imagine telling anyone else about that. Audrey was out of the question, because what if Mom overheard? I couldn’t tell Chris, either, because Chris was the ultimate joiner—a member of every sports team at the guys’ high school and half the clubs, too. Chris would’ve founded an interschool Transgender-Cisgender Alliance and ordered trans and nontrans folks to hold gender-neutral-themed softball tournaments and car-wash fund-raisers. And that would’ve been the final straw that made my mother officially disinherit me.

Back in ninth grade, when I first came out about liking girls, my mother told me I was in a “rebellious phase.” As far as Mom was concerned, this was yet another attempt on my part to torment my family. It got so bad I had to leave home and stay at a friend’s house for a week. I can only imagine what my mother would consider my real motive if I announced that I wasn’t even a girl in the first place.

So when I needed to talk about that stuff, I needed Gretchen.

I still need Gretchen now. It’ll take a lot more than a couple hundred miles between us to change that.

It’ll take more than a couple of lies, too.

Gretchen’s chin is still quivering. I put my finger in the dimple there, and Gretchen laughs. Only a small laugh, but it’s something.

This will be okay. If I just keep telling myself that, it’ll have to be the truth.

“Hey, this way we get to prove that the urban legend about long-distance college relationships is dead wrong,” I say.

Gretchen’s smile is almost too bright this time. “That has always been my number-one goal in life!”

I laugh, but now I’m actually thinking about it kind of seriously.

I’m pretty sure that rule—the don’t-go-to-college-with-a-girlfriend-back-home-unless-you-want-to-get-cheated-on-and-break-up-immediately rule—is just about casual relationships. Once they’re in different places, people in relationships like that probably get distracted as soon as someone new and shiny shows up in their dining hall. None of that has anything to do with Gretchen and me.

Plus, we’ll only be apart for a semester. After that, Gretchen can transfer back up to Boston, and college will be just like we always pictured it.

I squeeze Gretchen’s hand. The quiver in Gretchen’s chin has been replaced by that smile I love so much.

I lead us back toward the house, trying to think of a nice way to tell Chris and Audrey it’s time for them to go.

Gretchen and I still have tonight.

A few more hours until our world is scheduled to turn upside down.

2

AUGUST

FRESHMAN YEAR OF COLLEGE

1 DAY APART

GRETCHEN

I’m in New York now. So I have to do New York things.

There’s no point thinking about other stuff. Especially not about the car ride up here. About crying quietly in the backseat while Mom and Dad droned on about meal plans and registration. About how I wouldn’t let them help me unpack and basically shoved them out of my dorm room as soon as we got here. About how now I’m sitting on a bare mattress surrounded by boxes and laundry baskets full of towels and a suitcase full of jeans and old stuffed animals, waiting for the tears to start again.

There’s no point thinking about Toni up at Harvard. Being all smart and wearing wool scarves and doing whatever else it is people do up there.

Being mad at me.

Because, yeah, Toni’s mad. I’ve never seen Toni as mad as I did last night.

It’s all my fault. I lied. I spent a week acting like I was going up to Boston even when I’d already made up my mind. I spent months not mentioning I’d even applied here.

I just couldn’t do it. Tell the truth. I tried and tried, but I could never say the words.

Toni was so excited about college. About finally getting away from all the crap back home and living the life T had always dreamed of. I didn’t want to ruin that.

Instead I made it a thousand times worse.

I’ve got to find a way to make this up to Toni.

It seemed so important before. Coming here. Coming home.

Now it just seems stupid. How am I going to make it through a whole semester until I transfer? I can barely make it through a single day without Toni.

No. Thinking about that won’t help. I need to focus on fixing this. Making Toni forgive me.

I looked up the bus schedules from New York to Boston in the car, and I sent Toni a long email with a list of times I could go up there this weekend. Today’s Thursday, so I figure I could go up on Saturday morning. That way we’ll have had only two days apart, which seems like a good way to start. I figure for the first few weeks I can go up there instead of Toni coming down here. It’s the least I can do. The very least.

I haven’t heard back from my email yet, but Toni’s texted me twelve times since I got here anyway. Mostly funny stories about stuff the flight attendants said or jokes about how scary Boston cabdrivers are.

Maybe things will start to be all right. Maybe.

God, though. I’ve never seen Toni look the way T did last night. Like I’d just destroyed everything that was good in our world.

A random guy sticks his head inside the door of my dorm room. I jump up off the mattress, alarmed.

Then I remember my door is propped open. Everyone else’s doors were propped open and I figured it was the thing to do.

The guy grins at me. I try to smile back.

“Hey,” he says. “They told me there was a blond girl in this room.”

“They told you right,” I say.

“A bunch of us are going to a comedy club. Floor trip. We’re meeting downstairs in five.”

“Okay, cool.”

The guy leaves.

Perfect. A distraction!

Wait. Can I really just...leave? What about Toni? What about what I did?

I should really just sit here for the rest of the night. I don’t deserve distractions.

My phone buzzes. Another text from Toni.

My roommate and I are going to some burger place. What r u doing tonight?

Oh. Well, I guess if Toni’s going out, it’s OK for me to go out, too. I text back about the comedy show. Toni writes back right away.

Don’t forget ur pepper spray!

I smile and respond,

You too!

That’s a joke. Toni’s maid Consuela is awesome but also kind of scary. She makes Toni and Audrey carry pepper spray around with them whenever they go outside after dark. She stands in the door and yells after them, “Don’t forget your pepper spray!” It gives the muggers an unfair advantage, really. They can all probably hear her from miles around. They’ll know to be prepared.

I stare down at my phone screen and breathe in and out until I’m sure I’m not going to cry. Then I go to the mirror and brush the fattest tangles out of my hair. I look around the room one more time—at my side, with the bare twin bed and plain wood desk and half-empty boxes everywhere, and the other side, where my roommate’s neatly made-up bed sits under black lace tapestry hangings and the desk is decorated with pretty purple candles. I decide it isn’t worth trying to clean up my side. I don’t want to miss the group leaving, and it will take me hours just to make a dent in this mess. I head out into the hall, locking the door behind me, and take the elevator down fourteen floors to the lobby.

When I get outside the dorm, a dozen people are standing around the sidewalk, waiting to go. We’re all freshmen, so no one knows each other yet, and everyone’s checking out everyone else. You can tell what they’re all thinking:

This is it. This is the only chance I will ever have to establish my college social status. If I do not immediately bond with the coolest people here, I will be friendless and pathetic until graduation, and I will whimper alone in my dorm room every night.

I sit down on a bench to text Toni again.

A guy standing a few feet away lights a cigarette. Smoke gets in my face. I wave my hand around to blow it away. The guy doesn’t notice. He’s cute, but it’s the scruffy kind of cute, with messy hair, a bored expression and a pair of bowling shoes poking out from under his khaki pants.

A girl across from me is looking at the guy, too. She’s rocking on her heels, about to pounce.

It’s now or never, I imagine the girl thinking. I will be the first girl here to approach the mysterious cute boy. He will think I am bold and intriguing, and will immediately want to make out with me.

She walks toward him, smile in place. I try to catch her eye and signal her to stop—this guy is very obviously gay—but she’s too fast.

“Hi,” she says to the guy. “Excuse me. I was wondering. I couldn’t help but notice. Those shoes, with the stripe, that you’re wearing. Are those bowling shoes?”

She’s doing that thing where you’re nervous, so you use more words than you need to. I feel bad for her.

“Yes,” the guy says.

“Because I’ve been wanting to get bowling shoes,” the girl says. “Where’d you find them?”

The guy exhales a long puff of cigarette smoke. I cough.

“I slept with the little old man,” the guy says.

The girl blinks at him. “Uh. What?”

I feel even worse for the girl, but it’s hard to keep from laughing.

“Who?” she asks.

“The old man,” the guy says. “At the bowling alley. With the foot spray. His name was Gerald. Charming fellow.”

“Oh,” the girl says.

The guy looks at her.

“Um, okay,” she says. “Well, I guess I’ll see you around.”

The girl walks away. Probably to give up on the whole comedy-club idea and slink back to her room for the next four years.

When she’s far enough away, I laugh out loud.

The bowling shoes guy turns around. His lips twitch.

“What’s funny?” he asks.

“That was so mean, what you did to that girl!” I say, still smiling.

He frowns. “It was just a joke.”

“Oh, come on. How was she supposed to come back from that?”

He frowns some more. “I don’t know. I didn’t think about that.”

“Where did you get those shoes?” I ask him.

“A vintage shop down on Canal. Are you into vintage clothes?” He looks down at my Martha Jefferson Academy for Young Women Tennis Team T-shirt. “By that I mean real vintage, not some ancient crap you dug out of the bottom of your girlfriend’s closet.”

I clutch at my heart. “Your wit, it burns me.”

The guy sits down next to me. “Hi. I’m Carroll.”

I laugh some more. I can’t believe how good laughing feels after everything that’s happened. “No way.”

“Yes way.” He pulls out his wallet and shows me his New Jersey driver’s license. It says Carroll Ostrowski next to a photo of him looking twelve years old and even scruffier than he does now.

“Little-known fact,” he says. “In 1932, Carroll was the hundred and seventy-third most popular name for boy babies in the United States.”

“What happened after that?”

“It fell off the chart thirty years later.” Carroll smiles, showing off extremely prominent dimples. “My folks fancied themselves eccentrics.”

I laugh again. I can’t wait to tell Toni this story later. Toni’s parents are into old-fashioned names, too, so they named their daughters Antonia and Audrey. Bad, but not as bad as Carroll.

“You don’t have a nickname?” I ask Carroll.

“In high school I tried to have people call me Carrey, ’cause at least that sounded kind of like a guy’s name. Then I got beat up anyway, and I figured now that I’m out of that hell town, I should embrace the real me.”

“Okay, Carroll.” I smile. He’s clearly rehearsed this speech, but it’s funny anyway.

“So?” he asks. “I showed you mine. You show me yours.”

“Oh. Okay.” I dig in my bag and pull out my Maryland driver’s license.

“Gretchen Daniels,” he reads. “Also somewhat old-fashioned, and yet not the sort of name that prompts disbelief. I like it.”

“I’m glad you approve.”

The other guy, the one who stuck his head through my doorway earlier, motions for us to come with him. We get up and follow him down the street. I don’t know if he’s our orientation guide or our RA or just a very outgoing freshman, but whoever he is, he doesn’t know the city at all. He has us looping all the way around Washington Square Park.

It’s fine, though. I’m busy with Carroll. It’s distraction city over here.

“That’s my roommate,” Carroll says, pointing to a tall guy in a sports jersey. “Juan, from LA. He already hates me, but he’s hot, so I’m okay with it. Who’s your roommate?”

“I still haven’t seen her. I know her name’s Samantha and she’s from South Carolina. Oh, and she’s a goth. I know because there’s black lace and purple candles spread out all over her side of the room.”

“Is she in Tisch?” Carroll asks. Tisch is the arts school, where all the wannabe dancers and filmmakers go.

“No,” I tell him. “She’s Arts and Sciences, same as me.”

Carroll snorts. “Why’d you pay all that money to come here for that? You can take English and math anywhere.”

“Hey.” I give him a shove. “Anywhere isn’t New York. I guess you’re an artsy fartsy Tisch kid, then, since you have such an attitude about it?”

“Absolutely! I’m a drama queen all the way, baby.” He strikes a pose like he’s about to burst into song. I laugh.

We make fun of each other for the rest of the walk to the comedy club. Once we get inside, it turns out the comedians aren’t that great, so we spend most of the show whispering to each other and writing funny notes on our drink napkins. We annoy the heck out of everyone else in our group, but that’s probably because we’re having a way better time than they are. Carroll’s not as much fun to talk to as Toni, but then, no one I meet here 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, what? Your girlfriend’s an it?”

“No!” This conversation isn’t going how I thought it would. I wish I’d never told him. I stand up and pace to the other end of the room.

I don’t know how to say this so he’ll understand. I’ve never had to explain this to anyone. I’ve barely even talked about it with Toni besides the really basic stuff. Toni and I talk a lot about how male and female are such restrictive, limiting terms, and how our society is so rigid about labels and it’s so damaging and...to be honest, mostly it was Toni who said all that. I nodded like I understood it all because I wanted to be supportive, but there was an awful lot I didn’t follow.

“Sorry.” Carroll shakes his head. “Look, I’m from this tiny town way out in Jersey, okay? We don’t have this stuff out there.”

I sigh. I can tell Carroll really doesn’t know any better.

“It’s okay,” I say. “I didn’t mean to freak out on you.”

“Seriously, I’m just trying to understand,” he says. “I didn’t mean to say the wrong thing. But what does this all mean? Did she, like, get a sex change operation?”

I lean my head against the base of my roommate’s bed. Carroll’s flicking through my yearbook again.

“No,” I say.

“So, what, she’s just a butch lesbian?”

The truth is, I’m not really clear on where the lines are between all these things. I was always afraid I’d say the wrong thing if I asked Toni too much about the details.