In the Silences Page 4

  I rubbed Mr. Pickles’ silky ear fur and said, “That’s actually cool, yin in the yang. It’s not, like, two separate things; they mix. Like gender.” I almost said, “like my gender,” but I wasn’t quite there. I knew I was some kind of non-conforming or trans or shapeshifter, but not what.

  “But we agree my dad is weird,” Aisha insisted.

  “Your dad is so weird,” I told her.

  Aisha had her hair up, tight and neat around her face with a mass of tiny, soft curls on top. The deep V-neck of her light green and navy striped sweater showed off the slenderness of her neck and breadth of her smile. Definitely time to get on with the girlfriend conversation.

  “Hey, what’s it about Kate Bishop you like?” I asked. “I mean, cute-wise?”

  Aisha pulled her stack of to-read comics and graphic novels off the headboard bookcase and thumbed through them. Half her headboard hosted the weirdest, best beanie baby collection ever. Her rules for the collection included: one, it couldn’t be a currently existing animal and two, the stranger the better. She had a pterodactyl, a mammoth, a dodo bird, a triceratops, a T-Rex, some dragons (blue, green and hot pink), a Pegasus unicorn, a brachiosaur, a hummingbird she insisted was a phoenix, and a wolf-dog that had to be a chupacabra.

  “Kate’s a badass,” Aisha said. “She’s super brave because she doesn’t have all the powers in the world but she goes up against the big baddies, same as all the heroes who do.”

  “But, physically?”

  “She’s kind of long but curvy, but also the sweatshirts and stuff, she’s not all about showing off. And truth, it’s her jaw. The way she sets it when stuff gets real.”

  “Oh, cool,” I said and sat on my hand so I wouldn’t touch the side of my jaw and see if I could set it like that.

  I snagged the latest Kate Bishop comic from Aisha’s to-read pile, rested it on Mr. Pickles’ butt and opened it. But I ended up just listening to Aisha’s quiet breathing and the soft sound of pages turning.

  Aisha scooted from her headboard to sit against the wall next to me and opened an issue of Black Panther, pointing at two women characters, Ayo and Aneka, who were very in love with each other.

  “Who do you think is cuter?” she asked.

  I pointed and said, “Ayo. Her hair.”

  “Hey!”

  “Your hair’s great too, you know that.”

  “Mmhm, you don’t like the girl with the nappy hair, I see how you are,” she said, scrunching her lips around her grin but failing to hide it.

  “Oh shut up, Aneka’s hair is common compared to Ayo’s,” I protested. “You know shaved-head ponytail is my number one hairstyle, but then it’s all nappy, kinky and curly down to number twelve.”

  “What’s twelve?”

  “That side-braid fishtail thing.”

  “Oh yeah. What’s number two?”

  “Natural curl, loose or with a headband,” I said. “And number three is natural messy updo.”

  Those were how she usually wore her hair. She pretended to go back to her comic, but I saw her dimples. I’d cued up the dating question.

  But then she asked, “Seriously, across all our comics, who do you like?”

  That threw me. I should’ve known she’d ask and prepped an answer, someone like Aisha. I should say “Jean Grey,” since that was her character, except I had less than zero interest in the actual Jean Grey. Would she know what I meant? Should I pick someone black, like Aneka? Except I’d just said I liked Ayo’s hair better and that wasn’t Aisha’s hair… crap.

  Plus, I had too many real answers to this question because who I’d date in the comic books depended on who I got to be.

  “As me?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Or not. It’s okay if you’re ace. I know you don’t like talking about who’s cute. I’m not pushing you. I’m just asking. We don’t have to be the same, you know?”

  What I really wanted to ask her: If I’m not exactly a girl, would you be my girlfriend anyway?

  “I’m not ace,” I mumbled. “I had a dream the other night that I kissed Wiccan.”

  That was meant to prove the not-asexual point, but as soon as I said it, I realized how far it was from what I’d meant to say. Now was the exact wrong time to talk about kissing boys.

  “So you think Wiccan’s cute?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I’m not into him right now. In the dream I was Hulkling.” She hadn’t read much Young Avengers yet, so I added, “They’re boyfriends in the comic, or I guess fiancés? Hulkling proposed to Wiccan, it was super cute. But maybe I was only dreaming the comic book, you know.”

  I’d woken up from that dream half on fire and rolled onto my belly and rubbed against my mattress until the fire rose and flared and died down. I wasn’t going to say that. But I blushed like mad and Aisha saw, then glanced away toward the beanie collection.

  My problem with the “who do you think is cute?” question was that my answer changed based on who I was. If I thought of myself as Hulkling, a cute, shapeshifter, muscle guy with a mop of blond hair and a goofy smile, then of course I was perfect for Wiccan with all his emo damage and his black-haired, waify, white-guy handsomeness.

  And if I was like America Chavez—an ultra-confident Latina-from-another-dimension girl superhero in short shorts and kickass boots—then I’d absolutely have asked Aisha out weeks ago.

  Still, I could do this!

  The comic book angle wasn’t working. I lifted Mr. Pickles out of my lap. He grumbled and went to his dog bed beside Aisha’s desk. Climbing over Aisha’s legs to the headboard, I grabbed the phoenix and the green dragon. Sitting where she’d been when we started talking, I bent my legs over hers. I walked the two beanies up to my knee and wiggled the head of the dragon as it asked the phoenix, “Do you want to go out? Like date?”

  Aisha looked from the beanies to my face and back, her forehead wrinkled, a slight shake to her head. “That’s not one of the gay dragons,” she said. “Wait, are you…?”

  “I am not the hot pink dragon,” I told her.

  “I know! Blue?” She leaned past my shoulder to snag the blue dragon off the headboard.

  “Give it,” I said.

  Smirking, she rolled halfway back to where she’d been, bracing on her elbow, back against the wall, holding the dragon up, away from me. I stretched for it leaning forward, across her. My skin turned to flowing energy except where my fingers wrapped around hers. I barely breathed. I didn’t want to break this moment. Her dimples deepened, the corners of her mouth quirking, her eyes crinkling. That perfect secret smile.

  I got my fingers around her wrist, inching up to snag the dragon, but I didn’t take it. I wrapped my fingers all the way around her hand and the dragon. I wanted to put my hand around all of her.

  Her eyes shone bright and dark, like the night sky. It was too much to look in her eyes or at her curving lips. I stared at the slope of her cheek up to where her ear got cute, hoped I’d aimed my lips close enough to hers, and kissed her.

  Her elbow slipped out from under her. I fell forward. Lips brushing down her cheek. Her chest under mine moved fast with her breath and suppressed laughter. Her breasts pressed against my body. Against my chest.

  Against my… breasts? I didn’t have. I had. I couldn’t. My breath stuttered. My body cracked and broke apart like ice hit by a ship. I floated away from myself, fought, drowning, against these feelings.

  I did not begin or end where I thought I did.

  I sat back, arms wrapped around myself, shaking. Aisha propped up on an elbow. “What happened?”

  “My body,” I said, because those were all the words I had.

  “Hurts?”

  I shook my head.

  “Scared?”

  I shrugged.

  “Of what?”

  Looking up through the drowning deep gray water inside me, I saw her face getting hard, jaw set, eyes going narrow: the look she got when someone hurt her.

  “Me,” I crammed the words to the front of
my mouth and kicked them out with my tongue. “This body. You’re perfect.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Can I…?” She held her arms open. I slumped sideways, arms still around my chest, falling half into her lap and she leaned over me, hugging gently.

  “It’s okay,” she said, and again, a whole bunch. And repeated other things about how we had time to figure out who we were. I heard some of that through how much I was trying not to cry and be a baby.

  The blue dragon had fallen toward the edge of the bed. She leaned forward and tugged its tail until she could pick it up. Then she rested the blue dragon on her knee, saying, “However you are is okay. We’re friends no matter what.”

  I took the dragon from her and pressed it over my heart, trying to force that trapped drumming to slow.

  Aisha sighed and rested back against the wall. She kept one arm over my shoulder, fingers rubbing slow circles. I tried to relax with my head in her lap, the back of my head almost touching her belly.

  She picked up the green dragon and had it hop over and kiss my forehead. Wiggling the dragon’s head, like it was talking, Aisha asked, “Do you think I should date the brachiosaur?”

  “Do dragons even date dinosaurs?”

  “Where do you think pterodactyls come from?”

  I snorted and curled my hand around her knee. She stroked her fingers over my hair.

  “I should stick to Wolvie and trees,” I grumbled.

  “You’re going to date a tree?” Her voice got rough and she stopped to clear her throat. “What, like your treehouse tree?”

  “She’s like part of the family. It would be weird.”

  “She?”

  “Trees aren’t really gendered like that. Milo says ‘she,’ but the treehouse tree is an oak and they’re all—I mean almost all plants are—both male and female. So I guess that tree’s pronouns are they/them. I wish I could ask what pronouns they use with each other, but trees talk to each other with chemicals, so the pronoun would be a chemical signal, not a sound.”

  “What chemical?” she asked.

  “Maybe carbon since it’s a building block of life? I feel like it would mean all the pronouns at the same time: I, you, us, them.”

  “I like that. Like there’s a pronoun that’s just for life. I think maybe that’s what pronouns were supposed to be for.”

  “I hope so,” I said.

  “Kaz, carbon pronouns. Works for me.”

  It worked for me too, but I had no idea how to get from there to being able to kiss her.

  Chapter Four

  Early October 2016

  After the kiss, the next few mornings, while Aisha slept, I took Wolverine on long walks and told her what had happened. She trotted ahead of me, glancing back like: You should tell all this to Aisha; she’s cool about carbon atom pronouns, what more do you want?

  “I don’t know what to say,” I explained. “I don’t even a hundred percent know what’s wrong.”

  She wagged her tail to say: I don’t know why you bother to bark all that. You should use your ears and bodies for the important stuff. And tails. Where is your tail?

  “Trust me,” I told Wolvie. “Trying to explain everything to Aisha without talking would be a thousand times worse.”

  She said: squirrel! And ran to the limit of her leash, so that was all the help I’d get from her.

  I wanted to tell Aisha everything, but I’d have to include the dreams I kept having about two guys from the comics, the super cute boyfriends Hulkling and Wiccan. I was always Hulkling, the shapeshifter with sandy hair and muscles. Sometimes I thought about those dreams when I was awake. And I mean: I thought about them—in detail, alone in bed, late at night after Mom was asleep. And not just thinking.

  Milo and Pops went to bed at nine p.m., before Mom. Not to sleep right away, but that’s when they went into their bedroom and didn’t come out again. Probably they read and talked about the rest of us. Brock went to bed whenever he wanted, but his room was in the basement and he wasn’t going to bust in on me anyway.

  Once Mom had said good night, I was alone to think about two really cute boys together. Or two cute girls, America Chavez and Kate Bishop, or maybe—since I wasn’t that into being Kate—Ayo and Aneka, even though they were older. I always imagined being a girl with girl or a guy with a guy.

  Maybe whatever gender I turned out to be, I’d like the same. Or some flavor of the same. Hulkling was hunky and Wiccan was more the emo, goth boy, so they were two different kind of boys, but they were both boys—so if I was a boy, then I liked boys.

  But if I was a girl, I liked girls.

  Did that make me bi or two kinds of gay?

  Or if I was a shape-shifting alien…? I should stick to trees.

  Except that was not my body’s agenda. If I tried not to think about it, I’d have those dreams where I was a boy kissing a boy, or a girl kissing a girl—and more than kissing. I’d wake up shivering and hot and not sure what to do about it since my door didn’t lock.

  Smarter to get ahead of the process and imagine that stuff at night when I was awake and I could handle how it made me feel, without worrying that my door would go flying open in the middle of it all.

  Maybe, a few times, I got to thinking about what would happen some morning if Aisha opened my door. I made up ridiculous scenarios to justify her coming over at six-thirty a.m. and having to burst into my room. Like her dad having a yoga accident while the cell network was down and she needed Wolverine to run for help. But once I thought about Aisha opening my door—and getting into my bed with me, just holding each other—I couldn’t look her in the eyes for two days, so I had to go back to the other scenarios.

  It was safest to think about being Hulkling and kissing Wiccan. Imagining the two of us rubbing together, how cool that would be to rub against someone if you both had your business mostly on the outside of your bodies. Plus it would be so easy to know that he was into me. And really easy to let him know I was into him.

  And yeah, sometimes I’d roll up a pair of thick socks and put them in front of me, down there, between me and the mattress. It made sense to have a thick presence there. I’d imagine kissing a cute guy who was a bit smaller than me, how his body fit against mine, the feel of his hands. That never lasted long because I’d flare up inside and end up flushed with good feelings and sweaty and scared.

  How could I be a lesbian girl and a queer guy and some trees and a nebula all at the same time?

  * * *

  October came in warm. Yeah, October, because it took me three more weeks to get up the courage to talk to Aisha.

  Plus she got busy with school and I still had most of the dog walking jobs I’d picked up that summer. She walked with me a lot in September, but by October she wanted to use that time for homework so we’d have a good amount of TV-watching time after. Evenings when we didn’t have family dinners or homework, I watched TV at her house or we texted about what we were going to watch and started shows at the same time in both our houses.

  Saturday afternoon, after I’d done my dog-walking job, cleaned my room, done my chores and half of Brock’s because he offered to legit pay me to do them, I texted Aisha from the treehouse.

  Pops is grilling, want to come over and stay for dinner?

  Yeah! she wrote back, Mom’s at work, Dad’s at Yoga and Riq’s still married to the Xbox. They’re going to have little robot babies.

  I thought they already had & that’s what the controllers are.

  Aisha sent back a laughing emoji.

  A few minutes later, she opened the door and crawled in. The treehouse roof wasn’t quite high enough to stand up unless you were in the middle by the tree trunk. Aisha had her hair in two soft buns on top of her head, making her look half grown up and half kid. She wore the super soft, girly denim shirt that had been washed half to death, a shirt I loved, over an old pair of orange knee-length shorts that might’ve been Tariq’s when he was a kid. They made her knees look bony in an adorable way, like I should cover
her kneecaps with my palms.

  We’d stocked the treehouse with old pillows. I had cushions from some lawn furniture Milo and Pops got rid of a few years ago and Aisha contributed a bunch of throw pillows her mom had decided to replace. Two weeks ago, a few days after the failed kiss, Aisha had moved both of the big lawn chair pillows to the wall, so we could sit side by side, really close.

  I sat there now, but I’d made Wolvie lie down by the open window because she was chewing a rawhide and that always gave her the swamp farts. Aisha knew the deal with rawhide and sat on the far side of me from Wolvie. She picked up a comic book and started reading. And she leaned into me, so I leaned back.

  Pops and Milo came into the yard talking about the election. I heard Pops rolling out the grille and the rustle of Milo settling into a deck chair. Our yard had a weathered gray cedar deck overlooking a lighter gray cement patio. One of the deck chairs stayed on the patio so Milo could sit near Pops while he grilled.

  The back door opened and closed a few more times as Pops got his burger-making things. I wanted to talk to Aisha about the kiss and kissing in general and maybe even some of the dreams. If I whispered, Pops and Milo wouldn’t hear me. But where to even start?

  Aisha caught me looking at her Patsy Walker A.K.A. Hellcat comic and slid it over both our knees. I opened my mouth, but she put her finger to her lips and pointed through the treehouse wall in the direction of Pops and Milo’s voices.

  I tuned in to Milo saying, “In California a person had her gender legally changed to nonbinary. How does sexism operate then? Does the third gender come in at the bottom or does it break the system?”

  Pops chuckled and said, “Depends if they put you in charge.”

  “Should,” she replied.

  “Amen to that. Does it say how it works? Did they add a third sex when I wasn’t looking?”

  “You know sex and gender aren’t the same,” Milo told him. “Cultures have all sorts of genders.”

  “Nonbinary?” Pops asked.