Should I Stay or Should You Go?

MONDAY


Thomas
It’s not every day you leave home for the first time.

We’ve been on the highway for half an hour, zipping past fields and farmhouses shrouded in early morning shadows. That thought pops into my head as my eyes trace a lazy river, and I like the way it sounds. I silently try out different ways of pronouncing it, putting the emphasis on the word every, the word day. Wondering if it sounds better with a gentle fall at the end, or if it’s phrased almost like a question.

Once I’m sure I have the cadence right, I say it aloud, my voice warm and confident in my throat.

Mom takes it in, and I have a moment to feel proud of myself before she bursts into laughter.

“Hey!” I protest. “What’s so funny? It’s true, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Bug, it’s true.” She only uses that nickname for me when she thinks I’m being extra cute. Like I’m a dreamy nine-year-old again.

“So? Why are you laughing?” Because she is.

“Oh, it’s just . . .” She wipes a tear from the corner of her eye. Rude. “That sounds profound, I know, but it’s also so obvious. Of course it’s not every day you do a specific thing for the first time. That contradiction is built into the idea itself. Damn, you’re not even in college yet and you already sound like a stoned philosophy major.” She shakes her head, smiling.

I slump down into my seat, a little embarrassed. I hadn’t thought about it that way. “No, you’re right. It sounded cool in my head, is all.”

She reaches over to tousle my hair. “It does sound cool. And, in your defense, you’ve spent a lot of your life explaining obvious concepts to very simple people. You get a pass this time.”

“Phew.” I yawn and lean my head against the window. I cannot wait to stop explaining things to people. Especially people who tell me how important my voice is while not listening to anything I’m saying.

The day I got my early admission acceptance letter to Erickson University—Erickson, the storied Ivy League institution in New York City, a world away from my tiny Vermont hometown—I knew that my life was going to turn a sharp corner. They have an entire office dedicated to LGBTQ student affairs, and a robust list of resources “for our trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students.” According to the student activities page on the website there are, like, five different queer groups, two trans ones, and they even have a trans-only Greek house.

And, best of all, I don’t have to join any of them.

Maybe I’ll join an improv troupe. Or the science fiction society. Different groups sometimes organize snowboarding trips or hikes, if I start longing for the familiarity of the outdoors. I’m not sure if I’ll want to be a big-city person forever, but I’m excited for my life to become temporarily unrecognizable in as many ways as possible.

A couple hours later we stop for an early lunch at one of those highway rest stops that have a bunch of different chains and a generic gas station market. Mom gets Quiznos pizza, I get Subway, and we find a crumb-strewn table in the corner of the crowded, echoey dining room.

“I cannot wait for you to have your first slice of real pizza,” Mom says, blotting the top of hers with a napkin. “This is like a savory piece of shortcake with ketchup and string cheese.”

I pretend to retch at her description. “It can’t possibly be that bad. It’s Quiznos.”

She sighs. “No, I know, you’re right. It’s just, I’ve never gotten over missing New York food. Real bagels, real pizza, real everything. It’s something in the water. You’ll get what I mean after your first week, and then you’ll hate coming home. I promise.”

She has this faraway look in her eyes, the one that means she’s reliving those first awful months after I was born. My dad had died in a car accident. As soon as they could after that, Mom and her brother, my uncle Roderick, moved up to an old family house in rural Vermont. Then Uncle Roderick died when I was eleven, so for the last six years it’s been just the two of us. I touch the thin gold chain around my neck, the heart-shaped locket tucked, as always, beneath my shirt. On one side is a tiny picture of my mom, and the dad I never met. Uncle Roderick smiles out at me from the other side, healthy and bright and forever in his twenties.

Neither one of us likes the idea of Mom being all alone, even though we both know that I can’t stay with her forever. And yet, her plan is to drive me down, drop me off, and drive right back. She didn’t book a hotel room or ask to crash on a friend’s couch or take advantage of the university’s offer to put her up in a dorm for a night. It’s her first time in the city since leaving, with newborn me and the word widow hanging leaden over her head. She’s been so supportive of my plan to go to school in New York, to reinvent my place in the world capital of reinvention. She’ll never forget what the city cost her, but she also knows what it gave her. And what it could give me.

Now is not the time for moping, though. I want to keep the mood light.

“What were your favorite spots in my new neighbor-hood?” I ask, my mouth full of bread. “Do you think anything is still around?”

Mom snaps back to the present and puts down her pizza. “Oh, I never went up there. I was a Brooklyn girl! For a while I dated a guy in Harlem and that was basically a long-distance relationship; you could drive from our house to Burlington in the same amount of time it took me to take the Q to the 4.” She shakes her head ruefully. “Besides, the one thing about New York that stays the same is that it’s always changing. How’s this, kiddo? You let me know if you go on a Brooklyn jaunt, and I’ll give you some advice. It might be out of date, but you never know. Deal?”

“Deal,” I agree, and steal a bite of Mom’s pizza. It’s pretty good. I don’t know what she’s complaining about.

The first chance I got after receiving my acceptance letter, I drove forty-five minutes to the nearest Barnes & Noble and bought myself a pocket-sized map of New York City. I know my phone can tell me how to get anywhere, but I love poring over an actual, paper guide to my new home. I like tracing my finger down Broadway, reading the names of streets in tiny, tucked-away corners, figuring out how I would take the subway to, say, the Met, or the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It’s going to be so different from everything I have ever known. I can’t wait.

“By the way,” Mom says, once we’re back in the car. “I’ve been meaning to ask you. Have you figured out what name you’re going to go by?”

I sigh. I thought I had picked the simplest name in the world—Thomas, after Uncle Roderick’s middle name. But it turns out that, in fact, I had chosen a weirdly complicated name. It can be Thomas, or Thom, or Tom, or Tommy, and each option presents a subtly different picture of who I might be.

At first I introduced myself as Tommy, but soon that made me feel like a little kid from a comic strip. My most recent boyfriend—also my first boyfriend, also my only boyfriend, hopefully not my last boyfriend but who knows—called me Tommy-boy, which was cute at first but by the time we broke up I hated it. My best friend Moira calls me Thom, specifying that she spells it that way in her head because she thinks it’s the most “dignified” option. When I introduced myself at PFLAG trainings, or the Transgender Day of Visibility assemblies where some middle school paid me two hundred dollars to talk about my brave journey, I called myself Tom, because it’s simple.

“I think I’ve settled on Thomas,” I tell her. I’ve been wrestling with this question for months. You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Another saying that sounds profound but is actually pretty obvious.

Mom nods. “It’s a good choice. Not that there are any wrong choices, I like all the available options. Do you want to tell me why you landed on ‘Thomas,’ though?”

“It’s boring,” I explain, and she snorts.

“True. So, why do you, my brilliant, handsome, wise-beyond-his-years son, want to go with boring?”

I grimace. “This is going to sound insanely egotistical, but it comes from a true thing that people have literally said to my face. So you have to promise not to judge me, okay?”

Mom smirks. “I bet I can guess. You’re tired of being the most interesting person anyone has ever met, and the reason you feel that way is because people tell you that all the time.”

“Exactly.”

Look, I don’t identify as the most interesting person that you could meet. Number one, everyone is interesting in their own way. Number two, I’m really not that interesting. I’m just trans. But all too often people get this glint in their eye upon meeting me, like I’m a mythological creature they’ve only read about in books, and now that unicorn or dragon or whatever is shaking their hand and asking where it can fill its water bottle.

I’m not the only trans person in the area. There’s a local PFLAG chapter that gets families from fifty miles around, and a handful of them include a trans family member. A couple kids came out in my high school over the last few years. But in seventh grade, the principal asked if I would share my story for National Coming Out Day, and I said yes because . . . I don’t know. Because why not.

Then I got asked to present at a different middle school, and then at all the high schools in a hundred-mile radius, and then at a community college. Some places even started paying me. By sophomore year it was clear that I could spend the rest of my life being known as that nice transgender boy, the one who’s so good at explaining the difference between gender identity and gender expression, and why you shouldn’t deadname people.

It’s gotten even worse the few times I’ve told the real, honest, true story of how I figured out I was trans. That takes me from “such an interesting young person” to a three-ring circus.

I have to get the fuck away from all of that. Going by “Thomas” is the first step in the right direction.



Annabelle

It might have been a mistake to wear these heels.

They seemed like a good idea at the time, the time being last night in my boring house in a boring suburb of boring Washington State, preparing to get on a red-eye flight. Because we were going to spend all night on an airplane, which is sitting down, and also heels are easy to take off and put back on during airport security theater and on the airplane itself. I figured we’d hail a famous yellow New York City taxicab right outside the airport, and I also assumed that my dad would help me with my suitcase.

It turns out I was wrong on every count, except for the whole “sitting down on an airplane” part.

I planned an outfit that was more comfortable than cute so I could sleep on the plane, but I wanted at least one article of clothing to make a fashion-forward impression on everyone I met during my first day as a New Yorker, hence the vintage white pumps with rose-gold bows. But of course I couldn’t sleep at all, so I spent the six-hour flight staring blankly at Toy Story 4 and then Boss Baby 2 as my parents snored on either side of me, and felt like a total mess by the time we staggered off the Boeing Airbus seven-something-seven. Dad made me wrestle my gigantic suitcase off the baggage claim all by myself, and dragging it behind me in heels sucked. I kept wobbling like it was my first time in big-girl shoes. Then, instead of sitting comfortably in a famous yellow cab, even a convenient-but-problematic-business-model Uber, he made us take an AirTrain and then the subway all the way from JFK airport. That did involve a lot of sitting down but also a lot of maneuvering between trains and up and down stairs with, again, my gigantic suitcase.

It also turns out that, just beyond the wrought iron gates welcoming you Gilman College, the entire campus is covered in goddamn bricks. My heels kept getting caught between them. At one point I literally had to hop on one foot to retrieve my other shoe. Femmephobia is real.

So by the time we found Perkins Hall, where we were supposed to check in, I was sweaty and grumpy and disheveled and very much had to pee. Which might have been for the best, honestly. All of those minor, mundane sensations were almost able to crowd out the anxiety that had been growing ever since we drove away from my childhood home. Nothing would be familiar again, not for a very long time. I reminded myself that that was exactly what I wanted.

There were other families waiting to check in, but no one was at the table for “Last Names A–F.” I clipped up to it, hoping that I couldn’t possibly look as unstable as I felt.

A sleek young woman sat behind the table. “Hi!” I greeted her. I was considering starting college with a new nickname, Anna or Belle or Bella or something. “My last name is Blake, B-L—”

She handed me a purple welcome packet before I got to the A. “Hi, Annabelle! Welcome to Gilman College’s Early Students Orientation Program. If you and your parents”—she waved at my mom and dad, who were looking around like total tourists—“can hang out for a sec, your ESOP guide will be back in a minute.”

She got onto her walkie-talkie before I could say “Actually I’m going by” Anna or Belle or Bella or whatever. I’d pick one before the first big social event, I told myself, and retreated to where my parents were waiting. Paper-clipped to the folder was a map of campus. I pulled it out and studied it, trying to figure out where, exactly, Perkins Hall was in relation to the dorms and dining hall and everything else. I had just located Erickson University, which was right across the street but could fit three of our campuses inside its gates, when a perky white girl with a blunt haircut and black-framed glasses came over to us.

“Annabelle, right?” she said, sticking out her hand for me to shake. “I’m Emily, your guide and RA for the week. And I’m assuming you’re Mr. and Mrs. Blake?” she continued, smiling at my parents.

“Mike,” said my dad, putting out his hand for her to shake.

“And I’m Hannah,” said my mom, who was also wearing heels, but wasn’t sweating at all and hadn’t seemed to struggle through any of my same problems. Probably because she had packed for a two-night stay while I had to pack for an entire year. And she did have more experience in heels than I did.

Emily led us out a side door, down one small flight of steps, and then up another. I shot my dad a pleading look—he had been married to a femme for decades, he knew how hard it was to look cute while dragging a heavy suitcase—but he just gave me a smirk. Probably he was trying to teach me some lesson about feminist self-reliance and how I couldn’t always depend on some masc to carry my things for me.

Well. I had already learned that lesson, the hard way. I flinched, telling myself not to think about it, I had more important things to concentrate on. Luckily, once Emily led us to the center of the quad, all my fizzy thoughts evaporated.

“Wow,” I whispered. “It’s beautiful.” The quad, a small rectangle of green, was still and cool, despite being only steps away from the hot, loud avenue. Bricks soared up in all directions, and some of the windows had tiny balconies that didn’t look like they could support my weight but were beyond cute. My free hand had been clenched into a nervous fist, but I relaxed a little at the sight of this calm, quiet oasis. Emily smiled proudly, and my parents paused to take it all in.

It was a big risk, deciding to go to a college without visiting it first. But my family couldn’t afford to make a cross-country trip just to look around, not when there were virtual tours available for free.

Besides, my main criterion was that I wanted to be in New York City. I had visited once before, for a national queer youth leadership summit, and the sights, the sounds, even the smells made me feel alive in a way that my sleepy little corner of the Pacific Northwest could never. The second I got home I started plotting how to get back. Skipping college wasn’t an option, at least according to my parents, so coming here for school was the obvious solution.

A major plus was that Gilman called itself a “historically women’s college open to people of marginalized gender identities,” which meant that it would be full of my kind of queers. And its agreement with Erickson University meant that I could take classes on their neighboring campus and also meet trans guys who didn’t want to go to a “historically women’s college open to people of marginalized gender identities.”

By the time my acceptance rolled in, the most important thing about Gilman became the fact that it was three thousand miles away, in a city where I didn’t know a single other person.

A year ago I assumed that leaving home would include a big going-away party full of friends, maybe as a surprise from my best friend, including a tearful goodbye to whoever I was dating at the moment, complete with the promise that we’d try to make it work and the unspoken knowledge that it wouldn’t. The classic bittersweet beginnings-and-endings kind of thing.

Instead, I packed alone. My parents and I went out for sushi at a slightly more expensive place than usual. And I texted Bailey, my best friend of seven years, while waiting to board the airplane.

Heading to the big apple! I told them. After half an hour Bailey responded with a thumbs-up. I stared at it, hoping an actual response would follow—“I miss you” or “Have fun” or even, like, an update about their life, but when my message remained brutally un-responded to, I put my phone on airplane mode and told myself I didn’t even care. It wasn’t true, of course. That, more than the cramped seats and recycled air, kept me from sleeping on the plane.

Here, in Manhattan, was the chance to start over again. I focused my attention on Emily.

“You’ll be in Greenwell Hall,” she explained, pointing to the tallest tower, “which is very lucky. It’s the newest one, with much nicer bathrooms than the three other dorms in the quad. And it’s in the same building as the dining hall.”

I deflated a little. I had wanted to be in Rand, the oldest dorm on campus, or Griffith, the second-oldest. Because, I don’t know, history? I wanted to walk up and down the halls and feel connected to all the famous women who had lived there in the past. I wanted to go to sleep wrapped in the memories of everyone who slept there before me. And I also liked the idea of hooking up with people in dorm rooms that had seen generations of hot sapphic action, especially the repressed kind back when women had their “special friends” and “lifelong companions.”

Oh well. Guess I’m responsible for making that history, too. What would Gilman first-years think about me in a hundred years? Would my name be on one of those buildings someday? Would I be invited back to speak at graduation? Or will this place and I forget about each other the second I leave?

Emily took us into the lobby and showed me how to swipe my student ID to get past the front desk. We took the elevator up to the seventh floor, down the industrial-carpeted hallway, and into my home away from home for the next ten months.

“So, can you tell us a little more about this early-bird program?” Mom asked as I heaved my giant suitcase onto the bed. “I understand the basics, about how some students might need a little extra time to adjust, but what is her week going to look like?”

“It’ll be a blend of planned activities and suggestions for their free time,” Emily explained. “Here’s the schedule on the app. You can see that we’re hosting a family dinner tonight, followed by a tour of both campuses tomorrow, and then . . .” I excused myself and found the bathroom.

My parents had been surprised when I got the email welcoming me to ESOP; they hadn’t known I had applied, and it’s not like I was an international student, or some hick who’d never been on public transit before. It wasn’t even my first time in New York.

But when I saw the opportunity to move in early, I knew I had to take it. The last six months had been one long, stultifying waiting game as I dragged through the end of my senior year, spending extra time on my homework and studying for finals even though no one cared about those last grades. That lonely summer had been even worse. Abruptly deprived of friends, dates, or a social life—and without even the distraction of social media—I was desperate for something good to happen.

And now I had a whole extra week in New York City, without classes or homework or anything. I could leave my past in the dust and jump-start my life as a New Yorker. How could I say no?